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Disney World Joins 50-Somethings: Grown-Up Attractions
If you’ve got kids, you probably recall that Disney’s “Happiest Celebration on Earth" was a much publicized company-wide initiative marking the 50th birthday of the original Disneyland. Disney showed us this was one aging Boomer who’s not ready to retire: from several new attractions, to a wall decorated with commemorative tiles created by past visitors, new guest service initiatives, to the opening of a spectacular theme park in Hong Kong, 2006 was a very busy year for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. Fortunately, all the innovation made Disney World in Orlando even more fun for parents and grandparents.
Yes, 2006 was Disneyland's 50th birthday, but this dowager didn't receive the facelift that the Orlando park did. Instead, Magic Kingdom’s centerpiece Castle received a gilding and a nip n'tuck for the worldwide celebration. The new parade designed for the celebration, Wishes, has since been voted the park’s #1 attraction by visitors, and takes place on Main Street each evening. Other park enhancements have been ongoing too.
Disney World Scales Everest
Disney World Orlando, where there's more real estate to develop, seized the milestone to open one of its best recent adult attractions, Expedition Everest, a themed coaster ride at Animal Kingdom. Guests are plunged into an engrossing storyline as a climbing team boards a steep mountain railway and comes across an angry Yeti. This mystical hairy-ape-like creature, sacred to the Nepalese and Chinese who believe he protects their “mother” mountain, shadows the entire ride experience, from the detailed Serka Zong village in the Himalayas where park guests join the expedition, to the foothills of Everest, where he...
Designed for guests taller than 44” including active grands, and perfectly suitable for the first ride after lunch, Expedition Everest is a fun, mile-long ride with an 80-foot-drop, dark elements and plot twists. Our group of avid travelers adored the authentic details of the base village and its three-tiered mandir or temple, carved with Yeti images. Landscapers brought in more than 900 bamboo plants, 10 species of trees, and 110 species of shrubs to convincingly transform the 6.2-acre parcel into the Himalayan foothills.
Here’s one ride where you won’t mind the wait, as the snaking queue route is lined with Everest memorabilia, research photographs from Nepal and Tibet, posters for trekking companies, aged woodwork, and pottery seemingly lifted from Namche Bazar (modeled after elements of the Ding Gua Shan monastery in Mustang, Nepal).
According to Joe Rohde, executive designer at Walt Disney Imagineering and the attraction’s passionate creator, “We started with the concept of a big iconic object – with an element of action and a man in conflict with Nature theme – to construct our story.”
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