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A D+ Ride (continued)
The queue is highly detailed, amazingly painted, and
extremely immersive. It's one of the best out there. The CM out front promised
me the best queue ever, but I wouldn't go that far. The Indiana Jones Adventure
in Anaheim (and perhaps Dueling Dragons at Islands of Adventure) still has it
beat. But it's a pretty good queue nonetheless.
First off, there is more stuff than you'd expect. The
queue features many switchbacks, and surrounding all of them is a neverending
jumble of set pieces recalling toys you may have had as a child. Once you enter
the building, you realize you're going into Andy's Room (oversized wall sockets
and night lights give it away), and as you round a corner, you start seeing toys
everywhere. It's like we've stumbled into Andy's toybox.
More jumbled toys and crazy colors.
Cleverly, excitingly, the designers saw fit to
incorporate the games right into the queue. We wind our way through the first
switchback and see that Candyland is painted on the ground below us. What a
fantastic way to appeal to kids (and the young at heart). My five year old
lapped it up.
I think I own this ViewMaster reel of
Disneyland's Tomorrowland.
The games are all around us, even on the ceiling above.
If nothing else, kids and adults will wander through excitedly on their first
visit as they spot new toys they know (or had forgotten!) During this annual
passholder preview, there was no FastPass, so the Standby line went very fast
and was constantly moving. That will not be the case once FastPass is
operational.
The clear highlight of the queue is the
Audio-Animatronics figure of Mr. Potato Head, who appears near the end of the
Stand-by Line. About the size of the robotic Buzz Lightyear on the other ride,
Mr. Potato Head has realistic-looking projections for his eyes and eyelids, and
startlingly good mouth movements.
He definitely draws attention!
He appears to be interactive. At a minimum, there is
someone watching via remote camera, and will call out people every so often.
Based on what I saw, it could have been that the voices were pre-recorded and
"canned", and the live operator just waited for the right moment to select the
correct audio file. I suppose it could be that this is another of the "living
character" initiatives (a live operator speaks into a microphone and the words
are put in the right accent), but if so, this particular person didn't take full
advantage. It seemed a bit canned. Not that it wasn't entertaining! The voice
certainly sounded like Don Rickles, the original voice actor, throughout.
Our favorite spud offered jokes ("Why does Woody wear
spurs on his heels? … Because they'd look silly on his head!") ("Let me guess
your weight… 20, maybe 30 minutes!") ("Is that your son or did your husband see
a shrink?") Most seemed harmless, and a few induced a chuckle. Certainly the
humor was better than you can expect at Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor. He also took
off his ear at one point, a robotic marvel to watch in person.
While the Stand-by line went through most of the
jumbled toys, the FastPass line took a shortcut through the majority, and does
not come anywhere close to Mr. Potato Head. At this ride, the Single Rider line
and the FastPass line use the same corridor at first. The merge point with the
Standby line, which happens after Mr. Potato Head, is where the single riders
are weeded out to a separate line.
How did he do this? Very impressive.
Be a bit cautious about using single rider on this
attraction. At Everest, where single rider is a bit hidden, it can save you a
long time. At Test Track, where single rider is announced but the vehicles seat
3-persons in each row, the single rider line moves extremely fast. But at TSMM,
the single rider line is highly visible AND the vehicles seat two people across,
so single riders a bit less "in demand" than at Test Track. Also, on our second
visit, the loader completely forgot about the single rider line for a full
fifteen minutes (we didn't move an inch). Granted, that's just one guy and there
are still bugs to be worked out, but this is the kind of thing you figure would
be easy to understand. When you seat a group of three, instantly grab a single
rider. It's what they do at Test Track.
If you want a barometer of how long single rider is, we
found that the line lasts about sixty minutes (maybe a touch less) if it
stretches to the bottom of the staircase (right to the merge point). Speaking of
the merge point, it made me wonder what the plan is if the single rider line
stretches beyond that. On this preview day, when FastPass was turned off, the
single rider line just stretched back into the FastPass/single rider joint
corridor. But they won't let that happen on a crowded day, right? The FastPass
people will be stuck in a VERY slow moving line, mixed in with the single
riders, until the merge. I wonder if they'll have to install queue poles and
bifurcate this joint corridor.
A nitpick: there are two brothers named Grimm.
Thus, they are known as the Grimms. Their
collection of fairy tales must therefore be Grimms' Fairy Tales (note the
apostrophe).
One more observation about single rider: as this line
climbs the staircase, the CMs at the merge point fall away from view. Running
parallel is the standby line (technically the "regular" line, since FastPass has
been merged in by now), and this standby line shrinks up the staircase before
the CMs replenish it. It would be downright easy for single riders to hop that
little fence and skip past the last thirty minutes of their wait, since it
appears that there are no CM eyes up here.
On the queue bridge you can see the wheelchair loading
zone off to the side. By having its own loading area and special vehicles that
are diverted here on each pass through, the designers cleverly will avoid ever
having a "cascade" failure, when the ride vehicles back up so much that the
attraction breaks down.
The lines cross over the queue area and descend a
staircase, an effect which reminded me oddly of it's a small world, and then
reach the loading area. From up high, you get your first glimpse of the ride and
the theming. We've left the toybox behind and are now at a carnival. It's still
Andy's Room (we can see the cloud wallpaper), but the toys have used TinkerToys
and Christmas lights to decorate up a fake midway.
The look will fit in at DCA, but (even out of
place) at DHS it didn't bother me.
On one wall is a giant cardboard box, splayed open, and
this is where the ride vehicles go. That cardboard box explains that the Toy
Story Midway Mania is a new toy that Andy must have just purchased, and as
fellow toys we're going to test it out.
Let's try out Andy's new Play Set!
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