One aspect of Michael Eisner I admire when it comes to his time as Disney CEO was his insistence on brainstorming from all levels of the company.He felt that it was important to foster an environment where people weren’t afraid to voice their ideas. From that ethic came some ideas that changed the Disney company forever and are still with us today. There were also some pretty bad ideas. Here are five failed ideas from the Eisner Era.
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Number 5: Rentable boats in the World Showcase Lagoon
According to both Eisner and investor Sid Bass, during an afternoon at EPCOT together while walking around the park and talking business, Eisner realized that there was nothing going on in the World Showcase Lagoon.
Disney did run tests of a boat rental program in Epcot, however it never left the testing stage as they soon learned that the testers struggled with boats due to the wake bouncing off the walls of the lagoon and roughing up the waters.
On the subject he said “Our people who were testing were all capsizing and getting sick.”
Number 4: Disney Fast Food
In 1990 during the rise of the Disney store, as they were expanding from 41 to over 120 locations across the country, Disney decided it was time to get into the fast food business. The idea was called Mickey’s Kitchen and the first one opened in April of that year at their Montclair Plaza Disney Store in California.
The idea was to offer a healthy fast food alternative with the Disney brand attached to it, and the initial test locations existed within Disney stores themselves as extensions. The menu offered up dishes such as “Salads in Wonderland”, meatless “Mickey Burgers” and “Bibbity Bobbedy Beverages”.
The test lasted for two years and expanded to a second location, but by March of 1992 both were shut down due to poor performance. As consumer products division spokesman Chuck Champlin put it, Disney “barely broke even with Mickey’s Kitchen.”
Number 3: Disney Cars. No, not the Pixar film. Actual Disney cars.
When it came time for Eisner's son Breck to start driving, Eisner floated the idea of an actual Disney car. He thought it would be wonderful for Disney to be known as the safest car on the roads. The car would, among being the safest, offer fenders and roofs that could easily be swapped out for different designs, making them more customizable.
The idea got as far a focus testing through Disney’s outsourced PR firm, Young and Rubicam. As it turns out, according to Young and Rubicam’s Steve Rose, when people think of a Disney car, they imagine Goofy on the hood and a Mickey Mouse steering wheel. It was an idea nobody wanted. With that data at hand, Eisner shelved the concept.
Number 2: The year long wedding of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
The concept was to not only have Mickey and Minnie get married, but to make a year long event out of it. The idea was that Mickey and Minnie would get engaged on Valentine’s Day, get a ring in April at Tiffany & Co (surely a sponsorship opportunity), and finally get married in June during the height of the Disney vacationing season and during a televised special. Lastly the two would honeymoon in Paris, not too far off from the relatively new EuroDisney.
It was packed with all of the tie-ins and synergy that Eisner was known for. However ultimately the idea of Mickey and Minnie getting married, and all the implications and complications that came with it, were just too radical for many at the company, and the idea was shot down.
Number 1: The Mickey Mouse hotel, a 43-story towering, inhabitable monument to the mouse himself.
During their second week as CEO and COO of The Walt Disney Company, Michael Eisner and Frank Wells got to work on developing a new plan for the Walt Disney Studios lot over in Burbank. One idea that made it on the list was putting a hotel along Riverside Drive. Eisner and Wells met with legendary Imagineer Marty Sklar and Disney’s in-house Harvard trained architect, Wing Chao and that’s when Eisner proposed his idea for the hotel.
He said “Let’s make this a Mickey Mouse hotel.”
Sklar replied “You mean the name, the Mickey Mouse Hotel?”
“No” said Eisner. “Make it in the shape of Mickey, with rooms in the legs.
The idea was to build a 43-story version of Mickey Mouse that would stand upright and with a leg on each side of the drive, straddling the street. It was such a bizarre idea that as first nobody was sure if he was even being serious.
There was some lively debate over the practicality of such an idea, but it was finally Chao who put the idea to rest by raising the question as to where the elevators for the hotel would go, what with the dynamic shape of the building and all.