Greg Maletic
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The Fortress
The Fortress, though it looks like a castle, isn’t really a castle in the vein of those found in the Magic Kingdom parks. Instead, it’s a place to explore, more like Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer Island. The Fortress provides a dozen or so rooms to discover, each with a Renaissance-inspired scientific or artistic mini-exhibit. One room showcases a Foucault’s Pendulum, suspended thirty or so feet from the rafters, knocking down a single peg a day as the world rotates around it. Another shows an illusionary painting whose image only comes into focus when standing in a particular spot. Tiny radio-controlled boats let you circumnavigate the flattened pre-Columbian world map (and are surprisingly fun!). Faux cannons that you fire by pulling a rope fuse let you pass the time shooting at the Transit Steamer boats, just as visitors to Fort Sam Clemens do with their rifle fire, attempting to hit the Mark Twain Riverboat at Disneyland. As with everything else at DisneySea, the fortress is filled with the kinds of detail that Disney fans love, from its beautiful cobalt-and-gold domes to an elegant sculpted fountain with medieval sea serpents.
Detail is everywhere in DisneySea. I wasn’t prepared for the ornate New York buildings in the American Waterfront. American Waterfront functions as a kind of Main Street for DisneySea, hosting the majority of the park’s shopping and eating facilities. (This park actually has two Main Streets if you count Mediterranean Harbor.) It was most fascinating because the amount of detail put into the buildings would, on paper, seem to make them "too" real. (One of the buildings even has fire escapes down its front!) I would have bet you beforehand that making the buildings so authentic would miss out on the charming abstraction of Disneyland’s Main Street, but after seeing DisneySea’s New York, the Main Street buildings seem like mere cardboard cut-outs.
The awestruck feeling continued as my family stepped on board the park’s huge ocean liner, The Columbia, for a drink in the ship’s Teddy Roosevelt lounge. (The ship’s rendition of a margarita isn’t quite what one from the West would expect; go for a beer instead.) I’ve heard that the Columbia is a stylistic carryover from when the park was targeted for a location next to the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. Whether this story is true or not, it seems like for somebody high up in Imagineering, The Columbia was the heart of what they were trying to build in DisneySea. The lounge--in fact, the entire ship--is extraordinarily ornate. So much so, in fact, that it provoked as much confusion in me as admiration. Despite its enormous physical presence, the Columbia seems a kind of "throwaway" element of the park: it contains a restaurant but no attractions (no attractions are even nearby), and despite the fact that I loved it, if it weren’t there, it would never have been missed. For Disney to have put so much effort into something that will generate relatively little revenue seemed, well, bewildering, even to someone like me who both expects and demands that Disney go a little over-the-top. I’m sure that Disney’s aware that even the largest budgets can be spent too easily, and the fact that the Columbia made it into the park in such an elaborate fashion is remarkable.
Most visitors new to the park would assume that the most popular attraction in Mysterious Island would be the big-budget Journey to the Center of the Earth ride or 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, but they’d be dead wrong. The most popular attraction in the park is Mysterious Island’s Gyoza Sausage Bun cart, which had a line of at least sixty to seventy people going almost all day long. In terms of return-on-investment, this food cart is easily the most lucrative portion of the park. Beyond providing sausage buns, Mysterious Island doesn’t disappoint. Geysers explode with regularity (and what an explosion: that’s a lot of water!), a one-third scale Nautilus is docked to one side while Transit Steamers plow their way through the center of the caldera. It all looks fantastic. A little sterile and creepy looking, even--it’d be nice to have just a little bit of vegetation in there--but it’s still great. (I hope the Imagineers left a little room to put a Nautilus walkthrough in Mysterious Island: although its detail is extraordinary, the place begs for a place to spend a little more time taking it all in and immersing one’s self in the atmosphere. A re-creation of Paris’ Mysteries of the Nautilus (maybe just a little more elaborate!) would be a great way to accomplish this.)
Other less heralded areas of the park are nearly as spectacular. Since Mermaid Lagoon is almost entirely indoors and photos of it are hard to come by, it was a bit of a mystery to me. A pleasant surprise, it’s arguably the most successful themed land in the park. Mermaid Lagoon builds a sense of drama in its entryway: after passing a beautiful statue of King Triton at the entrance, small windows give you seductive glimpses into the truly outstanding visual of the play area. The Imagineers did a fantastic job here: the activity area looks convincingly like a scene from the animated movie.
And after covering Disney’s Tomorrowlands in my last column, DisneySea’s Port Discovery was of particular interest. The concept doesn’t make any sense--there isn’t much to discover here, and the idea of a futuristic seaport is an odd one--but it really doesn’t matter because it looks so good. Obviously inspired by some Imagineer’s beautiful sketch, Disney was evidently willing to cook up whatever "back-story" it could in order to build it. I especially liked the prototype watercraft sprinkled around the port’s harbor, as well as the giant, spinning gyroscope-like sculpture that serves as the land’s icon. (Boy, is that thing big.)
I could go through every other "land" step-by-step, but my words don’t really add up to much: it all looks great. Arabian Coast, Lost River Delta, New England Harbor…they’re all as elaborately done as any Disney fan could hope for.