Disney Lies

Quick announcement: Alexander Hamilton will be giving a series of patriotic speeches in Disneyland’s Main Street Opera House tomorrow so that Abe Lincoln can have the day off for his birthday.

Happy Groundhog Day from the entire DisneyLies blog staff! Remember, if Pooh comes out of Rabbit’s house and sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of 2fer tickets at Disneyland!

A few bits of Disneyland flotsam we’ve been meaning to pass along:

• Tomorrowland’s Starcade is closed so that they can empty the quarters out of all the machines. (It turns out they get really full over the course of a year.)
• The Jewel of Orleans shop shop in New Orleans Square will be permanently closing mid-April. Apparently last month’s “All-Free Jewelry Day” promotion wasn’t such a great idea after all.
• Rumor has it that the gorgeous DCA Animation Building lobby may be significantly reworked so that a number of Disney accountants can have the pleasure of metaphorically grabbing a large number of Disneyland fanatics, manacling them to a cold steel table, ripping out their still beating hearts with a pair of sharpened salad tongs, and feeding them to a hoard of half-starved wild pigs. Or, possibly, for budgetary reasons.

Rumor has it that Disneyland’s Main Street Cinema will be reopening tomorrow. Said a cast member, “This will be a unique experience. If crowd levels tomorrow are similar to today’s, every guest in the park will be able to visit the cinema at the same time!”

The cinema was closed while the old floor was torn out and replaced with a new floor (complete with “simulated” flood damage!)

There is currently a photo on Twitpic claiming to show Disneyland’s Main Street flooded by today’s rains. However, this is incorrect — Disneyland’s fine drainage system can more than handle a little torrential rain. Rather, this photo shows Disney engineers in the process of moving the water that had previously been in the Rivers of America (which has been drained to facilitate refurbishment work) being moved from its temporary storage place in the old Tom Sawyer Island fort to its newly readied storage facility in DCA’s former “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” building.

Remember, just because you see a picture of something on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true!

Disneyland master photographer Paul Heffalump (sp?) is featured on the Disney Parks Blog today showing off a photograph he took while leaping over Disneyland’s “Partners” statue. It’s a lovely photo, very unusual, and blah, blah, blah, but for sheer uniqueness it’s nothing compared to this:

That’s right, our own Official Disney Lies Photo Correspondent, despite great risk of being caught and ejected bodily from the park, managed to take a picture of Main Street from inside the Partners statue! Talk about unique!!

Due to heavy rains, Disneyland closed three hours early today. Said parks spokes animal Hetta Moocow, “This is California — we really hadn’t prepared for weather like this. And in retrospect, saving a few dollars by making the new monorail out of spun sugar instead of fiberglass may have been a mistake.”

Our spies deep within Disney imagineering have, at great risk to life and limb, brought us a pair of exciting updates on issues of interest to all Disneyland fans!

First, many of you are likely aware of the online petition to transform Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island into The Lost Experience on Tom Sawyer Island. According to our source: “There is no way that Disney would turn such an iconic piece of real estate into a tribute to an ABC show, even one that is so beloved. Walt Disney himself did that, by opening an entire park based on his Disneyland TV show on ABC, and we don’t dare try and duplicate his incredible success for fear of jinxing ourselves.”

This means that you can also forget about that Scrubs Tower of Terror petition.

Second, last, and foremost, new details have been uncovered regarding Star Tours II, which will begin construction later this year! The completely reworked new attraction will feature something that fans have been clamoring for — multiple possible outcomes! The new story will involve a Star Tours flight 815, an inter-planet transport that breaks apart during a routine flight, crash landing on a deserted tropical planet more than 1,000 light years off their course so there is no chance of rescue. All appears peaceful at first, but then strange noises are heard from deep within the foliage. Will the crash survivors survive???

From there, many possible endings are, um, possible, including those involving such exciting elements as a strange smoke monster, an out-of-place-seeming ravenous polar bear, a rebel scout who has been trapped on the island for 16 years, cryptic flashbacks, and strange ewok-like natives referred to only as “the others”. “Originally,” said our secret inside source, “the idea was that guests would be on a three-hour Star Tour and crash on a desert island where there would be wacky adventures involving the captain and his bumbling first mate, a rich couple that had brought all their money with them in a big trunk, a holo-movie star, and the rest, but the idea just evolved from there.”

We can’t wait to see the finished product!

Hurry! We’ve just learned that the conversion of Honey, I Shrunk the Audience into Captain EO has been suspended for a few days (due to a union-required rest period), so for a limited time guests can visit the semi-converted theater and enjoy Honey, I Shrunk the EO! Run! Seats are limited!

(And for those of you who didn’t know that Captain EO is returning, please be aware that DisneyLies.com is unilaterally taking 93% of the credit for giving Disney the idea, and we expect nothing more than your eternal adoration and gratitude.)