Progress City, U.S.A.

The recent flurry of discussion about future expansion of the new Pixar Place at Disney’s Hollywood Studios has borne some fruit. Message threads on prominent discussion boards have resulted in some very reliable sources confirming that WDI is, in fact, working on a new indoor coaster attraction themed to Monsters, Inc. Work seems to have progressed beyond the mere “Blue Sky” phase, with some saying that Disney has already started to contact contractors.

The above image, produced by Disney documentarian extraordinaire Martin Smith, shows the expansion area available to WDI for Pixar Place’s Phase 2. At the top of the image, in white, is the track layout for the recently opened Toy Story Mania! The area outlined in yellow is the current Pixar Place, and the area outlined in red is the former Soundstage One building which has been earmarked for the new attraction. To the left of the buildings is a backstage area which contains, among other things, the wardrobe department. The purple outline shows how far Soundstage One can be expanded without impacting the function of these buildings, while the blue outline shows a possible ride footprint which would affect the backstage areas. More accessible backstage areas are outlined in cyan, and this is where it is rumored that the attraction’s queue area would be set up.

This image, also from Martin Smith, compares the footprint of Disney Studios Paris’s Crush’s Coaster to that of Hollywood Studios’ Soundstage One. The Paris coaster is often mentioned as an example of what Orlando’s new attraction will resemble. While the plot size of the two attractions are roughly similar, Smith says that the Crush’s Coaster building is far taller that the available building in Florida.

In any case, it seems that help is on the way for the beleaguered Hollywood Studios. With the confirmation that this coaster will arrive around 2011 and the increasingly solid rumors of the Little Mermaid attraction for the Magic Kingdom, we now have two of the four speculated E-ticket attractions for the resort’s 40th anniversary. More nebulous rumors say that EPCOT Center might at last receive a worthy restoration of Journey Into Imagination by that time, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what’s coming to Animal Kingdom. At the very least, it seems that we east-coasters are finally feeling the love from Unca John.

UPDATE: Mention of the coaster seems to have crept into the somewhat-official media. The MTV Movies blog spoke to Monsters, Inc. director Pete Docter and asked him about the possibility of a sequel to that film. While Docter mentions that they’ve “thought about it” and have “got a couple of ideas”, he won’t confirm or deny any rumors. The article goes on to state that “in the moment, those ideas are being filtered into a “Monsters, Inc” roller-coaster at the Walt Disney Resorts, which should open in a couple of years.” Now I don’t know what MTV’s source on this was, but it seems like a pretty definitive statement on the issue. I’d say this project is a go.

The new gateway to Pixar Place. Photo nabbed from EpcotServo.

These are odd times for Disney theme park fans. After a decade of escalating affronts to the legacy of quality and good taste they had long taken for granted, relief came in the form of new CEO Bob Iger and the John Lasseter-led Pixar braintrust. While some would see Lasseter as the White Knight by whose hands all positive change would be affected, his efforts will hopefully result instead in a wide variety of Imagineers who could be equally trusted with large-scale, E-ticket projects. As the most highly-placed creative staffer in the company, Lasseter has the ear of individuals that the average Imagineer or animator could only dream of calling for a lunch meeting. After so many years in the wilderness, Disney fans thought that they finally had an advocate at the highest levels of the corporate ladder.

The problem, however, with surviving the reign of a tyrant is that any small kindness is viewed as loving and magnanimous. Things in the parks were so bad for so long, that just getting a fresh coat of paint on anything seemed like the theming achievement of the century. After having been so grateful to see the bleeding staunched, it would seem ungrateful to criticize the new wave of attractions emerging from WDI.

For many of us, though, the last decade of Eisner’s rule left us uneasy and suspicious of change. After decades of gladly giving WDI the benefit of the doubt, trusting fans would now be burned time and time again with each new attraction. The first few years of the new leadership have indeed been far from critic-proof; concerns about the “toonification” of areas formerly themed to exciting “real-world” adventures have combined with worries over the fairly obvious Pixar-centric drift of new development.

It’s not that Pixar has no place in the parks; as the most uniformly popular output of Walt Disney Pictures in the last decade they’re obviously meant for inclusion. While fans might hope that WDI would some day give heed to the huge back-catalog of Disney films and shows without attractions - or even build some completely new attractions without licensing tie-ins, it’s fairly reasonable to expect that the average Disney guest would look to find Buzz, Remy and WALL-E on their Disney vacations.

So while neither unexpected nor unwarranted, the arrival of Pixar in the parks has been a bit overwhelming, and at times redundant and out-of-place. From a Walt Disney World standpoint, it’s definitely been noticeable. In recent years we’ve had Finding Nemo attractions open in two separate parks - one of which placed a cute and pleasant Nemo dark ride into a location that unfortunately stripped EPCOT’s Seas pavilion of its informative nature and overshadowed the real-life thrill of undersea exploration. Tomorrowland now plays host to a Monsters, Inc. attraction which, aside from being absolutely tragic, is woefully out of place thematically (Tokyo Disneyland will soon be getting an out-of-place Monsters, Inc. attraction in their Tomorrowland, but that is at least guaranteed to be a budget-busting E-ticket affair). Last but not least, Walt Disney World is now home to two attractions themed to Toy Story that differ in technological complexity but feature the exact same game mechanic.

This is not to say that the new management has failed, but rather underlines that work remains to be done. While both WDI and Feature Animation are home to an array of great talent, there still needs to be a “scouring of the Shire” at the upper levels of management to clear out those who forced through so many embarrassments in the past. Prime amongst these offenders is Disney Parks head Jay Rasulo, whose disastrous global branding initiative is designed to make Disney’s parks as unique from each other as five slices of stale white bread. It was Rasulo’s visionary leadership that led to the cloning of Toy Story Mania - an attraction designed for Anaheim’s California Adventure - to Florida’s Hollywood Studios. While this fine attraction was a much needed and well-themed addition to the California park, it is completely out of place in Florida’s Studios park.

Pixar Place, home of Toy Story Mania! Photo from WDWMagic.com.

This brings us, at last, to Disney’s Hollywood Studios and the new Pixar Place. The recently opened area, formerly known as Mickey Avenue, has been completely and elaborately rethemed to resemble Pixar’s Emeryville studios. While the area is ostensibly intended to house a variety of Pixar’s creations, at the moment its only inhabitant is the new Toy Story Mania. With the former Disney-MGM Studios rumored to be the site of several new attractions and re-themings over the next decade, it’s certain that Pixar Place will see a great deal of welcome new development. But what’s on the way?

The site in question, circa 1989. At this point, Mickey Avenue was off-limits to guests as it was still part of the working Backlot. Guests were only allowed in this area via the Backlot Tour, which then departed from the current Magic of Disney Animation queue.

One persistent rumor over the last year is that Pixar Place will be the site of a new roller coaster, which would be the park’s marketable new attraction for Walt Disney World’s big 40th anniversary celebration in 2011. This speculation derives from last year’s Pixar-based “Toon Studios” expansion at Disney Studios Paris, which contained Crush’s Coaster, an indoor spinning coaster based on Finding Nemo. While many expected the attraction to be cloned in Florida’s Pixar Place, other rumors held that the coaster would instead be based on 2007’s Ratatouille. The latest speculation stems from a recent Jim Hill article, which claims that the new coaster will be themed to Monsters, Inc.

The pre-millennial Mickey Avenue. The area was by now open to the public, as production had ceased in most of the facilities and the space was now used to preview upcoming Disney films. The entrance to the now-shortened Backlot Tour was now housed at the end of Mickey Avenue.

Since its release in 2001, Disney fans have anticipated the creation of a Monster’s, Inc. coaster themed to the film’s Door Hangar sequence. Hill claims that just such an attraction is being designed for installation into the former Soundstage One building on Pixar Place. The building would be rethemed to resemble the Monsters, Inc. facility from the film, with the conceit that guests are attending an open house to see how the titular monsters collect laughter to fuel Monstropolis. As they careen through the building in their coaster vehicles, guests’ screams and laughter will be collected in canisters which will fill to explosive levels.

A behatted Disney-MGM Studios. Mickey Avenue gained the Walt Disney tribute One Man’s Dream (yay) as well as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire - Play It! (boo) in 2001.

How plausible is this rumor? While the pricey and well-themed attraction would no doubt be a hit, there’s been no hint of it from Disney. Or has there?

This won’t be the end of the additions to Pixar Place. Hill continues to say that the former Honey, I Shrunk the Kids playground will be rethemed to Pixar’s a bug’s life, and floats the possibility of Lights, Motors, Action receiving its own Pixar overlay when Cars 2 debuts in 2012. He also mentions the rumor, reported elsewhere, that a great deal of the remaining backlot area will be leveled to make way for a clone of the Carsland area that’s coming to California Adventure. This depends, of course, on how popular that new attraction proves to be when it opens around 2012. Hopefully, though, Disney’s cloning trend will by then be wholly purged from the company and we Florida-goers will have unique new E-tickets to call our own.

Pixar Place today. If rumors hold true, this area will expand to the left and top of the map in upcoming years.

Maybe, just maybe, Disney’s Hollywood Studios will get something new and unique that suits and enhances the park’s own themes. It would just go to show you, anything can happen in the movies…

While I was deep in my own non-blogging slumber, an exciting announcement was made concerning the return of a lost and long-lamented Disneyland attraction. On July 17th, in honor of Disneyland’s 53rd birthday, Disney Imagineers Tony Baxter, Chris Merritt and John Gritz announced that the now-shuttered Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough would reopen later this year. The attraction, which previously operated from 1957-2002, will be restored and upgraded to coincide with next year’s 50th anniversary DVD re-release of 1959’s Sleeping Beauty.

The original Castle Walkthrough was a design afterthought, opening two years after Disneyland debuted in 1955. The Castle was neither designed nor intended to house an attraction, yet Walt constantly noted that guests desired to explore the structure. Walt selected Imagineer Ken Anderson to come up with something to fill the limited amount of empty space in the castle, and after a perilous site tour during which Disney, Anderson and set designer Emile Kuri were beset by the feral cats and attending fleas that had infested the castle interior, Anderson began to work with artist Eyvind Earle on designs for a series of dioramas depicting scenes from the film.

Earle’s conceptual art for the banquet scene. Photo courtesy Disney.

The attraction that opened on April 29th, 1957, was a very simple A-Ticket affair. Visiting guests walked past eleven dioramas which combined paintings and painted plywood flats with visual illusions and limited motion effects. Anderson, who at the time was working on very early concepts for what would become the Haunted Mansion, used the opportunity of working on the Castle Walkthrough to prototype various special effects that would be used on a much larger scale in the later attraction. Earle’s artwork made the Walkthrough consistent with the distinctive look of his work on the film, but the fact that Sleeping Beauty was not completed until two years after its namesake attraction meant that there was not a perfect match between the scenes depicted in the dioramas and the subsequent film.

Disney Imagineer Chris Merritt holds the original Maleficent cutout from the 1950s-era diorama in the Sleeping Beauty Castle. Her pet raven Diablo’s wings move. Photo from LaughingPlace.

Time passed and tastes changed, and in 1977 the attraction was remodeled and redesigned. Gone were the flats and Earle designs, and in their place were more detailed dioramas featuring three-dimensional sculptures with more complicated animation. The effect was not unlike the animated window displays from Main Street’s Emporium, as the new dioramas were designed by the same team responsible for those vignettes. While the new dioramas were more elaborate and true to the plot of the film, they lacked Earle’s unique visual flair and roughly resembled Ken and Barbie dolls in fancy dress costume.

The 1970s version of the diorama was far less stylized and more dimensional. Photo from Yesterland.

Even more time passed, but this time there was also a change in management and corporate ethos. Park attendance dropped off due to decreases in quality and innovation, and subsequently plummeted in the wake of the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks. Soon after, the Castle Walkthrough was closed without comment and placed on the list of attractions “Under Refurbishment”. Speculation somewhat ridiculously posited that this was due to “security” concerns, but a far more likely culprit was corporate greed and a desire to cut staffing costs. Another plausible, though unsubstantiated, reason is that major refurbishment would require bringing the Walkthrough into line with modern ADA guidelines and Disney was far too cheap for that (witness Skyway). Disney would not comment on the reason for the closure, and eventually the pretense of “refurbishment” was abandoned as the attraction was removed from Disney’s official lists. Slowly the Walkthrough faded into history.

As Disney prepared for next year’s Platinum Edition DVD of Sleeping Beauty, Tony Baxter and his team at WDI were asked to put together a virtual re-creation of the attraction to put on the disc. As research materials were gathered and the re-creation pieced together, parties within the company began to discuss the restoration of the actual attraction. Thankfully, times have changed at Disney and the project was greenlit (I’ll point out that Baxter’s team, who also put together a ride simulation for the Little Mermaid DVD, are now two-for-two for getting shelved ride concepts greenlit by resurrecting them digitally). Imagineers have been working to reopen the attraction, which will incorporate modern technology with Earle’s original visual style to create a new series of dioramas.

Andy Siditsky, Tony Baxter, Chris Merritt and John Gritz unveil the working model of the new Castle tour. Photo from LaughingPlace.

The attraction was announced on July 17th to an appreciative crowd at the NFFC 2008 convention at Disneyland’s Opera House. Fans were pleased; the announcement heralds the welcome return of another lost attraction, as Disneyland takes another step on the long road to reaching its former pre-Pressler glory. With the return of the Submarines and now the Castle Walkthrough, Disneyland is slowly regaining the capacity it once held before rides began to be closed to save costs. The next frontier for this revival is, of course, Tomorrowland, but those plans remain shrouded in mystery.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the re-opening of this attraction is that as a very modest A-Ticket affair, it is not the very splashy, hype-heavy type of attraction that theme parks gravitate towards these days. Rather it’s the kind of small, unheralded attraction that gave the Disney parks in particular their unique texture in years past, and what helps separate them from the “megacoaster in a parking lot” school of themed design. For years I was afraid that Disney had forgotten that they could actually build things that weren’t highly marketable E-Tickets, so this announcement is a nice change of pace. Here’s to the restoration of Disneyland - one piece at a time.

Read Disney’s press release

View video and images from the NFFC announcement at LaughingPlace

An excellent history of the attraction at MousePlanet

Tour the Castle Walkthrough at Yesterland and MousePlanet

I feel that I am perhaps the last individual in the Disney blogosphere to post any sort of public comment about the recent controversy surrounding the rumored changes to Disneyland’s version of it’s a small world. This is due to a number of reasons, but mostly, as a grizzled veteran of Eisner’s last decade at the helm of the Walt Disney company, I have attained a degree of scandal fatigue. Quite simply, I have seen so many desecrations and obscenities foisted upon the art of themed entertainment and design that I have become inured to such grand disappointments.

I fought in the Toad Wars of 1998, had the first website devoted to saving Horizons and wrote a letter so incensed by Journey Into YOUR Imagination that I got a call at home from the then Vice President of EPCOT Center. I watched Disney built a park with amazing theming but little to do (Animal Kingdom), minimal theming and nothing to do (California Adventure) and no theming and nothing to do (Disney Studios Paris). I consider Hong Kong Disneyland something of a gated botanical gardens. After wands and hats and Pop Century, I had no store of indignation left.

Young revolutionaries on the barricades - the last Toad-In, September 7, 1998.
I seem distracted.

But just as things looked bleakest, there was a ray of hope. Paul Pressler left to destroy another company. Michael Eisner left to hang out with Bette Midler and trade baseball cards. John Lasseter and the Pixar squad rode in on their white horses to give the triage badly needed by a dying WDI and dead Feature Animation department. Even Bob Iger, Eisner’s hand-picked successor, proved me wrong and wound up not being a proxy for the departed CEO but a fairly bold new leader who embraced a far more progressive view of new technologies than his predecessor. Surely, everyone would live happily ever after.

Still, all was not well. The management purges and noxious politics of the last decade had left Imagineering paranoid and factionalized, split between the embattled creatives who had managed to survive in the hope of better days ahead and those who, bolstered by political maneuvering and their ability to “play the game” successfully had risen through the ranks. Not since the Augean stables had an organization so desperately needed a flushing out of the dross and a complete rebuilding.

While change came, however, it came slowly. Sub-par attractions still filtered out into the parks, and more alarmingly, newly announced attractions started to have a noticeably Pixar-centric tilt. The “toonification” of the parks amped up in earnest, and areas that once whisked guests away to adventure in fantastic but real-world settings became new venues for promoting the Franchise of the Month. It seemed that at our moment of greatest triumph, the folks from marketing had won after all. The parks were going to become ads for character merchandise, and the days of the great non-”property” rides like Pirates or Mansion might never return.

Oh noes.

There remained reasons for optimism, though, and obviously a great deal of wonderful, devoted and creative staff continue to try their best to keep the company living up to Walt’s ideals. I’ve tended to cut them slack even in times of irritation, and even though I might disagree with their choices I’m usually eager to see where they’re going in the hopes that the ship will eventually get turned around completely. So, for a while, my crusading came to an end.

Recently, though, rumors emerged of something so strangely unnecessary, blinkered and contrary to both good taste and Disney legacy that I felt that old activist drumbeat once more. Something had been planned so purely based in concepts of “marketing” and “brand awareness” and intended to move merchandise that it can’t help but to raise the hackles of fans. Something that strikes right at the nexus of several “sacrosanct” movements in Disney park history, and something that was neither asked for or needed.

So why not? Once more into the breach, dear friends. Start your petitions and phone calls, emails and letters. Grab the pitchforks and light up those torches, because they’re going to screw around with it’s a small world.

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There has been an explosion lately of rumors concerning a future fifth gate for the Florida property. Things came to a head this morning when Jim Hill posted a story with the exclusive “scoop” on the long-rumored new Walt Disney World park. Far be it for a humble Tiki god to declare shenanigans on a fellow Disney blogger, but from looking at the web searches that visitors have used to find this page over the last several months it’s obvious that there’s a great interest in rumors about a fifth gate, and I can’t help but to weigh in with my opinion on this story.

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