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Magic Kingdom Review

Here's the first of my mini-reviews of the parks we went to for our vacation.  I'm just going to review the individual attractions/rides we went on, and not the park itself.  So here they are, in no particular order:

Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor
One of the best things we did at the Magic Kingdom.  It's an animated comedy show with audience participation.  Before the show, they had signs telling you to text in jokes to be read during the show.  I wasn't sure how all of this would work, but I was pleasantly surprised.  I was actually not too enthused about this as we were waiting in line, but afterwards, I thought it was great.  The humor was okay, I guess, but the seamless transition from what was pre-defined to the audience-driven content was amazing.  The characters on screen actually responded to what was specifically said by the audience participants.  Their mouths even moved in a close approximation to what they were saying.  The real-time computer animation and scripting to do this was amazing.

"It's a small world"
It's a classic, and it shows.  With all of the amazing animatronic people, animals, and other creatures that the parks at Disneyworld have, the ride seems incredibly dated now.  It's still a fun little trip to different cultures in a cartoonish way, but it's starting to lose its luster to me.  That song, even in different languages, actually makes the ride worse, because it just repeats the same four lines a countless number of times, since the ride itself is fairly long.  I couldn't take it much longer.  The whole time, I was thinking of the Simpsons episode, where Lisa gets drunk on the "water" in the parody ride at Duff Gardens.  It really does seem that this ride could deeply disturb someone who was not with it completely at the time.

Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin
I had a good time on this; Erin didn't enjoy it nearly as much.  It's almost like a laser tag ride.  You sit in a car with two space guns, and you have to shoot at the various targets that come up as you move through a few rooms.  Erin couldn't see where the red dot from her gun was at first, so she didn't really understand what was going on.  She caught up admirably, but I still bested her by about 100,000 points.  Of course, taking out Zerg's giant robot for a big bonus helped that for me.

Mickey's PhilharMagic
The absolute best thing at the park.  It's a 3-D animated film, where Donald takes Mickey's sorceror hat while setting up for a concert.  He gets sent flying on a whirlwind tour through the various worlds of the Disney animated classics.  The key thing here, is that it's not just a 3-D film, there are experiences for your other senses as well (well, at least touch and smell).  When Donald is at the Beast's mansion, and they are singing "Be Our Guest," the food comes out at you, and they fill the room with the smell of pies, cakes, and whatever else is on the screen.  When he falls into the ocean to meet up with Ariel, they spray a little bit of water at you, from the back of the chair in front of you.  Obviously, they can't make this a full-length feature film, due to the fact that they need to repeatedly get more and more people through it, the whole thing was way too short for me.

Peter Pan's Flight
For some reason, this ride had huge wait times.  We had no idea what it was going in.  We got our FastPass for it at around one in the afternoon, and by then, the FastPass had already filled up until after seven.  When we finally got to the ride, it was one of those ones where you just move from room to room, viewing 3-D representations of various things from the movie.  The only difference here was that you were viewing it all from above, in a "flying" pirate ship.  I would have been incredibly irritated if we had waited in the stand by line for this for almost two hours, but since we only waited about fifteen minutes in total, I'm pretty neutral.  Okay ride if you can get in with a short wait (< 20 minutes), but a complete waste of time if you wait as long as some people did.

The Enchanted Tiki Room
This is a musical and comedy show with a bunch of animatronic birds inside, well, a tiki room.  Zazu from The Lion King and Iago from Aladdin join in, so it has the Disney feel.  There's some neat lighting, with all sorts of fluorescent colors and black lights, and the songs are nice.  Kind of neutral on this one.  Not bad, but nothing special either.

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
Another one of the "ride in a car, watch scenes from the movie as they go by" item.  This apparently replaced "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" a few years back, and it's a step up.  Neither are particularly exciting, but Winnie the Pooh is very popular, and has been for some time, so it made sense to start putting Pooh inspired rides in the park.  Plus, Erin absolutely loves Eeyore, so that made this more than worthwhile.

Pirates of the Caribbean
And now, another sit in the car and watch the scenery rides (notice a pattern yet?).  This is different, however, for two reasons.  First, the scenery has all sorts of animatronic people and animasl, so it isn't just static scenes.  Second, the ride came before the movie.  I remember when I went to Disneyworld as a kid, the ride wasn't even all that popular.  But the movies have made it incredibly popular now.  They even updated it to add Captain Sparrow in several of the scenes to make it more familiar to people.

Snow White's Scary Adventures
Just like the Pooh ride and the Peter Pan ride, just with the entire story of Snow White told in about a ten minute ride.  This one actually had even less 3-D statues and a lot more pictures just painted on the walls.  Pretty tame, but at least the wait was shorter than the Peter Pan ride.

Stitch's Great Escape
Another really good attraction.  You play the part of security guards in training, when a new prisoner gets teleported in.  And of course, it's Stitch.  You all get sent into a big circular room, with a teleportation chamber in the middle.  When the smoke clears, there's an animatronic Stitch in front of you, trying to get out.  He of course does, and then wreaks havoc.  The lights go out, and you get sprayed with water just as you hear him "spitting" at you.  The seats have speakers right next to your head, so at various times, it feels like he is whispering to you from right behind you.  They blow air at the top of your head when he's behind you and with the vocal work, you get that he's playing with your hair.  You are so into it at the time, that that's what it actually feels like for a second or two.  A great interactive attraction, which, in case you hadn't noticed, are the ones that I enjoyed the most at the park.

Jungle Cruise
This is a boat ride through a jungle, with all sorts of animatronic animals.  Very neat to see the realistic movements from the animals, even if the "tour guide's" jokes were incredibly bad.  With the Animal Kingdom actually having several of these same animals out on it's "safari" ride, this has kind of lost it's appeal, but it's still one of the better ride in my mind.

Swiss Family Treehouse
It's a big treehouse where you climb all the way up to the top, and all the way back down.  If we hadn't been walking right past it as soon as we walked into the park, we probably wouldn't have done it.  There are various rooms in the treehouse that are supposed to represent the rooms that they actually had built in the movie "Swiss Family Robinson."  Moderatly neat to look at, but it seemed to drag on as it just kept going up higher.

The Hall of Presidents
You start out in a waiting area with all sorts of artifacts from the different presidents.  Then you're taken inside the theater where you see a great film about the presidents.  It is followed by a presentation of animatronic representations of all 42 presidents of this great country.  Some of them give small speeches, ending with a speech by current president George W. Bush.  A really nice presentation overall.  One of my favorites to view when I was a kid, and one of my favorites now.

The Haunted Mansion
Very similar to the Pirates of the Caribbean.  Animatronics and a ride that got turned into a movie.  Unlike a haunted house at Halloween time, this haunted mansion does nothing to try and scare you.  Okay ride overall, but it gets bonus points for having a roof over the line while we were outside yet, because we got in line for this right about the time it started raining.  Because of this, we fortunately missed out on the only rain that we got during the entire vacation.

Tom Sawyer Island
This is an island in the middle of the park that you can explore.  There's various trails, some caves to walk through, a few buildings, and an old military fort.  There's also a barrel bridge which bobs up and down as you cross it.  That was pretty much the only fun part of the entire thing for me.  There were some interesting things to look at, and the first cave we walked through was interesting only because I forgot to take off my sunglasses, so it was completely dark, but other than that, not much worthwhile.

Wald Disney's Carousel of Progress
This is a pseudo-play with an animatronic family going through the technologies of the different eras of the twentieth century.  They do the 00's, 20's, 40's, and then a present/future home.  The play was written in the 60's, and the first three eras have remained the same since then.  They've just updated the last segment to reflect current technology and potential future technologies.  Rather than having the stage change or rotate out the characters, the audience seating area rotates around the stage to get you to each of the different segments.  It's a pretty neat concept, and was fairly enjoyable.  We went during the nightly fireworks, right before we left, so it was pretty empty.  I'm not actually sure how popular it is anymore, and it's kind of in the back of the park, so I don't know that it ever really has too many visitors, which is a shame.

Parades
We only saw about half of the normal daily parade, and it was neat, I guess.  I was able to get the picture of Cinderella that I had promised my four-year-old niece that I would get.  The SpectroMagic parade was pretty cool, though.  Al of the characters and performers have lighted costumes, and it takes place after dark, so everything looks really cool.  They had floats for various movies, and it has an entirely different feel when they are all lit up with what are essentially Christmas lights.

Well, that's it for the attractions that we went to at the Magic Kingdom.  Next up - Animal Kingdom.


Posted Thu, Nov 29 2007 10:26 PM by Charles Boyung
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