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"The opposite of Disneyland?"
Disney's California Adventure is located directly across the entry plaza from Disneyland. Recall that this is a Saturday morning, so you can imagine my shock and surprise...especially coming directly from Disneyland...when I went across the plaza, ehtered the park and discovered a gigantic entry plaza that is...EMPTY. It's a big open space of the kind that Disneyland hasn't got, and it's almost completely devoid of the thing that Disneyland has far too many of: customers. My brain sought out something to connect this to, and soon came up with a word that seemed to match: EPCOT. Only without the giant golf ball and tiara. We bore to the right, and came upon something that looks a bit like a rural airport. It took a moment for my mind to process it, but before long I realized that every person in the park was standing in line for the nearest attraction, Soarin' over California. Knowing that our time was somewhat limited, we opted to make use of the FastPass system for this attraction instead of waiting in the hour-long queue. We put our admission tickets into a machine, it gave them back along with a ticket that told us to come back in an hour or so.
Fastpass is an evil invention. It is an evil system, and I can say with certainty that it imposed a negative impact on my experience in both of the Disney parks, and that it imposed its negative effects on my visit both as a user and as a non-user. It's all because of the way the system fails to work. The idea seems reasonable enough: intercept potential riders at the queue entrance and get some of them to take tickets for a later visit. When those riders come back they get to board immediately instead of waiting in line. On the surface, it sounds like a good idea. But in practice, it really does not work. It does not work because the park is not designed around the structure that the FastPass system imposes on system users, and it does not work because of the basic limitations of the attraction. A certain percentage of the ride's hourly capacity is reserved for the FastPass users, which artificially lengthens the line for the non-users, making the FastPass system more attractive. Never mind that if FastPass didn't exist, the wait would be shorter for everybody. For those of us who use the system, it causes other problems. We collected our tickets, looked at them, looked at each other, then said, "Now what?"
There was nothing else anywhere close. So we hiked on down the path, a long, hot, winding path with no shade, which reminded me in many ways of MarineLand in Canada. This took us past a hotel, and past a rapids ride that none of us was particularly interested in, and ultimately dumped us out along side a large pond which forms the 'beachfront' for Paradise Pier. I set off clockwise around the pond to arrive at California Screamin'.
When I got there, there was nobody in sight. I went up and down the ramps and caught up to the three or four people who were waiting on the platform. Mom and Dad opted out, so I ended up riding by myself in the front seat of the last car. The ride is long and winding, so it is a very satisfying ride that reminds me a lot of the Sooperdooperlooper at Hersheypark. It has the one big loop, it starts with an electric launch, and it features two linear-motor lift hills that work amazingly well. It gives a very nicely paced Schwarzkopf-esque ride, with one dramatic exception, that being the enormous shoulder bars of the sort that should not be allowed on any coaster anywhere. They were actually more of a detriment to this ride than the ones on Revolution were. Aside from that, California Screamin' is quite a nice ride.
When I got off, Mom and Dad were waiting, and Dad and I opted to ride the Sun Wheel. It's a modernized re-creation of the Coney Island Wonder Wheel and because of a very slow loading process, it was our longest wait of the day (aside from Soarin') even though the line wasn't very long. We were partly delayed by our preference to ride in one of the "swinging" cars. I believe the ride was built by Waagner-Biro, which is now part of Intamin. It's a smooth running wheel, but its location is a bit odd. It's a spectacular location alongside the lake, but the loading platform is actually below the water level, meaning the Wheel is in the lowest part of the park. So the amount of observation you can do from the wheel is somewhat limited. Not that you can see much through the quarter-inch openings in the steel screening over the gondola. I really do think that mesh is overkill; I would have preferred a 4" ball rejection. The ride is kind of neat. If you're not familiar, it's a giant gondola Ferris wheel, except that many of the gondolas are mounted on kidney-shaped tracks within the structure of the wheel, which allows the gondolas to roll back and forth instead of merely hanging on the rim of the wheel. As the wheel begins to turn, the car rolls around the end of the track and down towards the center of the wheel. Near the 90-degree point, the track transitions from a generally vertical orientation to a generally horizontal orientation. At this point, the car rolls along the track, picking up a fair amount of speed, and rolls all the way out to the rim of the wheel, swinging wildly as it does so. It turns out that the best seat is the one Dad got...it's on the left-hand side as you board, and that puts you facing outward when the car goes through this wild-swing maneuver. The disappointing thing about the Sun Wheel is that once it is loaded, the complete ride involves only one full rotation before they start unloading again. Because of the added rolling and swinging motion, a second full revolution would make for a more fulfilling ride.
It is probably just as well that we didn't get that extra rotation, as our time was fast approaching for our ride on Soarin' over California. We re-joined Mom (she does not do Ferris wheels of any sort) and continued around the lake, past the games midway, Maliboomer and the California Zephyr and back down that long and winding path to Soarin'. With our FastPass tickets in hand (remember, we've waited about an hour and a half, and had to backtrack through the park, having not had quite enough time to ride either the Zephyr or Mulholland Madness, which means we have to go back to the lake for those...) we proceeded into the aircraft hangar and directly down to the preshow boarding area.
Initially, it is not exactly obvious what you're getting yourself into. It's several rows of seats, individual seats, but hooked together, and flush, so these aren't molded or anything like that. But they are suspended from above, with a dress plate obscuring the forward and overhead view. We took our seats and fastened our seat belts. You know you are an amusement park nut when you walk into a theater and think nothing of the fact that the overhead view from your seat is completely obstructed, and your seat has a seat belt. All of this became perfectly sensible in a few moments, as the seats were hoisted forward and upward, positioning us above a large curved projection screen on the floor. I guess you might call it a "floor show." Anyway, the show is spectacular, and in many ways it is a real throwback to the World Expo-type attractions that Disney did better than anybody else. A cynic would look at this attraction and wonder how it ever got the green light in a modern Disney park...after all, there is no character tie-in, there is no synergy with any of the other Disney properties, it's just an experience based on a hang-glider flight over California, ending, oddly enough, in Anaheim. It features sights, sounds, smells and wind effects, and it's a fantastic attraction for all ages. But it practically screams, "1964!!" Not that it is a dated attraction (it really isn't) but rather it is very much like the kind of attractions that Disney was building back then. A look at some of the more disappointing stuff that has come to the Disney parks in recent years makes Soarin' look a little bit out of place. It doesn't fit in. And yet, it appears to be the most popular attraction in the park, it is certainly the most talked-about attraction in the park, it is extraordinarily well done, and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the only attraction built for California Adventure that has been exported to another Disney park, where, I am sure it will be a huge success. I hope the bean counters running the company take a close look at this thing and understand why it works where some of the bigger, fancier, more complicated, and much more synergistic attractions have been far less successful. Soarin' is Disney doing what Disney does best in an amusement park attraction, and proof that for all the troubles they've had in recent years, Disney is still capable of doing remarkable things, and Imagineering is still alive.
After Soarin', we returned to the lake so that I could get a ride on Mulholland Madness, which turns out to be an unremarkable Mack Wild Mouse coaster. This one is similar to the one at Hersheypark, but it lacks the brakeless operation and the non-stop loading. It ends up being another pretty forgettable California steel coaster.
Less forgettable is the ride across the midway, the California Zephyr. Built by Chance-Morgan, it is a re-creation of the classic Traver circle-swing. I was fortunate enough to ride the Rocket Ships at Geauga Lake in the last season before they were heartlessly ripped out of that park. The re-creation is remarkably faithful to the original. It lacks the guide rail above the loading platform that Traver used to pull the rockets in level with the loading platform, and the spring-loaded doors on the rockets. It also has a set of very strange seat belts that appear to be made from cut up pieces of waterpark float-tube glued to a side-squeeze buckle. I wonder if they are intentionally designed to be entirely devoid of any strength at all. The ride gets up to speed and swings out to full extension in a hurry, and while it is no major thrill machine in the forces department, it's a great visual experience both on board and from the ground. I continue to believe this is the kind of ride that almost any park could benefit from because it is very approachable by riders of literally all ages, but it can be exciting for riders of all ages as well. In fact, I was a little disappointed to see that Lakeside Park has converted their Rocket Ship tower into a game joint and light tower.
At this point, it kind of felt like we had done the whole park, which brings us back around to the very strange layout of California Adventure. It turns out that there is another spur to the park which carries more of a Hollywood movie studio theme. It's a fairly obvious path from the park entrance, but from the Paradise Pier section where we were, it's kind of hidden. The path reminds me a lot of the Disney/MGM Studios park in that it's more long paths down fake streets with building facades, and not a lot else. California Adventure actually reminds me a lot of EPCOT with its long distances and small crowds. A lot of that is because most of the attractions in this part of the park are indoor attractions, many of them copied from the Florida parks: we skipped the MuppetVision 3D show, for instance, because while it's a great show, I have seen it in Florida several times. There are also animation and production attractions, I guess, but I missed those as well. Again, I've been to the Disney/MGM park several times and there's only so much of that old-time moviemaking stuff that is actually worth seeing again.
What I did not miss was the Tower of Terror attraction, which is copied from the Florida park. This incarnation is a little different...the hotel itself is smaller and less elaborate, but the crowd is also a lot smaller. The most obvious difference is in the ride system itself. Like the Florida ride, there are two drop shafts, but unlike Florida there are only two loading areas, making for a simpler elevator design. With the tiny crowd, I reallly didn't have time to appreciate much at all of the queue. Instead, I proceeded directly to the waiting elevator, took my seat (!), fastened my seat belt (!), and waited. The doors closed, and the ride began. My sense is that there is a bit more going on with this ride than with the one in Florida. It seems that it did more going up and down, it had some additional stuff visible in the shaft, and everything happened a lot quicker than it did in Florida. By "a lot quicker" I don't mean that it is a shorter ride, but rather that each "scene" is shorter. There is less time spent on any given level within the tower, perhaps a nod to the average rider's ever-decreasing attention span and yet ever-increasing rate of perception. As a result there seemed to be more stuffed into the ride program than there was in Florida. Or something like that. In any case, it was a pretty good ride.
I met up with Mom and Dad again, who had unexpectedly failed to ride Tower of Terror and we set off down the midway again. It was a long walk, and we stopped briefly to take a ride through Monstropolis on the Monsters, Inc. dark ride. I guess the ride replaced the original Superstar Limo, about which I never heard a single positive review. It must have truly been awful, because while this ride was tolerable, it was far from great. It was about as forgettable as the Pooh ride at the Magic Kingdom.
By this time, we had suffered enough. We spent half a day in what is really about half of a park, a park which just feels empty and unfinished. For us, it was time to go up the road to Knott's Berry Farm. California Adventure turns out to be a poorly executed answer to an obvious desperate need. Disneyland is far too small and far too crowded to handle the number of people who try to pack its tiny midways. Crowd control at Disneyland is a nightmare, partly because of the comedy of logistical errors perpetrated by a bunch of people who could learn a lot from their East coast bretheren, but mostly because of the sheer magnitude of the crowd. Disneyland was in desperate need of a major expansion, but the design of the park kind of precludes any kind of an expansion of the scale that was required. So Disney created California Adventure, part movie studio park, part traditional amusement park and styled after some of the more successful projects elsewhere in the world. While the overarching theme of a California adventure is rather strange for a Southern California amusement park (perhaps "Florida Adventure" would have been more successful, not to mention more accurate?) the idea of building a second gate as a major expansion to Disneyland should have worked. They did a lot of smart things with California Adventure. The park has a lot of 'elbow room' within its gates, and it features the attractions that are obvious in their absence from Disneyland, particularly the roller coaster, Space Shot, and Ferris wheel of Paradise Pier. And yet California Adventure has not been a rousing success. Walking through the park, I notice that it is vast and empty. Attractions are limited, and the park just isn't all that comfortable. It seems there is a tremendous amount of gratuitous walking, the kind of roundabout wandering enforced by the kind of layout that Walt Disney explicitly avoided when he designed Disneyland. It reminds me of no park so much as it reminds me of MarineLand, with its eight rides crammed into more than a thousand acres. It's interesting that the park is so unlike Disneyland. Disneyland has a unique layout, and it is easy to conclude that perhaps there is something wrong with its hub and spoke design simply because it has been duplicated or adapted in so few parks, even among Disney's own parks, over the last fifty years. But looking at California Adventure, I wonder if it isn't simply a lack of creativity and vision. Instead of using the park to capitalize on half a century of experience with not only Disneyland but also its copies and offshoots all over the world, California Adventure adopts a more conventional Duell-style layout, a design which is more reminiscent of Cedar Point but without the short-cuts. The result is a park that just feels like it has no energy. It lacks crowds, but even if it had crowds it lacks energy and interaction. Worse than having no energy of its own, California Adventure sucks the energy out of its customers with an incredible amount of gratuitous extra walking, magnified by the distances between attractions and the use of the evil FastPass system. At the moment, California Adventure is at best half the park that Disneyland is. It has a lot of potential just because of the amount of useable space it offers. But right now that is unrealized potential. The park has failed to relieve the crowd pressure on Disneyland because it doesn't really work, either as a complement to Disneyland or as an alternative to it.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Next: Knott's Berry Farm
Footnote 1: [Return to text]
--DCAjr
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