The Miscellaneous Thought Thread

PiratesMansion

Well-Known Member
Hyperspace is a must-see exactly once when it comes around, and only for the near-miss TIE Fighter moment. Soarin' over California is a masterpiece and I don't think I could ever get sick of it.
I did Hyperspace in Hong Kong. I'm guessing they're the same or similar, but yeah, once was enough for me.

SOC is to SOTW as DL Pirates is to MK Pirates.
 

CaptinEO

Well-Known Member
Hot take, but Hyperspace Mountain is the greatest Star Wars ride Disney has created so far.
My only problem with the ride is the voices from your "commander/copilots?" during the ride are sped up to the level they sound like minnie mouse on helium.

No one in Star Wars sounds like that. I have a feeling they recorded some lines with a voice actor at normal speed and then realized that a roller coaster moved through the scenes too fast for the clips to play through, so they sped up the recordings.

I still can't get over how weird the voice sounds, doesn't sound human at all, it's like a sped up tape cassette the entire ride.

If they fixed this I would have no complaints.
 

mickEblu

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Absolutely blissful at the parks yesterday. I had a feeling it would be even after a particular vlogger said it would be packed. You start getting a sense for these things after a while. It was great to get on POTC again and I got my son (who rides Space Mountain almost every visit) on after a year saying he was scared of it. Don’t get me wrong he was terrified until after the first dropped but then he realized it wasn’t as bad as he remembered. So it’s back on the rotation!

Pleasantly surprised with Napolini. We tried some pizza on the way back to the car. Million times better than anything in the parks. I wouldn’t say I’m a pizza snob but I know good Pizza and have eaten a lot of it at most of the best places in So Cal. The quick Margherita I had yesterday was more than serviceable.
 

SuddenStorm

Well-Known Member
Absolutely blissful at the parks yesterday. I had a feeling it would be even after a particular vlogger said it would be packed. You start getting a sense for these things after a while. It was great to get on POTC again and I got my son (who rides Space Mountain almost every visit) on after a year saying he was scared of it. Don’t get me wrong he was terrified until after the first dropped but then he realized it wasn’t as bad as he remembered. So it’s back on the rotation!

Pleasantly surprised with Napolini. We tried some pizza on the way back to the car. Million times better than anything in the parks. I wouldn’t say I’m a pizza snob but I know good Pizza and have eaten a lot of it at most of the best places in So Cal. The quick Margherita I had yesterday was more than serviceable.

To be fair, a $5 hot and ready is better than what's in the parks, haha!
 

Phroobar

Well-Known Member
Happy Fourth of July!
dgd.jpg
 

waltography

Well-Known Member
Went to the parks yesterday to show some friends around and it was the first time in a while I actually stayed for longer than a few hours: 10am to midnight! Managed to swing the 9pm Fantasmic! followed by the 9:30pm fireworks in the middle of Main Street, then rode a few more rides before catching the Electrical Parade at 10:45.

Fantasmic! was in rough shape, unfortunately: the side fountains are still off, the magic carpet was broken, no cannons during the Pirates section, Belle was missing Beast in the princess medley, the pinwheels didn't go off on the Mark Twain during the finale, and there are fewer characters overall. The Electrical Parade was also experiencing some issues; there was a show stop for about 5-10 minutes where we got really familiar with Pan and Hook's fight choreography.
 

mickEblu

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Went to the parks yesterday to show some friends around and it was the first time in a while I actually stayed for longer than a few hours: 10am to midnight! Managed to swing the 9pm Fantasmic! followed by the 9:30pm fireworks in the middle of Main Street, then rode a few more rides before catching the Electrical Parade at 10:45.

Fantasmic! was in rough shape, unfortunately: the side fountains are still off, the magic carpet was broken, no cannons during the Pirates section, Belle was missing Beast in the princess medley, the pinwheels didn't go off on the Mark Twain during the finale, and there are fewer characters overall. The Electrical Parade was also experiencing some issues; there was a show stop for about 5-10 minutes where we got really familiar with Pan and Hook's fight choreography.

I went Friday and it was amazing. I’ve been kind of confused when folks around here and vloggers have been referring to the “busy summer season at Disneyland.” Summers have been the least busy time of year the last few years as a couple tiers of APs are blocked out. This year seems no different. Unless maybe people thought tourists and day guests would make up the difference due to the pent up traveling demand?
 

PiratesMansion

Well-Known Member
How did I not know it uses two standby lines, also why?


Pirates has always used two standby queues. Prior to FP/MP/LL, the same was also true for rides like BTM and HM.

I'm probably going to explain this poorly, but here's an attempt to explain their rationale:
If you have a ride with mega high capacity, you want to make sure it's all going to be utilized properly. One of the ways to do that is to actually divide the queue into two. If you just send everyone into one line, you run the risk that the line never gets long enough that you are properly utilizing the attraction's capacity potential, and what happens instead is that you're just sending out tons of seats empty.

Back when IOA had the Dueling Dragons coasters, they built two coasters, each with three trains for a total of six. Sounds like a great way to build a high capacity attraction, right? But Universal made the fatal flaw of building only one extra long queue to get to the ride, and the result was that the attraction much of the time never generated a big wait, and was using less capacity than it was capable of-which is something that parks don't like and has similarly spelled doom for attractions like America Sings or CBJ over the years. Gemini at Cedar Point used to run six trains at a time, but they had trouble actually getting people to the station fast enough to use that capacity, so they had to build another set of queues to direct people to the other side of the station and actually utilize all the capacity they had properly.

In order to properly use the high capacity potential on rides like Pirates, you need to get people to the station quickly and get a bit of a wait to build fairly early on so that as many seats leave the station filled as possible. That's why there are two queues.

So did they actually change the queue configurations? I had finally learned to always go right to avoid that long extended queue that the left side was always forced into.
 
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PiratesMansion

Well-Known Member
While I'm here: I've been starting to watch the Disneyland app to see if anything's changed/unusual from my last visit, and despite some escalated LL-related drama that's been popping up, I have to say that what is being shown on the app looks like, for the most part, typical summer waits from pre-2020 times.

THAT SAID: what's the deal with the train? I feel like it never used to be a big deal to get on the train and now I'm seeing 30 or 40 minute waits sometimes. Are they just not running enough trains to try and save a buck? Are they refurbing some of the engines? What's going on?
 

waltography

Well-Known Member
I went Friday and it was amazing. I’ve been kind of confused when folks around here and vloggers have been referring to the “busy summer season at Disneyland.” Summers have been the least busy time of year the last few years as a couple tiers of APs are blocked out. This year seems no different. Unless maybe people thought tourists and day guests would make up the difference due to the pent up traveling demand?
Totally agree; ever since they introduced the tiered pricing system + the APs hit a critical mass, summer became the off season for the parks. Yesterday was pleasant for the most part (until the evening, but crowd control can only go so far when you've got so many nighttime spectaculars).

While I'm here: I've been starting to watch the Disneyland app to see if anything's changed/unusual from my last visit, and despite some escalated LL-related drama that's been popping up, I have to say that what is being shown on the app looks like, for the most part, typical summer waits from pre-2020 times.
Wait times have been pretty good this summer; just yesterday, RotR hovered around 60-70 minutes for the most part, which I take as a sign that Disneyland isn't as crowded as it could be.
 

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