Walt Disney World’s first Halloween event for the Magic Kingdom wasn’t much. In fact, it almost wasn’t at all.
You see — back then — the country was in the middle of its first gasoline crisis. With unheard of lines at gas stations and the media playing it for all it was worth. Naturally, tourism was down. That August, Walt Disney World, which had only been operating for three years, had faced a further complication. Sandy Quinn, the resort’s talented original director of marketing had resigned. Given the situation, management in Burbank decided to go outside the company and replace him with an industry professional — the first time that had ever happened at the director level.
They ended up hiring a former advertising agency creative director who was then an associate professor of advertising and marketing at Michigan State University. Me.
In a later column I may go into what it was like for an “outside bright-boy” working in the Disney culture of those days, but suffice to say that I still have a long list of friends from that time in my life.
Back to the first Halloween. It didn’t take even an “outside bright-boy” long to figure that if you can’t count on tourists, you need to increase the local traffic. And we’d need some kind of promotional event to do that. It was already late August. Back to School? Nah. How about Halloween?
Everyone thought that was a good idea. At least, until marketing presented the plan. It included five seemingly logical elements: Halloween decorations (gap-toothed pumpkins, skeletons, strategically placed spider webs, etc), a few new character ghosts and goblins to wander around, trick or treat candy for all the restaurants and stores to give away to children, special screenings of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” at the Main Street Theater, and an advertising campaign to promote it.
Remember, I said “seemingly logical.”
The Halloween decorations were the first to go. “The Magic Kingdom is a snapshot of Americana and it can’t be fooled around with,” management said, as I recall.
“But…what about Christmas and Candlelight?”
That’s Christmas!”
“Oh.”
The same logic (plus the capital expense for the sheets) put an end to the Halloween characters. Someone suggested that we invite guests to wear their Halloween costumes. That would give the event some atmosphere – at no expense. At that point, the legal department started shaking their heads. Not with masks, they insisted. Someone might trip and hurt themselves and claim the Company was liable. So, we got to invite guests to wear their scary costumes sans masks.
The trick or treat candy was saved by someone in the merchandise department who said he had a supplier that would provide it at an extremely low price so long as their brand was mentioned. The memory mists are thick here, but I think it was a sponsor, possibly Brachs.
That left us with no Halloween decorations, no Halloween characters, no Halloween masks, but we still had the draw of trick or treating in the Magic Kingdom and what I thought would be a key attraction of the event: the special screenings of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which had been unavailable in theaters or on TV for a long time.
Irving Ludwig, the head of Buena Vista, the Disney motion picture distribution arm, didn’t agree. In fact, he refused to send a print of the film to Walt Disney World. When I asked why I was told that the theater on Main Street was not technically a theater since it didn’t show the films of other distributors and it didn’t charge admission. Therefore, it couldn’t screen “The Legend of Sleep Hollow.”
Fortunately, he was eventually over ruled by top management and, as far as I know, no one said that Irving just didn’t like people, especially “outside bright-boys,” tramping on his turf. I can’t remember whether or not he ever did come to Florida. But it wasn’t the last of our “conversations.
Finally, we come to the advertising campaign. “Who are you going to get to run ads for it?” was the first question I remember during that part of the marketing presentation. You see, in those days, Disney didn’t advertise. That was the primary reason for sponsors (or participants as they were called then). So they could “participate” in the Disney phenomenon – and its promotion. However, when I explained that our national sponsors such as Eastern Airlines, Hertz, Kodak and the others would have little interest in a local event, most of management understood.
In the end, we not only advertised the event, we ran a television campaign on the local stations – a first for Walt Disney World. And I’ll never forget the commercial. Or the filming of it. We weren’t allowed to use footage from the Sleepy Hollow film – naturally. So, we created our own clip.
Imagine you’re in Liberty Square late at night, after the park has closed, with no one around and only the flickering colonial era street lamps for light. Then a huge black stallion carrying a caped rider in black clatters across the bridge from Main Street. The apparition moves toward you. At the last minute, the horse rears and you see that the rider is headless. Just before he hurls a leering pumpkin head at the camera.
Of course, the headless horseman part came at the end of the spot, after we’d invited everyone to come trick or treat with their masks off.
As I remember it, Disney World’s first Halloween wasn’t a barn burner. But it did prove that we could increase attendance with local events and it became the precursor for a long list of others.