Episode 16 - Making a Deal and Living a Dream.
Ah, early morning at Walt Disney World. Is there anything greater? Endless possibilities stand before you. Anticipation and excitement build. All of your senses are ready to be overloaded. Your eyes are treated to larger than life icons, brilliantly colored architecture and giant walking cartoon characters. Your ears take in the roar of the parking lot trams, the creaking of turnstiles, and the faint yet familiar mood music as you enter the parks, having once again missed rope drop.
DOH! Dag nabbit, Euble T. Biscuits Ben Eatin! We missed it again? Great Giblet Juice! Oh well, let it go, happy place, happy place, baker’s man, could be worse and stuck on the tram.
Okay. I’m over it. Good to go. Give me a park map. Why? To smack folks on the head and say “HURRY IT UP THERE TONTO!” Why else? You don’t think I actually need to read it, do you? I know this park like the back of my hand! Well...the side of my elbow anyway.
Where are we today? The Disney MGM Studios. (Slap an amber gel in the spotlight, crank me out a light mist on the hazer, cue the angelic chorus and give me a shaft of gleaming golden light on my monitor.) This was more than just Disney euphoria for me; this was film junky geekiness on steroids. Like A-Rod in the Rangers dugout, I was juicing.
I love, Love, LOVE film, TV, and theatrical production. From my days of doing stage lighting in high school and college, to my college dude stint as student manager in the campus TV studio, to the hours I currently spend doing stage lighting and shooting and editing video for our church, I have found a long-standing joy in being behind the scenes.
Whereas most people go to a live show to actually watch said show, I watch the tech. I count the number and type of lights they are using, try to get a peek at the lighting console, check out the FX equipment they have installed, look for hidden spotlight operators, see what color gel combinations they use, etc.
When I buy a DVD, the thing I’m most interested in is not the actual show, but the bonus features. (The Lord of the Rings Trilogy extended edition DVDs are my favorite for bonus features BTW.) The point is, I’m enamored with the entire production process and within moments, The Studios (as it likes to be called) became my favorite park.
I worry now that this will change when I go back. The last time we were there, I actually got to see a scene being shot for a feature film. (More on that around episode 26-ish.) Now that the studios no longer film actual productions, I wonder if some of the luster will have worn off.
Being older and wiser, well older anyway, will it no longer hold the same cool factor as it once did? Possibly. But then there are a host of attractions that I have never done in this park and if anything will get you over a nostalgic letdown, being propelled at high velocity through looping embankments ought to do the trick.
Having effectively wasted an entire page rambling on about nothing of consequence, perhaps it would behoove me to get this episode moving along. Upon entering the park, we made our way left and headed straight to our transport to the Moon of Endor and it’s embedded attraction, Star Tours. Having ridden it to death on this and subsequent journeys, can I just say I still love this ride? I know it’s dated and a little hokey, okay, a lot hokey, but I just really LOVE this ride.
The theming in the queue area (still not as fun to say as queue caves) is just fun. It makes me smile. And that, to me, makes it special.
This being my first ride on my first visit to the park, it was a near out-of-body experience. The fact that I didn’t spend the entire day running from the exit back to the queue is a testament to my mother’s skill as a negotiator.
Forget those 12 hour standoffs they have where policeman A makes nice with bad guy B while policemen C-Z plan to scramble bad guy B’s cranium the moment they get a clean shot. Just send in my mother. It’d be over in a minute. All she’d have to do is use her mom voice, grab a bullhorn and say “Boy you better get your rear end out here RIGHT NOW before I have to come in there and beat you with my shoe!” (Which she often threatened, yet never followed through on. But I wasn’t about to be the fellow to call her bluff.)
We left Star Tours and went next door to the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular! After seeing the show, I wholeheartedly endorsed the appropriateness of its naming. (This was the only time I saw this show, but I’ve heard it is long overdue for a re-write.)
Having thus met my morning quota of John Williams, it was time to move on. At the time, Let’s Make A Deal was doing their little spiel at MGM and we headed that way to join in on the “Contestant Audition”. I think that this was actually some sort of retribution on the part of Disney against its park guests.
Somewhere, some Imagineer got a comment card from a cast member requesting some way to get even for all of the crazy things guests have put her through.
After careful thought, the solution became clear. Let’s pack hundreds of hot sweaty park guests around a tiny little stage, and make them jump up and down and scream for thirty minutes to win a spot on a simulated game show. Yeah, that would be fun. And because they built it, we came. (It’s a rule. Section 12, Paragraph 14 of the James Earl Jones directive.)
We were not chosen to participate as contestants, but it did lead to one humorous memory. My mom and Lynnlee were up against the front of the stage, trying to get noticed. To help my sister get more air on her jumps my mom grabbed her by the waistband and gave her some power lifts. My sister then starts yelling “Mom, you’re giving me a wedgie!” Pete and I, of course, break down laughing and my mom replies “JUST KEEP JUMPING!”
Good times.
When we finally did get in for our taping which was not a taping, we wound up in the top row. This was great for me as it gave me a chance to ogle all the cool techno stuff without looking like a total hick. (Look PA! One of them thar new fangled tele-mavision cameras!) Pete spent the entire time screaming “KEEP THE MONEY!” which was promptly incorporated into our “phrases of annoyance” repertoire.
All in all, it was fun, but by the time we waited for the lobby doors to open, waited around the stage for microphone dude to come out, “auditioned”, waited for the studio doors to open, and then sat through the “taping”, we had burned up nearly two hours.
A bit bummed at having only taken in three attractions that morning, we set out for our daily off-site lunch. The day before, while we were off conquering time shares, my grandparents had spent the morning in Epcot and had loved World Showcase. To that end, they had returned again this particular morning to continue their tour. We all met up at an off-site BBQ place that I can’t remember the name of but had some REALLY good smoked chicken. (Chicken and fish were after all the staples of my grandfather’s cardio diet.) It was somewhere on the Kissimmee strip, on the same side of the street as Medieval Times. If you think of it, help a Biscuit out. It was definitely Good Eats!
I hoped to fare better on our evening romp through the studio. As it turned out, this particular evening would stand out as a little different than I had hoped. It would introduce me to the longest line I have ever stood in at “The World”.
Coming up on Episode 17 - The Longest Line EVER (Bet you didn’t see that creative title coming!)
I was really amazed that I did not wheeze/cough/gag at Conservation Station in AK; it must have been the pixie dust in the air that counteracts all allergens.
You wouldn't want to be one with that chicken.
