Well Jeff I always agree with people when I'm right
And yes I am not happy with many things that the big ME/his team have done for the last couple of years. But that doesn't change the fact that much good was done by him and his team's' over the years.
As to AK/AKL showing a commitment to quality and 'Disney Magic' as opposed to cost-justification and base amusement park 'stuff' I simply do not agree with you.
Just because portions of the park were not complete when the park opened doesn't lower the quality of the rest. When the MK opened it had less than half of the attractions that it has today - it still had 'Disney Magic', period.
Just because a ride mechanism is 'off the shelf' doesn't mean that a ride can't be created using it that still has 'Disney Magic'. I'm sure that the basic Space Mountain roller coaster mechanism broke no new ground when it was built.
I chose AK because the 'detail' level is there. The Tree of Life, Harambe, the ride buildings, the landscaping, shoot - even the imprints of leaves and paws on the walkways and the fake 'mud' on the 'road' that the Safari ride uses demonstrate that the "Disney Magic' touched the place.
As to attendance figures - according to 'Amusement Business' the 2001 attendance was indeed down 7% from 2000. But that percentage compares favorably to all the other parks (Disney as well as other companies) in Orlando - most of them were down several hundreds of thousands of people more than AK (Universal was down 9% for example). AK continues as the #6 most popular Theme park in the US, ahead of all other parks expect other Disney parks and will have about 8 million people visit it this year. Vivendi wishes IoA had failed that badly...but even if it had half that many people attending it wouldn't change the fact that it is a 'Magical Place'.
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As to GAH being an acceptable premise for a movie - it's certainly as good as "A ditzy scientist builds a machine that shrinks his kids to microscopic size, then mistakenly sweeps them up and throws them out with the trash where they then have to battle their way across the back yard undrgoing misadventures till he can find them and enlarge them back to normal."
Now if AV is right about GAH and it is going to be the 'best' that Disney can offer right now - and they are expecting it to rival Spiderman - we might as well write off Buena Vista right now...