Disneyland for Vampires now available

September 17th, 2017

Disneyland for Vampires, Zombies, and Others with VERY Special Needs

Disneyland for Vampires, Zombies, and Others with VERY Special Needs is now available for purchase! If you’re a non-human (or non-standard human) who wants to visit Disneyland, this is the book for you! Seriously! Buy it!

Walt Disney World for Vampires, Zombies, and Others with VERY Special Needs

While we’re at it, Walt Disney World for Vampires, Zombies, and Others with VERY Special Needs is also available. For safety sake, it’s better to just go ahead and purchase both.

Increased ticket prices a boon for social media

February 13th, 2017

Over the weekend, Disney increased ticket prices for both Disneyland and Walt Disney World. “It’s a tradition,” says self-appointed Disney history historian Ferdinand Bullworth. “It stems from Walt Disney’s nostalgic rememberings of his local movie theater raising their movie prices every year. The company’s decision to continue that tradition is yet another wonderful link to the yesteryear of Walt’s youth.”

Continuing tradition is only one benefit of the annual price increase. “For all of my friends in the Disney fan and blogging community, it saves us a lot of work,” says PrincesMickey1955 via misdirected text message. “Every year, we just dust off our rants and complaints about not being able to afford to visit parks and Disney no longer caring for the average visitor, update the numbers, and re-post them to Facebook, our blogs, Twitter — everywhere. It’s like a little vacation so we can do some extra shopping for Valentines Day. Thanks Disney!”

Super Crowds

February 6th, 2017

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday, and as usual Disneyland crowds were particularly low. Said Castmember Amy Fakename, “I’ve worked at Disneyland for six years and have never seen it so empty. Main Street was like a ghost town, cast members outnumbered guests in Toontown, you could walk right on to Indiana Jones, and the line for Peter Pan was only 40 minutes. Incredible!”

Upcoming Disney Westerns

January 30th, 2017

Today, Disney may have announced that their animation department is in production on a number of new western-themed shorts films starring classic Disney characters. “As recent western films have shown,” said a person we overheard somewhere important, “there have been no quality recent western films, and the all-time number of western-themed animated films can be counted on one fist full of dollars.”

Disney’s slate of western cartoons — slated to be shown before upcoming Disney features — will be as follows:

  • “Butch Mickey and the Duckdance Kid”
  • “Pie Fight at the O.K. Corral”
  • “Paint Your Little Red Wagon”
  • “A Man Called Horsecollar”
  • “The Lone Junior Woodchuck”
  • “Pluto Unchained”
  • “Toonstone” (title changed from “High Toon” due to concerns about implications of drug use)
  • “The Good, the Bad, and the Goofy”
  • “Dances with Big, Bad Wolves”
  • “The Magnificent Seven Dwarfs”

If these are successful, Disney will follow with a series of science-fiction shorts, bridged by a sci-fi/western production, “Frontierlandworld.”

Hall of Presidents update

January 20th, 2017

In the light of growing unrest among Imagineers over the prospect of having to construct a Donald Trump animatronic for the Hall of Presidents, an unpresidented (pun intended) decision has been made. According to a woman high up in Imagineering who appeared to us in a dream and will be referred to as Bob, “Due to various Imagineers’ discomfort with creating an animatronic figure of our new President, the Walt Disney Company has decided to completely revamp Walt Disney World’s Hall of Presidents. The Hall of Presidents will have its final operating day on January 20, 2017, and will reopen on January 21, 2017, as an entirely new attraction, the Hall of Former Presidents.”

This is seen as a win for both staff and management, as the change will require only new signage. “This is not necessarily a permanent retheming,” added Bob. “The issue of the attraction’s ongoing identity will be revisited after the inevitable impeachment.”

It’s official

January 20th, 2017

It’s official: Disney World Imagineers must steel themselves for the emotionally difficult task of creating an animatronic Donald Trump and installing it in the Hall of Presidents.

“We have asked if we can put the Trump animatronic in the back, maybe facing a wall,” said one Imagineer on condition of our making clear that this is a fake news site and everyone at Disney is actually really, really excited about the new administration. “If that doesn’t work out, we’d like to make his Presidential speech 140 characters or less. You know, to match his style.”

In related news, it appears that Disney will face a 35% penalty tax if all of Epcot’s international employees aren’t replaced with (quoting dubious government sources) “Real Americans.” Construction on the wall around the Mexico pavilion starts Monday.

All Tired Out

February 16th, 2015

Today is the last day of operation for the poor, beloved Luigi’s Flying Tires attraction at Disney California Adventure. The attraction was never as popular as Disney might have hoped, but it certainly had its fans. Here’s a picture taken this morning of the attraction so you can have one last look before it is replaced by something that is certain to be less delightful (and possibly Frozen-car themed):

Luigi's Flying Tires last day of operation

(Although the crowds had not yet descended upon the attraction when this photo was taken, the attraction had only been open for an hour at that point. We’re certain that it became very busy later in the day.)

It’s difficult to see in the photo — you might have to click it to see it larger — but all of the Flying Tires cast members wore black armbands on their left arms to mark the attraction’s final hours. It was a respectful, if subtly depressing, gesture.

The general feeling about Luigi’s can be summed up in a quote from a guest we spotted dressed in black and weeping quietly into a black handkerchief near where this photo was taken. Said the guest (only slightly muffled by her black mourning veil):

My parents first met on the original Flying Saucers attraction at Disneyland. They were sitting in their individual saucers, yelling and cursing about how then couldn’t figure out how to get them to move, when they caught each others’ eye. That started them laughing over their shared frustration, and the rest is Disney romance history.

I’ve been coming to Luigi’s every day since it opened, riding it incessantly and waiting for a love connection. After 976 days of trying, I guess I’m going to have to look for another way to find a soul mate. I might have to resort to hoping I get stranded for an hour on Pirates with Mr. Right.

The big question, of course, is “Why is this attraction closing?” It may have been seen as a risk to try a new version of an attraction that originally didn’t last long at Disneyland, and over the months since “Flying Saucers II” opened the company may have lost its nerve. As one former individual said, “Whoever gave the park permission to open Luigi’s Flying Tires sure had a lot of balls, but unfortunately they were removed a few weeks after attraction opening due to technical issues.”

The internet is rife with rampant rumors about the closure. Some are blaming Obamacare or feminist criticism of video games, while others say it’s related to an unfortunate incident that occurred near the end of 2014 during which a woman was caught throwing the ashes of her beloved former Ford Fiesta about the attraction to commemorate its passing after its engine seized up and she had it incinerated. But, as is often the case, the truth is far more mundane. Said a relative of a person who claims to know things:

Disney never anticipated that the Monster Truck Racing Association would want their tires back so soon. In retrospect, they really should have signed a longer contract, but nobody anticipated that there would be any difficulty in getting them to renew every three years. It turns out that some MTRA brass was really upset that guests entering attraction vehicles tended to step on the giant tires, getting footprints on them and leaving them all scuffed up at the end of the day. In MTRA management’s mind, that made the MTRA look unprofessional. They complained to Disney, and the park did try to modify guest behavior, but in the end it just couldn’t be done.

RIP Luigi’s Flying Tires: 6/15/2012 – 2/16/2015

Disneyland measles button

February 9th, 2015

We’ve been so busy promoting our new That’s Not At Disneyland books that we’ve hardly had time to visit the Disneyland Resort in the last two months. We were finally able to visit over the weekend, and were thrilled to see all the new entertainment and changes throughout both parks.

One interesting details we discovered at City Hall was that Disneyland now has these buttons available:

Disneyland "vaccinated" button

We asked a cast member to hold one of the buttons and tell us a little bit about it. According to her, “I’m happy to help, but it’s too bad I didn’t do my nails last night. I’m not a professional hand model.”

Assuming that the buttons were created in reaction to the recent outbreak of measles that was traced to Disneyland, we asked if she had more details. “Not that there’s anything wrong with professional hand models,” she said. “It’s a great career and I wouldn’t mind getting into it, so long as I could work around my Disneyland job.”

After we took our pictures, we asked if Guest Services had been inundated with questions about communicable diseases in the parks, availability of measles vaccinations at First Aid, and annoying “it’s a smallpox world” and “Jungle (Cruise) fever” jokes. She had little to say about that but, as we were leaving, did add, “You’ll let me know about any hand modeling opportunities you hear of, won’t you?”

Frozen Singalong II

January 6th, 2015

The new Frozen-themed attractions in Disney California Adventure have proved to be even more popular than park management anticipated. Said one person who claims to share sandwiches with park management, “It’s cool how hot they are! (Get it? Cool? Hot?)”

The Frozen singalong performance in the former Muppetvision 3D theater is having trouble meeting demand, so the resort will be opening a second Frozen singalong, this time in Disneyland. “Walt Disney’s Frozen Tiki Room” will begin performances in March, after a month-long refurbishment to upgrade and reprogram the TIki Room’s inhabitants. Changes will include replacing many birds with penguins and puffins, adding frostbite to the plants, reworking the totem polls to resemble the film’s Marshmallow character, replacing the tiki gods with animatronic Olafs, and changing the climactic rainstorm into a snowstorm.

The show’s music will also (obviously) be changed. For example, at the start of the show:

Olaf! Olaf! Its showtime!

In the frozen, frozen, frozen, frozen tiki room,
In the frozen, frozen, frozen, frozen tiki room,
All the birds wear coats and snowmen croon,
In the frozen, frozen, frozen, frozen tiki room.

Welcome to a movie-themed overlay, you lucky people, you.
Our home in Arendelle go the chills today,
So we flew south to be with you.

After much shenanigans and banter, guests will be introduced to the ice-carved Birdmobile and asked to sing along with a new tune, “Do You Want To Find Rosita?” It begins:

Hey what happened to Rosita?
I hope that she’s okay.
She isn’t on the Birdmobile
And now I feel
She might have flown away.

She used to sing so pretty
And now she’s gone.
Was it something that I squawked?

Hey what happened to Rosita?
(At least I think her name’s Rosita.)

The traditional singing of “Heigh Ho” as guests leave the attraction is replaced (of course) by Frozen’s signature song, “Let It Go.” The modified tune ends like this:

Let it snow, let it snow,
While you all leave us in a lurch.
Let it snow, let it snow,
I’m frozen to my perch.
We all sing
In the Tiki way.
What else rhymes with “perch?”

I don’t know so get up and go away.

Poor Pooh!

January 1st, 2015

Winnie the Pooh (as seen in our local grocery store) apparently was celebrating the new year a little too hard last night.

Drunk Pooh