Monthly Archives: November 2011

Walt Disney: Junior Time Traveller

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Disney California Adventure is sort of like an alcoholic that has managed to stay sober for over a year now. We’re all very proud. Doesn’t mean we trust it to drive the kids home from the New Year’s party, but we’re glad it has turned its life around.

A lot of this progress is due to a clever approach in show development, and this approach is called: Don’t be a mall. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best, and DCA is stealing everything it can from its sister park next door: nighttime spectaculars, Fantasyland dark rides,  exclusive membership clubs, themed main streets. Don’t be surprised if Disney soon announces the opening of Walt’s private apartment, where he used to stay when dreaming up his ideal ferris wheels and rotating swing rides.

Also, there’s this new statue being planned for DCA’s Buena Vista Street. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Disney has put forth several official statements about this statue, how it is supposed to represent Walt as he just stepped off the train from Kansas City, ready to embark on his own California Adventure. It’s a bookend to the story that concludes with the Partners statue in Disneyland, which shows Walt as king of the Magic Kingdom. This is fresh-faced Walt, before the smoker’s cough, before Mickey, before even Oswald. All he has are his dreams. And his luggage.

This is a “study maquette” displayed at DCA’s Blue Sky gallery. Procrastinating students with no time to study may be interested in the Cliff Notes Maquette. Am I right?

Unlike the Partners statue, there is no pedestal for this version of Walt. The official explanation goes something like “Here he is just a commoner like us, he hasn’t been elevated above us.” It’s a little insulting and reeks of vague cost-saving measures. But I’ll forgive it.

I do tend to go a bit ballistic over all the luggage. What’s he doing with an engraved trunk? Is this canon? I thought the lore was Walt had only a beat up old suitcase when he stepped off the train from Kansas City. Sort of like what Mickey has. What’s Mickey even doing in the statue? He wasn’t created yet. Oh, but he was in Walt’s head and heart, he just wasn’t a star yet. The old Roger Rabbit explanation for anachronisms. Fine, I’ll buy it. Mickey wasn’t a star, he lived in Kansas City, and one day he happened to hook up with commoner Walt Disney as they both stepped off the train on their way to seek their fortunes.

And then I saw this picture.

Do you spot anything here? I’ll give you a hint. Look at the fingers. That’s a wedding ring, if I’m not mistaken. The only problem is that Walt didn’t get married until a couple years after he moved to L.A. Did Lilly know about his first wife? Because Mickey sure did.

Look, I don’t expect Imagineers to be experts on every single tidbit of Walt’s life, but I would expect them to have the basic timeline straight.

Anyway, I suppose I’m being too harsh. These pictures are all from the Blue Sky Cellar, and were probably conceptual anyway. Other versions of the statue do not seem to have the wedding ring. So maybe it’s a detail that was caught and fixed. But it certainly felt good to rant for a bit. Especially following a holiday that is all about being thankful.

Special thanks to Andy Castro, who runs the absolutely phenomenal Dateline Disneyland blog over at miceage. The pics are all his.

The Two Faces of Teddi Berra

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You say “Two Faces of Teddi Berra” in public, and the connotation is you’ve got a bear with some serious mental problems. Like maybe one day she’s the quiet neighbor upstairs. The next day she’s on trial for beheading a deer, a moose, and a buffalo. Like a twist ending to the Goldilocks story, where we find out all three bears were really just one. The kind of bear who needs a tacked on Alfred Hitchcock ending to explain just what caused her to go a little mad.

Do you still hear the swings creaking, Clarice?

But Teddi really is a nice gal. She just happens to be one of the few Country Bears that owes an awful lot of herself to some real life influences. Like her song, for instance. Her show-stopping number, Heart We Did All That We Could isn’t a CBJ original. In fact, most of the songs in the show are legit little ditties from the hillbilly dance circuit.

I’m one of those fans that has complained in the past about Disney taking the lazy way out when it comes to music, specifically Food Rocks and the Enchanted Tiki Room Under New Management. It always felt cheap to take some 80s pop songs and hand them over to a cast of robotic parrots. I mean, what is this, Chuck E. Cheese? The Sherman Brothers were too busy counting their money to take a crack at it?

Yet I would give a pass to Country Bear Jamboree, mainly because I’ve never heard these songs before, outside of the Magic Kingdom. All this really proves is that I have limited knowledge of music. It’s kind of a catch-22. When your favorite genre in iTunes is Theme Park Music, it can sometimes come as a shock when you find out Hoop De Doo was not actually written for the classic dinner show of the same name.

Also, American Adventure’s Two Brothers was written in the 1950s by some guy named Irving Gordon, and a major theme from the Magic Kingdom fireworks show was apparently taken directly from an old animated movie about a wooden puppet.

At least that Fort Wilderness show had the good sense to steal its chorus from an older tune. Teddi Berra’s song is surprisingly current — or would have been in 1971. Heart We Did All That We Could was actually a Billboard Country Top 20 hit in 1967, just four years before Country Bear Jamboree opened. It was performed by Jean Shepard, a lifelong member of the Grand Ole Opry and just this year was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame (and whose official website looks like it was created about the same time she was topping the charts).

Which means that if you get her to autograph a picture of Teddi Berra, the “HOF” tag will raise its eBay value considerably.

But Jean Shepard isn’t Teddi’s only influence. Her mannerisms and costumes are ripped off straight from one of vaudeville’s (and Hollywood’s) biggest stars. Mae West was a saucy, sultry performer, and blessed with two of the most desirable assets in show business: Double entendres.

She even had a famous line: “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” from the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong. The line is usually misquoted as “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” which not so coincidentally is Teddi Berra’s last line in the show (Henry follows it with “Soon as I find a ladder I’ll be right up.”)

But it’s not just the line. It’s the entire get-up. Still don’t think Teddi Berra owes a lot to Mae West?

One of these women sprang from the fertile imagination of Marc Davis. The other is a robotic bear.

The Walt Disney Company apparently had a major obsession with Mae West. Mae appeared as herself in the 1933 short Mickey’s Gala Premier, and was said to bear more than a passing resemblance with Clara Cluck:

… as well as Pinocchio’s pet fish Cleo:

Perhaps the most fun is a dead-on caricature of West as the femme fatale Jenny Wren in Who Killed Cock Robin?

With all these bird versions of Mae, it’s a wonder she didn’t show up in the Enchanted Tiki Room. But I guess we can consider ourselves lucky to have the teddy bear version.

Teddi Berra photo by Loren Javier

Spiderman’s Boardwalk Crawl

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I believe I have good news for all you Marvel fans. While running out at the Boardwalk, I noticed what I believe to be the first major construction work being done on the new Spiderman’s Boardwalk Crawl Next-Gen game that should be coming to this resort area in the very near future.

Spidey is a regular at Beaches ‘n Cream

Based on what we can piece together, this game will allow youngsters to traverse a webbed wall all along the entire Boardwalk/Yacht/Beach complex, collecting SpiderStamps and solving tricky maneuvering puzzles. No word yet on whether or not there will be a corresponding mobile application for this thrilling new addition.

They have not yet finished installing it, though it has been going up piecemeal for at least a week now. The first step was to install tacky 2-inch wooden barricades along the edge of the entire boardwalk area out at the Beach Club, which was done last week. This week has seen installation of the special Spidey webbing to be used in the game. Several panels are already complete, on the section of Boardwalk nearest the Dolphin hotel.

You can see the new wall being installed on the right, with the original boardwalk railing treatment on the left.

To say that we are looking forward to this new Next-Gen experience is quite an understatement. To our knowledge, this is the first time Next-Gen has appeared in the resorts, and also the first time Marvel characters have been incorporated. Disney continues to impress with their ability to keep this project under wraps, much like the Avatar-themed lands that dropped a bombshell on the superfans a few months back.

Note that no official announcement has yet been made, and we’re going to be pretty upset if we’ve completely misread this. I guess there’s an outside shot that this is nothing more than typical lawyerly lawsuit-proofing. But until we confirm that, we’ll be practicing our web slinging abilities and honing our SpiderSense.

Surely there’s a good reason for this, right? Right??

Stay Out Of The Woods

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Our planet is full of sinister powers, but perhaps none more so than the power of nature to swallow up the once-grand civilizations of man. The Earth may be round, but it still has its corners – dark pockets of mystery where the forest shrouds a decaying edifice, lost to history.
For instance, this is all that remains of the original Backlot Studio Tour queue.
If Stephen King has taught us anything, it’s that you should never visit Maine. I mean seriously, you are pretty much guaranteed to die if you cross the New Hampshire border. But only slightly less well known is this: Stay out of the woods.
Trees lead slow, deliberate lives, and they seem bent on total and utter consummation of anything you might have erected in their place. Amid the frenetic, gleeful construction of the New Fantasyland, there are places within Fantasyland right now that are rotting under our nose.
If you’re looking for Dumbo, you should have turned left three miles ago.
One such desolate forest is the Hundred Acre Woods. It has been barely a year since the new interactive queue area first opened at the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. This was the harbinger of the fabled NextGen project – a new way to experience attractions, without the rigid queues of the past. It has been a runaway success – better even than the Haunted Mansion queue which followed it. But time has forgotten the small clearing to the East, an enchanted glen of tiger-striped stepping stones that lies concealed behind a barrier of thickly entangled shrubbery.
Tigger’s Bouncy Place had all the makings of a real highlight: A series of delightful trampoline-like springs embedded in the ground, where kids young and old could burn off excess energy in bouncy, flouncy, pouncy ways. Before the queue even opened, this parkeologist observed a team of Imagineers and their test subjects (probably their own children) trying out the springs. I remember being amazed at the depth to which the platforms sank into the ground, and the strong launching power they could achieve. But Tigger’s Bouncy Place never opened to the public. It sits unused behind the planters, a pogo stick and Tigger-striped ball the only indication that it is there at all.
I just bounced right out of a grave! Who wants a hug?
Somewhere along the lines, the fans lost interest in this little nook. Anticipation for other projects took over: New Fantasyland, talking Mickey, a new Star Tours. Guests continue to enjoy the Winnie the Pooh queue without even missing Tigger. Honey walls and Gopher pop-ups are more than enough to satisfy them. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.
History become legend. Legend became myth. And for twelve months, Tigger’s Bouncy Spot passed out of all knowledge.
Darkness crept back into the forests of the world. Rumor grew of a shadow in the East. Whispers of a nameless fear.
Lawyers.
Pictured: Unadulterated evil. Also the reason we have seatbelts on Tower of Terror, lapbars on Splash Mountain, and curlicued wrought iron pokey things on the bridge to Mexico.
Did this age-old evil shut down the show, as has been theorized by the fans? Or did the equipment simply not stand-up to the rigorous play testing of a hundred thousand happy toddlers? Perhaps we are not meant to know.
The queue has recently gone down for rehab, only a year later. The paying public can be hard on Disney show scenes, especially if there is a lot of tugging, banging, popping, or wiping involved. But perhaps the way will be cleared, and Tigger’s glade finally opened.
For now, we can merely keep watch. For who knows what evil lurks in the heart of the forest? Beware, my friends, and stay out of the woods.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The Most Wonderful Time

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It’s been quiet around the parkeology offices lately. As you might have guessed, this is because we went overboard on the Halloween party, and while Teevtee’s Cloverfield monster costume was a huge hit, those prosthetics gave him a severe case of carpal tunnel.

He barely survived the karaoke portion of the festivities.

So with this downtime, we’ve been digitizing our entire If You Had Wings sound effect library, catching up on our old restaurant menu preservation efforts, and rummaging through the pressure-sealed fire-proof display areas in the Parkeology basement, looking for an appropriate way to kick off the Christmas holiday season.

And predictably, we came up short, so here’s a picture of the Castle Dreamlights.

As seen on every freakin’ Disney blog in the world.

The Dreamlights were on last night for the first time this season, and that’s exciting, right? Right?? OK, it kinda is. I like the Dreamlights, and I love how the parks just seem different this time of year. I realize it’s not exactly new and different, which is what strive for here at Parkeology.

So with that in mind, I’m happy to present you with a bit of awesomeness you won’t find on any other Disney blog. Prepare to have your mind blown:

The backside of Dreamlights!

Wow, what a disappointment, huh? Promising something neat, and then resorting to a lame Jungle Cruise rip-off (and the most obvious, cliche, widely-quoted one at that). But come on, this is a unique angle, with the Prince Charming Regal Carousel in the foreground. Give us credit for a different perspective here.

I guess technically it’s still nothing you haven’t seen before. It’s just the back of the castle, and the same Carousel that’s been there for forty years. Well last night I tracked down something that you have never seen before, because it has never existed in a Disney park until this season. I know what you come to this site for, and I am to please. Feast your eyes on this little beauty:

Okay, we suck.

This is a brand new iphone cover that they now sell in the parks! They’ve had a version out with Cinderella Castle on it for awhile now, but never with the Dreamlights version! Limited Edition, baby! Snap these things up while you can, because if you don’t, you won’t see them again for a whole ‘nother year.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is, thanks for being patient. We really do have some good stuff coming, including a scary story that was originally planned for last Monday, and which is now totally inopportune! So if you’re all in the mood for a good old fashioned November ghost story, stay tuned for more.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to drive Teevtee to Austin, TX. Why that guy can’t see a specialist close to home is beyond me.