September 1, 2010
3:11 PM
Disney Merchandise
Nearly everyone who has visited Disney World has ridden the monorail, and everyone who rides it hears the dulcet tones of Jack Wagner: "por favor mantengase alejado de las puertas".
Translation: please stand clear of the doors.
Disney saw gold in Por Favor and recently put it on a T-shirt (pins, toys, and hats, too), reports Chad Emerson in a feature for Blooloop, a site that covers theme parks from a business perspective.
Chad spoke with Disney artist Doug Strayer and product developer Laura Caszatt about the new 'Por Favor' line and other trends in Mouse merchandise. Caszatt trumpets the T-shirt as a big seller though fails to explain that the best way to put it on is before you take small children by the hand.
My preferred summer attire is the unbuttoned, over-sized Hawaiian shirt, worn over a solid-colored 'T', but every so often I come across a novelty T that enhances my flair: Por Favor is such a T.
By the way, if the name Chad Emerson sounds familiar, it's because he's the author of Project Future, a book that chronicles the creation of Disney World and available on Amazon where it continues to sell briskly.
MORE: Blooloop (Chad Emerson)
2:04 PM
Disney Attraction
A few days ago, I gave some hullabaloo to Jeff Baham, known in the afterlife as Chef Mayhem, about his peerless Disney fan site, Doombuggies. Having not heard back from the Chef, I feared that he might finally have been trapped in the Mansion he loves and so I began looking for clues to perhaps free his sorry spirit.
I had not far to look before finding Long-Forgotten, an equally eerie site devoted to the Haunted Mansion and run by the most unlikely of people, a Doctor of Biblical Studios who specializes in the Book of Enoch.
(Folks, if I could make this stuff up, I'd be telling Matt Lauer on my book tour how I did it.)
The good doctor, Dan Olson, has some genuinely spooky imagery on his site, and he debunks in detail the tricks used by charlatans for centuries to fool the foolish public. In his "ruminations and revelations" he also sheds light into the darker corners of the Haunted Mansion, most recently with a long article about the mechanics behind the creepy conveyance known as the Doombuggy.
And so we've come full circle: Doombuggies to Doombuggy but no closer to Chef Mayhem unless those screams in the dark, getting closer, suggest that Chef Mayhem is getting closer to us...
MORE: Long Forgotten Haunted Mansion
In my previous hullabaloo, I wrote about the perils of being animatronic.
According to Jim Hill, it's nothing new. In an article published Monday on JimHillMedia, the titular Hill explains how the original animatronic Abraham was built from military surplus parts and (likely as a result) didn't work properly until Imagineer Corky Wilds got to work on Abe and fixed what ailed the former President.
The fix, as it turned out, did not involve pouring more blue mass down Lincoln's gullet but rather re-sizing his actuators.
Corky has plenty of stories like those he will share when he takes the stage at the Disneyland Hotel on September 18 with other Imagineers in "MAPO Magic: The History of Animatronics". It's part of Disney's "Marvelous Mechanized Magic" event hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, who I doubt ever got his hands on Lincoln.
Jim's article includes a priceless vintage shot of Walt Disney seemingly frightened by an animatronic caveman wrapped in what looks like a sarong.
JimHillMedia has gotten hullabaloo here before, most recently in the August 13 edition for Dawn Bachers' Typhoon Tech: Behind-the-Waves at Typhoon Lagoon.
MORE: Jim Hill Media (Jim Hill)
9:00 AM
Disneyland, Disney World
A serial malfunction is preying on Disney's large animatronic citizens.
As Jason Garcia reported in a past edition of the Orlando Sentinel's Daily Disney, the Expedition Everest Yeti has become even more elusive in recent months, perhaps due to the creature's historic distaste for 'man and all his puny inventions', but more likely due to a failure by Disney Imagineers to fully embrace the stupendous (and expensive) technology required to build and maintain the company's massive menagerie of mythical beasts.
The Yeti no longer swipes his tree-trunk arm at passing park guests, as he did when I rode the ride in its early days, but now merely glowers from behind flashing lights.
In further grim news, I commented on the collapse of Disneyland's Murphy the Dragon during Saturday night's performance of Fantasmic.
Both the Yeti and the Dragon are colossal. It's hard to comprehend their construction. That they worked at all is a heady achievement for the Imagineers. But Jason Garcia raises a point made by others that Disney is slow to fix the Yeti (and presumably now the Dragon) because doing so would cost money, lots of money. I disagree. It would cost even more money not to fix them, given the huge investment already made in these twin titans that would be lost if they were left to languish.
I think, as usual, Disney is taking its time. I have faith in Imagineering.
And that leaves us to wonder: what (or who) is next? Will the peaceful, leisure-loving constructs in Splash Mountain suddenly stop singing and just... stare? Will Barack Obama in Hall of Presidents start to speak in glowing terms of the Bush years? Suddenly, it's scary to be animatronic.
Jason Garcia of TheDailyDisney has gotten hullabaloo here before, most recently in the August 13 edition for The Plans, They Keep A-Changin'.
MORE: The Daily Disney (Jason Garcia)
We all have our stories about pricklepants, especially you gentlemen in the audience, but this hullabaloo is not about that pricklepants but about Mr. Pricklepants, the Shakespearean hedgehog featured all too briefly in Toy Story 3.
Brett Nachman, who writes a column called Mouse House for busy film site FusedFilm, is doing his part to raise pubic awareness of Mr. Pricklepants by sharing official audition videos not only of the hedgehog but also of Buttercup the Unicorn and Lotso the Bear whose strawberry-scented fur distracts victims from the hatred in his heart.
Mr. Pricklepants was voiced by Timothy Dalton, yes, that Timothy Dalton, the one who played James Bond, and of course Lotso was voiced by Ned Beatty, whose famous scene in Deliverance many people wish had been endured (or perhaps enjoyed) by Lotso, instead.
There's nothing new in these videos and Toy Story 3 is not the most topical of topics, but as September strikes I like to revisit summer cinema so I can calculate how much all those DVDs (released just in time for the holidays) are going to cost me.
For Toy Story 3, according to Amazon, it'll be about twenty bucks, nearly what I paid for the popcorn at Cinemark.
MORE: Fused Film (Brett Nachman)
Thanks for signing up!
Look for your first
Digest tomorrow night.
Signing up gets you one e-mail per day, sent after sundown. The e-mail is minimal: just a list of that day's headlines with a link to the site in case you want to read any of the hullabaloo.
