Beyond Blue Sky: Disney Parks and Kingdom Hearts

You know what I haven't talked about in a good while? Video games.

I like video games. I want to say I love them, but in all honesty? If I truly loved them I'd probably play more of them. Keeping on top of the medium takes a serious investment of time and money that I'm just not willing to put in. It would too greatly hamper my ability to pursue everything else I do...including this blog. I'm usually vaguely aware of the latest developments in the industry, but the most advanced console in my personal possession is...a PlayStation 2.

But that's okay. You know what I can play on a PS2? Kingdom Hearts.

I've mentioned before that there are many similarities between playing a video game, especially one with a “sandbox” structure, and visiting a theme park. The games in the Kingdom Hearts series are not very sandbox-y, but they are especially comparable to a Disneyland visit, and not just because of the whole Disney mega-crossover thing. Game progression in this series revolves around traveling to a succession of “worlds,” like miniature planets, each a unique setting with its own theme and quirks. In the first game alone (the one I own and the only one I am especially familiar with—see above), the playable worlds include a tropical island, a gorilla-inhabited jungle, an underwater realm, a spooooooky haunted realm, a pseudo-futuristic/steampunk/magepunk palace, Wonderland, Neverland, and the 100-Acre Wood. Kingdom Hearts II adds a fairy tale castle, a pirate cove, a world of classic cartoons, and a virtual reality computer world, among others. I can't keep track of all the prequels and interquels and whatnot cluttering up the franchise, but the third proper installment is due to be released next year, and...guys?

There's theme park in it.

One of the game's special features will have the hero summon ride vehicles—actual ride vehicles, ranging in type from a Big Thunder Mountain train to a pair of spinning Teacups—and ride in them to gain advantages during battle sequences. As a charming bonus, the vehicles show up outlined in little colored lights, à la Electrical Parade floats:

Disney's most ambitious and unique concept has finally been included in what is probably its most successful video game franchise. I'm surprised the park fans aren't talking about it more.* But it's not really fully integrated, is it? The “summons” in these games are fun, but they're basically cameos. They're not part of the story. The stuff that matters in these games is bound up in the various worlds you travel to and the native characters you meet there.

You can probably tell where I'm going with this. Just for fun, here's some completely speculative fanwank on my part about how certain Disneyland attractions might fit into the Kingdom Hearts series as actual worlds. Naturally, there's more to consider than just “Is this cool?” Ideally, a world for this game franchise should combine:

• A striking setting
• Potential unique gameplay elements
• Potential thematic enemy types/bosses
• Characters who can be your allies

Even of the existing worlds, not all of them hit all four points, but most of them hit at least three, and the exceptions are typically uniquely positioned within the plot—for instance, in the first game, “End of the World” contains no allies, but that's because it's the last dang stage in the game, described as a conglomeration of destroyed worlds—what friendly character could reasonably be expected to show up there?

So here's what I've come up with.

Beyond Blue Sky: A Princess For Every Land

Let's be perfectly clear: Most animated Disney movies are not “Princess movies.” Run the numbers, and you’ll find that a protagonist in the Disney Animated Canon is much more likely to be some kind of non-human animal than a young lady of royal disposition.

If not both...

But the Princesses are probably the most collectively visible characters under the Disney banner, and not just because they have a merchandise brand. And there are quite a few of them, especially when you expand beyond the fairly restrictive boundaries* of said brand. They are perhaps the quintessential Fantasyland characters, but are so popular for meet-and-greets that Fantasyland alone cannot contain them. Not only do Princesses pop up in other parts of Disneyland and even across the way in California Adventure, but Fantasyland itself annexed a chunk of Main Street in order to host the Princesses in Fantasy Faire.

So here's an idea that's kinda fun and silly: Can we assign each land in the Disneyland Resort its very own, focus-tested, thematically or at least situationally appropriate Princess? And by we, I of course mean I. I have too much respect for you to ever accuse you of finding enjoyment in something this self-referentially nerdy.

It should go without saying, but I am not restricting this project to the “official” Disney Princesses, or even the official Princesses plus the few characters that everyone assumes will become official sooner or later. That wouldn't be enough, in terms of raw numbers or variety of character types. Instead, I am taking into consideration official Princesses, presumed future official Princesses, and characters from theatrical releases who are referred to as princesses and/or presumed to be princesses in-universe. Basically, if fans are prone to wondering why a character isn't included in the brand, we can give her an honorarium for the purposes of this post.

Got it? Good.

Beyond Blue Sky: The Disneyland House

“Bring Home the Magic.” One of Disney's many marketing slogans. It's usually used in conjunction with their home video productions, but people also take the expression a little more literally and decorate their houses with their favorite Disney characters and motifs. And sometimes with their favorite Disney theme park motifs, which Disney finally cottoned onto a few years ago, so now you can get official Disneyland attraction housewares. If you had about a grand to spare and a more advanced case of Disneyland-mania than even I have, you could go to Le Bat en Rouge and outfit your entire dining room with Haunted Mansion plates, placemats, drinking glass coasters, and even candlesticks.*

But what if more were possible?

What if you had basically unlimited funds and no sense of restraint whatsoever?

What if you could make your entire house into a mini-Disneyland of sorts? If you could, in fact, Make the Magic Your Home?

My sister and I had more-or-less this conversation the other day, fantasizing all kinds of what-if, and we came up with a rough plan for a Disneyland House, if only such a thing could be achieved. And then...I couldn't stop thinking about it. More and more details suggested themselves to my mind. And since it would be out of character for me to keep my thoughts to myself, I'm happy to share them with you here.

Read on, dear...readers, yes...and dream with me.

Beyond Blue Sky: Collectible Disneyland Minifigs, Part 2

Last week, I had a purely self-indulgent post where I imagined a wave of Collectible LEGO Minifigures consisting of Disney film and TV characters representing the themed lands of Disneyland. This week, I continue to pamper myself by imagining a wave of Collectible LEGO Minifigures consisting of characters more specific to Disneyland: characters originating in the Disney theme parks, prominent Cast Member concepts, and even a few guests.

I suppose a reiteration of the rules is in order here:

• I have to come up with 18 concepts for minifigs.
• There will be two minifigs per land (including the upcoming Star Wars area—although I had to break this sub-rule last time), one male and one female.
• Each minifig must have an identifiable connection to the land where I assign them, not just fit in a general thematic sense. This should be easier to manage here than in last week's project, since I'm using characters specific to the parks.
• Each minifig must be original. Last time, that meant no repeats of characters who have already been made into minifigs. This time, it's going to be even harder; LEGO has produced minifigs for a vast variety of themes over the years, many of which cover similar ground to the themed areas at Disneyland.
• Not a rule as such, but more of a consideration—when crafting the character set last week, I made sure to think about the desires of LEGO collectors and Disney fans who aren't so interested in the parks per se. In other words, even though my goal was a minifig set specifically tied to Disneyland, I wanted it to be something that people outside that narrow fandom could enjoy on its own merits. I'm aiming for the same thing with this one—these should be minifig concepts that anyone can find a use for.

Think I can do it again? Let's find out!

Beyond Blue Sky: Collectible Disneyland Minifigs, Part 1

I'm going to talk about LEGO again. If that's not your thing, please examine the sidebar for other websites you might enjoy for the next two weeks.

Remember last year when I was getting all excited about LEGO minifigures of Disney characters and the Cinderella Castle set and the prospect of more theme park sets to come?

Well…we haven’t had any more theme park sets, but the character minifigs were enough of a hit that we expect to get another wave of them. The speculation about which characters will be included in Round Two has been madder than a Tea Party…but you can probably guess where my mind is going in all this. As long as we're going to have collectible Disney minifigs...why not collectible Disneyland minifigs?

Think they wouldn't sell? I beg to differ. I can't really think of any minifigure concept that is so specific to Disneyland as to hold no interest for the adult LEGO fan community at large. “Disneyland minifigs” potentially fall into two main categories: 1) Disney characters, which have already proven their appeal, and 2) general characters, whose potential appeal can be demonstrated by...basically all the other non-licensed waves of collectible minifigures.

To further illustrate what I mean, I offer this hypothetical set of minifigs designed to satisfy fans of both Disneyland and LEGO, so that the true breadth of their appeal will be evident.

In fact...I'm going to offer two sets: one for each of the two main categories mentioned above. I'll cover the pre-existing Disney character this week and the others next week.

Beyond Blue Sky: Disneyland Alignment Chart

Please bear with me; I've gotten into a weird mood and I'm short on ideas again.

In your online travels, dear reader, you may occasionally come across a peculiar graphic: a three-by-three grid, each square containing a picture of a person or character or something, and each labeled with a two-adjective phrase, the phrases arranged such that each square in a given row or column has one word in common. At least nine times out of ten, the words so mixed and matched will be: Lawful, Chaotic, Good, Evil, and Neutral. The other ten percent of the time, a different pattern will be followed…but Neutral will always be included. Run into enough of these, even if you never see one using characters you recognize and have no idea what is up with this funky Punnett square, and you will likely come to the conclusion that, okay, this is a thing. A meme of some kind. Okay, whatever, the internet is weird.

At the risk of outing myself as an even bigger nerd than you probably already thought I was, I would like to inform you that this is what’s known as an alignment chart, and has its origins in…get ready…

Beyond Blue Sky: Wicked Kingdoms

One oft-repeated wish in the Disney theme park fandom is for some permanent attraction based on the Disney Villains brand. A Villains ride, or a Villains land (often envisioned as an offshoot of Fantasyland)...sometimes even an entire Villains park, with themed areas based around individual members of the brand.

On the whole, the conceit seems to be the result of Disney's own relentless trend toward character branding running smack into the young adult taste for the dark and edgy. Most Disney animation showcases pretty black-and-white morality, and if the good guys come across as unappealingly twee (as they often do, thanks to child-oriented marketing efforts), there's only one place left to go.

To be honest, I don't think a Villains-themed area, ride, or park would really work. Disney Villains is very much like Disney Princess—a marketing brand that involves characters from several different movies but keeps them rigorously separated instead of allowing true crossover interaction. With Disney's theme parks in thrall to its branded IPs, I can't see the Imagineers being allowed to do anything really satisfying with the concept. Something like Princess Fantasy Faire squeaks by because its target audience is fairly undiscriminating about these things. I doubt the fans wishing for a Villains attraction would be content with a collection of meet-and-greet spots.

On the other hand, there's all kinds of fun to be had with layering the Villains on top of what's already there. “The Villains take over” is the plot bunny for a hundred and two Disney fanfics (including part of my own Crowns of the Kingdom as well as my flight of fancy about the ultimate Disneyland-based video game), but few people (myself included) really explore the potential. Disney itself rarely goes farther than the odd Halloween event, wherein the takeover seems limited to a particular live entertainment location and is quickly defeated. I'm thinking it could be fun to examine the possibilities if the Villains really did take over Disneyland and parcel it out amongst themselves.

Actually, let's make that both parks, maybe even the entire Disneyland Resort. There are a lot of Villains, after all—even considering only those from the Disney Animated Canon—and one of their qualifying traits is that they don't play well with others. They need a lot of territory to avoid getting up in each other's business and fracturing the whole coalition.

For this bit of spitballing, I'll be deviating from my usual practice of examining the themed lands in map order: Main Street, Adventureland, etc. An awful lot here hinges on what goes on at the epicenter of Villain activity: Fantasyland.

As a final note before we dive in, Disney's last few movies have surprised audiences (or not, depending upon how shrewd they are as viewers...no comment on my end) with the identity of the real Villain. So SPOILER WARNINGS apply to the rest of this post!

Beyond Blue Sky: The Time Machine

Because you are a good person at heart, the Blue Fairy has teamed up with Cornelius Robinson to give you a gift: a real working time machine, good for one trip into the past, and the return trip, and no more. To minimize the risk of changing history and damaging the timestream, you may only stay in the past for one day, and it is highly advised that you spend that day in a place where your actions have few or no repercussions for the outside world.

Might as well go to Disneyland, huh?

So...how far back do you go?

Do you drop in on Opening Day and shake Walt Disney's hand? Maybe pop back and see one of the New Tomorrowlands—'59, '67, or '98—when it was genuinely new? Are you more tempted by the prospect of revisiting your own nostalgic memories or seeing things that were gone before you had the chance to know them?

Not gonna lie—I'm going with Option A. I'd rather go back and see things I miss than things I missed, if you follow. Nonetheless, I'm actually gonna set my time machine to a point slightly before my earliest solid memories of the park. Target Year: 1980.

Beyond Blue Sky: The Disneylands Within Disneyland

Some Disney attractions could be considered “theme parks within theme parks,” and usually the fans don't think much of them. The stand-out examples here are Chester & Hester's Din-o-Rama (Animal Kingdom) and Paradise Pier (California Adventure). The first has often been called inappropriately cheesy and cheap-looking.* The second elicits the burning question: “What is the point of an amusement park-themed amusement park?” Whatever your personal opinion of these areas, you can see the complainers' point. We prefer Disney attractions because they aren't just the same old off-the-shelf carnival rides in the same old dingy, unadorned carnival setting. It feels like a betrayal when they backslide to the minimal theming effort typified by California Screamin' and Triceratops Spin.

But sometimes recursion can work. There are at least two miniature Disneylands within Disneyland. They have been operating for decades—one of them goes right back to July 17, 1955—entertaining thousands of guests every day, and to the best of my knowledge even the most persnickety park aficionado has not called them out for being redundant or inadequately themed.

In fact, most people don't even seem to notice that they are, effectively, miniature Disneylands.

Beyond Blue Sky: The Building Blocks Of Magic, Part 2

(Don't worry, I promise this will not turn into a LEGO blog.)

So the Genie or the Blue Fairy or somebody must have bugged my apartment back in March, because the news has broken that the LEGO Company will release a Disney castle later this year! It's going to be Cinderella's Castle from Orlando, not Sleeping Beauty Castle, but a) I predicted this in the earlier post, and b) I'll buy it anyway if I can remotely justify the expense. I want to send a clear message to the decision-makers in charge of this stuff that Disney theme park LEGO sets are a VERY GOOD idea.

And because my imagination is a naive optimist, it's taking this news and running wild with more ideas for other Disneyland-based sets. Bear with me while I geek out some more?

Beyond Blue Sky – Four Disneyland Headcanons

Disneyland tells a lot of stories...a lot of extremely incomplete stories. Even the longest, most intricately designed ride hasn't enough time and space to give us all the details. We're left with a sharply abridged narrative, or perhaps even just a series of vignettes with no explicit “plot” to connect them.

It's like I keep saying: this park is awesome.

A story told piecemeal is practically an engraved invitation to fill in the gaps with your own interpretations, speculations, and headcanons.* These bits of fanfiction might be as simple as names assigned to animatronic characters who don't have official ones, or as elaborate as a “how they met” story for all 17 Country Bears. The vast majority will probably fall somewhere in the middle.

Here are four of mine.

Beyond Blue Sky: The Building Blocks of Magic

I never expected to do another post about toys this soon, but here we are.

So this is happening:

Not gonna lie, I'm pretty excited for these. If there's one hobby I enjoy almost as much as Disneyland (and spend comparably on over the course of a year), it's LEGO.

Disney and LEGO have been partnered for several years now, with quite a few licensed sets based on properties like Toy Story, Cars, Pirates of the Caribbean (the movies, unfortunately, not the ride), and now an ongoing Disney Princess line. But this is the first time the partnership has been put to a purpose other than promoting a current Disney film or franchise. It makes me excited for potential new directions the team-up might take.

Because really, are a few Disney Theme Park LEGO sets too much to ask?

Beyond Blue Sky: What Kind of Castaway Are You?

Last week, I shared an Armchair Imagineering proposal for turning Adventureland's Treehouse, once the home of the Swiss Family Robinson and now of Tarzan, into a generalized Castaway's Treehouse where the guests themselves are the implicit inhabitants. One of the interactive features I suggested including was a “What Kind of Castaway Are You?” personality quiz, along with related merchandise.

This week, to keep Adventureland August going, I decided...what the heck, I'll write the quiz! Enjoy!

Beyond Blue Sky: In Search of the Perfect Disneyland Video Game

Disneyland was designed and constructed as something like a movie brought to life in three dimensions, so that you could walk through it and experience it as your own story. The ground at the entrance resembled a red carpet (at first), emerging from the entry tunnel is like a curtain lifting and revealing the scene, the Main Street windows feature “credits,” etc. But while a theme park can include a lot of movie-like content, visiting one can never really be comparable to watching a film. The audience of a film is entirely passive; the story on the screen unfolds as it will no matter how the viewers feel about it, or even whether they are paying attention. Outside of a few avant-garde experiments, there is nothing interactive about a movie.

But theme parks are inherently interactive. Even if you just wander around and don't actively engage with the attractions, you still choose where and how you wander, plotting the “story” in the process.

My point, I suppose, is that the reason Walt Disney and the Imagineers thought of the Disneyland concept as a living movie is that video games hadn't been invented yet. Exploring even the most cinematic theme park is a lot more like playing a sandbox-style video game than it is like watching a movie.

Think about it. You start the game/enter the park and get your overworld map. If you need “quests,” you can talk to an NPC (park employee) and find out what is available to do (attractions) and the difficulty of succeeding (wait times). At Disneyland itself, most of the area themes have ready counterparts in many games, especially classic platformers—you can visit the jungle level (Adventureland), the desert level (Frontierland), the outer space level (Tomorrowland), and the zany level (Mickey's Toontown). Most “levels” have atmospheric music playing non-stop. There's even a “final battle” at the end, although in this case, instead of an evil overlord, you're fighting human foot traffic.

Given all that, wouldn't it be cool if there were a Disneyland video game? Well...there have been some. A half-dozen or so—not bad for something that is usually seen as an adaptation of works of media, rather than a work of media in its own right that can be adapted. (Although I should note that only one of these games actually takes place in Disneyland itself. Likewise, only one of them takes place in Orlando's Magic Kingdom. The rest of the time, the game's designers meld the two parks together into a genericized “Magic Kingdom”¹ containing salient features of both.) Perhaps the most interesting thing about them is how different they all are. To the best of my knowledge, none of them was ever an overwhelming success...perhaps Disney Interactive is still searching for the perfect template for the perfect theme park-based game.

That's okay. So am I.

Beyond Blue Sky: The Plaza Hub as a Magic Circle

Welcome to Beyond Blue Sky, where I pull out all the stops and share my very wildest and wackiest ideas and observations. Attention, Bobsled riders: thar be squalls ahead and there's no turning back now!

Boy, those Disney marketers sure love to spam the word magic, don't they? (Also dreams and wishes and believe, but magic is our focus here.) Disneyland is the Magic Kingdom, even if the name officially belongs to its Orlando counterpart. Advertising invites you to “experience the magic.” Or “share the magic.” Or “bring home the magic.” The short street running alongside the main parking area for the resort is called Magic Way. The year 2000 brought us the 45 Years of Magic Parade and the fireworks show “Believe...There's Magic in The Stars.” The holiday fireworks are still called “Believe...in Holiday Magic.” “Mickey and the Magical Map,” currently showing in the Fantasyland Theatre,” draws full audiences (and deservedly so—I'm not claiming that the mere presence of an overused word automatically taints anything associated with it). We're due to have the MyMagic+ system imported from Florida, thereby allowing guests to reserve time on attractions, appointment-style, with their Magic Bands. And that's just what comes off the top of my head.

That's a whole lotta “magic.” And the irony is that those marketers are probably completely unaware that the very geography of Disneyland hearkens back to ancient traditions of real magic, in the sense of mysticism and spellcraft.