Cars Land at Disney California Adventure

Disney releases ride test video for Mater's Junkyard Jamboree in Cars Land

Disneyland today released a video snippet of ride testing for Mater's Junkyard Jamboree, one of the three new rides coming to Cars Land at Disney California Adventure this spring/summer.

As you can see from the video, Mater's really appears to be a basic spinner ride, with some whipping action. How much action will it get? I suppose that will depend upon the weight in each car.

Mater's Junkyard Jamboree looks to be a fairly low capacity attraction, putting through a few hundred people per hour, at best. But the big attraction in the Cars Land will be the much higher capacity Radiator Springs Racers - and if it turns out anything like Journey to the Center of the Earth at Tokyo DisneySea, which uses the same ride system, expect Radiator Springs Racers to be a huge, huge it. I'll write more about Radiator Springs Racers during Tokyo DisneySea Week on Theme Park Insider, starting Monday.

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A look behind the construction wall at Disney California Adventure's Cars Land

The Disneyland Resort wrapped up its summer media event this morning with a presentation on "What's Next" set, appropriately enough, inside the Cars Land construction site within Disney California Adventure.

Disneyland President George Kalogridis described the changes still to come at the California Adventure, including the debut of the new entrance turnstiles, the Buena Vista Street entrance plaza and the Carthay Circle Theater, which will occupy the place once held by the Sun Sphere. The Carthay Circle was theater where Walt Disney's first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, debuted in the 1920s. California Adventure's Carthay Circle will house a new table-service restaurant and lounge, Kalogridis said, putting to rest rumors that a new Club 33-style private club might go into that space.

Next up, Disney Imagineers Kathy Magnum and Kevin Rafferty talked the crowd through the construction progress in Cars Land. As they spoke, a live video feed from the top of the Tower of Terror panned across the land, shooting close-ups of the construction that were displayed on a video screen. (So you're going to see pictures of a picture here.)

Today's event took place at what will become one of two entrances into Cars Land. The main entrance will stand across from the Blue Sky Cellar, where the Lightning McQueen and Mater meet-'n-greet now stands. Visitors entering Cars Land at that point will walk up Route 66 on their way to Ornament Valley and the land's iconic Radiator Springs Racers ride.

The other entrance, where we sat today, will welcome visitors entering from Pacific Wharf. They walk along the cross street to Route 66, then on to the various attractions and shops in the new land.

Magnum and Rafferty described some of the coming features in the land, as the camera showed them under construction.

The Cozy Cone won't be a motel, as it was in the movie. Now, Sally's property will be a snack food court, selling as sorts of "cone" food, inkling "popcorn" and "chili cone carne," among other groan-inducing puns.

The main restaurant in Cars Land will be Flo's V8 Cafe. There, you'll find "comfort food," inspired by many mom-'n-pop diners along Route 66. (Think Roadfood, I suspect.) Magnum mentioned mac n' cheese as one menu item, and both mentioned that the restaurant will offer pie, the food the two said Imagineers overindulged in on their research trip across the remains of Route 66.

The cafe, which is built to look like a giant air filter, also will provide a backstory for Flo, who they said used to be a Motown-style singer, and whose gold records you'll see on the wall in the cafe. The cafe also will house Doc Hudson's Museum, providing additional backstory on the character voiced in the film by the late Paul Newman.

Luigi's Flying Tires will run in the backyard of the Luigi's tire shop. Here, the story is that Luigi's fired up the air compressors to allow visitors to "fly" on floating tires, levitated by the compressed air.

Finally, the two talked us through Radiator Springs Racers. Visitors will encounter several of the Cars characters, including Lightning McQueen, Mater and Doc Hudson, in the queue for the attraction. Then it's off to the track, where Luigi and Guido will wave the flag as you race against another car of visitors.

Radiator Springs Racers will run on a similar ride system to Test Track at Epcot in Florida. Except that this ride will dispense with all that indoor faux ride testing in favor of just that exhilarating speed run outside, with dips and several turns through Ornament Valley, making this more a thrill ride experience than Test Track.

But there are some surprises at the end of the ride, too. "We have a really wonderful part of Ornament Valley, which is a natural wonder called Tailight Caverns," Rafferty said. "It's filled with stalag-lights [I don't know if he meant "stalactites" or if Disney's coining a new term for those spire-like features in its Ornament Valley caves], which are designed in the style of old '50s-style cars, and in that scene, you come back from the race and we're going to create different ride profiles so that you cross the finish lines at different times. You may get a different one each time you go."

So what exactly does he mean by "multiple ride profiles"? Rafferty wouldn't say, insisting that people would have to ride to find out. But it seems that a welcome back from Lightning McQueen and Mater will be part of the end of every ride.

As I left, I did capture a couple of other shots of the construction. Here's the ornament arch under which visitors will enter from Pacific Wharf:

And here's a close-up of the Radiator Springs Racers track, with Ornament Valley in the background.

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Disneyland Resort grows its Enchanted Forest of Construction Walls

The kids are in school and crowds are light at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California - making plenty of space for the construction crews to move in and get to work.

There's no longer any "California" in front of Disney California Adventure. Nor is the old sun icon standing behind the Golden Gate bridge, either.

Disney's put the letters into storage and torn down the middle third of the entry turnstiles as it remakes the front entrance of the park.

Hmm, do you think that artist concept of the new Disney California Adventure entry plaza that looks a bit like the entry to Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World?

I like what Disney's done with this construction wall, though, evoking the new 1930s theme for the entry plaza by featuring many of Disney's original toons, including Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mortimer Mouse. (It gives the park an "Epic Mickey" spin, as Imagineering effectively erases much of the park to recreate it.)

Inside the park, construction's broken the circuit around the lagoon, at the site of the now-removed Maliboomer.

The new Little Mermaid show building is almost complete, preparing for an expected soft opening in April.

And work's coming along on Cars Land, set to debut sometime next year.

The Playhouse Disney show is gone now, soon to be replaced with Disney Junior: Live on Stage.

And the Red Car Trolley tracks are ready to go in the Hollywood Pictures Backlot. But they'll have to wait for the new front entry plaza to be complete before we see trolleys on those tracks.

Across the esplanade at Disneyland, the Enchanted Forest of Construction Walls grows, as well.

Behind some walls, we'll eventually find new attractions, such as the new version of Star Tours, set to debut in May.

Behind others, we await the completion of more traditional refurbs, such as that happening now to Splash Mountain.

Not only is Splash down, Disney's shuttered the entire Critter Country land for refurbishment. It's been ages since I remember Disney closing an entire land.

Yet, if you can find your way around the walls, most of the rest of Disney's top attractions remain open (Pirates, Indy, Thunder, Subs, etc.), with the shortest wait times of the year.

Later today, I'll post my review of the new menu at Fantasyland's Village Haus Restaurant.

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Disney's California Adventure - April 2010 construction update

The kids and I took a trip down to Anaheim over the past couple of days, so I thought it a good time to bring you up to date on the construction at Disney's California Adventure.

If you're unfamiliar with the project, here's what California Adventure will look like in two years:

Note the Disney's Hollywood Studios-style front gate, as well as the new Pixar-themed Cars Land standing between Tower of Terror and Paradise Pier, in the space that used to be a parking lot.

Here's a picture of what that area looks like now, looking from the south north toward the park. (You can see Grizzly Peak and the Grand Californian Hotel in the background.) If you look to the left in the photo, you can see the steel skeleton of a show building, while just above the palm trees you can see what sure looked to me like a banked track, already taking shape.

Radiator Springs Racers, a high-speed "Cars"-themed track ride, debuts in 2012.

In 2011, California Adventure will debut a new family dark ride, The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Adventure. Construction's just begun on the show building, which you can see emerging behind the construction wall.

The "Palace of Fine Arts" entryway to the old Golden Dreams show remains, and will be part of The Little Mermaid building's facade, as seen in this concept art:

Here's more concept art, of the Paradise Garden Grill and Boardwalk Pizza & Pasta restaurants that will debut later this year. (I don't know about the "Spring" date mentioned in the caption.)

The concept art shows that the Jumping Jellyfish and Golden Zephyr rides will survive the park's makeover. But I have yet to see the Maliboomer on any concept art, seemingly confirming the widespread rumors that the space shot ride's days are numbered. (FWIW, Mulholland Madness will be rethemed as Goofy's Sky School.)

Finally, I leave you with this shot of the soon-to-open Mickey's Silly Symphony Swings, which I caught at night. The sky seemed appropriately turbulent for this tornado-themed waveswinger ride....

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D23 Saturday Trip Report

My day at the D23 Expo did not get off to a good start. After waking up at 5am on a Saturday morning and taking the long journey on public transportation from West LA to Anaheim, I arrived at the convention center a little after 8:30. I made my way up the escalator to the Storyteller’s theater for the 9am “So You Want To Be An Imagineer” presentation, and I was shocked at the length of the line to get in. There had to be at least 500 people in line, with more people constantly trickling in. They made an announcement at 8:50 that the capacity of the theater was only 350, and most of the people in line would not get in. Once the theater was full, they opened an overflow room where you could watch the presentation from a TV, but that also quickly filled to capacity, and I was left with disappointed with at least a hundred other fans. After a few failed attempts to sneak in, I finally accepted the fact that I would have to find something else to do. I took the opportunity to visit the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Pavilion.

This was probably the most interesting thing I did all day. The first area was dedicated to the new cars land – with a 1:50 scale model of the new Radiator Springs Racers, and some concept art for the land. I have not visited the Blue Sky Cellar, but I imagine you can see pretty similar stuff there. They did however have a mock-up of the Lightning McQueen character. It’s done in the same way as the Mr. Potato head character at Midway Mania. Of course as soon as I took my camera out to take a picture I realized it had been open in my bag all morning and was now out of batteries (hence the picture-less report). There were several interesting exhibits on the evolution of animatronics. One showed the original control panels compared to the current one. They also had the original Mr. Lincoln animatronic from Disneyland. But the big ticket item was the unveiling of the new “Autonomotronic.” This is an animatronic with facial recognition, voice recognition, and the ability to make decisions in real time. In the demonstration it was able to detect people who were smiling, hear and repeat guest’s names, and recognize when they said specific words, like colors. I talked to one of the guys who worked on it and he said the technology is still very new and they haven’t really decided what to do with it yet.

Another new item they had was called Storyteller’s Sandbox. They were doing play testing at the expo of this new demonstration. Six blackjack like tables were set up in a room, with a cast member working at each. The tables were filled with “magic sand.” A man was at the front of the room, telling a story, and then images were projected on to the sand. With the help of the cast member, the guests could shape the sand so that the images looked more life like. For example, in my group we were talking about Hawaii, and we created a topographic map of the island of Oahu out of the sand. It was interesting, and different, but I can’t think of anything they would use it for. There were also models of the new resort at Ko Olina, Hawaii, and the two new Disney cruise ships.

At the end they had an exhibit on the expansion for Hong Kong Disneyland, adding a Toy Story Land, Mystic Point, and Grizzly Trail. The big ticket attractions from each are the RC Racers, Mystic Manor, and Grizzly Mountain Coaster, respectively. No information was really given on the RC Racers, but Mystic Manor is a new, Haunted Mansion type ride, but with a more elaborate story of a collector and his curious pet monkey who accidentally opens this enchanted music box. Each room will have a theme, like Chinese artifacts, or ancient masks, and these intimate objects will come to life when the magic music reaches it. There will also be more rooms than you can see in one ride, so each ride will be different. Grizzly Mountain Coaster is sort of a combination between Thunder Mountain and Expedition Everest. It is a launching coaster, with a backwards section that sounds similar to Everest, but it’s set in a runaway mine car. However, unlike both rides it will go all over the Grizzly Trail land, instead of being contained to a smaller mountain. It was described to me as if you unraveled Thunder Mountain and spread it around all of Frontier Land.

The highlight of the Future of Parks and Resorts presentation was the Fantasyland expansion, which was already talked about earlier today. They also announced the addition of two more cruise ships to the Disney Cruise Line, and that the Disney Wonder will be moving the west coast. There was also mention of an addition at Castaway Cay. Then of course the announcement of Star Tours. They showed a clip from the new ride which was a scene from Episode 1 with the pod racers.

After that I went to the Science of Imagineering presentation. It was originally designed for little kids, so the science part wasn’t too advanced, but it was certainly entertaining. They did show a new gadget that was pretty cool – it is a speaker that projects such a high frequency, you can’t hear it until the sound wave hits your ear directly and vibrates off of your skull. It basically makes it seem like the sound is coming from inside your head.

The last presentation I went to was on the evolution of It’s a Small World. The most interesting part was when they were explaining the reasons they decided to put characters into the Disneyland version. This was because every so often, the rides need to be completely refurbished and restored. In this particular case, the flume was still the original one from the 1964 World’s Fair, and it needed a complete overhaul. Whenever a ride is going to be closed for a long time like this, they find it necessary to add something to the ride, so that guests can feel excited about something new, instead of disappointed that something is closed. This was the case for Pirates, and it was also the case for Small World.

The “Making of the US Presidents” presentation was rescheduled for later in the day, so I wasn’t able to make it, but I spent the rest of my afternoon walking around the showroom and looking at the different stores, collections, and exhibits. There are a few kinks that I think will have to be worked out before next year. Every presentation was full to capacity, with many people being turned away. And with every presentation only being shown once, this created a lot of unhappy people. The staff was all extremely friendly, but there seemed to be little communication between staff members, when I asked multiple people the same question, I always got different answers.

All in all, it was a really good day. I enjoyed the presentations I was able to go to, and the Theme Park exhibit was really interesting and a lot of fun. I will definitely be returning next year.

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An Insider's look at the Disney's California Adventure changes

This week I am debuting a new weekly feature on Theme Park Insider: Tuesday Park Visit. Each Tuesday between now and next spring, I'll bring you an in-depth look at a popular theme park attraction, restaurant or personality, to help those folks who live outside SoCal and Central Florida to get their off-season theme park fix.

Since I live in Southern California, that will be my focus, though I am planning to fly to Orlando a couple times between now and next spring to look in at the Central Florida theme parks, too. This week, I'm starting with a look at Walt Disney Imagineering's "Blue Sky Cellar" at Disney's California Adventure.

This is the new "preview center" for WDI's rehab of Disneyland's second gate, detailing the plans that have been known to Internet readers for more than a year. I'll forgive the curious name for the center ("sky" and "cellar" - huh?), which appropriately reflects the conundrums that have plagued this park since before it opened. (A themed look, or a contemporary one? Family friendly, or adult oriented? Disney quality, or off-the-shelf carny rides?)

The Blue Sky Cellar stands in the old Seasons of the Vine building behind Grizzly Peak, just up the path from DCA's entrance.

Walk inside, and you'll find a cozy display of concept art, scale models and a looped film detailing the planned changes and additions to California Adventure.

Cast members mingle, offering to answer your questions, giving this location what I'm guessing is the largest current cast member-to-guest ratio for any attraction at any Disney theme park. ;-) Hey, that's a good thing. Kudos to Disney for staffing this place right.

Here's the concept board for the retheming of Paradise Pier, already underway with this summer's debut of Toy Story Midway Mania. The sketches here show the revamp of the Orange Stinger wave swinger as "Silly Symphony Swings," complete with Conductor Mickey on top.

Here's the scale model for the new look Paradise Pier, complete with Mickey replacing the Sun Wheel:

Compare that to the same view, in real life, that I snapped this morning:

One problem with DCA that Disney's Imagineers won't be able to fix is the park's orientation. Entering the park from the north, opposite of Disneyland - where you enter from the south, leaves you shooting into the sunlight when taking pictures of many DCA sights.

In addition to the Paradise Pier changes, Disney will retheme Mulholland Madness as Goofy's Flight School, evoking the Goofy Barnstormer coaster at Florida's Magic Kingdom, though the DCA ride will retain its current Wild Mouse track. Disney's also tearing down the Maliboomer space shot and replacing the Golden Dreams theater with a Little Mermaid dark ride. (Previously discussed here and here.)

But my son was drawn immediately to the concept art for Cars Land, debuting (in his opinion) in way-too-far-off 2012.

The image that interested me though, was this one of the planned new DCA entrance:

Hmmm... does that, um, look familiar?

Disney reps said that the new design for the front entrance of California Adventure isn't final (indeed, no concept art ever is... until the final blueprints are drawn up). But the use of the Disney's Hollywood Studios main gate design further demonstrates that the concepts of these two parks are converging: 1920s Hollywood meets today's Pixar animation with a few themed thrills mixed in.

Take a look at the "new" DCA map, as shown on the Screening Room wall at the Blue Sky Cellar:

... and compare it with today's DCA guidemap:

Will these changes and additions work? I hope so. Cars Land looks like a blast. You won't find a bigger fan of historic L.A. than me, either. (Heck, I'd love for Disney to find a way to fit a Philippe's in here somewhere.) As Los Angeles is tearing down its past, I find a smidgen of comfort in being able to see a bit of the "old" L.A. down the road in Anaheim.

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Disney makes DCA revamp official today

Today's the day that Disney confirms its planned makeover of Disney's California Adventure with a press conference, featuring Disney CEO Bob Iger.

The details are widely known: Toy Story Midway Mania will be the centerpiece, followed by redos of the park's entrance and common areas. Most major attractions will stay, though Maliboomer and some of the other off-the-shelf-style rides in the midway will go. Cars and Little Mermaid attractions should follow in 2009-10.

The LA Times chases the story this morning, citing the plans being first reported in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Maybe that's where The Times' Richard Verrier first read of them. But the story actually was first reported by Al Lutz on MiceAge months ago, and picked up by fans on multiple theme park websites, including Theme Park Insider. (My $.02: The Times should let Kimi Yoshino cover *everything* regarding the Disney theme parks. Unlike Verrier's, her reports don't always lag the Disney blogosphere, and if they do, she always properly credits it.)

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