The Point From Which You Work Backward

Five years ago today, I started this blog with two posts on the state of EPCOT. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, since I’ve never represented my work here as good, merely as a thing I do because it’s fun. But writing it has turned me on to the bigger Disney fan community and its feuding factions, and it’s led to my joining Twitter and getting to know some fantastic people there. I even got to ruin an episode of WEDway NOW!

Also, I’d be seriously remiss if I failed to acknowledge my main inspirations for starting this blog in the first place: EPCOT Central, Passport to Dreams Old and New, and Progress City U.S.A. All three of these blogs are vastly superior to this one, and your time would be much better spent reading them. But now: today’s topic.

I am by no means an Apple “fanboy” or a worshipper of Steve Jobs. But he said something once that I think really nails why the “old” Walt Disney Company that produced things like EPCOT Center and the Walt Disney World resort is nothing like today’s Walt Disney Company that has spent the last decade-and-a-half ruining those things. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology” Jobs said shortly after his return to Apple in 1997. Obviously, he was not talking about the theme park industry when he said this, he was talking about the tech industry. But the principle is sound.

Think back to the birth of the online music store in the early 2000s. Starting in the late 90s, people would use file sharing networks like Napster or Kazaa to download music files and then burn them to CDs. (Kids, ask your parents) Now, the legality of this was rather questionable, and the truth was that most people welcomed a safe, easy, and legal option to buy music on the Internet. But when the recording industry first entered the online music business, that’s not how they approached it. First, they looked at the money that ISPs were making from monthly subscriptions and decided they wanted a piece of that, so their new services would be subscription based. Cancel your subscription, and the music you’ve paid for goes away. Next, they decided that they’d like to be able to make money on the various things people liked to do with their music, like burning it to CDs. So a fee was attached to that, too. The resulting services like Pressplay and MusicNet were utterly terrible. It was ridiculously obvious that the record companies started with how much money they wanted to make and worked backwards from that. A good customer experience was not important. Then in 2003, Apple came along with the iTunes store that made it easy to find the music you wanted and download it a reasonable price without a monthly subscription or extra fees. Five years later it was the biggest music retailer in the United States, and two years after that it became the biggest music retailer in the world. Clearly, working backward from the customer experience was the best way to go here.

Now let’s talk about Disney’s MyMagic+ program. I’ve talked in the past about why it’s bad for Disney’s customers. But why does it even exist? Is it because Disney’s theme park people identified some new experience they wanted to bring to customers and then worked backward to come up with a system to do that? In interviews, Disney’s executives always talk about how it’s going to enhance their revenues. They never mention any benefits that their customers will see from the system, except for the times when they confuse more personalized marketing with something that customers want. MyMagic+ is just another Pressplay/MusicNet fiasco waiting to happen. The only reason it may be more successful is that, whereas music lovers in the early 2000s could always just buy CDs, use online file-sharing services, or eventually the iTunes store, there are no other distribution channels for Disney theme park attractions. Anyone who wants to visit Disney World will have to submit themselves to MyMagic+. And since Disney has such a massive reservoir of cultural goodwill it’s built up over the decades, many customers may not even realize how much they’re being fleeced. I just wish Disney would remember where that massive amount of goodwill they enjoy came from.

For years, Disney used technology to delight and benefit their customers. Audio-Animatronics combined with ingenious projection, lighting, and other physical effects gave people experiences they couldn’t get anywhere else-experiences they were happy to pay for. When the company embarked on the construction of EPCOT Center, they used the two-and-a-half decades of experience they’d accumulated in the theme park business to make it the most crowd-friendly park ever. Spacious walkways and quick-loading, “people-eating” attractions kept crowding and long lines to a minimum. By the mid-90s Disney’s parks and resorts business was extremely popular and profitable, too.

But in the last decade or so Disney’s theme park innovations have had nothing to do with improving the customer experience. FastPass, the Dining Plan, and now MyMagic+ all serve to make it more difficult to experience attractions or eat in restaurants while providing nice “revenue enhancements” for Disney. Meanwhile, down the road Universal Studios is adding innovative new attractions left and right, and people are flocking to their parks like never before. Generally speaking, when Company A competes by offering a good experience while Company B merely tries to make more money through complicated revenue-generating schemes, Company A wins.

What will the final outcome of MyMagic+ be? There’s no way to know now, and any answer is likely years in the future. But I continue to wish that Disney will one day rediscover the philosophy of starting with the customer experience and working backward.

The Pixie Dust Detoxification Effect

A warning: A lot of what I’m about to say will in this post come across as uncharacteristically blunt. I’m not one of those people who goes around telling anyone with a different opinion than me that I’m right and they’re wrong. In fact, I usually edit myself pretty strongly to avoid seeming hypercritical or not respectful enough of someone else’s opinions. So if anything I’ve written here makes you a little hot under the collar, I'm really sorry. But it's a very big Internet, and it's easy to filter out people who say stuff you don't like. And in the end, I'm just some guy. My opinions don't actually matter.

So let’s dive right in.

If you’re reading this I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the basics of MyMagic+ by now. If not there’s a pretty good breakdown here, although it does have an unreasonably positive spin in my opinion. I don’t like MyMagic+, and I think that anyone who looks at what it’s supposed to do and says that it makes the Disney World experience “better for everyone” is either a liar or a fool. I usually try to make more nuanced statements than that, but this not one of those things that’s just a matter of opinion. With MyMagic+, Disney is instituting a program that’s good for them and bad for their customers. There’s no way to completely opt out of the program since all ticket media will be RFID-enabled (more on that later) and those who choose not to use features like FastPass+ will have a much worse experience in the parks than those who do. These are facts. Not opinions. Facts. Let me break it down for you:

FASTPASS+

The current FastPass system will completely go away and be replaced by FastPass+. FastPass+ will encompass all attractions, not just the most popular ones, and will also include things like special parade and fireworks viewing areas and selected character meet-and-greets. All customers will get 3 FastPasses per day to be used at one park only. Also, all FastPasses must be scheduled in advance via the MyMagic+ mobile app or the My Disney Experience website. There will be little, if any provision for same-day FastPass availability. None of what I’ve just said is opinion or speculation, it’s all been confirmed by Disney. After reading that you can probably tell why FastPass+ is such bad deal for Walt Disney World visitors, but just in case you’re scratching your head and saying “That doesn’t sound bad at all!” let me explain why you’re wrong:

1. You will have to plan your entire vacation almost down to the minute. The complexity of a Disney World vacation had already reached the upper limit of what I was prepared to tolerate. Thanks to the Dining Plan, you have to make dining reservations months in advance unless you want to eat fast food your whole trip. Then, when you arrive at the park, you have to make sure the return times for any FastPasses you get don’t conflict with your restaurant reservations. It’s a hassle.

But now with MyMagic+, you’ll have to plan all this stuff out in advance. Instead of just saying “I think we’ll go to EPCOT on Tuesday”, you have to plan exactly what everyone in your party will do in EPCOT on Tuesday. You have to make sure that none of their FastPass return windows conflict with the lunch reservation you made for the family at Biergarten or your dinner reservation at Garden Grille. And what if your son Justin used his three FastPasses on Soarin’, Test Track, and Mission:Space and now he has no FastPasses left to get into the Illuminations viewing area with the rest of the family? Sure, he can go into the app and change it, but what if he doesn’t want to? Now you’ve got an argument on your hands, which distracts you from the spreadsheet you’re building to keep track of where everyone will be in the park at what time to make sure they don’t miss your meal reservations. And all that’s just for one day! Multiply it by a four day vacation and you can see what a gigantic pain in the butt this is going to be.

But wait! There’s more! You know how if you want to eat at an extremely popular restaurant like Le Cellier or Be Our Guest you have to make your reservation at literally the earliest possible second or you won’t get one at all? (Let’s suspend our disbelief here for a moment and pretend there’s a high demand for these restaurants because they serve genuinely excellent food, not because they’ve been unreasonably hyped by bloggers who are just trying to show off how totally part of the “knowledgeable Disney insider” crowd they are.) Now FastPasses are going to work the same way! If you don’t book your FastPasses for Soarin’, Toy Story Midway Mania, Space Mountain, or whatever insanely popular attraction you care to name at the earliest possible moment, you may not get one. And if you do, it could be at a ridiculously inconvenient time. Ask yourself how many average, non-theme-park-savvy people are going to realize this? How many of them will forget to book FastPasses altogether, or wait until the week before their trip?  I’d say the appropriate metaphor for those folks involves a river of excrement and a Native American water vessel without any means of propulsion. But, even if you’re the biggest Disney nerd there is and know exactly how to work the MyMagic system, you still won’t be able to avoid . . .

2. Longer wait times for everything. The current FastPass system doesn’t actually make wait times shorter. What it does is grotesquely inflate the wait time for standby riders while FastPass riders wait about as long as they would if there were no such thing as FastPass. This means that for highly popular but slow-loading attractions like Peter Pan’s Flight or Soarin’, the standby line is so long that it basically isn’t worth it to ride them without a FastPass. Of course, there’s a way around this: simply ride these attractions first thing after rope drop, before FastPass return times kick in. Also, it’s worth noting that attractions that load quickly, like the PeopleMover or Pirates of the Caribbean, don’t use FastPass, and their original loading procedure remains highly efficient.

But now this is all going to change. Since every attraction will have FastPass+, standby wait times for every attraction will be drastically inflated. And since you only get three FastPasses per day, you will end up waiting in some of those lines if you want to visit more than three attractions. Since FastPasses will be entirely reserved in advance, there won’t be a “window” at the beginning of the day where you can hop in the Standby line for a popular attraction and progress quickly through it without being held up by the FastPass process. The fact that wait times will increase is something even Disney acknowledges. Why else would they be installing interactive games in so many standby queues? Because they love their customers and want them to be happy? Or because of the need to placate customers who are going to be spending a lot more time standing in basically stationary standby lines once MyMagic+ is fully up and running?

3. Less flexibility. One thing Disney representatives always say when talking about MyMagic+ is that it’s all about giving their customers more choices, more options, more freedom to personalize their vacation. This is a completely and utterly false lie. It’s the same kind of thing that AT&T or Verizon says whenever they introduce some complicated new rate plan designed to squeeze more money from their customers but not improve their service in any way. What is really more likely, that a huge corporation like Disney or AT&T loves its customers so much that it wants to spend a huge amount of money developing a system to make their lives easier, then add it to the service it already provides at no additional cost? Or that they’ve found a way to enhance their revenue in a way that worsens their customers’ experience, and they’re just marketing it as in improvement?
FastPass+ will restrict you to one park per day. This is by design. Its stated goal, as outlined in company documents that have leaked online and/or message board postings from people with a proven track record for providing reliable inside information, is to solve the problem of outsized crowds at the Magic Kingdom (and EPCOT, to a much lesser extent) in the late afternoon and evening due to people park-hopping there after spending the first part of the day at Hollywood Studios or Animal Kingdom. What Disney would like is for people who started their day at Hollywood Studios to remain there, and presumably for people who started their day at Animal Kingdom to go back to their hotel room and sit on their hands, since that park closes at like 5 o’clock in the afternoon.

Now, to any sane person the answer to the question of how to get people to stay longer at Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom, or even EPCOT is obvious: add more attractions and entertainment to those parks that people will want to experience. After all, it worked pretty well in Anaheim with the California Adventure overhaul. But Disney is not in the theme park business just so it can do what people want, even if those people happen to be paying customers. No, the approach Disney is taking here is to herd people where it wants them to go, not where they are naturally inclined to be. The executives are very happy about this “crowd management” feature of MyMagic+, because they imagine that it will spread crowds more evenly throughout the four theme parks and alleviate the need to spend the money to add new attractions. Because we all know that the Orlando management team would rather get a colonoscopy from Captain Hook than spend the money to add new attractions.

Now maybe after reading all this, you’re like “Dave, I totally agree that FastPass+ is going to be a giant hassle. I just won’t use it! I’ll opt out!” Well, good for you. But since the current FastPass system will go away, and FastPass+ will dramatically increase the wait times at every single ride on property, you’ll be waiting in a lot of hideously long, barely-moving standby lines. But you will have paid as much to get into the park as everyone else.

So that’s it. I’ve spent over 1,250 words talking about just one aspect of MyMagic+ and why it’s so bad for everyone who’s not a Disney executive. And I didn’t even get into the fact that another exciting feature of this technology is that Disney will be able to track you all over the property and develop a complete picture of your park touring, dining, and spending habits for every minute of your stay. That’s something that freaks a lot of people out, and if it doesn’t at least worry you you’re incredibly naïve.

Still, so as not to be accused of being too one-sided in my opinions I really do need to mention one positive aspect of MyMagic+: its convenience. Instead of having to fish a ticket out of your pocket and feed it into a little slot while pressing your finger against a biometric scanner to enter the park, you just swipe your MagicBand against an RFID reader. Instead of having to pull a card out of your wallet to pay for something, you just swipe your MagicBand against an RFID reader. And instead of having to insert your park ticket into a FastPass machine to receive a FastPass, then present that FastPass to the Cast Member at the front of the FastPass queue, you just swipe your MagicBand against an RFID reader. Is it convenient? Sure. You’ll save seconds of valuable time. But balance that against the increased time you’ll spend waiting in line and maybe you’ll see why I’m not enthused.
But perhaps I’m getting all upset over nothing. Because Disney has been doing a lot of tests of the MyMagic system over the past few weeks, and they’ve gone great except for the fact that the system doesn’t work and the frontline Cast Members are obviously not trained to deal with any of the problems it has. Here’s a nice first-person account from one of the MyMagic test subjects. Here’s another one. What worries me most is that Disney management is going to respond to the negative feedback from their customers and the front line Cast Members like this:

. . . and decide to push ahead with full implementation of the system anyway even though it clearly does not work. And if you seriously think that Disney’s executives are not out-of-touch enough to do something like this, then I have a tropical island in North Dakota I’d like to sell you.

As I said at the outset, I am not usually this blunt. But the fact of the matter is that anyone who says that MyMagic+ is really going to be a great thing for Disney’s customers fits into one of three categories:

1. Extremely naïve people who view the world through rose-colored glasses and won’t consider the possibility that Disney is just like every other corporation because that would “spoil the magic.”
2. People who work for Disney and are being paid to lie about how wonderful MyMagic+ is.
3. Bloggers, podcasters, or website owners who don’t dare to say anything negative about any of Disney’s ventures lest they upset their friends in Disney’s social media arm who provide them with freebies and access to make them feel special, or aspiring bloggers, podcasters, or website owners who are trying to get in good with Disney’s social media arm to obtain the aforementioned freebies and access.

The first category of person is just clueless, maybe even mentally ill, and I don’t dislike those folks but I do feel sorry for them. But the other two groups of people will deliberately steer you wrong just to satisfy their own selfish agenda, an agenda that may be as trivial as hoping Disney will notice them and treat them like a “preferred” blogger. And I have nothing but contempt for those people.
If you’ve made it all the way through this extremely dense wall of text, you deserve a prize. Unfortunately, I don’t have any, because this isn’t one of those blogs with sponsors and stuff. But, maybe you’re wondering “What does all of this have to do with the title of this post? And why do you feel so strongly about it?”

Well, I’ve had a lifelong love for Walt Disney World. It used to be full of awesome stuff that I loved. Some of that stuff is gone now, but there’s still plenty there. And I’m very much a creature of habit. Once I find something I like and am comfortable with, be it a burger joint, a brand of sneakers, or a certain cartoon mouse-themed vacation compound, I stick with it and it takes a lot to un-stick me. But over the past decade or so I’ve watched Disney World get progressively more expensive and more complicated to navigate without necessarily getting any more fun. For me, MyMagic+ is the final straw. At one time, I might’ve qualified as a “pixie duster”. But if this thing is implemented, if even the FastPass+ part of it is implemented as currently planned, I’m completely done with Disney World. They’ve lost me as a customer, and I will never go back unless someone else pays for it.
I’ve heard people who spend a lot of time at Disney World spoken of as “pixie dust addicts”. And I know the feeling. I know the irrational desire, at the end of a days-long Disney vacation, to whip out my credit card and max it out just so I can stay another few days. But the last time I walked out of a Disney park, which has been almost two years ago now, I did not have that feeling. I was just ready to go home. The best way to detox from your Pixie Dust addiction, in my opinion, is to take a step back and realize how expensive and difficult-to-plan a Disney vacation has become. Then go online and realize what a great vacation you can have elsewhere for a fraction of the price.

If that doesn’t shock you back to reality, nothing will.

The MyMagic+ Backlash and Fireworks Show

For the last couple weeks, the new MyMagic+ program that will soon be implemented at Walt Disney World has been the big topic of conversation in most Disney fan circles. If you’re reading this I’m going to assume you know what’s going on, but I’ll restate some of the basic facts:

On January 5, some sensitive (and no doubt highly confidential) information on the long-awaited NextGen project appeared on an Internet message board. According to the leaked information, a major implementation of the NextGen program is an RFID-enabled bracelet (which we would later learn is called a MagicBand, presumably because the names DreamBracelet and PixieCuff didn’t test well with focus groups) that would be issued to park vistors at Walt Disney World and would serve as a combination park ticket, room key, and FastPass. The document made it clear that, while this change would be marketed as an improvement to the customer experience, its true goal was to enable the company to conduct total surveillance of every customer on their property as part of a gigantic data-mining operation. But what really creeped people out (besides the total surveillance thing, of course) was this passage:

To reach the profit targets and overarching design goals set for this project, as well as export the technology and its fruit to other companies, Disney understood early on that there could be no opt-out for any guest. Application of an 'opt-out mode' would remove the control and thereby defeat the financial gains required of such a massive capital outlay defined publicly devoid of detail.

Amazingly, some people actually had a problem with the idea of mandatory participation in a surveillance/data mining scheme as a condition of doing business with Walt Disney World.

Two days later, on January 7, Disney attempted to regain control of the situation with a post on the Disney Parks blog “announcing” MyMagic+ and also a New York Times fluff piece that read like a company press release. Both articles assured us that customers would be able to opt out of the new program if they wished. However, there were noticeably few details offered as to how that would work. And since Disney is obviously looking to make a lot of money from mining their customers’ data, the consensus that emerged among the level-headed members of the online community that while MyMagic would probably have an opt-out option, the company would likely make it a painful and inconvenient process, and that those who did opt out would be “penalized” with a worse theme park experience.

Then on January 23, Massachussetts Congressman Edward J. Markey sent a letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger in which he raised a lot of the same questions about privacy and customer experience that had been discussed on Internet message boards for the previous three weeks, but which Disney had pointedly failed to address. I’ve linked to the full letter above, but some of the more interesting questions are:

• “Will Disney guests be required to use MagicBand?”
• “If a guests choose not to use MagicBand, what disadvantages, if any, will that guest experience while visiting a Disney park (i.e., longer waits for attractions, etc.)?”
• “Does your company plan to use information collected from MagicBands to target advertisements and marketing at guests? . . . If yes, do you planto target advertisements at kids 12 and under? If yes, please explain the ways in which you plan to target advertisements at children.”

Now, I’m certainly willing to believe that Mr. Markey’s motives in writing this letter are less about genuine concern for Disney’s customers and their children and more about a desire to make himself look like a Crusading Advocate For Ordinary People in advance of an upcoming special election for a Senate seat in his state that has recently opened up.

Nevertheless, the questions he raised are still valid. Most of them are things that the Disney fan community has been wondering about since news of this whole MyMagic+ thing broke earlier in the month. And none of them were directly addressed in the company’s January 7 blog post or the New York Times story they spoon-fed to “reporter” Brooks Barnes the same day.

So, if Disney was really not engaging in anything sinister, and the Congressman’s letter was nothing but a groundless bit of political grandstanding, then it would be quite easy for the company to pop his balloon by simply answering the questions. So that is not what Disney did. Instead, CEO Bob Iger and his lawyers replied to the Congressman with an angry letter that made the following points:

• Disney is a beloved American company, and as such it is completely above criticism.
• The mere suggestion that Disney would ever do anything the least bit underhanded is ridiculous and Disney is offended that the Congressman would dare to even think of such a thing.
• Disney would never haphazardly introduce a program that manipulates children. (Presumably, it would only introduce a program that manipulates children in a non-haphazard fashion)
• Congressman Markey’s stupid questions are answered on Disney’s website, and if he’d spent five minutes reading it before writing his stupid letter, he would have known better than to cast aspersions on Disney and its sterling reputation.
• But, just to shut the Congressman’s big fat stupid mouth, answers to a few of his questions are on an attached document.
• Congressman Markey is ugly and his mother dresses him funny.

To be fair, one of the Congressman’s questions (the one about whether or not Disney will use information collected through the MagicBand program to market to children under 13) was directly answered on the document attached to Mr. Iger’s letter. But the rest of it is nothing but a lot of angry posturing.

Noted Disney blogger and podcaster Tom Bricker put it best, I think, when he quoted this adage: “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table.” That’s what we’re seeing here. Is that because the facts and/or the law is not on Disney’s side? I don’t know, since I’m not a Disney insider, just a guy who puts his opinions on the Internet. But it sure looks that way.

I think it’s very telling that the only people with whom Mr. Iger’s angry, indignant response seems to have played well are:

1. Fanatical Disney fans who love anything the company does, no matter what it is. If Disney World opened an attraction called “Kill Baby Kittens With A Hammer” these people would squeal excitedly about how “magical” it is.
2. People who, for political/ideological reasons, dislike Mr. Markey and/or the political party to which he belongs.

But that’s a pretty tiny fraction of Disney’s overall customer base, isn’t it? The majority of Disney’s customers are parents who partake of the company’s offerings only because it offers reliably kid-friendly entertainment. They don’t frequent Disney-themed websites or blogs and likely would have never heard of MyMagic+ until they went to book their next Disney World vacation on the Disney website, where the program would be presented in a positive light.

But now the Congressman’s inquiries about the program, and the bellicose response of Mr. Iger and his lawyerbots, are sure to attract media attention. And not the kind of “gee-whiz, look at this excellent and cool new thing at Walt Disney World” attention the company prefers, but the “Disney wants to use a manacle-like wristband to track your children” narrative that the company wanted to avoid at all costs.

I realize I haven’t said a lot about my opinions on MyMagic+. That’s coming in a later post. For now, the backlash surrounding this program makes for one heck of an entertaining fireworks show. Enjoy!

The NextGen Aversion Rationale

As the Fantasyland expansion project at Florida’s Magic Kingdom inches toward completion, you’d think that it would be the main topic of conversation in the online Disney fan community. And you would be wrong. Fantasyland is already old news. No, the big topic of conversation these days is the NextGen initiative, which encompasses things like interactive attraction queues and parkwide games like the new Sorcerers Of The Magic Kingdom and is moving implacably toward a new system called XPass.

I’m not going to talk much about XPass here because most of what we think we know about it comes from one source and there’s been no official information released as of yet.

I am, however, going to talk about the parts of NextGen that we do have today: interactive queues and (briefly) Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom. This little Groucho Marx ditty nicely sums up my feelings about them:

Now I know what you’re probably thinking: I’m a curmudgeonly fanboy who hates change and wishes Disney World would stay forever frozen in the year 1989. But that’s not it. Nor do I object to the implementation of new technology. Heck, I love new technology. But here’s the main reason why I have a problem with NextGen:

The company is spending over a billion dollars on it while existing attractions and facilities are deliberately allowed to fall apart or stand empty.

A perfect example of this is Peter Pan’s Flight. It’s a very popular attraction, kids love it, and it always has a long line. It’s also basically the same ride that opened at Disneyland in the ‘50s, and as maintenance at Walt Disney World has fallen by the wayside, it’s begun to look rather musty and dilapidated. A few new effects, maybe a modern Animatronic or two, and some general TLC would go a long way toward making the attraction fresh and new again. So that is not what Disney is doing. Instead, they’re going to be putting in an interactive queue, presumably with touchscreen video games for people to play while they’re waiting. That’s a bit like getting an expensive paint job for a rusted-out car. And while interactive queues are great for rides like Soarin’ that are not continuously loading, all they do for rides like Peter Pan or Space Mountain is slow things down.

What about interactive games, like the new Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom? From what I’ve heard, it certainly seems to be popular with kids. But it also seems to be causing traffic problems by causing lines to form where none were ever intended to be.

After the NextGen project has blown through its alleged billion-dollar budget, what will we have to show for it? The Monorails will still be falling apart. Various aging and ill-maintained Magic Kingdom attractions will still need the improvements that have been vetoed by park VP and world-class idiot Phil Holmes. Over at EPCOT, the Imagination pavilion will still be a pathetic shell of its former self, the Wonders of Life pavilion will still be empty, and Universe of Energy’s show will still resemble an overlong episode of I Love The 90s. The Backlot Tour at the Studios will still be a joke, and Animal Kingdom will still have, well, all the problems that Animal Kingdom has. Also, Downtown Disney will still be a complete waste of time.

If all four parks on the Florida property had reached ideal buildout, every attraction was well-maintained and the infrastructure was in good shape, then I could see this NextGen thing as a good idea. But as things currently stand, it’s just a shiny object dangling in the face of clueless senior management, distracting them from the real improvements the resort needs.

And that’s why I’m against it.