Amid the madness and mayhem I’ve been experiencing over the past few months, my inner child was awarded with a treat yesterday. I’ve been to Disneyland more times than I could count (and probably more times than I should admit as a currently childless adult, unless you count the inner child, which I choose to.) But yesterday was special. That’s because after I took part of a press event that granted me the opportunity to get a sneak peek at the loading area for the new Toy Story Mania ride premiering at Disney's California Adventure in June, I took off to Burbank and sat myself in the lobby of Walt Disney Imagineering, where I waited to be escorted to a separate facility to test the ride the way Imagineers do when they’re building it. And I have to say, this experience rates right up there in my top ten of all time.
read more ↓I arrived way early for the testing, but it granted me the opportunity to watch Imagineers coming and going. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest that the vast majority of them wore something that was at least a cousin to the Hawaiian shirt. I then met up with the rest of the group from Anaheim and we were walked to the testing facility… where I was disallowed from taking pictures. Understandable, but still – drat. Before we walked in we were warned that this was pretty bare bones, but that we’d get the essential gist of what was going on. Upon entry we were greeted by three of the imagineers that worked on the ride and some story boards that showed the basic premise behind it. (This was also explained at the loading area reveal. Basically, Andy gets a midway games game set that the toys wind up taking over. Riders get shrunk to toy size, venture into the box, and play five different midway games over the course of about four minutes.)
All of us were handed 3-D glasses. Off to the side was a mock ride vehicle loaded with operational “guns” and the LCD screen that listed accuracy and total scores, and it sat directly in front of a giant screen to simulate the same screen that riders will see in the actual ride. There was a second screen as well, and both screens had a different color-scheme of frame surrounding it.
“That was so we could test which scenario worked best with the black light,” explained the ride’s lead producer. “Who wants to go first?”
I waited a respectful five seconds to see if anyone else would take the bait, then calmly stated, “I’ll go.” My inner child, however, jumped up and down screaming, “ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!” I climbed the stairs into the vehicle, and a business writer from the L.A. Times joined me. The “gun” or shooter actually leans toward you when the lap bar is lowered, so it appears the shooter will be well positioned for any rider no matter what the size.
With a click of a mouse, the “ride” began. The first game is an opportunity for you to get used to shooting and aiming at things. The gun has a pulley kind of like a talking doll, and whenever you release it to let fly with ammo, it makes a popping sound of sorts – like bubble wrap with a cartoon edge. So while Buzz and Woody held arm targets and moved them around to give us a good workout, I was able to get the hang of aiming and shooting pretty quickly. (For the record, the ammo of choice for the warm-up was pie.)
The first official game was Hamm & Eggs, where you get to shoot colorful eggs at various floating and stationary targets like pigs, cows, and a goat periodically poking its head out. But it’s not just about shooting at the insolent mice in the barn worth 2,000 points (I never did catch them, dammit), it’s about shooting things that help reveal Easter eggs and experiencing the 4-D aspect of the ride. One of the best examples of this comes in the second game, Bo-Peep’s Baaa-loon Pop. Instead of eggs, you’re shooting darts at the balloons for different points. Some are filled with air, resulting in a whoosh from an air gun coming at you when you successfully pop one, and others are filled with water (and I probably don’t have to explain the effect of popping one of those.) When you shoot down all the balloons on the cloud over the sun, the cloud falls to reveal vibrant rays.
The other games are just as fun and inventive. You get to hurl baseballs at floating plates with the Army Men, shoot targets with Woody, and the most confounding one for me, ring toss with Buzz Lightyear and the little green aliens. Using the gun to fling rings is no easier than doing it by hand. But the awesome thing is the aliens each have their own facial expressions and movements to keep you entertained while you try (though sometimes I felt like the one that would periodically wave at me from afar on a floating platform worth 2,000 was actually mocking me.) In the end my score was 77,000, which I thought was pretty damn good for a first-timer… until another writer from the Times creamed me with a score of 130,000. But one of the imagineers held the record with – if I remember correctly – something like 800k.
“How did you do that?” we asked. “Practice?”
“No, I just know where everything is,” she said, grinning.
Once everyone had taken a turn the imagineers launched a program that showed us a virtual ride-through of the attraction and explained how it helped them to work out kinks before and during construction. Each ride vehicle holds eight people and glides gently from scene to scene, rotating riders as it goes so that each ride experience is unique. Plus, there are different things that happen in every game, so while the essential game is the same, there’s still something new to catch every time you ride. There was even talk of how easy it would be to create a holiday overlay where riders could lob snowballs at targets during the busy holiday season.
At one point as we were all chit chatting I asked one of the imagineers what the best part of working on the project was. “Playing the game over and over again,” he replied without hesitation. Even when I asked him if there was anything about creating the ride that was a confounding issue, he explained that there wasn’t really anything that caused him to tear his hair out. They had so much fun working on it that even issues became enjoyable ways to problem solve, and in the end they were afforded the opportunity to use their creativity to imagine and build a ride that was both fun and innovative. So essentially, even the problems became fun. Imagine that.
Earlier in the day before we left for WDI I was sitting with one of the Disneyland publicists having lunch in Hollywood Pictures Backlot at DCA. He said to me, “You know, I have to ask you something. How did you go from porn to travel writing?”
You know, sometimes I have no idea. But I’m damned sure glad that it happened.
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