Haunted Mansion Counterstrike Ride-Through

If it’s possible for this to be any cooler, I don’t wanna know! They’ve even included the inevitable interruption by playful spooks.

You should not be surprised to know that I spotted this on BoingBoing, which also has links to more info.

Jentasmic!: SuperStar Monorail Cast Members

I was thrilled when I heard that some of the Year of a Million Dreams team had read my Jentasmic! column last month on Superstar Cast Members. I’m sad that the Year of a Million Dreams is wrapping up soon, and truly hope that Disney will continue to give its Cast Members the flexibility to be able to provide an extra bit of kindness and magic here and there, as the individual Cast Members see fit.

So, I just couldn’t resist reprising the concept, and this time focusing on some of the fabulous Cast Members I’ve met on the Monorails. I have been so very fortunate! A sample:

Backstage Tour! I have never seen the Electrical Water Pageant. Dunno why…every trip I think I’m gonna catch it, and then every trip it’s just too much bother to get over to the viewing spot when I could be taking yet another spin on Pirates or Haunted Mansion. But thanks to one kind Cast Member, now I know where they keep the floats! My son and I were chatting about the water pageant while riding in the coveted front car of the Monorail between Magic Kingdom and the TTC, and the Monorail Operator was kind enough to slow down the monorail for a few seconds while he pointed out the storage location to us.  I still haven’t seen the darn pageant…but now I feel like I’m in on a fun little secret.

Jentasmic! Scared at the Studios

Happy Halloween everybody! In this week’s Jentasmic! column at StudiosCentral.com, I share a few scary stories of my visits to Disney’s Hollywood Studios. I’ll bet there’s something in there a lot of Disney geeks will understand…

How Much?!? Sure, I’d done the math before getting to the counter, and I was sure that Annual Passes were the best value for my son and me. And yes, I knew it would mean we might be able to afford a couple more Disney trips that year. But still, when the Cast Member slid the credit card slip over for my signature, I thought I’d have a heart attack. Damn.

Mickey’s Discontinued, But He’s Still My Pal

Yes indeed, the news recently hit the Interwebs that Pal Mickey is being discontinued.

And I gotta say, as much as I enjoy my own little personal tour guide to Walt Disney World, it’s real clear to me that Disney never figured out how to make the most of Pal Mickey. I bought mine expecting interesting trivia and the occasional useful park touring tip…and instead, ended up feeling like I had a needy three-year old vibrating at my hip, wanting to tell me the same old joke again, and again, and again. Lisa and I tried to interview him on Episode #2 of Those Darn Cats (MP3), with predictable results. He also didn’t fare particularly well in comparison with a plastic cup from Club Cool.

But strangely, despite his clear failings I’ve found myself rather attached to Pal Mickey. I’ve been a fan of stuffed animals since I was a kid, and despite never being a huge Barbie fan there’s something fun about dressing Mickey up for the Pirate and Princess Party, or making him a duck costume for a DisBoards meet aboard a duck boat, or just making him a simple t-shirt with the logo of my local roller derby league.

Will I continue bringing Pal Mickey to the parks? Well, maybe not all the time. But he’s shown up so many times on Broke Hoedown that I feel almost duty-bound to bring him to MouseFest this December, and make up a batch of Those Darn Cats t-shirts for him and his little friends.

And I do hope that Disney eventually comes up with a genuine virtual tour guide, like Pal Mickey should have been from the start. They were testing a Nintendo DS-based guide a while back, so I suppose we’ll eventually hear more on that front.

Counting Down to MouseFest 2008!

Okay, I know it’s still a couple months away…but I’m excited to let you know that the Those Darn Cats Podcast (of which I am a co-host and co-producer) is an Underwriting Sponsor for MouseFest 2008! We’ve got a page up on our blog with info for a couple meets we’re hosting, at Haunted Mansionand Finding Nemo – The Musical. We may even throw something together for Thursday morning, if enough of our buddies seem to be around that early (hey buddy, whatcha doin’ before MouseFest 101?). And of course, the MouseFest site is the ultimate authority for all the various meets that will take place that week…including (I’m sure) tons that haven’t even been scheduled yet.

Photo by my BFF

I am very sad that my son (aka The Wachamacallit) won’t be coming with me, due to his demanding academic life. (I’ve been complaining about this for a while now….even rambled on about it on my Jentasmic! column in August.) But Pal Mickey will no doubt keep me company — he does tell a joke or two, from time to time.

Plus, I’ve heard that there’s no such thing as a solo trip to MouseFest. It’s still early October and already I’m having to make tough choices about which activities to partake of! I suspect I will not have much time to sit around and mope.

And besides, I could not even consider missing MouseFest this year! I cannot risk a repeat of last year’s Mr. Potato Head Meet, which is the sole post ever published here under the tag “bitter bitter bitter.” Nobody wants to see that happen again.

Superstar Cast Members

In this week’s Jentasmic! column, I reminisce about some of the kind things Cast Members have done to make my Disney trips more, well, magical. Here’s one, as a teaser:

Mickey Mouse Rescue Operation: Tokyo Disneyland is unparalleled when it comes to the friendliness and helpfulness of its Cast Members. As my then-five-year-old son and I were carrying our meals to a table in the Pan Galactic Pizza Port, he dropped his Mickey Mouse souvenir cup. Before we’d even had a chance to finish picking up the pieces, a Cast Member had appeared to ask if something was wrong. When I explained that my kid had just dropped his cup, the Cast Member nodded and scurried off, then returned with a freshly-filled replacement. I don’t think I even have to tell you that another Cast Member had already arrived with cleaning supplies, or that everybody was cheerful about the whole thing.

Backwards Epcot: Turn Venice into a Disney Park?

Nope, that wasn’t my idea! Mr Broke Hoedown’s informed me of a Yahoo! News article on a British economist winning an award for proposing Venice turn over its management to Disney.

“Only one man can save Venice: Mickey Mouse,” read the headline for [John Kay’s] article explaining the concept, published in March in British newspaper The Times. “The city is already a theme park and should be handed over to Disney — they would do a better job of running it.”

Its population long dwindling, Venice’s remaining 70,000 residents are far outnumbered by the millions of tourists who flock to the city every year — creating an artificial economy that cheats tourists and sends locals packing, Kay wrote.

“If the first thing visitors to Venice remember is the magnificence of the setting, the second is the frequency with which they were ripped off,” he wrote.

“Disney wants its guests to have a good time because it cares whether they come back. Most residents of Venice would rather that visitors didn’t come back.”

Now, my first inclination is to bristle. I mean really, I’d be the first to praise Disney for its superb crowd and traffic management strategies, especially at Walt Disney World itself. But there are certain infrastructure requirements that one simply cannot meet in an existing urban environment (retrofit Venice’s transportation networks, anybody?), and certain things are lost in hyper-efficient processes. A certain, well, je ne sais quoi.

But then I get to thinking a bit more, and I might just want to defend the paper, rather amusing given I have not read the darn thing. Nonetheless, there’s a general point here.

Remember a while back, when Lani Guinier got raked over the coals (and lost her Assistant Attorney General nomination) because she had suggested alternative voting systems in her academic papers? Well, here’s the thing people forget about academia….it is a place that encourages and celebrates the discussion of ideas which are not necessarily yet implementable. In some cases, academics put forth ideas that are wildly improbable, for the sake of discussion and learning.

So hey, I’d give that John Kay article a read. It doesn’t seem to be on The Times Online….anybody got a link to the full text?

Celebration Vacations? No Thanks, Give Me Dreams

I just can’t get excited about Celebration Vacations, Disney’s 2009 marketing promotion. But I gotta tell ya, I bought 80 postcard stamps today.

Since about January, I’ve been sending in the postcard entries for Year of a Million Dreams. It’s strange how attached I’ve become to the daily ritual of hand-addressing my postcard and stopping by the mailbox.

I was actually about to give it up last week, after a third pair of Mickey Dream Ears had arrived in the mail. Because yes, I have indeed won some prizes in this sweepstakes. Two pairs of Dream Ears arrived on the day my son graduated from elementary school (a bigger day than I would have imagined), and this last pair arrived on a weary September afternoon, when perhaps I’d supervised one too many hours of homework.

I’ve also been lucky enough to win a few things in the Parks: A Dream Fast Pass at Disneyland, a couple trading pins, a couple of lanyards for my son and me at Magic Kingdom. And a bittersweet memory: The American Wishing Tale Dream, which we won just two days after my son had been through some unsettling medical tests (which, thank goodness, turned out just fine).

I know plenty of Disneyphiles are glad to see Year of a Million Dreams come to a close, after what will be more than two years and probably more than a couple million dreams. And I know a lot of people are frustrated that they didn’t win anything. Maybe it’s easy for me to like the promotion because I’ve won a number of prizes. But I’m not sure that’s the only reason I like the promotion. My favorite aspect of YOMD has not actually been the free lanyards, the Mickey Ears, or even the Mickey confetti on that table in the Liberty Inn. I feel the best part of the promotion has been the increased emphasis on Cast Member empowerment and responsibility to make a little extra magic here and there. At the start of this campaign, I wrote:

The success of the campaign over the long haul may depend in part on how well Disney continues to support its Cast Members in creating the magic, and in managing Guest expectations. Will the Cast Members burn out after month upon month of going beyond even their usual level of consistent cheerfulness? Have the Guests’ expectations been raised to an unreasonable level, and will there be backlash from those whose Dreams don’t come true? Already The Disney Blog has raised the question of whether low-level prizes are being awarded in a manner inconsistent with the rules (and perhaps in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act), and certainly plenty of Guests have been frustrated to be almost in the right place at the right time, as they watch Dreams awarded to others. But the casual, occasional Disney visitor probably isn’t paying enough attention to have their hopes raiesed as high, and it’s hard to imagine the Disney Faithful changing their park attendance patterns just because they didn’t get handed a free pin.

Year of a Million Dreams might well turn out to be a stroke of marketing genius, if Disney can keep it up. But the real heart of the Disney magic is the Cast Members who go above and beyond the call of duty to create those special moments for Guests. Our Segway-riding friend Chris didn’t need any special campaign backing him up to make our evening a little more magic, he just did. Let’s hope that Disney gives Chris and all his colleagues the support they need to keep that magic going.

As far as I’m concerned, that part of the YOMD doesn’t have to end.

So what about those stamps? Well, I honestly was starting to get sick of mailing the damn postcards. For the money I’ve spent on postcards and stamps, I surely could have bought myself three pairs of Mickey Ears, and gotten them embroidered to boot. But when I mentioned to my son that I wasn’t going to be sending the postcards anymore, he looked at me blankly, saying, “But Mom, you got us Mickey ears!”

Enough said.

Minnie’s Country Home, and Feminism 101

Meeting Minnie, en route to her Left Coast Country Home

Just yesterday, I stumbled across a fabulous new blog: Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog, which features a feminism FAQ. Why is this so fabulous? Well, before this site, I wasn’t aware of any resource where I could send people for those Frequently Asked Questions about feminism, and any tech support folks out there (or computer geeks who end up doing tech support for their loved ones and random cocktail party strangers) know how useful it is to be able to point people to some basic information and assumptions, so that conversations and debate don’t have to be derailed by going back to review first principles. And also, how tiring it is to re-tread the same basic ground over and over again.

Or, to quote from their “Why was I sent to this blog?” page:

AKA: I asked some feminists a question, and instead of answering they sent me here. Why?

Your question probably covered ground they have gone over many times before, and they didn’t want to derail the interesting discussion they were already having. [1]

• People find questions that do not further the current discussion frustrating. Questioners find being ignored at least as frustrating, and such mutual dissatisfaction can totally disrupt a discussion. By sending you here the feminists hope to avoid such disruption, yet are also not completely ignoring your question(s). [2]

• Maybe you didn’t ask a question at all, but asserted/argued a point that denied the factuality/importance of the topic being discussed. Nobody cheers at the thought of trying to run another through reams of introductory material before that person gains the grounding to argue a topic knowledgeably.

Either way, educating you on the basics would derail the discussion about the actual topic the feminists are interested in, just for you. That’s an awful lot to ask of people on the net who don’t even know you, isn’t it?

This blog exists to give you a few pointers to places you can find more information to answer your question (although we’re only in early days yet, FAQs will continue to be added until the basics are covered). Once you are better informed you will be able to contribute to lively feminist discussions productively, armed with facts and theory, even if/when you don’t end up agreeing with feminist opinions.

A casual breakfast with my girlfriend Minnie, at the Watercress Café Character Breakfast

So, why am I peppering this post with pictures of our dearly loved rodent girl? Well y’know, I just happened across the Feminism 101 blog at just the right time! Because this week’s Those Darn Cats podcast (MP3, show notes) once again delves into political analysis of a well-loved Disney Parks tradition, Minnie’s Country House. And while I know that many of our listeners are already quite well-versed in answers to questions like “I’ve got nothing against equal rights for women, but we’ve got that, so isn’t feminism nowadays just going too far” and “But men and women are born different! Isn’t that obvious?” and “Does feminism matter?“, I figure an additional resource for these answers is never a bad thing, and might even be useful for those folks who are new to the conversation, including those who are not feminists but would like to better understand the basic philosophy and ideology.

And hey, if any of y’all reading this have podcasts of your own, or interweb radio shows or any other such project (perhaps Disneyphile, perhaps not)? My BFF and partner-in-crime Lisa cooked up a short MP3 promo for us, grooving on a Laverne and Shirley vibe. You can hear it at the end of TDC#17 (MP3, show notes), and I’m happy to email you the promo as a separate MP3 file.

Say, Can Anybody Spare 20,275 Disney Movie Rewards Points?

I am a geek, with an inexplicable fondness for spreadsheets and a serious addiction to travel, especially Disney trips. I even have a list of online sweepstakes which I enter every ding-dong day, just on the off chance that I might might might be the one to win that Disney Vacation Club membership, or that boatload of Hilton Honors points!

So, when I recently logged into the Disney Movie Rewards web site (to enter my daily sweepstakes, natch) and saw that one of the currently-listed awards is a 4-night trip to Walt Disney World, I had to break out the Excel and run some rough numbers to try to find a clue.

The trip will cost you 22,000 Disney Movie Reward points. If the average DVD gets you 100 points, and you’re paying an average of $22 for your movies (think sales at Target, people), that’s about 220 movies you’re gonna have to buy, for a cost of $4,840. (You could get there a little faster with the Blu-Ray releases, since they generally carry more points, but they’re also more expensive and there aren’t as many titles to choose from.)

Is there a limit on how many copies of the same title you can redeem points on? I’m not sure there are 220 movies currently on the market which you can actually earn the points on…so I do believe you’re gonna need some duplicates to get there.

Now, you can also earn points by going to the movie theatre, but you can’t earn many points that way. For example, I earned 50 points each for WALL-E tickets, but I believe there was a limit of 4 tickets one could redeem for that feature, and that seems to be about the usual limit.

So, this probably makes sense if you just happened to need 220 Disney DVDs, both for your own collection and to share with friends, family, and random strangers on the bus who you decide to be kind to, as they look like they had a lousy day. But leaving aside the value of your newly-enhanced movie collection, would the $4,840 be a wise investment for your Disney travel needs?

Well y’know, the weird thing is it just might be, but I can’t tell for sure. Your party of four would be staying at a Deluxe Resort, enjoying a day with a VIP tour guide, with Magic Your Way Park Hoppers and various trinkets for everybody, plus a $250 dining allowance and all airfare fully paid. When I did a little search on the Disney World web site, I found that a party of 4 adults staying at the Grand Floridian for four nights in late December with those tickets would spend $4,104.68…and we all know that most parties of four are going to be spending more than $700 on their airfare to MCO these days, right? We don’t even have to calculate the cost of the VIP tour guide, or the other vaguely-described benefits (“Character Meet-and-Greet and Dining Experience, plus photos and more!”), or the ever-popular, ever-essential Mickey Ears and pin trading starter sets. (That $4,104.68 was for a garden-view room, by the way, so if the lucky recipient is staying at Concierge, that’s a whole different ballpark. On the other hand, it’s also at peak season, so if we’re talking Value season the cost would of course decline.)

But there’s no way to reliably do the math, even if my numbers were more heavily researched. Because you see, there are unspecified blackout dates and other “redemption restrictions” that will only be disclosed upon “reward redemption verification.” And how many people are racking up 22,000 Disney Movie Rewards points just in the course of their day-to-day Disney entertainment needs? I’m a pretty serious consumer here…and I still have only 1875 points (it’ll be 1925 after my recent WALL-E viewing is credited!).

So hey, is there anybody out there who’s actually redeemed for this award, or who even has 22,000 points in the first place? What’s the scoop, people? Or by any chance does anybody want to give me 20,275 points so I can test this thing out? I’d happily mail you the Mickey Ears and pin trading starter sets, I promise!