Somebody Call The Waaambulance!

The Walt Disney Company has created a monster. I’m sure that’s not what they set out to do. They saw the success the various Comic-Con style conventions were having and decided that all those Disney fans out there would relish the chance to pay admission for the privilege of crowding into a packed convention center to buy overpriced merchandise and have the company’s newest offerings aggressively marketed to them.

However, as is often the case when Disney tries to copy what all the cool kids are doing, they made a critical mistake. One of the main things that makes Comic-Con so popular, besides the Slave Leia cosplayers, is the announcements about various upcoming things. There’s always news about some highly anticipated comics event, genre film, or TV show. People are conditioned to expect Big Announcements at these types of conventions, and therein lies Disney’s problem. You see, the stuff that’s promoted at the annual Comic-Con is generally stuff that will hit the market before the next year’s Con. Studios don’t use Comic-Con to promote projects that are several years from seeing the light of day. That’s exactly what Disney did, though, when they announced the New Fantasyland project for Florida’s Magic Kingdom at the first D23 Expo in 2010. Now we’re conditioned to expect big announcements at every Expo.

So, when  the Parks and Resorts presentation at this year’s Expo failed to yield anything new, the online Disney fan community erupted with howls of outrage. The way it sounded, you’d think the Walt Disney Company killed their dog. People I like and respect were comparing the company to an abusive boyfriend, because the plight of abused women is so similar to that of aggrieved Disney parkgoers with a sense of entitlement, isn’t it?

Disney has really painted themselves into a corner with this Expo thing. They’ve pretty much guaranteed that every Parks and Resorts presentation from now until the end of time will have one of the following outcomes:

1. Disney makes a big announcement, and the fans immediately take to the Internet to complain about its shortcomings.
2. Disney fails to make a big announcement, and the fans immediately take to the Internet to complain about that.

Let’s get real, guys. Disney is in the middle of three large projects: WDW’s New Fantasyland, California’s DCA overhaul, and Shanghai Disneyland. Neither will be finished anytime soon. If you seriously think that Disney has done you wrong by not announcing another E-Ticket attraction this year, then your car has arrived:

Enjoy the ride.

The Birds Are All Right

Well, the moment hardcore WEDHeads dreamed of but scarcely believed they’d live to see has actually come. It came yesterday, actually, when the restored Enchanted Tiki Room opened its doors, forever free of the excerable Iago-and-Zazu overlay that had been inflicted upon it during the Dark Ages of the late 1990s. Before the Internet, those of us who are unable to drop everything and scurry down to Disney World whenever we feel like it would’ve had to rely on secondhand accounts or even worse, Disney marketing-babble, to tell us what the show was like. That being said, thank the Tiki Gods for technology!

Obviously, watching a video is no substitute for experiencing the show in person, but here are my preliminary thoughts:

Imagineering did a good job on this. I admit to being a tad disappointed to lose the “Let’s All Sing Like The Birdies Sing” sing-along, but I think it was a wise omission. Florida, after all, has a greater percentage of first-time visitors than California does, and the sing-along is more geared to repeat customers. I don’t much mind the loss of the Enchanted Fountain, either. The show moves along just fine without it.

Back in January, after the sheer awfulness of the Under New Management Show caused it to spontaneously combust, I was eager for a return of the original show. Still, I wondered if audiences would just get bored and walk out in the middle, the way they were doing in the ‘90s shortly before Iago and Zazu took over. Only time will answer that question, but it looks like the Imagineers have done a great job editing the show down in such a way that maintains its essence without dragging on in a way that would grate on modern attention spans. The average visitor who doesn’t have the original show audio on their iPod won’t even be able to tell where the cuts where made.

I don’t know when I’ll be back in the Magic Kingdom again, but whenever I return, it’ll be nice to know that, instead of scowling at the Under New Management sign as I pass the Sunshine Pavilion, I’ll be able to go inside and enjoy a charming show with no obnoxious interruptions. And since my wife never got to see the original show, it’ll be nice to be able to share this reborn classic with her.

Thanks so much for reading. I’ll be back next week with another post about Tomorrowland.

Tomorrowland: Nostalgia vs. Reality

On my last few trips to Florida’s Magic Kingdom, I’ve often found myself longing for the pure, unspoiled pre-Flash Gordon Tomorrowland of my childhood:

The funny thing is, the last time I was there I didn’t feel that way at all.

It was 1992. I was 14 years old, and my family was on a day trip to the Magic Kingdom. Even though park maintenance had not yet begun to slip the way it would later in the decade, Tomorrowland felt like an abandoned corner of the park that the Imagineers had forgotten about. More than anything else, it reminded me of Marineland.

Marineland was Florida’s first theme park, a kind of proto-Sea World. Located just south of St. Augustine on A1A, it opened in 1938 and remained popular with tourists well into the 1970s. I made frequent visits on school field trips and family outings during the ‘80s, but by then Marineland had entered into a sustained period of decline thanks to the opening of Sea World. I didn’t notice it when I was in elementary school, but the last trip we made to Marineland was in 1990, and by then even my dense twelve-year-old self could tell that the park had seen better days. Marineland in 1990 was quaint, creaky, and obviously old. Just like Tomorrowland in 1992.

Unfair, you say? Let’s take a look at Tomorrowland’s 1992 attraction lineup. Guests entering the land from the hub were greeted by two attractions that anchored Anaheim’s Tomorrowland when it opened in 1955: Mission To Mars (which was really just Flight To The Moon with a different film) and a CircleVision theater. Pushing farther into the land you had Delta Dreamflight, a ride that was charming, but looked a whole lot like a scaled-down, cheaper version of EPCOT Center’s more elaborate Omnimover attractions. The final scene of the Carousel of Progress was showing audiences of the 1990s what people in the late 1970s imagined life would be like in the late 1980s, and the Grand Prix Raceway was another Disneyland original that was no more futuristic in 1992 than it is today. Compared to EPCOT Center’s sleek, modern Future World, Tomorrowland looked about as pathetic as Marineland did when compared to Orlando’s sleek, modern Sea World.

It’s tempting to look at today’s Tomorrowland with its visual clutter and its crass Licensed Character-infused attractions and think that everything would be perfect if we woke up one morning to find it magically restored to its pre-1994 iteration. That might satisfy a tiny minority of the Disney fan community, but it wouldn’t play well with the general public, that’s for sure. And if we take an objective view, I think even hardcore WEDHeads like me would admit that the old Tomorrowland is best left in the past.

The End of the Space Shuttle

At 5:57 AM Eastern this morning, about thirty-three minutes before my alarm clock went off, the Space Shuttle Atlantis landed in Florida, officially ending the Shuttle program. This milestone ends an era that began with a prototype named Enterprise and a photo-op by the original cast of Star Trek, dressed like they were on their way to meet John Travolta at a disco:

^{Pictured: Gene Roddenberry and the original cast of Star Trek, minus William Shatner, who must have been off filming Kingdom of the Spiders or something}

More than anything, that picture really underscores how old the Space Shuttle is. If you owned a car that old, you’d be able to register it as an antique. And yet, in the early 80s we thought the Shuttle would be around forever.

So, while the end of the Shuttle program means different things to different people, to me it means that at least one piece of this scene from Horizons is now technically impossible:

And to be honest, that makes me kind of sad.

When You Wish Upon A Spreadsheet

A few weeks ago, Disney announced that an executive named Al Weiss would be retiring. The Disney fan community, believing him to be responsible for every bad thing that has happened since Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, reacted like this:

The good feelings lasted until it was revealed that much-reviled Walt Disney World president Meg Crofton would be promoted to oversee theme park operations in the USA and France, at which point the online Disney fan community did this:

I want to stress that, unlike many of the folks who follow the Disney company more closely than I do and are plugged into various sources of inside information, I don’t really know a whole lot about these people. Some folks more knowledgeable than myself seemed to think that Crofton’s promotion was the worst thing to happen since Michael Bay decided to go into the movie business. Others insisted that any bad decisions that seemed to have been made by Crofton in the past were not actually her fault, but the fault of the old executive structure that existed before Al Weiss’s departure. I had no way of knowing which opinion was closer to the truth, so I resolved to wait and see what happened.

Then we got the news that Monorail service will be discontinued during evening Extra Magic Hours. Permanently. The Disney fan community, myself included, reacted in a measured and logical manner:

Okay, that’s not entirely true. Many folks on the WDWMagic forums were falling all over themselves to justify this, to the point that I began to wonder if they were either

1. On Meg Crofton’s payroll, or
2. Had family members being held hostage by Ms. Crofton, and going on the Internet to justify this horrible decision was one of the conditions for their release.

Or maybe they’re just idiots. I really don’t know. What I do know is that this is the first time I can remember Disney actually targeting their highest-paying customers with such an openly hostile policy. Consider: if you can only afford to stay at an All-Star resort, this really doesn’t affect you at all. When it’s time for you to go back to your room at 2 a.m. after Extra Magic Hours at the Magic Kingdom you’ll just get on a bus, the same as you would any other time. But what if you’ve plunked down the cash for a Club-level room at the Contemporary with a Magic Kingdom view? (which could run as high as $885 during the peak season) For $885 a night, how will Disney be returning you to your resort? Let me show you:

^{Image borrowed from YourFirstVisit.net}

That’s right. You get to walk. In the dark. Along a route that requires you to cross a four-lane road. Yes, I know there are street lights, but that’s not exactly the point. There’s an implicit understanding we all have with the companies with whom we do business: the more money we give them, the more they will pretend to care about us. This means different things at different companies. Paying first-class money to an airline, for example, will just get you a seat designed for a human being (as opposed to the seats in Coach class, which are designed for smaller life-forms such as gerbils) But paying first-class money at Disney, a company that allegedly prides itself on stellar customer service, should get you an amazing experience. Instead, you get to walk back to your resort, or wait for a small, slow-moving boat if you’re staying at the Polynesian or Grand Floridian.

Now, there’s been an allegation that, far from being an exercise in cynical corporate cost-cutting, this move was actually demanded by Transportation employees who felt that the monorails needed more maintenance downtime. I’m no expert in park operations, but I do know that there are eleven monorails, and that the maintenance garage located east of the Magic Kingdom doesn’t have room to service all of them simultaneously. During evening Extra Magic Hours at EPCOT and the Magic Kingdom, I can’t imagine that there are more than three trains on the line. Therefore, I can’t imagine how running two or three trains during the three nights a week that either the Magic Kingdom or EPCOT have Extra Magic Hours would make things difficult from a maintenance perspective. Maybe I’m wrong. If you know more about this than I do, please feel free to correct me in the comments.

I believe that there’s an even more insidious purpose to this new policy than just cutting Monorail-related costs, however. Management might be trying to sabotage evening Extra Magic Hour attendance to provide a pretext for discontinuing them altogether. They’ve done this kind of thing before, most notably in the mid-1990s when they restructured Journey Into Imagination’s queue to steer people toward Honey, I Shrunk The Audience, thus creating an artificial drop in attendance for the ride-through attraction and providing a pretext for its eventual Eric Idle-themed ruination. I have no inside information, but my Spidey-sense tells me that’s what’s going on here.

To be fair, Disney parks management has made some good decisions lately. For example, nixing the Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty meet-and-greet that was planned for the Fantasyland expansion and putting the more expensive Seven Dwarves Mine Train coaster there instead. However, this latest fiasco serves to remind us that, for all its bleating about magic and dreams and wishing on stars, the executives at the Walt Disney Company are no different than the executives at any other mega-corporation. Like it or not, success is measured by numbers on a spreadsheet.

And, like the Accounting Fairy said in the movie Reverse Pinocchio, where a real boy grows up to become a wooden puppet, “When you wish upon a spreadsheet, a few angry customers are no big deal.”

Saddle Up For The Soarin’ Stampede!

I’ve mentioned this before, but I really admire the people on the Walt Disney World Mom’s Panel. No doubt you do, too, if you’ve ever spent some time reading the questions they’re asked. But maybe you’ve wondered, what if those questions were answered by someone without superhuman reserves of cheerfulness and patience? Someone less like Mr. Rogers and more like Dr. House? What if they were answered . . . by a WEDHead?

Well, wonder no longer! Here are the latest batch of real-ish questions and answers from the WEDHead’s Panel!

Q: How much does it cost to swim with the sharks at The Seas With Nemo? –C. Snozzwanger, Boise, ID

A: Trust me, swimming in the shark tank costs more than you can afford. But if you walk up to me and call Spaceship Earth a "giant golf ball", I'll throw you in there for free!

Q: I did the Leave A Legacy Program back in 2000. Is there any way to view my picture online without visiting the park? –L. Hornswoggler, Baltimore, MD

A: If I understand your question correctly, you're asking if there's any way to view a low-quality black-and-white picture of yourself on the Internet. And the answer is no. You have to go to Epcot and purchase a full-price admission for everyone in your party. It costs an extra $100 to look at your Leave A Legacy tile, but if you can find me I’ll let you see it for only $75.

Q: Is it possible to see Illuminations from the Garden Grill Restaurant? –P. Whangdoodle, Ames, IA

A: Sure! All you need is a very long telescope and a drill to bore a hole in the wall of the Land pavilion. You'll get a great view of Illuminations before you're apprehended by Security!

Q: My family has an 8:30 breakfast reservation at the Crystal Palace, but the Magic Kingdom doesn't open until 9:00. How will we be able to get in? V. Knid, Jacksonville, FL

A: Your best bet is to camp out on Tom Sawyer Island the night before, then swim to shore in the morning and walk to the Crystal Palace. With any luck, only a few of you will drown or be eaten by alligators.

Q: I'm excited about seeing Captain EO! What's the best place in the theater to sit? -J. Nelson, Kansas City, MO

A: Front row, next to Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot.

Q: In your opinion, what is the most popular thing at Epcot? -V. Salt, Hahira, GA

A: Without a doubt it's the Soarin' Stampede. What's the Soarin Stampede? I'm glad you asked! The Soarin' Stampede is the mad rush to The Land pavilion that occurs right after rope drop. Actions that would be considered extremely rude at best or felony assault at worst are perfectly acceptable during the Soarin' Stampede! Trample the elderly! Trip children! Anything goes in the race for a Soarin' FastPass! Soarin' Fastpasses are worth more than gold and have the power to raise the dead! I mean, why else would people make such idiots of themselves just to get hold of a slip of cardboard that grants them the right to wait in a forty-five minute line five hours from now, when they could just hop in the Standby line right away and wait for only fifteen minutes?

Q: Umm, were you being sarcastic just now?

A: I honestly don't know.

Well, that’s all for today’s WEDHead’s Panel! Tune in next time when the WEDHead’s Panel will answer such well-formulated questions as “Are Mickey in the epcot ball?”