i shook my laptop so much that the picture tuned to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8bpIh2B-30
looks like they tuned the lighting levels way down in under the sea, and the hair looks 100% better, it also looks like Ariel moves much more
WARNING! SPOILERS FOR THE DCA AND WDW VERSIONS OF MERMAID AHEAD!
I broke down and went over to the park this evening and rode Little Mermaid 2.0 twice in a row with a friend in town for a dentist's convention at the Anaheim Convention Center. I also had ridden Mermaid at DCA last week twice in a row to get a good point of reference for Mermaid 1.0 prior to the rehab. DCA was busy this evening, and the wait time was posted at 10 minutes but both times I only waited 6 minutes in a quickly shuffling line as the Omnimover gobbled us all up.
Once you are on the ride....
it's a noticeable improvement! The YouTube video above captures the main stuff rather poorly, but obviously it's hard to capture the animation and lighting levels in a ride like this. They call them "dark rides" for a reason.
The animation of Ariel looks much, much better. It now looks like a really HD, colorful version of circa 1989 animation, instead of the bizarre Japanese-ish computer animation it had looked like before. The computer animation bugged me more than any robotic hairdo ever did, and it's great that it's fixed!
The lighting in several scenes isn't actually darker than before, as they had turned down the lighting levels throughout the ride by late 2011. What is different, and what makes it look "darker" though is the addition of new watery projections and bubble projections in several rooms. There's a lot more shimmering and sparkling and rising bubbles on walls and sets throughout several of the rooms, and I think all of those new projections make the rooms come to life more and the effect is it enhances the already darkened sets and rooms.
There's also more seaweed placed about in the big Under The Sea room, and a lot more foliage and tree branches in the Kiss The Girl scene. The effect makes both rooms look more layered and deeper.
And finally, and most noticeably, there's the new Ariel animatronic in the Under The Sea room. Her new hairdo looks much better. I never really understood the big deal with her beehive hairdo, as I thought it looked fine. But this new hairdo that just sort of flows behind her in a slightly different way than it does in the grotto where she sings I Want To Be Where The People Are looks really great. It's a nice change.
It also helped that the whole ride still looks amazing! All the animatronics were working nicely, Ursula's big musical production number looked fabulous, the lighting and projections were spot on, the audio was crystal clear, the queue and CM's were sparkling and fresh and polite, and the whole experience was just fun.
This is a great addition with a very fast moving line for DCA, and it will be a nice offering for Magic Kingdom as well even though there it will have NextGen xPass and all that stuff instead of just a normal 10 minute line to wait through. :sohappy:
