More Hong Kong Disneyland
The good: The park is clean and everything is nicely detailed. It looked like they spent some money on the place. It does not look like the bargain-rate mall that California Adventure is. Its weird to think I am standing on an artificial;y reclaimed island, on what would have been underwater 10 years ago. Yet here are the familiar sights of Main Street USA.
The bad: This is mini-Disneyland. WAY smaller than at home. No Pirates, Matterhorn, Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, Haunted Mansion, Toontown, Adventureland etc etc. Not just less rides, but the lands themselves are physically smaller. And its true, no one waits in line, everyone cuts constantly.
Although for 1/3 of the park in the US, they also charge a lot less , in the neighborhood of US$35 as Disneyland California climbs closer and closer to $100.
We start on the Disneyland Railroad, which is missing the cheesy dinosaurs. The narration starts in Chinese, and then switches to the fake old west drawl american version. No one listens to the narrator telling people to remain seated. and they are all standing and taking pictures.
High School Musical parade in Chinese. Weird. I don’t see the appeal of American high school to a foreign audience, but what do I know?
Finally got to see Philharmagic. I almost ended up working on this, and many of my friends and co-workers did work on it. It starts on a tiny little screen, and I’m thinking “this is it? This sucks”. But once the lights go down , the little screen open up into 3 gigantic ones. Some nice gags in the seats for wind and water spraying on you. This will hopefully come to California someday.
Space Mountain. The one big E-ticket here. Waiting room is planets hanging from the ceiling, instead of big fake spaceship. This one seems significantly better than California. Better star field effects, some nebula-like projections you go through, asteroids, seems like they juiced up all the fx, pretty cool. And best of all , you can walk right on with no line on a Friday night.
The Stitch Adventure. Awful, like being tortured. And we wasted 15 minutes of our 2 hours waiting for this show to start. Its a real-time CG Stitch being mo-capped from someone behind the scenes somewhere. He doesn’t speak Chinese. None of the kids in the audience speak English. This is very awkward and uncomfortable as Stitch asks 10 times “What’s your name? What’s your name? You don’t know your name?” And the kids look at their parents, and then at the screen, and aren’t sure what to say. Note to Disney, hire a bi-lingual Stitch.
The one HK exclusive! Fantasy Gardens. Gazebos in a garden with Disney characters you take pictures with, boring.
No Tom Sawyer island, but here the Tarzan Treehouse is on an island and the rafts go there instead.
Small World. Brand new for this year. And will open in…. 2 weeks. Oh well, just missed it.
Marie. what is the deal with Marie from the Aristocats? Why is she so popular here? Every piece of merchandise can be broken down into 4 categories, Mickey, Pooh, Stitch, and Marie. I barely remember the Aristocats, and here she is knocking Goofy, Donald, Minnie, etc off of the top spot. Stitch is super-popular as well, as seen in his awful show above.
Chopsticks:
One more Disney park checked off the list (only Paris is yet to visit).
