Thursday, April 1, 2010

Disneyland Trip Report


Hey everyone, I just got back from Disneyland! Here's a quick trip report on a few of the changes that had taken place since my last visit.

I was surprised to find out that Star Tours had closed....for good. At first I thought it was just for the installation of the long rumored new film and special effects, but it turns out that a decision was made to just close it permanently and convert the queue into a clothing store. An cast member also informed me, that "brown" is going to become the primary color of Tomorrowland once again.


Over in Critter Country, I noticed they were using redesigned ride vehicles for Splash Mt. The new logs now hold only three people at a time. Unfortunately, this change has cut down ride capacity quite a bit.


In Fantasyland, the characters from the soon to be released animated film, "The Princess and the Pickle" were greeting guests. That's Susie Sandwich there on the right. She's the princess' sidekick in the film, at least until.....SPOILER ALERT!.....she gets eaten by the evil Pickle King.


Upon entering the Opera House on Main St., I learned about an upcoming change to Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. The slide show sequence featuring the family with the "two brothers" that served in the Civil War, will be removed and replaced with the audio-animatronic family from the "Two Brothers" segment of The American Adventure attraction at Epcot.

They will continue to use the "Two Brothers" song for this segment, but the soundtrack will be rerecorded using a different artist. While a final decision hasn't been made yet, these are the artists they have narrowed the selection down to:







This next version is the one that is most likely to be used, but Disney would ask The Pet Shop Boys to come in and mix their vocals into the track, to give the song a little more of an 80's pop vibe, since "Captain EO" with it's 1980's music soundtrack is so popular right now:





There was talk for a while however, of just replacing the entire Lincoln show with a computer animated 3-D movie. Here is the full version of that film which had already been completed, when the decision was made to scrap it and just add the audio-animatronic family to the existing show:





Oh, and if you get over to Disneyland, make sure you check out the new Construction Wall Maze attraction over at "the other park." It's a real "E" ticket!


6 comments:

Daveland said...

Wish I'd been there for that trip to Dland—excellent post!

Snow White Archive said...

Hilarious post! Can't wait to see "The Princess and the Pickle" ;)

Vintage Disneyland Tickets said...

I love it, dang I need to get to the park soon to see all these exciting changes...

The two brothers videos are killing me, I actually watched all three, so do I win something? Who is the female singer in the 3rd video, I kinda like that one?

TokyoMagic! said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
TokyoMagic! said...

Thanks, Dave and "Snow White"!

VDT, You do deserve some sort of prize if you watched all the videos until the end! That third singer is Dusty Springfield. She had a pretty big career in the sixties and then had sort of a "comeback" in the '80's singing "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" with the Pet Shop Boys.

Dan Alexander said...

Ha ha!

I'm trying to figure out if that animated movie was made using the computer game "The Sims."