The Tragic Kingdom in 2023

draft

This is a report on the current status of the Disneyland Park (and to a lesser degree the Disneyland Resort) from a visit on January 25, 2023.  My partner in this adventure was Jill Fraser.  There is a lot to go over here from the lowest levels to the highest.  Jimini Crickett said to emphasize the positive but this review will have some negative as well.  Its up to you what order to read it in.  Topics will include the trivial (food at the Magic Kingdom), to the highest levels of aesthetics in theme parks, including the new Star Wars land and the dismaying decay and abandonment of Tomorrowland.

1. Timing and pricing.  We chose to go on a Wednesday when school is in session and the weather is cold(er).  For these days, Disney lowers prices for each park to $104/person but the park also closes earlier and does not have its big shows.  Everything else seems to be there.

2. The food was dreadful and expensive.  As bad as I have ever had there.  I recommend you pack some trail mix, eat like you were backpacking, rehydrate regularly and then eat something better when you get home or leave the park.

3. Perhaps the highlight of the park was, for me, three so-called cast members.  We had Xavier at the Magic Store on Main Street, some unknown people at the Penny Arcade and best of all "Mike" at one of the Adventureland emporia across from the Jungle Cruise.  Xavier demonstrated what could be done with the trimmed cards.  I asked Mike if they still had the shrunken heads you used to be able to find there.  He not only knew what I was talking about, he was able to remind me of the old Jungle Cruise exhibit/joke in which a Witch Doctor wants to trade two of his heads for one of yours.  I loved this guy and plan to look for him again the next time I am at the park.  Its the people who matter.

4. I am also happy to say that the Magic Shop and Mickey's theatre on Main Street are both there.

5. But what happened to the horse drawn carriages on Main Street?  And even if you get rid of them, you should replace them with "in period" motor driven vehicles.  Dont just drop transportation.  Not everyone wants to walk the 200 - 300 yards distance from the entrance to the castle.

6. That castle is looking a little small in context with everything else, maybe it is time to refurbish and enlarge it.

7. The new Star Wars land is spectacular.  It is very large, where did all that land come from?  The two main attractions are both amazing and I am curious to know how they pulled off some of those things.  No I could not figure out what our guides were saying most of the time, but that was OK.  

 

 

8. Genie Plus was worthwhile occassionally. But we had to pay an extra $25/person to get the "Lightning Line" feature at Rise of the Rebellion.  We felt that they were being overly greedy.

9. The food was a disaster.  Bring your own food.  Oh did I mention that before.

10.  Getting hooked up with the app was painful.  

11. Tomorrowland was a sad wreck of a land, once so filled with promise and optimism, now fallen into decay, a parody of itself.  The Carousel of Progress is a gigantic wreck in the middle of everything.  The decayed PeopleMover just has its track laid like pointless linguini on the land with the obnoxious wreck of what used to be a peoplemover terminal rusting in the middle.  One of the main attractions, the CircleVision 360 film about America is now a trivial shoot em up with several Pixar characters.  This is fun but very, very minor.  Where is the vision?  None to be seen.

Carousel of Failure

The Former People Mover

12.  The Tiki Room was as enchanted as ever and they should just keep it.  But the Jungle Cruise!? Forget about it, tear it down and do something else with it.

13. I always wanted to check if the entrances to back stage were really hidden in plain sight, and yes they were.  How amusing.

 

14. Perhaps the biggest failure is the disastrous parking system.  Really, Disneyland?  You want to make customers walk a mile or two after parking and wait for trams while trying to go to your park?  This is the best you can do?

 

15. I think it would be worthwhile to use one of these discount days to go to California Adventure.  Bring  your own food, etc. 

SIGGRAPH 2016 Report

This is the first report on the SIGGRAPH 2016 conference. I might or might not add a later, more detailed, report. If you have any specific questions, please send me email or comment here and I will try to answer them.

Thanks

Special thanks to Michael Deering, Terrence Massan, Tom Duff and Ken Perlin for their material contributions to my ability to attend SIGGRAPH at all. Special thanks also to Jon Snoddy for enabling the Disney R&D participation, Wendy Wirthlin of Pixar for enabling my entry into the Pixar reception and to Jerry Weil for a tour of the exhibit floor.  Thanks go to MK Haley for her general hand holding even in absentia.  

Also thanks go to Michael Johnson of Pixar for indulging my neurotic job search issues.

Summary

SIGGRAPH this year was about the same as it has been for the last several years.

A. It is very pleasant on a social level.  B.  It is moderately interesting on a technical level, but nothing outstanding.  C. The tradeshow floor was very useful as a way of keeping up with what is happening in production technology.  D. SIGGRAPH has been essentially useless for me for a decade for economic or employment purposes.  E. The job fair was completely useless.  F. The people who run SIGGRAPH seem completely unaware of anything going on outside their very narrow interests, but it is not clear to me that this is the wrong thing.

Community

The idea that SIGGRAPH formed a community of people who were inventing a new field is long, long gone. And thats the way the people who run SIGGRAPH want it to be.  Too bad.  They fucked it up.

AR and VR

AR and VR is now in the "spend money to show how creative we are", or not creative, as you please. Everyone agrees that there is some AR and VR in our future, and most people seems to think that AR will totally dominate over VR, or so it seems from my casual conversations with a few dozen Siggraph participants. Beyond that, there is a lot of skepticism that the hardware available today is definitive, but general agreement that the hardware available soon will be. And that AR in particular will make it easier to deploy this technology vs VR because of the ability to see and not bump into things and the lack of nausea in most AR situations.

I personally had a strong negative reaction to the hype-based "vanity" projects at SIGGRAPH based on AR/VR.  But this might be a little hypocritical of me since, after all, I had benefited so directly from such projects in the early days of computer animation.

Fast Forward

As always, the Fast Forward was the best part of SIGGRAPH. It allowed one to quickly and efficiently get a feel for whether or not a paper was of interest. There were quite a few papers of minor interest to me, but none of compelling (that is, I had to see it) interest.  There should be guidelines about humor for the participants so they do not humiliate themselves.

Keynote Speech

One more time we have a keynote speaker who has nothing to do with the field (an executive from JPL) and who was very nice about thanking us for “our” work maybe 20 years ago. What she forgot to say is that there is absolutely no financing for visualization in space science, that maybe 5 people are employed in that area in the entire United States, and one more time the Keynote Speech was useless, even contemptuous, of all of the thousands of people who devoted their lives to computer animation but have no way to make a living at it. Thanks a lot, SIGGRAPH, I really appreciate it.

Pioneer Reception

The speech by Alvy Ray Smith was interesting but all too short. I was intrigued to see that he was wearing the moral equivalent of a Nehru jacket and that he acknowledged that in general evil geniuses tend to wear them.

Anaheim as a Venue

Remember that this is peak summer and that Anaheim is across the street from Disneyland. Anaheim has in two years become much more expensive, and thus has become less suitable for a SIGGRAPH location. There were no rooms in any hotel for about 50 miles, unless you wanted a $300 a night suite.

The Exhibit Floor

Walked the trade show floor with Jerry Weil and saw numerous interesting things. In particular an Israeli handheld scanner thing that was spectacular.

HDR / Technicolor

Josh Pines and colleague gave an informative discussion of high dynamic range imagery in the glamourous and rewarding motion picture industry.

Pixar Reception

Pixar, it would seem, has completely changed out their old software suite for a completely new one. Which of these are available to the public and which are internal only is not clear to me.

Disney R&D Mixer

I knew almost no one there, but had a very nice chat with Christophe Hery of Pixar and Scott Watson of Disney R&D.

I think that this event could benefit from more structure and I humbly propose one here. Since I presume that most of the attendees were there to push their agendas within the larger Disney financing pool, this could be assisted perhaps by a large Disney org chart positioned somewhere near the entrance, or perhaps also in the food or drink line, that color codes their executives in helpful ways.  It might report the amount of currently budgeted discretionary financing.  Then the Disney executives could wear special color coded hats or other easily visible apparel that could be checked against this chart.

Alternatively, one might consider a handout at the entrance with a picture of each executive or project leader and a brief description.  "Stanley Berriview will entertain concepts based on the real time use of surveillance technology to create a more meaningful guest experience."   And so forth.

Another Point of View

One attendee, Lance Williams, who looks remarkably like an old school Russian revolutionary these days, points out that his employer, NVIDIA, had a foveal display of some sort. This is certainly an idea worth looking at more closely.

Sightings and Social Activities

Richard Chuang, founder of PDI, announced that he was on some committee to help SIGGRAPH figure out what its future is.  The future, or perhaps the doom, of SIGGRAPH will certainly be the topic of one or more posts on this blog.

John Hughes, founder of Rhythm and Hues, and now of Tao Studios in Beijing, was sighted at SIGGRAPH, perhaps the first time in decades.

Jim Hillin was informative about the failure of the crafts to sue to force the US Government to enforce the trade laws regarding subsidies.

Kawaguchi Sake Party had a video of an inflatable Kawaguchi style critter that I thought was very appealing.

Finally met Gene Miller and Garland Stern.

Had a nice chat with Richard Edlund, Ray Feeney, Andrew Glassner, Dave Leavitt, Debbie Deas and Richard Cray.

Finally got to to talk to Aung Min after all these years.

Comment from Dave Moon about Tomorrowland

I was delignted that Dave Moon, formerly of the MIT AI Lab and Symbolics, commented on my Disneyland / Tomorrowland post.

He wrote: 

____________________________________

    Dave Moon December 26, 2014 at 11:37 AM

    
    I am shocked, shocked, to learn that Disneyland has been commercialized!

    You will perhaps be pleased to know that in Disneyland's clone sister in Florida, as of a year and a half ago, 
    the People Mover had been refurbished and was back in operation.

    The Carousel of Progress is still in operation there and pretty well corresponds to my memory of it from the New 
    York Worlds Fair in 1964. Presumably it has been refurbished too, but its essence is unchanged. If you haven't 
    read Cory Doctorow's novella The Great Big Beautiful Tomrrow, you should.

    The train people are cool in Florida, too.

    --Dave Moon

____________________________________

Dave

Its great to hear from you. Its been a long time. You may not remember this but I used to lurk on one of the ITS systems at MIT and used to see you logged on and apparently active at all hours of the day and night. This would have been about 1974 and I was at the time “mike@ucsb-mod75”

I am delighted to hear that the Carousel of Progress is still in Disneyworld. I was under the mistaken impression that it was not there but that GE Horizons in EPCOT had replaced it. Well apparently the Carousel is still there but its “sequel”, Horizons, is gone. Also good to know about the Peoplemover.

But even if those were recreated at Tomorrowland it would still not solve the “vision” problem that I am talking about. Both of those two attractions are from the 1967 or so vision which benefited in no small part from the triumph of the 1964 World's Fair. I believe that the 1964 World's Fair was the apogee of American civilization, when we had hope for the future, economic strength and a great sense of design. We might go so far as to say that the 64 World's Fair was the REAL Tomorrowland for our nation, and the others were pleasant but pale reflections.

The problem today is not merely to clean up the decayed infrastructure, or to create some new cool attractions, both of which I am sure Imagineering can do just fine. The problem is to create a vision of the future, a vision that we can believe in. That feeling, that vision, that gestalt is not there now and not even the Carousel of Progress or a roomful of robotic presidents can bring it back.

Do we really believe that there is a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day? I don't think so.

Hope all is well, tell me how you are.

        Sincerely,

             MW

Field Notes on Disneyland Winter 2014

This is a report on a visit to the Magic Kingdom gate at Disneyland in December of 2014. My two previous posts on Disneyland can be found here and here.

This time I visited the park with Harvie Branscomb and Yayoi Wakabayashi during their annual Thanksgiving visit to see Harvie's father in San Diego. They were there the entire day and aggressively achieved a very high attraction visitation rate.

I had a more eclectic agenda involving a variety of topics that have been on the backburner for several years now. I still need to return to see several new attractions (new to me, at least) and updates of some older, traditional ones.

Its important to know as you read this that I grew up in S. California and have visited the park many, many times in the past, perhaps 20 times. I remember when Space Mountain was just a drawing on the maps of the park they used to sell. I used to give an informal tour of Disneyland to visitors from outside the area. (1)

Here are my notes:

1. In all the times I have visited Disneyland, this is the first time that I never had to wait in line for an attraction, other than a very brief wait for the Disneyland Railroad. Fastpass completely changes the strategy of seeing the best of the park and makes everyone's time more productive. On the other hand, Harvie observed that the user experience associated with Fastpass per se is decidedly flat. Where is the entertainment value is just printing out a little ticket? At the very least it could resemble a Pachinko machine or perhaps Esmerelda could be located in all these machines (spiritually of course) and could also print a fortune while she is doing her Fastpass thing.

The boring Fastpass device could certainly be more entertaining.

For example, it could be made to resemble a Pachinko machine.

2. The Haunted Mansion was in its holiday version based on Nightmare Before Xmas. I had never seen this whereas I knew the traditional Haunted Mansion by heart. I liked the design but I felt something was missing, and that was probably the score. I would swear that they had been able to change the order of some of the rooms, something I would have guessed was impossible.

I thought the announcing angels of the apocalypse were a nice touch.

3. I had dinner with Yayoi Wakabayashi and Harvie Branscomb at the Cafe Orleans in New Orleans Square where Yahoi had thoughtfully made reservations. What stunned me, what completely flabbergasted me, was that the “usual vegetarian entree” was actually very good. It was regional, it was fresh, it was great. It is one of the best high end vegetarian plates I have ever had, and believe me, I have had a few.

4. There seem to be no more animals in the park. Horses powering trolleys and carts were an important part of the recreation of the turn of the century America. Now kids will only realize that horses had something to do with transportation and motive power through the archaic term “horsepower”.

5. The attendants in Jungleland were extremely helpful in understanding what I was looking for in terms of shrunken heads and glowing skulls, and reported that those tschotskies had not been at the park for a long time. I did notice, however, some excellent faux snakes and bats that would have fulfilled the same role in a horror-oriented young visitor.

6. The attendants / docents of the Disneyland Railroad answered our questions (we sat right behind the engine) and explained where the five locomotive engines had come from, and various other technicalities of the track, the cars and so forth. These are real steam locomotives, something that barely exists anymore, but was so critical to the history of the modern world. The Small World alarm clock animation helpfully went off while we were waiting inside it.

7. I explained to Harvie the vital necessity of finding the access roads and the places where the park turned inward and became behind the scenes. This is particularly productive when using the railroad or the monorail, as both take you behind the scenes, if only unwittingly.  We noticed that they would occasionally paint fences and gates with camouflage.

8. I had heard that the Main Street Cinema was no longer there but fortunately this is not the case. It is still there, and it still attracts its tiny number of appreciative adults and children. To my amazement, the glass blowers on Main Street were still on post as well, although on lunch break when I happened through. The Penny Arcade has been turned into a Disney Store while retaining a few key exhibits from its more glorious past. Esmerelda is still telling fortunes and the electric hand grip manhood evaluator is still there to evaluate your potency.

Esmerelda will foretell the future.  The penny arcade one reelers are to the left.

9. The Kodak store has been turned into the Nikon store. I don't know for sure what they sell there, but there is no more film sold anywhere in the park. Just think how symbolic this is, the great American company is no more, so they outsource the storefront to a far eastern company and do not actually sell anything there. Its beautiful

10. I refused to see that traitor Lincoln, or his robotic avatar, unless I could throw tomatoes at it. Sic Semper Tyrannis.

11. Harvie points out that the audience at Disneyland is far less interesting than the audience at Burning Man.  Although that is no doubt true, I think this is something of an unfair comparison.  The whole point of Burning Man is that the audience is the performance, and the people who attend Burning Man are people who buy into that aesthetic.    The Disney parks are based on a more traditional audience / performer dichotomy.   I also point out that just our one park that we attended that day had 50,000 or so attendees, and they do numbers like that more or less every day of the year.  Burning Man does about 50,000 attendees a year, and the attendees spend a non-trivial amount of the year preparing for that 1 week event.  It is certainly an interesting comparison but they (Burning Man and the Disney Parks) are very different sorts of things.  I might even call Burning Man a more elite counterculture type of event, which by its very nature can not be sustained year round.

12. Harvie and I both noticed that people seemed to be wearing "custom" mouse ears that were very colorful and creative.  Harvie concluded that people had made their own, which was my first impression as well.  They are very nice mouse ears, don't get me wrong, but I am pretty sure that everything I saw was for sale at various places in the park.  I think that Harvie was observing this through his Burning Man filters and giving the audience a bit too much credit here.  The mouse ears were no doubt entertaining and value added however, but I am pretty sure they were an expression of a whimsical purchasing decision not a personal creative endeavor.

We will discuss the dramatic and insidious shrinking of the park and the wreckage of our future that is Tomorowland in our next post.

_____________________________________________

List of current Disneyland attractions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disneyland_attractions

1. My tour was called “Transcendental Style in Theme Parks” and discusses how the divine and eternal are represented at Disneyland.

Report on the Overland Train Route to Disneyland

In Southern California, we take any efforts to build a mass transit system personally. How dare the swinish scum-sucking politicians use our tax money to build a system that does not use the holy automobile! The most pure are the politicians of Los Angeles who will sink to any level to obstruct or destroy anything in the public interest such as mass transit.

But the city of Anaheim is not at one with the body of Christ in Commerce for they are failing to obstruct mass transit. These do-gooding, tree-hugging, business hating lefty swine think that they can build infrastructure for the public good. I laugh at their pathetic efforts here in Southern California. Don't they know that the Republicans will rise up and destroy them?

Nevertheless I am here to testify that I have personally taken the train to Disneyland from Oceanside and it worked very well. Furthermore, Anaheim not only makes this convenient, they have built a whole new transit center / train station / bus station / etc. to support the activity. In other words, they appear to want people to use mass transit. Crazy, huh?

Anaheim Station from a distance

Interior of Anaheim Station

The ticket to/from Anaheim from Ocanside is roughly $20 each way by Amtrak, and perhaps 1/2 that by Metrolink. The trains via Amtrak run about every two hours. I would think that the main application here would be to/from LA and I do not know what it costs, but I can tell you that it takes roughly 40 minutes by train to get from Union Station to Anaheim station.

Once in Anaheim, you have the option of using some sort of bus system to get you to Disneyland, but I opted for using the taxi cabs that were provided in a taxi stand right outside the station. How amazing and unique, what a concept, a taxi stand. There are no taxi stands outside stations in LA other than Union station. The taxi fare is about $15.00 each way, and it takes about 10 minutes.

One thing to keep in mind is that the taxi stand at Disneyland is convenient, but the whole transit situation outside Disneyland at 10:00 PM or so is so confusing that you might want to ask directions rather than just trying to make your way back by memory as I did.

I also tested whether one could see an evening show of some sort, we saw Fantasmic or something like that, and still make it to the final train Southbound from Amtrak which arrives at Anaheim about 10:50 PM. If you do not make that train, then you are stuck overnight or must have some other plan. Even though I decided to stay overnight at a local hotel, I did verify that I could easily make the train after the show. One must not dawdle however, one must push on and get to your train as there is quite a delay walking out of the park with everyone else.

Not only did the transit work very well, but I decided to reduce stress by staying overnight, and I was able to get a very reasonable hotel room at a local Motel 6 at 100 Disney Way, conveniently located, and reasonably priced at $100/night. A short bus or cab ride from Disneyland, one could probably even walk it if one were ambitious.

The new Anaheim station opened (a soft open) the day I returned to Oceanside, and it looks rather Saudi Arabian, which is to say large and futuristic. It seemed very nice to me as I ran though it trying to make my train.

In short, it is completely possible to use the train to go to/from Disneyland from LA or San Diego. It is convenient and probably not all that more expensive than driving and parking.

Jon Snoddy in New York City

One of the reasons I started with photography again after many years was because I noticed I seemed to have a large number of interesting friends, and that pictures of them as time went by would be entertaining.

Perhaps one of the inspirations for this was that famous black photographer of Harlem clubs, whose name I have forgotten, who took photographs of the people who came to play at clubs he hung out at and who eventually ended up with a photographic record of the history of jazz and blues in this country.

This is Jon Snoddy visiting me in New York City.  I think we are at a cafe on Columbus Ave in the Upper West Side.  I forget if he was working for Walt Disney Imagineering at the time or if this was during one of his entrepreneurial activities, perhaps Gameworks.

Jon is now back at Imagineering and has the misfortune of being rather senior in the Imagineering R&D organization.   We all make mistakes.

What Are Those Damn Pirates Mumbling About Anyway

In Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland there is a place near the start of the attraction which involves some different voices warning you of something (the accursed treasure, as it turns out). For years I went on that ride but could never quite make out what they were saying what with the rushing water and the screams of the people in front of you not to mention the cheerful yet ominous pirate music that is coming in and out of focus as you move through different areas.

Jwalt Adamczyk, renowned impressario and real-time animation performer, pointed me to the following Youtube soundtrack from the attraction and I finally know what they are saying. I have transcribed it here for other people who have been anxious to know (not that it really makes a difference, the intent of the voices comes through clearly: we are being warned of some terrible danger, and really that is all we have to know).

The soundtrack can be found here.

There are three voices. A Distant Voice which is muddied and always repeats "dead men tell no tales" and two other voices, which I will call the Dark Ominous Voice (DOV) and a crusty less ominous, but still concerned, voice (Voice 3).

Distant Voice:

                          Dead men tell no tales. Dead men tell no tales. Dead men tell no tales.

Then we have an interlude of cheerful music that suddenly becomes ominous in tone. The music changes instrument to be (primarily) harpsichord to help set the time period in which our dark ride takes place.

Dark Ominous Voice (DOV):

                         No fear have ye of evil curses, says you. Ha (chuckle). 

                         Properly warned ye be, says I.

                         Who knows when that evil curse will strike the greedy beholders 

                         of this bewitched treasure.

Distant Voice:

                         Dead men tell no tales.

Voice 3:

                         Perhaps he knows too much. He has seen the cursed treasure;

                         he knows where it be. Now proceed at your own risk. These be

                         the last friendly words you'll hear.

                         You may not survive to pass this way again.

Distant voice:

                         Dead men tell no tales.

And that is what they say.

I am sure you will sleep better knowing this.

Story Structure in Theme Parks and the Mystery of the Self-Illuminated Ears

On March 14th I visited the new Disneyland Resort in Anaheim for the first time since it ceased to be Disneyland and earned its second gate and the "resort" label. For only the second time in my life I was hosted by the Walt Disney Company which surprised me but which was certainly very courteous, not to mention unexpected, of them.

To put this in context, I used to go to Disneyland at least once a year when I lived in Southern California after college depending on the timing of visitors from out of state who often wanted to go there.  I used to give an informal tour of Disneyland called "Transcendental Style in Theme Parks" or how theme parks have become a spiritual experience for our volk, who hold hands around the magic castle as the fireworks go off and the luminous Tinkerbell miraculously appears. Then I moved to New York, the economy collapsed, and a decade went past before I could visit again.

But now I have returned to that happiest place and wish to review for you something amazing that I learned at the new World of Color show at the California Adventure Park. During this show I witnessed the unexpected transformation of a key Disney, and hence American, symbol: the mouse ears. Yes, the mouse ears have changed, wildly and radically, as I will describe.

Even the most dull among us must recognize that Disney represents an aspect of our culture, our time and our "civilization", such as it is. To ignore "Disneyland" is elitism of the most egregious sort for it ignores one of the fundamental phenomena that makes America what it is in the eyes of the world. For better or worse, the Disney company, in all its contradictions and complications, is embedded in our consciousness. Were the Disney parks ever to decline then I think it would signal the decline of American civilization as a whole.

Sure it is easy to dismiss people walking around in Mickey Mouse ear hats, but that is to shallowly ignore the semiotics of identifying with, and indeed emulating, the most famously endearing rodent in all our history. Mice are certainly cute as long as they are in their place and not rummaging around the kitchen while you are trying to sleep and these are not just any mouse ears we wear, these are symbolically Mickey's ears, the ears of our charming ubermouse.

Those ears, those very mouse ears, have been technically updated by Imagineering R&D in a way that is oddly symbolic of our technological present and future, as we discuss below.

The World of Color is the latest in a long tradition of climactic end-of-day shows that have appeared at Disneyland. The first of these was almost certainly the classic fireworks show around the Fantasyland Castle, a choreographed and carefully designed show over the iconic castle which concluded with the miracle of the arrival of Tinkerbell, who will only appear if you believe in her, the divine made flesh as the sky explodes in a crescendo of fire and light. 

This type of end-of-day show has an important place in the structure of a day's visit to the Park, I believe.  And I speculate that the people at Imagineering are very conscious about this when they design not just an attraction, but the park as a whole, and the nature of the experience that a visitor will have at the park.   This end-of-day show is the climax of the visit: an event that visitors make special provisions to be able to see, often with their family, before they slowly and regretfully leave the park, either to drive home in the classic Southern California version or to make their way back to their hotel in the resort version.  In story structure terms,  this show is the climax, the obligatory scene, the required event, after which the slow departure from the park would be the slightly sad denouement: the regret that it ever has to end.  I suspect that the importance of this type of event to the day's experience gives it a priority in park planning and budgeting.   And since things must not stay still or they become embalmed, the show must be recreated in new forms but still serving that same purpose in the structure of the day.

From fireworks, this type of show evolved in many ways at the various gates which are the larger Disneyland entity. Two other examples would be the Electric Parade with its synchronized and abstract design and characters or the IllumiNations show at Epcot which combines fireworks, fountains and music. Both of these two later shows were immense and impressive. World of Color continues that tradition in a pure water, color, projection and music show.

A vast and wonderful Triumph of the Mouse 

To set the stage, the World of Color happens in the lagoon in front of the Ferris Wheel / Rollercoaster at California Adventure. At a later date I will review some of the architectural issues of the new park, and at that time I will be rather puzzled. But the rollercoaster and the ferris wheel are the exceptions: they have a grandeur and presence that architect and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer would have approved of. The great big beaming face of Mickey within the wheel that encompasses our fate shines down on the World of Color and grants His approval. 

The World of Color has many impressive show elements more or less combined into a larger show. Certainly the most striking are the fountains which can shoot a stream of water 200 feet into the air, is illuminated at the base by LEDs, is illuminated in the air by projectors and lasers, and whose direction of spray is controllable on an individual fountain basis. And how many fountains are there? The press release says 1200 and that might be true: if one does a back of the envelope calculation of 50 per row and 20 rows, the numbers add right up.  So its believable. The water is all recycled of course as it falls back into the pond and is reused, but that trivializes the accomplishment of pumping that much water simultaneously at that velocity at once and over a 30 minute show. I would love to know the numbers.

There is a vast infrastructure that we do not see to support such an extravagant expression of water at pressure.

For those who are surprised that the colors can be so vivid or that one could project onto a wall of mist very recognizable images, remember that in a laminar flow fountain we have removed most of the turbulence so the spray and the droplets are for the most part symmetric and reflective. The surface tension of water provides the projection screen, a moving and transforming one, and that works very well.

A lot of effort was put into creating interesting abstractions with color and water as synchronized with audio, and when it was abstract I felt it was always rewarding. But this is Disney after all, and there have been criticisms that the new park was not tied in with Disney characters enough, so the World of Color created a pastiche of elements from many Disney films and used them as projections on the water. I felt this was overdone and that their purpose would be equally served with a few carefully chosen properties. But I admit that I am not in the important demographic here, and perhaps the audience wants to see their favorite characters, or other considerations.  I could remedy the situation in my case by defocusing  my eyes if I cared to and, voila, abstraction returns.

Do these colorful self-illuminated ears contain a secret menace?

But now to the discussion of new technologies at the park and the shocking revelation of networked and distributed mind control of enslaved mouse ears.

Yes you read correctly.

As I was waiting for the World of Color to begin I noticed that many in the audience wore a new type of mouse ears, these had a more robust skull cap and large, well-lit colored ears that would change color and blink happily and at random. Each pair of ears would do its own thing and while they were amusing, I wondered if it might not interfere with the show. The ears were bright, the lights were about to go down, those ears would be a distraction I thought.

I should not have worried.

As the show began I noticed that the ears seemed to turn themselves off all by themselves. Of course I am not looking at the ears I am looking at the show over the water. But as the show continued I realized that something quite odd was happening with the ears. Interspersed through the audience there were several hundred pairs of ears that from time to time would all blink together as if in synchrony with the music.  

And then I realized the truth. These innocent looking hats must have a radio controller in each one, such that they could be slaved to a signal and then controlled from a central source. The individual mouse ears had become unwitting slaves of a master show controller and now mindlessly served the greater good by dedicating their photons to the centrally directed World of Color.

My sources tell me that this project was the brainchild of a mysterious Imagineer and CTO by the name of Scott Watson.  Surely this could not be the same Scott Watson I knew from the early 1990s? He seemed like such a nice guy.   [Note: Mr. Watson has not replied as of yet to my emails.  I suppose he is just too busy hanging out with his real friends].

People are foolishly concerned about the NSA when perhaps they should worry about things closer to home.  What are the privacy and first amendment issues of these new mouse ears?   Are our positions being sent without our knowledge to some mouse server in a vault?  Is this project part of a larger collaborative effort to develop mind control technology with the CIA?   Is Burning Man somehow involved?  These and many other questions flashed through my mind all at once but I have none of the answers.

But this is certainly a topic that needs to be discussed in a public forum and ultimately our loyal public servants need to determine whether or not there should be regulation to protect the freedom and privacy of mouse ears everywhere.  As with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in public skies, this technology has policy implications.  

Oh brave new world to have such mouse ears in it.