My Trip to the 2013 D23 Expo - That's a Wrap!

[lurkergirl]

Regarding the Tomorrowland stuff, they still haven't revealed that much information.

Rumor has it the app will be updated shortly. I'm hoping they give us some crumbs.

 

[franandaj]

great minds think alike....

I'll probably see every one of those movies. What a presentation! In regards to the Marvel movies, there are quite a few 'bang bang, shoot em/beat em up' scenes but the story lines are usually always fantastic as well.

So jealous you got to see Angelina. I think she's fabulous.

I can't wait that some of them are about to come out. I'm glad that I saw this post before you edited it...

I'm not too much in to Marvel, but may see one of those movies if DH is interested.

However, I will probably end up seeing every single one of the other movies you mentioned. I think i'm going to really enjoy Saving Mr. Banks. Tomorrowland sounds interesting.

Definitely going to see Saving Mr. Banks and the Muppets, also Maleficent, but that's not until July.

I know I need to catch up, but I loved this update. What a fun event! To get a preview/details/inside info on all of these awesome movies is already cool enough. Add that to hearing from the stars directly, and it passes over into ridiculously cool. Sucks about the seats but glad to see you got pictures.

These big presentations really make the event, but you have to wait in a crazy line without the Sorcerer's pass.

Regarding the Tomorrowland stuff, they still haven't revealed that much information.

Rumor has it the app will be updated shortly. I'm hoping they give us some crumbs.

Hmmmm, you posted this about a month ago, I wonder if anything has changed since then. I'm not that curious to go seek it out, but curious enough to wonder from my computer.

 

[franandaj]

So I bet you guys all thought I totally forgot about this TR with all the excitement of WDW and the DISmeets and stuff. No, I didn’t forget, but it’s kind of hard to keep up when you left your notes at home and desperately need them to remember everything that happened and was said in the seminars! So now that I am back in Long Beach recuperating from our travels, I hope to sneak in updates on this TR while we are also getting caught up on our DVR!

So where we left off: We finally regrouped upstairs after the Live Action Presentation and decided to check out the Sorcerer’s Lounge, after seeing how high the bids on Si and Am had reached. We found these adorable cupcakes for our olfactory pleasure.





I headed down to the Legends Ceremony to snag us two seats. Fran decided to hang out with Si and Am and watch the bids close. I sent her a text as to where I was sitting so she could find me later. I think you know how the whole bidding thing turned out. For those who missed it, some lady came in and was willing to go all the way up to $20K for those cats. She also bragged about how she had spent $5K on a toilet once before. With competition like that who needs the figures????? We’ll pick up a set when Theme Park Connection gets a hold of some!

So anyways, back to the Legends. I got some seats about where we were seated for the Live Action Presentation. In this one we could take pictures so you can see how close we were to the stage in the previous seminar.

As the honorees entered the Arena many of the avid Disney fans were quite star struck. There were many past Disney Legends on hand for the ceremony including Marty Sklar, I think Alice Davis, Bob Gurr, and countless others. I tried to take pictures of some of them as they came in, but Fran had the DSLR and my little point and shoot just couldn’t zoom in well enough to identify who the folks were.

Tom Bergeron hosted this one again and he was his same old dry witted self.





They had this full sized Disney Legend Award on the stage for each of the recipients to stand in front of while they took their pictures after accepting the award.



Bob Iger came out to welcome everyone to the Presentation.



Darth Vader and the Dream Finder came out on stage to help give the first award of the afternoon.



As you may know, the Dream Finder was a creation of Tony Baxter’s Imagination and he was the one who oversaw the creation of the original Star Tours. Tony has a long history with Disney. He began working at the park scooping ice cream on Main Street, but always had the dream to become an imagineer. He moved up the ranks and was eventually placed on Claude Coates team where he helped to usher in a new generation of Imagineers. Claude was one of the originals and passed much of his philosophy down to Tony who carried it forward creating such rides as Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, much of Euro Disney (now DLP) and redesigning Finding Nemo, not to mention much of Epcot and it’s various pavilions.







The next honoree was Ed Wynn, known for his most notable Disney roles as the voice of the Mad Hatter, and Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins. After Bob Iger read a long list of his accomplishments he wished us all a Very Merry Unbirthday. His Granddaughter accepted the award on his behalf.



The next recipient was Colin Campbell

His projects included working on Club 33, the Tiki Room, Pirates of the Caribbean. He also did some of the original designs of Disneyland to sell to investors. Tom Sawyer’s Island was also another one of his projects. He retired in 1991 but he was known to have come back and consulted on the updates to the island. His son accepted the award on his behalf.





[Continued in Next Post]

 

[franandaj]

[Continued from Previous Post]


The next recipient was John Goodman. I have always heard that he is a quiet and private man, and this acceptance appearance was definite evidence of that. His first “thank you” was to the schedulers that he didn’t have to follow Billy Crystal. He said a few other heartfelt thank yous, and then stepped down.







Billy Crystal was up next and he was quite funny at first. Then he went on to tell a story about “what Disney meant to him”. He ended the speech with “this is what happens when you wish upon a star.”







Here is a Youtube link to the speech.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6507i7YTlo

The next recipient was Dick Clark who passed last year. His wife accepted on his behalf and made a joke that she had to follow Billy Crystal.







Glen Keane was the next recipient. He had retired from Disney last year, but he is still mentoring future animators. Among the projects that he worked on, he did the Beast, parts on Tangled, Pocohontas, Ariel and Tarzan. He mentioned that he missed the smells of Disney in his retirement, which he said were Cigarettes, Pencil Shavings and Scotch.





The final honoree was awarded posthumously. Steve Jobs served on the Board of Directors of Disney as well as an original contributor at Pixar.





John gave a very moving speech about his friendship with Steve Jobs. He talked about how Jobs was like a brother to him, since Lasseter’s own brother had died early on in the AIDS epidemic. It was hard to keep a dry eye during the speech, even John Lasseter had a hard time speaking at times. Rather than try and describe it, I found a YouTube clip of the speech.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RcicFebqRE

Follow that very moving speech, Bob Iger returned to the stage with all the characters that had greeted the various honorees.







Fran had come down about 45 minutes into the presentation. After it ended, we had a very calm exit onto a very busy show floor. I’ll be back with that later.

 

[PrincessInOz]

I must have missed the last update in my last minute preparations for the trip.

Great update. I can't wait to see all those movies!



And to today's update.....fantastic to see all those worthy recipients be honoured like that. I haven't clicked on any of the YouTube links yet....I'm having trouble keeping a dry eye just reading your report. Maybe later.

 

[mvf-m11c]

Very nice update from the Disney Legends Ceremony on Saturday night. We did get to see the Disney Legends Ceremony which was nice and it was nice to see it again since we didn't see it in 2011. The Billy Crystal induction was my favorite with all the joking he did. The John Lasseter speech was very nice as well.

After I finished with my trip report in September and I will have to finish the rest of the D23 Expo report.

 

[ACDSNY]

All the Legend recipients where so deserving, great update.

 

[kmedina]

What a fantastic presentation! I probably would have cried. Of course, I am wondering what pencil shavings smell like. Billy Crystal is pretty funny, so anyone would have a tough time following him.

 

[dgbg100106]

beautiful, I love those Disney Legends.

I am sure it was amazing just being there.

 

[Pinkocto]

I can't wait that some of them are about to come out. I'm glad that I saw this post before you edited it...
.

nobody commented and I thought 'oops, maybe that was TMI'.

 

[Pinkocto]

I need to watch the videos on something other than the phone but what a cool presentation.

 

[Leshaface]

What a cool award show to be at! I've always loved John Goodman. Never knew that he was a shy person. He appears so loud...well in Roseanne and every other movie he was in

 

[dolphingirl47]

Wow, what a great event to witness. I was choking up just reading and seeing the photos.

Corinna

 

[lurkergirl]

Hmmmm, you posted this about a month ago, I wonder if anything has changed since then. I'm not that curious to go seek it out, but curious enough to wonder from my computer.

Still distracted by those desserts...hee!

Actually, still no information. I know they ran into some issues due to the shutdown (something to do with NASA), though.

One big mystery!

 

[Wonder2008]

Thank you for this latest update! I'm a little surprised and sad that Glen Keane retired - I had no idea. I love his work, so I hope the animators he's mentoring will create works at least as good as Glen's.

Thanks for contining your trip report,
Robert

 

[franandaj]

I must have missed the last update in my last minute preparations for the trip.

Great update. I can't wait to see all those movies!

And to today's update.....fantastic to see all those worthy recipients be honoured like that. I haven't clicked on any of the YouTube links yet....I'm having trouble keeping a dry eye just reading your report. Maybe later.

It was a very neat ceremony.

Very nice update from the Disney Legends Ceremony on Saturday night. We did get to see the Disney Legends Ceremony which was nice and it was nice to see it again since we didn't see it in 2011. The Billy Crystal induction was my favorite with all the joking he did. The John Lasseter speech was very nice as well.

After I finished with my trip report in September and I will have to finish the rest of the D23 Expo report.

I'm glad you got to see it, I think all the Legends Ceremonies are worth attending.

All the Legend recipients where so deserving, great update.

Yes they were, it was nice to see them all (those who were still living)

What a fantastic presentation! I probably would have cried. Of course, I am wondering what pencil shavings smell like. Billy Crystal is pretty funny, so anyone would have a tough time following him.

I'm wondering what they smell like combined with scotch and cigarettes. I know what pencil shavings smell like!

beautiful, I love those Disney Legends.

I am sure it was amazing just being there.

It was

nobody commented and I thought 'oops, maybe that was TMI'.

I thought it was cute!

I need to watch the videos on something other than the phone but what a cool presentation.

They are better on a computer. I hate having to DIS from my phone.

What a cool award show to be at! I've always loved John Goodman. Never knew that he was a shy person. He appears so loud...well in Roseanne and every other movie he was in

That's why he's such a good ACTOR! He really is nothing like Roseanne's husband, or Sully.

Wow, what a great event to witness. I was choking up just reading and seeing the photos.

Corinna

It was very moving!

Still distracted by those desserts...hee!

Actually, still no information. I know they ran into some issues due to the shutdown (something to do with NASA), though.

One big mystery!

Oh well, I have other things to keep my mind occupied.

Thank you for this latest update! I'm a little surprised and sad that Glen Keane retired - I had no idea. I love his work, so I hope the animators he's mentoring will create works at least as good as Glen's.

Thanks for contining your trip report,
Robert

Your welcome, I've just had difficulty finding the time to squeeze it in, but hopefully now, I won't have an issue. No big trips for a while.

 

[franandaj]

After we left the Legends Ceremony, we walked around the show floor. Our next seminar was at 5:00PM “Crash Course in the Force: Star Wars Saga 101.” The Robert Sherman and Alan Menken Concert was at 6:30PM. We would have been out of the Star Wars thing after 6PM which would put us at the Sherman/Menken show after they most likely had begun seating people. Even the Sorcerer’s were lining up for things. We decided to bail on Star Wars and go with getting in line around 5:30PM.

Of course Fran wanted to spend the time at the Collector’s Forum, we made our way over there and I had her take some pictures of the crowd levels.













I totally loved this guys shirt. He told us the name of the website where he got it, and I’ve totally forgotten. I just googled it and you can get one almost anywhere!



Fran wanted to shop a little bit more so I decided to go back and get in line. I was starting to get hungry. I think I ate my salad waiting for the Legends performance to begin and that was over three hours ago. As I headed back to the queue area, I looked at the concession stands and they were either closing or the lines were really long, so I passed.

I snapped these shots of some of the booths that I didn’t have time to visit on my way back to the queue.









I went back to the Sorcerer’s Arena queue and we were about 75-100 people back. Everyone was just sitting on the floor, reading or playing with their electronic devices, chatting, or a combination of several of those activities. By this time it must have been just about 5:30ish. I waited for Fran to come back and it took her what seemed like forever.

By this point I was starving, we had some trail mix, and cookies, but I thought that perhaps there might be something in the Sorcerer’s lounge so while she held my place in line I went up to the third floor to check on what was available. It turns out that the Legends (well D23 and Disney management on their behalf) had hijacked our room and kicked us out of the cool Sorcerer’s Lounge and sent us to a little room across the way. I guess as a consolation, they had put out a lavish spread with more of the pulled pork sliders, some crudité, other finger foods, salad and some tortellini. In addition they were also pouring complimentary wine! And I MISSED all this?????

By the time I got there, I got the last say seven pieces of tortellini, a couple pieces of cheese and quite a few veggies, but there were plenty of the pork sliders. I ate my plate of torteliini (oh, well actually there weren’t any plates left, so I used a napkin or a cup). They were also all out of wine. Why is the wine always gone? I grabbed a bunch of the sliders in napkins (like 5-6 of them), some carrots, celery, green pepper and whatever was left and put them in my scooter basket along with any cans of diet coke and water I could find. I brought them to Fran who was waiting in the line and we had our “pre dinner”. A number of other folks in line had the same idea and they came back with stuff on plates, so they must have restocked them, but they had grabbed like a dozen of the sliders and brought them down. I think they restocked the veggies and brought out some other munchies, but I don’t remember now, I just saw what the other folks had on their plates.

At one point the Dreamfinder left the back of the Arena and he came down the line, some people at the front got pictures with him, but by the time he got to us, his handler just really wanted to get him out of there.





Shortly after that we were let into the Arena for the Richard Sherman/Alan Menken concert. I’ve even got some video footage (albeit from my cellphone) for that one so it might take a little while to coordinate those updates. I think I’ve uploaded all the videos to Youtube, I just have to remember which ones I recorded and link them with the proper pictures and tunes!

 

[PrincessInOz]

Wow! Look at all that merch. I think I could quite happily shop there and skip the presentations. And that Star Wars t-shirt is very funny.


Nice spread that was put out for you. Did you go back for seconds when you realised they had brought out fresh stuff?

 

[dgbg100106]

So much shopping to do.. Seems like a ton of people were there...


Alison, you are gonna have to do better with the wine. How can you be expected to keep the germs at bay without the germ killer!

 

[Paula Sedley-Burke]

Oh priceless re that Star Wars t shirt I am so getting one of those! Loving it!

Love the Jelly Belly stand. I just adore Jelly Belly's. I get loads when we come over. One of my best memories of Cali is doing the Jelly Belly factory tour in Fairfield. It was free and so entertaining!


Well done on getting the last of the food. The wine is always gone! They never have enough! I don't drink so Jo loves the fact I always take a glass too. More for her! She downs hers and swaps her empty glass for my full one lol.