California Adventure: Hollywood Land

For this one I am going to just quote from the letter I wrote to Aaron, because I think I covered it pretty well.

Into Hollywood Land. One of our favorite attractions here is MuppetVision 3D, which was unfortunately also closed for renovation. Obviously, it is a 3-D film of the Muppets, but it is also interactive, with some animatronics. So, there is a balcony with Statler and Waldorf in in, and an orchestra of penguins pops up, and Sweetums comes out for a while. It’s a lot of fun, and it got Julie addicted to the song “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, which is Miss Piggy’s big number.

We were ready for lunch now, which we had at Award Weiners. Their logo is kind of a cross between an Oscar and a hot dog. Their hot dogs are really good. Our next stop was Monsters Inc: Mike and Sully to the Rescue. It starts out with you getting in a car as if you were going for a tour of Monstropolis, and then the screen switches to an emergency broadcast about a child loose in Monstropolis, and you go through scenes from the movie as Mike and Sully try to get Boo back to her bedroom. It’s really cute. At the end, the slug-like woman who was an undercover agent, Roz, is there, and she talks to you and it is interactive. The first time we rode it, she asked “Did you have fun girls?” and we were so surprised we just laughed, and she turned her head and said “Whatever.”

There are a lot of things here that relate to making movies and to entertainment. So you can watch the Aladdin Musical, and a Playhouse Disney show. Aladdin is a regular show, but the Playhouse one is all about kids jumping, dancing and singing. There is another show based on the new Alice in Wonderland too, though we did not see it.

The behind the scenes things are interesting, but we have only done them once. With the Animation Academy, you go in and they give you a pencil and paper and someone leads you through drawing a Disney character. It was Mickey Mouse when we did it. With the Sorceror’s Workshop, you can practice dubbing your voices into cartoon scenes. For speaking we did a scene from Bambi, where Bambi meets Flower and Thumper, and then for singing we did “The Bear Necessities” from The Jungle Book.

Actually, what is especially funny in that section is you can go into another section where there are these books set up, and you can take a short quiz to see which Disney character you are. We each took them a few times. I got Cinderella once, I think, and then Lady from Lady and the Tramp. Julie got similar results. Maria got the Wicked Witch and the Evil Queen. Clearly, it recognized something.

There is also Turtle Talk with Crush. That is the adult turtle from Finding Nemo, and he is on a screen and will talk with the audience. It is pretty interactive, like Roz in the Monsters Inc ride. I don’t know if they have a certain amount of stuff pre-recorded and one person controlling it, or if there is some automated voice recognition, but for the kids it must be like they are really talking to the turtle, so that’s kind of cool.

Now clearly all of this sounds pretty child-friendly and educational, but as you keep penetrating further into the land you reach the Hollywood Tower Hotel, which has burn marks on the outside, and vines crawling over it, and creepy doormen saying they have been expecting you. This is the Tower of Terror ride.

It is built around a Twilight Zone episode where five people disappeared from an elevator when it was struck by lightning, and then you follow their path. You wind through an old hotel lobby, that is dusty and abandoned, because after the mysterious disappearance no one wanted to go into the haunted hotel. Then you go through the pipe rooms, and into a service elevator (that happens to have seats and seat-belts). You see a short video, and the ghostly figures of the original people who disappeared, and then you are in front of a mirror, so you see you and your fellow passengers reflected, and then there is light, and the mirror is still there, but reflecting empty seats. Then you fall.

The idea is to give the idea of a plunging elevator. You drop and get sent back up three times. They have worked it out so that it is a different number of “floors” each time, in different combinations, so the ride is never exactly the same. You do always get to the top floor at least once though, where you can see over the park.

It is really cool. I remember last time on the one bounce, I was seriously floating over my seat for a moment. There was just enough lag that I was defying gravity.