(800 x 600)
(640 x 480)
Honoring ten years of Disney's Animal Kingdom, Nick Nitsch brings us another in his series of stunning Disney desktops. Celebrate a decade of exploration and a future of discovery with this beautiful design. Thanks, Nick!
(800 x 600)
(640 x 480)
A quick weekend treat for all you desktop collectors. Nick Nitsch serves up the third and final design in his series of desktops inspired by Disney's Sky Crown and Mineral King. Nick will be returning again soon with more Disney-themed desktop designs so stay tuned. Thanks, Nick!
(800 x 600)
(640 x 480)
Our newest resident desktop designer Nick Nitsch returns with an exclusive design inspired by a very exclusive place. I was very fortunate to have dined at Club 33 on my recent trip to Disneyland; an altogether amazing and exciting time. Nick's elegant desktop vision is a happy reminder of that wonderful experience.
(800 x 600)
(640 x 480)
Even though we are well into spring, we haven't quite given up the ghosts of winter as Nick Nitsch serves us up another terrific desktop inspired by Disney's unrealized Mineral King ski resort. Nick revisits the Sky Crown designs created by an uncredited 1960s-era studio artist and takes us back to a bright and shiny "what might have been." Much thanks again to Nick for all his efforts.
(800 x 600)
(640 x 480)
That year and the next had bad news appearing on television almost as regularly as weather bulletins. Every night seemed to bring fresh images of horror and violence. Vietnam, race riots, assassinations, angry protests by kids not all much older than me. I’d watch them with my tutting parents, wondering if the world would go crazy before I got further into my teens.
I since wondered many times if any of the artists ever learned about my request. Somehow I did not mind the rejection; at least I tried. And Uncle Walt stayed with me in my heart as I grew up and maintained an interest in animation and cartoons – even to the extent of having cartoons of my own published! Not long ago I found the envelope from Disney amongst some old papers. It is still fully intact, complete with the letter (which tells a small story of its own), the promotional mini posters (which did please a 10-year-old boy) and the Uncle Walt postcards which today stand out as uniquely 1960ish in style. All in all a regular “time capsule” from the Walt Disney Studios in 1968!
The Walt Disney Company has a major presence on Hollywood Boulevard, in Hollywood, California.
Rumor has it that the animators (and Walt, too) used to frequent the café, meeting there to brainstorm while having a light meal or a “cup of joe.” Supposedly, the mural was a gift given as a token of appreciation for the café’s hospitality to studio personnel.
There are many pieces of artwork throughout the café, yet the menu acknowledges only the front door artwork as original. Were there other original paintings “once upon a time?” Were they repaired? Replaced? Or are the additional paintings just Disney look-alikes? Who painted these? There are more questions than answers.
Even though its provenance is vague, Hollywood’s SNOW WHITE CAFÉ is certainly of interest to Disney aficionados. And for locals and visitors, it still serves a great breakfast for six bucks!
Here is your personal photographic tour of the SNOW WHITE CAFÉ. If you plan a visit to Hollywood, be sure and stop in to see it for yourself.
(1024x768)
(1280x1024)
(1024x768)
(1280x1024)
(1280x1024)I spend too much time looking at details at Disney parks, and if you doubt me, you should see that one time I wrote about those weird fake skylights but that’s a story for another day. Still, you’d think that of all those years of staring down lighting fixtures (the moment I realized that the Keel Boats and the 20K queues shared the same lamp design was a highlight), you’d think I’d bother to actually look at the entrance gate to Frontierland. Nope. One log stockade is more or less like another, right?
Well I’ll be! Looks like there’s gonna be some shootin’ here sometime soon!
This really blew my mind when I first saw it. Is this really just because the shooting gallery is nearby? Perhaps its’ a dry run for Fort Sam Clemens on My theory? I like to think its Lee Van Cleef.
…Ok, maybe that was too sillyFoxxfur from the really terrific blog Passport to Dreams Old and New contributes a special commentary today. She takes a look at Disney World’s recent and upcoming plans for resort hotel expansion and provides a perspective both insightful and just a little bit provocative at times; hopefully a refreshing change of pace from my usually Pollyana-based views on the World. Enjoy!
One of the varied blessings Walt Disney World allows for is the blessing of the resorts. After years of having been variously elated and rather beaten-about by the Walt Disney World theme parks, storming in at 9:00 and out twelve hours later, after endless treks back and forth in the rain from the Train Station lockers to the Haunted Mansion, and after getting sick twice on Casey’s hot dogs, I discovered the wonder of the resorts.
The resorts are a blessing, especially for the Walt Disney World frequent abuser who has apparently seen and done it all, and I hold to the belief that Walt Disney World would be a less stressful, more sane place if more guests would bother to leave the park, go to a resort, and spend several hours doing nothing, or drinking heavily, or whatever it is they need to do before returning for more abuse. It’s been repeated ad infinitum from 1989 on, but this is genuinely good advice.
What is even better about the resorts is how they’ve become clustered: some of my nicest days on property haven’t been in parks as of late, but spending time in the resort areas.
But in the last ten years I’ve also began to become really miffed. As nice as these places are in expanding your vacation and as convenient they are, clustered as they are, I’ve begin to become increasingly uneasy about the Walt Disney World machine. Finally, when will enough finally be enough? I can go to Disney’s official website, wait for the interminable interface to load, and count from one to twenty-one without landing on something you’re not supposed to stay in for seven to ten days. I can add five or eight to that figure if I count the Disney Vacation Club adjuncts as separate resorts, like Disney does. And now with four cheap-o resorts on property, and that’s without counting the “not really Disney” Hotel Plaza Boulevard madness, we’re supposed to swallow that they’re planning on opening even more, even cheaper hotels on property, as well as a Four Seasons on top of one of the Golf Courses, as well as whole new sections of Animal Kingdom Lodge and Contemporary… and one begins to wonder if the person pulling the strings here has ever heard of the concept of supply exceeding demand.
I can go to Coronado Springs and not see a single normal guest in sight. This may be because the resort is so effing huge that your vision gives out before the acreage does, but it probably mostly has something to do with the fact that the resort only seems to exist for an endless parade of conventioneers. The resort is so strange and dead that Disney’s doesn’t even run the food court and there is no upscale dining option. Was all this money spent really necessary, in the long run? The resort is huge but it feels like a ghost town. Where is the demand?
Last time I stayed at Old Key West, I stayed in a room which hadn’t been opened in months. There were actually cobwebs the cleaning staff hadn’t gotten yet, and the whole place had a dead atmosphere like it had been forgotten and boarded up. We were nowhere near anything convenient and it was unlike any Disney Resort experience I’ve ever had. You can’t tell me Disney is filling up those rooms. And yet we’re building an adjunct to Animal Kingdom Lodge that’s bigger than the original resort and another 16 floor tower next to the Contemporary while you can’t swing a killer whale in Coronado Springs and knock down a vacationing family and Old Key West rooms are becoming nothing but containers for spiders and ghosts.
And yet, terrifyingly, park attendance numbers continue to climb and soon you won’t even be able to go into
Disney ought to be reducing their attendance cap at Magic Kingdom and MGM and start outlawing traditional strollers in the park and helping guests enjoy themselves and stop shoveling more price effective and price gouging “punishment packages” at guests hoping they won’t notice they’re being conned. But they won’t. They’ll build more resorts and try to drag in more people and offer nothing in the way of a pressure relief valve until it’s too late.
And meanwhile the parks deteriorate because management is terrified that these people will stage a revolt if something is closed (if you doubt this one, you should’ve seen Orlando Pirates between April and July last year) because they’ve been planning this trip for years and Disney can’t get its’ act together to actually work on the time table they’re encouraging guests to have to plan on. It’s disgusting that you have to make dining reservations months in advance, but that’s the way Disney wants it. They’ve dug themselves into a hole they can’t even function inside of.
Why isn’t the resort hemorrhaging money on these hotel rooms? We know they can’t fill them but they irrationally continue to build more. Are buildings being closed in Phases? When the iron gets too cold will they pull the same joke they produced post 9/11 and actually close whole resorts for “refurbishment”? Why are they building more resorts when they refuse to finish a building they half constructed over at Pop Century?
Walt Disney World opened with one theme park, two resorts, a Country Club hotel, and a campground. Eventually they added another Country Club, a shopping plaza, some cheap-o hotels and, finally, another park. Walt Disney World grew into its’ skin. Euro
I was thinking about Audio Animatronics recently and began attempting to collect my thoughts for a potential article and/or commentary here on 2719 Hyperion. I was primarily considering how in recent years there has been a distinct shift by Disney away from large scale audio animatronics-heavy attractions, much in the mold of The Great Movie Ride and early Future World endeavors like Horizons and World of Motion. Focus seems to have shifted to weenie-based, centerpiece AAs like Stitch, the Yeti and the much ballyhooed Jack Sparrow. I have wondered if this represented a dramatic shift away from AA-based attractions and reflected a growing disenchantment of the technology among both theme park guests and Walt Disney Imagineers.
Yet attractions that use AAs don't necessarily fail because of this. Although it's often mocked, sit in for a showing of The Hall of Presidents or The American Adventure and then stand right at the theater exit doors and listen to what people have to say. It's invariably positive, and usually mixed with some wonder about the figures. Although these are outliers as powerful presentations which have outlived many of their contemporaries, it's clear that people don't have conceptual limitations as to what an illusion of life can and can't be.
As far as culturally, AAs are strange creatures. I think the best description of them I've ever heard is in Robin Allan, who describes them as grotesque. There's something creepy about them, especially when they travel into, as Jack Sparrow does, the uncanny valley. Richard Schickel, his his book The Disney Version, launches into an insane attack on Disneyland at the very end of the book where he makes the place out to be a freakish remote controlled biosphere built by a man unable to change the world around him, so he built his own, and especially singles out Mr. Lincoln as an essential affront to God. Although probably not in so sure terms, we react to these devices as being vaguely profane as part of our natural tendency to distrust anything which is so fake it's convincing.
