Gotta love songs from The Simpsons. And you’ve gotta love the feeling of getting in that monorail and zooming towards the best fun you’ll ever have in an organised way ever, ever, ever. And that’s it – that’s ten days of things I love about Disney: the parks, the people and the topiary.
Disorganised blogging from me today. I’m too skittish and flight-nervous to link back to all the previous days (use the tag, though, or scroll down)…
I shall greet you from the Disney side!
Now, though the fella behind @TheDisneyBlog hated Fast Pass (and I have yet to get round to asking him why, although I’m very curious), I found it a thoroughly useful and excellent invention in 2004 when I first used it at WDW.
The concept is brilliantly simple: the queue is too long right now, so you get an hour-long slot (for rides) or performance time (for shows) to come back for, leaving you with a very short wait compared to the standby lines.
In practice most of the Fast Pass tickets are gone by 11am, but if you plan your park visit carefully – it does require a certain amount of military precision although there’s still arguably room for spontaneity – you’ll get hold of ones for the rides you most want to go on. For me the key Fast Passes to bag will be for Splash Mountain, Mission Space and Soarin’, I reckon (if they all do FP, which I believe they do).
No system is perfect, but as a way of helping you plan your day around the park without having to account for very long queues, it’s very helpful.
Day One: Howard Ashman & Alan Menken
Day Six, Seven & Eight: Adult Entertainment, Phil Harris & Sterling Holloway, Fireworks
Easter and Pesach shenanigans forcibly removed me from blogging for a couple of days, so here’s six, seven and eight in one post!
Day Six: Adult Entertainment
Okay, that’s a shamelessly attention-baiting title. But if I hear once more that “Las Vegas is like Disneyland for adults!” I think I’ll explode. This is almost invariably stated by people who have never been to a Disney park. Hell, they usually think Disneyland is in Florida. *sigh*. The fact is, adults pay for their kids to visit Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Disneyland Paris and the Far Eastern parks. It’s not necessarily the cheapest holiday in the world (although there are always good deals if you scout around and plan in advance), so just nagging by the kids is not going to be enough to cause parents to repeatedly shell out cash and spend hours walking around hot theme parks. No, what does that is that they’re great places to visit for an adult too. Much as with the films, the initial blast is very childlike – the dressed up cast members, etc – but the imaginative attention to detail, funny asides, great performances, scary thrills and well-designed facilities are definitely grown-up friendly. You can even grab an alcoholic drink in EPCOT. That’s not even mentioning the Downtown Disney developments with restaurants and entertainment galore.
No, Las Vegas ain’t Disneyland for adults. Except if they’re completely obsessed with drinking, I guess.
Day Seven: Phil Harris & Sterling Holloway
The voice of Thomas O’Malley, Baloo the Bear and Little John was famous for a whole cornucopia of radio work in his native US, but as a kid it was only through those three films that I had any idea who Phil Harris was. To me, this is the essence of Disney. While the modern performances of the High School Musical ilk certainly have their place – and a legion of fans – the likes of The Jungle Book will captivate generation after generation because of performances like Harris’s. There has tended to be a move to screen actors using their vocal skills for films recently, and some are very good, but traditional voice acting is a skill in and of itself. I don’t think anyone’s really topped Sterling Holloway as either The Cheshire Cat or Kaa the snake (even if Roquefort the mouse is my favourite).
Sadly, neither of these tremendous vocalists is still with us, but what better way to live forever? My nephew, at 3 years old, is as in love with The Jungle Book as his mum and auntie are, and we’ll make sure he plays it to his kids too.
Day Eight: The Fireworks
You know Sunday night feeling, when you know you have to go back to school / work the next morning? The fireworks at the end of a day in a park make me feel like that – brilliant and sad all at once.
Posted in Disney
Disney, like most big corporations with an eye on their reputation, has an outreach programme. Disney VoluntEARS, work with the Make-a-Wish Foundation and a strong emphasis on employees sharing skills are a few parts of Disney Worldwide Outreach.
This is, given my job, naturally an area of interest for me. I knew about Disney’s work with Make-a-Wish years ago as a visit to a Disney park, studio or other related venue is consistently one of the most popular wishes of very ill children. If that doesn’t tell you about the power of Disney’s story-telling and the evangelism that rises from it, nothing will. But I didn’t know until quite recently, when my interest increased, about the amount of employee time that is donated to communities.
This is one area where I’d love to see Disney developing online. Surely this is a place where online and offline communities really have a chance to be joined up. A place for volunteers to exchange information and potential volunteers to find out more? A place where kids can find online mentors from within Disney? A place where parents whose children have been helped through Make-a-Wish can build an online wall of memories of their child’s experience? A way for Disney to teach non-profit organisations without their budgets and marketing advantage to make the most of social technologies? You name it – the list of online possibilities surrounding outreach work are virtually endless.
My favourite is the Disney mentor idea – a natural online extension of the thousands of hours of offline community work Disney employee “VoluntEARS” already do. Imagine each employee giving up one hour a week to give advice to a kid online about becoming an attraction “imagineer”, animator, or other creative professional. What a boost to the arts that would be! And then there are the legion of other employees, from web wizards to front-of-house cast members. Each has advice and talent to offer; imagine how valued you would feel if you were asked to contribute your time to the project.
What’s in it for Disney? Well, though it might be done for entirely more altruistic reasons, there’s the lifelong fans you’re going to make when your pool of highly skilled employees shares the talent wealth a little. And the reputation advantages. Not to mention a direct line to possibly the greatest market research money can buy, straight from the people who love the Disney empire best, and a contacts list of future potential employees likely to feel completely loyal to a company that’s behaved like family.
For all I know, much of this is already in the pipeline or has been discussed and rejected for any number of reasons. But, for the record – that’s what I would do.
Mike's New Car
The initial distribution and then acquisition of Pixar is one of the creative decisions I’ve admired the most from Disney. The digital animation pioneers have consistently turned out tightly scripted, smart, engaging movies that appeal to kids and adults alike and have done it all with groundbreaking artistry.
It doesn’t hurt that I’m quite the Apple fan (so sue me) and think that Pixar might be one of Steve Jobs’ best projects ever. I think the harshest criticism I’ve ever heard about a Pixar film was directed at Wall-E, which a friend described as a “two hour ident”. To which I say “so what?”. One of the best parts of going to watch a Pixar film in the cinema is the warm-up animation, starting with the bouncing, angle-poise lamp ident; why would I mind if the undeniable cute factor, warmth and humour of this is extended over two hours?
Oh, and the director’s commentary on short Mike’s New Car (on the DVD of Monsters Inc) is absolute comedy gold.
Posted in Art & Design, Disney
Tagged mikes new car, monsters inc, pixar, ten days of disney
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You came here for stuff about Disney and I give you… gardening?! Seriously, though. There’s more to Disney’s extraordinary landscaping than you might think.
Before you even start on the amazing Disney topiary contests (always more impressive in person than in pictures), everything about the way the Disney parks are laid out is wonderful. The attention to detail from leaping fountains and peaceful waterways to lovely swathes of parkland that you watch zooming by from the monorail is just wonderful. It very cleverly makes what’s essentially a huge man-made development fit very sympathetically into place. It’s not an urban blot on the landscape but an attractive marriage of nature and architecture. You’ve got to love that (and we’ll go onto architecture on another Day of Disney, no doubt).
Despite involving tonnes and tonnes of concrete, bricks and paint, a visit to WDW always seems like a visit to a rural park. I imagine this will only be better in Animal Kingdom’s mock-safari areas, and I look forward to seeing that and the gorgeous Tree of Life I’ve heard so much about. Much of Orlando is inescapably touristy and industrial - which serves a useful purpose but isn’t exactly attractive – so it’s great to go into a tourist area and yet not feel like you’re in a concrete pit.
Day One: Howard Ashman & Alan Menken
[Image Source: Tink Spinning Topiary from Princess Shari on Flickr]
Now, I appreciate that the Magic Kingdom is the symbol of Disney in every sense. Not only was it the original theme park from which I have pictures of a four-year-old slack-jawed Alex watching a parade in absolute, blissful awe, but the image of Cinderella Castle – particularly with fireworks breaking in the sky above – is absolutely synonymous with everything from film idents to promotional materials.
But it’s not my favourite park. Oh, don’t get me wrong, Pirates of the Caribbean and the newly-refitted Haunted Mansion are totally on my “don’t leave without seeing” list (It’s a Small World not so much but then I’m no longer a small person). But as much as the Lands of Fantasy, Frontier and more delight me and fill me with excitement and joy, it’s EPCOT that I really look forward to visiting.
The giant silver golf ball that marks the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow makes my heart race when it hoves into view from the monorail. I was always, always a techy, geeky kid. Fascinated by computers, the first one to figure out how to programme the VCR to record. I took after my mother – she was the one setting timers and changing plugs in our house, and she’s taught herself HTML in her 60s just because she felt like it, really. So heading into a whole world of beeps and whistles, a supercharged collection of the most fun science museum stands, was tremendously exciting. EPCOT, with its Spaceship Earth based around communication, is really an inevitable choice for a social media and online communications bod, isn’t it?
More than that, though, there was the World Showcase. A brilliantly multi-cultural idea from a company who could at times seem a bit sterile and white, it’s also by far the best place to eat in the whole of WDW (especially Morocco). Oh, and the best vantage point to watch the gorgeous Illuminations light and firework show over the lake.
This year is my first visit to Animal Kingdom. It was open when I last went in 2004 but I was only there for a week and chose to revisit old friends rather than trying to spend time getting to know a new park. I imagine it will be a great experience, but my first priority will be introducing my complete Disnewbie of a husband to EPCOT.
Posted in Disney
Tagged Disney, epcot, florida, holidays, my favourite things about disney, orlando, ten days of disney, walt disney world
I’m on the countdown to my holiday – well, belated honeymoon – to Walt Disney World and thus everything else has disappeared from my mind. Actually, that’s not at all true. I still intend to blog about a whole host of things since I’ve made a little progress on the Grown Up Monster Book and there are some exciting things happening in the world world of social media.
But, in the meantime, forgive me if pick a different thing every day for ten days that I love about Disney. It’ll take my mind off how much I freakin’ hate flying, to use some US terminology that seems appropriate.
So, day one, obviously: Alan Menken and Howard Ashman.
When I was a child, The Aristocats was my favourite film. It’s still one of my favourite films; I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue the other day with Ashley and could be overheard explaining “no, it’s Abraham DeLacey…”. Still, despite that fondness and regular viewings of Snow White, 101 Dalmatians and The Fox and the Hound, I was still a middling fan of the films in my early youth. From my first visits at four and five years old, I was a major obsessive when it came to the parks but the films were a bit hit and miss for my liking.
And then there was The Little Mermaid. As it transpired in later life I would go on to love some of Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman’s other work – namely Little Shop of Horrors – too. But somehow, coupled with a new Disney zeal for making not just pretty and child-friendly but once again groundbreaking animation (though in fairness I didn’t realise that as a nine-year-old), it made me into a Mouse evangelist overnight.
The Little Mermaid marked a post-Oliver and Company new dawn of Disney animation. The films became more complex and adult-friendly. They took on the feel of Broadway musicals again in a way that seemed to have been lost after complete joy that is The Jungle Book and the heyday of the simply magical Sherman brothers. The journey that would lead to the adoption of Pixar and animated movies that are now just good films that also raise the bar for hand-drawn and digital artistry had begun.
The music was a huge part of that. My friend Lizzie and I, giggling pre-teens, would sing the songs from The Little Mermaid all day long if we had the chance. She’s now throwing a Little Mermaid-themed hen do for another friend, and it’s definitely the theme of the film, not just the story. The lyrics were witty, the tunes relentlessly hummable and, occasionally, heartbreaking. At university, I attended an audition for a musical to support a friend and the first thing she pounced on in the whole list of possible audition songs was Part of Your World.
Things actually improved from there, impossible as it seemed. Beauty and the Beast was an extraodinary achievement, and the music was a huge and very prominent part of that. The powerhouse continued on to Aladdin before Ashman finally succumbed to illness, leaving Menken to complete the music with famous Lloyd-Webber lyricist Tim Rice. Ashman was, to me, a huge loss. When I heard what had happened I found myself crying over a man I’d never met and didn’t know simply because I was so impressed by his work – surely the way an artist wants to be mourned? Despite Rice’s immense talent and Menken’s continuing brilliance, it’s all too easy to tell which songs were primarily Ashman’s work (A Friend Like Me, Arabian Nights) and which mostly Rice (A Whole New World, which leaves me rather cold).
Since then, Disney’s taken a typically inventive attitude to soundtracks, with a combination of using old favourites like Menken and partnerships with pop stars like Phil Collins (Tarzan). No matter how good, I don’t believe they’ll ever sound as good as the glory days to me, but with my DVDs at my disposal, what does that matter?
Guru nominations aside, I make no secret of the fact that I think much of social media marketing resolves down to good old fashioned common sense plus good communication skills. Writing online is different to writing for print, but both are forms of storytelling. If you’re creative, polite and honest with a decent grasp of spelling and grammar, you’ll probably find the seeds of a good blogger inside yourself.
Of course, that’s breaking it down to its most simplistic form, but I do think that’s a useful thing to do. This is because when you look at the bare bones of how and what you’re communicating, you find inspiration and ideas come from rather unexpected sources.
I’m a huge Disney fan. Massive. Lifelong. Since my first visit as a four-year-old to my last visit as a twenty-four-year old. I’m going again in a month’s time, to spend two blissful weeks in the vicinity of what is undoubtedly one of the Happiest Places on Earth. But until recently I hadn’t joined up my love of the Mouse with what I do on a day-to-day business. After all, I work for a charity, not a commercial organisation. Sure, charities can (and should) learn from businesses, but what we do online is quite different, right?
In the case of Disney – wrong.
The main difference between the average charity and the average business is one of product. We’re selling the gift of a better existence to a person or animal, and in a way that is our online advantage, because it naturally lends itself to storytelling. Updates about dogs needing homes, Sponsor Dog information, guest blogs from dog owners, animal-related news… for us there’s a veritable fount of stories to be delivered and many ways to deliver them. We blog, Tweet and find a winning combination of inspiration, storytellers and audience online. Many companies would salivate over that kind of access to close interaction; we delight in the ability to be able to talk and – more crucially – listen to our supporters.
We’re not selling a product; we’re describing an ideal, and inviting people to become part of making it a reality, thanking them as we go.
But Disney has lots of products, right? It even has a paid for social media product. So what on Earth does it have in common with a charity that can help non-profits learn the rules of the game?
Stories.
Disney, unusually among commercial conglomerates, sells an experience as much as it sells actual products. It sells being part of the Disney dream. It has an army of dedicated advocates and fans, who take their evangelical love of the company and instill it in their children. It absolutely revels in stories from visitors – the Disney Moms Panel is sheer genius – and gives a platform to everyone it can to talk, talk, talk, interrupting as little as possible.
Human nature has not changed thanks to the Internet. People still, at heart, just want a voice. Charities have the privileged chance to give it to them, and they might not have Disney’s budget but they can share its passion. I will be watching carefully, and taking notes.
Digital Marketing Officer for a UK animal welfare charity.
Blogger for a variety of people.
Mother, writer, reviewer, editor, feminist, Disney fan and friendly neighbourhood weirdo for fun.
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