Disney Mark 2
Feb. 13th, 2007 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenMore Disney World tidbits! Feel free to contribute your own observations if you've been recently, too!
-I have determined that no matter how short (the Norway ride) or educational ("Living with the Land") or annoying ("it's a small world") the ride is, I will always be a sucker for a boat ride at an amusement park. There's something about gliding along on a guided track of water that is just way too much fun! Even when I got sprayed in the face on the log flume (three times!), I was beside myself with joy.
-Speaking of, the log flume--"Splash Mountain"--is terrible fun. Disney, having thirty billion times more money than anyone else in the amusement park game, really adds a bit of fun to the riding-along-waiting-for-the-big-drop bit to a log flume ride. The big drop itself is set up to look like you plunge into a crop of giant thorns, and before that there is a story with Brer Fox and Brer Bear going after Brer Rabbit. Brer Rabbit, caught, begs only that they not throw him into the briar patch. Just as your car tips up to the edge of the big plunge, you hear the dippy, dopey bear go, "Briar patch?" And then fall into one. That's pretty clever, actually.
-Guided tours are THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE. The Jungle Safari boat ride was choc-a-block with puns and stupidity. MGM has a "Movie Tour" that takes you through the "sets" of famous movies, many of which are so old and not at all kid-friendly that I suppose this would be their token "adult" ride. They'd do better to stick with the rollercoasters and freefall rides. The Movie Tour featured actors pretending to shoot it out with animatronic dummies, puns--my God, PUNS!--and absolutely nothing to offer anyone on the ride who'd not had a full lobotomy when it came to an ability to appreciate movies.
The one--one thing I enjoyed was going through the Alien set (you heard me; at Disney) and seeing the alien peer down menacingly. That set was successfully creepy, with the acid-burned holes dripping goo, the lights flashing, the alien hissing (and never mind the dummy Ripley which looked more like a retarded Mary-Louise Parker than Sigourney Weaver). Alas, the alien didn't pop out right in front of us. Still, I did like that part (mostly because the guide fucking shut up in "terror" as we went through).
-I feel embarrassed for celebrities pretending to act as characters in Disney rides. The Rockin' Rollercoaster was the most fun ride I went on, but the five or so minutes they make you spend in the "recording booth" with Aerosmith beforehand was excruciating. I'm spoiling you, but the skit involves them bullying their "manager" into giving you "backstage passes" and "a ride" to "the concert." I think Steven Tyler does a better job acting in Wayne's World 2. Other notable moments of awful acting in a Disney Ride: Eric Idle in the "Journey into Imagination" ride, the people pretending to be zapped in the Twilight Zone "Tower of Terror" ride, anyone repeating a role in another Disney film for the ride from the same feature (notable exception: Pirates of the Caribbean, where Bill Nighy, Geoffrey Rush, and Johnny Depp all manage to salvage dignity by saying as little as possible through animatronic mouths), and outdated "celebrity" Bill Nye the Science Guy. To be fair, the ride with Ellen DeGeneres wasn't awful where she was in it--she is genuinely funny and self-depricating enough to make the schtick stick--but you feel it's just wrong that the most anyone will remember Bill Nye for will be this out-dated energy fable and that Jamie Lee Curtis is anywhere near the thing. Alex Trebek, you're still awesome any day, but that ride made me miss the 'stache.
-The best place to eat within the Disney sphere is at the World Showcase in EPCOT. Disney does year-long exchanges where people from the respective countries featured come over and work at the park. The food and dining experience is transplanted and nearly authentic. We had a fabulous time in Italy for dinner, and our waitress was the nicest, most excited and happy waitress I've ever seen. I dunno if she's just drinking the Disney Kool Aid or what, but the food was exquisite, the wine and drinks fabulous, and all had a good time.
Just a bit of summary there. I really had a great time overall, even though I was bone-tired every day when we were done at the park. My poor 84-year-old grandmother and mother kept up with me for two days, though the second of those was a tamer one spent mostly sitting in rides at EPCOT.
EPCOT, if you don't wait on the disgusting line for their one supposedly super ride (I didn't wait, hence 'supposedly'), has very little to actually do as an amusement park on its own. The ride in the dome has aged terribly. You can feel all the wasted space within where "new technology" back when I went on the ride as a kid has become outdated, even exposed as laughably impossible in the light of current scientific and engineering knowledge. This ride is about communication, yet the most that the internet, cell phones, or wi-fi get mentioned is in one line about the current ability to communicate through the air. Uh-huh. That sounds like "woo messages in the ether, man."
I remember EPCOT-as-was fairly well, and it's sad to see how it's changed. For one thing, the Land of Imagination is a joke. For all that waving your arms around to create music is fun, I miss the room that they had at the end of the Figment ride that was like a giant Spencer's Gifts, with Van der Graaf generators and light tubes and that table full of pins that you could make impressions on. The "Journey into Imagination" ride is so awful, with Figment being so in-your-face cah-raaaaaazy as to be irritating from minute one. And couldn't they have clay-mated him or something? His animated form is interacted with more poorly than the dragon from Pete's Dragon, and how old is that movie (the answer: thirty fucking years, man)? And, while Honey, I Shrunk the Audience proves that even the geekiest little kid can grow up pretty cute (Hi there!), and even though it ismore appropriate given how things have turned out, I still miss Captain EO. Can't help it, I do.
And another thing: they still haven't opened "The Wonders of the Body." This was basically the biology/physiology land, and that's like gold to me. I remember loving that place. They had that slightly nauseating ride Body Wars, where you're "minimized" and explore the body from the inside (a Magic School Bus ride!). There's also the cute animated movie and animatronic stage show where you helped a small pilot navigate a teenage boy through his day as his "brain." This pavillion has been closed for years at this point. Budding biologists agree: that was a lot of fun. I think it might be closed due to debate over biological things being rather tetchy these days (I noticed that the Energy-Ellen ride used the geological age of Earth and the Big Bang, but nowhere stated that anything evolved into anything else). It might also be because the information there was easily as outdated as the ancient communication predictions for the future were.
The World Showcase is still rather fun, especially as I got margaritas there (finally, alcohol!) and another boat ride. I still wonder what the people working in each of the country pavillions think about the representation of their home country. I mean, if you were forced to wear a cheap polyester imitation of your native costume and see some famous cultural, artistic, et al things about your nation squashed together into a space smaller than a city block, how would you feel?
Oh, and before I forget? THE AMERICAN SHOWCASE AT EPCOT BLOWS DONKEYS. Further proof that, in the USA, nationalism is what happens to other countries but patriotism begins at home, the half-hour animatronics show narrated by Ben Franklin and Sam Clemens (noticeably absent: any mention of Franklin's pathological addiction to women) was painful above all else. I wanted to poke my brain out my ears so it wouldn't have to suffer this crap. My grandmother, of course, got teary-eyed. She eats that stuff up.
To the show's credit, it never tried to rape the old lies about the first Thanksgiving, but it sure did gloss over the nastier side of the immigrant experience and the most that indigenous peoples got was a quote from Chief Joseph talking about how really shitty the USA was from his point of view (he ain't just whistling Dixie, but the quote came as an abrupt stop to the show then he disappeared and there was hardly a "Oopsie" on the part of any of the other dummies thereafter, making it seem like the rudeness was on his part for interrupting the "YAY WHITE PEOPLE!" parade).
Speaking of "We love Whitey!" the Civil War discussion predictably focused on slavery as the main at-odds issue, but the hilariously awful bit was there were almost no black animatronic people in the whole thing and none during the Civil War bit. Instead, the focus was on two brothers who went to war for different sides and how the stupid racist pig Reb got killed and the virtuous, wonderful Union guy did not, but isn't it awful about what War will do to families of white people? Shocking! Meanwhile, Frederick Douglas got to ride a swamp boat. Fan-fucking-tastic.
It sounds like I didn't have fun. I did, really, it's just that the fun stuffs weren't worth blogging about as they seem like I am bragging--ha ha, I went to the bestest rollercoaster ever!--versus how much fun I have agonizing over the rest.
-I have determined that no matter how short (the Norway ride) or educational ("Living with the Land") or annoying ("it's a small world") the ride is, I will always be a sucker for a boat ride at an amusement park. There's something about gliding along on a guided track of water that is just way too much fun! Even when I got sprayed in the face on the log flume (three times!), I was beside myself with joy.
-Speaking of, the log flume--"Splash Mountain"--is terrible fun. Disney, having thirty billion times more money than anyone else in the amusement park game, really adds a bit of fun to the riding-along-waiting-for-the-big-drop bit to a log flume ride. The big drop itself is set up to look like you plunge into a crop of giant thorns, and before that there is a story with Brer Fox and Brer Bear going after Brer Rabbit. Brer Rabbit, caught, begs only that they not throw him into the briar patch. Just as your car tips up to the edge of the big plunge, you hear the dippy, dopey bear go, "Briar patch?" And then fall into one. That's pretty clever, actually.
-Guided tours are THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE. The Jungle Safari boat ride was choc-a-block with puns and stupidity. MGM has a "Movie Tour" that takes you through the "sets" of famous movies, many of which are so old and not at all kid-friendly that I suppose this would be their token "adult" ride. They'd do better to stick with the rollercoasters and freefall rides. The Movie Tour featured actors pretending to shoot it out with animatronic dummies, puns--my God, PUNS!--and absolutely nothing to offer anyone on the ride who'd not had a full lobotomy when it came to an ability to appreciate movies.
The one--one thing I enjoyed was going through the Alien set (you heard me; at Disney) and seeing the alien peer down menacingly. That set was successfully creepy, with the acid-burned holes dripping goo, the lights flashing, the alien hissing (and never mind the dummy Ripley which looked more like a retarded Mary-Louise Parker than Sigourney Weaver). Alas, the alien didn't pop out right in front of us. Still, I did like that part (mostly because the guide fucking shut up in "terror" as we went through).
-I feel embarrassed for celebrities pretending to act as characters in Disney rides. The Rockin' Rollercoaster was the most fun ride I went on, but the five or so minutes they make you spend in the "recording booth" with Aerosmith beforehand was excruciating. I'm spoiling you, but the skit involves them bullying their "manager" into giving you "backstage passes" and "a ride" to "the concert." I think Steven Tyler does a better job acting in Wayne's World 2. Other notable moments of awful acting in a Disney Ride: Eric Idle in the "Journey into Imagination" ride, the people pretending to be zapped in the Twilight Zone "Tower of Terror" ride, anyone repeating a role in another Disney film for the ride from the same feature (notable exception: Pirates of the Caribbean, where Bill Nighy, Geoffrey Rush, and Johnny Depp all manage to salvage dignity by saying as little as possible through animatronic mouths), and outdated "celebrity" Bill Nye the Science Guy. To be fair, the ride with Ellen DeGeneres wasn't awful where she was in it--she is genuinely funny and self-depricating enough to make the schtick stick--but you feel it's just wrong that the most anyone will remember Bill Nye for will be this out-dated energy fable and that Jamie Lee Curtis is anywhere near the thing. Alex Trebek, you're still awesome any day, but that ride made me miss the 'stache.
-The best place to eat within the Disney sphere is at the World Showcase in EPCOT. Disney does year-long exchanges where people from the respective countries featured come over and work at the park. The food and dining experience is transplanted and nearly authentic. We had a fabulous time in Italy for dinner, and our waitress was the nicest, most excited and happy waitress I've ever seen. I dunno if she's just drinking the Disney Kool Aid or what, but the food was exquisite, the wine and drinks fabulous, and all had a good time.
Just a bit of summary there. I really had a great time overall, even though I was bone-tired every day when we were done at the park. My poor 84-year-old grandmother and mother kept up with me for two days, though the second of those was a tamer one spent mostly sitting in rides at EPCOT.
EPCOT, if you don't wait on the disgusting line for their one supposedly super ride (I didn't wait, hence 'supposedly'), has very little to actually do as an amusement park on its own. The ride in the dome has aged terribly. You can feel all the wasted space within where "new technology" back when I went on the ride as a kid has become outdated, even exposed as laughably impossible in the light of current scientific and engineering knowledge. This ride is about communication, yet the most that the internet, cell phones, or wi-fi get mentioned is in one line about the current ability to communicate through the air. Uh-huh. That sounds like "woo messages in the ether, man."
I remember EPCOT-as-was fairly well, and it's sad to see how it's changed. For one thing, the Land of Imagination is a joke. For all that waving your arms around to create music is fun, I miss the room that they had at the end of the Figment ride that was like a giant Spencer's Gifts, with Van der Graaf generators and light tubes and that table full of pins that you could make impressions on. The "Journey into Imagination" ride is so awful, with Figment being so in-your-face cah-raaaaaazy as to be irritating from minute one. And couldn't they have clay-mated him or something? His animated form is interacted with more poorly than the dragon from Pete's Dragon, and how old is that movie (the answer: thirty fucking years, man)? And, while Honey, I Shrunk the Audience proves that even the geekiest little kid can grow up pretty cute (Hi there!), and even though it ismore appropriate given how things have turned out, I still miss Captain EO. Can't help it, I do.
And another thing: they still haven't opened "The Wonders of the Body." This was basically the biology/physiology land, and that's like gold to me. I remember loving that place. They had that slightly nauseating ride Body Wars, where you're "minimized" and explore the body from the inside (a Magic School Bus ride!). There's also the cute animated movie and animatronic stage show where you helped a small pilot navigate a teenage boy through his day as his "brain." This pavillion has been closed for years at this point. Budding biologists agree: that was a lot of fun. I think it might be closed due to debate over biological things being rather tetchy these days (I noticed that the Energy-Ellen ride used the geological age of Earth and the Big Bang, but nowhere stated that anything evolved into anything else). It might also be because the information there was easily as outdated as the ancient communication predictions for the future were.
The World Showcase is still rather fun, especially as I got margaritas there (finally, alcohol!) and another boat ride. I still wonder what the people working in each of the country pavillions think about the representation of their home country. I mean, if you were forced to wear a cheap polyester imitation of your native costume and see some famous cultural, artistic, et al things about your nation squashed together into a space smaller than a city block, how would you feel?
Oh, and before I forget? THE AMERICAN SHOWCASE AT EPCOT BLOWS DONKEYS. Further proof that, in the USA, nationalism is what happens to other countries but patriotism begins at home, the half-hour animatronics show narrated by Ben Franklin and Sam Clemens (noticeably absent: any mention of Franklin's pathological addiction to women) was painful above all else. I wanted to poke my brain out my ears so it wouldn't have to suffer this crap. My grandmother, of course, got teary-eyed. She eats that stuff up.
To the show's credit, it never tried to rape the old lies about the first Thanksgiving, but it sure did gloss over the nastier side of the immigrant experience and the most that indigenous peoples got was a quote from Chief Joseph talking about how really shitty the USA was from his point of view (he ain't just whistling Dixie, but the quote came as an abrupt stop to the show then he disappeared and there was hardly a "Oopsie" on the part of any of the other dummies thereafter, making it seem like the rudeness was on his part for interrupting the "YAY WHITE PEOPLE!" parade).
Speaking of "We love Whitey!" the Civil War discussion predictably focused on slavery as the main at-odds issue, but the hilariously awful bit was there were almost no black animatronic people in the whole thing and none during the Civil War bit. Instead, the focus was on two brothers who went to war for different sides and how the stupid racist pig Reb got killed and the virtuous, wonderful Union guy did not, but isn't it awful about what War will do to families of white people? Shocking! Meanwhile, Frederick Douglas got to ride a swamp boat. Fan-fucking-tastic.
It sounds like I didn't have fun. I did, really, it's just that the fun stuffs weren't worth blogging about as they seem like I am bragging--ha ha, I went to the bestest rollercoaster ever!--versus how much fun I have agonizing over the rest.
