Wednesday, 23rd March 2011
It’s official: the Molly Brown riverboat will return to the Rivers of the Far West as planned this Friday, with a special re-dedication ceremony even planned to mark the occasion. Having been practically rebuilt during an extensive year-long restoration, the unique side-wheel riverboat will be re-dedicated by Disneyland Paris ambassadors Régis Alart and Osvaldo del Mistero at 11am this Friday, 25th March. The public event will take place at Thunder Mesa Riverboat Landing in Frontierland, so be sure to drop by if you’re visiting the resort and witness a little piece of Disneyland Paris history.
As noted in the comments following our article last week, the riverboat has actually lost her “Queen of River” title during the restoration, with the side wheels now displaying the slightly more generic nomenclature: “Western River Line”. It remains to be seen what other smaller changes may have taken place. DLRP Today will be reporting back from the rebuilt vessel’s maiden cruise and might even tweet a few live updates on Friday — so follow us on Twitter, if you’re not already!
Wednesday, 23rd March 2011
Your Disneyland Paris park ticket will be celebrating the Disney Magical Moments Festival very soon. Like the past three celebrations, a number of different coloured ticket designs will be available, each featuring one of the key characters of the year. Whilst last year was all about the New Generation, this year sees some old favourites such as Timon and Pumba, Captain Hook and the Queen of Hearts given their own design. The golden tickets also now clearly state “2 Parcs” and the logo used this year is the main Disneyland Paris logo, rather than the festival logo. Although the tickets still have some way to go to beat the boldness of the 1990s designs, they might become even more collectible. As more and more visitors now print out their own rather drab “E-Tickets” at home, these “proper” tickets must surely be beginning to drop in circulation.
The resort’s four Annual Passports will also be updated, with Rapunzel’s huge box office success in Tangled scoring her the prized “Dream” spot already, from Woody and Buzz last year.
Tuesday, 22nd March 2011
Progress continues at Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant from every angle and we can begin to see even more “before and after” views of this extensive and much-needed restoration. The stone wall above, for example, has regained its rich colour tones, whilst the lighter pink beginning to appear across the tallest tower shows how the whole Castle will soon look — if not yet giving away the final “after”. It’s impressive that all of this work to the upper towers, and much elsewhere, is being undertaken overnight. Walt Disney Imagineering will need to return to those freshly painted walls later to add special paint effects such as weathering to make sure Aurora’s château looks believably, timelessly old, not like it was poured out of concrete just twenty years ago.
Scaffolding has also now spread over the two side wings of Sleeping Beauty Castle, reaching towards La Confiserie des Trois Fées and La Chaumière des Sept Nains boutiques on either side. From the front, the scaffolding covers the Castle’s walls to the right and so far has only a plain white covering.
Wednesday, 16th March 2011
If you follow the official Disney Parks Blog you might have already enjoyed the superb “Tilt-Shift” videos of Magic Kingdom and Epcot at Walt Disney World, which turned those grand Disney parks into something resembling a toy train set or stop-motion animated film. Well, great news Disneyland Paris fans — they’ve taken a trip across the Atlantic! A brand new Disneyland Paris tilt-shift video premiered just hours ago today, in honour of the ninth birthday of Walt Disney Studios Park. Take a look above — it’s a seriously beautiful piece of work.
As the Disney Parks Blog explains, “Tilt-shift videos like these use different photo angles, focus settings and color saturation adjustments to make the subject of a photo appear miniature.” And most awe-inspiring, “It took more than seven months and 4,000 photographs to produce this 2:38-minute clip.” The variety of attractions, events and locations captured is truly impressive, far greater than the two earlier single-park videos, successfully making everything from Disney’s Fantillusion to Moteurs… Action! look like a small-scale model magically coming to life. We even get to see the up-scaled Toy Story Playland attractions downscaled again to the size of a toy!
Wednesday, 16th March 2011
Concrete walls continue to surround our future oasis of shopping. Since going vertical last month, World of Disney has now hit its second level around the rear of the site. Walls are even beginning to slowly rise around the front of the site, to conceal the ventilation shaft for the railway line and platforms below, which is when the hub will really begin to enter a new era. Although the building will certainly be a towering construction, it’s not expected the trading space or shop floor will extend above ground level. Instead, any upper level(s) will be used for operations and storage, presumably to maximise space on the ground floor for all that glorious Disneyland Paris merchandise.
Wednesday, 16th March 2011
Nine years ago today, Disney’s tenth theme park worldwide opened its gates. For such a milestone, the original Walt Disney Studios Park of 16th March 2002 was perhaps not the best representative of the Disneyland ideals. Be it through desperate lack of budget or not, the park drastically missed the mark of what a European audience — or any audience — wants from a theme park. Forget the beautiful landscapes of Tokyo DisneySea, opened a year earlier; here there were almost no outdoor themed areas to speak of at all, just 25 hectares of freshly poured tarmac asphalt and 10 attractions housed in uninspiring “soundstages” of concrete. The bid to pay tribute to European filmmakers was noble but possibly misguided — Florida’s raining Singin’ in the Rain umbrella scene was changed to the barely known Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, for example — and the glitzy warmth of Hollywood was oddly missing. The park suffered from a complete lack of escapism, when what people really wanted was a whole park with the colour and spirit found inside, say, Disney Studio 1.
Because that’s the thing — the park has always had some great attractions. Nine years on, CinéMagique remains beautifully subtle and wonderfully entertaining, one of the best movie-based attractions ever. Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster starring Aerosmith might not be pretty on the outside but the ride inside arguably beats its kitsch Florida cousin, whilst after 9,000 performances it’s easy to take for granted just how impressive the stunts of Moteurs… Action! Stunt Show Spectacular really are.
Having dug itself a hole by ploughing too much (or, you could say, not enough) money into an unpopular park, it took Euro Disney SCA far longer than it should have done to begin expanding the second gate. The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror should really have opened in 2005 (or earlier), rather than begun construction that year, whilst the Toon Studio expansion of Crush’s Coaster and Cars Quatre Roues Rallye should have been there from the start, not five years after opening. No-one should have ever green-lit the Television Production Tour, now occupied instead by Stitch Live! since 2008 and Playhouse Disney Live on Stage! since 2009.
The modest Hollywood Boulevard turned out to be a great surprise and even Toy Story Playland, maligned by some corners of the fan community, is a marked step above any other themed areas in the park. To get the Ratatouille dark ride built in the years ahead would be an amazing feat: the first new dark ride at Disneyland Paris (ignoring Buzz) in all its 20 years and possibly the first real implementation of Audio Animatronics in the whole Studios park. But let’s just hope it doesn’t end there, that we see the park continue like its last four years rather than the first five. May the park continue to improve and expand, to revisit Theater District and fix the original areas, to add places to eat and places to buy things, and maybe, one day, rename Production Courtyard. We can but dream… Here’s to the future!
Tuesday, 15th March 2011
With only around two months to go before the projected May 2011 opening date of Disney Village‘s new Earl of Sandwich restaurant, the first internal features can now be spotted and the glass outer walls appear to have finished installation. These new photos taken this past weekend by Photos Magiques also show a new steel structure on the raised terrace to the left. Inside, the ceiling above the mezzanine level has been fitted, with a circular central feature and lighting arrangement visible from outside.
Even with the glass in place, there’s a lot of work to do for the exterior. Concept art showed a colourful red and yellow pattern in the spaces between the glass, and bronze Earl of Sandwich branding wrapped around the building. Hopefully with large-scale soon finished the walkway to Disney’s Newport Bay Club will reopen to guests as quickly as possible, who currently have to take a lengthy diversion around the other side of Lake Disney.
Tuesday, 15th March 2011
Well, just look at this grand old dame! The Molly Brown riverboat is finally nearing the end of her complete bow-to-stern refurbishment, much needed after several years of problems and neglect. A refurbishment that has lasted almost an entire year and has seen the side-wheel riverboat, unique to Disneyland Paris, practically rebuilt from scratch. Indeed, back in July the boat had been stripped back to nothing more than a shell in the dry dock. This weekend, the dock is filled with water and Molly Brown has never looked better.
She’s even been given a refreshed paint design, with the old turquoise rim around the lower deck turned maroon and two more matching maroon accents added around the other two decks. The old dark green single funnel now appears more black in appearance, with a gold band around its top. If all goes to plan, the rebuilt boat will steam out into the Rivers of the Far West for her maiden voyage next week.
Monday, 14th March 2011
DLRP Today received several emails last month questioning why Euro Disney SCA’s share price had suddenly rocketed from €4.39 to as high as €9.05, its highest price since June 2008, in just the space of around 10 days. And it seems us Disneyland Paris fans weren’t the only ones to think it just a little odd. As The Telegraph reports, the sudden price spike will now be investigated by France’s stock exchange watchdog, the Financial Markets Authority (Autorité des Marchés Financiers). Christian Sylt writes, “Its share price jumped 17pc on the positive first quarter results and, defying expectations, continued to climb with the trading volume following suit. In one session 13pc of the company changed hands, which led to speculation of a takeover or that the shares would be delisted and bought back by the Walt Disney Company. Both suggestions seem to be wrong.”
The Telegraph cites a source close to the investigation as suggesting it has raised suspicions of “classic market abuse”. “The volumes traded reached more than 50 times normal levels on some days last month and this led to the AMF putting the share under watch. According to the source, it was then put under investigation earlier this week ‘in order to see what is going on’. A spokesman for the AMF declined to comment, and one Paris-based analyst said: ‘I don’t know why the shares have gone up and the company doesn’t know either.'” Euro Disney SCA, the operating company behind Disneyland Paris, is 39.8% owned by The Walt Disney Company and 10% by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed with the remaining 50.2% shares publicly traded on the Paris Euronext stock exchange.
Friday, 11th March 2011
Which countries were the biggest visitors to Disneyland Paris in 2010? Last week’s AGM presentation was published online this morning and includes the exact percentages for the past year, showing an interesting shift in where those 15 million visitors are travelling from. Here’s the big news: For perhaps the first time in the resort’s history, more than 50% of visitors came from France itself — a huge 51%, to be precise. This seems to show a big boost from the resort’s home country, but may hide continued falls in attendance from surrounding countries. Back in 2002, for example, the percentage of visitors from France was just 40%, whilst an impressive 21% of visitors had travelled across the channel from the United Kingdom. In 2010, that figure has dropped dramatically to just 12%, perhaps the lowest percentage of British visitors ever, after falling from 20% in 2006, 18% in 2007, 16% in 2008 and 14% in 2009 — a worrying trend of falling visitor numbers every year for the past five years now.
Visitors from the Benelux meanwhile have remained relatively steady in percentage terms over the past decade, with Belgium and Luxembourg making up 7% of visitors in both 2010 and 2009, having been recorded at 6% for 2002 and 2006. The Netherlands appears to have experienced a slight drop in prominence, at 7% of visitors for 2010 but previously having made up 8% in 2006 and 9% in 2002. One big success for Disneyland Paris in recent years has been in attracting more guests from Spain, but even here the draw appears to be waning. Back in 2002, Spain was even combined with Italy, for a total 9% of visitors, but by 2005 had attained this number all by itself. Spanish visitors appeared to reach their peak in 2008, making up 11% of guests, but this dropped to 8% in 2009 and 2010. Finally, visitors from the rest of the world have remained steady at 9%, having stuck at that percentage for the past decade (though Euro Disney SCA claims an increasing demand from visitors of further afield for 2010).
But wait — we’re forgetting somewhere. Making just 3% of visitors in 2010, Germany is at risk of barely even registering on the figures. This German market has dropped consistently for the past few years — from 4% in 2006, 5% in 2005 and 7% back in 2002 — despite being a wealthy country of 80 million where Disney is as popular as anywhere, with several big theme parks of its own. Those successful parks might be part of the problem, as might the lack of a direct Eurostar-style link, but surely this should be a bigger market for the resort. Back in 1992, it seemed to be expected that Germany would be right behind the UK as one of the biggest visitors. So, what’s keeping Deutschland away from Disneyland?
