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...Pixar East, School Daze (continued) Meanwhile, the Florida team for no apparent reason came up with a small static stage plopped down in the middle of Tomorrowland draped with a Wildcats banner, and had just four performers that struggled to get a rather painful ten minute show off the ground (photo below). I saw this mess on my October visit there last year and it was one of the sparks for my column on just how stale the Orlando resort was getting.
Anyway, Al Weiss and Jay Rasulo visited Anaheim last October shortly after first seeing the High School Musical show in Orlando. They took one look at the dramatically different DCA offering and immediately instructed the Florida team to prepare an exact duplicate of the California version, this time for MGM instead of Tomorrowland. While the Floridians may have a bit of a different look than the Californians, they at least got the same rolling stage, costumes and overall scale of the superior Anaheim production. Florida visitors and High School Musical fans may send their thank you cards to Team Disney Anaheim.
Super-Mega-Colossal! Before that new Pixar entertainment can show up in DCA however, there's going to be some rather painful work to be done there. In preparation for the new super-mega-colossal Wonderful World of Color lagoon show, the water in Paradise Bay will be drained completely for several months starting in January. If anyone dropped their sunglasses into it over the last six years, now will be the time to go find them.
While the lagoon is dry they'll be going in and adding all the plumbing and infrastructure, as well as prepping the area to handle the barges and watercraft to be used for the show. Much of it was originally planned for DCA's lagoon as recently as 1998, but was cut by Paul Pressler and his finance guy Byron Pollitt by 1999 as an unnecessary investment in a park that was sure to be a big hit without any silly and expensive water show needed. Let's not discuss how much more this will end up costing now, as opposed to how much they would have saved by doing it when it was first constructed. At this same time they'll also begin work on a dock and equipment for a planned lagoon boat ride that will have its loading area at the base of the Sun Wheel. The Sun Wheel queue, certainly one of DCA's ugliest (in a park with some really ugly queues that make it a real contest), will also be reworked and dressed up to match the new Victorian era theme that Paradise Pier will be getting over the next couple of years.
Planning continues on the Wonderful World of Color show, and this is truly going to be a super-mega-colossal event if both Steve Davison and Lasseter get their way with the bean counters. There's some hesitation right now as the nightly price tag to produce and present this show is currently running at nearly triple the price tag of Fantasmic. When you've got 40,000+ people inside Disneyland at show time, a $30,000 show like Fantasmic is justifiable. But when you've got a park like DCA that often has less than 10,000 people left after sundown on even the busiest days, the $75,000+ super-mega-colossal per show budget that Wonderful World of Color would require is much harder to justify. Of course there's the argument that to get more people to stay in DCA longer than four or five hours you are going to have to offer them something worth their while, but as you long-time readers know that's not the way bean counters think. A show as super-mega-colossal as World of Color is planned to be would be that draw, but the finance guys consider that putting the cart in front of the horse. It's sounding like a broken record (or a dropped iPod, for you younger post-vinyl readers), but there's good 'ol Lasseter again providing the political clout to push this through thus far. We'll have more about the World of Color once the final super-mega-colossal scope (and of course super-mega-colossal budget) is nailed down, but with Davison's track record what it is, this one could empty out the Fantasmic terraces if TDA plays its cards right. Now if there was only somewhere on that flat no-so-super-mega-colossal boardwalk to put 15,000 people so they could actually see it... Spot the Plywood While were on the subject of DCA, on the last day of the Grizzly River Run rehab earlier this month the Imagineers went ahead and ran a test to determine placement of animatronics along the Grizzly River flume. They set up some plywood cutouts along the flume representing the seven groups of creatures that are planned for this ride, and then hopped into the rafts to see how easy it was to spot them as they floated by. This way they could confirm strategic areas along the flume where the rafts float past at a slower speed, such as the approach to the first drop where there's currently a kayak and some camping equipment on the right side of the flume.
The test was considered a big success, and WDI is now confident that adding up to seven vignettes of Natures Wonderland-style animatronic animal show scenes will play well to the audience in the rafts as they drift by. Grizzly's modern theming as an abandoned mining area taken over by young extreme sports enthusiasts would be ditched along with all of the other contemporary references DCA was originally saddled with. With the addition of animatronic wildlife, the raft ride would blend in with the early 1900's National Park theme that will envelop that entire section of DCA. Construction Photo Break! You're right, it's a long update today, and guess what - we're only halfway through it! Let's refresh those well worn peepers of yours with a whirlwind photo tour (mostly thanks to the intrepid David "Darkbeer" Michael) of all the frenzied construction going on at the Disneyland resort right now.
Work continues on the
Pirate's Lair overhaul of Tom Sawyer Island. The
The suspension bridge area is seen from both sides of the island (above and below).
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