Con Critiques and Accolades.
The Good:
-organization was so much better this year. Besides the HM 50 line up, all the lines seemed organized and no Parks snafus like 2017.
-security: security was great, there were no hour long waits like 2017. Also really appreciated the food trucks being within security. We ate there every day.
-Marvel booth: thank you thank you for doing a giveaway everyone could participate in. Was a breath of fresh air after all the reserved giveaways everywhere else.
The Bad:
-those stupid reservation passes. Obviously, if the passes worked in your favor you had a great expo. I only got a handful of smaller stage passes, one of which I couldn't even use because I was in line for Disney+ (music and sounds of galaxy's edge). I got no giveaways, and was told time and again there was no standby. I got no talent passes, and got turned away from every standby line I attempted. Really left a bitter taste.
I can't say enough how those passes affected most parts of the expo. In 2017 we were surprised a few times with giveaways at Disney/Pixar. I barely saw any reason to even go to their booth this year. So not only were the giveaways all done by passes, but I could get no talent signings except for the music emporium. So glad they do it the way they do.
So no giveaway chances except Marvel, no talent signings except Music emporium. That takes away a lot from the floor right there. I'm not a big shopper either.
We also wasted almost our entire day Friday to guarantee a spot in Disney+. I don't regret going to the panel, but geez, I really wish I didn't need to spend almost the entire day in line. And yes, it was necessary to go that early. Nobody knew how many stage passes were handed out, how early people would line up for gold and standby. It was either go early or roll the dice.
The Ugly:
-MOG pin line. Calm down people, geez. Just keep your anger and frustration deep inside like I do, the healthy way. No need to get physically violent.
-the volume in the basement waiting area. My gosh, I know they were trying to discourage people from spending the night but that volume on the movies was atrocious. I couldn't even hear the people next to me when they were trying to speak to me at some points.
-the temperature in the basement in the early morning was freezing. We weren't allowed chairs or blow up mats, so it was terrible to sit on the cold floor.
Thank goodness for some amazing panels like Character Voices, because the whole experience left me feeling a bit defeated.
I feel like I wanted to add my two cents similarly - since some of our experiences intersected. we spent some time with
@OhioStateBuckeye and her friends when we could.
- We were lucky enough to get some of the panels with stage pass, but didn't manage to get any of the storepasses or talentpasses. The fact was I didn't really care about signatures, but with the store-pass I never saw a point where the lines for the stores were less than two hours, and I simply didn't need anything in those stores that much to wait that long. I managed to get 5 stage passes before they ran out.
- Unfortunately I had a party of 3 and could only get stagepasses for 2. This meant we couldn't all go to the panels that we had stagepasses for without someone in standy.
- On Friday we had stagepasses for the Star Wars Music panel and the Disney+ panel. We got to the arena around 8 AM and were in line at the East entrance. People had talked about how awful security was in the past - but they had moved security outwards, so we breezed through security right when we got there and were able to get into the arena browsing the floor for about two hours.
So like
@OhioStateBuckeye I got in line for the Disney+ panel at 11:30 am to ensure I could get in. DW and DD went to the Star Wars music panel. Probably had the best giveaway of the whole trip there - a QR code that gets to the DJ Rex playlist from Oga's Cantina. After that panel - about 2 PM - DW and DD came down to the basement to join the queue for stagepass.
Now, here's my biggest moment of complaint. So I had a spot in the Gold Queue., which loaded first. My DW and DD had a spot in the Stagepass queue, also guaranteed to get in. I asked several different employees if it would be possible for me to sit with my DW and DD, even if that meant me holding back and getting a worse seat. The answers I got were "I don't know" and "No", so I had to sit by myself while the rest of my family sat elsewhere. How DUMB is this - you designed a process so we COULDN'T get stagepassses together, and then even though I took the time to wait 4 hours for the panel I can't sit with the two other people I'm there with in a 7000 seat arena? You suck Disney.
That said, this panel was great - I thought the best of the bunch except for the lousy giveaway (A Disney+ hat and a pin.) LOTS of information, LOTS of big stars. An offer to sign up cheap to Disney+. Hands down this was best in show and made it so I didn't mind the 4 hour wait. Highlight was definitely the Marvel and Star Wars announcements. (Ewan MacGregor way to bring the house down.) After this we walked around the show floor a little bit longer, but headed back to the hotel at 6:30 PM.
I decided to take DD to the Movies panel on Saturday. We were able to walk in with our Stagepass at 8AM, and only waited 90 minutes! I can assure you I wouldn't have gotten up at 3 AM for this panel, but with an 8AM start it was worth it. I didn't like this panel as much because it sort of short-shrifted the Star Wars/Marvel stuff, focused on the Disney live action stuff, of which Jungle Cruise was really the most interesting presentation, and really until it got to Pixar/WDA I was sort of underwhelmed, but they really nailed it with the two Pixar and WDA movies they showed scenes from and then ending with Frozen cast singing a song was killer. So while I didn't like this as much as Disney+, it was very good. The giveaway was way better, though - three movies posters.
After this - DD had had enough trudging around, so we got some lunch from the food trucks and got her back to the room. DW and I then shopped a little bit around the floor and then went and saw the Imagineering panel "Immersive Worlds" (interesting to me but dry) with a Stagepass and then the Music of Aladdin panel - which was excellent, and probably the second best panel we saw. It ran long and ended at 7 - so that wrapped our day.
Day 3 we again had a Stagepass for the Parks and Resorts panel - the only stagepass we were able to get today.DD stayed in the room, and DW and I attended. This time we got to the basement closer to 7 AM and were able to get a spot in the center section of stagepass (previously were in the right-section). We were there until almost 10 AM by the time they let us in, but we had good seats. Unfortunately, the parks panel was a bit underwhelming. Don't get me wrong, they talked about a lot of stuff and gave out SOME details, but there was a real gap here in my view.
A) They talked about a lot of stuff but much of it was extremely vague. Dates such as early next year, or Summer 2020.
B) There were actually a TON of details from the Epcot presentation, BUT much of it was given away in the Parks display on the floor. So really the only real "new" thing was the Mary Poppins attraction - which was definitely the highlight of the show with Dick Van Dyke coming out. But even this there were really hardly any details given, no timing, not the type of attraction, just that there would be a Cherry Tree Lane.
C) What I was thinking would be the BIG announcement - the 50th anniversary plans - was a big ZILCH - oh wait, they told us about an APP.
D) The wrap up of the make-a-wish story was nice, but it was rather anticlimactic. Whoever designed this panel definitely had no idea how to work a crowd.
After this panel we got some food and spent a little more time walking around, we saw the Disney Archives display and we actually left early to get some rest and pack before going to the parks in the evening.
So overall we enjoyed our experience, but only because our expectations were well managed and the stagepass did help. The security and line-control were better than i expected, but the amount of time that you have to spend in line versus the amount of time that you actually DO something is almost ridiculous. The stage floor was interesting, but by the third day I we were sick of it even having not spent a lot of time on it. The stores were unusable without the storepass.
I would probably consider going back again someday - but if I couldn't get a stagepass, I would likely NOT wait on more than 1 of the big panels. I would try and get to more of the smaller panels - with "smaller" being the mid-size panels like the Aladdin panel, where we only had to get there an hour before the panel. I would also say there's ZERO chance that I would do this two years in a row, but maybe in 4 or 6 years I would find it fun enough to do again.
Our next trip to California, maybe in 3 years, will be in the fall to see the Halloween/Christmas overlays.
