We were there last year and thought it was a huge pain in the butt. It was our first day of the vacation and we had completely forgotten about the taping. Well they don't tell you until you see the little sandwich board in front of the turnstyles. We decided to try and go in. Big mistake. Main Street, obviously, was very crowded with the extras and people trying to peek over the extras heads. We walked in, I walked out of the way of traffic so I could try and figure out how to get around the crowd (we wanted to get to the Emporium - first stop every trip, lol) CMs kept yelling at us, forcing us to follow the crowd to the right (we needed to go left), and when I tried (always politely) to ask them, they'd ignore and keep yelling to keep moving. We got a few stores up Main Street and my aunt and I backed up behind a door so that we would be completely out of the way of the flow of traffic while my mom walked over to ask a CM how we could get over to the Emporium. Another CM came over and started screaming at us to keep moving that we were blocking traffic (remember we're wedged by an open door into one of the shops - I don't know what traffic was headed back there - must be a popular spot, LOL) She too would not listen that we were only going to be a second while mom asked a question.
A half an hour later we make it to the end of Main Street. We gave up on the Emporium altogether. The park was the most crowded I had seen it that week. It only got worse once they filming was over and the extras were allowed to wander the park. I heard that most of the extras left after a few hours since they'd been there so early, but after passing a bunch of attractions with 45 minute to hour long waits, we headed to Epcot to try and salvage our day.
Oh and we did finally hit the Emporium on the way out. Haha!!
My mom did write a letter that we understood that filming the parade is a lot of work and most likely very stressful on the CMs who have to manage the crowd, but they also need to remember that they still have paying guests and these people shouldn't be treated as burdens on parade filming day. She also mentioned that we had pretty much wasted half the day - getting to the MK, getting around the MK and deciding it's just not managable enough for us, to getting back out and then over to Epcot. Half the day was shot. A woman called back and offered to send us 1 day passes to compensate, but she needed the numbers on our park hopppers which we had thrown out since they were used up and it had been a couple months at this point. We weren't so much worried about that (would have been nice though) Our main thing was just letting the company know what was happening and hopefully have them pass the message along to CMs working those days that the regular day guests are still to be treated as valued customers. If we didn't have 30-40 trips under our belts, it might have somewhat ruined the trip for us. I can't imagine if it had been our first trip to Disney and feeling like the CMs thought of you as a big burden on them.
Yep! I'm crazy!!
