After-Action Report: The Fantasyland Dark Rides

Wow, how long has it been since I did an After-Action Report post? According to my records, it's been...oh. About three months. It seems longer. You know, when I first began this blog, right after the Bronze Age Collapse, I assumed the bulk of it would be me yammering on about existing attractions and other features, what I like and don't like about them and so forth. Funny, that.

This one has been a long time coming, I think. For some reason, theme park bloggers don't talk much about the Fantasyland dark rides as much as we probably should, considering they are in many ways the bread and butter of Disneyland's branding. The quintessential Disney theme park ride is one based on an animated movie, and these are the classic examples. Even I usually just bring them up in passing rather than applying any sort of analysis; on the rare occasions when I do devote an entire post to just one of them, it tends to be a shorter-than-usual example of its type. These rides just are not big enough to spark many deep and rambling thoughts.

And that's fine. They're bite-sized morsels of delight. So for this post, I'm not going to exhaustively list their individual features or even do much comparing and contrasting between them. I'm just going to highlight a few unique points of each—believe it or not, although they justifiably vary quite a bit in popularity, each of the five Fantasyland dark rides can claim to be the best at something.

Unauthorized Fun: The Stormy Weather Tour

So it's been raining, here in sunny Southern California, and we're all a little confused. It kinda makes me envy those Annual Passholders who are in college or whatever and can just jet down to the park whenevs, because Disneyland is lovely in the rain. It's cool, much of the crowd dissipates, and it's especially nice after dark, with all the lights reflecting in the wet pavement.

But if you think about it...every day at Disneyland is a stormy one, at least if you use your imagination. A surprisingly high number of attractions use storm imagery to set the mood, drive the plot, and/or shake things up. Howling winds, torrential rains, thunderbolts—all these can be found in abundance throughout the park, in the form of special and practical effects. With a little creative planning, you could spin a little “meta-story” out of some of them.

And creativity is, after all, what my Unauthorized Fun category is all about!

It does not need to be literally raining for you to take advantage of this unofficial tour; in fact, you'll have more control over the beats of the “story” if there's no real weather to contend with. On the other hand, a little real rain wont hurt you either. It's just for fun, after all.

Let's start the tour!

The 5 Scariest Disneyland Resort Attractions (That Aren't the Haunted Mansion)

There is a school of thought, concerning theme park attractions, that says: Scarier = Better. (It often overlaps with the related Faster = Better school.) Naturally, it comes to the fore during the fall season, when temporary Halloween attractions pop up everywhere and try their best to scare the pants off everyone who pays good money to experience them, and occasionally succeed.

Disney theme parks don't usually fare too well on the Scarier = Better scale. WDI tends to take a middle-of-the-road approach with attraction content, avoiding both the too-saccharine and the too-horrific. Exceptions, especially on the too-horrific end of the scale, come across as “not Disney enough” and may not last as long as they probably would in someone else's park. It's something of a pity—it would be nice if the world's finest attraction builders got to stretch themselves a little more, instead of having to stick within the bounds of a PG/soft PG-13 rating.

Regardless, Disney rides are not scary. At least, they don't have a reputation for being scary. Depending on the guest, they can be quite scary indeed...not always on purpose! The Haunted Mansion is the obvious example of a Disney attraction that is considered at least mildly spooky—so obvious that for this post, I decided it would be more fruitful to set it aside and talk about others instead.*

So here are—in my estimation—the five scariest non-Haunted Mansion Disneyland Resort attractions!

(Disclaimer: None of them actually scare me, nor ever have. Even when I was little, I think I had too firm a grasp of reality to be actually frightened by Disneyland. I knew it was all pretend and couldn't really hurt me.)

It Came From the Fandom: That's From Disneyland!

The Disneyland-related benefits of living in Los Angeles do not stop with proximity to the resort itself. Because the park has remained primarily of interest to locals (as opposed to tourists like its Orlando counterpart), the hardcore fan community is pretty centralized to Southern California. As well, this city being a major hub—maybe the major hub—for the entertainment industry as a whole means that, to put it delicately, there are quite a few stinking rich people in this area. And that all means that, on those rare occasions when Disneyland just up and gets rid of something, it tends to end up in the possession of someone who lives nearby...and in the fullness of time, many of these things come back to the fan community in some way.

One of those ways is by being loaned for display to the Van Eaton Galleries, an art distributor and auction house headquartered in Sherman Oaks, CA, perhaps a 45-minute drive from Disneyland...and about five miles away from the residence of Yours Truly. I manage to drop in whenever they have a Disneyland memorabilia collection on the premises. The subsequent auctions are invariably too rich for my blood, but they let you take as many photos in the meantime as you like.

For the most recent exhibit, still (barely) ongoing, they've ramped things up. This time, the feature is the collection of Disneyland megafan Richard Kraft, including everything from concept art to decommissioned ride vehicles, and there weren't no way that was going to fit into their regular exhibition rooms or even the overflow space next door. So they've leased a two-story retail location* for a full-on, museum-style pop-up exhibit and gift shop, freely open to the public. The name of the exhibit? That's From Disneyland!

That name says it all, doesn't it? They certainly know who their audience is—people who know Disneyland's iconography by sight and need no other reason to love it.

What? Of course I've been there. What kind of question is that? Here are just a few of the nice photos I got...

After-Action Report: A Tale of Two Dark Rides

Much to the delight of little girls (and often the chagrin of their parents), Disneyland features what might charitably be called a lot of Princess content. There’s the Castle, of course, with its walkthrough attraction. Several shops focus exclusively on Princess merchandise from dolls to costumes to stationery sets, the Princess movies are favorites for abridging into stage shows, every parade has a Princess unit, and the Princess character meet-and-greets eventually got so popular that an entire sub-district of Fantasyland was built around them.

But you know what the Disney Princesses don’t get very many of? Actual rides. And this is true not just of the Disneyland Resort but of Disney theme parks as a whole. Seriously, how many rides centered on a Princess character can you think of? Like, three, right?

This may be because for all their popularity and grandeur, the Princess movies are not ideal for conversion into rides. Remember the cardinal rule of good attraction design: Put the Guests in the Center of the Action. Most of Disney's Princess films actually don't have a lot of action per se, focusing more on an internal journey (falling in love, discovering self-worth, etc.) than an external one. Show someone a movie, letting them spend upwards of an hour getting to know the main character, and you can usually get them to go along with an internal journey. But a theme park ride rarely affords its participants more than about ten minutes to absorb its content—nowhere near enough time to develop a sympathetic bond with a character, even if they weren't distracted by the physical presence of it all.

Nowhere is this clearer than in comparing the two Princess rides that can be found in the Disneyland Resort. One the one hand, we have Snow White's Scary Adventures, the classic that does it all right, bizarre points and all. On the other, we have The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel's Undersea Adventure,* the newcomer that falls flat in so many ways.

Source Materials: A Few Excellent Moves by the Horticulture Department

Source Materials is my new label for posts about things from outside Disney theme parks that influence decisions about what to include inside the parks. For instance, I have retroactively re-classified my two-part post about heraldry in Fantasyland as a Source Materials post. There probably won't be too many of these; most of the stuff that would qualify has been gone over, extensively and in more depth than I think I would muster, by other bloggers. (Check out the sidebar for some of them!)

It's June now. What can I write about that goes well with June?

Gardening? Did I hear gardening? Gardening it is. It turns out to be a fertile* subject where Disneyland is concerned. The park's Horticulture Department is quite the unsung hero, producing magnificent work pretty much across the board, from the obvious:

to the subtle:

People certainly notice the lovely trees and garden beds throughout Disneyland, but only rarely is attention deliberately drawn toward them. It's even rarer that the specific choices made by the Horticulture Department get any focus, even though they're often brilliantly on-the-nose. Magnolia trees in New Orleans Square and edelweiss around the base of the Matterhorn are just the tip of the iceberg (lettuce).** In many cases, the appropriateness is more than just geographic.

Here are a few of my favorites.