This is a refinement of an earlier article I did for LaughingPlace.com.
It started last year, as my wife and I finished our day at Disneyland and walked back to our room at the Disneyland Hotel. Not for the first time, I noticed the iconic “Disneyland Hotel” red neon sign missing, and an old sentiment awakened: “what moron decided to get rid of that sign?” (For those curious, here’s what it became.) At the start of every Disneyland trip—short of seeing the Matterhorn from Harbor Boulevard—was anything more evocative than that old sign?
I know: there’s some new Anaheim zoning law that precludes giant neon signs illuminating a several-city-block radius. Maybe Disney put up a good fight to keep the sign, but still…it seems like there exist alternatives that could have preserved the sign’s essence (red LEDs?) while complying with the regulation. Didn’t anyone at Disney find that sign as special as I did?
I didn’t stop there. Coasting a wave of indignation, I thought: what other mistakes has Disney made? This sprawling list is the result. Unlike the Disneyland Hotel sign fiasco, I decided to focus on what I consider to be the big mistakes: genuine blunders that have cost the company either 1) millions of dollars, or 2) millions of dollars in goodwill. (The “little” mistakes, like leaving that ridiculous Epcot wand up for a decade, merit inclusion on their own list…just not this one.)
So in no particular order, here we go…
It was just hours ago that I stared, disgusted, at my TV as Comcast’s OnDemand service pelted me with ad after ad for their newest pay-per-view offering, the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson crapfest Fool’s Gold. I found this disgusting because of all the fantastic movies in the world Comcast could promote, they were wasting time on this terrible specimen. (If you didn’t realize, Fool’s Gold received a 




