Disneyland Part I

This is not a blog on how my girlfriend and I immersed ourselves in the Disneyland Resort this past March. This is about all the things that are great or unknown or weird variety of things you can experience yourself. If you’re looking for a guide to Hidden Mickey spotting, Amazon has six or seven books on the subject. This is for the novice. The average person. People that probably hate Disneyland and need to throw up their hands and embrace the magic.

Let’s start in Adventureland. Did you know that this area’s former E-ticket ride, the Jungle Cruise, is the only non-Fantasyland ride to survive from Opening Day in 1955 to the present. Did you care? Me neither.
Since 1993, this particular land has housed the best Disneyland attraction ever: The Indiana Jones Adventure. The ride is so immense that, once you board your vehicle, you are actually outside the park’s berm, housed in a building that can’t even be detected by Google Earth. There’s also about a quarter mile’s worth of queue, some of the best and most atmospheric ever. Throughout the dimly-lit section of caves and temples there are dozens of phrases in a bizarre heiroglyphic language. Today it’s impossible to decipher them simply because the majority of the phrases are advertisements for AT&T, the former sponsor of the attraction. Back during the attraction’s salad days, decoder cards were handed out towards the entrance, which also features a prop Mercedes used in Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are two central illusions during this attraction, both of which are ingenious.
We shall start with the first thing you actually see in the attraction: the “three” temple doors are a bluff. There is actually only one door. If you look at the track in front of you, it’s the easiest illusion to spoil, as you may notice that there is no track leading to any other door than the one you enter. The trick is elemental: three sets of doors that simply move to the left and right for each oncoming vehicle combined with lighting effects.
The second is the most impressive: the Raiders boulder. The scene is thus. Your troop transport enters a pitch-black cave with an Animatronic Indy (who neither looks nor sounds like Harrison Ford) hanging from the ceiling. As light enters the cave, you notice a giant boulder coming your way. The illusion begins when your car appears to be moving in reverse, simply because it’s not. The room is moving toward you. The giant boulder is simply attached to a stick and, with the aid of strobe lights, appears to almost strike your car. The final scene in the ride, that of Indy and the defeated boulder, is embarassing in its cheapness. As the cars enter the load/unload section, an average eye can see a giant mechanical apparatus sticking out of Indy’s back, with wires aplenty.

The Jungle Cruise is the most well-known attractions in theme park history, so I’ll only cover my favorite part of the excursion: the infamous Schweitzer Falls, of course named after Dr. Albert Falls.

The next area is New Orleans Square, the most meticulously designed pre-Toontown area. This area houses both Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion, two more rides that take place off-property. Pirates was recently revamped following the shitty Bruckheimer trilogy, essentially adding a plot to one of the more influential non-linear attractions ever. The new version adds lots of dialogue involving hunting down Jack Sparrow, who barely appears in the attraction. Scenes that were once designed around environment and tone (like the drowning or the wench auction) now have random Sparrow references from very different-sounding pirates, ruining some of the best moments. Also, the attraction features a digital projection of Davy Jones, which doesn’t make sense simply because the ride itself is not supernatural. There are lots of skeletons around, but none of them move. So what the fuck is a giant squid monster doing here? Did he get lost en route to the Submarine Voyage?

The Haunted Mansion has a few cool tricks. First of all, there’s nothing inside the house. When you leave the stretching room (a complicated slowly-descending elevator with a scrim ceiling), you are underground. What’s inside the house? I’d love to find out. Also, the show building for the Mansion is actually next to the show building for Splash Mountain, so much so that the ride operators for both attractions occasionally switch rides on a whim. The outside of the attraction features a horse-drawn hearse without a horse. Some morons on the Internet claim that it was Brigham Young’s hearse, but in actuality it was purchased in 1991 as part of an Indiana Jones stunt show that never passed the development phase. The actual ghosts in the attraction are Animatronics in front of a large pane of glass. Shining light on these figures on-and-off makes them appear and disappear. In fact, any time you see ghosts that de-materialize, look very carefully, because all of these scenes will take place between a very large pane of glass. My favorite little detail? Towards the end of the graveyard scene, you will notice a large woman yodeling in a Viking uniform. What’s the explanation? According to the designing Imagineers, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.

Part II on the way...