There are always rumors in the Disneyverse. Sometimes there are only a few, while other times the whole Internet seems to quake under the volume of rumors. And sometimes you have a high degree of confidence in a rumor, whereas other times it is low.

You hear little things all the time, such as Monorail Purple will be retired as a color for monorails (I think this is likely) or that the big sorcerer hat at Disney’s Hollywood Studios is soon to be removed (I think this is also likely, considering it was a WDI honcho who said publicly it would happen "sooner rather than later.") Watch for the Tomorrowland Skyway building to be demolished soon, too.

A different kind of rumor now making the rounds suggests that Disney has been looking once again at the Beastly Kingdomme expansion to Animal Kingdom. The idea would not be to use the rides as once envisioned (indeed, Dueling Dragons at IOA is basically already what they had in mind), but to go in new directions. Would you believe bringing over Tokyo DisneySea’s Journey to the Center of the Earth? It’s a kind of Test-Track-type ride into a volcano, with a thrilling finale that dwarfs the original Test Track. But this rumor has been around before, and may not have legs.

But right now, the other two highest-octane rumors running around the Disney online universe seem particularly potent and much more likely to occur: radical changes to FastPass and an expansion of Magic Kingdom’s Fantasyland. Both have enormous and far-reaching implications, if they come to pass.

Let’s start with Fantasyland. There have long been substantiated rumors that Disney is looking to expand this area. Over the past months and years, the reports focused on a Seven Dwarves Mine children’s coaster, a Beauty and the Beast dark ride, and the Little Mermaid dark ride (a clone of the one going into DCA). And place emphasis on the word "expand", rather than merely refurbish. The idea is to push out the boundaries of Fantasyland, and gain at least some new real estate.

Fantasyland and the former 20,000 Leagues plot of land, as they appear now.

Within the past week, two events have occurred that raised the "alert level" among the fans: first, the rumors increased in frequency and certainty. The expansion was not just on the books, suddenly it was greenlit. It’s being reported (again, unsubstantiated) that John Lasseter is the one forcing the expansion to take place over the objections of Jay Rasulo and the Team Disney Orlando (TDO) management. If true, that’s an extraordinary development (and one that just makes me want to find John and buy him a drink! Or twenty.) If the recent greenlighting were an override from Lasseter, it would explain why the parks are currently refurbishing some of the things that are likely to go away in the expansion: because TDO assumed it had the right to veto the expansion and not spend the money that way. That, as well as the fact that any expansion would take time to actually build.

Details are lacking regarding cost, but some rumors call for hundreds of millions of dollars. As for timeline, one assumes that the pending opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (up the road at Islands of Adventure) may be a factor. If Disney wants to open its expansion at the same time or shortly after the IOA addition, they will probably aim for late 2010 or early 2011.

The other event to occur last week was the posting of what appears to be a blueprint detailing the Fantasyland expansion. We can't offer the blueprint here, lest it turn out to be real (which would make it property of the Walt Disney Company, and not something I should be showing you).

Everything inside the colored border will be razed, and will form the new Fantasyland.

Arguments broke out online immediately about its veracity. Was it a fake? If it’s real, does it represent an OLD plan or the most current one? Some MiceChat posters offered compelling arguments in both directions, by virtue of close analysis of smudges and geometry.

I tend to believe the blueprint is real. It uses modern Disney terminology ("NEXTGEN interactive queue"), it uses placeholder names for attractions (a common thing on blueprints this early), and most of all, it seems plausible.

What does the expansion contain, if real? One new ride (the Little Mermaid clone from DCA), some very extensive landscape re-theming, several meet-and-greet locations, and some vaguely labeled, small structures that purport to be attractions (but may be on the order of the Beast’s Library rather than a ride or full-sized show).

The expansion boils down to several mini-lands, each themed to a separate princess. There is some precedent for this; the recently-announced additions to Hong Kong Disneyland (such as their version of Haunted Mansion, called Mystic Manor) similarly feature tiny lands, with little more than one attraction per land and some additional theming around it.

Dark blue will be Belle, purple is Ariel, light green is Cinderella, sky blue is a new Pooh area,
red is Aurora, dark green is Pixie Hollow, and yellow is Dumbo (which is labeled
twice on the blueprint, as though it’s two different lands.

To free up space for the mini-lands, and to de-clutter Fantasyland a little bit, Dumbo will be moved all the way to the corner of the park. In fact, there will be two Dumbos (someone has wittily coined the term ‘Dueling Dumbos’, which I find amusing) to double the capacity of this perennial favorite. You can see why they’d put a big draw in the corner of the park; it encourages visitors to penetrate into every nook and cranny instead of crowd up in the middle. The blueprint promises a "Next-Gen" interactive queue for the Dueling Dumbos. This, I think, will be universally praised.

The big ride is clearly meant to be the Little Mermaid clone. On the blueprints, it’s labeled merely as "Voyage of the Mermaid Attraction," which fails to mimic the exact title of the DCA ride ("Ariel’s Undersea Adventure") as well as even get the movie’s name right (where’s the "little"?), but no matter. It’s clearly a placeholder name, and numerous insiders are certain this will be a clone of the DCA ride, which promises to be dazzling. The footprint of the building isn’t nearly as enormous as you’d expect for a dark ride that purports to be on the scale of Haunted Mansion, but there’s not a lot of land to work with in DCA, either.

The Ariel zone will be about half queue, and half ride.

Having one of the signature rides at DCA duplicated this quickly on the East coast continues a recent tradition of cloning that has been controversial in the fan community. On the one hand, it clearly saves the company money to harvest two rides out of one set of development costs, which is a win for everyone. But on the other hand, a lack of uniqueness on both coasts argues against frequent visits to the more distant park. If you live in Phoenix, you may have less reason to visit WDW if many of your favorite rides are already at Disneyland. That goes double for someone in Ohio who normally visits WDW, since Disneyland has few rides (especially newer rides) that are not also cloned at WDW. DCA was originally a bid to make the Disneyland Resort a vacation destination, but if there isn’t anything unique about DCA, it will continue to fail at drawing the national and international crowds. At least, that’s true until the spectacular World of Color opens on the DCA lagoon. Hmmm, can we have that on the DAK lagoon please? Or replace (perhaps augment?) Illuminations?

The Fantasyland blueprints point to a fairly large building, or collection of buildings, in the corner nearest Pinocchio Village Haus. This is a restaurant facility and its backstage kitchens, and the main area is labeled "Be Our Guest Restaurant." It’s an oval-shaped space that appears to be about twice the size of the carrousel, presumably where the dining takes place. The name, theme, and shape of the restaurant look suspiciously like an Audio-Animatronics show proposed for Disneyland Paris, a kind of Tiki Room experience laid out in an oval, with dancing utensils on a giant table in the middle. Could it be they’ve turned the idea into a dining experience?

The concept of a show plus entertainment is quite familiar; it could work like a variation of the Medieval Times concept. That tickles the imagination because it takes a Tiki Room type concept and marries it with a restaurant… which was exactly what the original Tiki Room was supposed to be. The food element was cut out of it late in development, when they found that diners could not complete their meals on the show schedule. Nearby, a small area is labeled Gaston’s Tavern. Don’t get your hopes up for alcohol served in the Magic Kingdom; it’s probably just a quick service restaurant next to Be Our Guest.

Concept art from the once-planned Disneyland Paris attraction.

An awful lot of the expansion is geared toward girls. Most of the sub-lands are themed to princess areas: Belle, Aurora, Cinderella, Ariel, and Pixie Hollow will all lure little girls in with the promise to meet the princess and gain an autograph. This is undoubtedly a major win for families with small children, since meeting princesses is a huge highlight for them, and it’s too hit-or-miss at the moment to locate them.

At the same time, though, one wonders if perhaps there is TOO much aimed at little girls here. Will families with boys find anything of interest? What about visitors and parties with no little girls at all—will this expansion speak to them at all? One answer could be that the expansion isn’t meant to appeal to all age groups. If Disney is trying to counter the Potter expansion at IOA, perhaps it’s wise to target a different demographic, instead of going head to head over the same demographic. And Disney’s core audience has always been families with small children, so beefing up the offerings for such families actually makes quite a lot of sense, given the increased competition in other demographics.

And you could pretty easily construct an argument that the Magic Kingdom (and Disneyland before it) has always been a little too male-centric. It takes no great leap of logic to understand why. Disneyland was built as Walt Disney’s personal toy: his love of trains, his vision of a tech-fueled rocket future, his concept of "exotic" means anything outside of his white male European experience, and his interpretation of a romantic wilderness full of cowboys and Indians are all very much "male" pursuits. Disneyland reflects Walt’s desires, and Walt was of course biologically and culturally male. The Magic Kingdom essentially reproduced all the male-centric concepts from Disneyland, just on a different scale. Perhaps by installing some decidedly feminine areas, the balance will be somewhat restored (for the first time, natch).

Besides, the Pixie Hollow area includes a play zone. While we don’t know yet what this will look like, presumably it will be built to appeal to both boys and girls (goodness knows my boys like playgrounds!) and Disney is quite capable of building decent play areas. The abysmal Pooh’s Playful Spot will disappear in the expansion (a new, much smaller Pooh meet and greet area will be constructed from scratch), but this is hopefully not the model. I’d rather they reproduce the fun, inventive, immersive, and large play area in Mermaid Lagoon at Tokyo DisneySea. Well, not reproduce its theme, which would be out of place in Pixie Hollow, but reproduce its coolness factor.

The blueprint makes mention of new castle walls, roughly going where Dumbo is now. The idea, I assume, is to complete the castle courtyard as more of an enclosure, and imply that the castle area ends about here. Everything outside of the castle walls would be separated. The blueprints don't show how the theming might work, but one could imagine a medieval village: castle on the one side, charming cottages for everything else. Or perhaps they dare to add miniature castles to everything else? That would be intriguing, to imagine a Fantasyland dotted with smaller castles.

In terms of specifically-designated "meet and greet" areas, the blueprint makes mention of Winnie the Pooh, Ariel, and the Fairies. There are probably meet and greet areas for the other mini-lands as well, but they are intriguingly labeled differently on the blueprint. You’ve got Aurora and Cinderella each listed as having an "attraction." What might that mean? Certainly not a ride – there is no room – but perhaps a show? A stage show? A themed room akin to the Beast’s Library at DCA? Living Character adoptions that show the animated character on screen who interacts with the visitors?

The yellow areas denote buildings, castle walls, and meet-and-greet structures.

One unsubstantiated report (and not on the blueprint) makes mention of Cinderella’s Chateau and Sleeping Beauty’s Birthday Surprise. Both sound like elaborate meet and greet areas, perhaps consisting of a themed structure and a queue rather than just a backdrop outdoors.

Belle is not mentioned explicitly as having either a meet and greet or having an attraction, but there’s a whole sub-land dedicated to her, so one assumes she’ll be around at least in a meet and greet area. One report not necessarily associated with the blueprint calls for an area called "Enchanted Tales With Belle," and that sounds about right.

Other names that have been floated – again, not seen on the blueprint – include Triton’s Treasure, Gaston's Village, Lefou's Creperie, Scuttle’s Scavenger Hunt, the Village Book Shop, and the Enchanted Mirror Room. Some sound like stores (could we really get a book shop back in the park? I’d love that), but others might be minor attractions. At a minimum, they should be well-themed.

To make room for all of this, Mickey’s Toontown Fair will be ripped out. That land was always supposed to be temporary anyway, and the tents behind the house facades are starting to rot away anyway. About the only part of Mickey’s Toontown Fair still listed on the blueprint is the Barnstormer. Yet leaving that themed to Goofy while everything around it becomes princess and Dumbo themed seems odd. It’s a good bet that it will be re-themed and renamed the Seven Dwarves Mine coaster, even though the existing Snow White attraction is quite far away.

Doing away with Mickey’s Toontown Fair is not without risks. Symbolically, the park is jettisoning the Fab Five in favor of the princesses, which might sit well with some visiting girls, but could easily dismay others. Mickey and Minnie did not suddenly become unpopular, and it’s a sure thing that visitors will still want to see them. Part of the elegance of Toontown (on both East and West coasts) is that it gave visitors a rock-solid place to find Mickey Mouse, instead of just hoping to run into him on Main Street. Losing such certainty would be a shame.

Perhaps they intend to relocate the Mickey meet and greet? The new Fantasyland doesn’t mention a location. Could it be that Mickey will instead go to Main Street U.S.A.? There’s a large, underused building in Town Square that currently shows old cartoons but draws no crowd whatsoever. It makes some thematic sense, too. Mickey and Main Street are both "yesteryear" and celebrated with some nostalgia; both come from the early 20^th Century.

The plans are not being met with universal acclaim online. Some fans are dismayed by a lack of signature attractions. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there’s not enough "there" there, and it looks to some eyes like just a single dark ride attraction. On that note, I’m content to await more details before rending any judgment. If the dark ride ends up as elaborate and well-themed as, say, the Haunted Mansion (and even uses the same OmniMover system, as rumored), then I’ll be pretty pleased even if that’s all it is.

As always, the proof is in the pudding. If the expansion and re-theming looks cheap and minimal, it will be a bust. If the new streams, pathways, and landscaping provide an exciting environment though, that could be a different story. Hopefully the new buildings do an effective job of creating a narrative and transporting visitors away. Experiencing a fantasy first hand is, after all, the very mission of a place called Fantasyland.

It’s no secret that Disney has been looking at different models for FastPass. This has been true since 1999, when the system was first installed. Disney wasn’t the earliest theme park operator to offer a ride-reservation system (Cedar Fair had them before Disney), but Disney hoped to iron out the kinks and really implement the system on a wide scale. The idea from the beginning was to get customers out of line and into the stores and restaurants… spending money. Why else would Disney spend extra money to staff those FP positions?

I’ve argued since 1999 that this was an unrealistic hope. Most people snag a FastPass, sure, but they use it be in line for Space Mountain "virtually" while they also stand in line for Big Thunder "physically." Then there are those visitors who don’t know to use it, or who think that using it is just an option (the reality is, you are getting ripped off big-time for total rides in a day if you think you can just skip FP and use Standby lines, but these casual visitors don’t know that). Worst of all, the gigantic volume of FP holders meant that Standby lines often don’t move very fast, and the overall wait time jumped compared to previous years.

Universal, which rolled out a similar system called Express Pass, decided that the return on investment wasn’t high enough, and dramatically altered their system. They ripped out the machines and declared that anyone staying at their Universal hotels would receive a daylong Express Pass (ride as often as you like), or you could pay a surcharge (usually $30) to get a one-day Express Pass that is good for one visit to each ride. In this fashion, Universal monetized the front of line passes, and otherwise gained by increasing occupancy rates at their hotels. They only have 2,400 hotel rooms, which is not a lot, so the impact on the Standby lines has been negligible. Wait times at Universal parks are now within the bounds of normalcy, which was not the case when Express Pass was available to everyone. I’ve long hoped that Disney would do something similar.

The time may be coming. First, Disney is testing variations on the FP enterprise at Disneyland Paris, where they are selling Magic Passes (like the Universal pass to non-hotel-guests) for 80 Euros (about $113) per day (it was originally 100 Euros). Over in Hong Kong Disneyland, Star Pass (a kind of FastPass book) costs only 120 Hong Kong Dollars (about $15 in U.S. currency), which is cheaper presumably because there are far fewer E-ticket rides (and there are seldom long lines in HKDL).

Normally, that alone would be cause for speculation. But some semi-public chatter from Disney park officials hinted that changes were coming here, too, and this past weekend they started testing a "centralized" location for FastPass at Animal Kingdom, in the machines formerly used for It’s Tough to be a Bug. If that holds, people can get all their tickets in one spot, without needing to run around. One assumes this will lead to tickets "running out" faster in the day.

But that’s not the bigger news. Some visitors to Disney parks started reporting recently about surveys that inquired into attitudes toward a "paid FastPass." This has led to other rumors (it’s sometimes hard to tell if the first rumor spawns the second one, or if the second one corroborates the first, so take all of this with a grain of salt) that Walt Disney World may soon be looking at a FastPass model similar to Universal Studios Florida.

If that’s true, the theory goes, they would rip out the FastPass machines in the parks. If you are staying at a Disney hotel, you would still get some FastPasses. A new twist is that you’d get them ahead of time, and could really plan out your trip (some people love this idea of pre-planning, while some hate it… I go back and forth).

Yet more twists: the amount of FP tickets you get per day is dependent on how long your vacation is. If you’re only staying a few days at a Disney resort, then you’d only earn a couple FP tickets per day. If your vacation is longer, you’d get more per day. This would function to reward those who take longer vacations with Disney (you can see why they’d want to encourage that!)

People staying at hotels off Disney property would not get any. Locals who live close enough to need no hotels would also get none. The rumor is silent about annual passholders, but one assumes they would also get none, unless they are in hotels. It would be a nice gesture if non-hotel passholders could get a single FP per day, though… otherwise, they risk annoying a very core audience. Ditto for the DVC crowd, which is populous, has big pockets, and has already spent a ton of money at Disney and doesn’t want to get shafted now.

My reaction is guarded. On the one hand, I’m overjoyed if they really do rip out the FP machines. I liked the world of spontaneity before, and this would return "on the spot" decision-making to the parks. Well, not for those with "planned" FP tickets, I guess. But on the other hand, I’m worried that the actual rollout might miss a chance to alter the way FP ruins lines.

Let me put it another way: much depends on the execution. If they simply take the number of FP tickets issued in a day (for the sake of argument, let’s say 200,000 issued in the Magic Kingdom on a busy day, a number I get from guessing that 50,000 people each get four FP on average) and then distribute those to the people staying the hotels, then I will feel like I’ve been taken advantage of greatly. Why? Because keeping the number of FP tickets steady would mean that the Standby lines would stay just as long as they are today: 80 minutes for Peter Pan or Soarin’, 60 minutes for Splash Mountain or Rock ‘n Roller coaster.

This is a golden opportunity for them to change the entire equation. What if they dole out the FP tickets as perks to their hotel guests, but reduced the net number of tickets in the system? What if you only had 100,000 FP tickets sloshing around on a given day at the MK? I’m certain that would mean Standby lines would move faster. By definition, there are half as many people returning with tickets, so the people in the Standby lines could be allowed to proceed twice as often. Wouldn’t that make it a forty minute wait for Soarin and a 30 minute wait for Splash Mountain? Those are reasonable numbers and within the bounds of sanity. Best of all, it would happen in a system where those who paid Disney’s higher hotel prices got a benefit out of it (a few FPs, at least) but it didn’t happen in a way that made everyone else’s vacation utterly miserable.

Much depends on the execution: Can Disney really limit it to 100,000 FP tickets at the MK on a single day? Is the Universal Studios model even applicable at Disney, when Uni has 2,400 rooms and Disney 30,000?

Let’s try some back-of-the-envelope math, with the usual caveat that I’m freely inventing some numbers here that could be off (in fact, numbers are rounded for convenience):

If you gave three FP tickets to 25,000 people in the Magic Kingdom, you have given out only 75,000. That’s well under the 100,000 I was hoping for.

Assuming these numbers are even in the ballpark of accuracy, much depends on how generous they are with tickets. If the person on a short stay only gets 1-2 tickets, while the person on the weeklong stay gets 3 tickets per day, and the person on a 8+ day vacation gets 4-5 tickets per day, we’d easily still make the numbers I’m hoping for. But if they get overly generous and issue 5-6 tickets to everyone, with 8-9 tickets given out to the long-vacation folks, then there will be too many tickets sloshing around the system, and Standby lines will stay long and intolerable.

I hope they keep the ticket count down. Everyone would win! Well, the off-site hotels lose, as do Universal and SeaWorld, since a new trick like only giving FP tickets to Disney hotel visitors will do even more to keep people staying at Disney.

It’s a natural outgrowth of the "Destination Disney" program, which is an umbrella concept for "getting people to come to, stay at, and spend all their money at Disney." The Magical Express shuttle service from the airport encourages people to not rent a car, the Magic Your Way ticket pricing encourages people to spend every last day at Disney since it’s so darn cheap to add just one more day, Extra Magic Hours encourages visitors only to stay at Disney hotels, and the Dining Plan options encourage people to spend the equivalent of one counter-service and one table-service meal *every* day rather than just once in a while. Disney’s added variations of late, such as Free Dining or Free Days on the hotel rooms, which have contributed to the parks doing extremely well during this recession. There has been no lack of lines at Walt Disney World, because they’ve played their cards right.

Just to keep things interesting, there is additional chatter that the FastPass changes, whatever they turn out to be, might make heavy use of RFID, a kind of low-cost GPS system, possibly embedded right into the admission media. The parks would know where you are, and could issue coupons, special offers, and FastPasses based on your location. This is heady stuff, and the possibilities (as well as the privacy concerns) could be enormous.

Once again, this is based on a rumor or two and may turn out to be so much smoke, so we all need to be cautious about jumping the gun here. It might even be a trial balloon floated by Disney to gauge the probable customer reaction. The rumor says nothing about Disneyland, but one assumes the different clientele base there would argue for a different approach.

Fingers crossed. If this is done right, it will surely mean sanity and joy (and fairness!) returned to the WDW rides. That would be great news for everyone.

Kevin is the author of many books on Disney theme parks, including:

• Mouse Trap: Memoir of a Disneyland Cast Member provides the first authentic glimpse of what it's like to work at Disneyland.
• The Walt Disney World Menu Book lists restaurants, their menus, and prices for entrees, all in one handy pocket-sized guide.
• Tokyo Disney Made Easy is a travel guide to Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySeas, written to make the entire trip stress-free for non-speakers of Japanese.
• Magic Quizdom offers an exhaustive trivia quiz on Disneyland park, with expansive paragraph-length answers that flesh out the fuller story on this place rich with details.
• 101 Things You Never Knew About Disneyland is a list-oriented book that covers ground left intentionally unexposed in the trivia book, namely the tributes and homages around Disneyland, especially to past rides and attractions.
• 101 Things You Never Knew About Walt Disney World follows the example of the Disneyland book, detailing tributes and homages in the four Disney World parks.

More information on the above titles, along with ordering options are at this link. Kevin is currently working on other theme park related books, and expects the next one to be published soon.