This post might be a bit odd, it's a bit sporadic for me, but I just have some thoughts I feel the need to type out real quick. People keep judging what the current Disney company should do based on what they believe Walt would do. I even find myself thinking about this a lot. But it bothers me that I or anyone else ever thinks this way. Unfortunately Walt is gone, and we have no idea where the company would have gone if he hadn't passed so early. If the company always did "What Walt would have wanted" then we probably would have had fewer theme parks in the world, specifically in Florida where EPCOT as a city may have actually become a reality in some form. Obviously, there's no possible way to tell what Walt would want with the current state of the parks in this time period.
That does not mean that we should just disregard the general guidelines and principles set by Walt. This was started just now by a post on an article about ticket increases where someone said "Walt wouldn't want this." If we're thinking in to that way, I think that's true. I don't think Walt would have wanted to price people out of the parks. To be fair, Walt probably would have done things differently if he hadn't had Roy there to bring him back to reality some of the time, so should we be thinking with the mindset of what would Roy let Walt get away with?
I find just as many faults with current operations as other people do, but we can't use our opinion of what we think Walt would do to completely guide our opinions of company operations. I respect the fact that it is a business, and they need to make money. I'm not sure if the large profit they are making off the parks is necessary to pay for employees and bills and all that other stuff, but if people like us (assuming you must be a die hard Disney fan if you somehow found this and actually bothered to read it) keep paying the prices Disney asks of us, then stupid us for putting up with it.
I'm getting off of the point that I wanted to make. There are plenty of things that Walt set as standard or general guidelines for how the parks should be run (some of the most obvious examples being about cleanliness and show). But there are plenty of things that you can't say would be different if Walt were here. Instead we should look at Walt's ideals as guidelines but not as the final say, as he is not here, the parks are most likely (don't want to be too definitive here but I'd like to say it with 100% certainty) far from what Walt would have done, and it is a completely different time than Walt lived in. In regards to the comment on an article that fueled this, I think that the money should not be money hungry. One of Walt's morals (I feel like that's not the word I'm looking for but you get the gist) was that he made movies to get money to make more movies. He didn't make films to make money to get as rich as he could. I think that that general guideline should stick today to some extent, that the company should make money to pay the bills but to also pay for new attractions and such, and I'm sure there's plenty of room for cuts somewhere, but I doubt too many people would be able to hold high Iger's position just because "they enjoyed it" and would be ok making an average-ish salary while improving the company or at least keeping it afloat. (Wanted to make a quick note that I know too little about Iger's influence on the company besides the fact that he has brought so many brands under the Disney umbrella to say whether or not I think he has been good for the company.) So while it would be nice if Walt's earlier principles could still apply here, it just isn't feasible. But, that idea should at least influence the company to not just rake in and hoard all their profits, and to put what they can towards improving the parks.
It's getting late for me and I feel like my mind is not on the same track that it was when I started but I hope people get how I generally feel about this. I guess to just summarize for those who skip my rambles in the middle: we should not judge what the company should do based on what we believe Walt would do (for the reason that we don't know what he would do and a couple other reasons listed) but we should look at the way he ran the company before and let those general principles guide current operations where applicable and adjusting for how times have changed and what not. If anyone actually read this, I'd like to hear your opinions as well and just thank you for reading it. And sorry for all the misspellings or grammar errors I probably made but don't feel like going back to read over and fix. Thanks again!
