Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 17, 1994 TAG: 9407170016
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ In the spring of 1987, a team of Walt Disney Co. executives came to Roanoke and spent two days looking over plans for Explore Park.
For Disney, this was just one stop on a nationwide search for new projects. At the time, the entertainment company was looking at the prospect of joint ventures with the National Park Service - and park service officials had suggested Disney go visit the people in Roanoke who were drawing up plans for a history-oriented theme park along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Explore planners were delighted to share their ideas. Eager to find the cash to build their project, they hoped Disney might decide to invest.
But at the end of their visit, Explore Park engineer Richard Burrow remembers, the Disney executives said, in effect, "you've got a great idea, but it's a little too small for us. We wish you luck." The Disney executives recommended some financial consultants Explore might want to use, then went on their way.
End of story. Except . . .
Six years later, in November 1993, Disney announced plans to build its own history-oriented theme park in Northern Virginia. When the artists' sketches of Disney's America were released, Explore planners were flabbergasted at the similarities.
One longtime planner "told me she was almost speechless," says Explore Park director Rupert Cutler.
Indeed, the plans Disney showed off looked and sounded much like the original master plan for Explore, which was ridiculed by critics for being too "Disney-like" for the conservative Roanoke Valley.
Where Explore once planned to build its park around the theme of the Lewis and Clark expedition and send visitors down a log-flume ride, Disney's America talks of a "break-neck white-water ride" with the two Virginia-born explorers.
Where Explore once planned to have visitors enter its frontier town on a bridge over a canal, Disney's America wants to have visitors enter its frontier town on a bridge over a canal.
And where Explore once planned an authentic Native American village, a frontier fort, a steam train and re-enactments of early American industries, Disney's America proposes, well, the same.
"There's no question in my mind that they copied a few things," Burrow says. "One of the main giveaways was that they have an old-time frontier town with a Main Street. And they're incorporating Lewis and Clark and the Native American village into one area, which I don't think has been done anywhere before.
"Those two items really jumped out at me. My first thought was, `Holy cow, they got that idea from us.' "
At first, Explore planners kept their suspicions to themselves. Remember that in November, Explore still was seeking state funding of its own, and the project's future was less than certain. No need to cause trouble.
But in recent weeks, with two years' worth of state funding in the bag and their park finally open to the public, Explore planners have been bolder about raising the question: Did Disney rip off Explore?
"That's a great question," says Richmond banker Doug Cruickshanks, who from 1985 to 1989 headed the nonprofit River Foundation that established Explore. "I've thought about that a lot lately."
At the opening ceremonies for Explore on July 1, Del. Richard Cranwell, D-Roanoke County, even raised the question publicly for the first time. Disney, he said, "borrowed the idea from us."
But did it?
"That's a fun question we'll probably never know the answer to," Cruickshanks says.
Disney executives, when confronted with the question, are baffled.
Explore staffers remember the dates that the three Disney planners came to see them in 1987; they just can't remember the visitors' names.
Disney spokesman Tony Hatch says he doesn't know, either. He says he checked with the head of Disney Imagineering, the company's new project shop in Glenside, Calif., but couldn't find anyone who remembered a visit to Roanoke seven years ago.
Disney, he points out, is a big company, and it's impossible to track down every creative genius on staff.
The official line from Disney is that Disney's America did have a Virginia birth - but it was on the other side of the state from Roanoke. Hatch said the idea for a history-oriented theme park popped into Chairman Michael Eisner's head after a visit to Colonial Williamsburg about four years ago.
"Eisner had the idea about it, and a small group of imagineers began thinking about it then," Hatch says.
But even though Disney secretly started buying up land around Manassas two years ago, significant planning on what Disney's America would include didn't begin until last summer, Hatch said.
Could Eisner and other Disney's America planners have been influenced, though, by what the Disney executives saw of Explore's plans in 1987?
The evidence is circumstantial at best. "It doesn't bear out," Hatch says.
Besides, he says, there's no copyright on history. Anyone who set out to create a theme park based on American history would duplicate some things. "There's nothing unique about that. Lewis and Clark were part of history," Hatch says.
In any event, Explore planners say they're not upset that the Disney's America plans look so much like the early Explore plans. "Our project has changed, and we've become more authentic," Burrow says. "They're not going to be authentic."
And the latest word out of Disney's planning camp, Hatch says, is that the Lewis and Clark river ride might be axed from the project anyway.
by CNB