After-Action Report: The Frontier Re-Opens!

“...a sound broke out over the gently rippling water. In fact it was a sound that they had heard several times since entering Frontierland without thinking anything of it…because never during fifty years of their experience, except for comparatively brief stretches involving maintenance, had Frontierland been without it. It was almost background noise, a sound they took for granted. Its absence would have been a deafening clamor.

It was the low, mellow blast of the steam whistle on a paddlewheel-driven riverboat.”

– Crowns of the Kingdom Chapter 6, “Weirdness in the Wild West”

It may be the height of arrogance to quote one's own writing, but while planning this post and trying to come up with the best way to explain what it has been like to be without the Mark Twain—and the Columbia and the Disneyland Railroad and the rest—since January of 2016, I realized that...I already had. Their absence has been a deafening clamor. Disneyland isn't quite itself without these 100% classic attractions...particularly the steamboat and steam train, Opening Day originals.

It's been especially disconcerting because we've known the whole time that when they re-opened, these rides would be drastically—and permanently—altered. New construction around the edges of the park has affected the Disneyland Railroad before, of course, but never quite on this scale. We've been hearing a lot about how the train now turns left for the first! time! ever! as if that were something genuinely exciting. Me? I wasn't sure anything could make up for the fact that Tom Sawyer Island and the Rivers of America themselves have been truncated in order to free up land for Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge.

So now that I've seen it all...how is it? So glad you asked...

The New Rivers of America

For being noticeably shorter, the Rivers have not fared badly at all. The most important landmarks—the cabin, Plains Indian village, etc.—are all still there, if moved and rearranged in some (most?) cases. The new landscaping/rockwork is absolutely gorgeous, and the Rivers of America designation is finally properly earned, with sections explicitly modeled after the Columbia River (columnar basalt), Missouri River (tan sandstone), and Rio Grande del Norte (redder sandstone decorated with native art).* I have no complaints about any of it.

There's even some added humor to the panorama, in the form of the animatronic figure that park fans pretty much instantly dubbed Murder Beaver:

Why the dramatic name? Because those beams it's gnawing through are supports for one of the railroad bridges! Fortunately, this is Disneyland, not Universal Studios, so it doesn't affect the train trip itself. In fact, none of the ride narrations even call attention to Murder Beaver, leaving you to notice the scene and realize its significance on your own. Not that this is at all difficult, but still. It bodes well that Imagineering gives us that much credit. They haven't, in recent years.

Nor is the watercourse itself the only site of pleasant changes. A walkway has been added between the river and the Hungry Bear Restaurant, extending past the eatery along the bank for a few dozen yards before cutting left under the railroad tracks and ending at a Cast Members Only gate. A bit anti-climactic, sure, but we've been sorely needing some new quiet spaces since Big Thunder Ranch and so many others have been removed. This little stretch of footpath is a fantastic spot to watch the river traffic and I can see it becoming the new “hot tip” that people share on vacation message boards.

Mere words are insufficient to describe the delight of the new journey, so here's a video:

The New Disneyland Railroad

The railroad is also in very good shape. The much-touted left turn is...honestly not really noticeable while you're riding. It's a gentle curve, and if you're doing things right you'll be much too engrossed in the new scenery to pay heed to the motion of the train itself. Some of said scenery has already been addressed above—the railroad and Rivers of America are more integrated with each other than they have been at any point at least since the 1950s, and possibly ever. Murder Beaver is a perfect case in point: attacking the railroad, but best viewed from the river. The native shaman has been moved to an elevated position on a rock formation, and the train passes right next to him. And that's about the point where the railroad diverges from the river and into its own private wilderness retreat...its own “Nature's Wonderland,” if you will.

We fans had long speculated that the renovations to the railroad would include some restoration of Nature's Wonderland, based on a poster that appeared on the construction walls, and later on the emerging shape of the new rockwork, which reminded people of the old Balancing Rock Canyon. In the finished product, there are no corny wobbling boulders or cacti with faces, which is probably for the best. What we get are figures of wild animals, from a growling puma crouched beside the track** to a family of red foxes in a hollow log, recorded bird calls, and of course an extended area of quiet, peaceful wilderness. At points it overlooks the new Big Thunder Trail, which has been open for a few months now and is itself well worth seeing. The whole thing should become even lovelier as the young trees and shrubs grow in.

Sadly, the one feature many of us were really hoping for—a tunnel with a “Rainbow Caverns” scene—has not materialized. This shouldn't be considered a detriment in itself, and in any case there's always the chance that they will add one when the Railroad inevitably gets remodeled again for the opening of Galaxy's Edge.***

But that's not all! In a turn that shouldn't be surprising but currently kind of is, the Powers That Be decided that as long as the Disneyland Railroad was going to be down anyway, they would also enhance parts of it that weren't being re-routed. In the Adventureland leg of the trip, the black leopard (jaguar?) has returned to its rock—and instead of a moth-eaten shaggy critter, it's now a nice solid sculpture with a paint job that accurately reflects the appearance of melanistic big cats. That, however, pales in comparison to what's been done with the Grand Canyon and Primeval World dioramas.

With as often as certain fans complain about the dioramas being “outdated” and “out of theme” (for the Disneyland Railroad? The one attraction that touches all the lands?) and the undisputable fact that yeah, the taxidermied animals and animatronics are showing their age...many of us were afraid the long downtime of the railroad would be used as an excuse to modify the dioramas beyond recognizability or worse, scrap them altogether. Instead, much to our collective delight, they've been cleaned up, maintained, restored...and even plussed!

New projection effects in both dioramas enliven the backgrounds with flying creatures, atmospheric effects, and even an erupting cinder cone behind the battling dinosaurs—a clear case of this technology being used for good instead of evil. The Grand Canyon's brief thunderstorm now includes a foreground lightning strike to a tree stump. The Coal Age forest has been given a new paint job with blacklight-reactive accents, enhancing its eerie alienness. The dinos seem to be more active than I remember them being in years, indicating that their internal armatures have probably all been subjected to long-needed intensive maintenance. At a time when it seems like every month brings a new announcement of IP saturation at the expense of well-made attractions that have succeeded for decades, it's both refreshing and heartwarming to see such attention given to the dioramas.

Is it video time? It is.

All right, now for the bad news...

The New Fantasmic!

I do not like most of what has been done to Fantasmic! Odds were against my approving of any major changes from the start, since the original version was about as close to perfect as you can get when some of your special effects are finicky. But it needn't have been this bad. It's really a shame. What debuted in 1992 was a seamlessly integrated crossover telling a simple but epic story in three acts, with great music and eye-popping practical effects. The decision-makers have “rewarded” it for its 25 years of longevity by chopping it into pieces, saving some of them, and replacing the others with trendier (and, one might be led to conclude, less expensive) but inevitably less seamless substitutes.

Some relatively minor issues plague the entire production. Many scenes have collages of imagery liberally slathered over the entire stage via mapped projections, which I found not only unnecessary but actively distracting, making it hard to tell where the visual focus was meant to be at any given time. This issue is compounded by a reduction in the use of live performers and practical effects, leaving the projection mapping, traditional water screens, and a new screen hoisted over the Cider Mill, to all compete with each other much of the time.

Other issues are more momentary but also more serious. The plot of the original Fantasmic! was gorgeous in its simplicity: 1) Mickey Mouse dreams and undertakes wild flights of imagination; 2) Mickey's imagination runs away with him, and the moment of weakness allows the Disney Villains to stage a psychic invasion; 3) Mickey regains control of the dream, ousts the Villains, and brings the whole thing to a triumphant finale. In the new version, this plot is largely retained, but someone apparently decided it wasn't quite enough and now Mickey has a character arc. He appears in his Sorcerer's Apprentice costume much earlier in the proceedings so we can have the thing where he's tempted by the promise of magical power and that, not imaginative overactivity, is what lets the Villains sink their hooks in.

This bugs me. I don't know if I can even articulate all the reasons why, but one of them is something that never occurred to me before. I had to see it done wrong in order to understand what the original version did right. Originally, the Sorcerer's Apprentice costumed Mickey was part of the grand finale. We had the Fantasia footage on the water screens earlier, but that was understood as another layer of the dream sequence, just as it is a dream sequence in the film. When Mickey appeared live atop the Cider Mill near the end of the show, then, conducting an array of lasers...he wasn't actually the Sorcerer's Apprentice. It was meant to indicate that he had mastered his abilities and was in fact a Sorcerer in his own right. (At least within the context of the dream.)

I'm sure the actual reason for this change is so that the actual show better mirrors the promotional material, which all depicts Sorcerer Mickey facing off with Maleficent the dragon, and the plot rewrites were made in service to that motivation. That doesn't change the fact that it rather undercuts the impact of the finale. Mickey's sudden appearance in his Sorcerer garb is no big deal when he's been popping up like that throughout the show.

Other changes in the use of characters are even more damaging to the show's integrity. In the Princess Medley, Snow White has been swapped for Rapunzel. I don't doubt that Rapunzel is a much bigger deal than Snow White these days, but it's not as if Snow White was especially hot in 1992. She was included in the show back then because it made the sudden appearance of the Evil Queen—always regarded as the de facto leader of the Villains and therefore the obvious one to lead the charge—seem natural. There's no logical connection now between the Princess segment and the introduction of the Villains, which is a loss.

A lot of the substitutions are niggling little things like that. The old Jungle Book sequence started relatively low-key and gradually got louder and more intense until the only thing left to do was explode into Dumbo's Pink Elephants. Now it's been mashed up with The Lion King, starting with the bombastic opening vocals of “The Circle of Life” and remaning fairly manic throughout. Instead of the Pinocchio sequence with live puppeteers manipulating huge marionette figures,**** the Genie appears on water screens and spews animation all over the stage. Jiminy Cricket has to share his underwater time with Atlantica and a school of migrating stingrays from Finding Dory—why? Because in the current thinking, more movie clips is better?

And then there's...Pirates of the Caribbean. Of all the changes to the show, the decision to replace Peter Pan and Wendy with Jack Sparrow and...some girl?...has garnered the most criticism, even from people who otherwise like what's been done. There are so many reasons why this was a bad decision on the face of it. I'm not going to go into those, but I am going to point out how the execution is also bad.

Who are these people? Jack Sparrow is obvious, but who's the girl—it doesn't seem to be Elizabeth or any other established character from the film franchise—and who are the undead pirates this time? Yes, this is the sort of thing Jack gets up to in the movies, but lacking any sort of details, the sequence has an unsatisfying “lowest common denominator” feel to it.

What's going on? In the Peter Pan sequence, you could always pick out the principals easily by dint of their brilliantly hued costumes compared to the extras. When we saw the new version, I spotted the girl right away, but had to be told afterward that Jack had been high in the rigging the entire time. I never noticed him. Nothing drew my attention to his position. There is no identifiable antagonist getting in the way of Jack and the girl, they just seem to have trouble coordinating because...reasons? The extras are waving their swords at nothing.

Why is it all so lackluster? I get the impression with the entire show that the budget for live performers has been deeply slashed. Not only are there fewer of them, but fewer specialized performing skills are on display. Here, the pirate stuntwork seems to be down to a minimum, robbing the scene of much of its reason for existing.

Taken all together, do these changes ruin the show for me? That's hard to say—I didn't have the best seat for viewing, and apparently a number of the effects weren't working properly. I'll need to try again, hopefully with better luck, before I submit my final judgment. The biggest disappointment might be that they felt the need to change the show at all. Updating effects and technology? Sure. That's been done before and the spectacle was almost always the better for it. But like I said at the start of this section, Fantasmic! began as a nigh-perfect thing. Toying with its themes in order to satisfy some concept of “contemporary relevance” was bound to degrade it somewhat.

We'll see how it goes, won't we?

* This bit has actually been there for several years, but it's now being called out in so many words.

** If you're in one of the typical side-facing cars, it will be behind you—good for a mild jump-scare when you hear the growl!

*** I can't be the only person who thinks of cell phones every time I hear this name, can I?

**** Oh, you didn't know that's what was going on with that? Yep.