Day Four, Part 6
Fantasyland Update
So the Fantasyland update will double the size of Fantasyland. They will be adding a new Castle wall on the Fantasyland side of the Castle and it will be the portal that will take you to the new world.
Here is an overview of the property at the time of the convention. I know they told us where all the attractions were located, but now it escapes me.
Under the Sea Journey of the Little Mermaid
You will actually go into Ariels Grotto to enter the ride. There will be lots of waterfalls and forests will welcome you into Prince Erics Castle.
Sorry about the blurriness of this photo. On the left is Sebastian leading his band. On the top right we visit Ursulas lair. I assume the bottom one is Ariels Grotto, but its pretty fuzzy.
This ride will be pretty similar to the one opening up next week at DCA, but there will be subltle differences
Next they talked about the Be Our guest Restaurant There will be three different dining areas seating a total of 350 people, the one pictured here is the Ballroom from the Beasts Castle.
The second dining room will be The Beasts Gallery and the smallest dining room will be The Beasts West Wing. This will be the Beasts Castle, not Belles so it will have an aire of Foreboding. There will be gargoyles out front, there will be a large waterfall at an entry bridge. Lions and gargoyles will guard the gate.
Gastons Tavern will be in the Village from Beauty and the Beast. Gaston is very full of himself and it will be all about Gaston for Gaston from Gaston. The statue standing in front of the Tavern is presented to the city for Gaston by Gaston. There will be a lot things around the restaurant made out of antlers. There will also be a gift store next door to the restaurant.
Enchanted Tales with Belle is the character greet, however, they have turned this into a more immersive experience. Guests will enter through Maurices Cottage, see his workshop and magically whisked to the Beasts Castle. Guests will meet the wardrobe and go inside to meet Belle. Rather than just a character meet, it will be a 40 minute walk up storybook adventure culminating with your meet with Belle. According to the imagineers, it will be much longer and more immersive and not just a princess meet.
The Seven Dwarves Mine Train
This was an attraction that was included in the original plan, taken out, and then added back in. This ride will be much more about the dwarves and not Snow White. Guests will pass their cottage, go to the mine and meet the dwarves. This will be a middle type coaster, somewhere in between Big Thunder and Goofys Barnstormer. It will not be a huge thrill ride, but more about the storytelling. The first part of the ride will take guests through the woods, the second part will be a dark ride. The dwarves will be working in the mine and guests will pass by them. Snow White will also make a cameo somewhere.
The Princess Farytale Hall will be a permanent meet and greet for the Princesses.
The Storybook Circus will house two Dumbo rides. The wait for the rides will be in bleachers for the parents while the kids run around in a play area. When its your turn to ride you will be called to the ride. They were not very specific about how this would work, pagers? Who knows. They are going to change the color scheme they redesigned the ride based on the ride in the movie. The bottom part of each ride will tell the story of Dumbo in eight panels.
Goofys Barnstormer will stay, but will receive a new overlay and more theming. The imagineers recognize that this coaster is like a rite of passage for young kids who want to ride their first coaster.
The final announcement for this session was that the Enchanted Tiki Room would return in its original format.
After this we had a 2 hour lunch break, I ran back to the room made us meatloaf sandwiches that we ate in line along with chips and brownies. In the morning session we didnt have our same seats as before we were about 6 feet to the right a little farther away from the stage. After lunch we got our same spots again which made us happy.
The next session was really not conducive to photography, there were six people on the panel who were all involved in the opening of WDW.
Evidently while Disney was buying up all the land, there was much speculation as to who was actually buying the land. People thought it could be Ford, a Nuclear Fusion company, McDonnell/Douglas and Disney.
Bob Price talked first. What they did was found an attorney in Miami and a Real Estate Agent who were both known throughout the state. They also used a NY attorney and this guy had negotiated with Ho Chi Min in the past so they knew he was tough. In 1962 they identified Central Florida as the location where they would like to have the property. In 1963 they traveled to Florida, and while on that trip in Ocala Walt was recognized in a coffee shop, but he denied his identity.
This panel was very tangented, possibly from the age of the panelists and because things just took unexpected turns, but all of a sudden we were on a new topic. With WDW they knew that they did not need to reinvent the wheel, all they needed to do was make it bigger and better than
Disneyland. There was something called PICO implemented for WDW Project Implementation Coordination Operation.
One of the biggest challenges was acquiring the land. Evidently they were looking at 25 different parcels in 4 different counties. The principal parcel was under contract to be sold (it was called the Dimitri Property), once they acquired that the next one that Walt insisted upon was the Bay Lake Property. There were title issues and Mineral issues with much of the land, however they were able to get both of those two major parcels.
The next area that he focused upon was the land all around the 535/4 intersection. That area was called the Nunger subdivision and somewhere in the previous century or early 20th century it had been broken into five acre parcels and was sold by mail order to people all over the country. There were some people who owned parcels and didnt even know it!
It was right around this time that the news broke that Disney was buying up all the land. Once this fact was disclosed they had a more difficult time getting the smaller parcels of land. One incident that (I believe it was Bob Price) was remembered was about two ladies in their late sixties who had a parcel of land. They seemed ashamed that they owned the land and Disney employees could not figure out how these two women had such a parcel of land that they had never seen in such a remote area. It turns out that their father had won it in a poker game and willed it to them.
Another funny story that they related was that WDW was being built in the middle of nowhere. Also back in this time, Florida did not sell liquor on Sundays and places to buy it were hard to find in such a remote location. Evidently the workers really enjoyed Coors beer. When everyone got paid on Friday there was a HUGE demand for Coors beer, and there was one guy who operated a small convenience store in that part of the state. His business evidently went through the roof ordering truckloads of Coors beer for the WDW workers who would come by after receiving their paychecks.
Another one of the guys on the panel talked about how difficult it was to find talent to perform at the parks. LA was a hotbed for talent. Luring people to Anaheim wasnt difficult, but there just wasnt the talent pool outside Orlando like there was in LA. Originally they booked Military bands and any other trained talent that they could. In the beginning it was quite a challenge to find good musicians, dancers, etc.
Somewhere in here my pen actually ran out! I started to take notes in my cell phone and email them to myself!
The next program featured a different six guys who were there for the beginning of WDW
I wasnt able to get shots of the guys who were on the panel
Let's just say the first 15 minutes had nothing to do with the program. They gossiped and shared some interesting stuff, but nothing that was really worth writing down and reporting, mostly ribbing and other funny stuff.
They talked about the First family chosen M,F& 2 sons but never really said what was wrong with them
MK had a month of soft openings for the construction workers and their families plus Kiwanis clubs. Evidently they did this as a means to inspire the workers to finish on time. They spent Monday through Saturday working hard at the park and would show up with the families in their Sunday best to show off the hard work they had put into the job.
Because of these soft openings that were used to train the employees, by the time Magic Kingdom opened, most of Orlando had already been to the park. Several newspapers held contests for local residents to guess the crowd figures. On the day of park opening local media reported a high volume of traffic on the highway at 6AM. It was actually the employees reporting for work.
The opening for the press went smoothly because they let them in every three days in shifts. They did six different press days at the end of each day they held a luau at the Poly. One of the features of a luau is that the pig that has been cooked in the ground is paraded past the guests. For whatever reason they did not actually cook a pig in the ground. Instead for the ceremony they used a fake pig, evidently by the sixth night it didn't look good. When opening day finally arrived, only the large TV outlets were allowed in the park. They weren't allowed to take any pictures because they were filming a TV show to be broadcast 4-5 days later..
Everything went smoothly for the first couple weeks, crowds were manageable and everything ran smoothly. It wasnt until the day after Thanksgiving that problems occurred. The park reached capacity early on, the parking lot filled up soon afterwards. By afternoon, all the roads were backed up for miles, people were stopped on the parkway having picnics. There was nothing else that they could do.
The transportation system was not what it is today either. There were only 4 monorails and they did not run with the consistency we have come to expect today. They were constantly breaking down and people would be stuck in the train stations. The tractors that pulled the trams were not nearly strong enough to pull the weight load of the guests. They kept breaking down going up the hill from the Ticket and Transportation Center to the MK when they were full to capacity. Imagine 275 people walking to MK from in front of the Contemporary. The gentleman who talked about this also mentioned the boats. He said that if he had even one of the boats like they have today things would have been fine, but they were small boats and did not have near the capacity they needed. For all these transportation issues, it took about a year to get that under control.
In Florida, evidently there are lots of hunters and fishermen , so when those seasons opened there was lots of absenteeism. These guys also stressed the importance of the guy named Johnny who owned a liquor and bait store and found out that he would have 7000 construction workers come to buy beer on a Thursday.
During the building of Epcot, the workers objected to the portapotties. Since many of them smoked and had lighters on hand, they would soak rolls of toilet paper in lighter fluid, light them on fire and lob them in the toilets and they would blow up. Sometimes 2-3 would go up a day. Im not sure what the significance of this story was, but it was amusing.
At the opening of EPCOT they paid $18,000 to get satellite service so that reporters could come down from their local stations and broadcast live from WDW. As I mentioned earlier in the TR, this was groundbreaking for the time, but it bought Disney some unbelievable Media coverage that money really could not have bought. Having the home town reporters standing in EPCOT reporting back to their viewers was media coverage that Disney could not buy for any amount of money. The genius of making that satellite feed available was priceless.
For Donald Ducks 50th birthday, they wanted to have him stroll down Main Street with a flock of ducks following him. For ducks to actually follow him, he had to bond with all the ducks from birth. He got real good with the ducks, as they grew up.
At some point, they decided that the ducks needed hats. However they found out that if they put a hat on one of the ducks the others attacked it, perhaps out of some jealous rage for the hat. The solution that they came up with was to keep the ducks in a divided pen. They would take a duck from the half of the pen without hats and put a hat on it and then put it in half with the ducks who had hats. If they all had hats they were OK. As the presenter noted it was sort of like the people at this convention behave regarding pins!
The last part of this report was difficult for me to take notes because my pen ran out of ink during the last fifteen minutes of the first afternoon presentation. I had my vacation purse so I didnt have an extra pen available. I had to take notes on the cell phone email and send it to myself to cover the last session and a half!
Thanks for reading, and Ill wrap up with the evening concert and our visits to DHS and Epcot, even though the Flower and Garden Festival ended on the day Im reporting, they still had quite a bit of the topiaries on display so Ill have a few of those in addition to some food porn of our last couple meals out.