The “Kiss the Girl” scene is nicely done but very inappropriate. Major organizations (such as No Contact Before Marriage and the Defense Against Cooties Foundation) agree that explicit depictions of smooching may border on life scarring for children below voting age.

The actual kiss is depicted in silhouette form. A bit of trivia: this gigantic animated silhouette was cut from a single piece of black construction paper by the nice lady who makes silhouettes on Main Street.

In the back, there’s a little reference to Syndrome from The Incredibles. What’s up with that?

Ariel’s dad, Neptune, is totally ripped. This kind of idealized body image is what gives feelings of inadequacy to so many adolescent mermen.

The final wedding scene is cute, but the prince shows his lack of thespian experience by always looking right at the camera.

There’s a mysterious cabinet visible near the end of the attraction. If we are interpreting the markings correctly, this is a storage space for both the original manuscript of The Little Mermaid and Hans Christian Andersen’s head.

As you exit, notice the sea chest with the gigantic lock. It’s obviously full of treasure, but they don’t let guests have any. This is grossly unfair — teasing, really — and it left a bit of a sour taste in our mouth, which was unfortunate as the attraction had otherwise been so nice. (Also notice the attraction’s final hidden Mickey. Seriously — enough already!)

The attraction has only fifteen vehicles, but they are made to look like many more through the clever use of mirrors.

The attraction is narrated by a creepy, beady-eyed musical bird for some reason. Nobody we interviewed for the compilation of facts within this expose was able to tell us why (largely because they were too busy looking at is as if we were insane).

The attraction vehicles turn around and slip below the waves, complements of a special effect that, while brilliantly executed, is crammed with far too many tiny little hidden Mickeys for our taste.

As you descend into the sea, Arial can be seen overhead, accompanied by what appears to be a chambered nautilus and carrying a purse to help remind little princesses of their responsibility to accessorize.

Within Ariel’s undersea lair can be seen many of her treasures (forks, ruined books, jugs full of seawater), cleverly scavenged from among the many survivor-less shipwrecks that have drifted down to her domain.

In the “under the sea” room, Sebastian the crab faces a row of electric eels and, with his little baton, conducts electricity.

In the grand showroom, Ariel sings, dances, and sports a hairdo modeled after the shell of the fly-specked cerith.

Why is this fish kissing the front half of an old, barnacle-covered swan statue? We don’t know.

Ursula, the villain in this little tableau, is introduced in a dark, spooky scene in which she is depicted as being larger than the water-covered video globe of the Earth. We don’t understand this either.

Tomorrow, the exciting climax to this thrilling adventure!

The entrance to the attraction is very attractive, although here and there we could see a little room for additional quality control.

Within the entrance is a mosaic floor in which scenes from the film have been created entirely with natural sea-sourced materials, such as seaweed, shells, and bits of the Titanic.

Here’s a little bit of trivia for you, this marker embedded in the ground at the attraction’s entrance marks the exact, precise, geographic center of Disney California Adventure.

Within the show building, we immediately spotted this lamp, which serves as a hint of the one problem this attraction has — too darned many hidden Mickeys. Sure, we love hidden Mickeys as much as the next guy so long as the next guy isn’t Michael Eisner, but in this attraction they are just ubiquitous.

The level of detail in the queue is incredible, although we can’t quite understand why the rails are decorated with these little cacti.

As the vehicle boarding area approaches, there is a large mural decorated with this lovely painting of Arial, the Little Mermaid herself. As a subtle environmental message, the LM’s mermaid face glows gently, to help make riders aware of the problems caused by dumping radioactive materials into the planet’s oceans.

Coming tomorrow — the actual attraction!

Just wanted to share this incredible view from DCA. On our recent visit, the sky was so clear that for the first time ever we could actually see the mountains in the distance!

We finally got to see the new entrance to Disney California Adventure, and think it is an incredible tribute to the entrance to Disney Hollywood Studios in Florida.

Seeing the new entrance also helped us understand why the park’s name was changed from Disney’s California Adventure to Disney California Adventure — there is no possible way that the “‘s” could have fit on the marque. Seriously, it would have been crammed up against the “C” and just looked terrible. Good decision, Disney!

“It’s like a piece of history has been cut right out of history, and now — it’s history!” said Paula Babble, a former cast member whose lack of eloquence is matched only by a sense of nostalgia so overblown as to essentially be crippling. “I remember back when it was the Viewliner at Disneyland. I road it as a little girl and it was like a dream that I was actually dreaming, about a train and being on a train. I was so happy when they brought it out of storage and put it on display at California Adventure! But now it’s gone, and it’s like they’ve taken my childhood and crushed it and stomped it and ground it to pieces, hitting it with a hammer again, and again, and again until it is nothing more than bright, fragile shards of a ruined dream sprayed across the landscape of my life, threatening to draw blood from any who so much as think of touching a finger to them — only worse!”

Disney has announced that it will donate the California Zephyr to the Gene Autrey Museum of Western Heritage. The museum doesn’t want the train and has nowhere to put it, but Disney needs the tax deduction, so there you go.

“The new California Adventure entrance experience,” said an imagineer who spoke with us on condition of our pretending he existed, “will be reminiscent of Walt Disney’s early days in California. As of now, with the construction walls up and the stores and set pieces removed, the entrance’s new ‘Disneyland: 1954′ theme is complete. Guests detouring around the new entrance will be able to experience the thrill of passing by Disneyland as it was being built.”

If planned plans continue as planned, this new theme — complete with “workers” performing “construction” — will remain in place until early next year, after which it will be replaced by an even more Disney-historic orange grove.

The club will feature gourmet food, a “Golden Gate” entry staircase, a telephone booth and memorabilia from the movie Condorman, and a dining room themed to California-native Richard Nixon, complete with microphones in the chandeliers so that behind-the-scenes cast members can record and respond to any guest request at a moment’s notice. One special touch will be a ladies-room commode fashioned from palm fronds.

Membership is already full and the waiting list extends several years into the future, so if you are massively wealthy and interested, you’d best contact DCA management immediately to have your name added. Note that, in keeping with its California theme, Route 66 membership fees are payable only in gold nuggets.

To find out what was going on, we contacted Dr. Professor — a thin white man with disheveled gray hair and a doctorate in comparative accounting from an unaccredited university who sometimes walks around DCA in a lab coat. According to the doctor, “What Disney has done is realize that the so-called ‘Maliboomer’ attraction was, although entertaining, highly visible but artistically unappealing. To address this problem, they painted the entire attraction with infra-red paint that is invisible to the human eye and therefore renders the entire superstructure visually indetectable without highly specialized equipment.” He went on to warn that guests wandering in the area should pay particular attention to signs so that they don’t accidentally smack into one of the towers, and left to study vector equations in Midway Mania.

Thanks, Doctor!

It’s not the removal of the “’s” that has most fans up in arms, however, but the deletion of “Park” from the official name. Said one prominent Disney fan via Twitter from his mom’s basement, “That was one of the few ‘in’ jokes that Imagineers were able to sneak past Eisner and his cronies when California Adventure was in its infancy. I mean, it was a ‘park’ built on what used to be a parking lot, right? It was awesome!”

The name change was more than just a flight of fancy by park executives. Rather, it was the result of years of product testing, and will result in changes in signage and paper goods throughout the resort. In fact, the name change is expected to exhaust the bulk of the $1 billion Disney set aside to revamp the park. “That’s why we’ve had to cut corners here and there in the refurb,” said imaginary Imagineer Irene Iranirun. “If you think about it, you’ll see that we’re cutting corners everywhere. We’ve replaced a swing ride with a swing ride. We’re replacing a lake with a slightly more advanced lake. We’re replacing a parking lot with a tribute to cars. None of these are big stretches that require a lot of money, because the money’s all going to naming consultants and reprinting park maps.”

How will the name change impact you, the park guest? In three ways:

1. Disney California Adventure will now be referred to as “DCA,” instead of the former, more fun to say, DsCAP.
2. If you have any unused tickets to the old park, they’re now void. Unused park hoppers can only be used in Disneyland. Annual passes will have to be upgraded to allow entrance into the new park.
3. You can immediately start making fun of less knowledgeable people who still use the old name.
4. Lines for Toy Story’s Midway Mania ride will be drastically reduced. (However, lines for the Toy Story Midway Mania attraction are expected to double over the summer months.)