After Action Report: Tropical Hideaway

Subtitle: In Which I Review A Restaurant For A Bit And Then Go Off About The SEA

I know you’ve been on tenterhooks waiting for this one: my in-depth review of the latest iteration of the big Adventureland eatery, the Tropical Hideaway! I’d previously meandered around the seating area and looked at stuff, but only on my most recent trip to the park did I finally take some time to enjoy the Hideaway in full.

I’ll start by saying…it’s not very well named. The phrase “tropical hideaway” is of course drawn from the lyrics of “(In the) Tiki Tiki Tiki Room,” but there’s nothing hidden about this place—it’s open to view from the main walkway in a way that its immediate predecessor, Aladdin’s Oasis, was not. This isn’t really a complaint, just an ironic observation.

Despite being so very public, it's a nice little place to hang out for a while. It has a unique music loop, featuring mid-century exotica by the likes of Les Baxter and Augie Colon, and the food is garnering high praise from just about everyone who tries it. There are two snack counters in the Tropical Hideaway. The more obvious one, with a big ostentatious sign, is Dole Whip, I Presume. The name alone is a stroke of genius—it references the original Adventureland snack stand, Sunkist, I Presume (which became the Bengal Barbecue in the late Eighties), right down to the curly cursive font in which “I Presume” is written:

But the thing is, you don't have to be aware of that reference to get the name, because it's all a riff on the famous “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” incident. This is a theme park reference done right. (We'll see about some done wrong in a little while.)

Beyond that, a second Dole Whip counter is in itself justification for the entire Tropical Hideaway, because have you tried buying one lately? No snack, even an iconic one, should have a longer wait time than the attraction its service stand is nested with. Not only that, but Dole Whip, I Presume does the Tiki Juice Bar one better by offering orange and raspberry flavors alongside the traditional pineapple. I haven't tried them yet, but I'm bound to sooner or later!

The other counter has no name, and seems like its menu is intended to change over time, which, awesome! For now, it offers sweet lumpia and several varieties of bao dumplings. I only tried one, the kaffir lime chicken, and I am no expert on bao, but I did enjoy it.

A selection of chips, drinks, and other packaged snacks rounds out the menu. You could probably spend the entire day here, buying something every time you get peckish, and never eat the same thing twice.

On the whole, I have to call it a resounding success. As I hoped it might, it really ties Adventureland together. The name and most of the design influences come from the Enchanted Tiki Room, it overlooks the Jungle Cruise river and a display of oars on one wall suggests a further connection (but more about that later), and it even retains vestiges of Aladdin’s Oasis in the form of a Magic Carpet mosaic at the entrance and a nook full of Persian rugs and lamps:

Really, though, it functions as an adjunct to the Enchanted Tiki Room. All ten named birds from the show have roosts in the upper reaches of the area. This is the only good photo I could find of any of them, which is frustrating:

Josephine's perch is cropped out of this image, but I promise it's there.

Michael, Fritz, and Pierre have theirs off to the side, with their national flags rendered as Polynesian-styled paintings. I can't figure out whether that's cringey or not, but at least it clears up what nationality Fritz actually is. I wondered about that for years—he’s obviously Germanic, but his plumage had me wondering whether he might be specifically Austrian rather than German.* But the Schwartz-Rot-Gold over his perch suggests that he is German after all, so...mystery solved?

Jose's roost is completely separate, and isn't even labeled. For this reason, we spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to locate it on our earlier visit, and I wouldn't dream of robbing my readers of the joy of discovery, so I won't spoil the secret.

And then there's Rosita, by any measure the star of the Tropical Hideaway. She sits on a perch beside the river, surrounded by her worldly possessions, and periodically tells jokes—dreadful puns of the type that seven-year-olds repeat ad nauseam after reading them in Highlights for Children.** As I am no longer seven years old, her style of humor really doesn't work for me. I like puns just fine—otherwise I wouldn't like the Jungle Cruise as much as I do—but I like them to be a little cleverer than that. I think the implication here is that Rosita aspires to be a Jungle Cruise skipper, but I feel like the execution could have been a lot slicker. What if they gave her a sensor that could detect the approach of a boat, and then she swiveled her perch around to heckle the skippers (who would of course be encouraged to retort)?

I'm also not crazy about her voice. It's too...sweet. I would like a bit more rasp, to drive home the point that she is a cockatoo, not a human.

Rosita isn't bad as such, even if she's not for me, but there's something a little disconcerting to me about the fact that they included her at all. The character is inspired by a total throwaway line from the Enchanted Tiki Room. At least, I never figured that it meant anything—it was just a joke that failed to land, or maybe made sense in the Sixties but over time the context has been lost—but apparently a lot of people over the years have been madly speculating about whatever did happen to Rosita, and then some of them became Imagineers in a position to answer that question definitively. And that is one more data point in a larger trend about the way our culture consumes and interprets media. There seems to be this conviction among audiences (and creators who used to be audiences) that nothing in any work of media is incidental or accidental, but every single word and image means something concrete, in-universe, and it's our job as audiences to figure it out, or else compulsively complain when it's not explained in detail.

Disney fans seem especially prone to this kind of thinking, what with the animators constantly sneaking Easter eggs of characters from one movie into another, and people will twist themselves into knots trying to establish an inter-film continuity that allows it. The fans of the parks waxing giddy over Rosita appear to be so excited not because she's a character original to Disneyland, enhancing the park's ability to present stories and worlds of its own, but because Jose has been offhandedly*** mentioning “Rosita” for 55 years, therefore “Rosita” was an unseen character, and now she has finally (finally!) been revealed to us! As if it were the culmination of a decades-long MCU arc.

If it seems like I'm making too big a deal out of this, I'm really not. As examples of this phenomenon go, Rosita is not too egregious. However, there is a much worse example just a few feet away from her.

It's time to talk about the oars.

So there are a dozen oars of slightly varying sizes and shapes hanging on the wall, and they all have little brass plaques on them with the name of a person, the name of a river, and a date. So far, so good, you can get the idea that each oar was used on a significant river voyage by the person in question, and for humor value, some of them even bear evidence of the hazards the intrepid adventurer faced. (My favorite is the alligator skull still chomping on the paddle edge.)

People familiar with the “lore” of the Disney parks will notice several familiar names on those plaques. H. Hightower? H. Mystic? M.A. Pleasure? Why, it's the Society of Explorers and Adventurers! And that, for some reason, gets people...excited?

I realize that I'm in the minority opinion here, but I think the SEA is kind of...dumb. Not that there's anything wrong with the idea of a club for adventuresome globetrotters, each with their own exploits—it could potentially be a hell of a fun book series, or movie franchise. But theme parks are a very bad medium for that sort of long-term continuity. You can't tell a story via a ride with the same level of depth and detail that you could via a book or a movie, and the vast majority of parkgoers don't expect you to and aren't prepared to notice what detail is there. So we're left with the most superficial of connections: “The dudes who owned these places and/or caused the calamities which we guests now have to survive, all knew each other!” To which all I can say is...so what? We don't know anything about these people apart from what we can glean from the rides, and we're supposed to be impressed that someone else in another ride has the same secret decoder ring? It doesn't make Mystic Manor any more fun to know that the dude with the monkey is acquainted with the dude from Pleasure Island. Nor should it, because how many people are going to be able to visit both Hong Kong Disneyland and Walt Disney World and care enough about the convoluted backstory to appreciate that sort of thing? It winds up being just a bunch of Imagineer wankery, born from the same impulse that drives people to concoct the Pixar Theory.

To make matters worse, SEA backstories have been retroactively applied to older attractions built in an era long before anyone got the idea of inter-attraction continuity. Retrofitting a ride's theme or story is always a dodgy pursuit; doing it in the service of this dubious high-concept is just eye-rollingly unnecessary. Now the disaster of Big Thunder Mountain, which always spoke for itself, is “explained” as being the fault of Barnabas T. Bullion, and the Jungle Cruise is associated with one...wait for it...Dr. Albert Falls.

I'm sorry. Turning “Dr. Albert Falls” into a character is worse than Rosita. The worst thing you can say about Rosita in this regard is that she's a character inspired by a random comment—at most a joke that doesn't land—in an animatronic show next door. “Dr. Albert Falls” is taking a joke that most definitely does land...and retconning it not to be a joke. There are fewer jokes in the world since whoever is in charge of this sprawling mess decided that Dr. Albert Falls should be an SEA member. That's a terrible thing to do, and a perfect example of why I won't be warming up to the SEA any time soon.

I didn't intend, when I started writing this post, to spend nearly 600 words griping about the Society of Explorers and Adventurers. I especially don't want to give the impression that the display of their paddles in any way “ruins” the Tropical Hideaway, because it doesn't. The Tropical Hideaway is great, with or without the SEA, and with or without Rosita, for that matter. But there are a few things I wish had been included with the area:

• A spot for Adventureland-themed character meetups.
• A small stage for live performers (which could double as the character spot)
• Specialty merchandise kiosks, to really drive home the “traders' market” concept. There are a couple souvenirs you can buy there, but nothing like what I was envisioning.

There's still a possibility that they'll roll some of this out over time. The nook with the rugs and lamps makes a great backdrop for photos, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Genie starts showing up there. It's also easily large enough for a merch cart or maybe a small troupe of musicians. But whether that happens or not, the Tropical Hideaway has been sorely needed for a long time, and I'm glad it's finally here.

* Pierre’s feathers echo the colors of the French Tricolore, and Michael’s are within spitting distance of the Irish flag, so this wasn’t me looking to complicate things for no reason.

** Not that I would have any personal recollection of being such a seven-year-old. Ahem.

*** Offwingedly?