Disney

Wherein I Fix All of Marvel’s Problems

A.B. Kelly · May 16, 2024 · Musings · Comic Books, Disney, Marvel, marvel movies, mcu, Movie Review, Pop Culture · No Comments

As the foremost expert on all matters Marvel, I figured I should pipe in on this new/old/revamped/softly-rebooted MCU thingamagig.

(*Disclaimer: “Foremost Expert” is an unofficial title more or less determined by comparing my knowledge of comic books to a) my family members, and b) some of my coworkers. Plus I once blogged about why female superheroes have large breasts

So the MCU has been in a bit of a funk lately. And by “bit of a funk,” I mean it’s been a heap of hot garbage that’s hemorrhaging millions of dollars on each failed attempt to regain relevance. Kevin Feige, the guy in charge of the whole shebang, who as of five years ago was seen as a wunderkind who could film a fart and turn it into a billion-dollar franchise, is licking his wounds and going to that time-honored Hollywood tradition of retreading the same old shit they’ve been shilling out for decades.

The reasons for the recent failures in the MCU can be attributed to a ton of reasons. Some people, evidently including Kevin Feige, think it’s because they’ve used up all their “a-list” heroes and actors. Others think it’s the result of Disney “going woke” and “going broke.” Add to that the effects of Covid and HDTVs on the theater-going experience, plus the desire for Disney+ to have premium content, plus the glut of entertainment options, plus Jonathan Majors’s assault trial, plus the confusing storylines because do I really have to watch Loki, season two before I see Deadpool and Wolverine?

I’m here to confidently assert that each of those explanations is wrong.

Because, in many ways, they’re all right.

And if Kevin Feige thinks he’s going to solve the problem by giving Robert Downey, Jr. a shit-ton of money, he’s in for a rude awakening. Okay, maybe not the first time he tries that trick, but it ain’t gonna have staying power.

What everybody can agree on is the origin of the MCU’s problems, which started roughly the time between when the Avengers: Endgame afterglow left our hearts and the Covid virus entered our psyches.

Boy, Endgame only beat out Covid by the skin of its teeth. Remember how painful that year was between Infinity War and Endgame? Imagine if Infinity War had come out in 2019 instead of 2018. Then all the movie theaters would’ve shut down before we got the resolution. And there’s no way Disney would’ve tried that “just release it on Disney+” bullshit they did with Black Widow if it was the pinnacle of a decade of storytelling. Dare I say it, that would’ve made 2020 even worse than it already was.

But I digress. Let me start with the least, or maybe most, obvious problem the MCU is facing: Endgame hangover.

Don’t get me wrong. Endgame is one of the greatest cinematic accomplishments of all time. So much fan service, so many callbacks, wrapped up in a prefect send-off of characters we’d come to know for a decade or more.

Can I be honest? When I was in the theater, I didn’t even hear the dialogue when Dr. Strange’s teleportation circley things (told you I was a Marvel expert) all appeared on the air, because I was in one of those theaters where everyone was cheering at the top of their lungs.

Of course, the line, spoken by Falcon to Captain America, is “On your left,” which was what Captain America kept saying to Falcon when they were running around Capitol Mall and Cap kept lapping him in Falcon’s first appearance.

It’s details like this that set it apart. James Bond movies (pre-Daniel Craig) were always standalones. The Star Wars trilogies are mostly independent, and when they try to self-refer, it’s ham-handed and pisses off half the audience. Endgame was catharsis.

Unfortunately, with Endgame being such an accomplishment, Disney kinda forgot what brought us to the MCU in the first place. Endgame wouldn’t have worked in place of Iron Man in 2008. Just ask DCU, which continues to try (and fail) to reboot their own comic universe with deep gut-punches of movies. The MCU, by contrast, was light-hearted and fun. But now they think all of reality has to hang in the balance for every damn movie. Endgame worked because we were vested in the characters. We knew “On your left” and “I could do this all day” and “I am Iron Man,” so we were rooting for them as much as we were rooting for Earth or half of humanity.

In The Eternals, do we really give a shit about Ikarus or Sersei or Crystal?

(That was a test: Crystal is in the Inhumans, not the Eternals, and if you don’t know the difference, that’s the point.)

Now, Kevin Feige and the rest of the Disney brass would look at my last statement as proof that they need to bring back Iron Man and Captain America, but I call bullshit. Nobody knew who the hell the Guardians of the Galaxy were before 2014, but I guarantee that if I’d thrown Groot in my fake Eternals lineup instead of Crystal, everyone would have caught it immediately.

Before they follow this new “only big names” path, maybe they should find a single human who prefered Thor: Love and Thunder over Shang-Chi. Then put that huan in prison, because they are clearly a sociopath.

It’s not about the star power, either. Sure, Robert Downey, Jr. was always a star (albeit one who was known more for his off-screen misdeeds than any particular role), but Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth were hardly household names before they hit gold. It’s hilarious to look back on critics haranguing Disney for putting the original Thor movie in the hands of a couple of unknown lightweights named Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston.

Never forget that Shang-Chi begat Barbie, not the other way around.

This whole “just use the major characters” approach isn’t only a movie problem. For sixty years now, the Marvel Comics mantra has been, “If a comic isn’t selling, make Spider-Man and Wolverine guest star.” The only entity more egregious is DC Comics, who seem contractually obligated to put Batman in fifty percent of their printed comics each month.

It’s why I fear Wolverine being part of the MCU now. I really, really hope Hugh Jackman retires the character after the next Deadpool movie. Not because I dislike Hugh Jackman or Wolverine, but because if the MCU gets their way, he’ll replace Stan Lee in the cameo department.

Thank God Marvel can’t use Spider-Man with impunity. If Sony ever sells the rights back, assume the next seven MCU titles will be Spider-Man and Wolverine.

Where I started to lose interest in the MCU was when they transitioned from the (allegedly) minor characters of Vision and Scarlet Witch to the (again, allegedly) major characters of Falcon and Winter Soldier. Of all the decisions they’ve made over the past five years, moving WandaVision into the pole position of the Disney+ shows, was probably their worst. It showed how groundbreaking the new format could be. Wow, we can have a time-bending, reality-bending show steeped in pop-culture with painstaking attention to detail encompassing seventy years of pop culture? Cool!

Then they followed it up with stretching a two-hour movie into six episodes.

One thing everyone can agree on is that the glut needed to stop. I understand why Disney felt they needed a shit-ton of TV series right away. It’s hard to compete with Netflix if you’ve only got two or three properties. But, honestly, they could’ve waited more than a couple weeks in between each of those initial series. I watched almost every series, but if you put a gun to my head and asked if a particular scene happened in Hawkeye, Moon Knight, or She-Hulk, I might not be able to tell you. Unless it was in Egypt, in which case my answer it Moon Knight.

Speaking of the glut of Disney+ offerings, stop calling the cartoons part of the MCU. I’m sick of headlines saying “Iron Man returning to MCU” or “Tom Holland replaced as Spider-Man” only to find out it’s about Zombie Iron Man or Spidey and his Amazing Friends. Hell, I’m not even sure how I feeel about Deadpool and Wolverine being the only MCU movie coming out this year. Sure, Deadpool is a Disney property now, but does anyone actually feel, after seeing the first two movies, that this is a natural connector between The Marvels and Captain America: Brave New World? Even in the comics, Deadpool barely works in continuity. I worry the character will lose a lot of his appeal once he has to fit into MCU’s multiple convolusions.

I’m kinda bummed that The Marvels bombed. It was actually a good movie. So was Fall Guy, which also bombed, because somehow Hollywood still hasn’t figured out what gets people to the theaters. A lot of people blame it on Covid hangover, but theater attendance was down int he decade leading up to 2020, as well. For all properties except Marvel.

I think The Marvels is what the MCU needs more of. But not for the reasons that Disney thinks. And not for the reasons Fox News thinks.

It has nothing to do with the movie having three female superheroes. It’s because at least two of those three superheroes are interesting, played by actors who aren’t phoning it in. It also has Brie Larsen.

Considering that all three characters have gone by either Ms. Marvel or Captain Marvel in the comics, combining them in a movie called The Marvels makes total sense. Those of us in the know realized where it was going as soon as the last name Rambeau showed up in the original Captain Marvel.

If you haven’t seen WandaVision (or Ms. Marvel), it might feel like this was a woke shoe-horning in of three female characters of different ethnicities, but considering the MCUs bread and butter has always been characters showing up in each others’ movies, it would’ve seemd odd had Monica Rambeau and Kamala Khan NOT appeared in the next Captain Marvel movie. But yeah, one of those valid complaints of the MCU is that you shouldn’t have to watch every damn property to know what’s going on.

But if the reason you didn’t watch Ms. Marvel is because she’s Muslim, suck it up. You lost that worthless argument a couple generations ago.

Monica Rambeau’s been in the comics since the early 1980s, she’s hardly a woke “tick the box” representation character. Was Kamala Khan? Maybe at first, although I find it interesting that she showed up around the same time as Miles Morales. The complaint about Miles Morales was “if there’s going to be a minority character, make a new one. There’s already a white Spider-man.” Then those same people complained when the Muslim Ms. Marvel was completely different than the white one. Or the blue one, which was the original Mar-Vell.

With all that being said, Marvel Comics, and by extension the MCU, needs to stop putting “tick the boxes” ahead of character development. While I watched and enjoyed The Marvels, the entity I have no interest in whatsoever was Echo. The character of Echo is, allegedly, interesting because she is a) deaf, and b) Native American. Back story? Nah. Specific powers? Not really. Compelling backstory? Did I mention she was both Native American and deaf?

Two of the most boring Marvel characters are Hulkling and Wiccan. Hulking already has one strike against him because he is not in any way related to the Hulk. Hulk has a son, but that is not Hulkling. Instead, Hulkling is part Skrull, so he is green and can shape-shift into something strong, like Hulk. Wiccan is one of Vision and Wanda’s kids. He’ll show up in the MCU soon, I suppose.

Hulkling and Wiccan are gay and they are married to each other. So every time they’re shown, it’s some sort of date night or some other premise to show nonstop adoration between the two. They never fight, as married couples are wont to do. They never have their own agendas. They are simply in love with each other, at all times, because dammit, that’s good story-telling. Meanwhile, Invisible Woman is banging Namor every time Mr. Fantastic leaves the room for more than five minutes.

Hulking is literally the emperor of the combined Kree & Skrull empires, but somehow the only story of his that’s worth telling is that he’s married to a man and they are perfect together. Hey Marvel, it would feel a lot less like tokenism if you allowed the characters to be more than just a token.

This whole “minority characters can’t have flaws” is going to come back to bite Marvel in the ass before long. Exhibit #1: The Phoenix Force. Historically, it takes over a character, causes them to kick-ass for a period of time, then turns them insurmountably evil before burning out. The plot of X-Men vs Avengers, one of their most-hyped (and least-payoffed) crossovers of the last twenty years, is that infects six X-Men and runs them through the whole gamut in seven issues. They solve world hunger by issue #2 and are trying to end existence by Issue #6.

Now Echo has the Phoenix Force. Let me remind you, however, that she is Native American. And deaf. If Hulkling can’t have any flaws, that applies doubly to Echo. She can’t ever succumb to baser instincts because the Woke Bible says no Native American has ever had an impure thought in their entire history. Nor have the deaf. The way you humanize someone is by removing their humanity.

And sure enough, Echo has had the Phoenix Force since 2021 and… still has it. Hasn’t saved a planet, hasn’t destroyed one. In fact, she doesn’t really do anything. She’s the same character she’s always been and the Phoenix force is just kinda there. Can’t really flare up and do its Phoenix thing as that might detract from Echo’s primary role of being a) Native American, and b) deaf.

I assume they’ll finally fix it by having the Phoenix Force leave her voluntarily to find someone who is corruptable.

But Echo being a terrible character wasn’t the reason I avoided the TV show. The MCU entities are separate from the comic counterparts. The Thor in the comics has none of the humor of Chris Hemsworth. Tony Stark isn’t nearly as charismatic as Robert Downey, Jr. And Shang-Chi? Find me a Marvel fan who knew who that character was before 2018 and I’ll find you a liar.

But I did watch Hawkeye. It was mostly a good show. Kate Bishop has huge potential to carry the character forward, probably even better than the morose-as-hell Barton (which totally doesn’t match the way the character is in the comics). And Yelena is the single best character to be introduced post-Rocket Raccoon. And again, Yelena ain’t that big of a deal in the comics.

Most of the time, Hawkeye’s pace popped. The times it didn’t? When Echo was there. It was all Kate investigating her stepfather and Clint stuck in New York and Yelena quipping about what’s in the refrigerator. Then it’s, oh by the way, here’s Echo, dropping in like a “Very Special Episode” of a 1980s sitcom. The pace slowed down, the subject matter got serious, because Echo is not a character we are allowed to approach like every other character. We must understand that she MATTERS.

And they decided to give her an entire series not based on feedback, not based on an objective review of how the character played out, but on a “Fuck you, racist and ableist fucks!” Seriously, Kate, who was supposed to be taking over the main character, has only shown up one more time, in a cameo at the end of The Marvels, while Echo has received an entire series and is also going to be in the next Daredevil series. So who was the main purpose of Hawkeye?

Charlie Cox got thrown in the last Spider-Man movie because he was hugely popular and finally able to be in the MCU. Ditto with Hugh Jackman in the upcoming Deadpool flick. Loki wasn’t my cup of tea, but I get that it was quirky and had a following, so it made sense that season two was greenlit. Echo, meanwhile, was the opposite. Almost a dare. We’re gonna make a boring character and you’re all gonna watch it or else we’ll call you racist and ableist.

So I guess I can see why people thought The Marvels was going to go that route. But it didn’t.

Sure, The Marvels was little more than a torch-passing, but the torch was being passed from a stick in the mud who never really brought much to her roll, Brie Larsen, to someone who could not be a better embodiment of what the MCU should be, Iman Vellani. She steals every scene she’s in with her exuberance. She’s every bit what Tom Holland exuded in his early movies, but replace the “striving to impress” with a buttload of “OMG, this is so cool.” I know the MCU keeps looking for its next Robert Downey, Jr, and I’m not saying Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t the correct call on that, but what they really ought to be focusing on is the next Star Lord. The next Kat Dennings.

There’s a scene in The Marvels on a planet where everyone sings. It’s hilarious. At one point, Monica Rambeau asks Kamala Khan how many fanfic chapters she’s going to get out of this. But to me, the funniest line was when plot started happening, requiring the king to speak some lines instead of sing them. Kamala looks confused, but Carol Danvers explains that he’s bilingual.

Oh, and there’s a scene where a whole bunch of Flerkins (those cat aliens that scratched out Nick Fury’s eye) are eating up people in order to expedite the evacuation of a ship. Once on the ground, they’ll cough them all up like hairballs. Daughter couldn’t get over the announcements going over the loudspeakers (“Let the Flerkins eat you.” “Do not run from the Flerkins”) while I kept trying to place the background music.

It was “Memory.” From Cats.

You won’t find that level of tongue-in-cheek in Echo.

What separates The Marvels from half of the MCU’s drivel in the past half-decade is that it’s fun. Remember fun? It used to be the number one purpose of a Marvel movie. But they ended up convincing themselves that kick-ass was the adjective they were going for. Some of their movies are both, but when you’re shooting for kick-ass and you miss, you just get bloated drivel. They learned that lesson with Thor: Dark World, but seemed to forget it by the time Falcon and Winter Soldier came around.

Iron Man was fun. Avengers was fun. Guardians of the Galaxy was fun. Even Endgame was fun, in its own way. Eternals wasn’t fun. Multiverse of Madness wasn’t fun. Wakanda Forever, ugh, don’t even get me started.

And I can only assume Echo wasn’t fun.

Unfortunately, The Marvels failed. Maybe they shouldn’t have released it during the actor’s strike, when the actors could actually promote it. Maybe they should’ve marketed Iman Vellani as a Tom Holland that they actually have the rights to. Maybe they could’ve marketed it as a movie with three female superheores, not a movie for the purpose of having three female superheroes.

Or maybe they set it up to fail so that they could look down their nose at all the misogynists.

Deadpool & Wolverine looks fun. I’m sure it will do well. But the next movie is Captain America: New World Order, which, if it’s anything like Falcon and Winter Soldier, will be crap. Maybe when a Captain America movie fails, they’ll realize it’s got nothing to do with the characters.

Or they’ll just blame it on racists.

Although if Thunderbolts*, a movie led by a female who plays a minor character, does better than Captain America 4, which I think it might, maybe they’ll finally try to figure out what makes a movie good. What the MCU needs.

Wolverine vs Spider-man!

Spring Break in Orlando

A.B. Kelly · April 10, 2024 · Musings · Disney, Disney World, Disneyland, epcot, family vacation, Florida, Orlando, Spring Break, travel, travelblog, Universal Studios, Vacation, walt-disney-world · No Comments

One of the side effects of sending Daughter to a different school district than the one I work in is that our Spring Breaks rarely align. Mine comes at the end of third quarter while hs is tied to Easter. This year, a ten-week quarter and a March Easter conspired to give us, along with pretty much every student and teacher from kindergarten through graduate school, the same week off. So how about heading to Orlando for amusement parks and a cruise? Nothing says nice, relaxing family vacation like being sweaty ass to sweaty elbow with half the population of Earth.

In a random bit of serendipity, I was reading two books while there: Killers of a Certain Age, which starts out on an exploding cruise ship, and FantasticLand, about a Florida amusement park that turns into Lord of the Flies after being shut off from the world in a hurricane. Fortunately, my ship didn’t explode nor did we resort to cannibalism at Disney World, although with the amount of salt they put in their popcorn, they’re clearly hiding something.

This post will stick to the land stuff, while part two will cover the cruise.

We spent most of Friday flying east, arriving late at night using the logic of “our bodies will still be on West Coast time.” That logic always falters when the the alarm goes off the following morning on East Cost time.

On Saturday, we did two Universal parks, primarily so we could ride the Hogswarts Express between the two. On Sunday, we hit the Disney circuit, hopping between Animal Kingdom and Epcot. We skipped Magic Kingdom because it’s about 90% the same as Disneyland, which we’ve all been to countless times. As sacriligeous as it seems to fly 3000 miles and not go to Magic Kingdom, flying 3000 miles to go to a park that we can visit in an hour seems even worse.

Universal

The two Universal parks, which could really be one park but then they couldn’t charge extra for a park hopper, is an odd collection of old and new.

I might love the Simpsons as much as the next Gen Xer, but a land devoted to a show that hasn’t been hip for thirty years seems an odd choice. Fortunately for them, Jurassic Park has been either rebooted or sequelled (Kinda hard to tell where the Chris Pratt movies fit in the canon) or else two of their lands straight outta 1991. What, we couldn’t get a McGyver ride?

None of those are as bad as their Toon Land, though, which is based on newspaper comics. What 21st century kid doesn’t love following the exploits of Blondie, Heathcliff, and Marmaduke? A Popeye ride! Great! And yeah, sorry kid, I can’t even begin to explain to you who Dudley Doo-Right is.

Honestly, if it wasn’t for Harry Potter and one block of Minions, Daughter might not have had a clue about any character in the entire park.

Oh, except for Marvel.

How weird is it that a property that sold to Disney twenty years ago is still grandfathered into one of their competitor parks? I remember going to Universal Orlando once before the MCU took off and Marvel Land seemed as desolate as Marmaduke Land. Now it’s buzzing and Universal has got to be begging Disney to right that MCU ship soon. Or maybe coax Disney into making a new Popeye shared universe.

We started our day in Marvel Land, making our first ride of the day the Hulk Coaster, where we became aware of a very stringent riding policy. They don’t let you take anything on the ride. No keys, no cell phone. Nothing. You have to go through a metal detector!

While I understand the premise (there was a ride at Magic Mountain where I spent the whole ride freaking out that my phone was going to fall out of my pocket and couldn’t enjoy the ride), there’s got to be a limit, right? I mean, they let me keep my glasses on, and while I’m no physicist, I have to imagine that any ride forcing my keys out of my front pocket would long ago have thrown off my glasses.

There are “free” lockers nearby for you to put your everything in. You need your ticket to open it, and our tickets were on our phones. So how the hell am I supposed to reopen said locker? The attendant gave me a piece of paper the size of a business card with a QR code that opens a locker. Somehow that paper stayed in my pocket, whereas my wallet… wouldn’t?

The Hulk ride was great though. It’s an old-school coaster. Unfortunately, many of the rides at Universal were “cutting edge.” Which pretty much just means 4-d.

What is a 4-d ride? Not to belittle Universal any further, but think Star Tours. You’re in a stationary contraption that shimmies and shakes in order to appear to follow something happening on a screen in front of you.

Universal also likes to add occasional water sprays for emphasis. The most disgusting version of this was on the Kong ride, where the water spray simulated guts and viscera from monsters exploding via machine gun fire. Refreshing!

I understand the draw of these rides. They take up substantially less real estate than a traditional roller coaster. If all the Universal Rides took up the same amount of room as, say, their Hulk Coaster or Rock-It Coaster, they would have to expand the park.

I remember when Star Tours was new. It was groundbreaking. I couldn’t figure out how the hell they made it feel like we were gong to light speed, to say nothing of timing all the little jerks and jostles with the scene playing out “through the windshield.”

That was 1989.These days, I know that they’re just tipping the container back to simulate acceleration and forward to simulate braking.

Instead of the contained unit like Star Tours, most of the Universal rides have us in individual buggies jiggling in coordination with an Imax screen. The space in between creates a strange disconnect, as if the motion on the screen and the motion of our ride are separate entities.

It triggers Wife’s motion sickness something fierce. The only way she could ride the main Harry Potter ride was by closing her eyes the whole time. She didn’t even attempt the new Harry Potter “Escape from Gringotts” ride. We opted for the Simpsons ride instead, only to find it the same damn 4-d.

Speaking of Escape from Gringotts, I didn’t expect it to be so dang spoilery. Daughter finally started getting into Harry Potter books last year. We’re making her read the books before seeing the movies. She’s finished the first two and started number three on this vacation. While a few of the other rides might have some mild spoilers, it’s not like knowing there’s a World Cup of Quidditch will somehow make book four any less enjoyable.

I kinda assumed there was an unwritten rule that rides take a generalized approach to their characters. For instance, the Guardians of the Galaxy ride at Epcot Center takes place after the first movie, because it goes in depth about the planet they saved in it, but Groot is full-sized. Either they didn’t know he was going to age slowly over the next five movies or else they figured, hey it’s a fucking ride. It should be enjoyable even for the people who haven’t consumed every goddamn ounce of intellectual property.

But as you’re standing in line for Escape from Gringotts (so it’s not even a quick thing that can be overlooked), there are a number of Daily Prophet newspapers with headlines like “Dumbledore Dies,” “Severus Snape New Hogwarts Headmaster,” and “Harry Potter: Public Enemy #1.” And, of course, now Daughter wants to know WHEN Dumbledore dies and HOW IS IT POSSIBLE they’d give it to Snape and all I can say is, “You’ve got five more books to get through and they ain’t getting any shorter.”

Can’t wait until Disneyland opens the “Iron Man is Dead” ride.

I don’t mean to harsh on Universal. In all reality, despite my minor quibbles about the Harry Potter rides, the lands themselves are phenomenal. Fully immersive in a way that even the new Star Wars land at Disneyland, which opened afterward, fails to match. We spent hours there and didn’t even feel like we’d experienced it all. The butterbeers, the wands, almost every shop from both Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley presented the same way they were in the books and movies. While Daughter and I were in line for the Gringotts ride (because it was 4-d), Wife excitedly texted us that she’d found Knockturn Alley, the “dark wizard” portion of Diagon Alley.

It was a fun day. I grinned from ear to ear the entirety of the Hagrid’s Motorbike ride. Instant acceleration, both forward and backward!

Okay, fine, one more quibble. Our last ride of the day was the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit, a ride with a soundtrack. Each person picks their own personal song that blares in their ears throughout the ride. You start with five or six genres and, at least when I rode it a decade ago, that genre would lead to six choices of songs. I think last time I picked an Aerosmith song.

This time, each genre only had one choice. Daughter picked pop/disco in the hopes of a Taylor Swift option, but was instead saddled with “Waterloo,” by ABBA. It’s fine. She loves that song.

My only choice in the rock/classic rock genre was, similarly, a song I love, so no harm, no foul. It was “Welcome to the Black Parade,” by My Chemical Romance. I’m sure anybody older than me might not enjoy a song from 2006 being the only option in a classic rock genre, but it’s a kick-ass, balls-to-the-wall song that anybody should be fine riding a fast roller coaster to.

Or at least the middle portion is. If you haven’t heard the song, it has a little bit of that “Bohemian Rhapsody” vibe, where it starts out a little ethereal, dramatic, and then progressively gets faster and louder. If I were to pick a random spot in the song to coincide with a fucking roller coaster, it would be right around the 1:50 spot, and about two minutes later, when the ride would be ending, there’s an instrumental key change that could transition us back into the station.

Unfortunately, they started the song at the beginning, so it was JUST getting to that rocker part at 1:45 as we were pulling back into the station. It’s like “rocking out” to “There’s a lady who knows all that glitters is gold” only to dial down your excitement level right as they’re getting to “And as we wind on down the road.”

Seriously, people, it might be hard to sync up thirty songs to a roller coaster, but if you’ve only got five, figure out how to make the soundtrack match the action.

But you know what? Universal offers to put rum in your Icee. So, in my book, they can do no wrong.

Animal Kingdom

We started our Disney day at Animal Kingdom. And while I’m not the first person to take this photo, if the photographer’s gonna put his umbrella there, I simply can’t be a grown-up.

How was the actual park? It was fine. Maybe I’m a little spoiled because the San Diego Wild Animal Park (or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days) kinda sets the standard for these open-air zoos, but Animal Kingdom is definitely worth checking out.

The major draw of the animal portion of the park was the Africa Safari. Defeinitely some cool animals there. Lions and rhinos and giraffes, oh my! Got to see some gorilla kids climbing all over their very exhausted mother. Who says they’re not related to us?

One of the coolest exhibits was a glass looking both above and below the water of a hippo exhibit. Dude was just laying there while a shit-ton of fish swam around him, including up his nose and into his ears. Gotta be some good grub forming on an animal that sits there for hours at a time. He was so stationary that people around me thought he wasn’t real, that somehow amongst acres and acres of live animals,Disney just decided to put a statue of a hippo for the fish to swarm around.

Not saying Disney wouldn’t stoop to this level if required, but considering there was no unicorn exhibit, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt that this hippo wasn’t the same one from the Jungle Cruise.

Then again, they did have a dinosaur land. Fortunately, it was mostly a kids area made to look like a fossil dig. No velociraptors. How Disney would that be? If Universal is going to keep their Marvel land, wait’ll they see how we steal their Jurassic Park mojo.

The Asia area didn’t have a bus safari, but did have a walking one. The highlight was probably the tigers.

No, you know what was the highlight of both Asia and Africa? Aviaries. Not only did they contain colorful birds, but damn, them birds was active! All swoopin’ and cawin’ the whole dang time. Not sure why I regressed to second grade vocabulary there, but I don’t know much about birds, so you’ll just have to accept, “Dang, dey got lotta dem bright, purdy burdies.”

Unlike Africa, where the animals were the main draw, Asia contained rides. Unfortunately, we limited ourselves to one hour-long line in the hopes of utilizing our park hopper. So we skipped the water rapids ride and opted for the Everest Expedition. We originally laughed at the description, “Rush through the Himalayan mountains on a speeding train while avoiding the clutches of the mythic Abominable Snowman,” because if you replace train with bobsled, it’s pretty much the exact same description as the Matterhorn.

Except it was substantially more fun than Matterhorn. Faster, less predictable, not as bumpy. At one point, you’re going backward. Hagrid’s Motorbikes at Universal did the same thing, as did Guardians of the Galaxy in Epcot. Seems that’s the “it” things in rides these days, but as far as I know, no California parks have followed suit.

We also never made it to the Pandora because, well, if dinosaurs don’t belong in a modern “Animal Kingdom,” then for sure the make-believe blue things found in Avatar don’t belong. Seriously, who the hell decided that a park that’s based on science and nature should have a land devoted to fiction? I go to the zoo to see real raccoons, not Rocket Raccoon.

I know Disney’s got to mark its territory like a dog in heat, but sheesh, dudes, do you have to be so obvious about it? It’s not like you would confuse Norway with a Frozen land or any… I’m sorry, what do they have at Epcot? I wasn’t aware Arondale was a member of the United Nations. How’d they do in the last Olympics?

Then again, if the line for the Avatar ride was ever less than 100 minutes, I would’ve put all my opposition to Avatar Land aside.

Although if I had known what the next couple hours would contain, I would’ve just stood in the damn line… Not that my upcoming pergatory was Disney’s fault.

We left Animal Kingdom around 3:30, which was later than planned, but should have still given us a solid five hours at Epcot.

Unfortunately, we lost the damn car.

Daughter was convinced we had parked in two sections away from the park gate. I thought we were three away. Wife believed, naturally, that we were parked somewhere in the middle.

We were all wrong.

But that didn’t stop us from looking for, I shit you not, more than an hour. We went up rows. We went down rows. We went IN BETWEEN rows, because it had a bumper sticker (weird for a rental car) that we’d been using to distinguish it from the bazillion other silver mini-SUVs, but Animal Planet had double spots where the first car pulls all the way up and the next car pulls in behind them, so the bumper sticker would likely be blocked by whatever car was behind us.

I swear we must have checked every damn car in the parking lot. Multiple times. Obvioulsy we didn’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few cars I checked ten times or more.

You know how when you first can’t find your car, your first, absurd thought is “Oh my God, it’s stolen!” and then you calm yourself down and realize, it ain’t stolen, it’s just a row or two away. Well, we went through that process initially but, after twenty minutes or so, I was back to thinking maybe it WAS stolen. But who the hell would steal a rental Chevy Trax with 20k miles on it from a Disney parking lot?

Y’know, even though we rented it from Hertz, there was a previous rental paper in it from Dollar. Maybe one of them put an APB out on a missing car that we comehow triggered coming onto a Disney property with cameras everywhere. It wouldn’t be the first time Hertz accidentally got their cusomters arrested, right?

Although doesn’t pretty much EVERY rental car in Orlando make its way to a Disney parking lot? It’s clear I just need to walk up and down the rows again. I know it’s a Chevy, but did it have the Chevy symbol on the front, too? Ooo, Ooo, I think I see it. No, that’s just the same damn Kia I’ve already been fooled by multiple times.

I must’ve cycled through that progression a minimum of five times. We split up and looked in different directions. We come back together in that “in between” section. I kept hitting the open and close and alarm buttons on the key fob. Nothing. The damn thing was just not in this dimension.

While Wife and I are mainly incredulous, Daughter is having an existential crisis. There is no car. There has never been a car. There never will be a car and we will have to hitchhike back to our hotel. Or cut out the middle man and Uber straight to jail.

After she starts bawling, we finally cut our losses and take the shuttle to Epcot. Animal Kingdom closed at 6:00, so if we waited until, say, 8:00 and took the shuttle back, there should be a lot fewer cars for our nondescript rental to hide.

Epcot

Yeah, I can’t really give you a great rundown of Epcot. We planned on getting there by 3:00, but instead it was close to 6:00.

I was also low-key stressed the whole time. Not really worried, but going through a “What is reality” fugue state. It was going to be 9:00 when I got back to Animal Kingdom and was getting windy and I didn’t have anything warm to wear and who the hell knew how long I was going to be wandering around in the mostly empty parking lot and if it turned out Hertz or Dollar or some random criminal had removed the car from the premises, then I was going to be hanging out in the parking lot till midnight. And we skipped lunch at Animal Kingdom assuming we’d do the World Showcase at Epcot, but now it was too late to do that and I was getting friggin’ hungry and the Animal Planet parking lot might or might not have the car, but it definitely didn’t have a Chick-fil-a.

But, hey kid, Spaceship Earth! It appears to have last been updated in 2005.

Which is twenty years fresher than the Fignment ride.

We did manage to utilize our 7:00 am virtual queue for the Guardians of the Galaxy ride, which is totally different than the Guardians of the Galaxy ride in California. The latter was formerly a Twilight Zone ride (built forty years after Twilight Zone was a thing) tha drops you up and down. The Florida one is like Space Mountain except the indivudal cars detach from each other and spin independently. While it was hilariously fun, it was right up to the limits of my dizziness. Good thing I rode it this time, cause I don’t know if it’ll still be fun for me in another five years.

They also blare a loud song as you’re going through the ride. We got “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” but allegedly you can also get songs like “September” or “Disco Inferno.”

And unlike Universal, the songs actually go along with the ride.

After two days of non-stop amusement parks, we were ready to get on a boat. Check back next week for my review of the cruise.

The Car

Oh, you’re probably curious about the car. Yeah, it was where we left it.

I left Wife and Daughter at Epcot shortly after 8:00- to take the shuttle back. They don’t run as often once the destinateion park is closed. If Family hadn’t heard back from me by the time Epcot closed at 9:00, they were going to shuttle to Magic Kingdom, which was open until 11:00.

The parking lot was probably less than ten percent full and, more importantly, the remaining cars were spread out. I started walking from the park’s gate instead of taking the parking tram, because we had walked to the park in the morning, and, when I was walking back to meet them at the Epcot shuttle, about halfway there, I had that, “Wait a second, this part of the parking lot looks familiar” thought.

Yeah, instead of being in between tram stops one and two, it was actually before the first tram stop. Daughter was more right than me, but all three of us were way off.

I drove to Epcot, made damn sure I remembered where I parked this time, and then went to meet them in the park. Except I had left my tickets with them. Fine, it was almost 9:00, so they would be coming out any second. After they stopped at the Starbucks. And the gift shop. And the pin traders.

Thankfully, nobody was in the mood to attempt Magic Kingdom.

The Two Halves of a Mermaid

A.B. Kelly · June 6, 2023 · Musings · Disney, Little Mermaid, Movie Review, musicals, remakes · No Comments

I’m of two minds about the new The Little Mermaid remake? Reboot? We need a word for the animation-to-live-action movie reinvention, as they’re becoming more and more of a thing. Even if Super Mario Brothers went the opposite direction, to much success.

Actually, I’m of three minds, the third relating to whether or not I should blog about something as timely as a movie currently in theaters. It will mess up my usual timeline: two weeks plodding through 300 words a day followed by two months to edit. I’m not going over it with a fine-toothed comb, or really even improving it one iota. But editing doesn’t help my daily word count, so I wait forever, then just do a quick once-over.

The last step of my normal blogging process is to think of the perfect quip about five minutes after posting it.

I suppose I could wait until The Little Mermaid comes out on Disney+, but at the rate they’re going, the window between that and when they yank it off said service is probably smaller than its existence in theaters. As Daughter continues her candlelight vigil for The Mysterious Benedict Society. I haven’t even told her Flora & Ulysses got yanked, too.

I saw the movie in question when it opened on Memorial Day weekend. Not sure I was overly thrilled to see it. The original, while groundbreaking at the time, kinda pales in comparison to the animated musicals it spawned. The message of wooing a man by looking pretty and shutting the fuck up hasn’t really aged well, either. Although I suppose it’s no worse than Beauty and the Beast, which tells us that true love can only grow through abusive outbursts sprinkled with a bit of Stockholm Syndrome.

That being said, Beauty and the Beast was stunningly beautiful as one of the last non-CGI animated movies. Or maybe it was the first CGI animation? That ballroom scene is still breathtaking.

Thus I was very interested in Hermione and the Beast (I don’t have to italicize it if it’s a bullshit title, right?), the first of these newfangled non-animations. Nonimation? Trademark, motherfucker!

Hermione and the Beast was fine. Still haven’t shown it to Daughter, since animated Beast is much more child-friendly than CGI Beast.

I haven’t seen the Aladdin remake, but it’s certainly on the radar. We saw the stage play in New York, which I assume the live-action movie steals some extra songs and visuals from. I’m sure at some point I’ll watch it and try to swallow my Comic Book Guy “Worst Robin Williams ever!” comments for Will Smith. I like the Fresh Prince (I side with Chris Rock after their kerfuffle, but that doesn’t negate Will Smith being a great actor), but the reports are that instead of turning Genie into a Will Smith character (which, ironically, is how it’s played on Broadway), he tried too hard to play Robin Williams, which ain’t in his sizable repertoire. But again, I haven’t seen the movie, so I’m the last person who should be reviewing it. Unless it’s social media, then we can totally get in arguments without reading the articles we’re arguing about.

The one live-action remake I haven’t seen, and have little interest in seeing, is The Lion King. The reasons why dovetail into my first mind about The Little Mermaid, which correlates with the first half of the movie. Or the bottom half of the mermaid. Because when it was a tail, I might as well be watching a cartoon.

The Lion King, you might be surprised to learn, features animals. (Sorry, should that have come with a spoiler alert?) So the “live-actionness” of it is… computer animation. Sure, we’ve had the complicated technology to make animals appear as if they’re talking since Mr. Ed. It’s called peanut butter. But I don’t think they trained a capuchin monkey to hold a baby lion aloft to an adoring crowd of other lions.

If the animals are being computer animated, they’re still animated. So the only thing that’s changed from the first movie to the second is replacing Matthew Broderick with Donald Glover. Don’t get me wrong, I love Donald Glover, but he’s not in the movie. Just his voice. Which makes it, say it with me, animation.

That’s how I felt about the first half of The Little Mermaid. Sure, recasting the bird with Awkwafina was funny, and Daveed Diggs was a crab, but Flounder was pretty much Flounder. Am I supposed to be impressed that Sebastian was marginally three-dimensional? His eyes were creepy.

As an aside, Daveed Diggs was woefully underutilized. I know he didn’t have much to work with given the requirements of the role, but they added Ariel singing along during “Under the Sea” and allowed the bird and fish to muscle in on “Kiss the Girl.” To make matters worse, they added an extra fast-rap song and gave it to fucking Awkwafina instead of Daveed Diggs? I love Awkwafina. If I want the perfect combination of sassy and spazzy, it’s either her or, ironically considering the cast of The Little Mermaid, Melissa McCarthy. But if I want fast-talking rap, I want motherfucking Lafayette from Hamilton, especially if his character’s in the same room as the damn bird when the song happens.

So I spent most of the first half of the movie wondering why the hell we needed an animated remake of an animation movie. Sure, Halle Bailey (not Halle Berry, although it shouldn’t surprise longtime readers that I assumed the former Bond girl was associated with the movie, because if I can’t tell the difference between Cheryl Tiegs and Chrissy Teigen, I’ve got no fucking chance with a couple Hailey B.’s) was fine, but everything had that “filmed in front of a green screen” feel. Ever since Les Miserables, it’s obvious now when they’re lip synching to something they sang in the studio before filming. So when the mermaid is doing her twirls through the water with her hair floating every which way, it feels disconnected from the song she’s singing. I counted at least ten scene cuts.

They also added a song for Eric, pining away for the mystery woman who saved him, and it’s painful. He’s running around his castle and down some stairs while a faux-1980s power ballad warbles out. Might’ve been great if it wasn’t done better in Frozen II. Again, if we’re going to be live-actioning this shit, it’s gotta be better than the cartoons.

Shit, I just realized we’re about a decade away from the live-action Frozen. Can I send forth a hard pass on that one now? Frozen III, I’d be fine with. Frozen without Josh Gad and Kristen Bell? Are you high?

My opinion shifted dramatically right about the time Ariel lost her tail. And her voice. Shit, maybe I’m falling for the first movie’s premise. But trust me, it had nothing to do with whether or not mermaids should shut up. Besides, she has at least two “internal” songs, so she’s substantially less quiet than her redheaded forebear.

The reason I changed my opinion was because the dynamic of the movie changed. No more twirling in front of a green screen with her fellow actors locked in a sound room somewhere. Instead it was two or more actors interacting with and responding to each other. I think it’s called… acting?

Here’s where I finally answered my question of why does this movie need to be remade with real humans. Human actors can do facial expressions. Or point or furrow her brow or smile. Halle Bailey (C’mon, she’s got to at least be named after Halle Berry, right? If that’s your last name and you name your daughter Halle, you’re clearly signaling something.) does a great job of conveying the frustration, the desperation, of not being able to talk. Some scenes felt right out of The King’s Speech.

Although Ariel can’t talk, she can communicate. It wouldn’t seem strange to make a rom-com where the two characters have some barrier to clear communication, right? It’s the entire premise of, well, every rom-com I’ve ever heard of. Sometimes one of the main characters is vacationing in Italy. Other times, it’s just a misunderstanding, but the entire genre is based on falling in love despite some failure of clarity. Hell, the Hallmark Channel wouldn’t exist if characters could get their head out of their ass long enough to say, “Wait, are you Santa Claus?”

The best scene that couldn’t exist in the cartoon version is when he complains about not even knowing her name. She points to the constellation Aeries, which he had just showed her and named off. She got him to say Aeries, then put her hand on his mouth after the “Aerie,” then kept pulling down on his lip. After working through things like Ariem and Arieb, she pulls down on his lip slower to get him to Ariel, then nods. Okay, maybe a stretch, but it was cute. Eric is falling in love with her despite her lack of voice, not because of it. The way to a man’s heart isn’t to look pretty and shut up, but to engage with him despite the barriers.

Now that I mention it, does Eric ever even learn Ariel’s name in the original? Doesn’t really matter, because we shouldn’t teach our daughters that their names are important when wooing a dreamy mate. I also think the live version added a caveat that Ariel was cursed to forget her goal of getting Eric to kiss her. Again, maybe that was in the original, or maybe it was added because they realized that with a good actress, the whole “get the guy to fall in love with you without speaking” is amazingly simple. And if she could do it on her own, we wouldn’t get to need to hear both Awkwafina and Flounder screech over Daveed Diggs in “Kiss the Girl.”

Did the eels mess up the kiss at the end of that song in the original? I seem to remember it was just a “setting the mood” song, and that he clearly wasn’t going to kiss her because, hell, she hadn’t even helped him figure out her name with a seductive lip pulldown. In the live action, when there’s no reason in hell they wouldn’t kiss on the romantic boatride, Ursula sent eels to topple the canoe to prevent the kiss.

Okay, so I went back and rewatched the original “Kiss the Girl.” A few things jump out. First, he did learn her name, but only because Sebastian came right out and told him, thus taking away Ariel’s agency. Which means the crab speaks English, or whatever language he’s using. And nothing’s more romantically realistic than a guy trying to guess a lady’s name only to hear a strange Jamaican accent whispering it upon the air. Of course, this takes away any agency Ariel has in her own storyline.

In the original, she’s also trying very hard to get the kiss, which might confirm my belief that she knew her goal the whole time. Not to get him to fall in love with her, but just to get a kiss. So she’s just jamming her damn lips in front of his face every time he tries to get any conversation going.

Oh, and Flounder and the bird intruded their singing upon Sebastian’s song in the original, too. My bad, Awkwafina.

The boat does indeed flip over at the end, but the YouTube clip I saw failed to convey if that was intentional or not. I’ll assume it was just a mishap, because if Ariel can’t have agency, why should Ursula? A villain is just a villain. They can’t have any realistic motives or incentives to see their plans through. The foil must know he’s a foil.

I know, I know, agency? She’s a Disney princess, LOL.

She ought to be thankful she’s even awake during the whole process.

Splash Mountain, Post-COVID but Pre-Remodel

A.B. Kelly · August 6, 2021 · Musings · Disney, Disneyland, family vacation, history, Song of the South, Splash Mountain, Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah · No Comments

During my long polemic last week about my latest trip to Disneyland, I briefly mentioned Splash Mountain. Despite rumors of it immediately shutting down for de-racisting, turns out it’s still open. And if it took close to a year for them to get rid of a couple of shrunken heads on the Jungle Cruise, I figure it’ll be a decade or two before they change Splash Mountain, since they’re redesigning the whole shebang

In fact, they just announced they’re closing Big Thunder for refurbishment, so Splash Mountain wasn’t even next in the queue. Let’s start a race: What comes first, the Harriet Tubman $20 bill or the Princess and the Frog Splash Mountain?

Calibrate your watches.

In the meantime, are there other ways to maybe de-racist it. And ideally keep “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

The problem with Splash Mountain, of course, is that it’s based off the racist 1946 movie Song of the South.

Even when the ride was built back in the late 1980s, it felt an odd homage. We might not have been in the ultra-woke 2020s yet, but Song of the South was already the movie version of your racist uncle. I mean, one of it’s vignettes features tar babies, for Chrissakes! It wasn’t banned yet, but Disney was already downplaying its existence. There was talk they’d eventually pull it altogether, disavow it. The last thing one would expect them to do was build a brand new ride based on it.

The Little Mermaid came out the same year as Splash Mountain opened. I know the ride was likely planned long before the movie, but it seems a natural pairing, what with both entities containing water. Maybe Disney worried that movie would flop, seeing as it was the first of the new style musicals. But wouldn’t it be better to remind people of a minor failure of a film instead of a definitely racist one? People love Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride despite never seeing the movie it’s based on.

Still, Disney is profoundly slow to incorporate their movies into rides, as is evidenced by the fact that there are still no Frozen rides (in the U.S., at least), and that they think they’re being cutting edge by switching Splash Mountain to Princess and the Frog, a movie that came out in 2009.

Sorry, *planning* to switch Splash Mountain. Because as of right now, it’s still Song of the South. And honestly, I wouldn’t mind it staying that way. If only they could separate it from its racist roots.

Nothing against Princess and the Frog, but it’s hardly the movie that rolls off your tongue when asked to list Disney animated films. Part of that, I’m sure, is the systemic racism that they’re trying to combat, but I think it’s a general ho-hum movie. More in line with, say Tarzan or Hunchback of Notre Dame, as opposed to Frozen or Beauty and the Beast. I mean, the princess is a frog for a large portion of the movie. So maybe the color of her skin isn’t what causes low sales of her dolls? And Disney doubled down in Soul by turning their second Black lead into a white ghost for most of the movie. Can’t just make a character Black for the whole movie, huh?

What’ll come first, Harriet Tubman, Splash Mountain, or Elsa coming out of the closet?

But it’s okay, because at some point in the next decade or two, they’re going to take Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah off one of their rides!

Except I kinda like Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. I hope that doesn’t make me racist.

And while I’m asking, what about Br’er Rabbit?

I’m not being facetious here. I’m trying to figure out if there’s some way Splash Mountain, instead of being redesigned, could be made less racist.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Song of the South before, but it would’ve been forty years ago when I was only a child. The basic premise, if I remember correctly, was that an old African American man, named Uncle Remus, sat on a porch and told kids old folk tales about Br’er Rabbit and others. Those stories were animated, starting with Uncle Remus doing a voice-over introduction before the characters took over the narrative. Splash Mountain is based on one of those individual vignettes, not the movie as a whole.

The problem most people have with the movie, aside from the tar babies, is the character of Uncle Remus, who is little more than a stereotype of an “old Black dude.” Also, since the movie takes place in the Reconstruction Era, that makes Remus a former slave, but he seems like he’s in a good mood. I don’t know if the movie ever makes specific reference to slavery. Maybe he refers back to his youth but doesn’t specify he was a slave at the time? Personally, if I were a former slave, I don’t know if I’d want to constantly bring it up. I know many Holocaust survivors didn’t bring it up voluntarily.

I don’t think the lack of slavery references is what rubbed people the wrong way. I think it was that Remus was seen as uneducated, perhaps stupid. Comical? I feel like he was reminiscent of Louis Armstrong and Sammy Davis, Jr. as they aged. White society wanted to see its Black men acting a certain way, as a docile minstrel.

These racist portrayals of African Americans were inexcusable then and even moreso now. In one of the World War II era comics I use in my U.S. history class, there’s a character that, I shit you not, I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a monkey or an African American. I think it’s a monkey, but it has pronounced white lips and talks similar to Uncle Remus. And he was supporting the “good guys” against the Nazis. It’s embarrassing. But at the same time, it’s a powerful demonstration of our nation’s sordid past.

But I’m not here to defend Uncle Remus as a museum to our past. That portrayal might very well belong in history’s trash bin. My real question is if he’s even necessary in the movie.

Could they remake the movie, but leave out the narrator and make it “The Adventures of Br’er Rabbit”? I don’t think there’s anything inherently racist about the character. Is the fact that he uses wit to get out of jams a dog whistle for “shifty minorities”? If my understanding is correct, the stories of Br’er Rabbit weren’t made up by Disney, but were old folk tales told by southern Blacks, both before and after emancipation. I kinda feel like they could be presented in a more respectful manner here in the 21st century?

Okay, maybe not “respectful,” because somehow even He-Man causes social media vitriol. How about “contextually aware.”

This seems a much simpler task than shutting down Splash Mountain for a year or two to rebrand it. Bring back “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” but take away the stigma. Tell the story of a rabbit and a bear and their friends as they work their way through a world made difficult by systemic racism. Highlight them as symbols of African American resilience and perseverance when the deck is stacked against you.

Seems like something we ought to be applauding and promoting, not ignoring because some racists appropriated it for themselves seventy years ago.

And maybe get rid of the tar babies this time around.

Post-COVID Disney Trip: The Changes

A.B. Kelly · July 27, 2021 · Musings · child rearing, children, COVID, COVID restrictions, Disney, Disneyland, family vacation, reopening · No Comments

As I wrote last time, our last Disneyland visit was scheduled for the week after the whole world shut down. We returned this summer.

After an adventurous first day around the hotel and Downtown Disney (complete with 3:00 AM projectile vomiting!), we finally made our way into Disneyland proper. On Day Two, we went to California Adventure, and then back to what Floridians call the “Magic Kingdom” on day three. What follows are some of my observations. Today will be mostly COVID-related, while later this week I’ll post general “old curmudgeon in the Land of Forced Happiness” thoughts.

Openings and Closings and Maskings, oh my!

We went to Disney the last day of June and first of July, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. It seems to be in constant flux as they expand capacity. Rides that were closed one day were open the next. There weren’t going to be fireworks, but whatta ya know, at 9:00 on June 30, ka-BOOM! Too bad we weren’t in good position to see them. The next night, we made sure we could see the fireworks and then, wouldn’t ya know it, no Ka-Boom 😦

So if you’re coming here for guidance on what is open and closed, or where to find the best deals on… ha ha, just kidding, there are no good deals at Disneyland. But if your search engine sent you here because I referenced Disneyland COVID restrictions (I assume I must be within the top three results when googling Disney), then I apologize. But welcome!

If, on the other hand, you’re here for snarky explanations of what it was like a couple weeks ago, then welcome back.

Nobody’s saying what the current capacity is. Before June 15, they were limited to 25%. After, they said they were “lifting all restrictions.” But they’re still not at 100%. Nowhere close. They have to hire back all the staff they’ve fired, for one thing. July 1 seemed a little more crowded than June 30, which might be based on a monthly payroll issues. Even so, I’d guess they were between 50-60% capacity when we were there.

Many rides were damn close to walk-right-on. Most were in the 15-25 minute range, and even the biggies rarely popped above 45. As a result, even the longer lines were almost constantly moving. Forty minutes might seem a long time to wait, but the Space Mountain line is made to house a two-hour wait, so you don’t have those moments where you wait five minutes only to take two steps. Daughter will be forever ruined for future Disneyland visits.

Except for the Monsters, Inc ride, which strangely, is one of the slowest moving lines in either park.

Let’s see, what else? Monorail was closed. Lotta germy, germy spreading there, what with the five people riding it at a time. Or all day long.

All the shows were closed down. Even shows that nobody ever goes to like the Hall of Presidents.

The fireworks and water shows and parades were all down to prevent crowds. Except for when they shot off the fireworks. But if they don’t tell us it’s going to happen, we won’t congregate.

Unless it’s the Matterhorn.

Almost all the rides were open. The ones that were closed seemed not for COVID reasons, but for regular “updating.” Sure, the park’s been closed for fifteen months, why not spend the first month after reopening to close down a major attraction like the Matterhorn. Can’t imagine some other time they coulda done that.

The good news is that the Matterhorn did a soft reopen our last day there. In the morning, it was still listed as closed for refurbishment, but when we hit Alice in Wonderland, we noticed it was running. Checked the app and, wouldn’t you know it, a 40 minute wait. Obviously we weren’t the only people who discovered it opened.

We stood in one of the longer lines, got all the way to the front, got IN the damn ride, were already released from the boarding station and were stopped right before we went into the mountain. Ride broken. Sixteen months well spent. At least we weren’t in the middle of the ride. About five minutes after we were taken out, they were still announcing for people stuck on the ride to wait patiently and they’d get them out.

They were nice enough to scan a FastPass onto our ticket (the technology is still there) that we could use to go to the front of one ride, including the Matterhorn if it ever reopened, but at the rate the last reopening took, that would be October of 2022. Unfortunately, none of the FastPass entrances were open, so we were told to hunt down a ride employee to get to the front. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to stand in line to find one. Still, better to be us than those poor schlubs who were next in line, who had waited just as long as us, but didn’t get a FastPass scan out of it.

In the end, the Matterhorn was only closed for a couple hours, so we used our FastPass on it, because ten minutes after it reopened, the wait was back up to 40 minutes. The Yeti’s been updated. Way more realistic, looks like he’s grabbing for you. Pretty solid, but I don’t know if it represents sixteen months of progress.

The only other ride that was closed was Jungle Cruise, but that’s racism, which might take more than a week or two to fix. Splash Mountain, however, was still open and still featuring Song of the South. I mean, we can’t expect Disney to close ALL its racist rides at the same time, can we? They’ve got a Yeti to upgrade! Even after they eventually change Splash Mountain, the recordings on the train and steamboat still reference “Indian shamans” and “savage natives,” and the train was closed while Star Wars land was being built, so they could’ve updated that within the past five years, but chose to keep the recording.

Most of the eateries were open. They encourage mobile ordering, but it’s not a requirement as long as you’re willing to wait an hour for your food. Most places had 3 or 4 mobile pickup spots and only one line, so the line stretched somewhere into the neighboring land.

They seem to be on limited menus, too. For instance, I remember Cafe New Orleans serving a Monte Cristo sandwich, but it wasn’t on their menu. The Galactic Grill in Tomorrowland once had an extensive menu, but this visit it was pretty much burger or fried chicken sandwich.

The limited menu helps, as nothing needs to be made to order. When the app tells you your order’s ready, that doesn’t mean it’s waiting for you. When you get to the employee, they look up your order, then go collect the disparate parts from various bins with dozens of the similar product. So I’m not sure why I needed to pick a specific time and then wait to be told it was ready.

They had mobile orders for the Dole Whips, for chrissake! They serve one damn thing there. After the App told me my food was ready, I still had to stand in a line full of people whose orders were also ready. When I got to the front of the line, they asked for my order number, then handed me one of the twenty or so Dole Whips that were ready to go. I don’t have a problem with the mobile ordering. It’s so much easier than exchanging money at the sale sight. What I have a problem with is the ten minutes I had to wait before the app told me my food was ready if it’s going to be assembly line anyway.

Their mobile order system comes from the same laboratory as their…

Virtual Queues

The two new rides in the two new lands (Rise of the Resistance in Star Wars Land and Web Slingers in Marvel Land) use virtual queues. As I mentioned in my last post, I feel like Disney should’ve used most of the pandemic to implement virtual queues throughout the park. People could use virtual queues to pick a time to go on the ride, then go eat some food or buy some merch, sit for a spell, meet the characters. You know, enjoy the experience instead of spending the whole damn day with somebody else’s elbow up your ass.

Instead of using the pandemic to go universal FastPass, Disney opted to to remove FastPass, which allegedly is going to be replaced by a pay-to-play system with surge pricing. Because of course.

Instead, Disney uses the virtual queues to drum up demand sounded the same as the Nanjago ride at Legoland. But if we DON’T drag our asses out of bed at 7:00 am, we’ll never know.

There are only two times during the day you can sign up, 7:00 and noon. Obviously, the park isn’t open for the first one, but we’d heard a rumor you’re supposed to be near the park to be allowed in. Can’t confirm that, but the two times we stepped outside our hotel room (across the street), we got in. The day we didn’t, we didn’t. It’s okay. We got in at noon that day.

In fact, noon now has a distinct feel inside the Disney parks. People who missed the first virtual queue won’t get in any real-life line after 11:30. They all hover about, staring at their phones, waiting for 11:59 to turn over. A woman near the bathroom said it felt like the longest minute in her life. Then, precisely at noon, you hear whoops and cheers from far and near, like being in a sports bar when the home team wins. Followed ten seconds later by the groans of the vanquished.

One of the days we got the 7:00 am queue, I tried to double dip at noon. The app told me it was only one ride per person per day.

Once your virtual place comes up, though, it’s not like you walk right onto the ride. Far from it. This ain’t FastPass. The virtual queue only gets you past the bouncer, after which you get to stand in the normal ride line. Huzzah! Doncha feel lucky, punk?

To be fair, the Rise of the Resistance line still moved pretty fast. We zoomed right past benches and fancy decorations that were built to be enjoyed. So I assume at some point they’ll do away with virtual queueing and go to the standard American “line.” Why the hell did we switch to British when we went all fancy and “virtual”?

The Webslinger line after the virtual queue was still brutal. Well over a half-hour. Reminded me of the Monsters, Inc ride.

Reviews of both rides forthcoming.

Character “Meet-ups”

You’ve likely heard that character interactions have changed post-COVID. You can’t run up and give them hugs. No sneezing on them. No groping the princesses, although technically that was frowned upon before the plague, too.

The “no hugging” isn’t only a suggestion, it’s a physical impossibility. No fistbumps or patting them on the shoulder. You can’t even stand next to them, much less breathe your nasty vaccinated breath upon them. They’re hermetically sealed like bubble boys.

They’re always behind fencing with a Disney employee acting as bouncer. The more popular the character, the more children aren’t able to control themselves, the farther they are removed from the populace like 1970s Elvis. Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy were only available on the landing behind the Main Street train station, twenty feet in the air, waving from afar.

The other characters, the Chips and Dales and Plutos that nobody gives a shit about, are behind a smallish barrier. Ironically enough, the characters we got closest to, maybe only three feet away from, were Jasmine and Moana, two characters who don’t have the added barrier of a mascot uniform to protect them from our bad mojo. Then again, I’m guessing those clunky costumes have shitty air circulation, so they’re probably sitting in a cesspool under normal conditions.

Since they can’t interact with the public, their job includes a lot of waving and posing. They do a marginal job of posing seven feet behind the barricade while you yell at your child, “Just look at the camera and pretend he’s right behind you. No, don’t look at the character! Look happy, dammit!”

But overall, the characters look bored. There’s only so many ways you can wave. If you can’t pat a kid on the head or point to their shirt or, gasp!, give them a hug, then what are you going to do? At one point, Jasmine and Genie looked at each other, shrugged, and then started dancing either the hand jive or the Macarena together.

I feel sorry for the Disney employees. I grew up in Orange County, where being hired by Disney was basically a five-and-a-half month prison sentence. You won’t see your friends, they’ll work you to the bone, then they’ll fire you right before you start getting six-month benefits like reduced-price tickets. Add in the fact that it’s often ninety degrees and those characters are freaking saints. So maybe a little boredom is good for them? Or maybe it makes a tediously long day longer. I hope it’s the former.

Opening Times

The last change I can presumably tie to the COVID opening was the actual opening. By which I mean when we first entered the park.

I feel like when I was growing up, Disneyland always had the same hours of operation. Whether it was a Tuesday in November or a Saturday in July, it was open till midnight. There were fireworks at 9:00 and the electrical parade at 11:00. Or maybe those two were reversed?

Nowadays you need an advanced degree in abacussing to figure out if there’s enough time to get on one more ride, much less when you’re allowed to come back tomorrow.

The first two days we were there, the park opened at 9:00, the third day at 8:00. It’s okay if you can’t keep track, though, because on Disneyland time, 8:00 and 9:00 openings are the same thing.

Let me explain.

Both of the 9:00 am days, they let people into the park before 9:00. Not sure how early, but I’m guessing 8:00 because by the time we got there at 8:30, people were meandering down Main Street

This isn’t uncommon. Disney’s always let people onto Main Street early. Better to get some early shopping done. Our first long line of the day was the “coffee shop.” I put that in quotes because, despite looking all olde tyme signs denoting “roastery,” it’s a fucking Starbucks. Good thing, too cause I wouldn’t trust some 1950s soda jerker to make my upside down triple latte.

In the past, though, you couldn’t go beyond Main Street before the official opening time, leading to body-crushing mobs against the rope barriers and doors into the various lands. But this time, when we finally made it past the Coffee Ride to the end of Main Street, nothing prevented us from getting into the lands. I guess letting us stroll in promotes social distancing. Better than the mad Black-Friday-esque stampede that one normally experiences at Disneyland opening. Less chance of COVID and less chance of trampling.

Of course, once the masses are allowed into the various lands, what’s the first thing they’re going to do? Get in line for the rides, of course. So it stood as no surprise that there were already twenty minutes or so of people in line at Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland when Daughter decided to veer toward Fantasyland instead of our pre-draft strategy of Adventureland. In her defense, the Castle was closed off last time we were there.

When we finally joined the line at Alice in Wonderland, which seems to have an hour wait anytime of the day so might as well pull off the band-aid early, it was maybe 8:55 and the ride was already running. Did my eyes deceive me? Did they shit-can the “Magic Morning,” where people paid to get in an hour early, then do it on the down low and not charge extra money for it? That seems very un-Disneylike.

The next day, the same thing was happening at California Adventure, so we made a beeline for Radiator Springs, a ride that normally requires either a FastPass or really, really strong bladder. You can watch the entire “Cars” movie while in line. Maybe the sequel, too.

They didn’t let people into the Radiator Springs line until 8:40, but we figured even if they didn’t start the ride until 9:00, that’s only a twenty minute wait. Barely enough time for the coming attractions. But they actually put us on the ride. I think we were off the ride before the park was even open. We pressed our luck, heading over to the Toy Story ride, which also usually has an hour-plus wait. Walked right on, then doubled back and did the same for Incredi-coaster.

It was 9:30 and we had already ridden three of the longest lines. At this point, we were on borrowed time. We could’ve gone back to the hotel and called it a day, and nobody would’ve faulted us. Or we could go ride Guardians of the Galaxy three times in a row. Not the most step-economical course through the park, but who the hell cares when the lines are all ten minutes long?

Me. That’s “who the hell cares.” Or would care when I was on my third straight day of 24,000 steps. But at the time…

Our third day, the park opened at 8:00. Fortunately, we were back at Disneyland where we’d already ridden most of the rides, because we didn’t want to get there at 7:00 am after closing the park two nights in a row. Good thing, because when we walked up at 7:50, nobody was allowed in the park. Not even onto Main Street. They were holding everyone at the ticket stands.

Starbucks would have to wait.

So whether the park opens at 8:00 or 9:00, it seems to open at 8:00. Not sure how long that’ll continue, but use that as my one guide, your one reward for muddling through my 10,000 words of Disney drivel.

Don’t fuck with closing time, however. I tried to go back and buy that Iron Man drink holder at 9:02 pm and things were closed up tighter than a nun’s coochie.

I’ll be back on Friday with some non-COVID reflections on Disney 2021.

Post-COVID Disney Trip: Downtown Disney

A.B. Kelly · July 23, 2021 · Musings · child rearing, COVID, COVID restrictions, Disney, Disneyland, Downtown Disney, family vacation, reopening · No Comments

Last March, we were scheduled to go to Disneyland. Daughter’s Spring Break doesn’t line up with mine, so we’d already signed her up for a week of complicated kindergarten independent study, with tasks like “look for sight words” and, I don’t know, color inside the lines of the kid’s menus?

Then the whole fucking world shut down. Disneyland and the NBA shut down on Wednesday and Daughter’s school followed suit on Friday. She’s now at the end of first grade and still technically has perfect attendance, because there’s nothing easier than attending a Zoom call, despite what my own high school students would lead you to believe.

After waiting sixteen months for Disney to come back, we jumped on it. They were still at 25% capacity when we booked it, but we knew that wouldn’t last because our trip would be after Herr Kommandant Newsom’s magical 8-ball date of June 15. Good news is we were able to use our old tickets, so that saved us a year of Disney Inflation (significantly higher than regular inflation, which has been bad enough). Bad news is we’d paid for the FastPass, but that’s currently not operating. One would think things like FastPass would help facilitate the whole social distancing thing. If only they had been closed for 15 months recently when they could’ve implemented virtual queues for all their rides. I mean, I’m no Disney executive, but it seems to me the less we’re standing in line, the more we’re buying their overpriced food and tchotchkes. Of course, many of their eateries and shops are on limited capacity. Don’t be surprised if 2022 rolls around and, voila!, virtual queues everywhere.

Downtown Disney

We tried to plan an off-day in the middle of the three-day parks adventure, but since they were at 25% capacity when we booked, we took what we could damn well get. So our nice and relaxing day ended up being the first day of our trip, when we didn’t really need nice and/or relaxing. Then again, going to the pool twice with a seven-year old who is marginally “water safe” but nowhere near a swimmer is neither nice nor particularly relaxing.

Then there were the two trips into Downtown Disney, a purgatory where the unfortunate souls denied entry into Disneyland can still pay the company our indulgences. Downtown Disney is a strip mall with only two types of business: shops, mostly owned by Disney, and restaurants, which presumably only pay rent. But if the hour-long wait to eat on a Monday night is any indication, the rent they’re paying is exorbitant. There used to be an ESPN Zone restaurant there that went out of business. I’m not sure how any restaurant could go out of business there. Even settling for our third and fifth choices for dinner necessitated a fifteen minute wait.

Too bad. The ESPN Zone had the best chocolate chip cookie sundae in existence. Put the Pizookie to shame.

Daughter, of course, wants to buy the entire Disney store in preparation and/or celebration. Stuffies and t-shirts and mouse ears, oh my!

Have you seen the selection of mouse ears? Oh my! They’ve got glitter ears and sequin ears, rainbow ears and unicorn ears, Captain America ears and Homer Simpson ears. Okay, the Simpson ones weren’t official (one of the few intellectual properties left unowned by the Mouse), but the pink sprinkled donut ears are a pretty obvious homage.

You could get your rainbow ears in the Pride or non-Pride variety. Disney has a horrible track record with LGBTQ representation. But boy howdy, if there’s a buck to be made off of it, then they’re the most gay-friendly company in history. As long as you’re not wearing a knock-off rainbow flag. Then they’ll whitewash you into straightness worse than Elsa and Grenda.

The good news about the ears was that Daughter was content to purchase just one. As opposed to the…

Pins, Pins, and more Pins

Whichever exec came up with this racket deserves a gold star and a private parking space. Maybe a lifetime supply of cocaine.

The variety of ears pales in comparison to the pin selection. What’s your favorite property? Rapunzel? She has four or five poses. Snow White? Ditto. What’s your favorite ride? Because Space Mountain and Splash Mountain and Haunted Mansion each have rows of pins to choose from. Don’t even ask about Frozen or Marvel. Every property, every character, every quote is ripe for pinification, no matter how obscure. Shit, there are Star Wars references on pins that even a dork like me doesn’t understand.

We bought pins last time we were here. My lanyard had four, Wife’s close to ten. Daughter’s weighs close to her own body weight. And of course, she bought five new ones on day one this time around. At the price of roughly a remortgage each.

“Why don’t you buy any pins?” Daughter asked.

“I’ll buy some pins. I just don’t want to buy a pin and find a better one later.”

“But what if it’s sold out by then?”

“I doubt they’ll sell out. There are a lot here.”

“Yeah! They must really be worried we won’t get one. ‘

“I think they want to make sure they get our money.”

“We don’t want Disneyland to go out of business!”

A lot to unpack there. Good to know, I suppose, that her penchant to purchase every item she sees comes more from a fear of missing out than from straight up American consumerism. Although who can tell where the latter ends and the former begins. There’s a reason Amazon always tells me, “Last one at this price!”

I ran a little test along the lines of that old adage of offering a kid a cookie today or five cookies tomorrow. When Daughter whined that she wanted to shop in our hotel gift shop as we were checking in, long before Downtown Disney and the pins, I told her she could, but she’d get no others gifts the rest of the trip. She opted to wait. A bird in the hand ain’t worth three days of birds in two parks and twenty different shops.

Maybe those kids who take one cookie instead of five are skeptical of the actual delivery of said cookies tomorrow. “Let me keep this cookie now and, trust me, you’ll get more tomorrow” sounds an awful lot like paying you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Speaking of Gift Store Purchases

I saw these shirts in the Star Wars store.

My friends thought they were a perfectly fine pairing. Cute and obvious enough to avoid any awkward explanations. So maybe I’m reading too much into this, conjecturing into semantics (or is that semanticking into conjecture?), but I’m getting a serious “I’m with Stupid” vibe.

The “I’m with stupid” t-shirts go back at least a generation. They were a hilarious gag back when Reagan (Carter?) was president, but it wasn’t long before people found themselves separated from “Stupid.” And when you’re “with stupid,” but alone…

So sure, if Han shirt and Leia shirt are walking beside each other, it might make sense. Even if 90% of the “Han”s in this situation can’t summon the amount of manliness in Harrison Ford’s pinkie. As a general rule, when a woman tells you she loves you for the first time, your response shouldn’t be, “I Know” unless you are both a) as cool as Harrison Ford and b) about to be frozen in Carbonite. In any other situations, a simple “thank you” will suffice.

But again, it isn’t when these two shirt-wearers are nearby that concerns me, it’s when they’re (non-Han) solo. Then you’re either the lady who loves everyone she encounters (we all know one, right?), or you’re telling people who didn’t say or ask a damn thing, “I know.” As a high school teacher, I could probably get away with it, because I for sure know everything they’re going to say before they say it. Yes, I’m sure that if you were in a Nazi concentration camp, you would’ve grabbed the guard’s gun and escape. And yes, I know what the game of “Quarters” is. And 69 and 420. I know. I know. I know.

Beyond a few settings, though, randomly walking up to people saying “I know” seems psychotic. But whatever. My friends overruled me, said those t-shirts were fine.

But we all agreed on this bubble wand:

Sure, that’s only Mickey’s hand at the base. And it doesn’t need to be held at that angle. And for God’s sake, it’s a children’s toy, get my fucking mind out of the gutter.

But in my defense, almost every kid WAS holding it at precisely this angle. Right in front of their midriff. Shooting fucking bubbles out of the fucking tip.

So yeah, I’m a giant man child with a sophomoric sense of humor. But how is it possible there are no giant man children with sophomoric senses of humor in the vast empire that is Big Disney? No free cocaine for the exec who came up with that.

Flavored Churros

Did you know churros came in flavors other than cinnamon? It makes sense, because they don’t roll it in the cinnamon sugar until the end of the process. In theory, how hard can it be to swap out the cinnamon for some other delicacy? Yet it’s never been done.

Until now.

The churros inside the park are still, as God intended, cinnamon. But outside the park, in the wild, wild west that is Downtown Disney, there are carts that sell such monstrosities as strawberry churros and salted caramel churros and, gasp, key lime churros!

The last one freaked me out and enticed me the most. I had to try it! I laugh at little kids’ wiener wands, so I’m going to hell anyway. Might as well throw a churro crime against nature into the mix.

Oh my goodness, y’all! This abomination was a little slice of heaven. I expected tartness but, let’s be honest, if churro is in the title, sugar is the number-one ingredient. So it was sweet, no pucker factor whatsoever. But sweet lime was distinct enough, like a Sprite or virgin margarita, tingling taste buds on both sides on my tongue.

We returned on subsequent days, and I ended up trying the salted caramel and apple pie flavors, as well. Both were meh. Nothing to write home about and, more importantly, not better than cinnamon. But that key lime, man. I’d order that one again in a heartbeat.

Although maybe we shouldn’t have been plying the child with late-night churros while on vacation.

First Night Vomit

Who can really say what triggers an oh-dark regurgitation?

I think perhaps it was that very churro. It was only cinnamon, Daughter not being a food adventurer, but it was after 9:00 at night, which is usually her bedtime. And after a walk across the street back to the hotel, she went to sleep. There’s a reason you don’t jam yourself full of sugar and carbs that late at night. I had trouble falling asleep, needing to prop myself up and take a couple Zantac to avoid the bile, and still woke up multiple times in the first couple hours. I didn’t vomit, but I might’ve felt better if I did. I have in previous situations where my heartburn was that bad.

Daughter points the finger at the meal she had before the churro. Despite chicken tenders and burgers being on the kids’ menu, she opted for fish and chips, then was upset when she got, well, fish and chips. I guess she was expecting something closer to fish sticks, but she got some legitimate deep-fried fish in a doughy beer batter. “What is this?” she asked, aghast and appalled. Maybe I should’ve sent it back for chicken tenders, but I was in one of those “fuck you, you ordered it, eat it” father moods, so we asked for some ranch to dip it in and she was much more agreeable. Not sure why they would serve fish & chips, particularly a kids’ version, without tartar sauce. No malt vinegar, either, although I doubt I could’ve used this time to teach Daughter the proper way to eat them. In all honesty, even had they included the usual accoutrements, she still would’ve opted for ranch. Processed plastic mayonnaise hides the flavor of anything.

Our third potential criminal in this regurgitative whodunit, discovered by Gumshoe Wife, was the pool. Specifically the fact that Daughter seemed to have swallowed five or six poolfuls of it during our two forays. It’s not that she can’t swim. I mean, she can’t swim, but that’s not the entirety of the problem. After years and countless dollars, she’s at least borderline “water safe.” She can float, she can surface, she can get to the sides. Good enough. The problem is when she isn’t focusing on survival, when she’s in the part of the pool where she can touch, she’s got her damn mouth open the whole time. Laughing and yelling and explaining the constantly evolving rules to a game that only she is playing. So while she doesn’t inhale the water (which would be drowning), she’s gulping it down like it’s a college keg party. Anything that’s equal parts chlorine and urine, with maybe a splash or two of water thrown in for appearance sake, can’t do great on your insides.

Who really knows the culprit. Churro, fish & chips, chlorine? In all likelihood, they all merged together. Throw in the excitement and nerves before the “Happiest Place on Earth,” too. Regardless, just after 3:00 AM, our darling treasure woke us up with a phenomenal reenactment of The Exorcist all over the floor of the hotel room. At least she made it out of the bed first. In her defense, it’s tough to make it to the toilet under the best of conditions. Add in the fact that it’s dark and you’re in a room where the bed and toilet are unusually positioned and I’m pretty impressed with where it landed.

It was still dark when the second round came. I was scrambling to turn on the lights while Wife headed toward the bathroom for towels. I think she puked and farted at the same time, a juicy, squirty kinda flatulence followed by the sound of a few more plops upon the floor and I swear I thought she had just shit the floor. Is this Disneyland or one of my male-bonding camping trips? I finally got the lights on. Good news, only vomit upon the floor. Bad news, lots of vomit on the floor. I could hear her stomach gurgling from across the room. Poor girl, that fish & chips and ranch and churro and pool water must’ve been havoc on her system.

How about we add some sleep to the pre-Disneyland equation?

Last little post-COVID caveat: the hotel wasn’t doing maid service for the entirety of our stay (five days!). Not sure if it’s a shared space thing or a small workforce thing. But now our floors were sticky with cleaned up vomit, our trash can was full, and every towel in the room was sitting, puke-soaked, in our shower.

In the morning, on our way to Disneyland, hotel management relented and decided we could, in fact, get a special housekeeping for the day. And it wouldn’t even cost us nothin! Except maybe some COVID towels left behind like a Bubonic Plague victim’s remains by an overworked understaff. Omega variant, here we come.

With an opening day like that, what magic would the actual House of Mouse portend?

I’m planning on posting at least twice next week about our ventures inside the actual parks. They’re all written, just need a little editing. Hope to see you back here then.

Disney

Wherein I Fix All of Marvel’s Problems

Spring Break in Orlando

The Two Halves of a Mermaid

Splash Mountain, Post-COVID but Pre-Remodel

Post-COVID Disney Trip: The Changes

Post-COVID Disney Trip: Downtown Disney

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