What is it that makes the Magic Kingdom so magical, where dreams come true?
On a recent business trip to Orlando, I took the op-portunity to stay a bit longer to find out. It always amazes me how these large theme parks, restaurants, hotels and such bring it all together.
To give you an idea of the size of Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, if we took the original Disneyland theme park in California, and placed it in the Magic Kingdom’s parking lot, there would still be 500 more parking spots. Walt Disney and his brother Rob began purchasing property for Disney World back in 1965 at $180 acre until property owners got wise, and the price sky-rocketed to $1,000/acre. Overall 30,000 acres, to the tune of $5.8 million for the land, make up the Disney World properties.
As a business owner, the more I learn about Walt Disney (his brother Rob played just as big of part in all of this as he was the guy believing in his brother’s vision, and then made it happen) and his attention to detail, he is becoming an idol of mine. When designing what started out to be “The Magic Kingdom,” over 9 acres of underground “Utilidors” (ultility corridors) were part of the design. The story has it, Walt Disney was visiting Disneyland one day, and he was in “Tomorrow-land” and saw a “Cowboy” costume walk through this theme park to get to his post in “Frontierland.” Walt felt this spoiled the authenticity of the park.
Today, you will never see someone working for Disney ever walking through one theme park to another if not in proper costume. Which leads to another very important detail: No child will EVER see a character without their head on! Special check points as well as the un-derground “Utilidors” make sure of this. It gets you thinking of just the magnitude of detail that has been put into the effort for us and our children to have this “Magical Moment” at Disney World.
While in this amazing destination of fun, we spent a day at Universal Studios, which in all real-ity, has copied Disney. Disney has the “FastPass” and Universal has the “Express Pass.” However, the one noticeable difference, the garbage. At Universal, by midday all the garbage cans we walked by as we made our way through the 45 minute lines (hence the Express Pass did not work for all the popular rides, hmmm…) were overflowing. Visit Walt Disney’s theme park, and you will never see an overflowing garbage can. All garbage cans when they get to a certain level Disney designed a system that sucks the garbage downward to their own garbage central… are you kidding me, how awesome is this, OMG?
I guess when you have an underground empire, all kinds of ideas can come together. It is interesting how just one person can make such a differ-ence by his thinking and yet another human being by his thinking is always second-guessing him or herself and does not take that risk because of fear of what some other person may think.
One of my favorite acronyms is F.E.A.R., false evidence appearing real. What if Walt Disney had been fearful of what other people would think? You have to guess he had a lot of naysayers in his life: “You are going to build a castle where this thing is going to fly around and sprinkle some-thing called pixie dust? And people are going to come and spend their hard-earned money to watch this?”
Thank goodness for thinkers and risk takers, otherwise this world would be a very boring place.
At Central we spend a tremendous amount of time and energy training our team to pay atten-tion to details and create Raving Fans and lifelong relationships. I am personally invested in each one of our customers having a “magical moment” when we come to your home and take care of your needs at the time.
At Central your comfort is our Central concern, call us for all your heating, cooling, plumbing & electrical needs at 756-6656.
P.S. Stop by the fairgrounds this weekend for the Flathead Home Builder’s Association Home show; over 110 vendors are there to help you make your own “Dreams” come true. Enjoy!
