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DCA Update
There may be lots of change coming to decades old
attractions and locations at Disneyland, but over in DCA it's all about the
future. The new Midway Mania ride is heading into its last few months of testing
and working out the kinks. While the WDW version of the ride shoehorned into an
existing building will be opening later this spring, the DCA version in the
custom built facility won't see its first riders until the middle of June.
While
the ride itself is looking very promising, and may make the Buzz Lightyear ride
at Disneyland look almost boring by comparison, it's the exterior of the
building that should signal the most positive change for DCA as a whole (shown
below). Now
that the exterior is almost complete and has just a few finishing touches and
landscaping to complete, you can see very clearly the new design direction
coming to the rest of Paradise Pier later in 2008 and in to 2009.
As the weeks
go by, a few more changes have been made to the final plans, such as the recent
elimination of the Orange Stinger instead of simply moving the ride slightly to
the north and putting it in a newly designed Victorian era facility. But the
important thing is that massive change really is coming to DCA, and the new
façade of the Midway Mania building gives a great preview of the newly raised
showmanship standards WDI is using in place of the cheap route Paul Pressler
originally forced them to take with the park back in '01.
We'd told you in a previous update the great progress
being made with the impressive new Little Mermaid ride coming in 2011, and the
mind blowing World of Color lagoon show now set to debut during Disneyland's
growing 55th Anniversary party in 2010. But just to the east of the
radically revamped Paradise Pier area will sit the crown jewel of the DCA
makeover, the sprawling Cars Land addition to the park. Out of the three major
attractions coming to this new area, it's the Radiator Springs Racers family
thrill ride that has everyone in WDI the most excited.
This one is being
referred to as a "Super E Ticket" by folks internally, as the scale of the show
scenes and the scope of the entire facility approaches or surpasses some of the
biggest and grandest E Ticket attractions that Disney has done anywhere in the
world. The budget on this one ride is just as impressive as the towering red
cliffs that will camouflage the huge show building, as the price tag attached to
the ride has recently crept above the 300 Million mark. Yes, you read
that right, 300 Million dollars for this one ride alone.
Needless to say, Radiator Springs Racers is going to
be impressive, and the type of huge new ride that only Disney Imagineers with a
big budget and full executive support could create. More importantly, it's
shaping up to be the type of mega-ride that people plan vacations for. The long
and winding indoor/outdoor track layout has been decided on now, but the final
decisions on the exact sequence of the show scenes still hasn't had buyoff from
John Lasseter and Bob Iger. That executive blessing should be wrapped up before
Easter, although Lasseter will continue to be closely involved with this big
budget project right until the Cars Land opening day in early 2012.
While the thrilling glamour rides will appear in Cars
Land and around Paradise Pier, work is also underway on the main entrance
demolition and the smaller Hollywood revamp. The plan to turn MuppetVision 3D
into a flexible digital theater facility, after the proposal to put Mickey's Philharmagic there proved far too troublesome, has been shelved for now. While
it was a nifty concept that sounded especially good to animation geeks, the
operational reality of having an empty theater sit there the majority of the
time in between conferences and special performances has put the kibosh on the
digitial theater plans.
For now MuppetVision will soldier on through the end of
this decade, although now there is some talk of simply including that theater
space into an entirely different concept for a new ride yet to be decided on.
Matt Ouimet made a brief push around 2004 to get a new version of Rock N' Roller
Coaster added to that area of DCA, and while that roller coaster may not make
the cut a second time having that extra space to work with should help broaden
the list of proposals.
In the meantime, final planning and art direction is
going full steam ahead in Glendale on the new main entrance and the Carthay
Circle Theater housing the new Walt Disney Story attraction (shown above). Just after our last
update some folks from WDI briefly installed some support towers and cables
along Hollywood Boulevard to see for themselves just how the scale of the new
Red Car trolley line would fit in with that section of the park. The Red Car
attraction and its kinetic eye candy is coming along nicely, although its budget
has also grown recently once it was learned just how expensive it will be to
accurately reproduce the custom built 1920's versions of those iconic electric
trolleys.
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