No more tour guide on Living with the Land?

[imagineer boy]

Wasn't the original ride pre recorded? I have the audio on my ipod.

No. I know what you're talking about, and I think that it was done for a promo commercial or something. Jungle Cruise never had a pre recorded spiel. It has always had drivers because flume technology never existed when the Jungle Cruise was built in DL, so drivers were the only way to go.

 

[HoW]

A prerecorded tour would be a good thing in my eyes too. It seems like everytime I get on the boat I get a guide who is mad at the world, seems to hate his job, or just doesn't care. I don't think people jumping out would be too big of a problem, at least not something that could be fixed with a minor adjustment (like cameras). So all in all, I'm all for it.

 

[Epcot82Guy]

It depends on what they do with the show. The great thing is how much the internal show does change. Unfortunately, most people never know the stories of the plants on display. If it goes with a fully automated spiel, I'm afraid it will become completely generic (unless they are willing to switch audio parts every few months or so). You also have great variability with the speed of the canal, so sync-ing it with aspects of the greenhouses would pose a big problem. We'll see, though.

 

[unkadug]

It depends on what they do with the show. The great thing is how much the internal show does change. Unfortunately, most people never know the stories of the plants on display. If it goes with a fully automated spiel, I'm afraid it will become completely generic (unless they are willing to switch audio parts every few months or so). You also have great variability with the speed of the canal, so sync-ing it with aspects of the greenhouses would pose a big problem. We'll see, though.

Each area could have it's own audio track and it could be radioed to the boats.

Kinda like a puck system.

 

[Epcot82Guy]

Each area could have it's own audio track and it could be radioed to the boats.

Kinda like a puck system.

very true. I misspoke. The system was originally going to be fully recorded as one. They absolutely CAN. I should have said I have concens whether they WILL.

 

[yazmin182]

I had a guide that was also extremely boring and monotone. She had all her jokes memorized and she just repeated them and no one laughed. It was so awkward!

I agree with Unkadug, give the job to someone who cares and are more enthusiastic.

A recorded tape won't have the same appeal in my opinion.

 

[ScrapIron]

Well, this is the company that developed robots to replace actors.

Our last guide wasn't too bad, but I still remember the first, in 1983, and remarking at the time that it was unbelieveable that she was getting paid to talk.

Cheers.

 

[brkgnews]

Kinda torn on this one (if it's even true).

Pro: Definitely gets rid of the "bored" CM aspect. And who can blame them -- for the first half of the ride, their duties are to sit down and shut up. It's only once we hit the greenhouse that they get to actually do something.

Con: Constant re-recording would be neccesary (new plants, the latest total from the Tomato tree, etc).

Maybe they should start some actual "auditioning" for this role, rather than just memorization requirements?

 

[mousermerf]

I really think it would help the queue, as most the ride's problem is lack of staffing - no host, no boat.

I think with triggers along the ride path it would work pretty well. Kinda like the monorail and that is constantly updated.

 

[GymLeaderPhil]

I've had much better and more interested Cast Members on the parking lot trams lately. I don't think this would be a problem if deviation from the script was allowed. There is only so much that a person can do to add charm, depth, and life to a cut and dry script. Perhaps add a human interest (or animal rather) like Kilimanjaro Safaris?

I'm sure that main problem with letting the tour guides go wild would conflict with the scripted paid tours.

 

[BSikor]

I used to work on LwtL back in theday. I worked there from 94-98 and it is not the easiest tour to give. Most people are less than enthused about the information and most of the time you are intrupted by kids sticking their hands out of the boat. I personally give it my all each and every time. Well except this one time. But we won't talk about that.

Personally I have heard some really bad spiels, but I have also heard some really great ones. I hope they don't get rid of it.

It has always been a rumor, along it the funnier jungle crusie-like script and the waterfall drop in the storm scene.

 

[Shakes150]

As a former CP who was cross trained at the Land and speiled my butt off when I did it, I strongly doubt that they will go guideless. It's hard enough keeping guests seated and to not reach outside of the boat and grab plants as it is. It would also be rather unsafe if guests were unsupervised seeing as it is an open boat that is completely surrounded by water particularly in the rainforest scene.
Also, evacuations would take forever if the boats were not manned.
I stongly doubt that this will happen, however, anything is possible as someone else said. This is only my opinion. I look forward to seeing what may happen in September, if at all.
I think i was a fairly good guide as well, I even did trivia during the dark/slow times and gave stickers. And if it was your birthday, you sat next to me and the whole boat sang to you!
Ah, the good old days)

 

[mickey04]

I too am a recently retired LwtL tour guide-turned-Jungle skipper, and I've gotta say, it's a tough gig. The way the ride is set up right now with CDS (Cast Deployment System) CM's might have to go around 8 or 9 times straight (though in theory it shouldn't be more than 4). Add to that the dryness of the the speil and the fact that the greenhouse guys are all listening to you to make sure you stick to script, and you begin to understand why a lot of the cast there is unhappy.

Another problem is that a good amount of them are CP's and burnt-out full timers who are worked 50-60 hours a week and were not given the option of where they wanted to work, they were just put there. They're incredibly short-staffed right now (hence the reason there haven't been many boats on the flume) and quite a few new CPs in Operations will be going there as well, like it or not.

So maybe an automated speil is the answer, because I don't see Disney doing anything to fix its staffing problem in the near future. The ride system would need a serious upgrade if this was attempted however, as the pre-recorded speil in the show scenes hardly ever catch the sensors, and would be completely out of sync if there wasn't a CM on the boat to fix it.

 

[coastermaster83]

I got a wild idea. hows about they make the message recorded every morning on like a computer type system or once a week. I mean it wouldnt be that hard to do that and then pipe in the sound to the boats. They could get someone that has a nice sweet sounding angelic voice and they have them every sunday night come in and recored the 15 mins or whatever long speech so it would always be up to date each week. Hey it could work.

 

[lnsemsf]

Personally I think the guides should stay. I think it's much better to have a person going along. It feels more like it's tailerd to that specific trip, even if it's the same script over and over again. How often is a plant or group of plants changed out? If they change out something every few days then it seems like you'd have to have the voice guy on constant stand by. What if something changes and the guy isn't available to do the voiceover for several days, or if they don't think such a minor change is worth re-recording over. Eventually they get complacent with changing the spiel once every few weeks, or every month no matter what happens on the ride. I tend to think that with the way things occasionally get, it'll be easy to get lax on updating the audio. With a real person, even if he sounds slightly bored, at least you pretty much know it's accurate to that day.

 

[TP2000]

2. It would be unfortunate, seeing as for every bad performance by a tour guide, there tend to also be some inspired ones. I even had a guide that pulled the Strong Bad boat skipper routine: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail104.html

Which would be another excellent reason to get rid of the guides. Don't get me wrong, I loved that Strongbad Jungle Cruise vid when it came out a few years ago :lol: , but The Land boat ride is not where that humor belongs.

If the CM's can't stick to the script, and at least pretend to be interested, then they should replace the guides with a pre-recorded version. A lot of Imagineers spent a lot of money and hard work to make that ride the way it is, it shouldn't be ruined by a bored or poorly performing CM. There's probably some important folks at Nestle', and at Kraft Foods before them, who would also agree.

CM's should stick to the script, and do it well, or be replaced by a machine who can stick to the script and say it perfectly every single time.

 

[Punkss]

It must be a hard gig to do. We had a pretty good presenter who answered questions but that was during a busy period and an enthused boat but i imagine its not always that way. Piped audio would certainlly lose something in the lack of personalisation and human-ness but the recording would guarantee at least a base level of quality.

 

[Richie248]

A pre-recorded spiel with a nice background score would do it for me!

 

[Big-Bad-Dave]

I really don't think a "live" perrson is necessary. There is so much to look at while they are talking anyway. Maybe they could eliminate the jobs and with the money saved, open another Soarin'? LOL:lol:

 

[HauntedPirate]

I hope they keep the live tour guide in the boats. It's hard to enjoy the ride when you have an uninspired robot going thru the spiel (had one of those a few years ago), but that makes it that much more enjoyable when you get a good guide. And, hey, I didn't get an update on the tomato count in April when we rode!! :fork: :lol: