In addition to the amazing Forbidden Journey ride and the startlingly-good shops and restaurants of Hogsmeade, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter also retrofitted two existing rides from the Lost Continent section of the park (which is now much smaller as a result): the Flying Unicorn became Flight of the Hippogriff, and Dueling Dragons (side by side inverted roller coasters) became Dragon Challenge.
I didn’t actually ride these retrofits until just before the grand opening of the land. I also used the occasion to take more photos of Hogsmeade and Hogwarts, using my low-light lens. I therefore include all due apologies that these photos were taken some time ago, but I figured they are still relevant! I could do photo tours of Wizarding World for weeks and not feel like I’ve showed you all the details.
Let’s start with the smaller Hippogriff ride. They took out the iron unicorn figurehead at the front of the coaster, and replaced it with a wicker hippogriff—weird but true.
In the queue, a pumpkin scarecrow stands prominently, and Hagrid’s cottage stands off to one side. You see an oversized nest from the queue too. Once on the ride, though, you’ll quickly notice that’s not an empty nest—there’s an animatronic Buckbeak inside! He’s huge, and it was a little startling that I hadn’t seen him previously.
Atop the lift hill, there are some gorgeous views of Hogsmeade to be had. The rest of the ride is identical to the previous Unicorn ride.
Interesting views of the new land are also to be found in the outdoor portion of the queue for Dragon Challenge, which runs behind the snow-covered buildings of Hogsmeade. Banners everywhere proclaim this to be the Triwizard Tournament, where other schools of magic compete with Hogwarts. We see the backsides of the Hogsmeade buildings, which is interesting in and of itself (such is the power of this immersive theming!)
Just before the castle, held over from the Dueling Dragon days, we come across the Weasleys’ car, battered and apparently smacked out of the sky permanently.
Inside the castle, the first room is the striped champions’ tent with some artifacts (I liked the broom in the corner) and the goblet of blue fire that adjudicated the Triwizard champions. The queue follows the same path as before, but virtually everything has been rethemed. The “out and back” room now has the triwizard trophy. The room down the hall with skulls now only has broken wooden ceiling beams. The larger room with the frozen knight pulled in four directions above our heads now has floating candles—a neat effect.
The long, winding tunnel with numerous bones and skulls has been replaced with bare, though sculpted, rock. They did keep the large doors with a banging dragon on the other side (read: scary and loud sound effects), but mostly this part of the queue is more bare bones.
In the loading room, you have a choice to ride the two coasters. Ice is now Hungarian Horntail, while Fire is now Chinese Fireball. It’s a thematic fit, if nothing else. Above our heads in the loading platform, a new silhouette video shows a dragon, in shadow, lurking over the castle—another nice effect.
New to Me
I’m horribly behind in the New to Me photos. It’s not as if Disney has stopped revising and updating things. On the contrary, this year I’ve seen more than the usual share of tarps and scrims up on the buildings. In fact, Disney seems to be doing these ever deeper into the summer, which I actually view as a positive rather than a negative. Upkeep is not a bad thing.
But upkeep is not the point of the “new to me” series, which instead tries to snap photos of things I see when walking past, and look, well, new to me. Hopefully I don’t include things that are in fact years old, but mistakes can creep in (let me know if you find one!) In general, though, most of the stuff I’m seeing probably is relatively new, on the order of months or even weeks new.
Take the big swath of trees that have been cut out of the Seven Seas Lagoon area, now a couple of months old. This isn’t an upcoming hotel—it’s just a new sightline for the monorail drivers. Nothing big or urgent, but it caught my eye.
And here’s one from several months ago, when the Fantasyland expansion first began. I didn’t post it here immediately for various reasons, but now there's no harm in showing the area right after Pooh’s Playful Spot was ripped up. The big hole on the right is the former home of the treehouse, now moved next to the Pooh ride.
MuppetVision 3D got its own update several weeks, with new digital projection. Man, is it ever crisp and clear now! The 3D effects were amazing once again. Like many declines by degrees, this one wasn’t really noticeable until they *fixed* the decline.
Lotso from Toy Story 3 has moved into the Animation building at DHS. Folks have been lining up here for weeks, long before TS3 even came out!
The next one is more than a decade old, but I’ve never noticed it. Do you know what’s special about Flamingo Island on the safari? I never did. Here’s a photo—can you guess?
Time’s up! The answer is: it’s shaped like a hidden Mickey. I never cared about Hidden Mickeys before, despite knowing at least half of them. But my 7 year old recently caught the fever, and his enthusiasm is contagious (this is why we all go to Disney, right? For the kids?) I was floored by how obvious the Mickey was here, and I’d never noticed it. The other obvious one I’ve missed for years was in the clouds at the Splash Mountain riverboat finale. And I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’re having fun with the hunt.
Over to operational issues: since when do they let roller-coolers into the parks? At Disneyland, no food at all is allowed. At WDW, it used to be “no coolers,” but now just about anything goes. It saddens me a little bit; the park is being transformed to a simple city park. Much of this is Disney’s own fault. If the food were reasonably priced, fewer people would feel compelled to bring food in. But prices are just through the roof.
The Orange Bird has re-appeared in its former location at the exit to the Tiki Room. This little guy is apparently a bank, and it looks casual enough to be a Cast Member plant rather than something Imagineering put in there. Either way, I hope it stays as a nod to the past.
Summertime means lots of hula hoops at the parade route, and tons of bubbles. Sometimes they sell bubblemakers, but this one I’d never seen before. A modified trashcan, like PUSH, this one is essentially a gigantic bubblemaker. The kids liked it!
Splash Mountain had a rehab a while back, and I’ve only now set foot inside. The lighting effects were all fixed and turned on. In fact, it looked TOO bright in some areas (the dip-drop tunnel is case in point). But at least now I can take pictures on many of the other parts, which were otherwise too dark previously!
Typhoon Lagoon – A New View
Typhoon Lagoon never opened for business as usual on a Saturday some weeks ago, victim of an unfortunate mechanical breakdown smack in the middle of the always-busy Memorial Day weekend. At some point on that Friday night—they don’t know when exactly, because this park is unstaffed at night—a “water pipe” broke. Employees arriving in the early morning for their shifts found things broken enough to know the park wouldn’t open that day, so the resort kicked into high gear.
Busses for the Disney hotels picked up visitors wanting to go to Typhoon Lagoon and instead transported them to Blizzard Beach, to minimize their loss of time. This was great customer service, but it meant that Blizzard Beach hit its capacity quite quickly, and Typhoon Lagoon indeed did not open that morning.
An unusual sight: the mostly-drained lazy river.
To understand the problem, you have to know something about how the park uses water. Do you know the one central attraction in the park? Which part simply has to be operational for the rest of it to work? It’s not the wave pool. Surprisingly, it’s the lazy river. All the water for the slides in the park comes from the lazy river. When employees arrive in the morning and things are not yet running, the lazy river’s water level is much higher. As they turn on slides and pumps start going, water is diverted from the lazy river and its level sinks to what we visitors think of as normal. Only a few attractions don’t require the lazy river: Shark Reef, the kid playground, the wave pool, and Crush ‘n Gusher.
When Cast Members came to work on early Saturday morning, what greeted them was a brown lazy river. That clearly wouldn’t do for the slides, so the park had no choice but to divert hotel visitors as described above and not open for business in the usual fashion. However, it was a hugely busy weekend, so they came up with a fan-friendly alternative: they did open the four attractions they could, and let anyone who wanted to come in for free. They didn’t even staff the ticket booths.
I can’t remember another time when a Disney park opened for free like this. It must have cost them a fortune in ticket sales. Or then again, perhaps not. These days, the Magic Your Way ticket program probably means most travelers decide long before they leave their homes if they are going to the water parks, and if they are destined to go, they purchase the tickets ahead of time. So the gesture wasn’t as costly for Disney as it would have been 20 years ago, when more tickets were purchased on the spot. But it was still heartening to see Disney doing the right thing. They even sent out a small army of Cast Members to greet each car as it parked and explain the situation, so that families could decide to stay or go when it’s still convenient to make the decision. Bravo. Someone (probably several someones) was wearing the right thinking cap that morning.
Time to sweep up the dry parts of the lazy river.
Inside the park, a construction crew was ripping up a series of boards near the lazy river’s cave, clearly the location of the problematic pipe (or perhaps filtration unit?) that needed replacing. I was disappointed, though not surprised, to discover that the mountain trail hiking path was blocked off while all those slides on the mountain were closed. I had hoped to photograph dry slides, but it wasn’t in the cards.
The poor visitors who elected to stay at Typhoon Lagoon with only four attractions were destined to have even that limited fun interrupted. The famous summer weather in Orlando had other plans. If you’ve not seen it happen before, you may not know that water parks in Orlando have a lightning safety plan that forces people out of water when the frequent summer storms cause lightning within seven miles of the park. Visitors are cajoled under shelters of any kind (bathrooms, shops, even beach shade structures) while the storm rages. It can be a very long interruption indeed until the all-clear, and I wasn’t surprised to see a massive number of folks stream out of the park’s gates instead of trying to wait it out. After all, they hadn’t paid for the day, so even if they had to leave by 1pm, at least they didn’t have to feel they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth.
Since we joined the exodus and left the park early, I did not get to see if they fixed the river quickly enough to re-open the park, as they had hoped to do. It was originally scheduled to close by 5pm, so it was clearly a race against the clock, especially with the lightning problems.
Toy Story Mania
I carved out the time recently to see Toy Story Mania, fresh off its revised Bo Peep scene. It’s now a dinosaur scene, or perhaps better described as a volcano scene. You still throw darts to pop balloons in this screen, the same as had been true in the Bo Peep era, but now it’s introduced by the Toy Story dinosaurs (of which there is a new one for Toy Story 3—this is the obvious reason for the changeout now). The new scene thus doesn’t change much of anything in the ride. The overall experience is exactly the same, and in fact I would hazard a guess that non-frequent visitors may not even recognize that anything has changed (first time visitors, of course, would also have no clue).
For the repeat visitors, having a new scene brings a mild thrill, and certainly the lines for this ride have been boosted up in moderate ways (but that could also be the presence of Star Wars Weekends, which started at the same time). I’m happy that Imagineering sees fit to alter this ride. It’s still a very new ride, so they could very easily have not spent the time and money to update it yet. There was an obvious motivation to update it now, with the new movie coming out, and admittedly the format of the ride makes updates not hard to do and certainly pretty cheap compared to what has to happen if you wanted to update other rides.
But the same thing could have been said of Star Tours (and in fact it was said frequently in 1987, that changes would come), but it would have to wait until (late) 2010 to get its first update. I’m liking the track record at TSM better, though I’m sure updates will be less frequent when they are no new Toy Story movies coming out. |
