The Great Experiment

Fantasmic at Walt Disney World is different from the one at Disneyland.

Neon animals: a giraffe, an elephant, two cheetahs, and a crocodile

In my opinion, the show here is not as good. This one focuses much more on recent Disney movies, and it includes a live-action scene from Pocahontas, with the colonists digging up the stage and then being attacked by Indians. This is obviously Disney World's answer to the Peter Pan sequence at Disneyland, because this Fantasmic stage doesn't have a big ship with rigging to swing around on... but the whole Pocahontas scene just kind of seems out of place, and it's very hard to see what's going on.

This show also uses a lot more movie footage (on the giant sheet-of-water screens) and a lot less live action than the Disneyland show, too, I think. Frollo from 'Hunchback' makes a brief appearance as a villain, as does Jafar from 'Aladdin' (he even turns into a snake and comes onto the stage, Kaa-style, while Mickey quivers off to one side). Scar from 'Lion King' also appears, but they apparently couldn't get Jeremy Irons back to do the character's voice for this, and the replacement is pretty bad.

Both shows end similarly, however.

The scaly one makes her appearance

My money's on the dragon

One interesting problem here is that the pyrotechnics during the mouse-versus-dragon battle sequence created a LOT of smoke... and that smoke didn't blow away, leaving most of the climax of the battle hidden in a flickering greyness.

The steamboat which comes around at the end, carrying lots of walkarounds, is no match for Disneyland's Mark Twain.

Before the show, I bought a toy. Y'ever see those ratchet noisemakers where you hold the handle and twirl the top part of it around? Well, imagine one that doesn't make noise, but the end of the top part has a row of flickering red LED's on it... and when you spin it around, they spell out a message in the air. That's what I got.

It came with twenty preset messages like 'HAPPY 2000' and 'GO TEAM GO,' but it also lets you program your own message into it. To enter an 'A' you press the button once, 'B' is twice, and 'Z' is twenty-six times... so as to avoid a lot of work, I programmed it to say 'BAA.' As I spun it around, I got a lot of odd looks.

The toy vendor was also selling little handheld thingies with Winnie-the-Pooh on them, and when you turned it on, he would spin around and little glowing honeybees would whirl around him. "Spinny the Pooh!" she exclaimed, with the kind of half-crazed grin on her face that can only mean she had been selling those things for far too long.

This showing of Fantasmic we went to was the second one tonight. The ampitheater (Disney/MGM Studios has a special area for Fantasmic, with a stadium-style seating area, much better than Disneyland's sprawl-on-the-ground seating) was only about half-full. MacB explained that this is usually what happens, as most people pack into the first showing then leave the park. We practially had the entire Jafar seating section to ourselves.

After the show, we called it a night and headed home. Much fun! Thank you for coming out, MacB... and you didn't even get injured once!

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