DISNEYLAND/DISNEYWORLD APPRECIATION!!! PUT IN UR ORDER FOR AN NT DISNEY SPIRIT JERSEY NOW!!!

[sneaksfiend]

Star Wars Land is gonna be huge!

I agree, it's a good film but if I'm being honest it is overkill at this point.

I forget... when is star wars supposed to open?

When is GOTG tower opening?

 

[lightweight champion]

I don't think there's a timetable for Star Wars Land to open but if I remember correctly they are aiming to open Guardians of the Galaxy in May 2017.

 

[niketalker23]

GOTG TOT has not been confirmed.

 

[rfx45]

Most insiders believe it practically is from what I've been reading. They might coincide it's opening with of GotG2 next year in May.

 

[jada2001retro]

A 2 year old was dragged into the water by a gator at the Grand Floridian about two hours ago.

Praying for the baby and his family.

 

[lightweight champion]

My thoughts and prayers to the baby and the family, but how did this happen???

 

[jada2001retro]

They were on the beach part at the Grand, ready to watch the 10pm fireworks show & he was just playing around in the water.

The gator just came up and grabbed him, his dad tried to fight him off and couldn't.

 

[rfx45]

that is crazy

did the gator snuck in the water because I assume they cleared out the waters of any dangers if people are allowed to go in near the water during the fireworks?

or were they trying to watch the fireworks outside the park?

 

[rillo561]

From what I read they pulled 4 gators out already

 

[Sneaker P]

New food alert: Churro funnel cake topped with a Mickey Mouse shaped whipped cream & caramel drizzle at the Hungry Bear Restaurant in Critter Country.
View media item 2069333

 

[Fozz]

New food alert: Churro funnel cake topped with a Mickey Mouse shaped whipped cream & caramel drizzle at the Hungry Bear Restaurant in Critter Country.

Oh, man. I need to go.

 

[niketalker23]

edit- actually nm

 

[lightweight champion]

That funnel cake looks legit.

 

[VinMillerHearn58]

Did anyone go to the final day of Soarin Over California?

It wasn't my favorite ride, so I didn't really mind it leaving

What are they turning it into?

 

[rfx45]

Churro Funnel Cake is must try my next visit. Sadly my AP is blocked out for the next two months

Did anyone go to the final day of Soarin Over California?

It wasn't my favorite ride, so I didn't really mind it leaving

What are they turning it into?

It's the same concept except this time it is soaring all over the world.

 

[VinMillerHearn58]

Churro Funnel Cake is must try my next visit. Sadly my AP is blocked out for the next two months

Did anyone go to the final day of Soarin Over California?

It wasn't my favorite ride, so I didn't really mind it leaving

What are they turning it into?

It's the same concept except this time it is soaring all over the world.

Oh, thats a little disappointing....

 

[lightweight champion]

Next thing you know they're gonna take California off California Screamin'. Midas whale change the name of the park since they're removing everything CA.

 

[rfx45]

still surprises me why Disneys attracting so many people this year the the budget cuts keep on coming

only a rumor at this point but I wouldn't even be surprised at this point

RUMOR: Disneyland Forever Fireworks To Be Discontinued for Budgetary Reasons

When the Disneyland Forever fireworks show was introduced as part of the Diamond Celebration in May 2015, we assumed it would stay beyond the anniversary event, just as “Remember, Dreams Come True” did ten years earlier during the 50th anniversary of Disneyland. Well, it seems the show will conclude along with the Diamond Celebration come September 5th, 2016.

Why discontinue Disneyland’s biggest fireworks show ever? It is drawing record crowds and has proven ever-so-popular. Well, the show is big and expensive and Disneyland doesn’t seem to think they need it anymore.

Now, Disneyland does have two seasonal shows that they can slot in following the departure of Forever in September, the preexisting Halloween and Christmas fireworks shows. Certainly these two shows could carry the burden on select nights until the beginning of 2017, but instead of bringing Forever back at that point, Disneyland may reinstate the Magical fireworks show or introduce a new, smaller scale show in comparison to the current offering.

Unfortunately, this cancellation is part of a trend at the Disneyland Resort. In addition to budget cuts that have closed various restaurants around the resort, the spending constraints have left the long-standing Mad T Party staging and such over the Hollywood Land area in place, simply because it would cost $200,000 to restore the area to its former state.

 

[rfx45]

Elie Wiesel Visits Disneyland
The Holocaust survivor’s underappreciated journalistic work for ‘The Forverts,’ unearthed—including a dispatch from The Happiest Place on Earth

Twelve years after his liberation from Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel found himself in “the happiest place on earth.” At the time, he was a struggling journalist in New York and worked as the foreign correspondent at the United Nations for the Tel-Aviv-based newspaper Yediot Aharonot. To earn some extra money, Wiesel wrote Yiddish articles in Der Morgen Journal, submitted a 26-chapter serialized novel to Der Amerikaner, and contributed a regular Yiddish column to The Forverts.

But in early 1957, Wiesel was slowly recovering from his injuries after being hit by a car in Manhattan’s Times Square. In an effort to raise his spirits, Wiesel’s editor from Yediot Aharonot Dov Yudkovsky and wife Leah came to America for a visit and as Wiesel would later describe in All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995):

We went to concerts, restaurants. By now I was walking with a cane, which I thought made me look distinguished, but I tired easily. They rented a car and invited me to join them on a six-week cross-country trip, from New York to Los Angeles. Since Dov was my boss I didn’t have to worry about work, so I went. We discovered an America unknown to us, totally different from New York or Washington, which were the only places I knew. Interminable highways disappeared into a blue horizon ringing tall mountains embedded in skies of shifting colors. There were cascading rivers and peaceful brooks, green valleys and yellow hills, violent storms and dramatic sunsets. Never before had I been so close to nature. From the hills of San Francisco we gazed upon small towns floating in the fog as in a dream. In the Rocky Mountains the clouds seemed to wear a crown of snow, to touch it you would have to climb to God’s throne. Enchanting mirages, they are so disconcerting you cannot tell which is close and which is far, which is real and which is not. You have a sense of being present at a re-creation of the world.

Wiesel goes on to describe three stops from his six-week trip: the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and at an American Indian reservation in Arizona, where he met a Holocaust survivor “who made his living as an Indian by day while remaining a Jew by night,” and made a note in his diary: “America is truly a wonderland. Even the Indians speak Yiddish.”

After reading his account, I was intrigued with where else Elie Wiesel might have gone on that six-week-long American road-trip. Upon further research, I was surprised that there wasn’t any further mention of this trip within the vast literature and scholarly discussion that has emerged over the past half-century surrounding Elie Wiesel. While there have been several bibliographies and collections of Wiesel’s articles published over the years, one scholar was honest enough to state that “no attempt was made to list the [Forverts] articles written while Mr. Wiesel was a correspondent.” Nearly all of the scholars who have studied the work of Elie Wiesel over the past half-century have ignored his Yiddish newspaper articles.

Wiesel’s articles in The Forverts are not digitized online and so my first stop was to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research at the Center for Jewish History in New York, where the librarians and staff were of great assistance. After several hours of research, I found all of Wiesel’s articles from his 1957 road-trip. More than a year later and after many dozens of hours spent going through every page of Forverts from the mid-1950s until 1970, I have identified nearly one thousand articles that Wiesel wrote that ranged from works of Jewish literature and new books on the Holocaust, to a look at the religious and cultural events around New York, and meetings with Jewish dignitaries and visiting Israeli politicians. I also found “A Visit to the Wonderful Disneyland.”

Wiesel begins by observing:

I don’t know if a Garden of Eden awaits adults in the hereafter. I do know, though, that there is a Garden of Eden for children here in this life. I know because I myself visited this paradise. I have just returned from there, just passed through its gates, just left the magical kingdom known as Disneyland. And as I bid that kingdom farewell, I understood for the first time the true meaning of the French saying ‘to leave is to die a little’ [partir, c’est mourir un peu]

As the article continues, it reads (as one would expect) like a tourist would describe visiting any new location: “Disneyland is located in California, 30 miles from Los Angeles. And despite the fact that its name does not appear on any official map of California, and certainly not on a map of America, you can go to any travel agency, be it in New York or Paris, in Tel Aviv or Tokyo, in Berlin or Johannesburg, and buy a plane ticket to Disneyland.”

Wiesel the journalist provides the history of Disneyland, as well as some of the (then) contemporary statistics of its daily operation:

Walt Disney officially announced the opening of Disneyland as a children’s world in 1955. The work lasted just over a year: a year and a day. And when you consider the huge undertaking that was completed in the course of such a short span of time, you start to believe that the Master of the Universe could in fact have created the world in just six days. … It’s true that He had no collaborators, but He is still God! Speaking of God, it’s not yet clear to me whether we must thank Him for creating the world and mankind, but I am certain that all children who visit Walt Disney’s paradise will thank Him endlessly for having built Disneyland. Anyway, let us descend once again below God’s heavens and return to our little kingdom. About a thousand people are employed there, taking on various—and rather remarkable—positions as carriage drivers, captains of ships, and pilots of moonplanes. Disneyland has: an orchestra that gives 1,460 concerts a year; 24 restaurants that can serve 8,000 people an hour and sell a million hotdogs a year; its own trains, ships, rivers, police, and fire brigade. A kingdom unto itself—quite literally. A kingdom all of whose citizens are happy; a kingdom that relates, not only to man, but to animals as well, humanely. For instance: Any horse that works in Disneyland may not work more than four hours a day or more than six days a week. In many, many countries, people would die for such working conditions.

From the $1 entrance-fee to Disneyland—in contrast, Disney announced several months a ago that a single-day ticket is now $99—Wiesel takes his reader on a tour around the park, where “before your astonished eyes unfolds a magical realm, where daily worries and troubles have no place.” From Main Street, U.S.A. and Frontierland “as [the Western City] would have looked years ago,” with its “colorful tramways, pulled by horses [that] traverse the main streets; outmoded taxis; affable, smiling policemen turn around, seemingly having just jumped out of a very old film; and just over there is a store where they sell everything from ‘revolvers’ to bags of gold, gifts, and cowboy hats.” He then boards the train “through a desert where skeletons and Indians look at you with their dead stares” before disembarking to get his ticket for the Mark Twain Riverboat and travel down the giant Mississippi River, remarking “the ship is terrific, the river formidable.”

Wiesel finishes his travels through America’s past and heads now to “take a stroll through the land of the future, which is also a province of Disneyland” and describes the (now-closed) House of the Future shortly after it opened in the Summer of 1957: “Futuristic man will live such a wonderful life! Everything will come to him so, so easily! If someone knocks at the door, you won’t have to go to see who it is: He will appear on the screen of your television. If the telephone rings, you’ll be able to see the person you’re speaking with and not just hear his voice. And a thousand other such conveniences will turn your house into a royal palace and transform you yourself into a lazy, fat, lonely king.”

Several times in the article, Wiesel reflects on his appreciation of Walt Disney—“the person who created this land, this universe, must be a genius, a rare genius”—and then shares the anecdote that he was told of how Walt Disney often walks around Disneyland in disguise. Wiesel understands why: “If one wants to calm his nerves and forget the bitter realities of daily life, there is no better-suited place to do so than Disneyland. In Disneyland, the land of children’s dreams, everything is simple, beautiful, good. There, no one screams at his fellow, no one is exploited by his fellow, no one’s fortune derives from his fellow’s misfortune. If children had the right to vote, they would vote Disney their president. And the whole world would look different.”

Wiesel concludes his description of visiting Disneyland with a story from four years earlier, when he was a journalist covering the Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera and had the opportunity to interview Walt Disney in person after the latter had been awarded the French Légion d’Honneur in honor of his cinematographic contributions. (Wiesel would himself later receive this same award in 1984, two years before he won the Nobel Peace Prize.)

At a ceremony that was flowing with champagne, surrounded by screenwriters, producers, and film personalities from around the world, Elie Wiesel approached Walt Disney and asked: “The whole world loves you; your children’s films have brought you honor, renown, and anything one could wish for. I want to ask you: What is your goal? What do you want—what would you want—to achieve with your film work?”

Wiesel then writes:

“Disney thought for a bit, fixing his large eyes on a far off, invisible point in space, and answered:

‘Childhood. The goal of my work has always been to awaken a sense of youth in men, in adults. Because—the best part of man’s life is his childhood.’ ”

Wiesel’s ending places the Holocaust survivor next to Mickey Mouse, in a way that feels at once jarring and profound and that Walt Disney would certainly have appreciated:

“Difficult as it is to admit, I did not understand his words at the time. I do understand them better now, however, having been to Disneyland.

“Today, I visited not only Disneyland, but also—and especially—my childhood.”

 

[nikekid6]

just went to the first time on sunday... ive lived in la for 8 years now and just made it out there now.. smh at me

 

[rfx45]

how was your experience?

 

[nikekid6]

how was your experience?

not big on roller coasters so i usually have a universal season pass... i love the selection at universal

chick i went w made me go on the tower. never again

some rides imo didnt feel disneyish.

the staff at disney was phenomenal

LOVED hyperspace mountain and the cars ride.

onnly wish is i hoped to get a beer at more places than just CA

we were real efficient w lines and fast passes...
an employee even gave us a readmission pass to Hyperspace mountain ... kill that 75 min wait

the baddies at disney

im a fan of disneyland now. (ive been to disneyworld)

 

[niketalker23]

Going on my five day trip starting Tuesday.

 

[memphisboi55]

Tower of Terror my fave!


I buy a 3 day hopper once a year. I usually go thxgiving week.

 

[niketalker23]

I usually do a 3 Day hopper but im doing a 5 this time.