Here we go, it was our final expo day. We were all really dragging this morning. The night before we'd had a big debate about when we wanted to wake up.
There was no big panel to line up early for. I still thought we should get up early and get going. If you missed the cut off for waiting in the basement you then had to wait outside with no access to a bathroom. If you waited too long to line up you ended up way far back in the line and it took some people more than an hour after it opened at 9 to get inside.
In the end we decided to just suck it up and wake up early again. We did not want to waste an hour of the last day in line outside waiting to get in.
Somehow we all managed to be asleep around 9 pm. We were up a bit before 4 (thanks, Fitbit!). Woohoo bright eyed and bushy tailed indeed.
Here was the days panel schedule:
Arrival Time: we were walking inside and thru security a little before 5.
Initial Wants Before Arrival
9 am: Tangled animated stars signing wristband
10-11 am: Lion King Panel
11- 12 am: Michael Giachhino signing
12-1 pm: Tangled signing
12:30-1:30 pm: The Making of Hercules Panel
1:30-1:55 pm: Coco Music
1:30-3 pm: A Whole New World of Alan Menken
2-3 pm: Moana special effects talk
2-3:30 pm: Fulton Signing
2:45-3:15 pm: Susan Egan Broadway singing (she was the original Belle on broadway)
2:45-3:45 pm: signing Bret Iwan
3-4 pm: Signing Moana Directors
3:45-4:15 pm: Voices of Jim Cummings
6-7 pm: Legends of Walt Disney Imagineering
I just went ahead and underlined the things on the to do list that we actually did.
There were a lot less people in the underground holding pen on this day.
It was actually a little amusing, the giant section that was reserved for people waiting for the big panel was occupied by about 4 people. That section was being used for the Alan Menken line up. I had been worried about that panel, I had a lot of things on my to do list for Sunday and things were going to get messed up if we weren't able to get into the first panel. There was one at 1:30 and one at 5:30. Turns out I didn't really have to worry, Sunday was sold out, just like the other days but I think it really helped that there were 2 shows.
All the rest of us were lined up to get onto the show floor.
Here is a random photo:
We relaxed for a bit on our mattress and then Stephanie and I started to put our costumes on. We were going as Ursula and pirate Ariel.
I'll show you a picture we took later, it isn't the best picture but it does show our costumes:
I thought pirate Ariel turned out really well. Stephanie made the corset and I used Brian's Jack Sparrow swords since he was not in the mood to dress up. Stephanie also made the little fish net accessory thing, which looked pretty good when it wasn't constantly tangling and riding up. My necklace was one of the coins from the original POTC movie. I used my old Elisabeth Swann pirate hat, which didn't fit that well because I have a lot of hair and it was all shoved under that Ariel wig. My favorite detail was the tiny little fork that I had dangling from my hair. Like how Jack Sparrow has his pieces of eight accessory, I thought Ariel would use a dinglehopper.
Everyone ready for today's 'who the hell knows whats going on?' segment? A lot of people had lined up early to try to get a wristband for the Tangled voice actors signing. Could you really blame us? It was Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi (who if you don't know, are Rapunzel and Flynn's original voices and also very famous for other things as well). Also, Jeremy Jordan was also there signing (he played the original Jack on Broadway in Newsies). Though I'm still a bit confused by him. As far as I can tell his character has only been in one episode of the cartoon, I guess he just came along because he is famous. Also Eden Espinoza was there, she played Elphaba from Wicked on Broadway.
So...someone announced that they were going to take people who wanted to line up for the 10:30 am Tangled panel upstairs to line up. Since some volunteer upstairs had started another line of people who arrived later for the Tangled panel. This had been posted on twitter and people downstairs discovered it and threw a fit.
So about 20 people asked the volunteer if it was the line for the panel or for the wristbands. Every time they were told it was just for the panel. Yeah, you guys aren't dumb, you know where this is going.
They moved the downstairs line for the panel upstairs and made those later arrivers move back to let the downstairs people be the first in line, since downstairs people were there first. Upstairs people didn't like this so all threw a fit on twitter.
After waiting forever in the basement, it was finally time for all of us to move upstairs to get ready to enter the show floor. This whole process took forever, they had to carefully go line by line and move everyone out and up the stairs then line us up in pre-marked tape lines on the floor and wait for the official 9 am opening time to let us in the doors.
Here are some pictures I took while in the upstairs hallway.
Entirely made out of flip flops, which I did not realize until later. Hey, it had been a long weekend.
We weren't even inside the show floor and someone came out and announced that all the Tangled signing wristbands were gone. Oh well, so much for that. We later heard from some friends who had been in the Tangled panel line that someone had come out and handed out signing wristbands to people in line for the panel, even though all those waiting in the basement specifically for the signing were told that the line being formed to go upstairs was not for the signing, but for the panel.
Ah, conventions, what are you gonna do? It's kind of like the old show hosted by Drew Carey, Whose Line is it Anyway: the show where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
We allowed ourselves a few minutes of complaining about how dumb everything always is at conventions and then moved on with our day. We were finally being let inside the floor and we really had nothing of any urgency to do, so we decided to head over to the Imagineering pavilion and check out the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge model.
We were over there so early that there wasn't even a line and we could just walk right in! Amazing! We did spend a minute or two watching the robot wander around.
Once we entered the model area there was an imagineer on the microphone who was giving some backstory and talking about the new land.
This model was soooooo huge. These pictures won't do it's size justice. I'm just going to go ahead and post all the hundreds of pics I took of the model in case anyone is interested. This model is specifically for the
Disneyland Galaxy's Edge and WDW's will be a bit different. For instance, I believe the WDW will have less entrances/exits.
Someone in the crowd did question the Imagineer on the inaccuracies of the model. He asked why the whole land wasn't shoulder to shoulder with people. I appreciate the question, though I don't think the Imagineer did.
Yep, that is the Falcon hidden back there. More about that in a bit.
We all knew at this point that there was going to be an attraction based on piloting the Falcon. There were about 10 imagineers in the little space who switched off speaking on the mic and speaking with any individual who had questions.
I picked out my poor Imagineering victim and started to grill him about the Falcon attraction. He couldn't tell me much. I asked him what the Falcon was doing sitting on this planet and what the timeline was for the attraction. Apparently it is going to be after the Force Awakens. He said the Falcon was part of a smuggling/trading operation. I was like...what? Why does this random person have the Falcon?? Chewie would never give that ship up. He kind of stared at me with a blank look as I went rambling on about how this ship couldn't possibly be there and who had it? Was it Lando?! Cause that would be ok. But he wouldn't answer me and I just shook my head and was like you guys are gonna have lots of issues about this with us die hards, just you wait you'll see and then I walked away.
I didn't have a grumpy tone with him, I think I was speaking very factually but I was not pleased that the Falcon is just with some random person being used for their operations. Wouldn't happen. I wasn't too pleased with that.
So that happened...and then we looked a bit more at some of the smaller displays for Galaxies Edge.
I believe that is going to be the ride vehicle for the other attraction.
Oh the Falcon...what are you doing there??
I'll leave this for now until the next update since I believe I'm out of picture space.