It's always been touted "as a fact" today's business climate is so rough, that Wall Street is so driven, that the world is so eager to devore fluffy bunnies that Walt would have been grounded into hamburger.
That's a complete lie.
Business has changed, but it's certainly not the case The Great Depression was an easy time to start a movie studio in a garage, that World War Two really was a boon for expanding markets, and that getting capital from a bank was a simple matter of filling out a deposit slip.
In fact, today's capital sources - from venture captalists to junk bonds to hedge funds to international money markets - would have seem like impossible dream to anyone in the 1950s. Stock holders are infinetly more forgiving than Bank of America's board of directors were (for which Michael Eisner and the last ten years of his tenure will be forever grateful for).
This is not an opinion, it's simple history. It's never been easy to start a business, it's never been easy to grow a business, it's never been easy to sustain a business.
But there's this myth out in fanhood that somehow Walt had it really easy and therefore we can't hold today's company to the same standard.
That's utter and complete Billabong Sausages.
Walt got where he did because he created films people wanted to see and places people wanted to visit.
Disneyland could have been as huge a flop as California Adventure is - had Disney not spent the talent, energy and imagination to make the place "magical" instead of relying on cheap marketing phrases like DCA did.
Disney's success has nothing to do with easy money - it was a gift of showmanship combined with talent to pull it off and a deep understanding what people wanted. Today's Disney, for all it's money, doesn't seem to have those qualities. And that - not the stock market - is why things are different.
Disney's current failures have nothing to do with a shortage of funds. If Disney can waste hundreds of millions of dollars on Internet fiascos, plane leases and mega-flop movies without Wall Street even saying a solitary bad word - then certainly they could have dropped an additional $20 million and given WDW a
real Winnie the Pooh attraction instead of the parking lot carny version we got.
Today's Disney remarks off-handledy that they have to spend
one billion dollars just to
begin to fix California Adventure and Wall Street writes that off as nothing. Can you imagine what would have happened to Walt if he went back to Bank of America's board and said "sure, Disneyland has attracted less than 20% of the people we anticpated over the last five years, but just give me
more money than I spent originally and things will be fine"?
Granted, among fans of a company it's very tempting (if not a requirement) to ignore what really happens so that today seems all warm and fuzzy. You can't convinence a Brintey fan that's she's a complete loon, you won't get a Disney fanboi or fanprincess to say Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor is pretty sad for a company that at one time created 'The Haunted Mansion'.
There are plenty of fan sites on the Internet were the past is forgotten and today is all joy and rainbows. The DIS Boards is one of the few that (sometimes) grows beyond that into true, adult conversation. We were talking about the real reasons why a fifth theme park won't happen. It has nothing to do with Walt easy, carefree life or the evil financial analyst devils that crush all of Bob Iger's dreams. Instead there are real business decisions made by real people. That's what we should be talking about, not spreading falsehoods about times past.
