Discovery

Well, the plans for New Fantasyland East that Jim Hill told me about last week have been released, and, while there are the usual suspects running around in circles proclaiming that The End Is Nigh and chewing each other's ears, there is a lot of positivity amongst the Disney fandom. 

Yeppers, Snow White's Scary Adventures is going into the history books.  The original is still, like Mr. Toad, at Disneyland in California, so it's truly not the end of the world.  The new coaster promises to be at least as fun as Casey Jr., which I missed in Florida and really love in California.  If you haven't ridden it in a while, please do!  It really scoots in some places and the eye candy is great.

I still miss the Nautili plowing through the waters of Fantasyland, but 90% of the kids visiting WDW have never heard of him.  It's a shame, truly, and was a really dirty trick of Ops to get it closed down (they hated doing all the maintenance work it required, so took newbie Mike Ovitz in a non-operational, broken-down leaky sub and told him all the subs were like this one, so he okayed the closure.  He didn't know any better, and he's somewhere else now.  We rode the last guest sub on the last day, and I drove number 8, so there's that.

Speaking of Discovery Bay (I always get there, don't I?) did you see the Circus area of the NFE?  Does it remind you of anything?

Look over on the right side of the bottom photo.  This is the Discovery Bay model; I permanently dented my nose from having it pressed to the glass covering this model as a child.  That's Dumbo's Circus, a "buffer" land between Fantasyland and Discovery Bay.  It was going to include a Dumbo's Circus dark ride (Bill Justice did some art for it, if I recall correctly).  You know the saying: "No idea dies at Disney".

Jason Schultz, who knows everything (really!) had a nice post about the model last year, and The Neverland Files has two posts; here's the Dumbo's Circus one.

Look at the model at The Neverland Files, then look at the Dumbo's Circus area of the NFE artwork.  See?

As for me, I have web design class today, that's all.  See you at Fantasyland in 2012!

Memories

I've started building the outline of Manufacturing the Magic, and have found some wonderful, long-forgotten treasures.  I have to work on getting permission for the images I want to use, but this won't be done in a few weeks, maybe not even a year, because school begins Monday, and school comes first.

I'm so glad I kept the PowerPoints from my class, and that my pal Bill was able to fill in the missing spots.  Thank goodness for friends like Bill!  It looks like it is going to have twenty chapters, and I'm still going to leave out most of the out-of-the-USA after 1800 stuff.


Today I'm pretty much recovering from the cough I've had since September.  I bought an ionicpro turbo with a gift card we got as as wedding present, and half a day later, my cough is almost completely gone.  I'm sad that vacation is over but look forward to school; I'm taking more cake decorating, Japanese 2, History of Asian Art, Dreamweaver and am on the wait list for American History 10 and Computer Art, both with instructors I'm familiar with and fond of, so my chances are good at getting into at least one of these.

Would you like to know what I'm working on in the book, as I'm working on it, or would you rather be surprised?