February 3rd, 2010
Best
- Enchanted Tiki Room: It’s got pineapple snacks for sale, a floor show, a bathroom, and its own weather. Why would you ever need to leave?
- Bengal Barbecue: Try the tender, juicy, Tiki Bird Stick.
- Indiana Jones Adventure: An awesome ride for people who have absolutely no pre-existing medical conditions whatsoever.
- Restrooms: There are three restrooms within 40 feet of each other. It’s like Christmas!
- Jungle Cruise: You can imagine the spiel over and over in your head and never get sick of those silly jokes!
Worst
- Jungle Cruise: I’ve got the spiel stuck in my head and feel like if I hear about the back side of water one more time I might flip out and take a skipper’s life (if I can just catch him without that hippo gun).
- Tree with a little man living in it: I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the darned thing anywhere.
- Tarzan’s Treehouse: Why isn’t he ever home? And what did he do with the Robinsons??
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February 2nd, 2010
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!
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February 2nd, 2010
In response to an announcement on the Disney and More blog about a new, highly detailed 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea model of the Nautilus, famed cephalopod promoter and occasional blogger “P. Z.” Myers has (according to a post on the always reliable “Myers is a Godless Heathen” discussion forum) issued an ultimatum to the model’s creators.
Says Myers (badly quoted from a hostile source):
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is the epitome of anti-tentacled-sea-creature propaganda. The death of a glorious giant squid is played for thrills instead of tragedy. It is such an affront to all that is decent that I can’t see how a benevolent God could possibly allow such a thing to exist. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s an Internet poll about Ceiling Cat that I have to destroy.
Personally, we at DisneyLies.com love 20,000 Leagues Below the Sea and welcome this new model (which comes complete with working ram plate — for use against imperialistic remote-control boats — and a hint of Captain Nemo’s hidden angst), but are disappointed that its perfectly detailed pipe organ was removed for use in the company’s Haunted Mansion model.
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February 1st, 2010
We wanted to get a Princess and the Frog lies page up some time before the thing was out on DVD, so here it is!
DisneyLies.com: The Princess and the Frog
Beware, it’s full of spoilers that will completely ruin the film for those of you who foolishly haven’t seen it! After you read it, be sure to leave your comments in the comments.
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February 1st, 2010
Best
- Candy canes: During the holidays, the candy store makes fresh candy canes (not for use as a medical device) while you watch.
- The Disneyland Story featuring Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln: Don’t forget to clap and sing along with “Two Brothers”!
- Main Street Cinema: The only place where you can kill an afternoon watching “Plane Crazy” on an endless loop with the sound off.
- Partners statue: It’s beautiful and inspirational (but it would have been nice if they’d spent a few more dollars and made it in color).
- Esmeralda: The fortune-telling robot machine. Last time we were there, our fortune read, “You will experience long lines and have paid for the privilege of standing in them.” Spooky!
Worst
- City Hall: Having to stand in line behind a crowd of people who claim they deserve a birthday sticker even though it’s your birthday.
- Horse-drawn trolley: No matter how hard you beg, they won’t let you ride the horse.
- Main Street Cone Shop: Who the heck wants to buy a cone?
- Refreshment Corner: They sell hot dogs, chili, and Coke, but not all in one glass. Seriously folks — get with the times!
- Locker rental: Even the biggest locker is barely large enough to store a whining child.
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January 29th, 2010
Best
- Entrance: Enter through the left-hand tunnel and snicker about the ignorant buffoons who chose the right-hand tunnel.
- Snow: At Christmas time, if you stand in just the right place, you can watch the snow fall and get a shampoo at the same time.
- Churros: They’re a food group all by themselves.
- Walk in Walt’s Footsteps Tour: It’s so cool to be able to borrow a pair of Walt Disney’s shoes, even just for a few hours.
- Cast members: By far the greatest bunch of people who have ever managed to keep a smile on their face while you tell them what some kid just threw up on.
Worst
- Parking: It used to have its own parking lot and you could walk right up to the entrance. Now, if you try and park near the entrance, people freak out and call SWAT.
- Mickey’s Toontown: There are rumors that those aren’t real mountains.
- Disneyland Railroad dinosaur diorama: Why the scientifically inaccurate animatronic dinosaurs instead of some of those neat cloned ones from Jurassic Park?
- Identity theft: The people just inside the entrance who want to scan your ticket and ask for your Zip code are fine, but the ones who want to scan your driver’s license and get you to help their rich uncle get his wealth out of Nigeria make us twitchy.
- Walt’s apartment: It’s almost as if it’s there just to taunt Disneyland fans who want to say they’ve been everywhere in the park, but know you can’t get to it without the ability to climb a brass poll while carrying a power saw.
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January 27th, 2010
Inspired by the MouseStation Podcast (which, we swear, we’re going to start listening to as soon as we can figure out how this whole “Internet” thing works), DisneyLies will be — over the next few weeks — listing its official “Best & Worst” of all things Disney. We welcome comments and suggestions, but know deep in our hearts that our choices are absolutely, positively, objectively correct.
DisneyLies Official Best & Worst: Disneyland Resort
Best
- Arriving at the resort: Special, exclusive Disneyland Drive exit from the 5 freeway carpool lane and bridge over Ball Road allow you to thumb your nose at folks stuck in traffic or stopped at stoplights while you arrive for your day of fun.
- Disney’s California Adventure: By far the best California-themed amusement park in southern California.
- Disneyland: Not enjoying Disneyland is listed in the DSM-IV as a mental disorder (severe).
- Disneyland Hotel Childcare Club: If you “forget” to pick up your kid, they only charge you a small inconvenience fee (plus postage).
- Downtown Disney performers: We like the guy who makes balloon animals while breathing fire.
Worst
- Paradise Pier Hotel Finding Nemo Pool: The shark robot and “exploding” mines scare the heck out of little kids, and the lifeguards’ jokes to parents about missing children are as funny as a crutch.
- The House of Blues: Despite what the advertising would have you believe, there’s actually almost nothing blue here.
- Downtown Disney Underground: This subterranean venue for nightclubs and restaurants is dead, even on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s like people don’t even know it’s there.
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January 26th, 2010
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.
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January 25th, 2010
Last week, a white rhino was born at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The rhino weighed 178 pounds, and although this sounds like a lot, the baby rhino is actually significantly smaller than an adult, to the great relief of its mother.
This is the eighth white rhino born at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and the park is running out of room for the things. “We can’t figure out why the females keep having babies,” said one incompetent animal-care cast member. “The males don’t do it — they’re very well behaved. We’ve asked them for advice, and they asked to be housed with the females to see what could be done, but if anything the problem has gotten worse since we did that. We’re at a complete loss. Next one that comes along goes straight on eBay.”
For your entertainment and education, here are a few white-rhino facts, directly from someone in a safari hat:
- A white rhino is a gray rhino that was born while its mother was standing too close to a pool or vat of whitewash.
- There is a famous scene in Tom Sawyer in which Tom tricks a bunch of kids to pay him to let them paint a rhino white.
- You can’t eat a white rhino. If you try, it’ll kick your butt.
- Although they are strict vegetarians (for ethical reasons), a white rhino can eat its weight in Volkswagens.
- There is an urban legend that you can stop a rhino from charging by taking away its credit card. However, if you do that, the rhino will just open a PayPal account and link it to the credit card account.
- Rhino pianist: terrible. Rhino taiko drummer: awesome!
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January 23rd, 2010
Filming has begun on the Disney’s John Carter of Mars, based on the Edgar “Rice” Burroughs novel APrincess and a Pea of Mars. Because the original novel was first serialized in 1912, producers felt that it would not necessarily connect with either modern audiences, and there were some concerns about how easy it would be to get a film about a human killing giants multi-armed green guys into theaters with the G rating it needed to draw in family audiences. To help address these concerns, Disney has reportedly made a few changes to the original story. For example:
- Instead of being a veteran of the U.S. Civil War, the film’s John Carter is a veteran NASCAR driver.
- The ten-legged, multi-tusked creature — faster than a greyhound and strong enough to rip the chest off a bull ape — that is tasked with guarding Carter will appear in the film, but it will be fuzzy and adorably clumsy, always getting into wacky situations with its silly antics.
- Mars will not be referred to as “Barsoom” (which sounds too much like “bar room”), but as “Kaboom”(which sounds all cool and “actiony”).
- Although pretty much everyone in the novel runs around semi-nude, folks will have clothes and Dejah Thoris (“Disney’s first bright-red princess!”) will be radiant in a flowing gown, even during combat.
- The 12-foot-tall warrior green Martians will be muppets. Though at first they prefer to solve their quarrels in mortal combat, this will all change when Carter teaches them basketball.
- In the novel, all intelligent Martian creatures have a certain amount of telepathic talent. Because of the difficulty of representing something so subjective in film, the Martian facility for telepathy is being replaced with a Martian tendency to break out in spontaneous song.
An interesting bit of trivia: The movie is based on the first John Carter novel, A Princess of Mars, which is now in the public domain. However, the movie’s title comes from the last book in the series which, having been published in 1964, is still under copyright. (Though Disney did not have to pay for the rights to the novel, they had to pay an enormous sum to Burroughs’ estate for the title.) If the movie is successful, the next novel — The Chariots of the Gods of Mars — will be filmed using the title of the second-to-last novel, Llana of Ggathol, with only Mister Master Mind of Mars in the middle filmed under its own name, until, finally John Carter of Mars is filmed as A Princess and a Pea of Mars, even though there’s no princess in it.
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