You’ve passed through security and waved your Magic Band at the machine. You stand on the precipice of the Happiest Place on Earth. And you have a plan.
You’re ready to rush to your destination. You’ve anticipated this moment since the moment you woke up. You’ve thoughtfully chosen your first ride, likely an E Ticket attraction whose line will quickly fill. You have only a few moments to sprint to the front of the line. Sure, Disney discourages running in the parks, but you can get where you’re going faster than anyone else. Even under the new rules, rope drop is still the best way to secure the first ride of the morning.
As you race past other Disney fanatics, you give little thought to the state of the park. Over time, you’ve grown to take its impeccable cleanliness and orderly structure for granted. Disney was like this when you first visited as a child, and it remains that way to this day. Since you’ve come to expect it, you pay no mind to the impressive machine that is a Disney theme park.
As much as you’d like to believe that Pixie Dust is what caused the grounds to look so lovely, something striking is at work. Invisible gremlins don’t ready the park for your early morning visit. Instead, that task falls to thousands of loyal cast members. The jobs they perform in the waking hours when you’re still showering and sipping your first cup of coffee are integral to your enjoyment of your day. While you’re brushing your hair, they’re performing all the requisite steps to ensure that a Disney theme park visit feels just as special to a person today as in 1955.
The work is largely thankless, yet the employees who execute these assignments will remember mornings like this for the rest of their lives. Many of them will excel in other industries, and when others pick their brains about such professional triumphs, these former cast members will relay memories of pre-dawn efforts behind the scenes at Disney theme parks. They’ll state that the work ethic, customer engagement skills, and leadership abilities they possess today formed in the darkness at a Disney theme park.
These former Disney employees fondly recall moments of tremendous professional satisfaction and accomplishment that were sight unseen by the general public. During these instances of personal achievement, they took their first steps down the path to self-actualization. They were doing work that brought joy into the hearts of others, and they relished that rare time from years past when they able to grow as people and workers while also having the time of their lives.
To borrow from an old Army slogan, Disney employees do more by 9 a.m. than most people do all day. What follows is a combined recollection of the morning shift at the various North American Disney theme parks. Several former cast members were kind enough to offer a detailed recounting of their favorite times, the moments before the park had opened. They relayed the various aspects of their assigned duties, providing both insights and heartfelt optimism about what they’d achieved in an anonymous setting. If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at a Disney theme park before the gates open for the early morning crowd, read on to learn just how much cast members accomplish while the rest of us are still in our underwear.
An experimental city
The theme parks at Walt Disney World aren’t the utopias that Walt Disney had once projected for the land he purchased as part of Project X. Still, some of the premises apply. The same is true of Disneyland, the place he built from scratch on lands formerly filled with nothing but orange groves. Whether planned or a matter of happenstance, the two North American Disney campuses are functional cities.
The numbers support this notion. The Disneyland Resort is the largest single-site employer in Anaheim, California. More than 23,000 cast members head to work each morning, their goal being the happiness of strangers visiting from all corners of the planet. Walt Disney World’s numbers are even more dramatic. In order to operate the four gates on campus plus the accompanying resorts, water parks, and Disney Springs businesses, The Walt Disney Corporation employs more than 62,000 cast members. That’s 85,000 official Disney workers in Anaheim and Orlando plus several thousand more contractors. For perspective, that’s roughly equal to the population of Santa Monica, California.
Now consider that an average of 53,000 people visit Walt Disney World each day while 44,000 people attend Disneyland. Using these numbers as a baseline rather than peak season attendance, that’s 97,000 more people visiting the two sites each day. Including cast members, Disneyland hosts 67,000 people at the resort on an average day while Walt Disney World provides for 115,000. In combination, these two campuses roughly match the population of Knoxville, Tennessee, the 129th largest city in the United States. Factoring in contractors, the Disney parks would come close to qualifying as one of the 100 most populous cities in the country.
Imagine if you worked at a place with this much hustle and bustle. Now think about how strange your job is. Many of the people in our town each day are visitors from out of town. They’ll stay a few days and then be on their way. You’ll barely get a chance to know them, and you’ll interact with the overwhelming majority of them once at most. Your job is one of infrastructure. You must perform the tasks your bosses have determined are necessary to guarantee the orderly flow of thousands of people through a congested area. You also have to make certain that their basic needs are met. Those include food, water, shelter, and waste disposal. Since you’re at a tourist destination, you also have to provide extra touches that provide that special vacation feel. Otherwise, travelers won’t feel compelled to visit your establishment.
As a cast member at Disney, you’re the dinner AND the show.
You’re the one who causes theme park tourists to believe in the magical properties of pixie dust. You’re the cog in the machine that everyone takes for granted since they never see what you do in those early morning hours before the park has opened. It’s the breathing definition of thankless assignment yet tens of thousands of cast members over the years have felt tremendous personal satisfaction in doing their part.
So, if you were a cast member, how would you go about handling all of these duties, the ones that, in city-speak, keep the trains running on time? That answer is more painless than you might expect. The answer is that you stand on the shoulders of all the cast members who came before you.
These Disney employees meticulously constructed a series of processes, all of which have the same ultimate outcome. If you follow them, you’ll open the park on time. You’ll satisfy all the needs of the guests in attendance that day. And everyone will exit the park safely without any horror stories about their time at the Happiest Place on Earth. Sure, you accept at the start of each morning that you won’t make everyone happy every day, but when you do your job right, you’ll make most of them feel like a Disney theme park visit lived up to the hype. All you have to do is follow your procedures and your checklist. What are those? Well…
By dawn’s early light
During the research for this article, I interviewed 14 former Disney theme park employees. The Walt Disney Company’s general practice nowadays is to require many departing cast members to sign a non-disclosure agreement on the way out the door. None of the respondents for these interviews violated an NDA by participating in these interviews. A few either disqualified themselves or were disqualified from participating in order to honor Disney’s wish that certain parts of the job stay secret in order to maintain the illusion for visitors.
I attempted to respect Disney’s wishes as much as possible while writing this piece. Nothing posted here falls within the parameters of the tasks they want to go unpublicized. Instead, what follows is relayed information from employees who have worked at Disney theme parks as recently as 2015 and as far back as the 1980s. These participants wanted to share what they learned about the Disney theme park experience and what their duties were in doing their part to make a magical day for you.
A Disney cast member’s day starts in the twilight hours. The opening of a theme park generally happens at a set time, although it depends on the day of the week, season of operation, and a couple of other uncontrollable factors. One of them is whether Extra Magic Hours are in play at the park. If so, the opening moves up an hour.
Another is whether Disney is hosting a special event such as a marathon or private function. Despite the massive popularity of the parks, the company’s sales division still offers special park hours to corporations willing to pay a large sum in order to reserve Disney for their employees. Generally, the latter event happens at night. Marathons can start as early as 5:30 AM, so they screw up the process a bit. I’m going to ignore the exceptions in this discussion, instead prioritizing the details of a regular day at a Disney theme park. And the regular day of work at a Disney theme park starts the same way that any other job does.
Disney cast members wake up early in the morning, they get dressed, and they leave for work. It’s what happens once they arrive on the Disney campus that the situation is quite a bit different. The first issue involves parking. Disney understandably reserves their best parking lots for customers since they have to safeguard the transportation needs of tens of thousands of daily guests. They still try to accommodate cast members by offering special parking in different areas of the site.
At Magic Kingdom, the commute involves a bus trip from the staff parking section to the utilidors. Epcot also includes bus transportation for most employees. Animal Kingdom is perhaps the oddest one in that bikes are available for cast members to traverse the park to their job site. And Disneyland uses Cast Member shuttles from special parking sections, too. The rule of thumb suggested to most new employees is to allow an extra hour of travel for the first week on the job. After that, simply getting to the job from the parking lot can add 30 minutes to the trip.
Looking the part
That’s not the only inconvenience during the mundane part of the early morning hours. Disney’s specific theming throughout their parks requires exact costumes for virtually every attraction, store, and restaurant. Cast members don’t always work the same job, either. Disney believes in cross-training their employees. So, workers can’t very well stock up on the outfits they’ll wear for at their job. It’s not like pants suits and jackets are acceptable outerwear for Disney employees. Instead, they need costumes.
Getting a costume at a Disney theme park is kind of an ordeal. At Walt Disney World, cast members head to an innocuous building that I’ve previously described as “a unique combination of library, clothing store, and laundry service.” Here, Disney houses thousands of costumes for the various themed areas of their four gates. Once employees find out where they’ll work that day, they check out the appropriate outfit so that they can look the part while performing their job.
This process isn’t always smooth. Sometimes, a person can’t make it to work, causing reshuffling of the schedules of other workers. When that happens, a cast member might have to change to a different outfit. That means another trip over to the costume building, which comes with a round-trip bus ride. It’s this sort of aggravation that can set back morning preparations dramatically. Cast members only have a fixed amount of time before the gates open. Every second counts in readying the park for theme park tourists.
Starting the work day
Amazingly, none of the travel aggravation or costume acquisition is really a part of the work day, at least not when cast members describe it. They list those events as the preludes to the break of dawn routine performed while they’re hidden away from the world. To a Disney cast member, the morning doesn’t really begin until they start to work on their checklist.
As you might imagine, Disney’s rules and standards are restrictive but savvy. There’s not a lot of flexibility in how to perform the tasks on the checklist, although the corporation heartily encourages its cast members to suggest modifications and improvements whenever possible. A single good idea can save the company a lot of money. Streamlining the process of opening the park means fewer man-hours of salary. For a company with a dozen different parks in operation (two at Disneyland, four at Walt Disney World, two at Disneyland Paris, two at Tokyo Disneyland, and one each at Hong Kong Disneyland and Shanghai Disneyland), a time savings as simple as 20 minutes daily adds up to 1,460 hours across the parks over the course of a year. Finding several ways to shorten the opening literally pays for several people’s salaries each year. As you can see, Disney does have a vested interest in improving their procedures.
Still, until a change gets authorized by a higher power at Disney, cast members have to follow all the steps listed on their checklist. Stridently.
The rules vary from section to section, and that circles back to the costuming discussion above. Since Disney cross-trains cast members, their job is feasibly different each morning. An assignment for a ride attraction is different than opening a store or restaurant. Each checklist is specific to the duties of the position rather than for the cast member performing the designated assignments. Disney has handled their core business this way for several generations now, and they’ve perfected the system.
When a cast member arrives for work, they clock in like any other hourly employee. Then, they learn what their position is for the day. Their pre-opening job requirements aren’t the same as what they’ll do once the gates fly open and thousands of theme park tourists rush in. So, the start of the day isn’t quite the same. It’s no different than your early morning routine of showing up for work, checking your emails, voicemails, texts, and interoffice communications before beginning your job duties in earnest.
As far as assignments go, a great deal of variation exists depending on where the cast member’s job site is. For example, a cast member at Buzz Lightyear’s Astroblasters or Space Ranger Spin will handle a defined part of the attraction. It could be the FastPass section, the Merge Point (where regular riders and FastPass holders form into a single line, the boarding area, the unloading region, or greeter among others.
While what the worker does during the rest of the day isn’t the same, that role is the basis for early morning duties. The cast member has to make certain that their station is clean and free of anything that could cause injury such as wet spots from spills.
Safety first
Each moving part of a Disney attraction is under constant scrutiny. The company famously employs monitoring software to critique the functionality of its many complex machines. They deem anything operating at less than 99 percent efficiency as in need of maintenance, and some Audio-Animatronics (AAs) have hundreds of individual checks in place. A human can’t be that critical of their systems, but they still have basic tasks on the checklist. In fact, some of the checklists are 20 pages or more.
For starters, any debris in the path of an attraction is a huge no-no. A cast member must walk the portion of their attraction to ensure that nothing is visible that could block a part of the machinery, leading to a potentially cataclysmic breakdown. They also have to ride in the vehicle the same way that a guest would. That way, they can verify that all phases of the attraction are clear and ready for a full day of park operations. In the Astroblasters scenario, that means firing the lasers the way that a park guest would, verifying that the ride doesn’t have any unusual hiccups like unexpected bumps or sluggish movement, and that the loading/unloading process is flawless.
Yes, cast members are sometimes paid to ride Disney attractions. That may sound like many people’s dream job. The experience is quite different when the safety of others is at stake, though. Missing a single flaw with the system can lead to an embarrassing shutdown during operating hours…or worse. Injuries at Disney theme parks are few and far between. They do happen, though. A single miscalculation during the pre-opening safety check could lead to a news story. That’s exactly why Disney has such an explicit list of items for their workers to verify before they open a ride for the morning. If you ever rush to an attraction at rope drop only to discover that it’s not ready yet, it likely failed a major safety update. Disney correctly believes that it’s better to be safe than sorry.
What happens when a cast member notices something untoward with one of the systems in place? Disney rules require that they report their concern to their immediate superior. By “coordinating with the leads to fix the issue,” most minor problems get cleaned up almost immediately. When something more serious is in play, the leads then pass along the information to their boss, and a determination is made about how to proceed.
All of this sounds serious; don’t stress about it. Most of the “issues” are minor in nature. A loading mechanism may not work right. A boat might get stuck. A laser might not fire correctly. For most attractions at Walt Disney World, anything that doesn’t involve machinery isn’t a big deal. If the ride system on Buzz Lightyear isn’t running right, that’s a much larger concern. Vehicles in motion that are misbehaving place riders in jeopardy. The same is true of basically anything large in size or attached to anything large in size.
When Disney cast members relayed their stories about issues that shut down attractions, very few of them would scare the bejeezus out of you. Most are along the lines of when the coffee machine at work is broken. Everyone feels inconvenienced, but it’s a momentary setback. As an example, if the laser isn’t working on Buzz Lightyear, someone’s score is wrong. Sure, that lessens the enjoyment of the attraction. Nobody gets hurt, though. When the seat belts don’t work or the attraction suddenly stops or both, the rider’s safety is at risk. I cannot stress enough how much the Disney early morning checklist is predicated upon the welfare of park guests.
Morning chores
Since each job in every section of the park comes with a pre-opening list of job duties, plenty of other tasks exist beyond safety. Sure, that’s job duty one, but lots of other fun stuff is in play. The cast members I interviewed unanimously agreed that working the opening shift was one of their favorite assignments. They loved the fact that they had their section of the park to themselves. They also enjoyed the occasional glimpse of an empty Disney theme park, especially in those special moments as the sun rose.
Cast members regularly show up at 5 or 6 a.m., depending on whether Extra Magic Hours are in play. Most of their pre-opening work takes between 60 and 90 minutes, although two hours isn’t outside the realm of possibility. The easiest job is apparently photography, as people reported that setting up for a day of taking pictures takes as little as 30 minutes. Their primary tests are making certain that all the camera settings work and that potential backdrops have no unexpected impediments. No matter the job, former employees get stars in their eyes when they think about early mornings at Disney.
Lia Saunders describes the early morning shift in poetic terms:
“Disney World before the park opens is absolutely magical. It’s quiet and empty – even more so than at night, when people and cast members are still filtering out and there’s still conversation and music playing. But in the empty, quiet morning there’s a misty, foggy quality, and most magical of all is that the park itself is transformed. Every night the park is turned upside down and inside out, the fixtures are all scrubbed, the pillows fluffed, the plants re-potted, the grass replaced with slightly greener grass, and everything is dusted off before gently being placed back where it belongs. Arriving several hours before park opening means you witness your beloved park in this undressed stage of half-array. It looks completely different!”
Shani Wolf adds, “Many times, I saw the sun rise while working on Main Street. It was just beautiful! One of my favorite things to do before the park opened was to walk through the empty park on my way to my location. I felt proud to be a part of such a magical place and do my job to keep Walt Disney’s dream alive.” Statements like this one exemplify the amazing level of professional pride we’ve all come to expect from Disney.
Best staff meeting ever
Something else that the former employees enjoyed was their bonding time. Fraternizing with co-workers during park hours is discouraged since Disney wants their theme park operators to look business and thematically appropriate. Before the parks are full of guests, however, cast members interact without fear of consequences. Teams at attractions bond during these unholy hours of the morning. They can even play music at their work stations as they set out to prepare the park for thousands of guests. Pre-dawn is the most relaxed time for cast members, and the bonding experience is one that they remember for a lifetime.
Dr. Dana Corriel describes the experience thusly. “It helped that everyone was happy when we worked. It was Disney policy. Disneyland applied ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ to their employees. We had to always be pleasant, always answer happily, and have a smile on our faces. This is crucial in getting anywhere in life, and I still feel that way. Happiness is contagious. Happiness helps to maintain optimism.” Yes, Disney’s early morning policies are what one former cast member attributes to the joyous, Seven Dwarfs-esque working environment.
Wolf adds, “Many times, someone would bring donuts for the opening crew and we’d play music while preparing to open. It was a fun environment because for some reason casting would hire many teens (16 – 19 years old) and college students, like myself at that time. We had a few cast members over 25 and they were very respected because they were “old” but young at heart, so they fit in with the rest of us. Most everyone got along and it was so much fun going to work every day.”
Despite the group enthusiasm for the job, it’s still, you know, a job. That’s why some cast members worried about the downside of the opening shift. Since fewer employees are on staff first thing in the morning, a single slacker or malcontent can set back the process. No, there aren’t a lot of these employees at Disney, and the ones who are get weeded out quickly. Still, it can be a problem. Disney has a tendency to staff younger people for these positions, and not all of them have bought in yet.
When this happens, a fear factor exists among the better employees. As Kevin Koontz states of potential morning shift issues, “For me, it was always about my co-workers. The first thing I would do in the mornings was check the schedule to see who I’d be working with for the day. That usually determined my mood.” Others pointed out that a mistake-prone employee could delay the opening procedures by several minutes for reasons explained in just a moment.
They really need that Mouse
Once the employees arrive at their work stations, many of their tasks are mundane. They’ll check things as basic as whether lights are working, fire extinguishers are functional, and paint is peeling. Anything that puts a blemish on an attraction requires some work. When the worker at the station can’t do it, they notify someone else.
Cast members take pride in their ability to perform myriad assignments without delegating or shirking their duties. Still, a fresh coat of paint or a broken fire extinguisher might be beyond their purview. Disney isn’t quite as forgiving as Snow White, though. Any job deemed unsatisfactory must be done again. That’s why a disgruntled or apathetic cast member could create problems for co-workers and thereby the earliest guests. When an attraction isn’t open on time, the problem isn’t always mechanical. Somebody could have just screwed up.
Then again, the problem could be more basic. Sam Kelly describes the doomsday scenario in the moments leading up to rope drop. “For opening, Mickey and his friends have to show up on time. If not, the guests get overwhelmingly anxious. (Cast members truly have seen it all.)” Yes, the costumed cast members have been known to run late, thereby delaying park opening!
Disney employs the carrot as well as the stick to incentivize already-great employees to reach new heights. Former cast member Sam Kelly mentioned, “In Epcot, we generally started each day with the managers distributing awards to cast members. It was a congratulatory pump-up for the day and served as an inspiration to earn one yourself.” This is a smart corporate strategy. By boosting the spirits of workers before the customers arrived, everyone representing the company was in a wonderful mood, ready to spread cheer at the Most Magical Place on Earth.
Liz Taylor describes the business end of these meetings. “We also would look at projected park attendance and have team meetings regarding the day ahead to make sure everyone was best prepared.” In other words, Disney can look at historical data and accurately forecast expected park attendance for a day. They relay that information to cast members so that everyone has a good idea about the way the morning should unfold. Expected traffic volume is critical to areas such as ride throughput, merchandise sales, and food consumption. It also impacts sanitary issues like park cleanliness, too. More people means a bigger mess. Cast members are on top of all these little details due to pre-opening preparations.
Like every work environment, some jobs are easier than others. For example, one former cast member, Natalie O’Grady, worked at Innoventions, one of the now-defunct educational sections at Epcot. She also worked on attractions including the aforementioned Buzz Lightyear. When she worked on the ride, the duties coincided with the job position. At Innoventions, a more open-ended guest experience, each day started with a team meeting instead. Every section of the Disney Empire comes with its own unique set of challenges. Cast members must adapt to each one if they want to thrive within the company.
On your mark, get set…
What do cast members consider the best part of the morning shift? That answer’s easy. Rope drop isn’t something that’s only fun for theme park tourists. Disney workers love it, too! They’ve been preparing for it all morning. When you enter the gates, it’s the moment they’ve anticipated for hours.
Liz Taylor best sums up the joy of working at a Disney theme park: “I would have to say the most fun at opening would be helping with the rope drop ceremony. That was never my immediate responsibility, though. When opening, the excitement of guests arriving to begin the day as they enter a previously quiet park is contagious. Adventure awaits. Anything you can do to make their day memorable, or stand out from the rest makes it all worth it.”
Lia Saunders continues, “Any rabid Disney fan knows that arriving in time for Park Opening ceremonies is not just fun and exciting, but also absolutely necessary if you want to ride a ride without a line or a fast pass. So there’s always a crowd waiting at the entrance. There’s music playing and tons of characters come out to greet the guests. A family gets specially chosen to help open the park and meet the characters, and then we all welcome the guests into our park and lead them towards our ride together as a group. It’s really fun and exciting!”
Natalie O’Grady confirms that the opinion is unanimous. “If I was opening at the greeter position at Buzz Lightyear, I got to see what I called “the running of the guests.” Right after the opening ceremony ends and the ropes are dropped, the guests are just so excited to start their day and hurry as fast as they can to their favorite ride. It’s an infectious energy, and really gets you excited to work for the day.” As you can see, the cast members match your enthusiasm at the start of each day! Everyone loves those first magical moments when the gate opens, the rope drops, and the Happiest Place on Earth is open to the public.
Special thanks to…
As a final note, I want to express my thanks to the former cast members who offered their assistance with this article. More than 20 former Disney theme park employees offered to contribute to the piece. In the end, I culled the list to a series of 14 responses, several of which came from people who either couldn’t or asked not to be mentioned by name. The eight contributors who I want to thank by name publicly are Natalie O’Grady of AWordSmithComm.com, Shani Wolf from Academy Travel and ShaniWolf.com, Dr. Dana Corriel, Lia Saunders at PracticalWanderlust.com, Liz Taylor from Mickey Travels, Nikki and Kevin Koontz of Southern Utah University, and Sam Kelly of IAmSamKelly.com. I sincerely appreciate your invaluable contributions as well as your universal optimism.
Even when I asked these former cast members to relay negative experiences, they largely took the high road, instead highlighting all the ways that working at a Disney theme park bettered their lives. All of these contributors are a credit to the reputation of The Walt Disney Company, and there are more than 85,000 current cast members just like them at the North American Disney theme parks. The next time you’re at one of these locations, please take the time to offer your appreciation to the amazing professionals at Disney now that you better understand just how hard they work to perfect your theme park visit each day.
