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05/07/10 - My thoughts and observations from Friday at the Disneyland Resort
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Welcome to the disneygeek.com Geek Speaks section. In this section I will post my comments on trips to the parks or other Disney related events.

05/07/10 - My thoughts and observations from Friday at the Disneyland Resort

Hello all,

Friday was a relaxing day at the parks. The weather was perfect and the crowds were on the mild side for most of the evening. Most attraction wait times were minimal if you had some good luck, I even saw nemo under 20 minutes a couple of times by. Toy Story seemed to have the longest wait in the 40-45 min range at DCA. Over at Disneyland Splash Mountain was the winner.

Jason

Trip logs and mileage reports are in the Park Miles section.

Disneyland & DCA Thoughts and Observations:

  • As you saw in the pictorial update the Rivers of America have been refilled in preparation for Saturdays return to action. Anyone visit over the weekend and have thoughts, pictures to share? From what I could see from the shore and train it looks great. There seems to be quite a few new trees and the small scenes look great.

  • The food and wine festival was still going, not as strong as past visits, but with the crowd on the mild side it makes sense.

  • The new umbrellas in Paradise Park are a nice addition, but they do not provide a lot of shade.. guess it provided a little and it broke up the park a bit so in the end a nice addition. I was walking around and taking pictures when I realized I was the only one in the area.. kind of weird, almost like the park.. but it did not last long. As the sun set it cooled down the crowd in the park seemed to grow, especially in the evening to watch some of the fountain testing.

  • Stopped by the Blue Sky Cellar since there were banner advertising a count down to World of Color. They changed out the videos on the front three screens, added a Lasseter Cars Land photo, swapped Alice for Little Mermaid cut outs, and swapped the videos to play some of the web videos inside. Overall all great little tweaks that make it worth while to stop by if you are curious as to what is going on and to make you keep coming back. For those that are interested I included a Youtube link below that I came across that shows the three entrance screens.

  • While walking near the swings and around the SS Rustworthy area they had what sounded like a new background track playing, but then again I cannot seem to put my finger on what was playing in the area before.. but it sounded different to me.

  • Speaking of new sounding music after the Pixar Parade ended the music following it sounded different to me. It has been quite a while since I hung around the area after the parade so this song may been playing for a while or since the beginning but it sounded new to me too...

  • I caught the Pixar Play Parade from near Paradise Park. I was in the area and decided to stop and watch the parade since there were very few people around. As luck would have it the new Lots-O-Huggin Bear showed up in the parade in a new dump truck unit. Great to see they added a new character from Toy Story 3 to the parade and as far as I could tell nothing was removed. For some info on this new character check out the parks official blog (click here)

  • Caught the 4:30 Billy Hill show and the audience was really into it. There was a large group, a high school band that was performing on Saturday, and they filled up quite a bit of the theater and the Billys were feeding off their energy.. great to see!

  • We headed back to Disneyland in the evening, around 9pm, and Main Street had a good size crowd lining up for the fireworks. Kind of interesting when we left Tomorrowland and headed back toward the entrance instead of being forced to go around the hub and past the castle we were directed past Partners. This seemed slightly quicker but led to a larger traffic jam near the Frontierland bridge where as the round about approach seemed to get you through quicker.

  • Did you catch the video either on YouTube or on the Parks Blog of the play test of the new Mickey Character for the parks that can speak to you? If not here are the videos/links that I posted to the forum earlier in the week - click here After watching the videos I would say this will be a home run once they roll it out into the parks. It adds an entirely new dimension to the meet and greets. Now you can get that priceless video of your child (or self) talking and interacting with a Disney character. It appears to really enhance the experience. It should be fun/interesting to see where it goes. The really impressive thing from a technology perspective is that this is using a voice transformation system. For more info check out the patent information here (US Patent 5,327,521)



  • Interesting Web Finds/Notes:
    Below are some interesting links, notes, and rumors I found/stumble across/or have been informed of since the last Geekspeaks column.

Be sure to check out the picture update that goes with this Geekspeak column, it can be found in our Disneyland Resort Pictorial Update section

Stop by the Geek's Forum to discuss this and other Disney topics.. click here

Send comments, questions, any other email to: disneygeek@disneygeek.com
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