Disney: Fail

Disgusted. Sad. Disappointed. Disillusioned. Crap-tastically dumbfounded.

These are just a few of the feelings I've had after hearing that the Disney Music Block Party Tour suddenly canceled a whole bunch of their dates. Clearly, tickets weren't selling.

No, we didn't have tickets. The tour wasn't coming near Atlanta. Although looking at the tour site, it appears that the tour has only ever planned to play Long Island (the only dates from the tour that have not been canceled). All the other dates are just gone. Cancellations? Never happened. Failure? Disney? No, no, no. Nothin' to see here, folks. It's all good.

In fact, Disney hasn't issued any sort of statement, leaving it to the artists to break the news to their fans. Oh, and also leaving it to the venue staff in East Hartford, Connecticut, who had to explain to many families who showed up for today's show at an empty Rentschler Field. Oy. Imagine how those conversations must have gone.

Tickets for the Long Island shows are $36 a head, with kids under 2 free. I'm guessing (but someone can fill me in if this is wrong) that tickets for other shows were the same -- or at least a similar -- price. That $36 ticket gets you hours upon hours of music and other outdoor festival-type activities. That's comparable to (or even less than) the ticket price for the good seats at Disney on Ice, Sesame Street Live, or even Playhouse Disney Live. I'm trying to get my mind around the notion that parents are more willing to pay $35 or $40 for tickets to see a costumed character dance around and lip-synch to canned music than they are to pay for Dan Zanes, Ralph's World, and a slew of other artists performing LIVE MUSIC for kids. Gah.

DOES NOT COMPUTE. DOES NOT COMPUTE.

Would scheduling more shows at smaller venues have helped? Would a different mix of acts have helped? Would this have gone over better last summer, when gas prices and grocery prices weren't stressing out parents everywhere? We'll never know.

It must have been quite a shock for Disney to put out something with their name and their trademark mouse ears on it and see it fail. That doesn't happen often, does it?

Disney may end up blaming the whole thing on gas prices. Or the artists. Or Steven Page's unfortunate run-in with the law (back before Barenaked Ladies left the tour). I doubt they will take the blame themselves.

My husband's answer, when I asked him why he thought this tour fell apart, was that perhaps Disney was too ambitious. And I tend to agree. The Disney Music Block Party Tour wasn't necessarily "too ambitious" with the number of shows, or with ticket prices, or even the size of the venues. But it may have been too ambitious in putting together a tour in response to a perceived surge in the popularity of kids' music and kindie rock. If Disney had done their homework (i.e. market research), they might have found that many of the families that are most passionate about kids' music, and especially the "kindie rock" variety, are not big Disney consumers. They're also less interested in safe, mediatized, processed events for kids (such as Playhouse Disney Live) and more interested in taking their children to a Dan Zanes concert on a university campus. Many of them are families that watch little or no television. But I'm not sure Disney is even aware that such families exist. And is the perceived kindie rock surge even all that real? Or is it just something created by a lot of media hype over the last 24 months?

On a happier note, I had a nice reminder today of why Bill Childs is a genius. I couldn't have said this better myself.