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"Positively stupid, or utterly brilliant. I'm not sure which"
A lot can change in 25 hours in Disney's World. I got off the monorail, hiked down the ramp, showed my empty camera bag to the guard at the "nothing to declare" line, and joined a large, friendly mob milling about in the plaza in front of the Magic Kingdom. The mob really wasn't that many people, but it was really crowded because the space was limited. The stage wasn't there the day before, but then, neither were the 75 6-foot-tall Mickey Mouse statues which were the center of interest here. Today was designated Mickey Mouse's 75th birthday, and in his honor, 75 Mickey Mouse statues were sent off to 75 different dignitaries who decorated or designed decoration for each figure. All of the figures were standing together on the lawn outside the Magic Kingdom, and park employees were handing out brochures which described which Mickeys were designed by which people.I gave the figures a brief look, and proceeded under the railroad track and into the park. I walked down Main Street, then over to Tomorrowland for a couple of rides on Space Mountain while I still had a chance. You know, re-rides on that thing are a real pain, just because the boarding platform is so far away from the midway. A little like getting re-rides on Top Gun at Kings Island, except that Space Mountain has a Speedramp on the exit. The ride is rough, giving a very Wild Mouse-like ride with a couple of decent drops. It's a good ride, but overall it's really nothing special except for being really dark, and pulling off the "coaster in outer space" idea very nicely. I took a ride on each track, waiting a bit longer than I did yesterday. Then I decided to take in the Tomorrowland attraction I missed before, the Timekeeper. It's a CircleVision movie enhanced with a couple of animatronic hosts in the theater. The premise is that 9-Eye, the CircleVision camera, is able to travel through time and space under the control of the timekeeper. Mostly it's a clever excuse for doing all the usual special-venue theater tricks. I didn't watch the Canada CircleVision movie at Epcot this time, but Timekeeper seemed a lot quieter than I remember the Canadian show being the last time I was in there [Footnote 1]. I guess the CircleVision theater here in Tomorrowland has better sound isolation for the projectors. Anyway, the Timekeeper is a neat show, although it does have one easy-to-correct anachronism, which they could fix by setting the clock in the theater back a few years.
After the Timekeeper, I made my Disney Mistake. Yesterday, I had been intrigued by the treehouse over in Adventureland, so I decided to go check it out. That's when I found out that it's really nothing more than a themed queue. It didn't take long to see it, but it was time I probably could have better spent doing something else. It's hard to believe they used to take tickets for this thing!
I really didn't have time for anything else, so I took up a position near the hub-end of Main Street for the evening fireworks show. Called "Wishes," it's a vehicle for Disney music and audio clips combined with fireworks over Cinderella Castle. Disney does some really interesting and unusual things with perfectly ordinary fireworks, resulting in a pretty spectacular show. It's just unusual to see what are normally high aerial shells fired sideways for a lower show and an entirely different overall appearance. I also find it interesting that they close down a very small area surrounding the castle for the fireworks show
The Magic Kingdom is constructed so that while it is easy to get anywhere in the park (so long as there is no parade going on), if you want to leave the park, you MUST go down Main Street to the single entrance. Once out in the plaza with the 75 Mickeys, you board a bus, monorail, or boat to go back to the TTC and parking lot. The fireworks show (and the damned-early close!) insures that most people will stay in the park until the place closes. Closing immediately before the fireworks insures that once the fireworks are over, EVERYONE will head down Main Street and try to leave AT ONCE. This is either incredibly stupid, or terribly smart, I'm not sure which. I climbed up to the patio on the park side of the Main Street railway station just so that I could watch the spectacle of thousands of people all trying to leave at once. I started to analyze the situation. The fireworks show is viewable from almost anywhere in the park. So everyone moves around to the hub and then down Main Street. But Main Street has a limited capacity for moving people, and the gates are even more limited. This slows the rate at which people arrive at the monoail station, which means that even after delaying, I still only had about a two-train wait for the monorail, and they were running it at a very tight interval. I opted for the monorail rather than the ferry at least in part because I had to go all the way over to Epcot to collect my car. I was kind of planning to go back to Epcot for their closing show, but by the time I got there, it was late enough that I didn't think I'd get a good vantage point for the show (the best spot is about as far from the front gate as you can get) so I opted to end my day instead. It was a good day at Animal Kingdom, Epcot and the Magic Kingdom, but by this time my parents should have arrived at the motel, and tomorrow I have to return the car and spend a day on the IAAPA show floor.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: I still think IMAX would be more appropriate
for Epcot's Canada pavilion than CircleVision...since IMAX is Canadian... [Return
to text]
--DCAjr
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