Friday, October 29, 2010

hey disney! where are the movies at?

so this is a long time problem i have had with visiting disney resorts; where are the disney movies?

i can hear many of you now along with the cast members calling out that almost every shop on disney property sells movies.  while true i am not talking about the latest disney channel made for tv movie now available on dvd or the one movie currently released from the disney vault.  where can i find a selection of the vast disney movie library?

i can go to my local electronics super store or mega-bookstore and find a thousand times more disney films then i can actually at disney. why is that?  the one place on property i was able to find a good selection of disney movies was the virgin mega store which sadly has gone away and wasn't really a disney store.

i recently went to disneyland and the upcoming release of tron: legacy was everywhere; t-shirts, hats, toys, even a street party, but where in the hundred shops selling tron products can i find the movie tron? no where! that's where.

the first time i went to downtown disney in california i was very excited to see a store called the disney vault.  all right a the place where disney tells us all the disney classic films are kept only to be released once a decade for limited times and now here it is the repository of disney movies.  ARRRGGH! the disney vault while a cool disney store holds not a single disney film. why not?

in the disney vault concept the disney company has the perfect retail outlet for their fiilms.  imagine the extra incentive of traveling to a disney resort of getting to visit the disney vault an chosig any film from the disney past even the ones that are "in the vault" as the commercials we all see on tv say.  imagine this, disney imagineers have recently discovered walt's plans for the repository of his vast film archive and now that vault is open to the world.

please disney let me buy your movies from you.  let me come home from my trip to the beach club with a copy of condorman and the last flight of noah's ark.

where walt walked

so i just returned from blizzcon 2010 in anaheim, where i was able to spend a day at disneyland's magic kingdom and another at disney's california adventure.  now i am a big disney world fan and this was not my first time visiting disneyland, but i was sort of disappointed in my experience.  and although i stil feel every wdw fan should visit disneyland at least once, let me tell you why i had reservations during this trip.

last year i visited disneyland for the first time with quite a bit of excitement.   i was looking forward to walking where walt had walked.  visiting the park that walt had had a direct hand in.  as a first time visitor i had some expectations that there would be similarities to wdw and some differences, but that wdw would be the better place in the end.  the difference and similarities i will talk about in another post but i left thinking that disneyland had its own charm and few things that were actually better than wdw.

so i went back to disneyland this year with some high expectations of another good visit. i went to the magic kingdom on a thursday and dca on sunday.  i ended up leaving the park early each day.

we all have heard the story that walt wanted in florida what he didn't have in california, "space".  as the day gets later and the magic kingdom fills up you can really tell a differnce.  the streets at the park are much narrower and the lands all squished together without much in the way of transitions.  it can start to feel very cramped very fast.  there seems to be little space to get away from the whinning children and adults.  lines overflow into the streets making it hard to walk straight through areas.  when night fell there are some areas that have very low light, such as the path leading from frontierland to fantasyland. 

i visited during the halloween celebrations which i thought give me a fresh reason to visit the park, but what it did was point out one thing that i had never thought about in all my trips to wdw, disney doesn't change.  let me explain, as i now many of you will jump  and say disney is always updating and adding.  well step back and ask yourself how much does disney rest on its tradition of a great vacation spot.  disney does customer service better than anyone else and the landscaping and grounds of all their resorts is best, but when was the last time the peter pan ride got an update (no offense lou).  what i'm talking about is the lack of any sort of technological updates to parts of the park.  sure people like to share the same rides they went on with their kids, but at what point wil disney get left behind.

the halloween overlay on the haunted mansion and space mountain just pushed forward that the orginal ride is not fresh.  sure space mountain just got a redo, but truthfully did it take a great leap forward compared to the technology available in rides today?  i think no. feel free to disagree but if you are not a disney fan would how many of the disney rides would people come back to do over and over? 

i am a disney parks fan and go at least a couple times a year,  but what do you think the once every five year visitor thinks?