reddening's thread of DISNEY PARKS gossip

aka stuff i'd talk about with my sister only she's asleep or in class or w/e

thread created because disney just updated their "disney look" to allow workers to have beards. BEARDS!!!

first comment on that article sarcastically posits "what's next, facial tattoos?" never change disney traditionalists!

other articles are claiming that soul patches are still forbidden, good call imo

speaking of the disney look, this showed up on tumblr the other day:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvdseaLMzT1qjopp9o1_500.jpg

i don't think it's weird or unrealistic of me to demand that every person who works in tomorrowland should be forced to do their job with a big plexiglass bubble on their head at all times

I'm a liberal and I don't think Disney employees should have long hair or beards. Kids don't go to a Disney park to see their local 7-11 clerk running everything.

My local 7-11 clerk is clean shaven and tattoo less, try again, fascist.

i don't think it's weird or unrealistic of me to demand that every person who works in tomorrowland should be forced to do their job with a big plexiglass bubble on their head at all times

I would like to demand that of everyone tbqh.

Nicole otm.

my dad worked summers at Disneyland for a few years when I was younger, and I remember actually reading a copy of their employee guidebook, which was fucking hilarious. Included specific admonishments for: visible pantylines and bra-lines, hair length (both how far over the ears it could come, and how far above the collarline it had to be), facial hair of any kind, make-up, improperly groomed fingernails...

I approve of this thread. Now that we're all year-round-passed up at home we can investigate things at Disneyland as desired.

btw I am going to Disneyland for the first time in... uh let's see, 17 years in February! my daughter is going to LOSE HER MIND

re that photo above: do we have a vintage disney photo thread? i would love one.

shakey, how old is your daughter? i'm really excited to bring my daughter to disneyworld in the future, but she's still too young for her first visit to mickey-mecca to leave an impression on her.

I'm going to Walt Disney World in ten days for a weekend. For us the parks matter less than staying at a Disney hotel and eating and drinking and loungin'.

she turned 4 in December, I'll let you know how it goes

I have tons of photos of Disneyland from the 50s and 60s, lemme dig up some links

here's some from the 70s

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6218/6264208394_1da3dffb65_z.jpg

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6218/6264208394_1da3dffb65_z.jpg

er
http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6228/6264208722_98a1c353b6.jpg

The Mad Tea Party is the most violent ride ever conceived by man.

my father was a musician at disneyland on-and-off from the early eighties to ~2004, so my sisters and i spent a lot of time there + had a bunch of people in our peer group who worked there. i've probably told this story on ilx before, but i took a college creative writing course with one of the guys who played Goofy; he was very tall and strange and every story he submitted had something to do with infant and/or child murder.

moral of the story: stay away from Goofy

garsh

i haven't seen that guy in 10 years but there's an ~85% chance he currently posts to reddit

rip skyway ride

in ref to those pics obv

unfortunately can't get to my 50s-60s photos, waiting for flickr to unlock/renew my account arrgh

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltt5kzPqxh1qbh9d4o1_500.jpg

also RIP: creepy waving dolls inside Sleeping Beauty's Castle

i miss you, disneyland :(

― chaki, Tuesday, February 12, 2008

ohhh just realized you can see Monstro the whale in the background of Shakey's first pic! <3

also i covet the shirt the girl in the lower left corner is wearing

so.... gossip?

here is some gossip for you: last week, Disneyland quietly hooked up the Roger Rabbit's Cartoon Spin Fastpass system to the park-wide network of Fastpasses! for the last decade you could go get a Fastpass for the ride and it wouldn't count against your limited Fastpass total, because it wasn't hooked up to the main network. now you have to either waste a good Fastpass on Roger Rabbit or wait in line, which is of course fascist bullshit.

this is an outrage

oh man, i abused the fuck out of the fastpass last time i went cause i was there with my whole family and a bunch of peeps didn't want to ride the fastpass rides so i just grabbed fastpasses with all their tickets and had like five fastpasses at one time

how do the fastpasses work?

instead of waiting in line you go to a machine for the line and swipe your ticket and get a fastpass. the fastpass has a time on it and if you come back at that time you basically get automatic admission to the ride. but you can only have like 1 (or 2?) at a time

iirc

yeah, i think it goes: you get a fastpass with a return time on it, and then you can't get another one until it's that return time. however, if the return time is way later in the day, you can get another one two hours after you picked up the first one.

I am going to WDW in April. I am very excited. What are your pro tips, ILX friends?

use your fastpass.

find hidden mickeys.

get autograph book + have characters sign it

get the secret character phone number and call in to stalk, uh, hunt down, uh, find your fave characters.

playing drinking around the world where you drink at every country in epcot world pavilion. ride the troll ride.

ride the troll ride. 4chanstorm

You can get a second Fastpass if you approach the fifteen-minute window of the first -- at least in WDW.

whoa, neat!

1 day in Magic Kingdom
1 day in Animal Kingdom & Epcot (together)
1 day at Sea World

Sound good? I would skip Sea World but girlfriend is a big coaster fiend, and I don't think I can get away w/o going to another park outside Disney. I don't like coasters terribly much, so I figure Sea World might be kind of fun when she's whipping around upside down.

if you have a smartphone, i believe there's an app that shows you the wait times for all the rides. there's one for disneyland at least, i'm sure wdw has one too.

Confession: ten trips to WDW since '98, still haven't visited Animal Kingdom.

I would go for Universal Studios for your coaster needs.

Is Disneyland a completely different beast than WDW? We are tentatively considering a West Coast trip and loved WDW so much that Disneyland is under consideration.

Animal Kingdom is great. Not sure about feasibility of doing AK + Epcot on the same day, though. Epcot is my fave park. Also you're going to miss MGM? Tower of Terror is classic. Other good stuff (like 3D Muppet Movie! Star Wars ride!) worth doing there too.

Is Disneyland a completely different beast than WDW?

yes. it's much smaller for one thing.

I would go to MGM instead of Sea World and ride Tower of Terror and Aerosmith roller coaster which are both thrillier rides than most of WDW attractions.

also it's way older, there's stuff there from the 50s

xp

(Though it looks like the links from that overall page aren't working, but if you go to https://bestrestaurant.gawker.com/ itself they seem to be. And so, the key one for Alfred remains:

https://bestrestaurant.gawker.com/shot-sake-margarita-slush-the-best-drinking-around-1699537518

Also, separately, maybe I need to finally go to Disney World?

https://www.foodandwine.com/disney-wine-bar-george-7371523

It's fine? The food, that is.

I once had a dole whip at the grand rapids john ball zoo that was so good because I didn't pay $120 for the opportunity.

.@RobertIger to the state of Florida: FAFO

“Disney pulls plug on $1 billion development in Florida”

via @NYTimes https://t.co/FEr9UgBM9p#FlaPol

— Peter Schorsch (@PeterSchorschFL) May 18, 2023

They're also closing the immersive Star Wars hotel, which is one of the only contemporary Star Wars things that sounds remotely interesting

Wow, didn't last long

I don't really gaf about Star Wars, but I really love the idea of an immersive hotel, and would absolutely love to stay in an immersive hotel for two days.

Galaxy Cruiser seems absolutely in tune with the age of Sleep No More, escape rooms, Meow Wolf, Instagram "museums," etc.

Unfortunately it ALSO seemed in tune with a US economy that increasingly only seems to cater to the needs and wants of the wealthy. Disney stuff was never CHEAP but it always seemed like the type of thing a family like the Griswolds could save up for and enjoy. I did 8 days @ Disney World with my wife in 2014. We stayed at a midprice hotel and still balled out one night at Victoria & Alberts. It was, again, not cheap, but not prohibitively expensive: something I could def do on a music writer's salary

These days it really seems like the whole thing is just made to milk Disney Adults with the ability and desire to drop $4k on a weekend.

The idea for this sounded neat, but I heard nothing positive about it when it opened, and it seemed insanely expensive even for a Disney property, which are all overpriced. But still, I would have thought they'd figure out a way to make it work given the massive popularity of SW stuff.

A relatively low occupancy, luxury priced "immersive" (do the toilets look like RSD2?) experience has got to be about as precarious a concept as some super pricey fine-dining spots (many of which are struggling). Expensive is one thing, expensive and a pain in the ass is another.

stayed at a midprice hotel and still balled out one night at Victoria & Alberts.

My guy.

I wanna say I went on your recco, but I'm not sure

also shout out to Victoria & Alberts who hooked me up with 100% Japanese waygu beef, which apparently has only been available in America for 10 weeks

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Sunday, April 13, 2014 12:09 PM (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

...which is a fairytale straight out of Fantasyland lol. Sorry Whiney.

Were you living in NYC at the time? There's a few spots in midtown that have been importing 100% wagyu (then known as Kobe beef) since the '80s.

All I know is that it was really fuckin good.

No doubt!

Best restaurant in Florida.

revive, i'm going to DL/DCA soon!

Nobody in the fam has had any interest in DL/DCA nor DisneySea/Tokyo and now all of the sudden we're banking hard into making this a summer plan.

Talk me out of this please.

I'm jealous, I want to go

I watched the video about the history of Superstar Limo the other day, don't know how I had been completely unaware of this slice of DCA lore for so long.

Radiator Springs at DCA is really special. I think it's the best and most fully realized of any Disney "land".

Hi Spencer <3

Radiator Springs is so sick

def the highlight of DCA.

top tier:
radiator springs
soarin
incredicoaster
guardians

mid tier but still worth doing:
goofys sky school
grizzly run
little mermaid (this is a top tier wind down ride)
toy story
junkyard jamboree

the rest

trash tier:
spiderman (honestly cant beleive how bad this was, and the wait times made it even worse)

grizzly run >>>>>>>>>>>>> guardians imho

depends if its hot or not kinda. guardians was so much better as tower of terror but its still fun

I've always had a good time at the Disney places, I just wish they weren't so expensive and crowded. I have a friend whose fancy law firm gifts them a crazy benefit each year: they can go anywhere in the continental US for two nights with an insane budget of $20,000 or something, which they are allowed to spend on anything, the only catch being that they can't take anything home with them. So no souvenirs, no cases of wine or new wardrobe, basically food, airfare, activities and housing. It's a fun parlor game, trying to figure out where you could go (in the continental US) that would eat up that entire budget, and the conclusion my kids and I came to was an all the bells and whistles and perks trip to Disney. That might do it, with the only cost perhaps being pride when your coworkers find out that's where you went.

I spend an inordinate amount of time lurking on the r/disneyland subreddit and the prevailing arguments right now are that Disney has become incredibly and constantly crowded ever since COVID. Prices keep going up and quality keeps going down and everyone will still keep drinking that garbage

When you’re Disney they let you do it.

Disney keeps upping the price, which you'd think would dissuade people, but

https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/disney-goers-debt-survey/

Its basically turning into the housing market, where something every family should be able to do is slowly turning into a playground exclusively for the rich.

i would love to go to Disney again! i havent been since 2002 (lame!)

so i will follow steve shasta’s adventures with joy & vicarious envy

I don’t know if the EPCOT Guardians is the same ride you are all talking about but my experience was insane, I cackled like a madman the entire time and had no idea what was going on. It was terrific.

We won’t be going back to Orlando for a while because Florida politics and also money, but I can’t wait until we can, and I’m definitely not a Disney adult.

No one should go into debt for Disney, imo, but people spend their money all sorts of ways, and it's not really my place to say whether that's right or wrong. Many might and probably do see Disney World as a once in a lifetime trip. Obviously well-off Disney fans can visit whatever they want, whenever they want, as much as they want. But as far as one-off luxuries go, Disney's expensive but not totally inaccessible. You can drive there, you can find cheap hotels, you can even bring in your own food, etc. The park itself is the biggest pain, financial or otherwise, so once you remove on-site theme lodging and restaurants, it's relatively manageable, imo.

The crowds are a different matter, of course, but not exactly new. I grew up not far from Disneyland in CA, it's one of my formative memories, and I can still remember waiting in line forever to ride the Matterhorn, not least because I chickened out at the last minute and my parents were pissed. (I also remember burning a hole in my shirt in the back of our VW van with a matchbook I found in the Disneyland parking lot, that's another way to ingrain a memory.)

Anyway, my wife hates Disney, but me and the kids love it. I wonder if we'll ever get back any time soon.

I went last month for my bestie's engagement party, so much fun. Not much more expensive than Miami hotels and food tbh

Do you get a discount as a Floridian?

I don’t know if the EPCOT Guardians is the same ride you are all talking about but my experience was insane, I cackled like a madman the entire time and had no idea what was going on. It was terrific.

This was definitely one of the highlights when we went last year, that and Star Wars Rise of the Resistance.

We didn't go into debt going last year, but it was certainly a bad financial decision, but whatever, our kids are getting older and we figured we only have so many years left of them being kids and this is a rare thing all 3 of my kids are enthusiastic about. I have no regrets.

Do you get a discount as a Floridian?

Yeah — on hotel. Even as a non-Floridian I’m don’t see much point in staying outside WDW tbh. You’ll spend driving and parking to and fro. Disney offers decently priced “budget” resorts.

I've stayed at a couple of them, but they do lack the "magic" of the nicer themed resorts.

Soto, I thought you can get discounted tickets, too, right?

I still haven't stayed at one of the L.A. ones because they are stupidly expensive

*Anaheim

Yes! My BIL is an exec producer at Disney Pictures and offered us 40% off for Disney Hotels (there's 3 at DL) and the cheapest was $590/night with that discount.

But think of the giant stuffed animals who will come say hi in the middle of your dinner.

Fortunately there are a million places to stay between Anaheim and Los Angeles. There's a reason why the Disney parking lot is so huge.

It's funny, I had some friends who were deep into the "Disney is the antichrist and our children must never be exposed to it" zone and I learned to tolerate and respect their position, even though it seemed like dramatic goth posturing and I wanted to roll my eyes at it. I think my growth experience has been more learning to accept what other people hate than what they like tbh

― ding us a dong, you're the gamelan (Noodle Vague),

I don't like Disney characters, love Walt Disney World. My best friend is getting married there next April.

― hungover beet poo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, July 12, 2025 5:21 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well, that's.... um

― Mark G, Saturday, July 12, 2025 8:08 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's fun, with little of the forced jollity we're used to.

Whiney's a fan too: reddening's thread of DISNEY PARKS gossip

― hungover beet poo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, July 12, 2025 8:19 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

If we're rolling into this sidetrack then yeah, I'm not a committed Disneyite but those parks fully commit to a bit and it's kind of glorious

― ding us a dong, you're the gamelan (Noodle Vague), Saturday, July 12, 2025 8:30 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

As someone who can’t live without the ‘Little April Showers’ sequence in Bambi or the enchanted dinnerware numbers in Beauty and the Beast, i think Disney’s hygienic fascism and fusion of Euro-fetish with supernaturally rich and alluring color have done a great deal to promote the association of whiteness racial purity with safety. Can’t fault the haters too much.

― doe on a hill (Deflatormouse), Saturday, July 12, 2025 9:03 AM (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Disney in its neolib fashion has gone a long way to redress that deserved criticism, I gather, from the number of Black and brown heroes and heroines since the late '90s (my youngest niece sure loved her Tiana doll).

― hungover beet poo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, July 12, 2025 9:07 AM (forty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also: a considerable number of WDW employees in the Orlando area are gay boricuas.

― hungover beet poo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, July 12, 2025 9:08 AM (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

"disney people" are horrible monsters without personality imo. i don't think i'll ever forget the time i went to disneyland as a 13yo and finally registered that the place was miserable instead of wonderful. but i don't have kids and i'll never need to revise this opinion

― ivy., Saturday, July 12, 2025 9:17 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah my only visit to DL was when I was a 15yo sarcasm demon. back in 1994 the normalness was overwhelming and horrifying. no idea what I'd think now tbf (still possessed by sarcasm so prob similar)

― rob, Saturday, July 12, 2025 9:32 AM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

LOL, the worlds happiest prison

― doe on a hill (Deflatormouse), Saturday, July 12, 2025 9:35 AM (thirteen minutes ago)

My only actual experience with Disney theme parks was Eurodisney, which I gather is still universally seen as the crap one, and yeah it was a miserable experience - I think my parents timed it just a year or two too late so that I was growing out of my Disney interests at the time. I remember it being strangely unpopulated with characters (only met the strange duo of Goofy and Friar Tuck) and just general bad vibes.

That being said I have found this thread engrossing and can totally get the appeal of a fully artificial environment as some sort of immersive art experience (wish I could put that better because actual things billing themselves as immersive experiences are always the pits ime), tho I suspect I'll keep my interest vicarious instead of actually going anytime soon.

Re: racial representation in Disney, remains to be seen whether they'll go back on that now that diversity isn't cool in the corporate world anymore.

I do really like some things about Disney! I think in the list your favorite movie genres thread i wrote “talking animals and animate objects”
I didn’t take Aladdin as much of a compliment, and that’s what i was thinking of re: your previous posts. since then Moana might be the only one i’ve seen? Yeah, i think they got a bit better.

― doe on a hill (Deflatormouse), Saturday, July 12, 2025 9:58 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sorry, i missed the migration
I’m not a hater, Disney had a big influence on my life in both positive and negative ways, the polarity is pretty extreme i would say, ‘animate objects/Aladdin’ sums it up

The idea of dragging a sulking teenager to Disney World as punishment is fucking hilarious tho

I’ll stand by Encanto being one of the best kids’ because she was films of the decade.

Apparently there have been three deaths at Disney World in the last 10 days, two of them suicides.