Hello & welcome back to A Look at Disney. One of the best Disney YouTube channels is Rob Plays and he recently did a video on The Rise and Fall of the Disney Store and brought up something that has stuck with me since I watched that video. Disney tried to open a fast food restaurant.
That is just so insane. There are actual reports about this such as this one from the Chicago Tribune as the second location of Mickey's Kitchen as that is what the chain was known as opened in. To have a better understanding of what they were I went to the Disney A to Z page on the D23 website but that gave me a whole lotta nothin'.
The Walt Disney Company’s first restaurant venture outside of its theme parks, begun in 1990 with one facility next door to The Disney Store in Montclair, California. A second one was later opened in Schaumburg, Illinois. The fast-food restaurants, which emphasized healthier fare, did not catch on and the two were eventually removed.
I just have so many questions, I mean Rob brings up in the video that the idea for this was for the restaurants to be adjacent to the Disney Store in the malls and that they would serve healthier options than say your McDonald's or Burger King. There is honestly very little out there about these, it's just a weird footnote in Disney's history but man, I'd love it if anyone had a menu from one of these places and I would so want to travel to an alternate timeline, where Mickey's Kitchen became a success because it is just so fascinating as while we often associate Disney as being an umbrella corporation, this is just something that you would never think of.
I'm honestly most curious about the kid's meals and if they had toys and if so, what were they. I mean, just think if this had taken off, Disney would have had a built-in way to promote their movies at a fast food chain.
I wish I had more to say but I had to right this up as this was just so intriguing. Peace!
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