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.

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.)

After-Action Report: New Christmas Decs!

Short post this time—I've been a bit sick and the holiday tasks are piling up as it is! But I did manage to fit in a visit to the main park recently, and I took a few pictures of some lovely decorations that have been added this year.

I'll begin in Frontierland, which has been putting up Christmas decorations for quite some time (as described in this post). But these ones are new, and have a lot of character. It's not just the ornaments that are unique to each—the evergreen bases to which they are attached vary from post to post, as if each was assembled from scratch by a different person who used whatever they had on hand or could easily find. The highlight has to be the single boot, which is a perfect Old West stand-in for a Christmas stocking:

From there, we move to Fantasyland, where...I don't want to alarm anyone, but they have finally started putting up decorations in the Fantasyland Courtyard. I speculated in the post linked above about what that might hypothetically look like, but the reality turned out to be far more restrained than what I was imagining. You could put these up in your house without anyone batting an eye:

Yes, those are apples on the decoration for Snow White.

It almost feels like a beta test, like maybe they plan on expanding these in years to come. They are a little sparse for the medieval castle environment, I think.

Around this time most years, I put the blog on a little year-end hiatus so I can focus on my holiday obligations and brainstorm ideas for the new year. But I'm finding myself in a bit of a quandary this time around...I think I'm running out of topics to write about! I am coming to the end of my fourth straight year of Disneyland blogging, having maintained a pretty faithful weekly schedule for most of that time. Even a lifelong just-short-of-obsessed fan like me has to run dry eventually, right?

There are a few things I don't want to do. I don't want to start spacing the posts out more, for fear my eternally busy schedule squeezes out my motivation to maintain the blog altogether. And I don't want to let it devolve into more of this—just collections of recent photos detailing minutiae like crowd levels, construction progress, and maintenance hiccups. I want to keep this a thoughtful blog.

I might not be averse to expanding my subject matter. Reviewing other theme parks is probably off the table for now for financial reasons, but I occasionally touch on the subject of Disney movies, and perhaps I could go into more detail on my thoughts in that area.

Ideally, though, I would keep my focus on the Disneyland Resort. So I put it to you...what would you like to see me write about that I haven't yet? Any attractions, past or present, you'd like to see my take on? Principles of theme park design I should address? General questions I should answer?

I'll give you the next...oh, three weeks or so, to think about it. Until then, Happy Holidays to my few but loyal readers, and keep dreaming!

After-Action Report: 5 Cool Custom Gifts You Can Get At Disneyland

We can start thinking about Christmas shopping now, right?

Once upon a time, strange as it may seem, Disneyland was considered a prime shopping destination. The park was chock-a-block with unique shops selling lines of merchandise that could be found literally nowhere else. There was a candle shop on Main Street, an antique shop in New Orleans Square, and the Guatemalan Weavers operated out of the Adventureland Bazaar. This all changed in the Nineties, when Archdemon Pressler decided it would be more efficient to just stuff the park with the same stuff being sold in every large mall in the country via the Disney Store. But even the machinations of a suit-wearing hellfiend couldn't completely eliminate the park's uniqueness, and to this day, there are quite a few distinctive, customizable, and surprisingly affordable items available at Disneyland's specialty shops and kiosks.

Here are just five that would make awesome holiday gifts for the special people in your life.

After-Action Report: GotG—Monsters After Dark

They should not have closed the Tower of Terror. I still hold that opinion. That ride was...basically perfect for its circumstances. It fit in exactly with Hollywood Land, it did an extraordinary job of building up atmosphere, it made guests the center of the story (“...in tonight's episode you are the star...”) and the effects were pretty dang...effective.

Guardians of the Galaxy—Mission: Breakout! is a distinctly inferior replacement. I have no animus against the GotG franchise itself—on the contrary, the movies are delightful and the second-worst thing about the firing of James Gunn is the wrench it throws into the production cycle of the third one*—but it's not the sort of thing that begs to be a theme park ride, and certainly not this theme park ride. It's awkwardly crammed into infrastructure that was designed for something completely different, it jettisons the Tower's beautiful melding of physical sets with digital effects in favor of a collection of movie screens, instead of making the guests the protagonists it makes them side characters in someone else's adventure, it has an unwieldy, overly wordy name, and the building is an eyesore.

Someone signed paperwork approving this design. Wrap your mind around that.

(Some people have the audacity to claim that this is an improvement on Tower of Terror. To them I say: On what grounds? Seriously, what does it do better? Also, aren't you the same people who were telling us we shouldn't be upset that it was being changed because it was still going to be a drop ride? Do you see the contradiction there?)

All that said, there is something at least moderately interesting about the ride's Halloween overlay, Guardians of the Galaxy—Monsters After Dark, and that's that it is framed as a direct sequel to Mission: Breakout! I don't think that's ever been done with Disney theme park attractions before—Star Tours: The Adventures Continue is framed as a prequel to the original Star Tours, what with the older Starspeeder model and glitchy prototype of Rex in the queue, but there is no sense in which the events of the one lead to the events of the other.**

Mission: Breakout! literally causes Monsters After Dark. The tower's generators get shut off during the former, and in the latter, the loss of power has freed all the dangerous creatures from confinement (hence the title). If nothing else, I appreciate the experiment. A Halloween overlay that only goes into effect at night (with the default version of the attraction operating during the day) is probably the only circumstance under which this conceit could really work, and I imagine it must be pretty cool if you manage to go on both in one day.

This is not to say that similar ideas couldn't work, especially if played subtlely. It could cross the borders of attractions or even lands. Imagine, for instance, if evidence were planted suggesting that the founder of the Jungle Cruise Co. got his startup capital mining gold in Big Thunder Mountain (before the disaster, of course). Obviously this would have to be used sparingly—Imagineering is doing something like this with the Society of Explorers and Adventurers, and the overall consensus from the snooty elitist fans is that it's not nearly as clever as the creators seem to think it is, doesn't really add anything to the attractions it touches, and discourages guest imagination by imposing One True Backstory on everything.

Anyway, back to Monsters After Dark: How is it as a ride? Eh, it's okay, I guess. It has all the same weaknesses (compared to Tower of Terror) as its non-Halloween/daytime counterpart, but some of the details are different. Pro: Since it is framed as a horror story rather than action-adventure, the queue is made creepier and more atmospheric, with reddish lighting and corrupted video transmissions playing on the big screen. Con: Instead of a more traditional eerie Halloween score or even the upbeat pop songs of Mission: Breakout!, our musical accompaniment is abrasive and repetitive heavy metal.***

I'm also not entirely sure it works as a Halloween overlay. Mission: Breakout! is already a ride that drops you at unpredictable intervals while various threatening situations play out on the screens and occasionally are staged to narrowly miss you. I'm not sure there is a way to make that scarier or more thrilling and aside from the unsettling elements in the queue, I am sure Monsters After Dark isn't such. It also doesn't reference Halloween by name, or use any of the holiday's specific imagery such as ghosts or pumpkins. If they decided to make it a year-round thing, it wouldn't exactly be out of place.

And that's about all I have to say on the matter. Should you check out Monsters After Dark, if you find yourself in California Adventure this Halloween season? Sure, why not. Unless you're legitimately afraid of heights/falling, darkness, monsters, fire, or Bradley Cooper.

Have a magnificent spooky holiday, readers mine. Next week...something different!

* The first-worst thing is that it was done at the behest of neo-Nazis. In case you were wondering.

** And that's not even addressing the fact that in aggregate, the events of ST:TAC are a stinking jumbled mess of shredded continuity.

*** I don't personally mind it, and it is composed by Tyler Bates, who also did the scores for both movies, but I imagine it must have fairly niche appeal among the theme park crowd.

After-Action Report: Pin Collecting/Trading

I don't know what it is about the pins. It might be simply that they're cute, affordable, don't take up much space, and come in such a staggering variety that you're bound to find something that appeals to you. Got a favorite character, favorite ride, favorite holiday, favorite sport? There's a pin for that! With new ones released on a weekly basis, not to mention the special editions, mystery boxes, and whatever else they scheme in the smoke-filled rooms of Disney Marketing, there are so many pins. Even if you could afford it, you'd never be able to collect them all.

And I don't know about you, but that's a big relief to me, because it means I am under no obligation to try.

I exaggerate. I wouldn't say I've ever been into pin collecting. If I see one I adore, I will usually get it, but that rarely happens these days. I mostly got it out of my system back in the mid-2000s—you know, around the time of the 50^th Anniversary, possibly the single most rewarding time to be a Disneyland fan in my lifetime—but that was enough for me to build up a reasonably sized collection.

I've never actually traded for a pin. Ever. I have one that I bought on eBay, because it was already out of production by the time I discovered that I really wanted it. Everything else in my stash came from a Disney theme park pin store, sometimes through the intermediary of a friend who gave it as a gift.

So I might not be the most qualified person to talk about this. But did you know there's no licensing process for blogging? Strange but true!

Actually, I'll come clean: this is mostly an excuse to show off my pin collection. Photos and explanations under the break!

Er...fair warning: these are not good photos. They were taken in the decidedly nonprofessional setting of my apartment, using the sub-amateur equipment that is my phone, against the completely ad-hoc backdrop of my coffee table. And I was not always able to wrangle the flash very well.

After-Action Report: So How Is It? (PotC Changes)

So it's happened. Pirates of the Caribbean, the Anaheim original, the bestest theme park ride ever made, has been altered. Forever.

I mean, it's not the first time or anything, but this renovation seems to have gotten people hotter under the collar than earlier ones. The 1997 revamp—the one that changed the post-auction scene so that the pirates were after food rather than...um...romance—garnered a lot of eye-rolling,* but I don't remember much in the way of sackcloth and ashes. Even the addition of all the movie franchise stuff in 2006 didn't have theme park fans tearing their hair out to quite the same extent. Was the original auction scene just that beloved? Did the fact that feminism (boogie boogie!) was involved get people's hackles up?

Regardless, what's done is done. And now that I've seen it, I can share some informed thoughts on the matter.

First, it must be noted that the redesign of the auction scene was not the only big change made to the ride. There were others...but they didn't involve feminism (boogie boogie!) and so attracted much less controversy. (Also one of them was uncontroversial to begin with because it's inarguably a net positive.)

After Action Report: Window Shopping

It’s certainly possible to experience Disneyland without walking down Main Street, USA, but a) it’s non-intuitive, b) it’s not recommended, and c) I hope you like trains. I doubt if one guest in a million even thinks to try it. I think we can safely say that within an acceptable margin of error, everyone who visits the Happiest Place on Earth gets to take a gander at one of its most unique features: the Main Street Emporium window displays.

In principle, the Emporium windows are as straightforward a case of synergy as you can get—scenes from Disney films converted into animated dioramas for cross-promotional purposes. In practice, it’s a rather odd choice—that’s a lot of effort to go to for what amounts to a film trailer. And why the Emporium rather than, I don’t know, a dedicated exhibit space? And why did they keep on doing it? And why do we, the guests, find these miniaturized movie moments so goshdarn compelling?

After-Action Report: Peter Pan's Flight

You know what I don't talk about enough? Peter Pan's Flight. Let's fix that.

Peter Pan's Flight is the most popular of the Fantasyland dark rides by a country mile, with queues that regularly top 45 minutes. Granted, this is partly because of its low capacity for its ride type—the ornate pirate ships only seat two or three where most dark ride vehicles seat four—but let's give the ride's content plenty of credit too. Most people probably assume the secret of this attraction's success is neatly summed up by its title: it's based on Peter Pan, one of the most evergreen films in the Disney Animated Canon, and it lets guests fly.

The impact of that second bit cannot be overstated. There have been other suspended rides in the history of the Disneyland Resort, but none have ever managed to replicate anything like the atmosphere of Peter Pan's Flight, as you whiz through the stars over London and then Neverland. The Skyway, when it was around, lacked any sense of mystique; Soarin' lacks narrative structure and offers only an illusion of forward movement. Peter Pan's Flight is a proper adventure, taking place in what is perhaps the quintessential world of adventure.

But I would argue that there is another key ingredient to the ride's popularity: it is perhaps the single best example of classic dark ride design philosophy in any Disney park. It is about as far from a “book report ride” as you can get without literally presenting an original plot.* Instead of summarizing the events of Peter Pan, it strips the movie down to its emotional core. There in the heart of the film, we find, simply: the thrill of flying and the wonder of removing from our humdrum urban lives to a world of childhood magic. Accordingly, most of the ride is devoted to the airborne journey from London to Neverland, and even that is rendered impressionistic, with forced-perspective models and fiber-optic starfields, rather than being a “faithful” reproduction of the film scene. Everything else about the movie, even the central conflict between the children and Captain Hook, is almost literally an afterthought.

Can you even imagine a ride like this being built nowadays? If they had to invent Peter Pan's Flight from scratch in the current era, it would be called something like Journey to Neverland With Peter Pan**, more emphasis would be placed on all the song sequences, not just “You Can Fly!”, and Peter would be prominent in every scene. It would certainly remind people of the movie, but it would in no way feel like the movie. It almost certainly wouldn't build up 45 minutes' worth of queue at a time, judging by the way guest enthusiasm for the Little Mermaid ride has cooled.

This is why, when Peter Pan's Flight went down for extended refurbishment and gussying-up a few years ago, I was dreading what they'd do to it. I assumed, quite reasonably, that they'd stick in a bunch of imagery taken directly from the movie at the expense of the ride's unique qualities. The first part came to pass, but fortunately with a light enough touch that we were spared the second part. It has changed far less than the Alice dark ride did when it got its own “upgrades.”*** It's still very much the quirky classic it's always been (or at least since 1983).

I can make an observation along these lines: of the five dark rides in Fantasyland, popularity seems to correlate to some extent with adherence to the more traditional principles of dark ride design. As mentioned, Peter Pan's Flight is the most popular. Alice in Wonderland is nearly as abstract and also well-liked. On the other end of the scale, Pinocchio's Daring Journey is of more recent vintage than the others, leans toward the “book report” side of things, and is usually a walk-on. Obviously, there are many other variables to consider, but I think we can safely say that it doesn't hurt a dark ride's reputation to use the impressionistic approach.

So why have the Imagineers largely abandoned said approach? Clearly someone believes that guests want more literal and linear stories in dark rides, but the pattern I have just observed proves, at the very least, that there's more to it than that.

In any case, I'm really glad we still have Peter Pan's Flight as a counter-example to the current line of thinking.

As a final note, here's something I bet you never noticed before. As you turn the last switchback in the queue (before the turnstile), take a look to your left.

* Not that presenting an original plot is necessarily a bad way to go. Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin presents an original plot.

** Punchy attraction names are a dying breed.

*** I'm not convinced most of them are upgrades; can you tell?

After-Action Report: Three Underrated Attractions

A loooooooong time ago, I did say that this blog wasn't just for the big fancy rides that everyone loves, or even the medium-sized fancy rides with Important History that the theme park enthusiasts love. Sometimes, it pays to appreciate the little things: the rides and attractions often overlooked by the general public, or enjoyed as a last resort, to fill some time before a FASTPASS or dinner reservation slot rolls around. This week, I'd like to direct your attention, briefly, toward three such attractions.

After-Action Report: Disabled at Disneyland

Yes, the blog is still on hiatus due to Yours Truly's knee injury, but this topic intimately concerns said injury, so I figured I'd throw you a bone. (All, what, three of you?) I may do this from time to time until I'm properly back in the saddle and can commit to a weekly schedule again. The point is, a torn ACL, etc. is no excuse to cancel previously existing theme park plans, so the other day I got to undergo the Disneyland Wheelchair Experience.

My challenge was in fact twofold: 1) a complete inability to put weight on my left leg, and 2) this big honking immobilizing brace they're having me wear until further notice, additionally preventing me from bending said leg...unless I take it off, which is technically an option, but one I want to avoid as much as possible. I mention this because it serves as a contrast with my previous secondhand glimpses of the Disneyland Wheelchair Experience, with a party member who could walk, just not for hours at a time. No ride or attraction need be off-limits to such an individual. I knew from the outset that my situation was going to be a bit more dire than that.

So how did it work out? Here are some of the highlights. And lowlights.

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...

After-Action Report: The Main Street Electrical Parade

This past Tuesday, it was my very great privilege to experience, for the first time in over 20 years, one of the true classics of Disneyland's live entertainment traditions: the Main Street Electrical Parade!

Yes, I had seen the iteration that appeared for a few summers in California Adventure...but it wasn't right, you know? I'm not talking about the digitally remastered soundtrack, revised floats, or even the fact that they had Tinker Bell in the lead instead of the Blue Fairy. It was that it was supposed to be the Main Street Electrical Parade. The full name was fundamental. Transplanting it to a park without a Main Street couldn't help but cheapen it a little...and that's not even taking into consideration the awkward changes to the recorded introduction.*

Now—for the time being—the Electrical Parade has come home. It's about damn time.

But what is it that makes this parade so beloved? There is no shortage of awesome parades in Disneyland's history, from timeless charmers like the Christmas parades to audaciously hip experiments like Totally Minnie or The World According to Goofy. What is about this one that makes it the darling of veteran parkgoers such as myself? It can't just be that it's the park's most long-lived parade, because it wouldn't have been allowed to run so long if it hadn't been a major hit in the first place. The Main Street Electrical Parade is a Disneyland institution, as much as Space Mountain or “it's a small world” or complaining about how long the lines are. All those years it was absent felt more like a mistake than like normal parade turnover.

Anything lampooned by The Simpsons is a cultural institution by definition.

After-Action Report: Mickey's Toontown

Mickey's Toontown doesn't seem to have too many friends these days. It's one of the Disneyland fandom's most popular candidates for demolition, usually to make room for a much-desired Fantasyland expansion.* The justifications for deep-sixing an entire land usually fall along the lines of: There's nothing to do there/no good rides. It's only for little kids. It's tacky-looking. It's not a Disneyland-worthy concept. (Huh?)

Surprising no one, I am not on board with this idea. I don't visit Toontown every time I'm in the park, but I think it works. So I'm going to sit here and explain why the above arguments are wrong/misguided and why Toontown should stay, and you're going to read it.

Or, you know, visit some other website.

After-Action Report: Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

Here's how you can tell when a Disney theme park ride is really successful: It outlives its source material in the public's esteem. This can only occur under specific circumstances. Firstly, the source material has to become obscure despite a) having been well-regarded enough at one point to be adapted into a ride and b) having the ride around to reinforce it for millions of vacationers each year. Secondly, the ride has to be good enough to draw queues despite losing the power of brand name recognition.

As you can imagine, it doesn't happen very often. You can probably count the genuine instances on one hand. Splash Mountain is the big one, due to being a unique thrill ride based on a movie that is not just obscure by mainstream standards but actually banned. But let's not overlook Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, whose inspiring movie is hardly any more known these days. I mean, when was the last time you watched it?* As for how it survives despite its source material falling off the radar, the ride concept—joyriding around various parts of old-timey England in an old-timey horseless carriage—pretty much speaks for itself.

But I think there's more to it than that. I have been known, in passing, to use the word “transgressive” in regard to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, without going into any details. But how else to describe it? I can't think of another Fantasyland-style dark ride that breaks the mold the way this one does. The usual methodology for plotting out one of these things is to take scenes from the movie and rebuild them physically so guests can ride through. They don't always get the perspective right, but as a rule, you can hop on a dark ride and see events you remember from the movie.

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride...does not do that. It kind of does the opposite, in fact. It focuses on events that drive the plot of the movie** but actually occurred off-screen.*** The ride has been around forever and we take it for granted, but it's pretty bizarre when you think about it. We must consider that when Disneyland opened, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad was only six years old, well remembered by the public. Did it seem at all weird to 1950s guests that the other Fantasyland dark rides were fairly straightforward recreations and then this one was...well...fanfiction?

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.

After-Action Report: World of Color: Season of Light

I have never been what you’d call a huge fan of World of Color. For all the massive promotion when it first debuted, it has always struck me as distinctly inferior to Fantasmic! The reasons for this are numerous, but among them is that World of Color has always seemed so very commercial. From the very first iteration, it has come across as having the primary purpose of waving popular characters and recent or upcoming films in guests’ faces, spurring the purchase of merchandise and movie tickets. The previous holiday version, World of Color: Winter Dreams, was especially blatant about this, betraying its own theme—you know, winter—with the use of the song “In Summer” from Frozen.* They tried to pass it off as an ironic juxtaposition, but not many people were fooled. They knew a shameless advertisement when they saw one.

Thus it is with delight that I inform you that the new holiday version—World of Color: Season of Light—does not give me this impression at all. Instead of using the show to promote the characters, it uses characters to illustrate the themes of the show. There are no Disney songs in this one—just well-known Christmas tunes as performed by equally well-known singers (and one absolutely marvelous surprise, about which more later). Each song is accompanied by appropriate footage from Disney films and shorts, and the hey-look-at-our-new-movie vibe is kept to a minimum.

That said, it’s still fairly one-dimensional as a presentation. World of Color is by its very nature something of a one-trick pony, lacking the multiple facets of something like Fantasmic! or even a parade. So this is gonna be a pretty short post, focusing on some of the highlights that really stood out to me as making this one special.

• “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: The obligatory Princess/romance sequence uses this fairly infamous song, but there’s a twist—it’s the Idina Menzel/Michael Bublé cover, which swaps out some of the dodgier lyrics for more family-friendly ones. Combined with the footage of Princesses pulling away from their love interests (when we all know these stories have fully consensual, mutually fulfilling happy endings), it does a lot to redeem the song for modern sensibilities.
• “Mele Kalikamaka”: This segment starts with clips from Lilo & Stitch. Then it continues with clips from Lilo & Stitch, before concluding with clips from Lilo & Stitch. I fully expected it to tease Moana at some point, since that film comes out in just a few days. But it didn’t. That alone speaks well for its sincerity—it would have been so easy to throw in a promotional clip or two, but they resisted the urge.
• “Wizards in Winter”: This was the big surprise I mentioned earlier. Everyone knows who Trans-Siberian Orchestra is these days, but I don’t think many people are familiar with their work beyond the rock remixes of “The Nutcracker” and “Carol of the Bells.”** However, if just one of their original Christmas compositions has achieved any sort of penetration into public recognition, it surely must be “Wizards in Winter,” thanks to a YouTube video of someone’s elaborately synchronized home exterior Christmas lights that went viral some years back. Accordingly, this segment—the most over-the-top part of the whole show, making ample use of the laser grid as well as the fire jets—purports to be someone’s elaborately synchronized home exterior Christmas lights. The someone in question is Goofy, who is probably the only character in the Disney lineup who might believably use fire jets at Christmas.

Is there anything I would do differently? Absolutely. Well, maybe.

For example, there's a segment featuring music from “The Nutcracker” as sung, a cappella, by the Pentatonix...and illustrated with the dancing hippos and ostriches from Fantasia. Except...Fantasia has a “Nutcracker” segment, and it's not the one with hippos. (It's the one with dancing mushrooms and thistles that makes you wonder what the animators were on when they created it.) I'm being charitable and assuming they went that route in order to keep the tone light and portray explicit ballet dancers, but it still creates the impression that they missed an obvious target at close range.

Another aspect that seemed kind of odd was the complete absence of any acknowledgement of Hannukah. The Disneyland Resort's holiday shows can normally be counted upon to provide at least a token round of “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel,” making the lack of such this time around a pretty glaring omission. I would rather they leave it out than force it if they couldn't find a natural place for it in the lineup, and anyway California Adventure has no shortage of diversity celebration this season, for which I have nothing but praise.

So it's not perfect. But it still stands head and shoulders above any other iteration of World of Color, and I highly recommend it as the perfect way to cap off a day enjoying California Adventure's Festival of Holidays.

* Among other songs from said movie.

** Which are actually entitled, respectively, “A Mad Russian’s Christmas” and “Christmas Eve – Sarajevo 12/24.” People don't pay attention.

After-Action Report: Storybook Land Canal Boats

Walt Disney loved miniatures. This interest seems to be part of a broader fascination with extremes of size that gave us Mickey Mouse’s battles against giants in “The Brave Little Tailor” and “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” the immense dinosaurs and minute pixies of Fantasia, Alice’s size-shifting escapades in Wonderland, the tiny animal sidekicks in films such as Pinocchio and Cinderella, and perhaps even Adventure Thru Inner Space. A dramatic change of scale is a dramatic change of perspective, and Walt was all about seeing the world in unconventional ways. Combine that with the delicate and nimble touch required to craft miniature models, and it's not hard to see why he loved them so much that he decided to put an entire country of them in his park.

After-Action Report: Radiator Springs Racers

I have a love-hate relationship with Cars Land. The Cars franchise may well be Pixar's weakest concept,* and it really has nothing to offer me in particular. There are several reasons, but for our purposes here, the main one is that I'm not interested in cars. Never have been. And especially in the context of a theme park, where I prefer to be surrounded by things I don't see and hear every hour of every day. If it had been my decision to make, I never would have put Cars in a Disney theme park, especially not to the extent of building an entire huge themed land.

And yet...

And yet...

I cannot deny that Cars Land, apart from the dumb name, is really, really well done. I mean, look at this:

And that's not even the town part. This is the town part:

This is Imagineering at its placemaking best. The attention paid to detail here is phenomenal. You walk into Cars Land, and you're there, in a tiny town in the American Southwest, with jagged cliffs of red sandstone in the distance. I'm sure it helped that they had the setting pre-rendered in three digital dimensions for their convenience, but they still had to figure out how to create it in three actual dimensions, and it's stunning work.

A lot of cleverness went into the execution. The businesses of Radiator Springs have been translated into typical theme park fixtures. The hippie VW bus's “organic fuel” station is a beverage stand, the paint shop is a clothing store, the souvenir shop is...a souvenir shop. Businesses with no ready counterpart have either been adjusted or made the sites of rides. But the area's tentpole attraction, Radiator Springs Racers, isn't located in the town at all—it takes place on the outskirts, amid those magnificent buttes seen in the top photo.

I actually haven't been on it many times—three or four, total, since it opened. This is because a) it's in the park I don't favor, b) it's Cars, and c) the wait time frequently tops two hours. But I never regret riding it. It's too dang good...maybe the best execution of a ride concept in years.

Actually, calling Radiator Springs Racers a ride is underselling it. It's three rides in one, plus a fantastically immersive queue that expands on the source material in a charming way. I'll start with the queue since—as mentioned above—we're going to be standing in it for a while.

After-Action Report: Haunted Mansion Holiday

We must face it: Haunted Mansion Holiday is something we, as Disneyland fans, need to reckon with.* Yet in the 21 months this blog has been active, the only thoughts I have shared on the matter are that a) I wish it didn't go up so early in the year, and b) I adore the thing it temporarily replaces. I haven't ever given my actual opinion on the thing itself, as a holiday overlay. So here it is:

Eh, it's okay.

As a rule, I am far more forgiving of temporary ride alterations than permanent ones. The latter have to constitute a definite improvement on the original for me to approve of them, while the former just have to be moderately entertaining since, after all, I'll have the original back soon enough. Even if I can't stand a temporary change, all I have to do is wait it out.

I'm happy enough to put Haunted Mansion Holiday in the “moderately entertaining” pile. I like some of the music, the visuals in the stretching room are pretty sweet, and I like seeing the new gingerbread house each year. (Though this year's is a little...uh...) I even think the often criticized mismatch between the existing Haunted Mansion imagery and the Tim Burton additions kind of works with the concept—the Halloweentown characters are imposing their style on the Mansion, are they not?

Of course, I am well aware that this is the kind of cheap post-hoc rationalization for lazy attraction design that Disney's own Marketing Department apologists like to use: “Of course it sucks. We were going for suck.” So I don't give it too much weight. And there's plenty else to criticize about the endeavor.

I just don't find myself criticizing it on the level of “This is a travesty against everything Disneyland outght to stand for” like many commenters do. It's more along the lines of “This could have and should have been done better.” So what I'll do here is, I'll go over various aspects of the ride, explain what I do and don't like about them, and then—as a bonus bit of Armchair Imagineering—sketch out an alternate way of adding The Nightmare Before Christmas to the Haunted Mansion for the holiday season that hopefully makes more sense and is more engaging.