WDW Magazine April 2016 - Disney's Hollywood Studios | Page 9

The working studio-park…

The original idea for the park wasn’t for a park at all, but rather for two new pavilions in Epcot’s
Future World: Wonders of Life (at Epcot) and The Great Movie Ride, which would eventually
spark the idea for en entirely new park.
Looking to make waves and create a viable adversary for the coming Universal Studios Florida,
Disney’s newly appointed CEO, Michael Eisner, took Marty Sklar’s concept for The Great
Movie Ride and ran with it—proposing that a third Hollywood-themed park be created instead.
But this one would be different from MK and Epcot, being combined with fully functioning film
and television studios.
Having already entered into a licensing contract with MGM in 1985, Disney capitalized on the
name and soon came up with a plan to make Eisner’s studio-park real, calling it Disney-MGM
Studios.
Opening its gates to the public on May 1, 1989, Disney-MGM Studios had already filmed its
first full-length features, Ernest Saves Hollywood and Newsies, and contained Walt Disney
Feature Animation Florida, which produced a slew of popular animated films throughout the
90s and early 2000s, as well as Walt Disney Studios Florida, made up of three sound stages
primarily used for Disney Channel productions, and a radio studio, which would later become
home to Radio Disney.
Though Disney-MGM Studios was impressive on the studio-production side, the theme park
opened with only two rides: The Great Movie Ride and the Studio Backlot Tour, resulting in it
being labeled WDW’s first “half-day” park.