Disney Starts a Big Adventure

After three years of construction and more than $1 billion spent, Walt Disney Co. pulled back the curtains Wednesday on its new California Adventure park, launching a publicity blitz that will intensify as the February opening approaches.

California Adventure, which opens Feb. 8, is a smaller companion park next to the 45-year-old Disneyland in Anaheim. Disney is betting that the new park and surrounding retail and hotel development will help convert the Disneyland Resort into a multi-day destination for tourists.

Disney attractions boss Paul Pressler has said his biggest worry is of a slowdown in the economy. And indeed, it now appears Disney will open its new park in the dead of winter--its other parks have always opened in spring or summer--in the middle of what could be significant economic slowing.

Still, Disney officials said they were confident that the company’s $1.4-billion expansion of the Disneyland area will be a hit, and they are now moving to drum up public excitement.

Toward that end, Disney officials walked reporters and camera crews through the park Wednesday and beamed a satellite feed to the rest of the world. Under cloudy skies, they showed off the park’s impressionistic roundup of the state’s attractions--from farms, wineries and the Sierra Nevada to the beach, the San Francisco Bay Area and a tongue-in-cheek take on Hollywood.

Spokesman Tom Brocato said a national ad campaign beginning with the new year will counter notions that California Adventure, which will charge a separate admission, is merely a new attraction at the old park. The ads will feature “Toy Story’s” Buzz Lightyear on a reconnaissance mission, peering through binoculars from Disneyland toward the new park.

On Wednesday, Disney executives offered a few new details about their addition, which also includes a 750-room hotel and a nightclub, dining and shopping zone similar to the CityWalk entertainment mall at Universal Studios. The hotel and entertainment zone are to open in January.

The executives confirmed that tickets for the new park will cost the same as at Disneyland--currently $43 for adults and $33 for youngsters 3 to 9. The policy is the same as at Walt Disney World in Florida, where tickets cost the same at all four Disney parks.

Officials also said that despite the tight labor markets brought on by the country’s long economic expansion, they are ahead of schedule in hiring 8,200 new workers for their expanded resort. So far, 6,700 have been hired, Brocato said.

Nearly all the jobs are part-time work paying $6 to $7.50 an hour.

Certainly Disney executives are hoping that the new park will open under sunny economic skies. But the likelihood of that has dimmed lately. A series of reports have revealed slower growth in recent weeks. And Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, whose central bank raised interest rates six times to keep inflation at bay, suggested Tuesday that the Fed might reverse course and lower rates to combat a weakening economy, which he said “already has lost some momentum” and has slowed “appreciably.”

Nonetheless, Brocato said that in a downturn, California Adventure could look good by comparison with more expensive Western vacation destinations. “When the economy is great, they might take bigger-ticket trips to places like Hawaii,” he said. “We still think Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure will be high on priority lists.”

Brocato said he thinks the new park will burst on the scene like a highly anticipated and promoted movie, drawing huge crowds in its first year. The company says it is expecting about 7 million visitors annually to the new park--about half the number to Disneyland.

Barry Braverman, California Adventure’s lead designer, said the toughest challenge was squeezing the new park, Grand Californian luxury hotel and Downtown Disney mall into the constrained space of the former main parking lot at Disneyland. California Adventure also was built under tough financial constraints after Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner decided a larger complex based on Walt Disney World’s Epcot was infeasible.

The larger Westcot park and accompanying hotels and retail complexes would have cost $3 billion, while the California Adventure expansion was budgeted at less than half that. The new park has about 55 acres of space for visitors, compared to Disneyland’s 85 acres, and some critics have complained that its rides appear to be short on capacity and thrills.

Braverman defended the new park’s attractions, predicting customers will thrill to a simulated hang glider flight over a dozen famous California sites, a “raft ride” through a Sierra landscape and a looping roller coaster he said was still tame enough to qualify as a family attraction.

He said he was particularly fond of an animation exhibit in the park’s Hollywood backlot section. He said company Vice Chairman Roy Disney, the nephew of founder Walt Disney and a longtime advocate for the company’s commitment to animated movies, visited the exhibit “and it brought tears to his eyes.”

Braverman pointed out that several sites within the park remain available for smaller attractions, while a 20-acre section of parking lot just outside could be used for major rides. In opening its newer Florida parks, Disney has started small and then has added major attractions when attendance justifies it, such as the Asia section at Animal Kingdom and the Tower of Terror and Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster thrill rides at Disney-MGM Studios.

“I think you will see this park expand fairly rapidly,” Braverman said, suggesting that Disney may first add some attractions aimed at younger children.

For now, parkgoers will find a far more densely packed park than Disneyland. In the Golden State section, which celebrates California’s outdoors and culture, a few steps and turns around corners take visitors from Monterey Bay’s canneries to pine- and redwood-dotted slopes to aerospace factories in the high desert.

The Paradise Pier section emulates the crowded-together rides at beach amusement parks of old. The roller coaster, an elaborate Ferris wheel with cars that move toward the center and back as it twirls, and several other thrill rides drop, spin and shoot riders skyward in a tight space looking out on a lagoon with simulated waves.

The detail for which Disney is known is evident throughout, from what appears to be “mammoth bones” embedded in a rock wall to the scuffed and cracked surface of a path that looks like a high-desert runway.

Disney’s Imagineers perhaps had the most fun with the Hollywood section, where, unlike the company’s movie park in Florida, no actual movies or videos are made, Braverman pointed out. “In many ways that freed us up to deal with the mystique of the movies,” he said.

The designers responded with a faux Hollywood street where Los Angeles landmarks such as Bullock’s Wilshire, the Wiltern Theatre and the Max Factor building are jumbled cheek to jowl, and Art Deco buildings bump up against Frank Lloyd Wright Arts and Crafts structures.

One memorabilia shop labeled Rizzo’s Prop and Pawn featured a portrait of a rat--an homage of sorts to the Ratso Rizzo character in “Midnight Cowboy.” And howlers of puns abound throughout: from the BUR-R-R BANK Ice Cream shop near the entry to the sign advertising the office of a Hollywood private eye. The name on the door: Phil M. Noir.