Red Hot Frozen

Every once in a while an unexplained cultural phenomenon hits us. In my childhood it was Cabbage Patch Kids: ugly, expensive, wearing impossibly unfashionable clothes. In the 90's there was Tickle Me Elmo, with its creepy unending giggles that made you think you may wake up one night to see it holding a knife.

By now it's no news that Disney's Frozen is the unprecedented phenomenon of the decade. Even without any kids in the house, I'm aware of this, from the Facebook posts to the Disney blogs to the sudden appearance of Frozen Sing-Along movies at my local theater.

Going to Walt Disney World is like heading to Frozen central. It's completely CRAZED. Disney does a good job in keeping the chaos contained. The Princess Fairy Tale Hall is indoors, so I didn't see how many thousands of people are packed inside, but families can wait FIVE HOURS to meet Anna and Elsa.

Why yes, I will wait 300 minutes to meet some college girls wearing princess dresses.

While the Bippity Boppoty Boutique is churning out hundreds of little princesses a day, there's not a single Elsa coming out of the Disney boutiques because they simply can't keep the costumes in store. A few times I did catch glimpses of an Elsa skipping through the park - those lucky kids had parents who thought ahead to hunt down the costumes on eBay prior to visiting the park.

She doesn't know how lucky she is.

Nope, Frozen isn't just for little girls either.

The whole franchise is so popular now that in all the Disney shops there are Frozen sections with tags telling potential customers that they are limited to five items per person unless otherwise specified. Of course, with the feeding frenzy from other Frozen fans it's likely that your five items will be Frozen frosted cookies and Olaf t-shirts, rather than Elsa costumes or dolls.

Last week, I ducked into every princess store I passed without seeing Elsa dolls or costumes. On the last day, bingo! An entire wall of Elsa dolls, recently arrived that morning. The cast member estimated they got a thousand dolls, and would be sold out by early afternoon. Customers who were interested in buying it but wanted to come back later in the afternoon so they didn't have to carry it all day were advised to buy it now and put it in a locker.

Don't let her Snow White dress fool you: she really wants to be Elsa too.

I'm now hunting down references to just what Frozen has accomplished in real terms. So far, I've discovered that Elsa is the most profitable princess. Tourism in Norway is up: 152% more searches for flights to Norway, triple the normal visits to the Norwegian tourism web site. And more "Let It Go" covers than you can shake a stick at. 

I can't for the life of me figure out why it's all so popular. If you have any ideas, let me know. Or maybe I should just let it go too.

Welcome Home

When I spent three weeks in Tokyo on my own last year I got pretty lonely. Not only was I away from all of my friends and family, but being in a completely different environment where I couldn't even say "good morning" to the Seven-11 clerk became thoroughly depressing. So I went to Tokyo Disneyland, looking for familiarity, for a little bit of America in the middle of Japan. It was as close to home as I was going to feel until I managed to land back in San Francisco. Somehow, even though the Country Bears sang "On the Road Again" in Japanese, it made me feel like I was home.

Lately I've started talking to people about their connection to Disney, and have been surprised how often this word "home" is used. They don't even need to go on rides, or meet familiar characters. Sitting on a bench on Main Street, watching the crowds go by, is all the experience they need to feel like they are home again.

For some people, particularly in southern California where it all originated, it's not just their home but a familial home, kind of like Windsor Castle for the British royals. (And like Windsor Castle, tourists visit your home all the time, but it's still your home.) I've spoken with people who are now into building fourth-generation memories in the Disney Park home. Their parents were at Disney when it opened. They visited with their parents as kids, and when they had their own kids, brought them to the parks to share their own special memories and build new ones. And now their grandkids are layering on that emotional attachment to the family home.

And this is where the Disney understanding of its brand power comes in for the kill. With products like Disney Vacation Club and the Disneyland annual passport (as well as the Premier Passport for both Parks), the Disney Company invites people to come back to Disney parks again and again, every year, for the $98/day park tickets and $4 bottles of water that keep the shareholders happy. And with every trip and with every new generation, the parks become more of home, the attachment stronger.

I know there are other places people think of as "home." It's usually somewhere familiar, where they've spent happy times over repeated visits. For me it's also Las Vegas (particularly Circus Circus) and Hawaii and the Dish hike in the Stanford foothills. It's even something more intangible like Star Trek and the smell of dried California chaparral. But I've yet to find a place that so systematically builds on this product of home.

At the entryway of Animal Kingdom Lodge.

When Disney created the park he was inspired by his weekly visits with his daughter to the local park. He wanted something bigger, that the whole family could enjoy together. I wonder if he could see into the future at the parks that have grown out of his dream, what he would have thought.

"How tall IS he, anyway?"

Just a short and quick observation. When you're at any of the Disney parks, there are handy boards around that tell you how long the wait time is for each ride. This saves you from trekking across the length of the park only to find that the wait for Space Mountain is 2 hours.

If you hang around these boards you can hear how people plan and negotiate with each other. Which I was doing in Anaheim, when a family came by with their son. "Oooo, Splash Mountain is 55 minutes! David would like that." David, maybe 4 or 5 years old, nods vigorously. Then "Minimum 40 inches. Is he 40 inches? How tall IS he, anyway?" Parents look at each other blankly.

40" - 46" - 54" - who really knows how tall their kid is?

Because, of course, neither parent decisively knew. Kids that age sprout like bean stalks, and the last time you measured could have been 2 inches ago?

Once you get to the ride, the cast members have sticks to measure your kid. But if you're doing your planning at the board, it's a lot harder. It's actually impossible, because you can't measure at the board.

Easy experience design upgrade: measuring post located at all attraction boards, and everywhere else where people commonly stop to figure out their next ride.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and Pin Trading

The national motto of France is Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and it's also quite possibly the motto of everyone in the service industry in Paris. If you've ever been to a restaurant or cafe in Paris, you'll know what I'm talking about. I think it's the "egalité" part - equality - that trips up the service industry. Americans in Paris blog about this, the "I'm not your slave" attitude where people in the service industry try to prove you're not better than they are by not bringing you anything until they're good and ready, and smoking cigarettes while standing next to your table. .

I was interested in service at DLP because the service culture is so very different. US Disneys have incredible service. The cast members are cheerful, engaging, smiling, and helpful. The Japanese, a service-driven culture, excels at it even more than the US. At Disneyland Paris, the American training in service has clearly not quite caught up with the cast members. Rob was unable to get change from a few cast members who were standing in front of a pile of change. "It's not possible," they insisted, deadpan. All THREE of the cast members, while standing in front of about 30 Euros in change. 

I had even more fun with this when trying to trade pins. Pin trading is a very prescribed interaction. 

"May I see your pins," I ask the cast member.
"Of course," they smile, and hold out their lanyards for examination.

Anaheim cast member displaying pins in perfect form. Note the smile.

At this point you may trade any two of your pins for any two of their pins. Disney produces thousands of different types of pins, some unique to the park, some only available through trading. People are really into this. Fully grown adults, with children, will walk around the park with three pounds of pins around their necks. There are pin-only web sites for discussion and learning, pin trading stations in the park, even pin trading conventions. At Disney Tokyo, pin trading was so remarkably successful that they had to shut it down, because it changed the entire experience of the park. Now you can only buy pins there. Next time you're at a park, pay attention to people with pins. It's a not-so-secret club, a different layer to the Disney experience.

These people are wearing at least $150 in pins on their chests.

My collection. Sometimes it makes me happy just take them out and look at them at home.

At about $7 per pin, this is also quite a lot of money in Disney's pocket. And this is where Disneyland Paris is different from the US. Disneyland Paris has struggled because of the lower per-guest expenditure compared to US parks. Getting a guest to shell out even more money is just not happening. It's clear that DLP is trying to encourage pin trading, by having more cast members wear lanyards.

The cast members, however, are French. Not only do they not understand pin trading, they don't like being "summoned" to show their pins. And when they do, it wasn't unusual for me to be faced with some kind of egalité-demanding action on their part.

"I want that pin," one cast member said, pointing to my treasured Cheshire Cat. 
"I like that one," I said. "I want to give you this one."
"I can choose," she insisted. "That's the way it works. You choose mine, I choose yours. It's fair that way."
"That's not how it works," I protested.
"Yes it is," she says. And then she pulls her co-worker over. "She chooses and I choose, right?" Two against one. I lose.

In the end she got my Cheshire Cat, because I was just so bemused and shocked at this kind of assertiveness. I got the distinct impression that she knew exactly what the rules were. She just didn't want to live by them.

This wasn't the only time I had pin trading turned on its head in Paris either. The French are not okay with being in different positions of power. Certainly there were many cast members who understood the rules, even if they couldn't figure out how to display a lanyard correctly. But the attitude is just different. It was clear that they were not out to make a magical day for me. They had a job to do - making cotton candy, ringing up purchases at a register - and it did not involve some American coming and choosing pins from their collection while they had no say at all in the interaction.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

When Good Designs Go Bad

The person who designed FastPass should win an award. I'd like to see a statue of him next to Mickey Mouse in front of the castle. He was an experience design genius.

 If you're not familiar with it already, this is the system that lets you survive those "Crowd Level: 10" days. You stick your park ticket in a machine, it spits out another ticket with a time window that allows you to the front of the line. You then waltz off to find your smoked turkey leg or to trade pins or to ride something with a shorter line, returning later to smirk at schmucks in line while you cruise past them with your FastPass.

I wonder if Disney has ever tracked the amount of money that FastPass has made them. People standing in line spend zero money. People strolling through the park do - a T-shirt here, a Mickey-Mouse-shaped popsicle there - it must add up. The guests love it too. No one wants to stand in line. One of the most common complaints on Tripadvisor about Disney is how much standing in line your near-$100 ticket just bought you.

FastPass is a win-win system. Disney wins, guests win.

In Disneyland Paris, FastPass only kinda sorta worked. Return windows were shorter (15 minutes instead of 30 or 60). Rides broke down right when your return window opened, meaning you just wasted your precious FastPass on NOTHING.

Worst of all, the lines for FastPass were ridiculous. It was possible to stand in a 15-minute line to get a FastPass, so that you could later criss-cross the park to stand in line for another 30 minutes to get on a ride.

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See the hundred people here? All waiting to get a FastPass. And how many of them got it? About 15, since the ride broke five minutes after this photo was taken. They closed the FastPass station, but didn't tell the people who were standing in line. D'oh!

Once you got through the line to a machine, even getting a FastPass presents problems. In the US Disney Parks, you put your ticket in, you get a ticket out. Simple self-service.

Simple interface at a US FastPass kiosk

In Paris, getting a FastPass out of a machine was like getting a smile out of a Parisian waiter. Good luck with that, sucker! At each FastPass station, harried employees scuttled between machines, helping guests wrangle the machines into submission. I counted 2 employees for every four-machine station. Every once in a while, even the employees gave up with the tickets, and just opened the machine to manually force a FastPass to be printed.

Cast member helping a guest figure out how to scan his bar code.

One of the major problems in Paris is that there are at least THREE kinds of tickets being scanned by machines. Magnetic stripe tickets, bar code tickets, full A4 size printed-at-home tickets. Why DLP allows this I have no idea. But there were two kinds of scanner in each machine, and people couldn't figure out where their ticket should go.

I really think the bar code drawing tells me to put my ticket IN the slot. But no, you're supposed to slap it parallel to the surface of the machine. NOT intuitive. But it also needs to accommodate guests who printed their tickets in A4 paper at home.

According to another blog this two-reader system was supposed to be an improvement. But people ran the magnetic stripe backwards, stuck their bar code ticket IN to the machine (kinda like the drawing suggests) rather than putting it parallel to the surface, didn't know what to do with their printed-from-home tickets.  The instructions were non-existent or confusing. The printers were slow. Rather than taking a few seconds a ticket, it was taking 15 or 45 seconds a ticket. And with guests like the lady in front of me running 16 tickets at a time for her group, we were all in for a long wait.

Why Disney doesn't just issue one type of ticket is beyond me. Print-at-home tickets also exist here in the US, but are traded in for standardized tickets in Anaheim at the gate.

With design the devil's in the details - always. There's no reason FastPass can't work more smoothly, even with three kinds of tickets. Even creating a better graphic instruction and slapping on a sticker would help here.

If Disney does track how much money is spent when people have FastPasses, this would be an interesting question. How much money is not being spent at Disney when people are standing in FastPass lines?

Cultural Imperialism

Yup, this is France. Or at least, it's IN France.

If you ever want to laugh at the superior attitude of the French, you should read about the uproar from critics when Disney announced the planned building of Disneyland Paris. More importation of American culture! It was called a "cultural Chernobyl." One journalist went so far as to write, "I wish with all my heart that the rebels would set fire to Disney."

Others were more accepting, pointing out that France has started adopting American culture all on their own. English creeps insidiously into French language, and it takes an official government organization (Le Académie francaise) in order to ward of the Anglicization.

From the initial announcement of the park opening to the cries of dismay and accusations of American cultural imperialism, Disneyland has struggled with where it sits on the cultural spectrum. Mostly, the critics have calmed down by now about encroaching American values, 22 years after its opening. The park itself balances precariously between being French and being American, staying mostly American but with occasional nods to its French location through language and over-use of Beauty and the Beast.

Disney itself didn't really seem to know what it should be. In 1992 when Disney finally opened a resort in Europe, it was called Euro Disneyland. In 1994 (maybe in case anyone would be confused where they were) it became Euro Disney Resort Paris. 2002 came Disneyland Resort Paris. And today, it is Disneyland Paris. Or Parc Disneyland. Actually, it's Disneyland Paris the resort, or Parc Disneyland, the park.

Even they don't seem to know. Here are two different entrances to the park, both leading into the same place. True one is French and the other is English, but they don't seem to be able to decide if it's Park or Paris. The Disney fans just refer to it as DLP - simultaneously covering "park" and "Paris" at the same time.

For much of its life DLP seems to have had some identity issues. The audience, however, comes from everywhere. While Disneyland Anaheim draws largely from southern California and Walt Disney World Orlando from all over the US (with some overseas visitors), the guests at DLP seem to come from all over Europe. Standing in line for Peter Pan, you might hear some German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, Polish, and probably at least a few languages you won't recognize. There's also a bit of Chinese and even Japanese.

The sheer linguistic diversity of the park is staggering, especially on Easter Week when the crowds peak and mill all around you. Disney has done a good job of keeping up with the languages, hiring cast members who speak both French and English and often at least one other language, and providing brochures in six languages.

It also has gone and fitted one of its auditoriums with headphones tunable to five different language channels so that if you can't follow the French narration, perhaps one of these other ones will work.

Every seat has a set of these to let you watch the show.

But translation gets more complex when it's live, and simultaneous translation is both exhausting for the translator and a wildly expensive skill to have working 12 hours a day so Disney doesn't do that in the shows. In the "Stitch Live" show where an escaping Stitch talks live from his spaceship to children in the audience, they alternate between English and French shows.

Which kind of works, except that Stitch doesn't know his Welsh and Scottish names, so when a kid says his name is Carwyn, Stitch asks him to repeat it three times before giving up and saying "Welcome to Carin from Wales!"

Communications also extends beyond language and names.  Humor and spontaneity become incredibly hard to do at DLP with its multicultural audience. Germans, French, and Brits don't really share the same sense of humor.

DLP's saving grace is the shared common culture of Disney mythology. People arrive already knowing the Little Mermaid and Snow White and Rapunzel, whom they've seen on screen at home in their own language. With enough references to these links, the experience holds together for any culture that has been exposed to the Disney stories, allowing people to draw from much more than just what they are seeing during the day in order to build richer experiences.

Nowhere else but at DLP have I seen such a diversity of people from completely different cultures sharing the same experience. They walk through the turnstiles, step onto Main Street, USA, and explore different lands. They eat popcorn and hot dogs, meet Mickey Mouse, ride the Mississippi steam boat through the bayou.

And here I can see the French critic's objection. Disneyland is a slice of not just America but of Americana. It's folklore, history, culture. Plopped into the middle of the French countryside, it not only attracts the French to enjoy it, but invites people from all over Europe to come to France and see America.

Ouch.

Prejudice, Part II

When I rebooted my Disney addiction by taking my niece (12) and nephew (8) to Walt Disney World in 2011, they were shocked that kids not that much younger than them were riding around in strollers. We saw kids stuffed into strollers with gangly arms and legs not even fitting, dragging on the ground as their parents pushed them through the park.

Now I'm no parent, so I don't know if these kids were 5 or 6 or even 10 years old, but clearly they were able to walk. Have we gotten so lazy as a society that even kids that age, known for their boundless amounts of energy when excited, can't go to Disneyland on their own two feet?

I started looking at stroller occupants when I visited Japan. While Japan has its fair share of strollers, the kids never seemed more than 2 or 3 years old there. And even then, most of them ran along in the park on their own.

My first reaction, of course, was to condemn the parents who let older kids ride in strollers, as well as developing a fair amount of contempt for the kids themselves. I stewed in this holier-than-thou attitude for several trips, watching these lazy big kids kick back with their giant sodas and thinking of their future lifetime of fitness issues and weighing down our health care system.

But a lightbulb went off around the 289th time I encountered this site in the US. Disneyland is the ONLY place where I see kids this old in strollers. I don't see them in the mall, or the city park, or Safeway. Kids everywhere else in America were just like those in Japan - riding around in strollers until the age or 2 or 3, then walking around on their own.

So what's happening at Disney? Walking. Lots and lots of walking.

On an average day at Disney, a person taking a sane loop around the park can expect to clock 6-10 miles. This accounts for all the zigzagging through lines, doubling back to get a churro, running to catch a parade. If that person isn't sane - like if they were me and running around gathering Fastpasses in both parks in order to skip lines - they can expect to do 10-15 miles a day. Many people spend consecutive days at Disney, so this easily gets to 20 or 30 miles on a trip. (Sidenote: one day I will go on a weight loss camp, and it will consist entirely of spending all day in the park for a week. No churros or turkey legs.)

No normal kid is able to handle this amount of walking, probably not until they're into their tweens. If a parent wants to make sure their family gets to experience the entire park, they need to bring or rent equipment to make this possible. With the park opening at 8am and closing at midnight during peak hours, kids are already up early and down late. Mealtimes are disrupted and overstimulation is everywhere. Better use the stroller to save energy where possible, so they can enjoy all that the park has to offer.

This makes a lot of sense to me, but it doesn't explain what's happening in Japan.

I've been to Disney Tokyo about 10 times now, and I don't think the Japanese kids are as tuckered out from their walking as the American kids are from their sitting. I do notice lots of Japanese families just sitting in the shade on their picnic blankets, waiting for a parade or just letting the kids play games with each other. They're not crisscrossing the park seeking Dumbo for the third time.

And therein lies the difference. Americans have created a society of doers - we value getting things done and we'll move mountains to get to the bottom of that list of things we want to do. We'll facilitate our children getting those things done too, in whatever ways we can. They might be asleep between Small World and Peter Pan, but by golly they will get on every single one of those rides before the end of the trip.

There are some very different values at work here. I'm not making any judgements (for a change) about what's right and wrong. But it's possible to be the parent who makes sure your kid does everything there is to do, or to be the parent who goes at your kid's pace, even if that pace means missing most of the available experiences.

The strollers with big kids don't look like diabetes-creating machines to me at all any more. They're an expression of these values we've formed as a society - about maximizing experiences, about choosing more rather than less, about making sure the pack keeps moving together at the speed of the fastest rather than the slowest member. These values have helped us achieve an awful lot of things as a society, but it leaves a gnawing feeling in my gut about how we got here.

Too philosophical for a Disney blog? Let me know if I should be covering Disney snack foods in the next entry. I hear Disneyland Paris has Nutella-filled Mickey Mouse bread rolls.

Looking forward to these snacks. One of many examples found on one of many Disney food blogs.