Revisiting the Vacation Kingdom

In my last post, I mentioned I hadn’t been to Walt Disney World in about two years.  That last trip out to Florida was a whirlwind three-day affair that only happened because we joined a couple of friends on a quick trip to attend one of the final Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Parties of the season.  We only saw Magic Kingdom and Epcot on that trip before going to Universal Orlando for a day, never really slowing down along the way to take any of it in.  It was a great trip but fast.  I wasn’t expecting to visit Florida at all this year.  After the previous trip in 2015, I decided to swear off Orlando for a few years until it once again did something I felt was compelling enough to book a trip for.  I wasn’t particularly interested in the Avatar-themed land coming to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, adding Frozen to Epcot didn’t sit well with me, and other vanity projects like Magic Kingdom’s reconfigured hub or Disney Springs weren’t enough for me to book a trip. Anyway, after July’s D23 Expo where Disney announced two new attractions that would replace existing rides at Walt Disney World, I was finally compelled to book a trip out.  Seeing two classic rides before they were closed forever isn’t the ideal reason to book a trip out to Walt Disney World, but considering the rides, it was good enough reason for me.

 

Disney Springs

Since I wasn’t expecting to book a trip out to Florida this year, I had to do it on a dime. Luckily, a couple of great friends let me crash on their couch for a week (god bless ’em) so when I got in to Orlando from my red eye, we grabbed some breakfast and then I took a nap at their place before we headed over to Disney Springs for lunch.  It was my first time seeing Disney Springs more or less finished, as only pieces of it had been revealed back in 2015.  The overall product is a huge upgrade and significantly nicer than Walt Disney World’s old Downtown Disney, which had been neglected for so long that the whole thing had become pretty embarrassing.  Disney Springs’ southern California influences are obvious and I’ve been going to places like The Grove, The Americana, and Fashion Island for years and, by this point, they feel fairly commonplace to me.  Still, it’s a very nice upgrade for Central Florida and it’s actually pretty interesting to see it all come full circle — shopping malls so clearly influenced by Disneyland, finally influencing one of Disney’s own shopping malls.  It’s about time, really, and hopefully Anaheim’s Downtown Disney (hopelessly trapped in an early 2000s aesthetic) makes the leap soon.

We hit up Art Smith’s Homecomin’ for lunch and Amorette’s for dessert.  Both are excellent, with Homecomin’ showing just how great third-party dining on Disney property can be (this is a far cry from places like Rainforest Cafe). Meanwhile, Amorette’s showed off how surprisingly ambitious Disney’s own efforts can be (Amorette’s is Disney-run and acts as Disney World’s test kitchen of sorts for pastries and desserts).  We hit up Morimoto Asia at the end of the trip for its late-night menu, which was also great.   At the end of the day, Disney Springs is just a mall, and nothing remarkably special if you’re used to malls in Southern California.  It’s nothing to rush out and see, but if you’re at Walt Disney World for a week and want a break from the parks, it’s a very nice place to check out, grab a bite to eat, or do some shopping in — which couldn’t really be said for the space when it was still Downtown Disney.

 

Magic Kingdom

After Disney Springs, we headed to Magic Kingdom to hit up a couple favorites.  I wasn’t sure if I’d make it back to Magic Kingdom during the rest of the trip (and sure enough, I didn’t) so I didn’t stop to take many photos.  Magic Kingdom, however, looks great and feels even better.  Perhaps I’m just too close to Disneyland, but that classic feel of Disneyland has been missing for a while for me and it was great to walk into the Magic Kingdom and feel like I had stepped back in time a bit to classic 70s-era Disney.  What’s great about Magic Kingdom is that it still maintains a very of-its-time feel but also feels fresh with all the additions and upgrades its gotten in recent years.  The new hub is great, for example, even if some details feel off — it was the light posts, in particular, that didn’t feel right to me.  Maybe they were too elaborate in a way that didn’t match the rest of Main Street that seemed wrong, but that’s a minor quibble.  It was great to see that it turned out so nicely, as the removal of hub waterways and green spaces to add viewing areas and walkways could have ended very badly.  But, they really made it work to their benefit, and for the most part, it feels like the new hub was supposed to be like that all along.

The rest of the Magic Kingdom visit consisted of hitting up some favorites including the Country Bears, Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean and the Peoplemover.  They all look great, save for the Peoplemover, which seems to suffer under the Tomorrowland umbrella of neglect.  The land in general looked pretty run down, unsure of what it is or what purpose it serves.  That’s a trend across all Magic Kingdom-style parks, though, and one that’s unlikely to be solved anytime soon—with or without Tron.  My visit to the Magic Kingdom ended with a lap on the Walt Disney World Railroad and then we boated over to the Wilderness Lodge for dinner and to watch the fireworks away from the crowds.  I’d have liked to see the new show from inside the park but the heat in early August is so oppressive and I figured the show will probably be around for the better part of a decade anyway, so I was fine watching it from afar.  The audio for the show was piped in along the Wilderness Lodge waterfront where we watched from and my impression is that it’s a lovely little character-driven show.  Not exactly my cup of tea but at least an improvement over the stale and tired Wishes.

Disney’s Hollywood Studios

The rest of the trip is, honestly, a blur.  I spent a lot of time in Disney’s Hollywood Studios, more than I had ever spent before in that park and the most I’m likely to ever spend again.  The Great Movie Ride looked better than I had ever seen it, thanks to whatever refurbishment money the TCM sponsorship had brought to it.  What a shame that was so short-lived, as that ride still had plenty of life in it. Alas, if only Disney had cared enough to enhance and update it.  As a park, Disney’s Hollywood Studios is a husk, kept alive only by Disney’s inability to publicly admit defeat.  It’s astounding that Disney continues to charge full price for the park, which has hardly anything to do in it.   With the Great Movie Ride now closed, Disney’s Hollywood Studios has four actual rides, with the rest of its attraction line-up being theater shows or photo-ops.  It’s insulting to paying guests and Disney ought to either offer a hefty discount on admission or close the park entirely until they have some new stuff to open.  To their credit, they are working on adding new stuff here, with Toy Story Land and Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge bringing four new attractions to the line-up.  The new Mickey ride replacing Great Movie Ride will boost that park’s ride count to a meager 9 rides total, which is not great and only underscores the absurdity of replacing existing rides in a park that can take all the help it can get.  Obviously, money was the deciding factor — the Mickey Mouse ride will utilize a lot of projections in lieu of physical sets and animatronics, making it a lot cheaper to operate than the Great Movie Ride — but with a park so desperate for attraction capacity, the change is just feels cheap and short-sighted.  Hopefully it works out for Disney and there’s enough to do in that park when Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge opens up and hordes of new guests are stuck in the park, looking for things to do while they wait for their Millennium Falcon Fastpass+ return time.

The rest of the park looks fine, though. Disney’s Hollywood Studios has always suffered from having a great first act and then totally collapsing once you got to the end of Hollywood Blvd. and that hasn’t changed.  The new Toy Story and Star Wars areas will (hopefully) at least be quality additions, aesthetically, but run the risk of making everything else in the park look even worse.  What’s currently left runs the full spectrum — some of it’s great (Hollywood Blvd., Sunset Blvd. and the masterpiece that is Tower of Terror), some of it feels a little dated (Echo Lake), and some of it’s just flat-out unpleasant (Animation Courtyard, Rock ‘n’ Rollercoaster, Commissary Lane).  There are some efforts underway to spruce up some of this.  Muppets Courtyard is in the process of becoming part of a larger Grand Avenue area, which will give it a unified contemporary Los Angeles theme with a new brewery and sprinkled with Muppets.  The recent PizzeRizzo restaurant re-theme is super charming and a significant improvement over its predecessor, so hopefully the overall project to re-work that area lands well.  One Man’s Dream on Commissary Lane is getting a new name and marquee, which will likely look a lot better than the old marquee which was kind of ugly.   But what is left untouched will only look even worse when the new stuff opens and the park’s re-imagining is officially completed.  Disney California Adventure experienced this in 2012 when Cars Land and Buena Vista Street opened — the new stuff looked great but the park’s weakest areas, like Hollywood Land, A Bug’s Land, and parts of Paradise Pier only looked worse against all of the new stuff.  Disney’s Hollywood Studios will experience similar growing pains, which they’ll be able to ignore for a few years until Star Wars’ new car smell wears off. Once that shine wears off, Disney will have to accept that fancy new IP lands aren’t going to solve the myriad of problems a broken park like Hollywood Studios faces.  Disney California Adventure is struggling with this now and Disney would be wise to take note.

Disney’s Animal Kingdom

Meanwhile, Disney’s Animal Kingdom continues to be a beautiful park full of meaning but lacking a clear purpose. I’ve never really understood where Animal Kingdom fits in the Walt Disney World vacation puzzle because the park feels so different than the others.  That isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does sometimes make it hard to digest.  I think Disney’s Animal Kingdom’s environments are some of the most beautiful and compelling work Disney has on display in Florida but the park’s attractions often end up feeling like elaborate nothingburgers. In many ways, the new Avatar-themed land is all of the park’s problems encapsulated in a single land.  Strikingly beautiful, richly detailed, but burdened with a confusing layout and rides that aim high but never seem to hit the mark.

I’ve struggled with nailing down a reason why Pandora didn’t work for me and probably because it’s not a simple single issue; it’s many.  It’s easy to go into theme parks and be dazzled by them because they’re pretty or you connect with a park’s message or design, but the attractions have to follow through.  Disney’s Animal Kingdom as a whole benefits from this dazzle factor quite a bit for me; I like the park a lot because it’s so beautiful and the conservation message is great but a lot of the attractions but never quite deliver on their promise.  Pandora is stunning, to be sure, and it’s obvious Disney went to great lengths to design the land in a way that the IP fit the park’s overall conservation theme.  Unfortunately, I don’t think their efforts were totally successful — a lot of the Pandora conservation story that was cooked up for the land kind of feels superficial and forced, and it ends up falling by the wayside instead of being the big takeaway message of the experience.  No matter what story Disney added to make the IP work in the park, you’re still very aware that you’re in an area themed to a movie that was a big hit a few years ago.   That’s fine, I guess, and you kind of have to expect that — after all, the whole point of using an IP to carry an entire land in a theme park is so that you are aware of it and have an automatic emotional entry point to the experience.  It’s that emotional entry point that I just don’t think works for Pandora.  I liked the movie fine enough when I saw it in theaters but I didn’t leave the theater with any emotional connection to the story or any of its characters, and walking into Pandora, I couldn’t tell you what the movie’s plot was or who any of the characters were.  I’m not alone, as plenty of digital ink has been spilt about Avatar being a big hit but failing to leave any kind of lasting cultural mark.  Maybe Disney jumped the gun when licensing the theme park rights for Avatar and it’ll go down as one of the big error’s of CEO Bob Iger’s time at Disney.  Only time will tell if it’s a success for Disney, but I couldn’t help but feel that Pandora was a significant mistake when I was walking through it.  I was in the middle of a movie that Disney obviously thought I would or should care about but I absolutely didn’t.

The big E-Ticket is advertised as putting you on the back of a flying banshee, but you’re really on a machine that looks like a machine that is just “linked” to a real banshee.  You’re dangled in front of a screen that shows you what your real banshee is flying through while you’re actually inside of a repurposed military bunker.  Inexplicably, you still get splashed with water when your banshee flies near water, even though you’re not really flying on the banshee.  The ride technology is next-generation Soarin’ but with aliens.  It’s fine, but not the transcendent and groundbreaking experience I kept hearing it was.  The banshee “breathes” beneath you, which would be a cool effect if your seat was actually supposed to be a real banshee but it isn’t supposed to be.  It also doesn’t help that you can hear the clicking of the breathing mechanism throughout the ride, only underscoring that this is all a simulation.  What’s the point of building an insanely transportive land like Pandora with the promise that you’ll ride on the back of a flying beast, only to be told before getting on the ride that you aren’t really on the back of the banshee and that it’s all a simulation?  It’s a theme park, we know it’s a simulation, but the whole point is that we’re supposed to be fooled into believing it’s not.  Instead, you’re asked to perform insane mental gymnastics to believe that you’re really in Pandora but that the fake simulation is actually a for-real simulation made by scientists working in Pandora?  That’s really just bad design choices (apparently dictated by budget) that Disney tried to mask with the flimsiest, most superficial story nonsense.

The Na’vi River Journey boat ride in Pandora is lovely but criminally short.  It’ll be a great ride to enjoy in a couple years when wait times are only 5-10 minutes but I couldn’t imagine waiting in the long standby queue for it now.  Like the rest of Pandora, the boat ride is exceedingly pretty but I walked off asking “what’s the point?”  The Audio-Animatronics Shaman of Songs at the end of the ride is really impressive, though.  She’s so fluid and advanced that it caught me off guard — for the first time in a long time, I really could buy that an animatronic was a real, living thing.  The restaurant in Pandora is one of the real highlights of the land.  The food is excellent and fresh, and the portion size is great for the price.  Proteins are cooked on a huge display grill as you walk into the restaurant, which is a nice touch.  The restaurant itself is nicely themed but don’t think too hard about it because it doesn’t really make much sense if you do.

The rest of the land is really just nice to be in, if for no other reason than it is just really pretty.  The floating mountains are impressive and the waterfalls throughout the land are breathtaking.  The attention to detail is really remarkable, which is something that’s true for Animal Kingdom as a whole.   I’d suggest not diving too deep into the details here, though, cause a lot of it is weird and maybe not entirely family friendly.  For example, the first thing you see upon entering Pandora is a giant space plant with a fleshy pink opening.  If that wasn’t enough, you’re encouraged to stick your hand in the opening and touch the inside of the plant; which, if you stroke the inside of the plant enough, it sprays a fine mist into the air from its end that’s pointed up toward the sky.  That weird, borderline fetishistic, sexual subtext runs throughout Pandora’s design… lots of phallic plantlife and squirting things.  At one point, while walking through Pandora, a member of my party was stopped randomly by a Cast Member and invited to stick his hand into a random dark hole in a tree.  Maybe sexualized light-up plants is a big thing in the movie that my memory purged but it was certainly surprising to see it all in three dimensions in a Disney theme park.

The other big thing worth mentioning with Pandora is the the hugely-hyped bioluminescence.   Worth mentioning, but also not really.  It’s perhaps Pandora’s biggest nothingburger and a massive failure on Disney’s part.  Pandora is surprisingly dark at night, to the point where the photos here give an inaccurate idea of what to expect when seeing it in person.  It’s telling that they sell Avatar-branded souvenir flashlights in the gift shop because you almost need one to make your way around the land at night.  This shouldn’t be the case because Pandora after dark should be lit up like a Christmas tree with bioluminescent plants and creatures.  But, spoiler: it is not.  The bioluminescence largely amounts to some fake plants that house lightbulbs, countless strips of blue LED lights hidden in plain sight throughout the land, and black light paint splattered onto the pavement which really drives home the questionable sexual subtext of the land.   It’s a massive disappointment that is only underscored if you ride the Na’vi River Journey boat ride at night, where the bioluminescence is effective, beautiful, and believable.

The rest of Animal Kingdom is as gorgeous as ever.  The park’s signature attraction, Kilimanjaro Safaris, remains one of the best at Walt Disney World.  It’s a clever, believable, and immersive blend of real (animals) and simulation (the man-made savanna the animals reside on).   I missed the new Rivers of Light water show but caught the nighttime projections on the Tree of Life.  In terms of projections on a park icon, they’re fine.  They’re a nice distraction to stop and take in but it’s good that they’re small little things and not promoted as shows to go out of your way to see.   I saw the New Harambe expansion for the Africa area of the park on my last visit but I’ll mention it here because it really is quite nice. Excellent execution.  And the new signature restaurant — Tiffins — located just outside of Pandora, is a truly incredible fine dining experience. Tiffins is easily one of the best Disney dining experiences I’ve ever had, perhaps surpassed only by the Napa Rose in California or Magellan’s at Tokyo DisneySea.

I’m still not entirely sure how Animal Kingdom fits into a Disney World vacation — it’s a weird park.  It lets you know it’s an animal park in its name but tries to hard to let you know that it really isn’t as soon as you enter the gate.  Whatever it is, it’s very nice.  I just wish more of its attractions had the substance to match their elaborate theming.

 

Epcot

Finally, Epcot.  I fell in love with Epcot on my first visit to the park in 2005, despite it being riddled with neglect. The park’s maintenance issues were a problem then but even more was Epcot’s apparent struggle to find its message as the modern world left it behind.  Of course, Epcot continues that struggle, with Disney adding in movie characters wherever it can, be it Norway, Mexico or Future World.  Long gone are Disney’s ambitions to show us groundbreaking science and technologies in Future World, or to invite us to truly meet the world in World Showcase.  The park is now just another place to highlight Disney’s biggest IPs and so it is with all Disney parks.

Along with the Great Movie Ride in Hollywood Studios, seeing Epcot’s Universe of Energy before it permanently closed helped push me to book my trip.  Universe of Energy is now in the process of becoming a Guardians of the Galaxy ride, and it remains unclear if any sort of energy-related message will stick around with the new attraction.   Even if it does have an energy theme, it’ll likely be a superficial one. After all, they made no effort to make the Frozen ride in Norway have any connection to the people or culture of Norway, and the Finding Nemo ride in The Seas pavilion does little to educate you about our living seas. In any case, it was a bummer to visit Epcot this trip as it was, more than ever, apparent that Disney has no interest in what the park was designed to be or how its ambitious concepts could still be relevant today with some effort and proper investment.

There’s still a lot to love at Epcot, though, even with changes that push the park away from its lofty original goals.  World Showcase is still largely a delight, and it was really fascinating being in World Showcase again after visiting both Japan and France last year.  Much of my interest in traveling internationally arguably came from visiting Disney parks, so to see pavilions of countries I had finally actually visited for real was pretty cool and brought it full circle.  This is something I’ve thought about a lot when I was in World Showcase and something I’d like to explore more in a future WorldKey post.   Still, it was great to revisit some favorites in Epcot like Spaceship Earth, Living with the Land and Impressions de France, which appears will be spared even with the addition of Ratatouille!  It was also great to see the Three Caballeros animatronics figures in Mexico’s Gran Fiesta Tour — they hadn’t been added back in the last time I visited and it was a true delight to see them.  Adding characters to World Showcase isn’t ideal but having the Three Caballeros in the Mexico pavilion at least feels natural and in-line with World Showcase, given that their movie is about the peoples and cultures of Latin America.

Overall, Epcot may be the park most in need of help at Walt Disney World.  Disney’s Hollywood Studios is getting a lot right now and even though it may emerge with only 9 actual rides, it could prove to be a pretty solid little park when it is finished in 2019.  Epcot, even with Ratatouille in France and Guardians of the Galaxy in Future World, could use a lot of help.  Rumor has it that Disney is sitting on a lot of plans for this park, and hopefully they’ll finally make them official and announce them soon.  Epcot is never again going to be the ambitious, big-idea park it was in the 1980s and while that is a tragedy, the park shouldn’t linger on in perpetual decay. Epcot, at the very least, deserves to get park-wide investments that help refocus it to be something unique and worth visiting for today’s audiences.  Hopefully it does.

The Vacation Kingdom of the World

All-in-all, Walt Disney World really impressed me this last trip.  To be sure, there’s still a ton that Walt Disney World could do better but it really does seem like there’s a concerted effort to try to turn the Resort as a whole around in time for its 50th Anniversary in 2021.  Not only are new attractions (announced and rumored) in the works for every park, scheduled to come on line before or by 2021, but there’s a lot of infrastructure work underway, and major investments like the revitalization of the Magic Kingdom, the re-imagining of Disney Springs, and the major additions at Disney’s Animal Kingdom will serve as the foundation for a successful 50th Anniversary celebration in a few short years.  There’s a lot of infrastructure work underway throughout the Resort and across the property, Resorts are getting a lot of enhancements, too.   I didn’t see any of the new Resort room designs that have recently debuted, which have been criticized as being under-themed and generic, which is unfortunate. The success of these room overhauls are up to the general public but, if nothing else, at least Disney is attempting to update rooms… many of them have long needed it.

Speaking of Resorts, even though I didn’t stay at any, the Resorts turned out being a major highlight of my trip.  I’ve seen the lobbies of a few Resorts over the years, but never really took the time to walk the grounds or explore many of them. I spent some time exploring a few more this trip and my friends that joined me through much of my trip really made our Resort day special.  It was blisteringly hot outside and we took an entire afternoon and evening hopping between Resorts; stopping to enjoy each Resort’s unique theming, play board games, grab food, and just relax.  Taking the Monorail between Magic Kingdom resorts, or a FriendShip to the different Epcot-area Resorts, marveling at the massive Mary Blair mural in the Contemporary’s Grand Canyon Concourse, discovering a bubbling spring in the back of the Wilderness Lodge’s incredible towering lobby, and watching the Electrical Water Pageant float by on Bay Lake — all of these things are incredibly special and it’s this kind of stuff that really feels like classic Walt Disney World magic to me, more than Flight of Passage or Frozen Ever After ever could.

Really, a lot of that classic Walt Disney World magic is buried in the Resorts, just waiting to be discovered while everybody rushes to the parks.  The thing about Walt Disney World that I really learned this last trip, that I had failed to truly appreciate in the past, is that Walt Disney World isn’t really about rushing to do every ride and show in every park — that’s the Disneyland experience.  Walt Disney World’s original Vacation Kingdom of the World slogan still holds true today and it’s that vacation aspect — taking your time, finding quiet moments of relaxation, and really taking in the experience — is the whole point. MagicBands and Fastpass+ might lead you to believe the parks and rides are the key here, but they’re only one part of the puzzle.   I grew up going to Disneyland where Disneyland really is the star and missing things like Downtown Disney or the Disneyland Hotel won’t make or break your Disneyland vacation.  Spending time to really soak in and digest the whole experience is really kind of the big secret you should be doing while at the Vacation Kingdom and I’m glad I finally did.

 

 

A big thanks to the incredible friends that hosted me during my week in Florida, joined me on my adventures in the parks, helped me with reservations, and even showed me some of Orlando’s oddities beyond the Disney property line.    I can’t wait to visit again soon!