Professortango1
Well-Known Member
It all comes full circle!
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Tiana's Bayou Adventure: Disneyland Watch & Discussion
- Thread starter Californian Elitist
- Start date
TP2000
Well-Known Member
I distinctly remember when the Pooh ride opened in 2003 that all of us online complained that a British bear didn't belong in the American backwoods next to the Brer's and Davy Crockett.
Winnie The Pooh is most definitely a ride about a British bear. Along with the Peter Pan ride, which goes right over London and Big Ben, which is not an American city or landmark.
Critter Country was messed up, perhaps for all eternity, by the lousy leadership of Paul Pressler and Cynthia Harriss. It doesn't seem as though Josh D'Amaro or the current TDA President du Jour is much better than their idiot predecessors of 25 years ago.
Winnie The Pooh is most definitely a ride about a British bear. Along with the Peter Pan ride, which goes right over London and Big Ben, which is not an American city or landmark.
Critter Country was messed up, perhaps for all eternity, by the lousy leadership of Paul Pressler and Cynthia Harriss. It doesn't seem as though Josh D'Amaro or the current TDA President du Jour is much better than their idiot predecessors of 25 years ago.
SuddenStorm
Well-Known Member
I find it amusing that the reason cited for closure for CBJ was low viewership.
And the reasons cited by fans online to bring in Pooh were 1. More popular IP, will increase ridership and 2. Sell stuffed bears. But you can sell merchandise for a property that doesn't have an attraction in the park.
I've never seen Pooh with much of a wait, so I have a tough time imagining it's much more popular than CBJ, if at all. And in today's world of overlays and elaborate seasonal promotions I wonder if the park would have benefited from having the Country Bear Christmas special.
I wonder if Pooh is significantly less expensive to maintain since it doesn't have two theatres full of animatronics?
TP2000
Well-Known Member
The double-theater version Disneyland got in '72 had an hourly capacity of around 1,800+ people per hour, using only 3 or 4 hostesses to run the entire operation.
The Pooh dark ride that replaced it has an hourly capacity of less than 1,000 per hour. If some Disney spokeshole back in 2003 claimed Pooh would get them more capacity, they were clearly lying.
It might be, but I'm not sure. The ride system Pooh uses that requires 5 or 6 CM's may cause the hourly and annual operational expenses to be a complete wash, even if there are fewer animatronics in the Pooh ride compared to the dozens of animatronics in the double-theater CBJ show.
Rich T
Well-Known Member
The discussion most certainly has careened into the flower cart!
What have I done? Good choice in favorite Alice character. Poor Bill. My favorite’s the White Rabbit— But with the French audio track.
SuddenStorm
Well-Known Member
Not to mention, attractions CM's make $19.90/hour now- probably more than double what they made in the early 2000's. It has to change the math on if Pooh was viable as an attraction.
Luckily- with the higher pay we've seen attractions Cast Members really step up. The service these days is second to none, they're well groomed, and frankly put the CM's of old to shame.
Disney Irish
Premium Member
Which is all the more impressive with Felton's acting as she is from California near the Bay Area.
LittleBuford
Well-Known Member
This was the age when the Mid-Atlantic accent still held sway in a lot of entertainment, so I don't find it all that surprising that she could shift into a British-adjacent register. She actually sounds much more consistently posh in some of her other roles:Which is all the more impressive with Felton's acting as she is from California's Central Valley.
LittleBuford
Well-Known Member
I love Bill too!The discussion most certainly has careened into the flower cart!
How and why did you discover the French audio of the White Rabbit? I'll have to check it out myself.
PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
Adding my take to the weird tangents about British accents-Verna Felton sounds like Verna Felton as the Queen, and I don't know that I'd say her accent actually sounds British most of the time. Listen to her say "Silence!", "Off with her head", or even "Who painted my roses red?" Doesn't sound British at all to me. Maybe the Croquet line, but it sounds to me like more of a unique turn of phrase than really a British accent. But anyway...
CBJ had a much higher potential capacity than something like Pooh, but I believe that worked against the attraction. A high theoretical capacity means nothing if it's not utilized to its potential often enough to make park execs happy; similar logic has worked against attractions like America Sings, Mickey Mouse Revue (even though in that case there was a design flaw, where the preshow area wasn't large enough to hold a full house and so it was literally impossible for the attration to completely fill its theater), the various Circlevision films, etc. While it may be hearsay, I've heard it said multiple times around the interwebs that in the last few years DL didn't use both theaters at the same time; they simply kept one set up for the regular show and the other one set up for the Christmas show. Maybe that was cost-cutting, but I don't get the impression that demand was high enough for it to make a big difference in wait times for the majority of the year.
One thing that I think sometimes gets forgotten when talking about DL's Pooh is that it's relatively high capacity for a ride of its type; it loads two vehicles at a time, and each vehicle could theoretically hold six riders. So at any given time, assuming both load stations are being utilized, they could potentially load 66% more guests at a time than Snow White, Pinocchio, and even more than that for PPF, Toad, and Alice (due to the weight issues @Californian Elitist has discussed from time to time). So part of the reason the line is always short is due to location, but part of it is simply that it loads more efficiently than any comparable dark ride in the resort. Because of those factors, I imagine it gets better ridership than many people here might expect, even if the actual wait time is often pretty short.
It's definitely cheaper to maintain because DL's Pooh uses very cheap figures that wouldn't hold a candle in complexity to the CBJ figures. Even the WDW version (which predates the DL version) was built with a higher budget than DL's.
I get the impression that most Disneyland visitors never really got Country Bear Jamboree, though of course the location and double theater didn't help things. It might have helped if they did a full rotation of all the shows annually as they did in Tokyo, but it seems like such a thought didn't occur to Disney during the attraction's lifespan, and by the time Pressler was around I imagine there was no shot of such a thing being approved.
CBJ had a much higher potential capacity than something like Pooh, but I believe that worked against the attraction. A high theoretical capacity means nothing if it's not utilized to its potential often enough to make park execs happy; similar logic has worked against attractions like America Sings, Mickey Mouse Revue (even though in that case there was a design flaw, where the preshow area wasn't large enough to hold a full house and so it was literally impossible for the attration to completely fill its theater), the various Circlevision films, etc. While it may be hearsay, I've heard it said multiple times around the interwebs that in the last few years DL didn't use both theaters at the same time; they simply kept one set up for the regular show and the other one set up for the Christmas show. Maybe that was cost-cutting, but I don't get the impression that demand was high enough for it to make a big difference in wait times for the majority of the year.
One thing that I think sometimes gets forgotten when talking about DL's Pooh is that it's relatively high capacity for a ride of its type; it loads two vehicles at a time, and each vehicle could theoretically hold six riders. So at any given time, assuming both load stations are being utilized, they could potentially load 66% more guests at a time than Snow White, Pinocchio, and even more than that for PPF, Toad, and Alice (due to the weight issues @Californian Elitist has discussed from time to time). So part of the reason the line is always short is due to location, but part of it is simply that it loads more efficiently than any comparable dark ride in the resort. Because of those factors, I imagine it gets better ridership than many people here might expect, even if the actual wait time is often pretty short.
It's definitely cheaper to maintain because DL's Pooh uses very cheap figures that wouldn't hold a candle in complexity to the CBJ figures. Even the WDW version (which predates the DL version) was built with a higher budget than DL's.
TP2000
Well-Known Member
Yes! Isn't it great? A new 21st Century Golden Age that puts 20th century CM slobs like this to shame...
Interesting point on the cost of labor factoring in to an attraction's cost. You could see how they had 3 CM's running the entire double-theater show, as the CM who came out and welcomed you in and opened the automagic doors in the lobby would then do the pre-show and post-show announcements inside the actual theater. Plus a CM at the turnstiles. That was it.
But sure, the brain trust at TDA circa 1999 knew better than those old losers from Walt's day.
Homemade Imagineering
Well-Known Member
Weren’t the ride vehicles for Pooh tested on Superstar Limo’s busbar track shortly before opening?
Ne'er-Do-Well Cad
Well-Known Member
And accordingly it’s a much better attraction.
I just wish it weren’t so completely out of the realm of possibility that they could plus-up Pooh at Disneyland. Even just making the sets more 3-dimensional would go a long way, to say nothing of adding some projections or better quality characters.
I understand it’s an attraction for young children but we know the 21st-century Disney company can do better than plywood.
Rich T
Well-Known Member
I bought the film on Apple TV (formerly the video section of iTunes) and found it includes the option to switch the audio to French, Spanish, or English-with-Descriptive-narration. Just checked Amazon. and it lists the DVD and Blu Ray as having the French and Spanish Audio options as well. I highly recommend checking them out!
You know how the English White Rabbit has voice actor Bill Thompson’s Ranger Woodlore meekness to it? There’s none of that in the French dub; he sounds super-stressed and *angry*.
And French Bill sounds like a Smurf.
Rich T
Well-Known Member
The Florida version flows better, and its unique scene, Owl’s house, is brilliant. The vehicle bouncing is actually fun, and the ride doesn’t lamely end with “Wake up, Pooh, it’s your birthday!”
If the DL version had Mr. Toad’s ending, I’d enjoy the ride 100% more. Come to think of it, though, that twist would be more historically relevant for the Florida version. Toad could be the engineer.
truecoat
Well-Known Member
A one-day ticket in 2005 was $56. I think the CM pay is not a factor.
Consumer
Well-Known Member
Is this joke? I genuinely can’t tell.
Disney Analyst
Well-Known Member
It really feels like this have picked up pace.
Disney Irish
Premium Member
I had figured it was ~3 months behind WDW, but the way its looking it could be only a 1-2 months behind now. My prediction of opening by D23 is coming into focus.
Drew the Disney Dude
Well-Known Member
- In the Parks
- Yes
Here we go!!