B.E.N.’s Backyard, a room in the South West corner off of the Town Square that has a spongy anti-gravity floor perfect for rough housing and falling about, a jungle-gym geo-dome to be scaled, tunnels to climb through, teeter-planks, and soft ping-pong ball firing cannons for “defending the ship.�? The crossfire alone kept me at the entrance since a stray ball or two managed to zing out into the passage. The perfect environment for working off a pint-sized sugar high from the Krispy Kreme’s.

Thankfully I’d worn off my sugar excess back in the Town Square, so we moved on to Flint’s Trove, just south of Town Square. Philip and I both discovered this room a bit late in the game or otherwise we’d have been in the thick of it. Flint’s Trove is a race from a portal to the treasure back to a treasure chest, between which are a maze of laser beam booby traps and alarms crossing your path. The dark-room atmosphere filled with smoke permits perfect clarity of the laser beams. The florescent treasure chips are carried from the portal window back to your treasure chest where a mechanism counts the number of coins you’ve amassed. You have to avoid breaking the beam of the lasers by jumping over them, crawling under them or lifting your team-mate across them with caution otherwise points are deducted from your electronic scoreboard just above your portal. At the end of each timed round the winning team is signaled by a flashing light. It’s a sort of preparatory program for Vegas in the Vega Galaxy that looked like more fun than anything else in the attraction and an ideal game for families or groups of all ages.

The remaining room is a Virtual Gallery which was my favorite for obvious reasons. This is my territory, and it was a treat to watch friends and colleagues in video tape segments about the making of the film (a sneak peek of what will be on the supplemental disc for the deluxe “Treasure Planet�? DVD.) Here too are reproductions of various visual development art and the maquettes for the characters. Plus there were stations to make spin-art and a very charming Build Your Own Buccaneer station for the craft-minded younger set and the young-hearted crafty adult, too (little “Bekah�? Moseley was last seen headed in that direction….hmmmmm.)

Scattered throughout the attraction in each room are photo-email stations where you can have a digital photo of you and yours taken in front of a variety of “Treasure Planet�? backgrounds, and then send them as a postcard to a loved one (or, if you’re as bad with a digital camera as I proved to be, you send it to yourself!)

At this point Philip was exhausted or coming down from a sugar high, one of the two, and we hung out in Town Square to compare notes on the film for a minute or two, then exchanged a hip secret hand shake (I’m telling ya’ that posse is just around the corner, I can feel it!) and Philip went home while I went back to get more pictures that didn’t turn out. *sigh*

All in all this is one of the most enjoyable of the Disney premier attractions in recent years. Part of the success is the choice to move out of the adjacent building to the El Cap with its limited ceiling height and multiple floors that caused rather maddening traffic patterns. The tent is a big relief and made everything flow much more comfortably, particularly for parents with small children. It also adds to the grandeur and the efficacy of the scale appropriate to the theme of the film. I wish the “Atlantis�? and “Lilo & Stitch�? attractions had the benefit of this. Only “A Bugs Life�? seemed appropriate in the ant-hill-like confines of the adjoining space. “Finding Nemo�? will no doubt inspire something marvelous. Nemo’s oceanic expanse fits much better in the tent and would make for a magical and sweeping environment which I hope they’ll avail themselves of come spring of 2003.