Disney Day 5: Disney-MGM Studios

We've been keeping up an exhausting pace in Walt Disney World, getting up at the crack of dawn, visiting a park per day, spending all day and late into the night there seeing and doing and eating everything possible. Last night Susan and I looked at our children asleep on our shoulders on the bus ride back to the resort and decided that a vacation ought not to be more tiring than our daily routine! So today we slept in . . . not much but just enough to arrive at today's park after its opening time rather than an hour before it. Consequently, we ran out of time at the end of the day to see/do everything, and we don't think there will be time to return tomorrow (we're already planning to go back to both the Magic Kingdom and Epcot tomorrow, and that's going to be a jam-packed day as it is). I think that, even if we had set aside two days per park, we still wouldn't have been able to take everything in--that's just the magnitude of the Disney parks!

Be that as it may, today we spent at Disney-MGM Studios (to be renamed Disney's Hollywood Studios in January 2008) where every attraction has some connection to movies or movie making. It was another terrific day! This park is divided into six sections, which we already had explored a bit Sunday evening when we were here for the nighttime show Fantasmic!. Here's what we did and saw today (not in chronological order)--click the links to see video clips:

Hollywood Boulevard

• This is the street leading from the park's entrance to the center of the park, and just as we had entered and were orienting ourselves with our noses in a park map, a performance-on-a-float appeared out of nowhere and made its way up the street. It was High School Musical 2: School's Out!, based on the similarly titled recent Disney movie. Some performers were on the float while others danced around on the ground as it made its way from the park entrance down Hollywood Boulevard to the center of the park. We didn't follow it to watch the show, but the girls (who loved both High School Musical movies) recognized the song they were performing and sang along.

• Hollywood Boulevard features store fronts that evoke the Golden Age of Hollywood and have names that allude to films or movie stars or Hollywood locales. Just like Sunset Boulevard (see below)--and Main Street, U.S.A. in the Magic Kingdom--it's basically a merchandising route to the park's attractions; one must walk past all the shops in order to get to the rides, so one is likely to pop inside for a peek and, perhaps, a purchase. Clever Disney.

Echo Lake

• We started here with Star Tours, a flight simulator that gives riders the impression of flying in a Star Wars spaceship through various locations from the movie series. The entire thing jerks to mimic the movement of a spaceship dodging enemy fire in an intergalactic battle, taking dangerous high-speed turns through the space station, etc. It's very fun and right up my alley (as a child I LOVED all things Star Wars). But the very best part of the ride was that . . . (wait for it!) . . . we were chosen for another Year of a Million Dreams Celebration surprise! Before they started the ride, two Disney cast members entered our car and said that we'd all (about 15 or 20 of us) been randomly selected to receive Year of a Million Dreams collectible lanyards and pins. We each received a sealed package containing a silver Disney lanyard with two of these pins for pin trading. What a great way to start the day!

The girls pose on an Imperial speeder bike (well, a facsimile) used for reconnaisance and patrol duties in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Love those action poses!

• We also enjoyed the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, a show that doesn't seem to have changed since Susan and I saw it fifteen years ago. It's still thrilling, mind you--a variety of stunts featured in three different scenes from Indiana Jones movies: gun fights, leaps from roof tops, struggles atop out-of-control planes, explosions, spears popping up out of the ground, giant boulders rolling over people, etc. Several people were chosen from the audience to participate as extras and provided a through-line of teasing between actual stunt scenes as the Disney cast members set up each stunt by asking the extras to "act scared," for example--and then teasing them that they looked sick instead. There was a "plant" in the group, too--a Disney cast member posing as an audience member, feigning excitement to have been selected randomly from the audience, and then getting beaten up by one of the stunt women . . . only to get up afterward and let us all in on the set-up. The girls thought that was a clever trick!

One of the sets: a Middle Eastern bazaar that provided roofs to run across and jump from during a good-guys-vs.-bad-guys chase and plenty of space in the foreground for fights with guns, scimitars, and whips.

Posing at the Indiana Jones attraction with our Year of a Million Dreams lanyards and pins from the Star Tours attraction.

• We came back to eat in the evening. Susan had made supper reservations for us at '50s Prime Time Café, where we had eaten when here on our honeymoon. The servers treat the guests like family members, reminding customers not to put their elbows on the table and to eat all their vegetables if they expect to get any dessert. (As a matter of fact, one server made a woman from the table next to us stand in the corner due to repeated elbows-on-the-table violations!) The decor is '50s-themed with boomerang patterns on the formica tables, '50s reruns playing on the televisions all over, and knickknacks and wall hangings that could have come from a local thrift store anywhere in the country. Our server brought Susan and me an anniversary cupcake to share! That was in addition to the rest of our food: onion rings and fruit with deep-fried herbed cheese for appetizers; pot roast and steak for main courses; and s'mores and a chocolate malt for desserts. The girls had chicken and meat loaf and, for dessert, sundaes. It was raining by the time we were ready to leave, but we were stuffed; so we half ran, half waddled to our next (and last) attraction, the Muppet 3-D movie (see below).

Susan's entrée: old-fashioned pot roast with mashed potatoes, carrots, celery, and onions.

My entrée: top sirloin steak char-grilled and topped with sautéed mushrooms and red and green peppers and served with root vegetable hash.

Our anniversary cupcake served as a surprise in addition to our desserts!

Streets of America

• We ate our dinner at Studio Catering Co. Flatbread Grill: pulled-pork sandwich, chili dog, Greek salad, macaroni and cheese, chicken legs . . . yes, more food servings than there were people to eat it. Here's the deal: Faithful readers will recall that Susan signed us up for the Disney dining plan, giving us points to use up each day--a counter service meal for each of us daily (including a dessert for each adult), a sit-down meal for each of us daily (including an appetizer, entrée, and dessert for each adult), and a snack for each of us daily. It has turned out to be TOO MUCH FOOD! Plus, the dining plan began on Friday, although we arrived that day in time to eat only one meal. That means that we've got the snack points and counter service points from last Friday to use up in addition to all our points for today and tomorrow. So we ordered extra food at this meal to deduct from our counter service points and just shared everything. I don't know how we're going to make use of the rest of our snack and counter service points before we leave Disney World. We're going to be so fat when we get back home from this vacation!

Daddy: "Girls, pose for a photo in front of the fountain." Girls: What you see above.

See the red, white, and blue clump of lovely blondes at the foot of the yellow building? Those are Mobergs. And those New York City skyscrapers? That's one gigantic flat painting using forced perspective to make it look as though those are three-dimensional building with actual streets and sidewalks. Neat!

• We rushed from dinner to see Lights, Motors, Action! Extreme Stunt Show, which we joined slightly late and, thus, we missed the opening stunts. It is an outdoor display of automotive stunts that includes explanations of how moviemakers pull off the driving (and other) stunts that make action movies so thrilling. It was fun to see their tricks and to see them demonstrate the dangerous stunts--but boy, was it loud! By the time we left, the day had heated up quite a bit, so we were eager to get to our next indoor attraction to cool off.
• Later, our last stop of the night (after supper) was the Muppet Vision 3-D movie which, in typical Disney fashion, included physical elements to enhance the visual ones on screen. Before the movie started, the girls played in the rain outside the theater! They enjoyed coming indoors for the movie, too, but Susan and I might have enjoyed it more since we're familiar with the Muppets from our childhood. It's quite a funny movie with all the favorite Muppets in an adventure that ends with disaster, both in the movie and in the theater itself!

Expressing themselves in the rain outside the Muppets attraction. The fountain in the background features Muppets characters frolicking in the water.

Animation Courtyard

• Hillary was excited for the opportunity to see Playhouse Disney--Live on Stage because she's a fan of the Disney channel's "Playhouse Disney," its lineup of educational shows and cartoons for younguns. Susan and I were excited for a chance to get in out of the heat! Suzanna and Abigail aren't yet too old to watch the Playhouse Disney shows, so they knew all the characters who appeared in this performance of actors alongside puppets. There wasn't really a plot--just a series of appearances by familiar characters, which was enough to delight all the little kids in the audience. We all sat directly on the floor (no chairs were present), but the kids did a lot of leaping up, jumping around, singing along, and dancing in place. In fact, Abigail and Hillary both got to go dance (along with other children) in front of the stage during one number (Suzanna, feeling too old, declined). It was fun to see Hillary's face light up with each new puppet's entrance--and, frankly, there was a lot of facial lighting up going on with Abigail and Suzanna, too.

They appear here as blurs, but can you make out Abigail and Hillary returning to their seats after participating in the group dance at the foot of the stage? Even blurry, Abigail's typical from-her-heart-and-soul smile shines through!

Mickey Avenue

• We browsed Walt Disney: One Man's Dream, a museum to Disney's lifetime: his beginnings, his career, his achievement, his dreams, etc. It includes a biographical movie that, together with the self-paced walking tour of memorabilia and displays with informational placards, gives viewers "the big picture" of what Disney hoped to achieve when creating his animated features and, later, Disneyland and Disney World. (By the by, he used to like to spend Saturdays with his kids and thought, "Wouldn't it be nice if there were an amusement park that's just as much fun for parents as it is for their kids?" Thus, the idea for Disneyland was born!)
• We walked through Journey Into Narnia: Creating The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, an attraction that is pretty lame in comparison to everything else available at the park. It involves walking into a large room made to look like the wintery Narnia setting of the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, watching a brief "the making of" movie highlighting some of the work that went into the movie's special effects, and then exiting through a small gallery displaying some of the costumes, props, and set pieces from the movie. That's it. On the outside of the building is a large mural depicting the snow-covered landscape of Narnia, ideal for posing and photographing.

Faithful readers by now are used to this. Our daughters don't just pose; they POSE! A Disney cast member standing nearby commented on the girls' confidence and personality and how it comes through even in brief 15-second glimpses like watching them pose for a snapshot.

It may be 80 degrees, but the Narnia attraction keeps things eternally winter with this prop-and-backdrop photo opportunity. We have another photo of the girls shivering violently in front of this set!

Sunset Boulevard

• We saw a fine musical version of the movie Beauty and the Beast called--what else?--Beauty and the Beast--Live on Stage. It's not the Broadway musical version, although this one is touted as a "Broadway-style show," whatever that is! Still, it was fun to see for its costumes, its backdrops, and its very able performers. A nice surprise was what happened before the show. A stagehand came out to do a sound check on four microphones on stands in front of the closed stage curtain. The audience hushed when he spoke his "testing, one, two" into the microphone, causing him to look up and notice us, too. He got brave and sang a note or two, got a warm reception of laughter from us, and kept it up. Another stagehand came out to chastise him and shoo him off the stage, but soon he, too, was caught up in our attention and grabbed his own microphone to "la la la"' into. When stagehands #3 and #4 entered, it became apparent that this was all a set-up; these dudes were actually an a capella group called Four for a Dollar (when they're not performing at Disney, they call themselves Return 2 Zero). This "fake out the audience" thing is their shtick before launching into a handful of terrific songs as a warmup to the actual show. You can hear some of the group's music here.

Four for a Dollar/Return 2 Zero

If you've seen Disney's animated movie, you'll recognize the characters: Cogsworth, Beast, Mrs. Potts, Lumière, and Chip (behind Lumière).

• We rode Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith, an extreme coaster that thrilled the girls and me and tested the limits of what Susan is willing to do for her children. The conceit: we riders are all guests of the rock band Aerosmith, but we're late for their concert already in progress on the other side of Los Angeles. We must board a stretch limo that will zoom us quickly across town to the concert. The roller coaster starts off like a rocket, going from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds and exerting 5 g's of pressure on riders (for comparison: astronauts on the Space Shuttle experience about 3 g's at liftoff). There are rapid twists and turns and upside-down loops, all in darkness but for strategically placed neon-lit L.A. landmarks and highway signs, and all set to the booming rock music of Aerosmith. Susan didn't care for it at all, but because she loves us, she joined us as the girls and I got immediately back into line for a second ride!
• Neither Susan nor I were enthusiastic about trying Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, a horror-themed ride whose primary thrill involves riders' being dropped thirteen floors in a runaway elevator car. Because we survived Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, and because the girls were intent to try it out, and because we love our daughters so much, we consented to ride it, and we got FASTPASS tickets before heading off for our supper reservation. We did not have enough time between supper and the closing of the park to take advantage of our tickets, however (honestly!), so we still haven't tried this ride. We have to add it to the list of attractions that we simply ran out of time to see/do on this visit to Disney World!

The Tower of Terror, upon which we did not get a chance to ride. Someday . . .

A few photos of our room at Port Orleans Riverside resort.