Archive for the ‘DL Resort’ Category

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Prince of Persia promotion problem

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Disneyland and Walt Disney World planned to surprise park guests with a special promotion tied in to today’s release of Prince of Persia, Disney’s third video-game-inspired film (after Tron and Grand Theft Auto: Toontown). The promotion involved special “Sands of Time” tickets randomly distributed to guests who received FASTPASSes. According to the text on the tickets, a guest leaving an indicated attraction could give the ticket to any cast member and “be taken back in time to the point where you entered the vehicle loading area, exactly as if you had returned to the moment before you rode!” This effectively allowed a lucky guest to ride an attraction twice in a row while only standing in line once.

It sounded like a neat idea, something that would generate excellent online buzz, but there was a problem. Guests quickly began to balk when cast members attempted to take their Sands of Time ticket from them. As one guest put it, “If I’m traveling back in time, then I’m traveling back to a time when I had the ticket, not to a time when I didn’t have the ticket yet, so why should I have to give it up? And since I still have it when I get off the ride, why can’t I use it to travel back in time and ride again, like I’m in an infinite time loop? Then when I’m tired, I can just get off the ride and choose not to use the ticket, and I shouldn’t have to give it away when I didn’t use it, so there’s no situation in which I should have to let a cast member take my ticket.”

When guests who had won tickets began using this logical loophole to bring the queue at Expedition Everest (and, soon, other attractions) to a crawl, Disney realized they had to do something. The first thing they did was stop FASTPASS machines from giving out more tickets. The second thing they did was quickly inform cast members not to mention to guests that if the park is closing they could use their ticket to “go back in time” to just before the park closed and take another ride, then do it again, and again, and again, possibly keeping attractions open long into the night.

And the trouble doesn’t stop there. “We forgot to put expiration dates on the things,” said a suicidal-looking member of the team that brainstormed the Sands of Time promotion. “At this point, there’s nothing that can be done. We may have ruined Disney parks permanently.”

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Extreme hotel makeover!

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Disneyland Resort’s Disneyland Hotel is in the midst of a gigantic makeover, significant details of which were recently released to a Disneyland fan base hungry for news that had nothing to do with water shows.

The Disneyland Hotel’s new theme will be “Disneyland Nostalgia” (replacing the current theme, “Things Named After the Former Owner’s Wife”).

As part of the new theme, the current Peter Pan pool overlay will be removed and replaced with a Jungle Cruise theme, allowing guests to, for the first time, actually bathe with the elephants, swim past the back side of water, and shoot at hippos! A “Great Swims with Mr. Lincoln” kiddie pool will be created in between the current pool and the waterfall slash koi ponds before the latter is demolished. The koi ponds will be completely reimagined as a small water park with slides created from the old Mark I monorails that have been sitting behind the Team Disney building for decades. The slides will be almost as tall as the monorails were long — some 60 feet — and will still have their seats and other interior fixtures intact, promising a wild, thrilling ride! For younger kids, a smaller, closer-to-the-ground Viewliner slide will also be available.

Worried about the fish that will be displaced by the new water park area? Don’t be! The koi will have a home in the new attraction. There will even be a fish ladder for those daring fish that want to give the slides a try!

The hotel’s three towers (Bonita, Conchita, and Chiquita) will be renamed for Disneyland lands and appropriately themed. The Toontown tower is being remodeled and redecorated so that the rooms and public areas have no flat surfaces or right angles. The Tomorrowland tower will feature omnidirectional turbolifts instead of elevators, and boast rooms with holographic television, sonic showers, and artificially intelligent lighting. And in the Frontierland tower, guests will be able to “rough it” in rooms with horsehair beds, dirt floors, and no maid service.

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Getting an annual pass is getting easier!

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Disney’s California Adventure has opened an annual-pass processing center in the location of the old Superstar Limo garage in the Hollywood Backlot area, to help take some of the pressure off of Gerty — the woman who processes annual passes at the Plaza Pavilion in Disneyland. Said a Disneyland spokesperson on condition of remaining imaginary, “Gerty has been processing these things all by herself for some 30 years, and we thought it would be more respectful to build another processing center than to risk insulting her by hiring another cast member.”

In addition, the new stroller-rental facility will feature an annual-pass processing center when it opens a little later this month, and pass processing will be added in additional under-used park locations, such as DCA’s “San Francisco” area and Disneyland’s Pooh attraction.

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Going wild!

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Reports are in that new “Go wild in both parks” banners have been unveiled in Downtown Disney, and speculation is running rampant about what they might mean. Current theories include:

  • Introduction of roaming wild animals into the Disneyland Resort
  • An extreme expansion of the Jungle Cruise
  • Something to do with Joseph R. Francis buying tons of Disney stock in after-hours trading last weekend

If you’ve got a theory, we want to hear it!

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Remy Robot

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

An actual-size animatronic of Remy, the title character of Pixar’s Ratatouille, has been making surprise visits to Disneyland Hotel’s California Grill over the last week or so. The animatronic character scurries back and forth to the kitchen and occasionally squeeks at guests, presumably under the control of a hidden Imagineer.

Some guests were so convinced that the figure was real that they insist it count not have been a robot, and their feelings were somewhat justified when it was learned that the figure’s final appearance coincided with a visit from Ajax Exterminators.

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Monorail Red Finally Running

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

The new Mark VII Monorail — known as “Monorail Red” to those of us who are tired of Disney naming all of their monorails “Mark” — is finally running at Disneyland.

The monorail was plagued by design problems from the start. The first monorail delivered by German manufacturer Der Wonderkin Monorailverks was underpowered, hard to control, low capacity, and H0 scale — not at all what Disney had in mind. Specifications were completely revised, fleshed out from a single sentence (“A cool new red one”) to more than 500 pages and an entirely new vehicle was fabricated.

When the new model was delivered, it looked great but proved to be almost as problematic as its predecessor. Said Disneyland monorail roundhouse supervisor Monorail Supervisor Fred, “We just couldn’t understand why so many poor design decisions were made by the vendor. Why was the steering wheel so big? Why was it oblong? And why did a monorail have a steering wheel in the first place? It was a mess. The cabins had no air conditioning and the windows barely opened so the cabins got suffocatingly stuffy almost immediately, and that’s when we found out that the designers had done all their research on west-coast American weather by visiting Seattle. Not very diligent if you ask me, but I will say that the Mark VII has excellent rain protection.”

The pluses of the new design — such as a top speed of more than 600 MPH and sleeping berths for long journeys — were not enough to convince Disney that Monorail Red would be show ready without significant modifications. The problems became such a joke at Disney that Pixar even included a passing scene of a broken red monorail near the beginning of their hit movie WALL*E.

So how did Disney finally get Monorail Red up and running? By taking matters in their own hands, that’s how. Said Disneyland’s chief railstock engineer Chief Railstock Engineer Brunhilda, “It was nothing you couldn’t fix with a chainsaw, duct tape, and a little paint.”

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The Pin Vault

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Disney pin traders will be pleased with the latest addition to Disneyland Resort’s Downtown Disney — the Disney Pin Vault (captured just before opening by our Official DisneyLies Photo Correspondent).

The Pin Vault

This gigantic store has the largest collection of rare, vintage, hard-to-find, one-of-a-kind, signed, dangled, pin-on-pin, flocked, lenticular, light-up, animated, jumbo, micro, 3D, audio, holographic, precious-metal, scented, hallucinogenic, holy grail, POH, and self-aware collectible Disney pins on the planet. Says store manager Cloisinné Baubél, “Pin aficionados have been known to become excited to the point that they need medical attention when they see our collection. Our hand-selected pins cost from as little as $25 for a simple retired cast-member lanyard pin to as much as $12,000 for a pin encasing a relic such as a fragment of Walt Disney’s true desk. Many people ask if we trade pins and we answer that we do happily trade — for cold, hard cash.”

The store’s gigantic vault-like front door is in fact the real thing. It operates on a time lock, so guests must enter the store promptly when it opens at 10 a.m., and cannot leave until the door again opens at 5 p.m. Serious pin collectors only. No food, drinks, scrappers, or strollers.

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New Emergency Procedures

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

Disneyland has always maintained a focus on safety (aside from a brief period beginning in the mid ’90s). Even so, park management thinks that guests are not doing enough to keep their part of the safety bargain.

“You have no idea how unsafe guests can be,” said Perry Winkle, fictional Disneyland management professional. “They dance atop trash cans, put their kids on stilts to get them past height restrictions, and barely get out of the way when chunks fly off of insect-themed parade vehicles. Despite the safety benefits, it would be cost prohibitive to relieve the park of guests. That is why we have begun the Disneyland Safety Performance Initiative.”

This initiative involves teaching cast members to work safety information into their characters. Haunted Mansion cast members, for example, already use safety-related dialog (e.g., “Drag your body to the dead center of the room, or the unstoppable closing doors may leave half your corpse behind.”)

Our Official Disney Lies Photo Correspondent caught sight of a pair of newly trained Indiana Jones cast members perform the “if you’re not at least this tall, you could end up like this” skit.

Disneyland Indiana Jones attraction height demo demonstration

Hopefully, this will make us all much safer!

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Hidden Mickeys!

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Disney fans love searching the parks for hidden Mickeys (HMs). Our Official DisneyLies Photo Correspondent is no different, and she sent us photos of a number of HMs from a recent visit to Disneyland Resort.

New Orleans Square hidden Mickey

This HM, found in New Orleans Square, has unusually small ears. We assume it is supposed to represent a young Mickey Mouse.

Disney’s California Adventure hidden Mickey

This HM, from Disney’s California Adventure, is of the “exploded Mickey” type. Exploded Mickeys can be found in a number of DCA locations, and Disneymaniacs are hopeful that, during the extensive demolition that will preceed upcoming DCA improvements, they will get to see an exploded Mickey actually explode!

Indiana Jones hidden Mickey?

Do you see the HM in this photo from the Indiana Jones attraction? No? Here, we’ll crop, rotate, stretch, and enhance the photo. See it now?

Indiana Jones hidden Minnie detail

If you answered yes, then you’re wrong! That’s not a hidden Mickey, but a hidden Minnie, and they don’t count. Heck, it doesn’t even look that much like Minnie (it’s all blurry, distorted, and full of compression noise). While we’re at it, the hidden Eyeore in this attraction doesn’t count either, so stop sending us photos.

That’s it for this time. Thanks, Official DisneyLies Photo Correspondent!

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Sweater Day

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

In honor of what would have been the 80th birthday of Fred “Mr.” Rogers, cast members at all U.S. Disney parks and facilities will be wearing sweaters. Cast members will also be required to sing a happy little song in the morning when they get their sweaters out of their lockers.

Guests are invited to join in the fun by wearing sweaters and sneakers, avoiding the use of big words, and not discussing their violent past as a Navy Seal.

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