chipperSo maybe one of these days I'll try to make my thoughts coherent on the subject, but in the meantime, we have more Disneyland pictures! Or, if you want to be picky (as we often do), these pictures are of California Adventure.
First, we have the renewed gate:
I'm finding myself wishing I had a "before" picture. I might somewhere, but I don't wish for one strongly enough to go find it. Anyway, with the whole California Adventure renewal that's going on, the theme is when Walt Disney first came to California in the 1920s. So the original design, as Gaston occasionally laments (because they didn't do it that way), was to have the gate look just like in the picture, only in chrome. We, on the other hand, imagine the sun shining on such an entryway and our eyes want to run and hide at the thought of it. We are so glad it's not such a highly reflective material.
I don't know if they're planning to keep this sign there forever, because this is on the long, roundabout path around the entrance. Most of the front area past the gate is still under construction, so you have to walk a ways before you get to anything.
I believe I took this picture because I was feeling contrary. "No, Adventureland is back the other way." Then again, the whole park is called California Adventure so really, I'm just getting a bunch of mixed signals.
And the whole rest of this post will consist of about a million pictures (or seventeen) I took of the Little Mermaid attraction. First up is the first thing we saw of it--this window:
Which was on this building:
The ride was built in what used to be a theatre that showed a movie about the California Dream or something that we really should have watched more, because it has a pretty song (I have the sheet music, but I can't play it very well), but nobody watched it so it closed for a long time and then they decided to put a ride there. The entry to the queue area had a kind of circular thingie thing that probably has a name, but I don't know what it is because I don't know about architecture, but anyway, it was a round space surrounded by columns. And there's decorative tiling on the ground to mark the area. For the new ride, they redid the tile thusly:
(I did get a picture of the facade that says, "Hey, this is the Little Mermaid ride, and here's the entrance!" but not until much later, so it's not in this batch of photos.
Despite looking like the entrance to a building, that entrance is just the entrance to the line, which is outside and has special oceany cement with seashells mixed in. Tadah!
(That's my shoe, in case anyone was wondering.)
They put all kind of detail into the queue area:
(The rows of lights brighten and dim in a wave pattern at night.)
In keeping with the traditional "Disney dark rides," they decided to have a mural at the vehicle loading area.
The halo-y thing behind Ariel is a light effect that probably came with the old movie they had. I think it's a little over the top here, to be honest.
Fancy chandelier:
Eric!
You can see the entrance to the land of the Little Mermaid is a sunken ship...only it's not really submerged, because the submersion comes after you go into the ship and talk to Scuttle, so it's just a beached ship or something, I guess.
More fun queue area decorations.
I think this picture is because I wanted a better picture of King Triton.
More queue area detail:
Even the posts holding up the handrails had spineless sea urchins on them!
The ride vehicles were designed after the doom buggies from the Haunted Mansion.
We think they should have thought more "Peter Pan's Flight," but what are you gonna do?
And finally, I actually did take a few pictures on the ride, because I really liked the animatronic of the Carmen Miranda fish dancing with Flounder, and because I think the ride stopped right about when we got to that point. Unfortunately, since I couldn't use the flash, and the animatronics refused to hold still for the camera, the picture didn't come out. So I tried three more times and still got nothing. But this one looks kind of neat, so we decided to share it anyway:
Today I'm thankful for the great lesson we had on Joseph Smith today, finishing that chapter in Gyakuten Kenji 2, our Disney Date CD helping us wake up happy despite having stayed up an extra hour playing video games, the yummy Baked! Ruffles we had for lunch, and the great amusement brought by the Mori-Mori arrangement of Once Upon A Dream.
