Disneyland Paris – Where the magic may happen at the weekend?
A few weeks ago my partner and I took a 5 day trip to the Disneyland Paris resort. Before we left we had heard many comments putting the place in a bad light, I had visited the park when it was Euro Disney about ten years prior, this had been my first Disney experience and the experience hadn’t been a memorable one. Since that time WDW has come into our lives and is now our regular haunt.
Our Florida trip is still a few months away and a trip to Disney Paris was going to be our cure until then. We went with an open mind to have a fun Disney time, so how does the park rate?
The Disney resort Paris consists of two parks, Disneyland and Disney Studios, there is also a small Disney Village. The parks, hotels and rides are well themed and look fantastic, as you’d expect from Disney! The thing that let the parks down big time was the lack of Disney magic!
But fist the good stuff!
“Disneyland” - As I said the themeing is great and the rides are great, Big Thunder Mountain and IASW stand out as our top two rides. Another must do are the shows, the Legend Of The Lion King and The Tarzan Encounter are top rate and full of the Disney spirit, a must see!
“Disney Studios” – The themeing here seemed a little slap dash, will let them off as it’s a relatively new park for Paris. The best ride here was Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster, not as great as the MGM studios version but still the best ride at Disney Studios. Show wise they have Moteurs Action which was a brilliant stunt show, this is the first time we have seen this show and it was great, can’t wait to see how it translates to MGM studios. Another must see fun show is Animagique, this is a UV puppet and live action show featuring Donald Duck who breaks into the studio vaults and experiences some bizarre characters come to life. It’s a visual delight with a catchy theme tune (does any one know where I can get hold of it?)
The bad stuff!
“Disneyland” – One thing that hit us hard was the lack of Disney magic from the majority of the cast members. In our whole 5 day trip to the parks we met about 3 great cast members who were chatty, smiled and seemed happy to be there. The rest seemed unhappy and more interested in chatting with each other than the guests. It is so true when they say that the cast members make the magic! My hat goes off to the hard work and professionalism of the WDW cast members, however the Paris cast have much to learn. It took a lot of cajoling for any of the Paris cast to smile or talk to us. Even as they walked through the park they didn’t seem to want to make eye contact with the guests.
Another major disappointment was that there was absolutely no mention of the 50th Celebration. No signs, no banners, no pins and no promotion what so ever! After reading and seeing the photos of the build up and celebrations from the other parks around the world, it was a total let down that there was no mention from our European representative.
The New ride at Disneyland Paris is Space Mountain Mission 2, the first time we rode it was great, great music and great visuals. The second time was also great music and visuals but the ride was very rough and gave me a bad headache from my head hitting either side of the shoulder restraint, and my partner got bad neck and shoulder pain from the shoulder restraints as well. We could only bare the pain for a couple more rides. Another oversight for this ride was in the queue lines, they need bins! There was a lot of litter and the queue area gets darker as you go up steps, the empty plastic bottles on the steps are very dangerous and there were a lot of them! Bottles not steps! Another queue line that we felt needed attention was for Big Thunder Mountain, the graffiti along this line is a problem.
My last gripe about Disneyland Paris is the Parade. The floats were ok (looks as though they had borrowed from different parks) but the parade lacked theme, magic and imagination. The parade started with a song called Dancin’ A Catchy Rhythm, we thought this was a great song to start the parade with! However this one song was the parade! It repeated again and again and again with no variance or theme to the floats going past. An annoying, boring and disappointing parade!
“Disney Studios” – The lack of magic flowed over into the Studios as well. On our very first visit we took our place along the marked parade route ready for the ‘Good Morning Walt Disney Studios Parade’. The park was quiet and we would have a great view point for photos except for one thing, the parade stopped 100 yards before our view point. The parade had gone off the parade route and headed over to the Production Courtyard, at which point the characters had a meet and greet. We had a mad dash over to the characters to try and get some photos, as did a lot of people standing by us. When we got over to the characters they were walking all over the place, there seemed to be no organized queue lines for the characters. It was very frustrating that we couldn’t get photos of the characters in the cars and even more so because we couldn’t get nice shots of the characters with all this mayhem. There were no cast members with a lot of the characters and this was also the case later in our trip as well, we met Friar Tuck on one occasion and his inner sleeves were falling down showing a real arm. There was no cast member to tell! We gave up in the end with the morning parade meet and greet and went on the rides. This was a bad first impression! The music for this parade was the “Cars and Movie Stars” theme from MGM Studios, they had done a Disney Studios voice over and it was left to run in the back ground. A “Now it’s time to meet your favourite Disney stars” would have been nice, but no! If the park map had mentioned this parade change there would have been no disappointments!
The rest of our Studios visit was great except for the less than enthusiastic cast members. Also on our journey out of the park we saw Goofy in the ‘Lilo & Stitch Catch the wave party’ in the Production Courtyard and as we walked out through the front lot of the park we saw another Goofy having a meet and greet! What are they playing at?
So to sum up, we had a really nice short break and enjoyed the rides and shows. Be aware, if you do visit make sure you hold your ground in the queue lines as we found the people in the queues here the rudest ever. If you take a step forward they are on your heals and bumping into you. And should you happen to turn and talk to a friend they will push past you in a shot. Also, the parks here are seasonal, there are no fireworks until the busy summer months and you will find most of the restaurants closed mid week until this busier time. This was a let down and made us feel like second class Disney visitors.
We weren’t expecting a duplicate WDW but we were hoping that the same magic might be there. It wasn’t and the lack of magic let it down big time. They don’t seem to be as ‘on top of things’ as we hoped they would be, from silly Goofy mistakes to misinformation we felt very let down by the Paris resort. If the park had been a magical Disney experience then our visits would have become regular, as it stands we may visit again in about 10 years. In the mean time we will keep booking and looking forward to vacations in WDW Florida.
A few bad show photos
Space Or Thunder?
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This was the sign at the entrance to Thunder Mountain.
Star Tours - Dust Anyone?
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A Broken screen gathers dust - Two screens at this entrance were caked in dust. It would have only taken a minute to clean and would have given a better impression.
