Tips To Enjoy Disneyland

Yesterday, as part of Operation Get Some On Valentine’s Day, I took the girlfriend to Disneyland. Below is a list of tips to make your time there more enjoyable, and some general observations of the day.

• If a friend or family member works there, they can get you in for free.  I strongly recommend this.  It is a mathematical certainty that “Free” beats “$74 A Person.”  Also, with this free ticket, you get the ability to go into Disneyland’s bastard stepbrother, the California Adventure Park.  I don’t understand this thing.  They have a scale model of the Golden Gate.  Sure, you could drop the money to see that, or just drive north for six hours and see the real one.  This was like putting a Planet Hollywood in Beverly Hills next to the old CAA building.  Sure, I could see the white T-Shirt Bruce Willis wore in Die Hard, or I could just walk outside, and see Bruce Willis for realsies.
• Get some sort of ailment.  I’m not proposing breaking something or contracting lupus, but if you have an old ankle brace, dust that sucker off, put it on, get in a wheelchair, and get on all the rides from the exit, thereby avoiding the line. (WARNING: Not all of these tips are particularly honest, and anything between you and your God is your business)
• Fast Passes:  These are basically vouchers that you can get to hold a place in line.  If a ride offers a Fast Pass, you insert your ticket to Disneyland in a machine, and get a ticket that allows you to get on a much shorter line between two certain times.  When you’ve hit your time window, you go back to the ride, show the guy at the beginning of the line your Fast Pass, and he puts you in a shorter line.  It’s worth it if the wait time for the ride is 20 minutes or more, but don’t bother if it is less. Also, if you go at the very beginning of the time window, you get to the front or near the front of the Fast Pass line.  The longer you wait, the more people who got Fast Passes when you did will be in front of you.  Get a Fast Pass, go back to the ride right when the time window opens, and you’re looking at a five minute wait for the ride.
• Fast Passes are offered, but provide no advantage on the Autopia.  That ride is a steaming pile of shit anyway, so just skip it all together.
• This is my first time back since 2002, which is crazy, because I love it there, and live two hours away. In fact, until 2005, I lived 45 minutes away. Since then, Disney has hit on this idea that if a movie makes money, and there’s a ride that somehow fits in with that movie, they should redo the ride to fit that movie. Johnny Depp is now in Pirates Of The Caribbean.  This isn’t so bad, except for moments when it’s glaring that they just shoehorned references in.  Davy Jones now talks to riders via a projection on a curtain of dry ice.  This happens right before you go into the huge naval battle, and now Geoffrey Rush is demanding that the Conquistadors who are manning the fort hand over Captain Jack Sparrow. Granted, I never saw Pirate 3, and stopped paying attention halfway through 2, but Captain Jack hanging out with Conquistadors seems to violate quite a bit of history. The Submarine Voyage is now “Finding Nemo While We Get Rid Of Everything That Made This Ride Fun, And Now It Makes Absolutely No Sense.” You start out with a speech similar to the original saying you’re going on a submarine voyage, only now the accents are Australian, and you get to watch a lot of underwater animatronics.  That shit I love.  Then, the people stop talking, and you watch video out of your portholes while the dad fish and the stupid fish swim around and talk. They can’t even get the mix on this ride correct. At one point, the crew of the sub breaks in and says something, but you can’t understand it because there’s still dialogue going on from the two fish. They finally find Nemo, I guess, because there’s a fish that looks exactly like the dad fish, but with a different voice, and something about an underwater volcano.  See, in the original ride, you see the eruption of an underwater volcano, and the narrator discusses how dangerous it is.  Now, there are fish swimming around on the volcano set, and nobody says a word about it. All of a sudden everything is just red.  Then the narrators come back in to remind you that they were once there in the first place, and mention the mermaids and sea monster from the original ride.  But you don’t get to see them.  This ride now sucks out loud.
• Strangely enough, they didn’t add Eddie Murphy to the Haunted Mansion ride.
• If you’re on a ride that breaks down, you get a pass to avoid the line of any ride.  It’s a one-use thing, and works for parties up to 6. The girlfriend and I were on Thunder Mountain when it broke.  We used our pass to get on the Matterhorn.  Here’s a tip: If you’re in this situation, when they walk you back to the beginning of the ride, they ask how many people are in your party.  Have each person in your party say “One.”  You get as many passes as you have people with you, and can use them all over the place.
• Space Mountain has the same moving lights we do at my work. They seem to not work for them either.  If anyone is in the theatrical entertainment business, DO NOT BUY STUDIO SPOTS.  Space Mountain redid the ride so now you get music and a much darker room. The darker room is amazing.  The music is terrible. It’s some soundtracky adult contemporary music with an epileptic drummer playing behind it. They also do the thing where they take your picture, but it’s when the ride slows down to return to the beginning.  The photos have shots of a lot of people pitched forward as the brakes kick in.
• Captain Eo is fucking terrible. I mean absolutely fucking terrible. George Lucas, I can believe you put your name on this because of every movie you were involved with post 1989.  Coppola, you fucking made The Godfather.  Granted, this is mid-80s broke Coppola before he started making money on wine, but still. You are much better than this.  You wrote Patton. You go from George C Scott’s monologue in front of the flag to the dialogue in this piece of shit?  The inventor of the written language is rolling over in his grave.
• It’s somewhat depressing to watch a friend be the Jungle Cruise Skipper. Watching your friend repeat the same jokes they have for the last three years, and hearing the “(kill me)” riding on the carrier frequency of the terrible jokes makes you kind of sad. I was wearing a Yankee hat, and my friend introduced me to the rest of the boat as Short Round, despite the fact that I’m 6′, and white. I took a second to tell of the time Ponies! and I tried to start a twitter rumor that Short Round had died.  The rumor didn’t take.
• Skip Fantasmic and any parades or the fireworks. Fantasmic is some flashlights shining on water. The fireworks are controlled explosions in the sky that, frankly, you can see from anywhere in the park.  The parade is a parade, and like all parades, sucks.  Here’s what those events are good for: GO ON ALL THE BIG RIDES. Everyone is watching those things happen, and you can get on with little or no wait.
• Last thing:  Went on Pirates at like 9:30 AM, and saw a couple riding alone in a boat. They were both texting. It broke my heart to see that two people let such a prime opportunity for some ride head slip past them.