I would have loved to go to Universal, but the girls don't know the characters in the main areas (Harry Potter, Transformers, Spider-Man and Marvel Superheroes), and it just wasn't worth it this time.
We spent some time this morning swimming and relaxing before we headed into the park. With so much less to do in each park there's no rush to get up early in the mornings, so we didn't even bother today. Better to get some more sleep and enjoy the day more. Mike is still trying to get used to East Coast time (a definite consideration for anyone who flies out here to visit Disney World), and the rest of us are just wearing down.
Hollywood Studios is laid out in a long, wide strip that runs diagonal to the front entrance. It's divided into five sort of random areas, some of which only have one ride or attraction in them. From the looks of the map, it looks like the parking lot enters the back of the park, with the front entrance being accessible by a ferry boat or walkway from Epcot, or buses from the Disney Resort Hotels. The first area we came to is called Streets of America and is a series of streets that are designed to look like they are from cities like New York and San Francisco, complete with fake subway entrance stairs and newspaper dispensers. They have painted walls at the end of the streets so they'll look like they continue on forever, but it's just movie magic because they're only a few buildings long each.
This area also has a playground area designed to look like the giant lawn the kids got lost in in the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, the Muppet Vision 3D movie, an extreme stunt show with vehicle stunts (we opted for the other stunt show), and the Studio Backlot Tour. The Backlot tours are my favorite by far. It's my favorite ride at Universal back home and was my favorite in this park as well. I love driving through the mock movie sets (this one had a canyon with an earthquake, an oil spill that burst into a huge flaming wall, and ended with a flash flood)
The tour also took us by some larger movie props like a couple of versions of Herbie the Love Bug and some spaceships I didn't recognize. Towards the end of the tour, our tram went through a building with windows all along the walls that turned out to be the costume area, where they make and maintain all the costumes for the park characters, as well as for movies. They also make smaller props and small movie set pieces in the workshop. That was pretty fun to see. Unfortunately I only got one blurry picture of this place.
The ride exited into a small museum of sorts with movie props and costumes from Gone With the Wind, Titanic, Oz: The Great and Powerful, and much more. I'm wasn't sure what some of these movies had to do with Disney or how they came to own the rights to them, but they were cool to see.
Life boat from the movie Titanic
They have another area called Echo Lake (which surrounds a lake of the same name) that has the American Idol Experience where you can show up first thing in the morning and audition in front of a 'Casting Director' for a chance to appear on stage and compete for the day. During the day there are several different times where you can watch those who made it through sing and perform and vote for them to move on to the finals. At the end of the day there is a final performance and a winner for the day is chosen. It's definitely a cute idea but none of us were interested in trying it out.
That area also had a Drew Carey show that said it was scary for kids, an Indiana Jones stunt show, and Star Tours, which was labeled as "New". The Star Tours ride was really fun, with C3PO driving and the journey taking us to Wookie Island and underwater to the home of Jar-Jar Binks. It was one of the very best Star Tours versions I've seen, and it's in 3D like the one at home.
The Indiana Jones stunt show was a great choice for the girls. They jumped in their seats when the spikes came up out of the ground, gasped when the huge stone nearly rolled over Indiana Jones, and peeked through their fingers during the fight scenes.
We all giggled when two guys came out to roll the ball back up the hill and reset it for the next show.
They did fight demonstrations and showed how extras are trained for each scene. They talked about the difference between a stunt actor and a stunt double. And after they had set the scene and explained how everything was put together, they went ahead and rolled through the scene which ended in a big explosion and lots of fire ,of course. The girls really liked this show.
Just like the other parks, this one also had lots of sit down theater-type shows. Besides the Muppet and Drew Carey shows, this park also had a Little Mermaid theater show, a Disney Animation demonstration, the live Disney Junior show they have at CA, a Walt Disney museum of sorts, the other stunt show, and a Beauty and the Beast live-on-stage show. I don't know if it's because it's so hot out here, or if it's just because the tone at Disney World is more geared towards sitting, hanging out and wandering around instead of the Disneyland fast pace, but I would guess that more than half of the people in Disney World parks are sitting around at any given time. It might be even more on a busier or hotter day.
An area called Sunset Boulevard is towards one end of the park and is where the Tower of Terror sits along with another ride called the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster starring Aerosmith. I had no idea Aerosmith had ties with Disney, but the ride has posters in it of all different kinds of bands and musicians that record on labels owned by Disney. This was a very crazy, very fast roller coaster with some design elements similar to California Screamin'. It has that same rocket take-off in the beginning as you race to reach the concert in time (accelerating from 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds), riding in your stretched limo. The ride is completely indoors and completely in the dark with glow-in-the-dark neon street signs as your only sights. The ride has a rollover and a corkscrew and according to Wikipedia it has 4.5g of force on the first turn - more than an astronaut experiences on a space shuttle launch. The ride cars each play a different song with more than 100 speakers on board, so be prepared to hear Aerosmith sing if you ride this extreme coaster.
So that just leaves two areas I haven't mentioned. On a place called Hollywood Boulevard they had one ride called The Great Movie Ride. I was hoping to go on it, but I ran out of time. It's listed as being 22 minutes long on the map, so I'm not sure if it was a ride or a sit-down experience. The other area I haven't mentioned is called Pixar Place. The only ride in this area is the Toy Story Midway Mania, and just like back home, this ride had a ridiculously long line. Grrr.. A really wanted to ride it, Mike really wanted to sit for a while, and C and K wanted to look for lizards so I got in the 60+ minute line to wait with A. Sigh.
While we were in line, I did a little research because this park also has Fantasmic, one of my very favorite Disney shows. They have it in an amphitheater way out in the back of the park past the Tower of Terror. It's so far out there that they didn't even have its path pictured on the map. They just had one of those blowout diagram inserts like they do for Hawaii and Alaska on a map of the US. They also said that seating was first come, first served and when the stadium is full, no one else is allowed in. Since Mike was sitting and relaxing anyway, I asked if he'd be willing to wait near the entrance to Fantasmic for the rope to drop and save me a seat. While he was over there, he grabbed a Fastpass for K to ride the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster one more time.
A and I waited and waited and waited some more and finally rode the ride at about 7:30pm. The queue area had some things to look at but not much to do, and I will never be able to figure out why the line for that ride moves so slowly.
Mike told me that the line had already formed for Fantasmic at 7pm, but he was inside now and saving us a seat. By the time I got in there, two sections were already full but Mike had great seats in the center near an aisle (thanks!!) The way this show is scheduled is so weird because the show starts at 9pm (which is when the park closes for the day), but the stadium seats 10,000 and once it's full they close off access to the long (very, very, very long) walkway to get to it. Warning messages are playing that if you leave the area you won't be allowed back in, even if you already have seats, so you are forced to make the choice of losing your last hour or two in the park (spending it sitting on bleachers), or missing the show for the evening. The crowds on this day were really light, but I can only imagine what it would be like on a busy day.
Ignoring the warning, K and Mike headed out to ride the roller coaster one more time. Luckily they made it back in time before the theater filled and we grabbed some dinner at the food carts in the area. Since you can't leave the area, they have food and bathrooms near the theater area.
One other thing that Disney World really likes to do is pre-shows. They like to keep people busy while they're waiting and I guess it is actually pretty boring sitting on bleachers for an hour and half waiting for the show to start. They also like for these pre-shows to be really loud. They have pre-shows in many of the ride queue areas, too, especially the ones that are like sit-down theater type shows, and they are all SO loud! This one was a cheesy trivia game between two families up front. It felt a lot like being at Sea World or Six Flags. I would have much rather sat quietly and talked with my family than hear them yelling out trivia questions and answers for 15-20 minutes and having the crowd do 'the wave', but that's just me.
The show itself was actually really well done considering the different location (it was kind of like a killer whale-show stadium), and they even had the floating boats in the water and a little mini river boat at the end of the show. The only downside was that the stadium was facing right at the Magic Kingdom and the show was timed perfectly so the fireworks were going off behind the stage randomly. It was really weird that they did that because it was kind of distracting during the show.
the half of the stadium to our right - they say it seats 10,000 total
mini-river boat
Even though it had taken the last two hours of our day in this park, I'm glad we got to see the show. I would have been sad to miss it, but even sadder to waste 2-3 hours another night trying to come back to see it another day.
Now that we had been to all four parks, C reminded me that I told her she could have the souvenir she's been wanting since the Animal Kingdom. I told her we had to go to all four parks first before I would buy her anything, so I figured we'd take advantage of this 'early' evening and hit the World of Disney store in Downtown Disney on the way back to the hotel. How long could that take?
It's times like these that the difference between Disney World and Disneyland are evident. Instead of walking out the front gates and turning right and walking for a few more minutes, we had to take a tram to the car (waiting for a few because the park just closed and everyone was leaving), find our way out of the parking lot, and drive for about 10 minutes to the parking lot for Downtown Disney. What we didn't know is that DD is separated into three different areas and their parking lots are separated, too, so if you go into the wrong parking lot you have to exit back out to the road and go into another parking lot entrance. Who thought that was a good idea? Luckily the parking lot we wanted wasn't full (some of them were) so once we finally figured out where we wanted to be, we parked and ran inside the store to get a Swampy and Allie from Disney's online game Where's My Water?
Tomorrow we are headed back to the Magic Kingdom to see Tomorrowland and some of the rides we missed.
No comments:
Post a Comment