Written by Robert Niles
Published: July 16, 2004 at 10:47 PM
The Inside ScoopA tour plan for visiting Disney's California Adventure Before you go: Check with your local auto club chapter for discount tickets and packages. If you are not an auto club member, you can buy tickets at your local Disney store, or online via www.disneyland.com. Disney does not offer print at home tickets, so you must order online at least 8 days in advance. You can reserve dining times at any table-service restaurant by calling 714-781-DINE up to 30 days in advance. If you need a hotel, check out reader reviews and room rates on our Disneyland resort hotels page. Getting there: The parking garage for Disney's California Adventure and Disneyland is located off the Disneyland Drive exit of Interstate 5 in Anaheim, one hour south of Los Angeles. Be sure to arrive at the parking structure at least 20 minutes before the park opens to get to the front gate for the rope drop. (30 minutes on weekends and holidays.) What to do: Choose remaining attractions at your discretion. If you have small kids: Many of the major attractions at California Adventure have height restrictions and are not suitable for toddlers. You might prefer to spend the day at Disneyland instead. If not, be sure to visit the following attractions: And remember, after your visit, please submit a trip report and rate and review the park's attractions on our California Adventure page. | |
Of course, lines don't always correlate to attendance. Shorter operating hours, coupled with lower attraction capacity, can force long lines at ever sparsely attended parks. And California Adventure opened two hours after Disneyland this morning, closing shop three hours before its older sibling tonight. While the turnstile numbers might not yet be eliciting smiles in Burbank, enough people are coming to California Adventure that a visitor can no longer expect to walk right on every attraction.
As usual, I arrived before the park opened, to get a jump on the crowd and bag as many attractions as I could before early afternoon. But a little reconnaissance the day before lead me to think that a counterintuitive approach might help me breeze through California Adventure more quickly.
Logic would dictate that you go to the big new attraction first, in this case, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. But Disney's operating Tower of Terror at full capacity throughout the day, leaving it with one of the shorter standby waits in the park at midday. So I opted to go the other direction, and visit several busy attractions in Golden State and Paradise Pier earlier in the day.
First stop: Grab a Fastpass for Soarin' Over California. That in hand, I hiked back over to Paradise Pier to ride California Screamin'. (Apparently, Vanna ran out of “g”s when Disney desi'ned this park. Which is appropriate, 'cause DCA's bank account hasn't been showin' many G's ever since.)
Five minutes later, I was on board. After Xcelerator's zero-to-80, two-second launch on Wednesday, Screamin's launch seemed as brisk as the morning rush hour on the Hollywood Freeway. (Which, for non-Angelenos, means not very at all.) Throughout the ride on this faux woodie coaster (it's really steel), each element seemed dialed back a notch from where it should have been. The launch is step slow. The dips are a few degrees too flat, the turns nudge you rather than shove. Even the visuals are obscured by sound barriers on the south side of every crest. It's as if designers decided that a “Disney coaster” needed not just to be clean and pleasantly staffed, but dulled-down as well.
I left the ride feeling more indifferent than thrilled. And that was a reaction I'd feel throughout my day at California Adventure.
Next up was Maliboomer, a moonshot ride themed to be one of those bells a strongman would try to ring by smashing down a hammer. Except that there's no strongman. And carnival attractions aren't among the first 57,000 things that come to mind when thinking of Malibu. The Santa Monica pier, maybe, but I guess no one at Disney could think of a dumb pun for that. (The Santa Moonica?) Anyway, the blast up was okay, I guess, but then we bounced harmlessly up and down for a few seconds, just like on the kiddies' Jumpin' Jellyfish (come on, Vanna, there's gotta be a “g” on that board *someplace*), but 50 feet farther up. Feh.
After Maliboomer, I picked up a Fastpass for the Grizzly River Run on my way back to the front of the park to ride Soarin'.
Soarin' reminds me of my wife's favorite attraction at Epcot, Impressions de France. Both films are travelogues, set to music, taking viewers on a whirlwind tour of scenes from around the cities, mountaintops, farms and countrysides of the two relatively similar regions.
But while moviegoers watch France from traditional theater seats facing a 180-degree screen, California Adventure visitors watch Soarin' from handglider-style seats, suspended from the ceiling, watching an IMAX-style presentation. Much, much more impressive.
Well, it would be if the nearly 25-year-old France movie didn't eat its lunch. Disney's opted against a voice-over on Soarin', forcing the visuals and music to carry the film's narrative. They can't handle the burden. The conceit of flying across the state traps the camera in the air, where it can never close in on the faces or expressions of the people on the ground. Visual acrobatics could save the effort, but after opening with an impressive shot along a Sierra river, the film mostly offers up fairly straightforward images, as if the aircraft could rarely swoop too far nor the camera pan too freely.
And Soarin's derivative score reminds me of the unimaginative strings one might hear as background music during a Matlock rerun. Hardly the Saint Saens organ symphony.
On to the Tower of Terror. Some readers have jumped over me for writing that I thought Universal Studios Hollywood's Revenge of the Mummy a more impressive attraction that this.
Well, having given Tower a second look, I still believe that.
Look, Tower boasts a more impressive introduction, and an outstanding queue. But as fellow TPI'er Kevin Baxter pointed out, it's all first act. The narrative never reveals an irony -- that Twilight Zone moment -- which would raise this attraction to greatness. You know, where we find out that the monsters are really just us. Or that while we're finally alone in the world to read now, our glasses are busted. Instead, we bounce up and down in the dark for a few seconds. Fans loved the Twilight Zone for more than spooky talk about fifth dimensions. They loved and respected the show because it exposed life's consequences to an indifferent world.
Tower of Terror never lays out any consequences for the rider. We walk into a haunted hotel, board a service elevator, bounce up and down, then get out and leave. Mummy, on the other hand, offers a complete narrative arc. (One paragraph summary: An eclipse unleashes Imhotep's curse. Riders succumb to it by entering his tomb and viewing his treasure. Imhotep claims the riders' souls, damning them to the underworld, but then the eclipse breaks, Imhotep is defeated and riders return safely.)
Don't get me wrong, Tower of Terror will entertain most any rider. No one who visits California Adventure should miss it. But while I enjoyed the ride, I do not consider it as impressive as Mummy, or the original Tower of Terror in Florida. Disney could have done better. Give it a go, though. Your mileage may vary.
From joining the standby queue to finishing the ride, Tower took just 30 minutes, leaving me plenty of time to walk back over to the Grizzly River Run for my Fastpass reservation there. Grizzly, along with Soarin' and Muholland Madness, offers a single rider line, which normally I would recommend to any solo visitor like me. But today, I wanted to test my tour plan, so I stuck with the regular standby and Fastpass return lines.
Grizzly soaks it riders better than any other tub ride in Southern California. Its flume design spins the tub throughout the ride more aggressively than any other such ride in the area. And Grizzly offers a few intentionally leaky pipes, along with a strategically placed geyser at the end, to mop up whatever dry patches the whitewater might have missed.
Yet, like Knott's Bigfoot Rapids, Grizzly soaks you in silence, without the music or characters that elevate Splash Mountain over the likes of Knott's Log Ride. How hard would it have been to give Disney's Country Bears a new home here?
Again, on every attraction, California Adventure comes up a step short. Perhaps that's why so many visitors seem frustrated, or at least left cold, by this park. Some may complain about the theme. And I agree that I'd rather see attractions tied to the extensive history and mythology of California than to contemporary themes. But half-hearted execution provides the greater problem here. It's as if the park was designed by a committee, worried about keeping costs down and not offending anyone, rather than entertainers with a strong vision they wanted to share.
So here we have a park for the lowest common denominator of Disney fan -- the ones who thought Atlantis and Home on the Range were just swell. For a couple bucks, I'll rent those flicks for my kids. But I won't spend $40 to take the whole family to see them in the theater.
And that's ultimately how I feel about California Adventure. Show me another aggressive discount -- like the ones Knott's offers -- and I'll bring the family back to this park. Without one, however, I'll save the full-price expeditions for Disneyland or Universal instead.
I agree with Robert that DCA needs to use the history and mythology of the Golden State to make it distinctive. Take the new ToT, for example (which I haven't experienced, but my one of my nieces loved). Instead of using the same story as the Florida version, why not use the story of, say, San Jose's Sarah Winchester--the woman who believed that as long as she kept adding on to her house, she would never die and the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle would leave her alone? The Hollywood Tower could be the product of a wealthy Hollywood family who shares Sarah's bizarre beliefs, who keep pushing their workers to constantly "improve" and expand the hotel, thus ensuring their own immortality. One "dark and stormy night" (my apologies to Edward Bulwer-Lytton for stealing his most famous opening line), they're riding the elevator to inspect their latest addition on the top floor, lightning strikes, yadda yadda yadda. Guests today would ride the "service elevator," perhaps as "investors" interested in buying the old place, and have one chance at escaping the fate of the original builders (who are, indeed, immortal in the Twilight Zone)--plunging straight down (while the hotel, a malevolent force all its own) tries to pull them back in. Very California and very Hollywood, I think. Not very artfully expressed on my part, but there you have it.
In fact, turing the whole Hollywood pictures area into a sort of rundown, "haunted" backlot might be good way to go.
I look forward to hearing about your upcoming visit to Orlando.
Plus, the layout of this park is perhaps the worst in the country. My wife declared it to have horrible feng shui. Whether you believe in that stuff or not, the fact remains that the park is not as easy to navigate as Disneyland, or any other hub-n-spoke or grid-layout park. In fact, DCA's layout reminds me of the old TPI logo -- a line splitting off to a spur on the left and a loop sloped upward to the right.
A great new attraction or two won't raise this park to the level of Disneyland or Universal Studios. Only a substantial rebuild of much of the park and many of its attractions, under the direction of inspired creative leadership, would do that.
Universal Studios Hollywood *has* done that over the past decade, so the task's not impossible. Whether Disney's upper management is willing to spend the money necessary, or even able to identify such a leader, are other factors to be determined.
DCA's layout is a problem. I'm not surprised that Hollywood Pictures was often a ghost town (at least before ToT)--the inclination of your average visitor is to head off to the right (especially because Soarin' and GRR are in that direction), but Hollywood Pictures is a dead end off to the left.
I agree that USH's layout is a pain to navigate, but remember that it was not designed to be a theme park in the first place--it's a working movie and TV studio. In fact, USH reminds me of Walt Disney's original idea for Disneyland: a small park in front of his studio to entertain guests.
To make matters worse, DCA has long meandering pathways that lead to nothing or very little. Did the path really need to loop all the way over to Soarin'? Had they done this right, they would have created the path to go right through Grizzly Peak, so people wouldn't have so long to walk without anything to look at. The Pier would have connected right to the Wharf so that whole boring walk between the water and Grizzly Peak would have been unnecessary. But then while we are at it, the whole damn park would have actually opened COMPLETE, so it wouldn't be the joke of the theme park world.
Has DCA gotten better? That's certainly questionable. Aladdin was okay and ToT is needed, but other additions have been wholly unnecessary. Two decent attractions for a third-size park is not much of an improvement. And attendance numbers show that most people agree.
yeah it does,it makes it a pain,just how you think the DCA deadends are a pain.Its bad layout.
"Has DCA gotten better? That's certainly questionable. Aladdin was okay and ToT is needed, but other additions have been wholly unnecessary. Two decent attractions for a third-size park is not much of an improvement. And attendance numbers show that most people agree."
according to AB DCAs attendance went up 13% while USHs dropped 12 %,so what does that say about USH? at least DCA is on the rise...and im sure DCA will beat USH this year again.
Which, I guess makes USH's layout so bad that my mind's figured out how to make it okay. But DCA's is bad enough that it is not intuitive, but not so bad that it forces you to consciously figure it out, like at USH.
So DCA's in no man's land. Again.
For laughs, check out what some of the folks at MouseInfo.com have to say about my report: http://www.miboards.com/showthread.php?t=17043. Shout out to TP2000 (whoever he/she is) for actually *reading* the report.
Two things immediately popped into mind after stumbling across this:
1) I find it amazing that people will talk about a TPI report *on other sites* but won't post a response here.
2) How simplistically must one write a report so that no ideologue will read into it some straw-man's opinion which simply isn't there?
Robert, I've got to ask you. What the hell do you care what other people have to say about your site, your POV, or your article?
I'd believe a lot of these people will never post here because of the attack dog, Kevin.;o)
The park reminds me of AK, with the endless train going to several small attractions. The problem with USH is the escalators actually lead to attractions people want to go to. Could I live without it? Of course, but the vast majority of the park is much easier to get around than DCA. The biggest two rides in DCA are much farther apart than the biggest two in USH, and THAT makes DCA much worse to me.
And what exactly does DCA's attendance boost have to do with improving quality? It has NOTHING to do with it. DCA's attendance fell after opening, then increasing AP sales bumped up its attendance to original levels. You say it is crowded, but you cannot be more wrong. MiceAge chronicles its attendance and it has been either the same or worse. That is not crowded. I repeat: Just because you see people in one area, that doesn't make the park itself crowded.
Furthermore, the park will NOT be great in the next few years. There is nothing on the horizon for the next two years unless they finally give the green light to the Monsters Inc overlay to Superstar Lame-o. Considering Disney takes two years to create a ride of worth, DCA won't be anywhere near "great" for another decade. At the least. You may like it, but the public has spoken with their wallets.
Gawd, that Nemo88 is a moron! He is the type I have tried desperately to drive away from this site. We don't need people with blinders on littering this site with crap that provides no help whatsoever to the many people who use this site to better their vacations. "Disneyland is so great!" is useless, and I don't even understand why anyone would want to waste their time on a message board all the time with such lameness. Nothing is perfect (except for me) and nothing is perfectly awful, at least in the theme park world. Even the worst parks have soemthing worthwhile and the best have their problems.
For example, my favorite park is IOA, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about how sucky StormForce or Flying Unicorn or the fact that they haven't built a decent ride since they opened in 1999 without being a "Universal hater." Yet, say one bad thing about Disney, no matter how deserved and you are "biased." Which is even more retarded when they are claiming Robert is biased against Disney after writing a good DL report AND after he used to be a CM. Being "biased" against a single park is just stoopid and shows a severe lack of understanding of the English language. That's like claiming someone is biased against spinach.
Why were you even on there, Robert? Any site that wastes that much time whining about Al Lutz isn't a site anyone with a brain should be bothering with.
In answer to Jason's question, I do care what others think about TPI. I want the public to consider this an impartial, insightful and indispensible consumer guide to theme parks and the related vacation destinations. Of course, a few individuals will always be too dense to see the various shades of gray with which we paint the places we cover. They'll insist on reducing everything to black and white. Those simpletons can't be pleased. But I can get a good laugh out of reading their words now and then.
Good report on DCA. Such a welcome and refreshing change from Kev-blow's fey hipster manque.
Secondly, why did the designers create so few truly shaded areas in DCA? Orange County boasts more than 300 days of 8+ hours sunshine, and yet the majority of DCA's park benches are in completely unshaded areas. Sure, there are fledgling trees sprouting up, but I don't want to wait ten years for them to mature enough to provide useful shade. This asthetic setback further bewilders the patron.
When EPCOT opened in October, 1982, the park wisely contained transplanted mature greenery, which gave it a feeling of permanence. This is something, evidenced by the wide swaths of bare concrete and asphalt, that sorely is missing at DCA. A boon for dermatologists. A bust for DCA.
One nice thing about this park was that we never had to wait in any long lines. This was on the Saturday two weekends after Labor Day. We got into the gates of the park a little before noon, picked up fastpasses to Soarin', and then headed over to TZToT, where we only had to wait about 10 minutes before reaching the first elevator. As good as the ride is, I must echo Robert's critique that there's no real Twilight Zone connection with the ride. I guess the vibe is more with maybe the Hammer or Universal horror movies. TZ was always about creeping you out rather than thrilling you, and about concepts and irony mroe than just "well, there's a haunted hotel where some weird stuff happened." But I loved the effects and the ride was very different from other drop rides I've been on (never been to Orlando.)
After that the 12:40 Aladdin was starting, so we caught that... I surprised myself by really loving this show. It doesn't hurt that Aladdin is probably my favorite Disney animated movie since Jungle Book, but I think it even beats the shows at USH.
After that we had time for Soarin', which holds the distinction of being a unique design of a ride. The hangglider mechanisms and the wind did a great job of enhancing the experience. I only wish it had been longer and maybe had some narration to tie things together better thematically. A very fun ride, though.
Man, I could write a lot more, let me try to keep it shorter... I'm not going to critique Paradise Pier because my motion sickness problems really started giving me a hard time here. After that.... uhh... resolved itself, the tortilla factory was actually a nice way to rejuvenate myself. The bread factory wasn't as good.
I'm probably in the minority in preferring the Muppetvision 3D to It's Tought to Be a Bug; the bug movie had better effects, but I think the Muppet one was wittier. A Bug's Land kinda points out a problem with DCA... it's the best themed area of the park, but its rides are strictly kiddie fare.
After DCA closed at 8, we headed over to Disneyland until it closed at 11. Even with all the closed stuff and the much bigger crowds at DL, its "magic" was still clearly evident. PotC is quite simply the best (dare I say "most artistically successful?) use of theming on any ride, anywhere. The new Winnie the Pooh thing that replaced my beloved Country Bears (just as the movie was coming out... nice synergy, guys) was a very worthy addition to DL's roster of dark rides, but let's hope that rocking motion stays unique to this ride. After hitting those and wasting some time in line for the French Market, we basically went with whatever looked like it had the shortest lines. Even most of the things in Fantasyland had formidable looking lines at 10:00 at night. After a day of near walk-ons at DCA, we didn't feel like waiting 45 minutes for Peter Pan. Anything that can cut down on queue lengths at DL, though, has to be tried. Their capacity is very high, but it's just so darn good of a park that the demand is just staggering.
So, back on the subject of DCA, it's a fun place with a lot of neat stuff, but it's nowhere near as well-designed or packed with greatness as Disneyland. And I wouldn't be making that comparison if Disney didn't invite it by pricing it the same as the big park.
Also, Universal Studios is a joke in Southern California and a big ripoff. I didn't like it back in the 80's and it's of much less value than DCA hands down. Florida is a totally different story, but still not the best from any theme park fans ratings. Knotts is okay but again, a victim of space. Cedar Point has tried to fix it up, but it's fairly hopeless. I also like Screamin', I think Soaring is awesome as do most park visitors-it has a worldwide reputation and I'd suggest anyone get a Fastpass for it. Also, Grizzly is excellent. The characters are supposed to have limited exposure at this park because it's NOT Disneyland. I'm glad they're not included in this ride either!
But then again, this isn't a Disney website. We are a theme park fan website, and theme park fans ask a little more from Disney than those who are way too enamored of the Disney name.
I disagree Robert,I think DCA is a way better park then Universal,heck it already has more to do then Universal.I think you and Kevin are too hard on DCA,its a fledgling park,its not as bad as you guys make it.
DCA has its problems,no doubt,but it also has its gems and I think this park has a ton of potential.
I am glad to see attendance is getting better,the more people who come to this park the more money Disney will be willing to spend on new "stuff" =)