On Thursday, Dec. 5, 1996, some of Hollywood's then A-listers were in town for the ground-breaking of a proposed new resort-casino. Arriving via the less-than-conventional means of the raised bucket of a front-end loader, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Demi Moore, and Bruce Willis convened -- along with the de rigueur bevy of sequined-and-be-feathered showgirls -- at a site located at Las Vegas Boulevard and Sands Avenue (adjacent to what was still then the Desert Inn, and where now stands Wynn/Encore), for the official ground-breaking ceremony for a 3,300-room Planet Hollywood Hotel-Casino project.
An $830 million collaboration between Planet Hollywood and ITT Corp. of New York, which at that time operated Caesars Palace and the Desert Inn, the project was set for completion in 1999, with Schwarzenegger gushing about how within the next five years "maybe we'll have 50 casinos, 50 hotels worldwide. Would that be a great idea?"
As time would tell, the answer turned out to be that no, this was not a great idea. Only nine months prior to the heady ground-breaking ceremony, Planet Hollywood had gone public, with shares initially trading at $32. By 1999 that figure had dropped to less than $1 and since then the company has twice gone bankrupt, thanks to factors including misguided/ill-timed forays into parallel businesses including movie theaters and ice cream. Rather than embarking on world domination, more than 100 Planet Hollywood locations worldwide have now closed, with many other planned projects, both domestically and abroad, having been canned before they ever saw the light of day. Such was the fate of this first Planet Hollywood casino planned for Las Vegas, which never progressed beyond its high-profile ground-breaking ceremony.
In 1997, against the backdrop of a hostile-takeover attempt by Hilton Hotels Corp., ITT Corp. announced the delay of its plans to begin construction on Planet Hollywood casino-hotels in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, stating that no construction would take place before the first quarter of 1998 on the Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas, while work on the $490 million Planet Hollywood in Atlantic City was not expected to begin before the first quarter of 2000.
In a parallel development, by the late '80s there was center-Strip trouble, where the controversy-mired Aladdin was already on a slippery slope. Following its temporary closure for a major remodel, in 1987 the historic resort had reopened, but by 1989 it had already filed for bankruptcy protection. Things continued to go from bad to worse on multiple fronts, and in September 1997 it was announced that the Aladdin was to close two months later. In April 1998, the 17-story resort, which had operated under that name on the site of the former Tally Ho since 1966, was imploded.
Thereupon commenced a rebuild of the resort, in partnership with London Clubs International. The new Aladdin finally opened (a day late, and with ongoing "issues", not least being the fact that half the staff was clad in hard hats and that the first bank of slot machines to greet would-be casino goers was plastered with "Out of Order" signs) in August 2000. An even tackier remake of the original, the Aladdin Mark II fared no better than its previous incarnation and on June 20, 2003, the already-bankrupt resort was sold to a partnership of Planet Hollywood (which had yet to reach its own nadir, but from which a savvy Schwarzenegger had already severed all ties back in 2000) and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. The new-look Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino held its grand opening the weekend of November 16, 2007, before being sold to Caesars Entertainment three years later.
Meanwhile, back to your original question regarding those souvenir tokens, in regard to which all we can say is don't get your hopes up about the little gold-token goldmine you might be sitting on. Here's an excerpt from the Las Vegas Sun's coverage of the event at the time, which explained that the groundbreaking took place "in a sand pit seeded with souvenir 'gold' coins" and that later, "while VIP guests and media dug in the sand for treasure, showgirls traversed the perimeters of the crowd, handing out more coins." [Ed: As an aside, were you 'a VIP guest' or merely 'of the crowd'?!] According to this reportage at the time, "Anyone who returns one of the coins to the casino when it opens in 1999" was to receive "something special."
Alas, it was not to be, so you'll likely never know what that special something might have been. As for today, the tokens seem to come up for sale with some regularity on eBay: A recent example only in January of this year offered a token "thrown into the crowd by Sylvester Stallone" which had a reserve price of $39.99 but never received a bid. This, perhaps, is not surprising, since another identical-looking token from the same event failed to receive any action last December, with a starting-bid price of just $1.99.
