Join Eric as he uncovers the captivating story of Stephen Birnbaum, his partnership with Disney, and the enduring impact of the Birnbaum Guides. From their inception to the present day, these cherished guides continue to provide valuable information and a touch of Disney magic for travelers worldwide. Discover how Stephen and his wife, Alexandra Birnbaum, shaped the travel industry, gained insider access to Disney's secrets, and left a lasting legacy that continues to captivate Disney enthusiasts and independent travelers alike.
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00:59 --> 33:21 Hey, this is Synergy Loves Company, where we explore how Disney connects to everything. Thank you so much for listening and keeping me company. Just recently, Disney made a lot of new announcements about what will be changing for 2024 in the parks. And a lot of it was a return to pre pandemic fan favorites. Stuff like the return of the dining plan, no more park pass reservation for day tickets, and some upcoming changes to Genie. Plus, we don't know what those are yet, but I'm sure we'll find out pretty soon. This was some exciting news for those of us who really love to plan Disney trips. If you're a Disney trip planner, this is an episode especially for you. We're talking about the original trip planning resource for Disney, Stephen Burnbaum in his official guidebook of the Disney parks. And if you're enjoying Synergy Love's Company, please help us out and tell someone about it because it helps more people find the show. And if you can also find us on social media by searching Synergy Love's Company, I hope you'll spread the word. And thanks. Now let's get back to the show. My family loves to plan Disney vacations. Sometimes I think it's the planning we enjoy the most about the trips. I break out the YouTube videos and podcasts and the blog articles about upcoming additions to the park. My wife gets the spreadsheet started, and the kids make extensive Google Slides presentations with all the things that they want to do. We don't go as often to the parks as some, usually once about every two to three years. But we always like to plan far in advance. That makes me wonder, what kind of Disney planner are you? Let me know on Twitter, at Eric Hsnergy, and on Instagram and Facebook. At Synergy loves company. We do plan. Far out. That's one thing we really do. We just recently started the ball rolling on our 2024 trips. We can't even book them yet. That's coming up, like, next week, but we already started planning them. 2024 is going to be pretty special for Disney trips in our family. For spring break, we're going to be headed to Disneyland in Anaheim, and it will be the first time for all of us to go to the California parks. And then in the summer of 2024, we're going back to Walt Disney World in Orlando, but this time with a much larger group. My family of four is joining forces with my sister and brother in law, Caitlin and Adam and their kids. You might have heard them on earlier episodes of Synergy Love's Company last fall, and my parents are joining us for their first time back to the parks in over 15 years. I'm super excited about the trip, but the group dynamic changes things for our usual planning. We have already started having major family meetings to talk about expectations for the trip. We started planning well before we knew we could even book the vacation itself. The long range Disney planning, though, runs in the family. My mom was always planning our vacations out in detail when we went to the parks when I was a kid, she had Danny Tanner level itineraries back in the early two thousand s. One time in college, I was tagging along with my sister's dance team Disney Trip. I was just going to fly down, go do my own adult Disney, while the rest of them had the strict performance schedule to follow. At the last minute, though, I had to step into my mom's travel leader position, and I was intimidated until I took her bag and opened up the binder. It had step by step instructions, schedules, meal vouchers, where to use them. She was eventually able to get back on the trip, and I had a better appreciation of what she did to make our Disney trips happen. So when we started talking about the upcoming trip, the one in 2024, I asked her all about those trips that we took when I was younger, before I knew what went into planning a Disney trip. When talking about planning a Disney trip in the 1990s, a very special book came to mind the Burn Bomb Book. As a kid, I thought the Burn Bomb book was magical. I remember knowing the tips and tricks from Burn Bomb and thinking that we were invincible. We knew that we should arrive early. We knew to go left in the lines. Burn Bomb also led us to an excellent meal at La Salier, where I fell in love with those pretzel breadsticks. When my wife and I brought our kids to Walt Disney World for the first time as a family, I had to buy the Burn Bomb book for that year. It was mostly out of nostalgia, but it ended up being a great way for us to get hyped before our trip. For that same trip, we purchased the Kids the Burn Bomb for Kids edition, and it became our in park autograph book. The kids did some of the activities in the book and we added some photos of our own to it, and now it's a pretty awesome little scrapbook like souvenir from that first family trip. This time, however, when we sat down to plan the big Disney trip for next year, we used other, more 21st century Disney planning resources like YouTube videos, blog articles, and Google Docs and sheets to organize our plans. Today, there's pretty much a whole Disney planning culture out there on the Internet. I couldn't help but think that travel guides that started in the 1980s, like Burnbaum and The Unofficial Guide, are what paved the way for Disney planning culture that exists today. And that's exactly what we're going to take a look at steven Burnbaum, his book and Disney. So before getting into the actual guides and the Burn bomb books for the Disney parks from the beyond, I really wanted to learn a little bit more about who Stephen Burnbaum the man was. So many times we as Disney fans talk about how we're kind of afraid that people might lose sight of who Walt Disney The Man was. But I feel like that Burnbaum name, it gets slapped on those Disney guidebooks. And we don't really know who the person Stephen Burnbaum is. And let me tell you, it was pretty hard to find information on him, even though he was an authority on travel in the there's not a lot of good biographical information out there. That's why I got to go head up my local public libraries archives and take a look at some old news articles online, some cool stuff like that. So here we go. Let's talk a little bit about Stephen Burnbaum the man. So Stephen Burnbaum was a New Yorker his whole life. He was born in New York in 1937. And because he was born in 1937, the same year that Snow White was released, you could probably guess that he was a kid who grew up on Disney all through the that Disney merchandising that was coming out through the beyond, he would have been growing up right alongside of all of that pop culture. So I'm guessing even though he doesn't outright we don't have any outright stuff saying that he's a super Disney fan, I'm guessing he grew up on it. In 1957. He graduated from Columbia University. He joined the Coast Guard the next year in 1958 and served for two years before going out into his professional life. So at the beginning of the 60s, steven Bernbaum got into real estate in New York, founding his own company, Chamberlain Properties, and he continued running his company throughout the late 60s. He joined the DePerry advertising firm as their creative director. I couldn't help but thinking of Stephen Bernbaum as a Don Draper type. He goes into this advertising agency and he's putting together ads and whatnot in the late 60s. So I definitely got some Mad Men vibes. And he was only there for five years into the early 70s when he started working for Photos Travel Guides. So Photos Travel Guides in the 70s were kind of a big deal. They were unique because at the time, they were one of the first travel guide series to focus on providing detailed and practical information for independent travelers, rather than just offering kind of a general overview of the place that you would be going. So they would really get into the nitty gritty of the places to go, the sites to see what was offered there as far as local culture. So he worked for Photos into the by 1972, he was pretty accomplished as a travel writer and editor and Bernbaum soon then decided to go out on his own, break free from just working as a writer for Photos. And he headed up a group of investors to purchase Diversions magazine from Johnson and Johnson. Yes. That Johnson and Johnson. The reason Johnson and Johnson owned a travel magazine is because it was a travel magazine originally for doctors. So they would sell it to doctors for their offices, for their personal travel use and they would use it to then they could advertise Johnson and Johnson products in Diversions magazine. That is until they sold it to Steven Bernbaum and his investors. The cool thing about Diversions is it kind of opened up new doors to Steven Bernbaum. Bernbaum was able to use Diversions as kind of the travel resource to put his name on the map. And soon enough morning shows on TV were asking him for travel advice. And he appeared on Good Morning America in the Today show. And he did a lot with CBS, he was on CBS Radio with a kind of a syndicated radio show with them weekly. And he would also go on CBS television a lot too. Not just Aversions magazines, but when other magazines wanted someone to write about travel, they would look to Burnbaum and ask him for articles to contribute information to their magazines. And he did so much across all different types of media in the he built on what he learned from that initial run at Photos. Bernbaum began using his staff and the articles that they wrote from Diversions to help him create his own series of travel guides, which started to come out in the late 70s. What was really cool is he could just take information that they used for the magazine and compile it to make a travel guide. So they wrote a couple articles about say, New York. They could take all those articles, kind of add in some more information, and then they would have a whole book that they could share with the world about New York. So he continued on making his guides. This way he would use the magazine and the articles and the research that he did for TV, radio, other magazines, and he would put it together to make these travel guides. And people went crazy for him. People loved them. They were really great, great travel guides. They were some of the best selling and they were kind of seen as kind of cutting edge at the time. In the 70s, they really got down into detail. So people really loved them. And this is where we have Disney enter the picture here. So in the 1980s, Disney catches wind. Early 80s really, we could probably say in the late 70s they catch wind of Burn Bomb's books. Dick Nunes, Walt Disney's one time apprentice who was in charge of park operations at the time, states in the intro to some of the Burn bomb guides that he reached out to Steven Burnbaum about making an official guide to the parks in 1981. I think it's important to note that Disney reached out to Burnbaum. He wasn't the one looking to make a Disney guide. Disney asked him the authority on travel to make the guide of their parks. It's important to note that Disney was involved with the guides from early on. From the very beginning, they were always involved, and really, it was Disney's idea. I actually have kind of a Disney theory as to how they got Burn bomb on their radar. I mean, sure, there's a lot of travel that happens in all industries, but my guess is I like to think that while Wed and park operations team were traveling a lot to build Tokyo Disneyland and get different countries, to buy into the World Showcase for Epcot. They probably consulted a burn bomb guide or two in the late seventy s and early eighty s and probably even took a look at Diversions magazine or read an article of Steven Burnbaum's from some other magazine. Maybe heard him on the radio and they thought of him as the travel guy. And this would definitely put Steven Bernbaum on Disney's radar. Don't know if that's true, but I'm guessing they were familiar with him at the time from those kind of projects. So Bernbaum had become an authority well known to most travelers by the 1980s, and at Nunes's request, he put his staff on the task of making a Disney travel guide as early as 1981. The first Disney guide, though, came out the next year in 1982. For the 1983 season. It was called stephen Burnbaum brings you the best of Walt Disney World. Disneyland wouldn't get a guide until 1985, and when asked why Disneyland didn't get the first guide, I mean, it was the first park, the original Walt's Park. Why didn't it get the first guide? Bernbaum said that it was because as an East Coaster, remember, he was a New Yorker his whole life. As an East Coaster. He was already more familiar with Walt Disney World. It was his home park. He actually said he had been there before they even started making the guide. So of course, as a Great World traveler, he would have tried out the giant tourist attraction just south of him. So that was his home park. He wanted to start with Walt Disney World, his home park. And then later on, of course, a couple of years later, he'd made the Disneyland guide. So Burnbaum's guides were a little different than the non sanctioned guides that had been coming out for years. Since Disney was endorsing Burnbaum, asking him to make this book, sponsoring his guidebook, he had access to many Disney insiders many of whom would later become Disney Legends, including names like John Hench and Marty Scalar, tony Baxter and Van France. So many more would consult him on these guides. What really set these guides apart is that Burnbaum was able to give this insider information back to his readers. So we could hear a lot about the history of the parks in the Burn Bomb guides. We could hear a lot about little details and things that happened straight from Imagineers and Disney Legends to Stephen Bernbaum, to be shared with his readers. Stephen Bernbaum said that Disney never tried to censor his staff or their opinions or what was written in the books. He goes on to say that they could say what they wanted to about the parks, but I do wonder, if they were doing this kind of without Disney's assistance, would they have said something different? Even though they can say whatever they want, would they possibly get a little bit more critical of Disney if it wasn't sanctioned by them? But I will say, reading some of the older Burn Bomb books, they do sometimes tell you if they don't like it, steven Burnbaum will put in there if he thinks it's not the best use of your time. So I think there is something to be said about the subjectivity of it. However, at the same time we have the Unofficial Guide coming out in the those ones definitely would kind of compare Disney to things that were unDisney or outside the parks big time, more so than Burn Bomb would. So you could see that there was some subjectivity that was going on here. I think I had just mentioned the Unofficial Guide, and I think it's important to take a moment just to talk about the Unofficial Guide. I have copies of Burnbaum's book. I also have copies of the Unofficial Guide, and I can tell you they serve very different purposes. In my opinion, the Unofficial Guide does give us an outsider's perspective of Disney, which is very important. And when I say outsiders perspective, I don't mean a non fans. No, I know the people creating the unofficial guides are Disney fans. The information they give proves it. They've been there, they've been on the ground in the parks doing the work, but they don't have that access to the Disney Imagineers and knowledge that Burnbaum got, and they're not produced by the company themselves. So they really get into comparing Disney to some great attractions on the outside, telling you, maybe don't do this at Disney, but find this hotel off property. You'll get a better deal and different tips and tricks like that where Disney and Burn Bomb I don't think would ever push anyone too far outside of what Disney has to offer in the Vacation Kingdom in this scenario. But the Unofficial Guide didn't have the same access to the Trivia and the behind the scenes information that Burn Bomb was given because he was sponsored by Disney to make it the unofficial guide gets to tell more of the story outside the Disney bubble, where the Burn Bomb guides tend to stay more inside those 43 sq. Mi that Disney had purchased in Orlando. So Burnbaum continued publishing his guide for both Disney World and Disneyland throughout the rest of the 1980s and into the 1990s. But I want to pause to bring something up here really quick because I don't think the Bernbaum guide would have been the same if it was just Steve Burnbaum. You see, Steve Burnbaum had been married to Alexandra Bernbaum, Alex Bernbaum, since 1960. And she wasn't just his partner in life, she was his business partner too, especially with his travel guide business. And she traveled with him, she traveled without him, and she wrote and created content for the Burn Bomb books as much as he did. She helped edit. She was right there with him. I think she's probably one of the main reasons that the Burn Bomb guides for Disney even got made. Alex seems to have been the bigger Disney Parks fan. In fact, I've got a little excerpt from the intro to Burnbaum's 1990 book and the word from our editor intro. He says, I suspect that my wife may be the most blase traveler I know. I've actually come home and asked if she'd like to go to Paris for the weekend, only to have her answer that she was planning to wash her hair. So you can understand why I was a little apprehensive the first time I asked her if she'd like to spend a few days at Walt Disney World. It is perhaps the ultimate tribute to the appeal of this extraordinary place that my otherwise demure and dignified spouse immediately began jumping up and down and screaming, can we go on all the rides? My wife's reaction was clearly not unusual, since Walt Disney World occupies the unique position of being the most popular man made attraction on this planet. She was the one who seems to want it to have wanted to go. She might have been the reason behind saying yes to the project in the first place. In the dedication to the book, it even says, for Alex, who went on all the rides, to reference what she had asked in the in the intro. So she working side by side with him, wanting to go on the rides, wanting to be in the Disney bubble, I think, is one of those things that really shows that this is why these books got made. She's kind of the unsung hero. She doesn't get as much credit at this point for making the guides as maybe she should be. So Stephen Bernbaum continued making his books into the 90s. But in 1991, Stephen Bernbaum passed away from leukemia at the age of 54. When Stephen Bernbaum passed away, Alex Bernbaum stepped into his roles on TV, in the magazines, and his radio show. And she also took over as editor of the travel guides. In the mid 1990s, all of the Burn Bomb travel guides to cities around the world started to see their final editions. The Disney ones were the last to continue on. They were, in fact, the most popular guides. One of the reasons after Stephen passed away was that Wendy Lefcon took over the editing of the Disney Guides with Alex Burnbaum as a consulting editor. At this point, Disney is starting to take on the Burnbaum title for the Disney Parks. They're the ones who are taking over. Wendy Lefcon is now big in Disney Publishing as an editor for many Disney books, and she takes the Burn Bomb name into the company, further into Disney. And this time too, when Disney starts to take over the Burn Bomb name even more, they start adding more Burn Bomb spinoff titles. Stuff like Burn Bomb Book for Kids, by Kids, or completely opposite the Burn Bomb Book of Disney Without Kids, and then a whole series of books for the cruise line. So they start expanding out the titles as they take it closer into the company. And in 2001, Disney finally takes the last step of fully incorporating the Burn Bomb name, the Burn Bomb Guides, and these travel books into the company. When they buy the Burn Bomb brand in 2001, they were the last Burn Bomb book left, and Alex Burnbaum agrees to sell it to Disney. She still stays on as a consulting editor, but Disney is fully, at this point, staffing the writers, having their staff, their people write the book, complete insider information because the books are being created from inside the company itself. But what we see happen too around this time in the early two thousand s, is all of that objectivity goes away and it's definitely a spin from inside the company. Fans of the guide will tell you this is the part where you kind of see the definite shift in the writing of the guides, where Bernbaum was originally more objective and he would critique some things and his opinions and his descriptions, they might have been a little biased, but he still could say what he wanted. To some degree. Disney's ownership leads to a more like promotional language in the guides. We get a lot more commercial style language, kind of playing up the wonderfulness of everything Disney has to offer. So despite the shift from the Burn Bomb staff to the Disney staff writing under the Burn Bomb name, burn Bomb Guides still remain the most popular Disney travel guides today. They're still sold. There's a new one coming out next fall for 2024. I don't know, maybe I should have to get it for the 2024 trip and remember all the good old times. But they're still the most popular guides today. I actually have two guides with me here as I've been recording this. The one I read to you from was the 1990 edition and that was the one that had the quotes about Alex Bernbaum that Steve Burnbaum said. It also has some of that same language about how the book started from Dick Nunes too, in a letter at the beginning. So it's kind of a cool piece to have. And of course, being towards the end of Steve Bernbaum's run as the editor before he passed away in 1991. This is another kind of a special book, too, just close to his passing. But the reason why I have this book and it's special to me is 1990 was the very first Disney trip that I went on as a kid. This is what the first trip that my parents brought me and my brother on it's. It's a great way to look back at that trip. Now, I don't remember everything. I was young, I was a kid at the time, so I don't remember everything from that time. But reading this 1990 burn bomb book can bring me back to some of the things that happened on that trip and spark some memories or make me remember flashes of places that I were when I look at those photographs in them and just kind of give me a sense of what was happening in the parks at that time. These older Burn Bomb books are actually really great little time capsules that we could look back to. So that 1990 book is really important to me and I love that I have a copy of it to look at. It even has that whole new, like, brand new at the parks. We've got Disney, MGM Studios, theme park. Yes, MGM. I'll still call it MGM. I still do. And I'm not going to apologize. It's MGM. So I've got my 1990 guide, which is special to me because that was my first Disney trip. But I also have another guide with me. The other one I have is one of those that is a little less objective, one of the one that's maybe a little more Disney favorable because it was written by the Disney Company. And that's the 2016 version of the Burn Bomb book. The 2016 official guide I have because that was the first trip I went on as a parent. So I have the first trip I ever went on with me here. And I have the first trip that I went on as a parent. This one's really cool because it's got a whole little section about like, what's new with frozen in the parks. This is one of the first guides to feature Frozen ever after. It's got a lot of great stuff. It's before all of the Toy Story Land and Star Wars Galaxy's Edge stuff opened up. So there's like hinting that it's coming soon. It's another great little more recent time capsule of the trip I went on with my children. So in the same way that I can look back to my 1990 edition of the Burn Bomb book, I hope that my kids could look at this 2016 Burn Bomb book one day and think about their first trip, just quickly comparing the two. I did notice there's a lot of similar things that happen in both of the books, some things that happened with the format since the beginning that have stayed true through the whole time. So even though we've had shifts in who's writing it and how they're writing it, these things seem to be pretty similar in each guidebook. Each guidebook has a Before You Go section about planning your trip, and then they go into a section about each of the parks across all of the property, each one of the theme parks, and then into things, the little extra things like water parks and other activities that you can do all around Walt Disney World. Each of these sections, the Before You Go section, all the park sections, they're all color coded so that when you look at the side of the book, you could jump right to that section that you wanted to go to to see what you wanted to learn about. If you want to just learn about Magic Kingdom, you could pop right into that Magic Kingdom section. Both editions seem to have some even though they have a lot in common, they have some things that are different. For instance, the 1990 edition, when it comes to transportation and accommodations, it has a lot more about what's being offered outside of the park. Some of those early editions even talk about attractions outside of the Disney bubble. In the 2016 edition, it doesn't even mention the world outside of the Disney bubble. There's some mention to some hotels and things like that that are non Disney but still in the bubble, the things those hotels by Disney Springs and that kind of thing. So that's a difference. There in one cool thing to kind of compare them. The 2016 is kind of advertising those new additions to the MGM Studios park, like Toy Story Land and Galaxy's Edge, whereas my 1990 edition talks about how the brand new studios is there. And it's really cool to look at what was offered back in 1990 versus what's offered in 2016, and then even what's different in what's offered now. Looking at the parks today, it's all very different. And it's cool that you can kind of mark those milestones across these Burn Bomb guides. So a big collection of some special years does let you kind of paint a picture of what's going on at the parks year to year, both of them. Also, I got to talk about both the guides have maps at the back. I love maps. I should do another show about the maps. It's not an extensive one, but I take pride in my map collection. I love the maps. I don't even mind that the ones in the Burn Bomb books aren't to scale. That's fun. Sometimes we can look at them. And be like, oh, look at that. It looks like these are really close to each other. But we get maps at the back of each book, and we kind of see some of those different locations that popped up, new resorts that are on the map that weren't there before, and it's fun to look at those maps and those artifacts and see how things have changed over time. I think that's my favorite thing about the Burn Bomb books, that idea that we could look at them as a time capsule into what the parks were like and get a little insight as to what it might have been. You kind of take that vacation through the book. Steven Bernbaum did. He left a lasting impact on the travel industry, and his name still today adorns these Disney travel guides, even though sometimes people today might not think to like, what is Burn Bomb? Who is Burn Bomb? He definitely left a big impact on Disney's travel guides for sure. I really had a lot of fun researching the legacy or the life and legacy of Stephen Burnbaum. Let me know what you think about this episode and how you feel about the Burn Bomb books. I'd really like to know which Burn Bomb books you have in your collection. If you have any, reach out to me on the Socials, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. You can visit Synergylovescompany.com to find all of those. Remember, if you want to make sure that you don't miss the next episode of Synergylovescompany, you can go to Synergylovescompany.com. And right there on the main page, there is a button for most of the podcasters that you might use, whether it's itunes, Spotify, Google Podcast. Once you're to your favorite podcaster, make sure you hit Follow or subscribe so that you never miss an episode, and then you could get more Synergy Loves Company right there on your phone. And if you're enjoying Synergy Loves Company once again, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with a friend who loves Disney as much as you do. Maybe it's your Disney planning friend and you love the Burn Bomb books, or they grew up on the Burn Bomb books. Share this episode with them. Let them know that they can learn all about that history of Stephen Burnbaum. Just tell them to visit Synergylovescompany.com, because sharing the show is the number one way that you can support the show, and your support means the world to me. Thanks for exploring Disney's connections with me. And until next time, keep disc, covering the magic in everything.