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Royal Redecorating
After you watch the walkthrough tour on either
the Sleeping Beauty DVD or Blu-Ray disc...
The other new attraction coming for Christmas is the new Sleeping Beauty
Castle walkthrough. While the marketing department would have liked to have had
this open for the official kickoff of the Holiday season this Friday, the
realities of major construction in a 53 year old wood framed building that just
happens to be a national icon has meant some unforeseen delays to the project.
...you'll see a yellow Fleur de
Lis icon appear on the menu. Clicking it will...
The hope now is that they can be complete by Thanksgiving at the earliest, or
the peak Christmas weeks at the latest. Although there's also the possibility
that they might preview it during the Walt Disney Company Christmas Parties held
December 7th and 8th for Anaheim Cast Members and other
Company employees from Glendale and Burbank. Those parties are always attended
by Bob Iger and John Lasseter, with Bob passing out candy canes at the park
entrance and posing for pictures with giddy CM's and Burbank employees. It would
be a nice debut for the attraction that is tied so closely with the Blu-Ray/DVD
release of the film that Burbank has been working on for several years.
...take you to a
reproduction of the fancy preview brochure they used to give
visitors at the exit the first two years the walkthrough was
open.
Regardless of the exact date, the opening is now just weeks away and visitors
to the walk-through should find the tiny attraction simultaneously charming and
stunning. This is the type of 1950's quaint experience only Disneyland could
offer, but with all of the money and talent thrown at it over the past year it
will seem thoroughly fresh and intriguing. Imagineers are now considering the
Sleeping Beauty Castle walkthrough to be the small but luxurious jewel
of Disney attractions, and it should be a huge hit with Disneyland fans.
More Garden Walk Talk
Speaking of luxurious, the changing plans for Disney to
invest and invade the struggling GardenWalk mall on Katella continue to evolve.
Regular readers know the long saga of these two proposed hotels that Disney has
yet to formally acknowledge. The current state of the project is in a bit of
limbo now due to the need of the hotel developers, Prospera Hotels of Orange,
CA, to receive some tax breaks from the city in order to finance the 4 star
amenities that Disney wants to offer as the operators. Prospera can secure the
funding to develop a 3 star property, but the vision Jay Rasulo has for these
hotels is of a 4 star quality that will operate like a Disney version of a hip
and urban W Hotel or a lavish Ritz Carlton property.
Without getting dragged
down into local politics, the Anaheim City Council is struggling to offer the
same types of tax breaks that got all of those new hotels built down Harbor
Blvd. in Garden Grove, and since it has the name Disney attached to the project
the political will isn't there to offer up tax breaks to a big company like
that. The frozen credit markets are really what threw a monkey wrench into this
plan, and the drama with the Anaheim City Council hasn't helped, but the project
is still high up on Jay Rasulo's wish list and hopefully an agreement can be
reached soon with a formal Disney announcement shortly thereafter.
In the meantime, Disney is going full speed ahead with plans to develop
property they do own, such as the sprawling surface parking lot across Disney
Way from GardenWalk (shown below). The green light has been given to that project, and a
massive multi-level parking structure is now slated to open on that site by late
2011. The entrances to the structure, expected to be nearly as large as the 10,000 space Mickey
and Friends parking structure, will be fed directly by the existing Santa Ana
Freeway ramps that lead to Disney Way.
Those freeway ramps were designed 12
years ago to lead to a parking structure anyway, and the current setup that has
them leading to minor surface streets is just a temporary design that ended up
lasting several years more than either Disney or CalTrans had imagined they
would. This new structure will end up being the Resort entry point for the
majority of cars arriving on the Santa Ana Freeway from the south, while Mickey
and Friends will become the garage for cars arriving from the north.
This was the basic parking master plan that had been a part of Anaheim Resort
planning since the early 1990's when Westcot was being proposed. There's still
no word yet on what the structure will be called, or what the city of Anaheim
will let Disney get away with in regards to trams or transportation from the
structure to the parks across Harbor Blvd. (PeopleMovers anyone?) But the structure itself is now a go,
and if people have to walk across Harbor Blvd. at first Disney has decided to
bite the bullet and build it since the parking capacity will be so desperately
needed in just a couple years time.
With hundreds of spaces already taken from
the Timon lot for World of Color construction this Christmas, and hundreds more
spaces to be removed early next year for Cars Land construction, Disneyland
visitors arriving on busy days this Holiday season will likely be sent to the
Anaheim Convention Center and be asked to walk across Katella to get to a Timon
lot tram that can take them to the main entrance.
Parking may simply be a
constant headache on busy days for the next several years until the new
structure is built, and it would be wise for AP's to get used to heading to
Mickey and Friends first and try to get there early on busy days.
Malls & Motels
The new parking structure project slots in with two other projects that are
moving quickly through the approval and funding process, and that's an expansion
of Downtown Disney past Rainforest Cafe and ESPNZone by 2011, as well as a
fourth hotel tower going up at the Disneyland Hotel. You'll remember the plans
to completely gut and refurbish each of the three 1960's towers one by one, with
300+ rooms being taken offline with each tower refurbishment project that was
supposed to take 9 to 12 months each. But after the initial inspection and
reports came in on how out of date the buildings were, it was decided that
nothing short of complete demolition could be considered for the Disneyland
Hotel towers.
So how do you deal with losing a thousand rooms for a period of years while
the hotel is rebuilt? The answer now is to build a fourth luxury tower with
hundreds of additional rooms, and once that is complete close two towers for
demolition to be replaced with a second tower, and then finally remove the third
tower to replace it with a new structure that has more rooms plus a new
conference center and major hotel amenities. This is a plan that will take years
to complete, and it's something that has never been tried before in an operating
Disney resort. But the timeline has the first new tower opening for guests by
early 2012.
Timekeeper
Before Anaheim gets to the banner years of 2011 and 2012 however, there's the
not so minor impact of Disneyland's 55th anniversary. We've already
told you about the new Wonder parade headed to Disneyland for the 55th, and Mr.
Lincoln will have some new friends join him on the stage. Do you see how all of those additional Resort projects and additions line up
nicely with that DCA timeline we outlined for you in the last update? The new
parking structure and expanded Downtown Disney will be done by the time the new
DCA entrance and Little Mermaid ride start bringing in more daily visitors to
the Resort. And then the first luxury tower of the new Disneyland Hotel will be
completed in time for the 2012 debut of the West Coast Disney Cruise Line, not
to mention the massive new Cars Land expansion that same year.
The draining continued on Sunday.
The remake of
Paradise Pier in 2009 is not expected to do anything for DCA attendance, and
even the marketing goons realize there's not much they can work with on that for
'09. The debut of World of Color will be a big production to be sure, but it's
planned to be folded in to the larger marketing message of Disneyland's 55th
anniversary, and it's really being positioned as a way to increase the daily
length of stay for DCA rather than drive much additional attendance for the
Resort as a whole. It's the two new E Tickets opening back to back, Little
Mermaid in 2011 and Radiator Springs Racers in 2012, in addition to the added
area development and eye candy in the main entrance and Cars Land that will be
hyped in an attempt to increase Resort attendance.
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