My Year at WDW-The Seas with Nemo (and His Computer-Generated Friends)

Like most Disney attractions, the Seas pavilion went through a number of changes between the initial concept and the final design that actually got built. One feature remained constant, though, from the early concepts:

. . . to the final ones:

The aquarium. From the beginning, it was the Seas’ central attraction. But EPCOT is a Disney park, so visitors would have been pretty disappointed if the Seas was just an aquarium. Something else was needed to draw them in.

In the early concepts, visitors were transported to the aquarium viewing area via an immersive dark ride hosted by Poseidon, God of the Sea. By the time the pavilion actually opened in 1986, it had been scaled down to a short Hydrolator trip and a three-minute Seacab ride. Jim Hill says this was because corporate sponsor United Technologies was too cheap to fund the original concept, while Martin Smith’s Living Seas Ultimate Tribute video implies that WED decided on their own that the Poseidon-hosted dark ride was too fanciful and opted for the more academic tone.

The Living Seas, with its preshow film/Hydrolator/Seacab ride combination, did a good job of drawing in visitors, at least until the departure of its corporate sponsor. Forced to fund the pavilion’s operation on their own, Disney went into aggressive cost-cutting mode.  The Seacab ride was deactivated and walled off, the Seabase began to take on a dingy look as routine maintenance was scaled back, and visitors began to stay away from the pavilion. People began to grimly refer to it as “The Dead Seas”. Fans began to wonder if the Seas would suffer the same fate as the Wonders of Life.

You know what happened, of course. Disney pumped some money into the pavilion, and in 2007 it reopened as The Seas with Nemo and Friends. Was any attempt made to make the pavilion’s new theme fit in with the rest of Future World? No. Does the ride-thru attraction have any point other than to say “Hey kids, here’s Nemo!” and rehash the plot of the movie? Again, no. However, after making multiple trips to EPCOT last year, I have to admit that the Nemo rehab, ill-conceived though it was, has succeeded in one important area: drawing people back to the Seabase.

Even when the pavilion was The Living Seas, the main attraction wasn’t the Hydrolators, or the Seacab ride, or the preshow film featuring that female narrator with the amazing voice. It was the marine life inside the aquarium. But there really isn’t any point to it being there if no one is compelled to come look at it. During the handful of trips I’ve made since the Great Nemo Rehab of 2007, the Seabase has always been packed with excited families, even on days when the ride-thru attraction was a walk-on. And the families weren’t all crowded into the waiting area for Turtle Talk, either; every window into the aquarium was lined with kids staring into the water with amazement. I heard far more cries of delight at the antics of the dolphins than I did on the ride when Nemo and his friends appeared. Without exception, every kid I saw was much more excited to see a real shark prowling the reef than they were to see Animatronic Bruce and his artificial cohorts. And that’s why I have to admit that The Seas with Nemo and Friends is ultimately a success.

From its initial concept to the finished product, the purpose of EPCOT’s Seas pavilion was always to inform and educate people of all ages about the incredible array of life beneath the ocean’s surface. And when I see the Seabase area full of kids eager to look at and learn about the marine life in that massive aquarium, I’m forced to admit it’s accomplishing that purpose. Maybe it’s not going about it in quite the way I would prefer, and maybe if Disney had stuck with the original concept and built the pavilion with a big and elaborate dark ride I wouldn’t even need to write this. But love him or hate him, at least Nemo and his Computer-Generated friends are getting kids excited about a piece of the real world (specifically, the piece that comprises 70% of the globe). Maybe it’s only an unintended benefit of a rehab that Disney did primarily to sell more Nemo merchandise. But it’s proof that the spirit of EPCOT Center is still finding ways to shine through.

My Year at WDW-Security as Theater

 

When I was a little kid, I was afraid that there was quicksand in my backyard. Was it because the soil conditions in my area were especially conducive to the formation of quicksand? Nope! It was because of the scary depictions of quicksand in realistic documentary programs like Gilligan’s Island and the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan films. While I was tiptoeing around the backyard worrying about nonexistent quicksand, my mom was inside worrying that the Roadrunner cartoons would make me drop an anvil on my sister. Our brains seem wired to fear ridiculously improbable things.

It’s even worse if it’s something that’s highly publicized. The abduction and murder of Kimberly Leach in 1978 and Adam Walsh in 1981 made parents during my childhood terrified that their local malls and playgrounds were infested with evil kidnappers ready to snatch their children the second the parents’ back was turned. The Disney parks have always had an excellent reputation for safety and security, and their carefully-crafted atmosphere has usually been pretty good at causing visitors to discard those kind of fears. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, though, had such an overpowering effect on the American psyche that no amount of Disney theming could make park visitors forget about the newfound danger of terrorism. So management had to do something to make their customers feel safe so that Walt Disney World (and Disneyland, too) continued to be a desirable destination. You know what they came up with: bag checks.

X-ray machines and metal detectors would have been too expensive (and it’s not like they stopped the 9/11 hijackers) but the bag check stations outside the park entrances are sufficiently reminiscent of airport security checkpoints to cause vacationers to relax, secure in the knowledge that all those strangers in the Space Mountain line with them have passed through the bag check successfully, and are definitely not terrorists. After all, if they were terrorists, then the security guards at the bag check stations would have found a brick of C-4 or an AK-47 in their backpack, right?

Obviously, Disney has always had security at their parks. Currently, the New York Times story about the Magic Kingdom’s line-monitoring command center is generating some buzz. If Disney puts that much effort into monitoring attraction lines, how much more seriously do you think they take security? After all, a violent incident like a mugging, a rape, or an armed standoff would damage the company a lot more than a long line for Dumbo. (And no, I’m not implying that Disney cares more about its corporate image than the physical safety of its customers) Much like all the other backstage operations that keep the parks running smoothly, security is practically invisible. But it works. The real world doesn’t stop at Disney’s property line, and I’m sure that people have managed to smuggle drugs or even weapons onto the property. But despite the fact that Walt Disney World is visited by something like 17 million people per year, how many violent crimes have happened there? (The Celebration murders don’t count, since Celebration isn’t part of the resort) Despite the fact that, in the Magic Kingdom the number of people per square foot often rivals the busiest parts of New York City, there aren’t problems with pickpockets or muggers.

Ah, but what about terrorists? I’m sorry, but if you seriously think that a retiree in a policeman costume shining a flashlight into a backpack will be any deterrent to someone who’s so determined to kill people that he’s willing to blow himself up to do it, then you’re not just suffering from Vacation Stupidity Disorder, you’re suffering from Full-Time Stupidity Disorder! The only bad guys a bag check is going to thwart are the cartoon villains that menace Mickey Mouse.

After 9/11, our very natural feelings of fear and insecurity were heightened by media people breathlessly imagining all the ways a prospective terrorist could attack. Radioactive dirty bombs and attacks with biological weapons were favorite scenarios. Almost a full decade has gone by, and with the exception of the anthrax mailings (which were not a coordinated Al-Qaeda attack but the work of a lone crazy person in the U.S.) none of that stuff has happened. And even if Disney World were targeted by Al-Qaeda, or just a single psycho acting alone, there are plenty of places they could strike besides the parks. A bomb or biological agent would kill just as many people in a crowded monorail station, a ferryboat, or even in the bottleneck created by the bag-check stations as it would inside the Magic Kingdom.

The bag checks are a show designed to create an illusion. They’re not a real security checkpoint any more than the Astro Orbiter is a real space voyage. Their sole purpose is to quiet the fears of panicky vacationers whose brains have slipped into Reduced Functionality Mode, and ease them into the frame of mind that’s most conducive to consuming mass quantities of twenty-five dollar T-shirts and ten-dollar hamburgers. They’re like a night light to ward off monsters under the bed. So, even though Disney’s Illusion of Security Show is inconvenient and contributes little or nothing to park security, I expect it to stick around forever. Because as old as people get, they never quite stop believing in monsters under the bed. Or quicksand in the backyard.

My Year at WDW-In Which I Actually Say Something Nice About The Tarps

During the weekend that bridged the end of July and the beginning of August, when the Florida heat is so intense that merely turning your air conditioner down to “medium” can cause you to faint from heatstroke, I did a very stupid thing: I went to Disney World. Walt Disney World is a bad place to visit during the summer because, as any hardcore Disney fanatic will tell you, large chunks of it are located outdoors. A few posts ago, I made fun of the Team Disney Orlando executives for forgetting that little factoid when they gave the green light to Stitch’s Supersonic Celebration.  Well, as I baked in the sun while walking through Future World’s large unshaded expanses, I started to realize something: the designers of EPCOT Center forgot it, too.

EPCOT Center aficionados like me are always waxing poetic about the grand open spaces Future World used to have, especially in CommuniCore Plaza, and angrily denouncing all the visual clutter that’s ruined once-magnificent sightlines. Now, I still maintain that the tarps and whirlygigs in Innoventions plaza are unsightly, to say the least:

It looks like the nineties took a dump in the middle of Future World, and nobody cleaned it up.

But the tarps do occasionally serve a useful purpose:

Shade. Ditto for the hideous awning-looking thing that was bolted onto the front of the former World of Motion pavilion during its conversion to Test Track. Sure, this:

. . . is infinitely more attractive than this:

. . . but at least there’s some shade to be found under that giant ugly awning.

Of course, Walt’s original EPCOT concept offered a more elegant solution: the shopping area that inspired today’s World Showcase would have been enclosed and climate-controlled. No ugly tarps or giant Erector-set pieces required. One more reason why I’m envious of the version of myself that lives in the alternate universe where Walt’s EPCOT City actually got built.

Oh, one more thing. In addition to all the man-made clutter that’s popped up on Future World over the years, something else you’ll occasionally hear complaints about is clutter of the natural variety, by which I mean trees. Because EPCOT’s trees have not had the decency to remain the exact height they were when they were planted in the eighties, scenic vistas like this:

Now look more like this:

Okay, so the newer picture isn’t taken from the exact spot as the old one (I didn’t have the old photo with me for reference when I took it, also I think there’s a pretzel stand there now) but you get the idea. Anyway, I have no problem with this. Trees grow. That’s what living things do. Sure, they may obscure what might have been a postcard-perfect picture, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to chop them down or whack them in half.

And those are my thoughts about visual clutter at EPCOT. Insert a witty and clever ending here.

My Year at WDW: Animal Kingdom

Between 1981 and 2007, I made maybe eleven trips to Walt Disney World, most of them before 1990. However, I was able to afford an Annual Pass in late 2009, and since then I’ve taken ten trips. As a result, not only do I know the best places to go the bathroom, but my perspective on the parks has undergone something of a metamorphosis.  My next multi-part ongoing series, entitled “My Year At WDW”, will delve into that new perspective a little bit.

Let’s start with Animal Kingdom.

When the Magic Kingdom opened in 1971, it was missing a lot of the attractions we think of classics: no Space Mountain, Carousel of Progress, or PeopleMover, no Pirates of the Caribbean, and no Big Thunder Mountain. By the time the park celebrated its twelfth anniversary in 1983, all of those attractions had been added, and the Magic Kingdom as we know it today was largely complete.

Animal Kingdom opened in 1998 with only two rides, a smattering of shows, and lots of room for expansion. Surely, all kinds of stuff must have been added in the twelve years between 1998 and today. Let’s compare an 1998 guidemap and a 2010 guidemap and marvel at all the new attractions the park has! Well, there’s Expedition Everest, that’s a big one. Asia has gained Kali River Rapids-a little on the short side, but good on a hot day-and the Maharaja Jungle Trek. Over in Dinoland, they built that Chester and Hester’s Dinorama thing that nobody likes. And that’s it. Two rides (one of which is built around an Animatronic that doesn’t work as advertised) a walkthrough attraction that’s not much different from something you can see in one of your better zoos, and a cheap carnival area. And hey, the cheap carnival area is all concrete and metal, making it one of the best places to enjoy Florida’s blistering summer heat! To make things worse, the park’s only dark ride, Dinosaur, has had so many effects deactivated over the years that it’s hardly worth experiencing. Check out Martin Smith’s excellent Dinosaur tribute video for more details on that.

Another issue that I have with Animal Kingdom is that it’s basically the Star Trek: Voyager of Disney World parks. It’s the one they never should have built. The idea was that a fourth park on property would induce people to extend their vacations. Instead, it’s just cannibalized attendance and maintenance dollars from EPCOT and the Studios. If you want to hear more about this, I encourage you to check out Episode 46 of the WDW Fanboys podcast for a very insightful discussion on it.

My personal feeling is that while there are some nice things at Animal Kingdom, it’s just not worth my time. The executives obviously feel that having the Disney name on the park is enough to overcome its shortcomings, and that spending any money on the place is unnecessary. Fine. If Team Disney Orlando doesn’t want to spend any of their money on Animal Kingdom, then I definitely don’t want to spend any of my money at Animal Kingdom. Unfortunately, my wife likes the place, so I’m sure I’ll be dragged there at least once per trip. But I sure won’t be buying any merchandise or eating any expensive table service meals there.

And that’s it for Animal Kingdom. Next week, I’ll take a look at another park.