Summer Nightastic! The Good
The best part of last Friday’s media day at the Disneyland Resort had to be the news from a talk show-style presentation put on by the resort’s marketing department called What’s New, What’s Next.
Summer Nightastic! is the name of the Disneyland Resort’s summer 2009 marketing campaign. It covers everything from dance parties to new lighting effects, enhancements to longtime fans’ favorite shows and, best of all, a new fireworks extravaganza.
During the new “fireworks spectacular,” called Magical, Dumbo will make his airborne debut above Sleeping Beauty’s Castle as Broadway’s, and Disneyland’s own, Eden Espinosa serenades the park’s nighttime guests with such classic Disney tunes as Baby Mine.
Steve Davison, Walt Disney Imagineering Creative Director and Vice President of Fireworks and Spectaculars, has designed a show that promises to tug at your heart strings, fill your eyes with tears, and paint the sky with magic, color, and light.
If winds hamper performances of Magical, Disneyland will probably mount a Fantasmic! projector and screen above the castle and play the video of Davison acting out the show, which would be just as entertaining.
Espinosa will be the featured soloist throughout Magical, which, according to Davison, will end with the three good fairies from Sleeping Beauty—Flora, Fauna, and Meriwether—leading off Disney’s biggest fireworks finale ever. Magical is set to debut on June 12.
Disney V.P. Fireworks and Spectaculars Steve Davison performs Disneyland's new fireworks extravaganza Magical for members of the media.
Image copyright© obe-mediaone. All rights reserved.
Also returning June 12 is Fantasmic!, with a few new surprises of its own. All of the animated film segments will now be shown in High Definition. Live action Animatronic versions of sea witch Ursula’s pet eels, Flotsam and Jetsam, will dart about the Rivers of America aided by jet skis.
But the biggest news about Fantasmic! is the addition of a brand new 45-foot-tall Animatronic version of the Maleficent dragon from Sleeping Beauty.
In early 1992, television ads for Disneyland’s upcoming nighttime multimedia extravaganza Fantasmic! wowed viewers with scenes of Mickey Mouse doing battle with a startlingly realistic version of the dragon from Sleeping Beauty. When the show debuted that summer, audiences were surprised to see that the dragon in the show was much less realistic and far less articulated than the one they’d been seeing in those TV ads.
It didn’t matter. Fantasmic!, which was only scheduled to run for five years, has been playing to huge crowds lining the banks of Disneyland’s Rivers of America ever since its first performance May 13, 1992.
Now, 17 years after that first performance, there’s going to be a new fire belching, jaw snapping dragon in town that will not only look better than the one in those old TV ads but will rival the action and movements of the original animated character.
Over in Disney’s California Adventure (DCA), Disney’s Electrical Parade will return with an exciting new array of computerized LED lighting effects, a brand new lead float featuring Tinker Bell, the return of the Snow White and Seven Dwarfs gem mine train units, and an updated recording of the parade’s theme song Electric Hoedown.
Don’t worry, they haven’t changed a note, it just sounds better.
Tinker Bell’s new Disneyland Pixie Hollow will also be sprinkled with Summer Nightastic! fairy dust as it comes to life after sunset with colorful new lighting effects.
To help make Summer Nightastic! one of the biggest summers ever, even in these tough economic times, the Disneyland Resort is offering guests two new ways to save on their next Disneyland vacation.
First there’s a new $99 Summer Fun Pass for those few Southern California and Northern Baja residents who haven’t yet bought annual passes. With this special pass, guests can visit the resort theme parks for three days within a 45-day period for just $33 per day.
The Summer Fun Pass will be available to guests living in zip codes 90000 through 93599 and 21000 through 22999. It will be on sale all around Southern California and Northern Baja at Disney.com, the resort box office, Disney Stores, and a variety of local supermarkets and retail outlets.
Additionally, there’s a new travel package for vacationing guests of the Disneyland Resort. Between now and August 11, when you pay for three nights of hotel accommodations and three days of theme park admission, you’ll receive two more nights at the hotel and two more days of theme park admission free. After May 1, in addition to the three Disneyland Resort hotels, this offer will also be available at participating local Disneyland Resort Good Neighbor Hotels as well.
Why Mendenhall Left! The Bad
Our first stop on last Friday’s media junket was the Celebration Roundup & Barbecue at Big Thunder Ranch where we were treated to the full meal and show experience.
When the DLR first announced it was bringing food service back to Big Thunder Ranch, longtime Disneyland fans were ecstatic. Of course, they assumed this meant the return of the a la carte chuck wagon offerings of the previous Big Thunder Ranch Barbecue with its rustic picnic tables spread beneath the trees on the open ground.
It did not.
The new Celebration Roundup & Barbecue at Big Thunder Ranch is a fixed-price western style barbecue meal. Lunch and dinner are served at your table in buckets. The meal includes barbecue chicken and pork ribs, lots of sauce, coleslaw, corncob wheels, ranch beans, cornbread, and an optional vegetarian barbecue tofu and vegetable skewer. Kosher meals are available upon request. Dessert is a cupcake in a waffle cone resting on a bed of mousse, in a variety of flavors, served up in a colorful steel box designed to look like a gift box exploding with confetti and wrapping.
Throughout the lunch and dinner seating, there’s non-stop entertainment and photo opportunities. Woody, Jessie, and Bullseye of Toy Story fame mingle with guests, pose for pictures, and join the talented cowboy and cowgirl performers on onstage. In typical Disneyland fashion, some audience members are coaxed on stage to take part in the festivities. Likewise, the singers and dancers mingle with the audience and take part in guest “celebrations.”
In fact, the entire experience seems hell-bent on selling the word “celebrate” to everyone.
After 15 minutes of drilling celebrate into my cerebellum, I was reaching for the Celebrex and longing for the It’s a Small World jingle to become lodged in my head.
The words “celebrate,” and to a lesser extent “celebration,” are so crammed into every song lyric and line of dialogue spoken by the live performers that, after just a few minutes, guests stop enjoying the performances and begin anticipating the next time they’ll hear either word. Kids trying to count the number of utterances of “celebrate” quickly loose count.
The price for a lunch or dinner at Celebration Roundup & Barbecue at Big Thunder Ranch is $28.99 plus tax and a 15% automatic gratuity for adults 10 and up, and $12.99 plus tax and automatic 15% gratuity for children three to nine.
Disneyland guests join in the celebration at the Celebration Roundup and Barbecue..
Image copyright© obe-mediaone. All rights reserved.
Following lunch, our Disneyland Resort hosts walked us over the Small World Promenade to watch—wait for it—Celebrate A Street Party, which Disneyland describes as “an exhilarating spectacle of music, dance, and guest participation.”
Celebrate A Street Party is an all-out, full-tilt, in your face, virtually non-stop performance piece that leaves most of its viewers vaguely unfulfilled, if not downright dissatisfied.
Technically, there’s nothing wrong with Street Party. It features exceptionally talented performers, lavish costumes, colorful floats, and lots of everyone’s favorite Disney characters.
What Street Party lacks is heart and soul. It’s all forced smiles and unrelenting energy, used to constantly reinforce the use of the word “celebrate,” as if its audience was comprised of nothing more than absentminded two-year olds. It’s the Disney Channel on an extreme sugar rush.
Each of the rolling performance stages features a live “Party DJ.” The DJs smile constantly. They have one volume…loud…and one tone of voice…excited. All of which only serves to make them one-dimensional hyperactive automatons.
It is impossible for a performer to convey depth of feeling, much less a range of human emotions, with a single expression and tone of voice. The result is an unconscious feeling of distance and separation between audience and performer. There’s just no connection to what’s going on.
Both the Celebration Roundup & Barbecue at Big Thunder Ranch and Celebrate A Street Party feel like they were designed by the corporate marketing department of Disney Parks and Resorts rather than the entertainment division of the Disneyland Resort. Worse yet, by their constant abuse of the word “celebrate,” Parks and Resorts marketing seems to have forgotten one of the first rules of marketing,
Sell the sizzle, not the steak!
What Price Dinner? The Ugly
As I was leaving Big Thunder Ranch, I noticed that there were no prices to be found anywhere on any of the signs around Celebration Roundup & Barbecue at Big Thunder Ranch. Both the menu items and the entertainment were described in great detail on a variety of signs, but there wasn’t a dollar amount to be found on any of them. Including the sign directly behind the cashiers that would accept your cash, Visa, MasterCard, or American Express for the $28.99 plus tax and automatic 15% gratuity.
This sign hangs over the cashier's counter at the Celebration Roundup and Barbecue.
Image copyright© obe-mediaone. All rights reserved.
As it turned out, this phenomenon wasn’t limited to the Celebration Roundup & Barbecue. Many of Disneyland’s most popular eateries, including Café Orleans and the River Belle Terrace, lacked pricing information of any kind.
I understand that Disneyland is a profit-making business, and there is nothing wrong with that. I’m all in favor of profits—please check out our sponsors’ ads while you’re here at the site!
I also recognize that during these tough economic times, people are being more thoughtful about how and when they spend their money.
However, that’s not a reason for keeping park guests in the dark about the cost of a meal, all the way up until they’re at the head of a long line of hungry people, or after a long frustrating wait for a table.
That’s just plain mean, nasty, and deceptive.
There are far better ways for the Disneyland Resort to encourage guests to dine at its various eateries than playing hide-‘n-go-seek with the prices.
Many national restaurant chains are now offering a series of smaller, low-cost meals to encourage diners to return to their tables. It’s a far more positive alternative than keeping the cost of a meal secret until the last possible moment, when choosing the prudent thing to do has the potential for placing guests in a highly embarrassing situation.
Informed customers tend to make decisions that benefit themselves and businesses alike, something the Wharton MBAs in the Team Disney building seem to have forgotten.
Priceless, the exterior menus for Disneyland's River Belle Terrace (left) and Cafe Orleans (right) restaurants.
Image copyright© obe-mediaone. All rights reserved.
Here’s an example. By asking to see the price of meal items at Disneyland’s Café Orleans, I discovered that I could have a prepared-to-order entrée of my choice, a drink, and dessert at a full-table service restaurant for almost $12 less than dinner at the Celebration Roundup & Barbecue at Big Thunder Ranch would cost me. And, that includes the 20% gratuity I choose to leave my server.
Sure, I missed out on all the celebratory singing and dancing at Celebration Roundup, but, thanks to dining on the outdoor patio at Café Orleans, I never lacked for entertainment as throngs of people having a great time constantly paraded past my table.
Once before, back in the Eisner-Pressler-Harris days at Disneyland, prices began disappearing from menus around the park, until Disney watchdog Al Lutz brought it to the attention of his legions of readers, who in turn began flooding the park’s guest relations office in City Hall with complaints. Menu prices soon began reappearing around the parks.
Let’s hope Al’s reading this!
