News

• Jim and I are doing the second annual Gingerbread Challenge in Walt Disney World, starting Friday December 2, 2022.  
  

• We’re doing a live podcast recording on December 2.  Tickets available at
  
  https://tinyurl.com/gingerbreaddish
  
• Topic: March of the Wooden Soldiers

• Location: Disney’s Contemporary Resort, walking distance to the Magic Kingdom

• Breakfast starts at 8 a.m., podcast starts at 8:30 and should run for no more than 3 hours.
• It’s a Friday/Saturday (Dec 2 and Dec 3)
  

• I’m speaking at IAAPA (Int’l Ass of Amusement Parks and Attractions) in Orlando on November 18.  It’s in the morning, and you can register for this at https://tinyurl.com/iaapa-len

• As we mentioned last week, Fantasmic! Has returned to Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
  
• Holiday decorations are starting to pop up all over Walt Disney World.
  
• Our friends at WDWMagic.com have reported that Woody, Buzz, and Jessie are back doing character greetings over at Toy Story Land in Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

Surveys

From linsalt on the TP forums:

From Leandro:

And

And

And

And

And

Listener Questions

From Scott, Laura, Dawn, Chip, David, and approximately twelve dozen other listeners:

I'm a long time supporter and heard you talking about Disney's Castaway Cay survey last week.  You were wondering why they ask about the weather when it's something they can't control.  My speculation here is that they're probably trying to associate other survey responses with the weather conditions, i.e. If you said there wasn't enough to do or you didn't enjoy the island does that correlate with bad weather vs. a bad experience?  They could also use this data to try and create contingency plans for bad weather like some indoor experiences or character interactions that aren't normally available like they have done at some of the WDW resorts in times of bad weather.

Len: Yeah, I believe that’s the case.  I guess the thing I was expecting was one stand-alone question like “Did it rain while you were visiting Castaway Cay” and then a specific branch of questions if you answered ‘yes’.  Because it seems like now, you’d have two sets of results for every question: One for if it rained, and one if it didn’t.  

And then how do you break it down from there? What if you want to separate out by, say, families with small children and those without?  Now you’ve got four columns for every answer: Families with kids and no rain, families with kids and rain, families without kids and no rain, and families without kids and with rain.  But I suppose that’s what statisticians get paid for.

From Steven, who wrote in with an update to the Nickelodeon Suites time capsule that we said disappeared when the hotel was remodeled.

According to Defunctland, during the rebranding process in 2016 the time capsule was once again dug up and moved to the Nickelodeon Studios in Burbank.  It’s now prominently displayed at the hotel (16:45)  ("After the Studios closed in Orlando, it was re-buried at the Nick Hotel and displayed for guests" -  starts around 12:26).

From Laura:

You can definitely link a Hilton Disney Springs, Hilton Bonnet Creek/Signia, Waldorf Astoria, and Holiday Inn Disney Springs reservation to MDE.

My family did these in Aug 2019, Sept 2019, Jan 2022, and August 2022. We put the official Hilton reservation numbers into MDE and the reservations came up, just like they do for Swan and Dolphin.

We booked the Holiday Inn on Hotwire.  The Hotwire reservation number didn't work in MDE at all. I called the Holiday Inn front desk and they had a "second reservation number" that worked. Booking through a third party might be causing some people problems.

Also, after you make a direct Hilton reservation it takes about 2 days before the reservation number will work in MDE. Perhaps that is also causing some other issues.

And Howard added:

I stayed at the Lake Buena Vista Hilton for three nights last weekend, Oct 28-30th.  We only did one park, (Epcot on Saturday), as I only had one kidney to spare.  We did the whole rigamarole on Friday night. Downloaded and set up MDE, purchased tickets, registered for Epcot, and then I figured out that you had to link your hotel reservation number to the MDE app to get early access to the park and it worked for us.

Len says: I’ve asked Howard a follow-up question about when he booked his Hilton stay, and if he booked directly with Hilton.  Once I know this for every Good Neighbor hotel, I’ll write it up.

Disney Patents

Disney’s Bay Lake Towers and DVC history

Feature Piece

16 years ago this week (On November 6, 2006. To be exact), Disney Parks & Resorts filed a permit with Orange County Officials to begin work on a mystery project. Something that would eventually be built on the North Garden side of WDW’s Contemporary Resort and occupy a good chunk of real estate. We’re talking the entire north wing of this hotel, the Contemporary’s Racquet Club as well as part of the parking lot.

But as to what this project actually was, Disney stayed mum for the next 22 months. The corporation actually pretended ‘til the Fall of 2008 that nothing was going on at the Contemporary. The official party line – as a construction fence went up, encircling the entire North Garden Wing of the Contemporary, in the Late Fall / early Winter of 2006 and then the Racquet Club was demolished in January of 2007 – was “There’s nothing to see here. Move along.”

Now mind you, everyone inside & outside of the Company knew exactly what was going on here. The Disney Vacation Club was building its first-ever Magic Kingdom adjacent property. Hell, the original name for this DVC (and this info comes straight from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Which is where the Mouse had to file paperwork for this project back in February of 2007) was the "Kingdom Tower at Disney's Contemporary Resort." So the original name of this DVC actually referenced the theme park that this project was being built next to.

So why then all the secrecy? Which – I’ll tell you – got genuinely ridiculous as the weeks & months flew by. And every day, people riding on the Monorail as they made their way to the Magic Kingdom would look out the window and see all of this steel & concrete rising up behind that construction fence on the north side of WDW’s Contemporary Resort. And every time that Guests would ask “What’s being built over there?,” Resort officials would then hem & haw. Largely because they weren’t supposed to talk about this new on-property DVC until most of the room inventory had been sold for the previous on-property DVC. Which was Jambo House & Kidani Village over at the Disney Animal Kingdom Villas.

To explain: Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge opened on April 16, 2001. Roughly three years after the Animal Kingdom theme park first opened at the Walt Disney World Resort. This deluxe resort immediately becomes hugely popular with visitors, largely because Animal Kingdom Lodge’s 1307 rooms offer Guests views of three exclusive savannas (i.e., the Sunset, Arusha Savanna, and the Uzima Savannas). Which – combined – offer 33 acres of land for a variety of African & Asian mammals, reptiles, and birds to wander around in.

In fact, demand for rooms over at Disney’s Animal Kingdom was so strong that -- in October of 2006 – it was announced that this Peter Dominick-designed hotel (Peter was the same guy who designed Disney’s Wilderness Lodge for Florida as well as Disney’s Grand California in Anaheim) would become the home of the next DVC property. Which was to be called Animal Kingdom Villas.

Now remember that – at the top of today’s show – we mentioned that WDW filed permits in November of 2006 to begin work on that mystery project which would eventually become the Bay Lake Towers.

Now just so we all understand what we’re talking about here, let me clarify: There were two phases to the Animal Kingdom Villas project:

• Jambo House (which opened on February 18, 2008) with 134 rooms.
• Kidani Village (which opened on May 1, 2009) with 324 rooms

And then – just three months after Kidani Village opened next door to Animal Kingdom Lodge -- Bay Lake Tower at Disney’s Contemporary Resort came online with its 428 rooms on August 4th of that same year (i.e., 2009).

So that’s Disney Vacation Club – inside of a single 18 month-long period – adding an additional 886 rooms to its on-property inventory at WDW.

Now those of you who can remember what was going on in financial circles about this same time:

• The bursting of the housing bubble in the United States
• Coupled with the collapse in prices of mortgage-based securities
• Which then led to the subprime mortgage crisis
• Which then sent this country sliding into the Great Recession, the world’s biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression back in the 1930s

Long story short: The mid-2000s was not a great time for Disney to be putting all sorts of new DVC inventory on the market when consumers suddenly had very little discretionary income.

This is what happened with the Bay Lake Towers project. Disney went into greenlighting construction of a DVC that was attached to an already huge popular monorail resort because the thinking was … “Well, hell. Animal Kingdom Lodge is already immensely popular with visitors to Walt Disney World. So we’ll have absolutely no problem with selling all of the DVC units that we can build in a villa right next door to that resort. So let’s not wait on construction of the Kingdom Tower next to the Contemporary. Let’s get both of these DVC things going at the exact same time.”

So as you might imagine, as home sales began stalling out in the States in 2007, people then didn’t have the money to spend on frivolous things like DVC units at Walt Disney World. And since the plan had always been to announce the Bay Lake Tower project after all of the units for the Disney Animal Kingdom Villas had sold, and there were still plenty of rooms available at Jambo House and Kidani Village … Disney now found itself in this very weird space. Where they were clearly building a brand-new DVC that they couldn’t talk about yet. Largely out of fear that – should DVC rooms at Bay Lake Towers suddenly become available – sales over at Animal Kingdom Villas would then collapse.

Side note: There are things that people say they want (i.e., “I would love to own a DVC over Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge”) versus the things that people REALLY want (i.e., a DVC unit that’s within walking distance of the Magic Kingdom).

In hindsight, the Animal Kingdom Villas team now believes that it was a mistake to have Jambo House & Kidani Village share its main savanna (Sunset savanna) with Animal Kingdom Lodge. If that DVC had had its own exclusive savanna with a different set of animals than Animal Kingdom Lodge, that might have been a better selling point.

It’s worth noting here that – as soon as the U.S. economy began to revive (The Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009 after 19 months) – DVC revisited the idea of adding even more units to pre-existing monorail resorts with the December 2011 announcement of the Villas at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort. That 147-room unit opened in October of 2013.

In March of this year, we learned that Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort would be getting its own DVC expansion.

It’s worth noting here that “Reflections – A Disney Lakeside Lodge” was announced back in October of 2018. Land for this DVC was cleared in 2019. In 2020, on the heels of COVID and what that then did to business at the Disney Parks & Resorts, plans for “Reflections – A Disney Lakeside Lodge” were tabled and plans to add a DVC to the Poly (which have been around since the late 1990s) were revived.

Again, there are the things people say they want and then the things that People REALLY want. And – in uncertain financial times – Disney wants safer bets.

Addendum:

Disney’s Wilderness Lodge opens in May of 1994.

Villas at Wilderness Lodge announced in 1998. Accept first guests in November of 2000.

August 2014 – Disney decides to convert a number of rooms at Wilderness Lodge to DVC units

April 2015 – Expansion of DVC footprint at Wilderness Lodge announced.

July 17, 2017 – Copper Creek Villas & Cabins open at Wilderness Lodge.

May 2021 – Grand Floridian announces that it is changing 200 rooms in its Big Pine Key building (Building 9) into DVC units.

Work began in March of 2022. First rooms became available to DVC members in June of that same year.

BCX      

Bandcamp Exclusive Disney Dish Show

The Road to Cars Land – Part Three

Road to Cars Land

Part 3

Where we left off … Four years after Disney’s California Adventure first opened (January of 2001), Barry Braverman (the then-Chief Creative Executive on that theme park) then reached out to Kevin Rafferty and asked him to come up with a way to make DCA more like Disneyland.

Kevin digs down into the original development material for the Disneyland Resort’s second gate and then discovers that – once upon a time – California Adventure was supposed to have had an area that celebrated California’s car culture. Rafferty now revives this aspect of that project. Developing Cruise Street, which is supposed to be the 1950’s equivalent of Main Street, U.S.A. with lots of neon, classic cars with fins parked along the street, malt stands with juke boxes. Girls in poodle skirts. Guys with slicked back hair and leather jackets.

Kevin calls this proposed addition to DCA Carland. Is working on this project in 2005 only to then learn that Pixar has a movie in the works called “Cars.” Disney then buys Pixar in January of 2006 for $7.4 billion. Order comes down from on high that Pixar stuff needs to start going into the Parks ASAP.

Rafferty’s previously strictly theoretical addition to DCA turns into a greenlit go project overnight. When the $1.1 billion redo of DCA is officially announced in October of 2007, Kevin’s project – which is now called “Cars Land” – is the centerpiece of this redo. It will be (along with the redo of this theme park’s entrance, changing DCA’s Sunshine Plaza into Buena Vista Street) the very last piece of this project to come online in June of 2012.

Less that 5 years to complete this project. Gentleman, start your motors.

First thing out of the gate was “Toy Story Midway Mania.” Actually predates official announcement of DCA redo by eight months (originally announced in January of 2007). East Coast version opens in May of 2008, West Coast version in June of that same year.

On the other side of Paradise Bay, “Golden Dreams” closes on September 7, 2008 so that demolition of this theater can then begin. Which will then be followed by construction of “The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure.” Which will open to the public some two & a third years later on June 3, 2011.

Three months later, Walt Disney Imagineering Blue Sky Cellar opens (replacing “Season of the Vine” show) in October of 2008. Initially concentrates on how Paradise Pier will step away from being a celebration of California’s amusement piers of the 1930s and now become a home to Disney & Pixar characters. Which were previously missing from DCA.

Speaking of which – DCA’s Games of the Boardwalk now gets its previously California-based games (i.e., San Joaquin Volley, Cowheunga Pass and Shore Shots) replaced by Disney & Pixar-themed games (i.e., Goofy About Fishin’, Bullseye Stallion Stampede, and Dumbo Bucket Brigade). That happens in April of 2009.

The very next month (May of 2009) Paradise Pier’s Sun Wheel (with its fixed & sliding gondolas) now gets transformed into Mickey’s Fun Wheel. The rest of the boardwalk area gets an upgrade with lots of gingerbread styling.

Come 2010, construction shifts to the other side of Paradise Lagoon. DCA’s Orange Stinger swinger attraction closed the previous year (July 13, 2009 to be exact) and was then transformed into the Silly Symphony Swings. Which first opened to the public on May 28, 2010.

The real big deal that year was the introduction of DCA’s new night-time show, “World of Color.” Presented nightly out on the 5-acre wide Paradise Lagoon, this show debuted on June 11, 2010. It was powered by a one acre-wide platform that featured 1,200 programmable fountains. 26 minute long show (sometimes presented 3 times a night). Fountains could shoot 200 feet in the air.

With the opening of “Goofy's Sky School” (a reimagining of this theme park’s “Mulholland Madness” mad mouse ride in April of 2011) and then with “The Little Mermaid -- Ariel's Undersea Adventure” opening on early June of that same year), the thinking was that the revamped Paradise Pier area – with its assortment of new & revamped attractions – could effectively carry DCA for a while. Which meant that the truly serious heart surgery on the place (i.e., construction of Cars Land) could now begin.

One month, in the old Timon parking lot, John Lasseter officially breaks ground on Cars Land. $450 million area. $200 million alone on Radiator Springs Racers.

Cadillac Mountain range. Modeled after the fins on Cadillacs built from 1957 to 1962. Block out the Orange County Convention Center. 4000 tons of steel. Reaches a height of 125 feet (1959 Cadillac fin is the highest) 290,000 square feet of rockwork. Painted to look like the area around Lake Powell.

Rockwork art director Zsolt Hormay. Color use. Closer mountains more vibrant. Further away duller colors.

Steel super structure (23,000 inndividual pieces) covered first with mesh rebar and then slathered with cement & plaster. Workmen up on scaffolding that went up seven stories tall.

Do not want to go back up there. Plants made of colored metal. Hopefully won’t fade in sun.

Hard to believe less than 11 months later, this 12-acre land (plus Buena Street) opens. June 15, 2012.

Luigi's Flying Tires, Mater's Junkyard Jamboree & Radiator Springs Racers & Red Car Trolley all open.

Irony: July 2017 (Less than ten years after Paradise Pier originally redone) Pixar Pier project announced. California Screamin’, King Triton’s Carousel & Ariel’s restaurant all get a Pixar retheme: IncrediCoaster, Jessie’s Critter Carousel and

September of this year – Pixar Place Hotel to replace Paradise Pier Hotel. Not quite Disneyland yet.