Progress City, U.S.A.

A recent story on MiceAge detailed the problems that continue to plague the rollout of Disneyland’s new Mark VII Monorails. Since the delivery of Monorail Red last December, a series of mechanical and operational issues have repeatedly pushed back the attraction’s opening date far past its original February timeframe.

In fact, it had been projected that by summer of this year all three refurbished trains would be fully checked out and in service. While the second new train has indeed been delivered to Disneyland from its Canadian factory, neither of the Mark VII vehicles have been cleared for guest use and it has been left to the lone remaining Mark V train - itself nearly falling apart at the seams - to continue monorail service to the Disneyland Hotel.

The problems plaguing the Mark VIIs come down to a few issues, many of which stem from poor cooperation between WDI, corporate management at Team Disney Anaheim, and the Canadian fabricators. The most glaring initial problem facing the cars was that their new design led to a number of issues with track clearance. Due to discrepancies in Disney records, the new chassis design did not allow enough room to clear a number of turns on the monorail track; this resulted in the monorail’s body scraping against the beam and a great deal of damage to the monorail’s chassis, body, and the beam itself.

While some of these problems with the suspension and chassis have been solved through various modifications, other issues linger and delivery of the remaining two trains was delayed by the need to retrofit them with the design fixes. A number of operational issues then began to show themselves, key among them the inability to open the monorail car windows more than a few inches. Disney lawyers and California safety officials, keen to absolve guests of any responsibility or common sense whatsoever, felt that the Mark V cars allowed guests too much access to open windows and mandated the change in design. Overlooked was the fact that the reason the windows on the Mark V trains were allowed to fully open was that the train bodies did not have enough space for adequate air conditioning equipment in the car and ventilation was necessary to keep guests comfortable. Now that the lawyers have sealed the windows, temperatures in the cars soar to intolerable levels even on seasonable days. It remains to be seen how WDI will solve this issue.

Sadly, the problems facing the Mark VII rollout could have easily been avoided by a little something which seems sorely missing at WDI these days - institutional knowledge. This is something that has concerned me for a while, and the monorail fiasco has only brought the issue to the fore.

When Walt founded WED Enterprises in 1952, he pulled his best designers and technicians from the studio to begin work on his concepts for Disneyland. These artists and engineers began a process that lasted decades, with each successive creative step building upon the lessons learned in their last project. From studio work like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea they proceeded to Disneyland, which led to the 1964 World’s Fair, Walt Disney World, and eventually EPCOT and Tokyo Disneyland. Along the way they accrued a great deal of experience which allowed them to avoid mistakes - of which they made many early on - and push Imagineering to greater heights.

The 1980s proved the last hurrah for many of that first wave of Imagineers, as retirement and age began to claim many of their ranks. The huge staff that been needed for the construction of EPCOT and Tokyo Disneyland were faced with layoffs, and following Eisner’s loss of vision in the post-EuroDisney panic even more Imagineers were let go. The 1990s saw wave after wave of creative staff leave for other companies as Eisner and his lackey Paul Pressler decimated the WDI ranks.

While some of the old guard remain, and some have returned following Eisner’s departure, there still was a great deal of common sense and lessons learned that were lost during those purges. This is not to slag on the new generation of Imagineers - anyone familiar with Disneyland’s disasterous debut knows that even the the most legendary of Walt’s creative team learned their lessons the hard way. It’s just that after thirty or forty years of experience, those mistakes had been cut to a minimum and WDI had enough organizational shorthand within its ranks to avoid issues as pedestrian as forgetting to have enough air cooling in a southern California ride vehicle.

The new generation will learn in time; it’s just that we’ll have to experience the growing pains with them. Hopefully the one thing we can take from all of this, and never let management forget (and eventually, no matter what, they will), is to never let this happen again. Never let Disney sell out its legacy and purge its Imagineering ranks for the benefit of middle management and the detriment of creative personnel. Keep the knowledge in-house, avoid outsourcing (a futile hope, I fear), and hopefully some day all we’ll have to worry about is when the next amazing E-ticket will be opening and not whether the darn thing will even move or not.

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’s a subject that has been a steady source of discussion on Disney fan forums for at least a decade now - what is going to happen to the Carousel of Progress? This attraction, one of Walt’s own, now exists only at Walt Disney World in Orlando and, at least seemingly, has teetered on the verge of extinction for years. So let’s take a step back and look at the problem that has kept old-school Disney fans on edge for all this time. What is going to happen to the Carousel of Progress? And more importantly, what should happen to this legendary attraction?

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News continues to come in fits and starts from Orlando concerning the renovation of Spaceship Earth. Originally rumored to open in December, then officially pushed back until February, sources now insist that the ride will at least have some soft openings during December. Exactly when and for how long? Disney isn’t telling. But the rumor mill insists that internal changes to the ride are nearly complete, which can be somewhat believed due to the fact that WDI has managed to get around to installing all the external signage for the attraction.

Pictures posted on message boards show a variety of cosmetic signs, including warning signs, installed in and around the building; these are usually the last thing to go up before opening. Some rumors hold that the hangup with the opening date is the “interactive finale”, but this has not been confirmed.

What else have we learned? Well, this story on Distant Creations insists that an animatronic avatar for Steve Jobs will be shown inventing the personal computer. This goes with long-standing rumors that the cheesy “two kids sharing their ironic cross-cultural hobbies” scene will be replaced with three vignettes showing the rise of the computer (similar, one should point out, to the scene in the original 1982 attraction).

While we still haven’t been officially been told who is the new narrator of the attraction, Bruce Broughton has confirmed that he has written around twenty minutes of new music for the ride. Disney published a bit more about the rehab on their site, but as their required login irritates me I’ll reprint the story below the fold. We’ll continue to monitor all frequencies in the hope of finding some info about when the ride is going live. And it had better be soon; Team Tangaroa is T-minus seven days until we hit property…

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Yesterday, Disney went live with their new webpage for Toy Story Mania!, the new attraction for Disney-MGM Studios and California Adventure (where it will be known as Toy Story Midway Mania). The page (pictured above) is still rather sparse, but features a few pieces of concept art and behind the scenes images (through the ViewMaster on the left) and a short video blurb by Imagineer Tom “Walking, Talking Press Release” Fitzgerald (via the videocamera on the right).

The attraction, an interactive dark ride set to open next year, seems to be a combination of two earlier concepts. It’s partially a next-generation Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, but instead of dimensional sets and laser guns the ride will use computer animation and stereoscopic 3-D effects to simulate a shooting gallery environment. As can be seen in the pictures on the site, the “spring action shooters” that are attached to the ride vehicles seem quite similar to the cannons in the Pirates of the Caribbean shooting game at DisneyQuest. Toy Story Mania! thus seems to combine the VR technology of the Pirates attraction with Buzz Lightyear’s omnimover system.

In the ride, guests will pull back the spring on the shooters attached to their vehicles, launching a virtual projectile at a series of targets themed to different environments and characters from the Toy Story films. Guests will wear 3-D glasses, giving a depth of field to the shooting galleries and adding realism. One of the more interesting aspects of the attraction is that the computers running the show will change the difficulty level for each individual rider based on their skill, thus changing the show every time you ride it.

So load your shooters, take a double dose of your A.D.D. medicine and head on over to Disney’s site for a preview. Be sure and enjoy Fitzgerald talking about “the classic carnival games that we all know and love”… whatever, dude. The L.A. Times has also posted a short article about the attraction.