Progress City, U.S.A.

A saw a story yesterday that made me realize that there have been a lot of little bits and pieces of news trickling out lately about new attractions that are coming to some of the less-covered Disney parks overseas. These developments don’t tend to get the coverage that new American attractions receive, so I thought that I’d summarize them here.

Now, I know I’ve been a bit of a Debbie Downer lately, what with all the disappointing shenanigans at Feature Animation and Parks & Resorts, but I’m afraid that won’t be turned around by these projects. One can pretty much guarantee that any new project at Tokyo Disneyland will be top notch due to the incredibly high levels of quality and service that the Oriental Land Company manages to achieve, but even they’re getting stuck with some new attractions that are less than… inspiring. But let’s take a look:

Concept art for Fantasmic! at Tokyo DisneySea (Disney)

The most recent announcement came a couple of days ago when the Oriental Land Company announced that it would be replacing its current night-time water show BraviSEAmo! with the similarly punctuated Fantasmic! The new show will debut in April 2011 as part of the celebrations surrounding Tokyo DisneySea’s 10th Anniversary, which is on September 4th of that year.

This might seem underwhelming to Disney fans, who might already have seen Fantasmic! in either California (where it’s played since 1992) or Florida (where it debuted in 1998). Thankfully we can hope for a little of that OLC magic (and their roughly $33.5 million investment) to update the twenty-minute show, as the announcement promises scenes from Aladdin, Cinderella and Finding Nemo. One can expect some new staging, too, on the waters of the park’s Mediterranean Harbor area. The concept art above shows Mickey atop some kind of ziggurat rising out of the water, and it seems apparent that the setup of the show will accommodate the larger lagoon.

BraviSEAmo! will perform its last show on November 13th, 2010, and preparation for Fantasmic! will begin soon after. While it might seem sacrilegious in Disney circles, I really am not a fan of Fantasmic!. In fact, I kinda hate it; it’s just not my thing (save for the giant MechaMaleficent). But hopefully the OLC will pull out all the stops to make it worthwhile. After all, their live shows typically tend to blow the offerings in the American parks completely out of the water.

Of course, DisneySea has been paying the price lately for its decade of awesomeness by receiving a string of cast-offs from other parks. Last year they got Turtle Talk with Crush, which fits beautifully with the 1930s ambiance of the American Waterfront area and the stylish S.S. Columbia. The American Waterfront will be the site of DisneySea’s next expansion, arriving in 2012. We’ve talked about this one before – behold:

Eeeeeehh… (Disney)

Toy Story Mania! (what’s up with all the exclamation points?) will be added to the New York area of the American Waterfront. Hopefully its budget of $129 million will lead to a little plussing.

Now.

Over at Tokyo Disneyland proper, there are a few new attractions on the way. The park, of course, has recently received the massively popular Monsters, Inc. dark ride. While unannounced, it also seems certain that the park will be receiving the upgrades to Star Tours that are on the way to parks stateside. In 2011, Mickey’s Philharmagic will be added in Fantasyland. While that’s perfectly reasonable, it naturally makes me sad because it necessitated the loss of the legendary Mickey Mouse Revue which I will now never be able to see in person. Between the Revue and Meet the World, replaced itself by Monsters, Inc., Tokyo Disneyland was a haven for attractions that should exist at Walt Disney World and I always hoped to see them myself.

Anyway.

Another attraction I’d always wanted to see at Tokyo Disneyland was the Cinderella Castle Mystery Tour, a walkthrough attraction that took guests through the bowels of the park’s iconic castle. This attraction has to be one of the most truly bizarre in Disney park history, leading guests through a series of encounters with various villains to a final confrontation with the Horned King from The Black Cauldron as he tries to raise an army of the damned.

So, yeah. I kinda hated to miss that one. It sounded insane, it was the sole attraction ever to reference The Black Cauldron, and it furthered my inferiority complex about the Magic Kingdom having the only one of the first four Disney castles to not have an attraction of its own. But the Mystery Tour closed in 2006, without replacement. Until now.

Now, I understand the closing of the old attraction and I understand the desire to make the new walk-through, which opens in 2011, focus specifically on Cinderella. After all, it’s her castle. And if we’re embarking on a brave new world of endless princess meet-and-greet interactive experiences, this would be a reasonable place for one. But I want you to take a moment and absorb the piece of concept art that was released to accompany the press release announcing this attraction. This wasn’t released as part of a sequence of renderings, or to emphasize one specific aspect of the project. This was, and as far as I can tell still is, the only piece of artwork that has been released to promote this new attraction. Can you tell I’m really wanting to build this up? So much that I’m going to put a page break below to make you click through to see?

Drum roll, please – gentlemen, behold!

(more…)

Nothing to see here… these aren’t the toys you’re looking for… (Photo: DLP.info)

One of the stranger moments of my D23 Expo experience was having one of my questions shot down by Bruce Vaughn, the Chief Creative Executive of Imagineering. At a press conference following the panel discussion of the creation of Pixar-based attractions for the theme parks, I asked about some of the attractions they hadn’t mentioned – those being planned for the Walt Disney Studios park in Paris. To the apparent surprise of many of the fellow Disney obsessives in the crowd, Vaughn’s response was that no new projects had been announced for Paris.

To those in that audience who were less-informed, I might have come off as simply wrong or trying to be sneaky. Truth being told, I was trying to be sneaky – just not in the way you might think.

We’ve known about the upcoming Toy Story Playland for quite some time now. The expansion has been rumored for a few years, and more recently the expansion’s plans and construction permits have been posted online. We even discussed it at length here in April. Obviously, the old adage is that until ground is broken plans can change. The thing is, in this case ground has been broken! The always-informative DLP.info has posted construction pictures of the site, as well as the construction wall art that heralds the arrival of the Toy Story characters. You can understand why I didn’t bother to check to see if a press release had been issued before asking my question!

I wasn’t really asking about the Playland, though. In my oh-so-clever craftiness I thought that by asking a vague question about the Pixar projects underway in Paris instead of asking specifically about the Toy Story rides, I might get a comment about the rumored Ratatouille attraction that is also said to be underway. I couldn’t care less about Toy Story Playland and its three carny rides, but I’m darn sure interested in the rumored trackless Ratatouille dark ride. It’s pretty funny that I didn’t want to look like a jerk asking about a Ratatouille ride that I wasn’t sure had been officially confirmed, so I thought I’d cover myself by asking about the Toy Story Playland which I thought was fair game. Busted.

Obviously, I have no gripe with Vaughn over his answer. After all, if they haven’t announced anything, they haven’t announced anything. The look on the faces of the Imagineers when I asked the question was worth the price of admission anyway. Sorry guys, I knew not what I did! But my question is this: why hasn’t the Playland been announced? This seems to be a Disney trend lately; you might recall the constant denials of a new resort project as the Bay Lake Tower was built in plain sight of thousands of daily guests.

At least with Bay Lake Tower I can understand the reasoning; Disney still had plenty of DVC units to sell at Saratoga Springs and Animal Kingdom Lodge, and didn’t want to spoil that market by dumping all the Bay Lake rooms into the mix. But why the secrecy about the project in Paris that is obviously underway? I can think of two possibilities. The first is that there’s some contractual weirdness with Euro Disney S.C.A. that requires those announcements to be made in specific places and times. The second is that they’re trying to keep the Parisian version of Toy Story Playland under wraps for as long as possible, because an exact clone of the area is one of the three highly-touted expansions for Hong Kong Disneyland. Disney already had the area planned and ready to go for Paris; the Hong Kong version is a copy, and Disney might not want that to be obvious as they deal with testy Chinese officials. Surely the Hong Kong officials know, though; Toy Story Land was a last-minute addition to the HKDL expansions, joining the lineup when Chinese officials nixed the proposed Glacier Bay area.

As for Paris, the toys are on the way. Unless this is the most committed disinformation campaign ever!

Oh lordy.

I managed to make it back to the motor lodge, but I’m not sure I can keep my eyes open long enough to say anything intelligible. For those of you planning on coming to D23 next year, I recommend an extensive training regimen and sleep deprivation training. It’s hard core.

Anyway, if you don’t know what happened today I doubt you’ve been paying attention. Parks head Jay Rasulo confirmed that Walt Disney World will indeed be getting its new Fantasyland, and it’s spectacular. I won’t get the images up until I get home, but you can easily find them around and about. Most remarkable is the fact that the plans pretty much mirror those that were leaked a few months ago; who would have guessed that they would have survived the budgeting axe?

The princess attractions we had so many questions about are not rides, but they’re not plain meet-and-greets either. They sound like interactive experiences with a storyline and special effects, and should keep the kiddies entertained. For those of us less princess-inclined, we’ll have a lushly landscaped Fantasyland to look at, with lots of moving water and new buildings.

The “Be Our Guest Restaurant” will feature a lot of interactive elements, but is a completely different project than the original Beauty and the Beast show concept from Paris. More intriguing is the fact that it will operate as a quick-service venue for lunch, and convert to a table service restaurant for dinner. It makes a lot of sense, really, and fills a couple of underserved niches nicely.

We’ll get the “dueling” Dumbo spinners, in an entirely new area themed to that film. Since its construction will necessitate the demolition of Mickey’s Toontown Fair (yay!), that area’s train station will be rethemed to become the Fantasyland Station. The Barnstormer coaster, another Toontown property, will receive circus theming as well. I noted that one of the renderings featured a Casey Jr. Circus Train, and the Imagineers confirmed that it’s something that’s being considered for the area’s second phase. They say that it might not take the exact same form as the matching attraction at Disneyland, but it will hopefully be incorporated in some way.

The new ride based on The Little Mermaid will be built in part on the old 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea foundations. It will feature a facade designed specifically for Florida, but the actual ride will mirror that being planned for California Adventure in 2011.

These major additions are planned for completion by 2012. The Pixie Hollow area is now intended for a phase two opening in 2013. Design on that area is not complete, so there’s a lot to be figured out, but the Imagineers hinted that the final plan might include more attractions.

The other big reveal was the long, long overdue Star Tours 2. Disney is working with Lucasfilm now on updating the attraction, which will debut in 2011. The ride film will be in digital 3-D; they showed a teaser at the presentation that set the ride in a podracing sequence from the prequel trilogy.

Other tidbits include that Imagineers have several ideas for where to relocate Mickey once his Toontown home is bulldozed, and also that plans are underway to update and refresh the One Man’s Dream exhibit at the Hollywood Studios.

The day actually began before the Parks and Resorts presentation, with an early presentation by animation producer Don Hahn. Hahn, who wrote the recent The Alchemy of Animation, had a great lecture about the animation process with plenty of good art. Most notably, he included a slide of concept art from The Snow Queen, a new film now under development at Walt Disney Animation Studios. Hahn is also the producer of Tim Burton’s new stop-motion project Frankenweenie; he confirmed that puppet construction is already underway for the film.

There’s lots more to talk about, and plenty of pictures and art to show, but sleep must come now. After all, D23 waits for no man…