July is over, and it's time for our last color changes
...
Congratulations to our newest members of
Disneyland W.I.S.H. Green,
pix13dust,
PollyannaMom &
Sleeping*Beauty!
As soon as you walk through the gates of Disneyland Park, you'll see something green - with a Mickey head in the midlde!
This picture may look familiar to our WDW vets - that Floral Mickey head you see in front of the train station when you come into MK has an older brother at Disneyland! The Floral Mickey was an original part of Disneyland and has withstood the test of time (with different flowers used during different seasons). Recently Mickey was given a bow tie (complete with diamond) to help him celebrate Disneyland's 60th Birthday!
Since the month is over (and I no longer need to protect my secret sources), and people seem to have enjoyed the theme (and I enjoyed working on it), I wanted to share some "behind the scenes" notes on how I came up with the birthday & color changing information.
Behind-the-Scenes of Disney Daily Birthdays
The Birthdays:
My first resource was a great website I discovered last summer,
This Day in Disney History. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone looking at Disney history, and a cool read when you want a few moments of Disney!
The site is missing some things, like some of the international ride opening dates. That’s where I went crazy. One day I set aside a few hours, opened the Wikipedia page for every single attraction at every single Disney park around the world (minus the water parks) and looked for July opening dates (Disneyland had a lot of things that opened on July 17th … it took me a while to figure out that those were the attractions that opened with the park).
I tried to get 2-3 birthday options for each day, and decided which one to use based on what I had done the day before. I divided every birthday into categories – park, movie, and person. I tried not to use the same category two days in a row, but sometimes it was unavoidable.
I tried to sit down once a week and write up that week’s birthdays (I actually finished the month in mid-July because I knew I’d be busy later in the month). For each birthday, I wrote up a paragraph or two and found a picture. Sometimes I was able to write the paragraph from memory/knowledge, while other times I had to look up information on the internet and condense it.
The Color Changes:
I paid very careful attention to the percentages on my spreadsheet, and as we got close to our first change for every color, I looked up something related to that color & park. Some I knew in advance (like the purple cat at Hollywood Studios), but others I just googled the park and color and saw what came up.
And how did nobody call me out on using World of Color (at California Adventure) for
Disneyland W.I.S.H. Green?
W.I.S.H. Green:
I felt bad that I used WoC for the first Disneyland W.I.S.H. Green, so when we had our second day with a Green color change, I wanted to find something at Disneyland … and then I thought it would be cool to have a new green tidbit from Disneyland every time we had someone reach their goal!
Some of these I knew from memory or had seen something about recently (like Tink ½ Marathon, which I posted the day after early registration), others were just a matter of looking online and seeing what I hadn’t used yet.
And that's your behind the scenes look at the Disney Daily Birthdays of July!
I've already seen many of you report some great minutes on the August thread, and I hope to see many of us reach our goals there over the coming weeks!
It's been coming for awhile, but it really sidelined me for a couple of weeks. When walking becomes difficult it is time to take a break. Anyhow, going to set a modest goal and try again next month. Thanks!
.
, because that's exactly goal - 620/620! 
I even went back to catch up on the last few days I missed! 
