Brightest Young Things

Day 1: Downtown Disney
Day 2 Part I: Animal Kingdom
Day 2 Part II: Epcot

For my birthday this year my girlfriend Amy took me on a surprise whirlwind trip to Walt Disney World. There is something about being in Disney World that, for lack of a less obvious word, is magical. This is a trip I think everyone needs to do if you a) haven't been or b) haven't been in many years. a) was the case for Amy, and b) was the case for me. Growing up with relatives in Orlando certainly had its perks. What I offer you below is an account of my Disney adventure that I hope will aide you in planning yours.

Look for cheap package deals at:
http://wdwinfo.com/

And here is a good guide on the best time to go to Disney:
http://travelwithkids.about.com/cs/disneyworld/a/whenvisitwdw.htm

And one more:
http://www.wdisneyw.co.uk/when.html

Monday

We awake fully rested for our final day in Disney World.  I am so ready for more adventures, but Amy has had enough.  I won't let her poor attitude bring me down, no sir, I'm going to the Magic Kingdom and I'm going to love it.  I order scrambled eggs from room service.  It tastes and looks like Amy's Capri jet boat barf.  There is also an apple that is mealy and bruised.  And for some reason they can't charge it to the room, I have to go down and pay for it.  Asking them to get us a cab and hold our luggage for us trips them up as well.  It's as if we're the first guests to ever stay here.  I know I suggested staying at one of the Downtown Disney hotels, just don't do the Best Western.  Then again, you're only sleeping there so it doesn't really matter.

I'm anxious to get going.  We arrive and I remember that you have to take a monorail into the park.  Or a ferryboat.  This is amazing.  I'm gonna say it again, you have to take a monorail to the Magic Kingdom.  It really is a Magic Kingdom!!!

You enter the park at Main Street, USA, with it's turn-of-the-century American town motif. We stop into the Main Street Bakery for some especially delicious blueberry muffins with granulated sugar on top. As we head towards Cinderella's Castle a horse drawn carriage pulls up and a number of attractive young men and women wearing showboat costumes hop out and start doing a song and dance routine welcoming everyone, Mary Poppins style. This is the theme of the day, everywhere you turn in the Magic Kingdom there is something going on for no reason. Everything is engineered for maximum stimulation overload.  We get closer to the massive castle and there is some stage show going on with Peter Pan.  It's like a birthday party on Christmas on Oct 31st.

I decide we need to visit a classic first, so we head to Liberty Square, the smallest of all the Disney "lands", but it contains a childhood favorite, the Haunted Castle. The attraction is as brilliant as I remember. You ride your little Doom Buggy through creepy scenes, none of which are actually scary, but they are endlessly inventive. There is a timeless quality to it, and the special effects hold up well enough that they have only needed minor tweaks over the years.

Next we walk over to Fantasyland for one of my all time favorite Disney attractions – It’s A Small World.  I ask Amy, a Disney World virgin, if she’s familiar with the ride and/or song and she says of course.  I wonder if kids are somehow born with this knowledge.  We queue up and I reminisce about family trips to the park, my father's hatred of this ride boiling deep within his soul as my sister and I obsessively sang the song.

It's a world of laughter, A world of tears. It's a world of hopes, And a world of fears. There's so much that we share, That it's time we're aware, It's a small world after all.

It's a small world after all. It's a small world after all. It's a small world after all. It's a small, small world.

Repeat ad infinitum

The retro décor is wonderful, a sort of Lawrence Welk meets Merv Griffin wonderland.  You hop on a little boat and take the small world tour, room after room of psychedelic weirdness, crappy animatronic cherub children gyrating around, and that dreaded song on loop. I do not exaggerate when I say this; if you dropped acid on this thing you’d come out the other end either schizophrenic or knowing the meaning of life.

Across the street is another 4D movie, Mickey's PhilharMagic, I’ve kind of had enough of these but we check it out anyway. It’s only been open for a few years, but already the quality of the 3D has been far surpassed by our modern day digital projection screens. It’s disappointing and I’d avoid it.

I decide to keep up the pace of the classics and we head to Pirates of the Caribbean. I explain to Amy that the movie was actually an adaptation of the ride and not the other way around, yet the film is only based about .04% on the attraction itself. I wonder how a new generation of children, familiar with the films first, will enjoy the ride that doesn’t house any familiar faces. Disney, apparently wondering the same thing, but also concerned with the backlash of changing anything too drastically, has effectively stuck in Jack Sparrow at three different locations.  Again, this ride follows the basic Disney premise of a "dark ride", you sit on something that moves and it takes you around so you can look at stuff.  While Pirates does include a little waterfall drop at the beginning, it’s relatively tame and the rest of the ride is honestly just looking at stuff.

Now as a kid I also went to Kings Dominion, Busch Gardens, and Six Flags. I was addicted to thrill rides and roller coasters. Yet I still loved this ride. Somehow they tap into something. You ride through this town and look at these pirates and these intricate houses and passageways and it really transports you to another world. You want to get out of the boat and peak around the corner, sure that more treasure awaits. Something about the air and the smells and the lighting gives you a feeling that you’re outside, but outside in a dream. The ride seems too big to fit inside whatever building it’s in. This is a common theme in Disney parks, the illusion of large spaces inside what look to be small structures from the outside, years and years later I’m still not quite sure how it’s done, and doubt it can ever be recreated as effectively.

We walk through the Pirates gift shop and I note that the wooden musket I used to own now only comes in bright blue or red. We take a quick run through the Swiss Family Treehouse which gives you a neat view of the park as you peak through the trees. We stop at the Aloha Isle Refreshments to get some ice cream. I’m amazed that Foursquare has this stand in its database.  There are fireworks going off for no apparent reason and an old timey rag time band playing on the street.  Ok, where too now?

you just sort of walk around and look at stuff

We wonder around aimlessly and end up in Frontierland.  The Magic Kingdom is so old fashioned when you think about it.  All these lands are what a kid growing up in the 50s would be all about.  It’s wonderfully retro and quaint.  Splash Mountain, the Song of the South themed log flume ride, is down for repairs at the moment and Thunder Mountain, a roller coaster, is too vomit inducing for Amy and a too tame for me, so we stop putting it off and head to Tomorrowland.

Walt Disney's futurist ideas and obsession with progress must have seemed revolutionary in the mid 50s. The Tomorrowland TV specials, now available on the Disney Treasures DVD series, present fascinating ideas for space exploration that helped garner public support of NASA. The life on Mars segment is one of the finest pieces of animation I've ever seen. As the years have ticked by though it's been problematic, as it is in a constant state of becoming outdated. Amy smiled as she saw it, remarking it was cool that they left it all Jules Verney and retro. I explained that it's actually been revamped a number of times, but they have been able to keep it looking timelessly futuristic, or "the future that never was".

Last time I was in Tomorrowland there was an attraction called Alien Encounter.  They basically strapped you in a chair and scared the crap out of you via 4 senses, it was definitely the most kid unfriendly thing Disney had ever done.  Well, apparently it was too scary, cause they have re-imagined it with a new Lilo & Stitch storyline.  It should still be on your to do list though, cause even thought it's Stitch doing the scaring and not some gruesome alien, it still makes kids cry and parents demanding to be escorted out.  Awesome.

Next we head to The Carousel of Progress, which holds the record as the longest-running stage show, with the most performances, in the history of American theater. It originally appeared at the 1964 World's Fair and is supposedly Walt's favorite thing ever. You sit in a circular theater and get rotated around to four different scenes of an animatronic family as they describe the advances in household technology, starting in the 1900s and ending in a ridiculous prediction of the 2000s done in 1994. Don't miss this one, as the finale is unintentionally hilarious with grandma playing a virtual reality video game and the oven controlled by voice commands. The earlier scenes though are actually pretty interesting.  Oh, and they sing at the end of each theme.  Fat people behind us knew all the words and sang along.  Who has the Carousel of Progress theme memorized?  Seriously.

WTF?  It's 2010, when is Lawnmower Man coming true?

There is some new Monsters, Inc. comedy show attraction at Tomorrowland that we went into blindly. It ended up being the coolest attraction on the entire trip. As you wait in line they ask you to text jokes that will be used during the show.  Then you're led to a theater that looked like a comedy club (remember, the Monsters needs laughs now, not screams).  The show starts with some familiar characters from the film and a couple new ones on a giant movie screen doing stand up. Then something really unexpected happens, they turn the cameras on some audience members and the CGI monsters on the screen start interacting with them.

What was going on here?  At first I thought the shots of real audience members were pre-recorded, but then one happened near us and I saw that it was an actual person. Then I thought maybe they were plants, but there were some very real interactions with the monsters on the stage, like them not hearing the audience members name at first.  I eventually worked out that it was a real live improv show where they were rendering the CGI on the screen in real time, like digital puppets. The technology here was incredible, considering a second of the actual Monsters, Inc. film probably took a day to render.  I'm guessing they only render the mouths in real time, and all the body movements and actions are pre-programmed and can be launched with a push of a button or something like "move left", "wave", etc.  Oh, and the show was hilarious.  Like laugh out loud honest to God actually funny. This was the highlight of my day, don't miss it.  This thing should win some amusement park award.

Ok, we had a plane to catch so it was time for Space Mountain, Disney's iconic indoor roller coaster. This was my favorite ride as a kid, but I wasn't sure how it would hold up, I mean, it only goes 30mph, there are no inversions, and it is the same basic track from 1975.  But last year they did some nice renovations, the epic structure itself is mostly the same, a giant retro space fortress, but as you venture inside it there are numerous changes.  Video games have been added that you can play as you wait in line and the boarding area and has been completely redone.  The special effects during the ride have been tweaked, and the light pollution has been drastically reduced.  And, well, the ride was just as fun as I remember.  I don't know how they do it, technically it is a dinosaur, but they are able to make you feel like you're traveling at light speed.  It was a perfect ending to the trip. We headed back to the monorail to go home.

I love Disney World.

Day 1: Downtown Disney
Day 2 Part I: Animal Kingdom
Day 2 Part II: Epcot

Previously in Misc/Awesome:

• 12/28: Terrible Boyfriend/ Girlfriend Generator.
• 12/1: The John Waters Advent Calendar-it starts today
• 11/28: It Chooses You: All I Want for Christmas is Everything from Miranda July's Pop-Up Shop
• 11/3: Things I'd Move to Minnesota For
• 9/6: PHOTOS: Maloof $$ Money Cup
• 9/2: PHOTOS: Chantilly Model Train Show
• 9/1: Libby's List: 5 Things I Want Right Now...
• 8/22: PHOTOS: Best Friends Day
• 8/10: PHOTOS: Lawn Mover Racing, Eastern Seaboard Regionals @ Bowles Farm
• 7/26: Special List: Things the BYGays Want Now That We Can Marry In DC (and NY!)