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Backstage, at a price... (continued)
After a visit to the apartment, it's on to the train station for a grand
circle tour of the park aboard the Disneyland Railroad's private parlor car, the Lilly Belle. With
that busy day of activities completed, the tour guests are turned loose in the
park with a special Fastpass ticket that allows them to ride E-Tickets for the
rest of the day to their hearts content.
The next morning after breakfast the tour heads to DCA for a backstage tour
of the Soarin' Over California facility. The tour will take a ride on Soarin',
and then be led to the catwalks behind the big IMAX screen itself to see the
attraction go through its show cycle while watching from the other side of the
screen. (Cast Members who have done this have said it can be even more
entertaining to watch the attraction this way.)
Then in the hour before DCA's 10am opening, the tour is escorted over to the
Disney Animation attraction where they'll have exclusive use of the entire
facility with animators giving personal sketch lessons and a morning "coffee
talk" session with Crush in his theater. The day continues at DCA with the best
seats in the house reserved at the Hyperion Theater for Aladdin, followed by a
backstage tour of the big facility and demonstrations of the stagecraft used by
the theater management. Fastpasses for all the good DCA rides are distributed
for the day, and then a fancy wine dinner is served in the Vineyard Room.
The farewell takes place in the adjacent Seasons of the Vine theater, since
that little show is no longer opened for regular visitors anyway. A slide show
of their entire trip is shown, the tour guides pass out mementos and
personalized swag, and then Mickey and Minnie show up for pictures and goodbye
hugs. The evening ends with reserved seating out on the terrace for the
Electrical Parade before they return for the night to their Grand Californian
room.
The website for the tour is now up
As Adventures by Disney struggles to establish their business and find the
right mix of "Disney" and "Non-Disney" offerings, there are high hopes for this
new Disneyland and Studios experience. The sometimes rabid nature of Disney fans
may spark an interest in this itinerary just for the tour of Walt's apartment
and the visit to the archives at the Studio alone. To appreciate much of the
tour offerings you will need to have a basic understanding of the Disney
philosophy and Disneyland's mystique, and it's thought that many Southern
California locals will take the six day tour just to see behind the scenes of so
many previously forbidden locations.
The inclusion of Walt's apartment, and taking people backstage to places like
the float warehouse has been controversial, but if the tour proves popular the
big bucks Disney stands to make from this offering will be hard to argue. If
anything, the weekly tours heading into the backstage areas will keep TDA on its
toes when it comes to cleaning up the graffiti and vandalism that has been
creeping and growing in the backstage Cast Member areas all around the Resort in
the last year.
A Pirate's (After) Life For Me
Speaking of vandalism, there's been a growing list of incidents perpetrated
on attractions at Disneyland that are not only illegal but that are
increasingly, well... let's just say disturbing.
The big problem isn't graffiti
or hot-to-trot teens in a back row, it's park visitors smuggling in the
cremated remains of their loved ones and then spreading the ashes inside a
favorite attraction. The Haunted Mansion is by far the most popular location for
this, but you'd be surprised where else people are dumping cremated remains at
Disneyland.
Opened with 999 "happy haunts" - the number is
now much higher
The craze seems to have gotten its start at the Haunted Mansion, with the
earliest known incident taking place in the late 1990's. Ever since then the
practice becomes more popular by the year, and it happens so frequently now that
Disneyland has trained the ride operators how to handle such an incident and
what to do when remains are discovered inside the attraction. Sometimes the
person spreading the ashes is seen on the surveillance cameras and the Cast
Members can respond quickly.
Because they have been instructed by the Security and Legal departments to
never actually detain a park visitor, most of the perpetrators spreading the
ashes are never actually caught however, and they disappear into the park. But
when a Haunted Mansion Cast Member sees ashes being spread from a passing Doom
Buggy, the attraction is cycled out and shut down for hours at a time while the
Custodial department comes in and begins the clean up. The Anaheim Police are
also involved in the incident, but there's rarely anything they can do about it
either.
Sometimes however the cremated ashes aren't found until the end of the night
when the Cast Members close down the rides and walk the tracks looking for lost
and found. Just last month that situation occurred when a Cast Member at the
Haunted Mansion found several piles and a trail of ashes alongside the ride
track. The Anaheim Police and Disneyland Security were summoned, and judging by
the large amount of ashes this deposit was likely a small group of deceased
people, or perhaps a very large married couple. The police identified the
substance as human remains, and the custodial crew came in for the clean up.
To respond to this growing problem, Disneyland's custodial department
recently had to purchase special vacuums with very sophisticated HEPA filters
that can capture the gritty ash of human remains while also capturing the small
bone fragments that can also be present after cremation. The Cast Members who
work in Attractions know the code words when calling the custodial hotline, and
they tell the custodial dispatcher that they need a "HEPA Cleanup" as soon as
possible.
Theme park, or Memorial park?
While the rate of "HEPA Cleanups" has been increasing lately at the Haunted
Mansion, the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie craze (with its supernatural
plot themes) means that ride isn't immune either. Just this past Friday a Cast
Member watching the security cameras noticed a woman in the back of a boat
throwing a powdery substance into the lavishly decorated sets in the cavern
scenes near the beginning of the ride. Even though Pirates is a 15 minute long
ride, by the time the lady spreading the substance returned to the loading area
Security had yet to arrive.
The college age Cast Members operating the
attraction knew that legally they were not supposed to detain anyone, and when
they confronted her about what she was doing in the cameras she told them she
was only throwing baby powder around. The woman quickly disappeared out the
exit, never to be seen again, but she'd actually left more than baby powder all
over the Pirates of the Caribbean.
Security and the police finally arrived, and the ride was shut down on a busy
afternoon of a holiday weekend. The ash was identified by the Anaheim Police as
cremated remains, and the custodial department found most of it all over the
"Captain's Quarters" scene in the caverns. The woman had done a very thorough
job of spreading the ash everywhere though, and after an hour of cleaning with
the HEPA vacuums there was still work to be done.
Because those lavish sets are maintained by costumers and maintenance crews
that don't come in until Midnight, and with a growing crowd of cranky tourists
outside wanting to know when Pirates would reopen, Disneyland management was
faced with the decision of reopening the popular ride with ash remaining on the
bedspreads, props and antiques in the caverns.
While custodial did a thorough
job of cleaning the ash from the rockwork and the areas closest to the passing
boats, much of the cremated remains would have to stay there until the set could
be dismantled and cleaned completely after the park closed for the night. So
after a lengthy downtime, Pirates of the Caribbean was reopened by management
with the remains of a very devoted fan still spread through much of the Captains
Quarters.
Dead men do leave trails...
The growing phenomenon of cremated remains being spread inside Disneyland
rides is obviously a tough situation for the park. It has trained its ride
operators to try and respond as effectively as possible, and yet there's not
much else they can legally do about it short of staffing a police officer at the
Haunted Mansion every day. The example just this last weekend at Pirates of the
Caribbean however shows that no ride is really immune. And many attractions at
Disneyland still operate with no security cameras at all. The Matterhorn only
has three grainy cameras that cover the lift up the mountain, with the rest of
the bobsled run entirely unseen. If Uncle Bert was a big Matterhorn fan, he may
have been sprinkled inside without anyone knowing.
It's a Small World is another long, fifteen minute ride that doesn't have a
single security camera anywhere. All sorts of illicit things happen inside Small
World at the end of the night, and leaving Grandma's remains in there to listen
to that catchy song for all eternity is definitely a possibility. Disneyland
installed a security camera years ago inside the Snow White ride to catch people
trying to steal the apple from the witch's hand, but there are still many
popular attractions without any surveillance system where illegal dumping of
human ashes is still an option.
The residue is often found at the end of the night however, and most of the
people who carry out a last request by spreading a loved one's remains at The
Happiest Place On Earth likely don't know the less-than-reverential end they
meet at the hands of the ultra-efficient Disneyland Custodial Department. |
