Tag Archives: Monorail

The Transportation Codex

Posted on by
15

In many ways, Walt Disney World is a labyrinth. People used to get lost at Animal Kingdom, did you know that? When it first opened, visitors literally couldn’t find the exit and Disney went through and added a whole bunch of signs and stuff, a few months after opening. Apparently the intentional layout — designed to invite exploration — proved too much for the average family from Iowa. You can still find skeletons of lost souls if you know where to look. People who simply curled up behind a lemonade cart and gave up the ghost. It’s tragic, really.

But aside from just finding your way around, the labyrinth metaphor extends even to those of us who know the parks backwards and forwards. As our understanding deepens, our eyes are opened to new wonders we never knew existed. It’s a giant tootsie pop, and the more we lick, the closer we come to some gooey David Bowie center.

It takes a long time to peel back these layers of the onion, and even though I’m mixing metaphors, I advise you not to mix tootsie pops and onions in real life, because it is not pleasant. But mixing David Bowie with anything is always okay. Anyway, layers… Sometimes the most trivial items can take hold of a man’s fascination and drive him deeper and deeper into new levels of obsession.

On the surface, you have all the reasons people want to visit the parks. Top notch thrill rides, family time, autographs from sweaty college kids. Gradually you begin to understand more about the Disney approach to theming and storytelling. You dig deeper, buy your first Hidden Mickey book. You start collecting insider knowledge, and before you know it, you’re part of a weird fan community on the internet.

But it never stops. There’s always another layer, just beneath the one you’re currently standing on. And sometimes it’s hiding in plain sight.

Do not be fooled by those unofficial transportation collector cards! Accept only the real thing!

I recently obtained the above card during a trip to the Magic Kingdom. I have visited the Magic Kingdom in all the decades of its existence, and not once have I ever been offered an Official Walt Disney World Transportation Collector Card. I never even knew they existed. It wasn’t until I finally had a kid that an attendant approached us and secretly offered us two of these priceless relics for free!

My 2-year-old promptly obliterated one of them, but I salvaged the second one, and was prepared to pass it off as nothing more than those silly little “Magical Moments” they like to give to kids. Now that I have a son, I’m more aware of these things than ever. Mickey stickers are handed out like gateway drugs on every corner. He got some lame Autopia driver’s license, a monorail pilot’s license, a whole bunch of crap from Innoventions, and even a “Compensatory Star Tours FastPass for your Entire Family When You Finally Grow A Few More Inches.”

These things are harmless really. A chance to distract kids with bright pictures while waiting for mundane things like riding the monorail or failing the height stick. They’re cheap bits of fluff, hold attention for approximately 58.4 seconds, and then are quickly disposed of. I can imagine the moms and dads of America finding this stuff wadded into the crevasses of their suitcase the next time they pull out the luggage for a family trip. It probably garners a brief, nostalgic memory of their Disney trip eight months ago, and then gets promptly tossed in the garbage.

I took the card, marveled at Disney’s assumption that anyone (even a 2-year-old who can’t read) would think a Transportation Collector Card was even going to cause a blip in the attention radar, and turned it over to read the back.

Fun facts about both monorails AND crickets! And a hidden mickey, for you hidden mickey freaks! Did you find it?

There is absolutely nothing of interest here to fans. Even if you didn’t know the maximum speed of a Walt Disney World monorail, did you really care? And what brainless moron doesn’t know who Jiminy Cricket is?

I admit the Pinocchio Village Haus Hidden Mickey fact is okay, but you wouldn’t rush straight there to hunt for it. The card is a bit of garbage, just as we thought.

Except for that little line: “17 of 25.”

I stopped and re-read it. This isn’t just a bit of monorail fluff. This is one of an entire series. A series of collectible cards built around the Walt Disney World transportation system! Somebody sat down and painstakingly designed the entire set. Distributed it to various modes of transportation around property. Dared me to collect all 25!

Our brains are trained to ignore this stuff. Through experience and societal evolution, we have built-in filters that send this kind of manufactured puffery right past our logic circuits and into the garbage disposal. But if you give logic a chance, it can sometimes blow your mind.

Think about it. Can you even name 25 different modes of Walt Disney World transportation? Monorail, bus, tram, ferry, boat… seriously, I’m running out now. I guess you could start splitting the boats out into different styles. The smaller launches that service Poly and Grand Floridian. The Friendships at the Epcot resort. Maybe Magical Express gets its own card.

Yet some evil genius not only came up with 25 modes of transportation, he planted collectible cards at each one of them all over the property. A game about the most boring aspect of a Walt Disney World vacation. Unadvertised. Available only to cute toddlers. When the attendants don’t have anything better to do. An audience that has no concept of just how logically confounding these items are that they hold in their grubby little hands. It’s downright diabolical.

Now that I know these other 24 cards exist, there’s a part of me that’s obsessed with finding them. What if there are modes of transportation that I never knew existed! What if this is like Scientology, where only the Level Five fans get to use the Blizzard Beach pack mules, or the Downtown Disney transporter room? Are there Freemasons hang-gliding off the Contemporary rooftop as we speak?

It’s like stumbling onto an entire DaVinci code treasure hunt, buried in the unassuming transportation infrastructure of a massive resort complex.

The quest is on, ladies and gentlemen. And in this short of a race, there’s no prize for finishing second. I will solve this puzzle through the sheer power of my own magnificent brain. Forget those complete sets of Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom spell cards. Those things can be had for mere hundreds on eBay. But a complete set of Walt Disney World Transportation collector cards? You can’t put a value on that.

 

Merchandise Mashup

Posted on by
8

I may not be the biggest fan when it comes to turning Disney theme parks into a shopping mall.  I still miss the days when the shops actually carried unique, one-of-a-kind items.  It was a simpler time, when the experience meant more than spreadsheets, spending trends, and maximizing ROI (which I think stands for “Roy Oliver Isney”)

But while I disapprove of seeing the same “Walt Disney World 2011″ sweatshirt sold everywhere from the Emporium to Yankee Trader to Mitsukoshi, I do have to admit, I’m developing a grudging respect for the merchandising folks’ ability to create interesting products, even if they end up homogenized on every resort gift shop shelf.  Here are a few favorites from my rounds this weekend…

Whoever thought up the idea of character mash-ups should be awarded a medal by the merch department.  Their best work is usually during events.  Especially Halloween, when you’ll see Mickey dressed as Captain Hook, Pluto dressed as Scar, or the Seven Dwarfs as each of Kevin Spacey’s kills in “Seven.”  They’ve also done Star Wars Weekend mash-ups, which give us Goofy as Vader, Donald Duck frozen in Carbonite, and Dumbo as a Bantha (fingers crossed).

But I came across this Minnie Mouse plush over the weekend and thought it was an inspired sort of bizarre.  In case you can’t tell, that’s Minnie decked out in Marie gear.  Yes, Marie, one of the kittens from Aristocats.  Marie has been steadily climbing the charts as a best selling character, in spite of her movie being utterly forgettable.  Blame Japan (they love them some cute kittens).  I don’t mind it so much, as she is obscure enough for me to love also.

What about this M&Ms knockoff?  There’s actually a whole line of rip-off candy that has rolled out lately.  Dark chocolate, milk chocolate, mints, etc.  All themed in some way to a Disney character.  This one had a special, obvious park connection, made even more awesome by the Spanish echo of the famous monorail saying.

Oh, and speaking of monorails, this next one is officially my favorite new thing about Cars 2, speeding into theaters this summer:

Yes!  It’s a monorail as a Cars character!  Dang, he looks friendly.  They’ve got him slapped on a ton of merchandise at the Studios, and it’s sheer awesome.  For me, Cars is one of those movies that keeps getting better the more times I watch it.  I’m totally psyched about Cars 2, and now I’m wondering if the Tronorail wrap will get replaced with this guy.

Could it possibly get even more awesome?  The answer is yes.  Yes it can:

Yeah, it’s the same Cars-ified monorail, but now we get a Cars parking lot tram too!  Seriously, if they start Cars-ifying all the ride vehicles, my bank account is going to take a hit.  Right now they’re just images on activity books and lunch boxes, but if these things come out as toys, I predict big sales.

So now I guess this makes two merchandise-related posts in a row.  First the balloons, now the mash-ups.  I guess it could be worse.  I could be posting about vinylmation.

Tronorails

Posted on by
Reply

A few monorails around the resort are starting to take on a new look.  They will stay this way at least for the next nine months or so, until Walt Disney Pictures gives birth to the sequel to a certain breakthrough film from 1982.

No, Condorman was 1981.
There’s a lot of internet buzz for the movie, but getting lost in the argument is that the original Tron was a boring exercise in experimental technology.  Park fans like us would rather debate whether it is okay to use transportation vehicles as billboards. 

But I mean think about it.  We’re 28 years removed from the original film, and the most excitement it has generated (in the parks) involves some temporary tattoos.

Admit it.  This is cool.
Why didn’t Tron make an impact?  It’s not necessarily for lack of trying.  You might recall that a mega-blockbuster theme park opened the same year as Tron, Disney World’s first massive expansion project, fully half of which was devoted to visions of the future.  A Tron Arcade was originally slotted for EPCOT Center’s Communicore building.  It would have been located in the same area where Club Cool is now.  According to Harry Abrams’s fantastic book Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center: Creating The New World of Tomorrow (Harry Abrams wasn’t much for brevity), the Tron Arcade would be a

speculative and playful vision of games of the future [which will] give us the chance to interact with intelligent machines in a wide variety of gamelike activities.

In other words, it was a video arcade.
No one knows for sure why the Tron Arcade never materialized, though one suspects it may have something to do with the fact that Tron barely made back its $17 million budget.  In the end, Tron only managed to invade the parks in one teensy weensy way:  

This poster makes it sound way more impressive than it was.  Disneyland’s Peoplemover already had “speed tunnels” (an effect used in World of Motion, Dream Flight, and Horizons), in which a fast-moving image is projected around the ride vehicle, to give the impression of high speed (sort of a precursor to Star Tours).  They simply swapped in new footage of Tron’s lightcycles, replacing the old footage of race cars or something.

I guess technically I’m leaving something out.  Tron has actually had a presence in Walt Disney World since 1998.  It is enjoyed by only a lucky few every day, tucked away on the Fourth Floor of a Tron-like blue building in the heart of Downtown Disney.  Give it a try, if you can find it.  It’s way better than that Peoplemover thing.


Photo Attribution

Beams So Clean You Can Eat Off Them

Posted on by
2

Okay everyone.  I’m here to confirm for you that there is something big happening at WDW.   I’m not referring to the press event of last week, which announced the return of the Main Street Electrical Parade. You haven’t missed any new ride planning sessions, or rehearsals for the next major show.  And no, we haven’t received confirmation that the Hat is coming down (a whole year of a million other dreams, yet that one is still outstanding).


I am talking about the big kahuna, the event to end all events, the one we’ve all been waiting for.  Finally, at long last, the EPCOT monorail beams are being cleaned.

Just a few hundred crates does the trick!



Only in the Disney internet community can we make a big deal out of some powerwashing, but in this case, the fans are right.  The difference between the purified beams and the unwashed leper beams is striking. Disney deserves a little chiding for letting it get to this state, but it also deserves some credit for doing something about it.  They’ve made it partially around Future World (on the Test Track side), and one wonders if they’re going to quit, since the rest of the track continues out over water.  But hopefully they’ll finish the job before the newly cleaned beams laps back into wavy stink lines like that character from “Peanuts.” 



Apparently birds love the newly cleaned beams — not surprising, since birds love newly washed cars also.  They were perching on the beams in great numbers when I was there Saturday (you can see one in the photo above), leading to one of those great Walt Disney World rarities:  The elegant honk of a Monorail horn.  It sounds more Tugboat than Amtrak, and it did indeed scare the birds off the beam for just a moment.  It’s a sound seldom heard, so if you see those birds, it might be worth waiting for the monorail to pass by, just so you can mock it for blowing its nose.  In case you don’t want to wait, here’s a brief youtube video of the horn (Disneyland’s version, but they sound very similar).