Wow it’s been so many months since my last update. Too much going on, so I’ll talk about what we did recently…Toy Story Midway Mania! The ride doesn’t officially open until June 17, 2008, but we had special cast preview tickets for last Saturday, 6/7.
Since this was a special preview, the line was very short, much shorter than what I would expect when the ride opens up to everyone. There were 4, maybe 5 cast members at the entrance making sure everyone who gets in line had the right ticket. Once we got past them, we came up on Mr. Potato Head. He’s an animatronic, but he actually interacts with people. He can “see” people and speak to them with specific references, such as what they’re wearing or the color of their shirt. While we were there, he was working as expected, but I heard he broke down quite a bit when we weren’t there. Which is expected of course. They still have a week left to figure everything out. Anyway, since there wasn’t much of a line, we didn’t stick around Mr. Potato Head.
We got our 3D glasses and went towards the loading platform. Another cast member there was punching tickets, basically signifying we will ride it once already. We got on the ride, and it sure was fun! The ride vehicle consists of a lap bar and a cannon that comes towards you when you pull the lap bar down. On the end of the cannon is basically a ball attached to a rope. Pulling this ball/rope shoots your ammo, whether it’s darts, rings, or pies! Our targets consists of many items, including plates, balloons, and aliens. Popping the balloons produces a burst of air into your face, while popping the water balloons actually trigger squirts of water onto you!
At the end of the ride, your scores are displayed on the big screen. You can compare this with others riding with you. There’s also another screen that shows the top 3 scores for the day, and the top score for the past month. My top score was 177,800 with a 21% accuracy. The top score of the day was 291,400, and the top score of the month is 370,900! I wonder if the rumor is true that the top score is John Lasseter’s score. He knows all the secrets to get high scores, so I don’t doubt that rumor.
We ended up riding the ride 3 more times, but my arm wasn’t up to it. Pulling the ball/rope constantly was very tiring. I switched between my left and right hand/arm multiple times. My last ride’s score was very low. Nevertheless, if I had a chance to go on the ride right now, I wouldn’t hesitate.
It was also interesting seeing how many people were trying to get on the ride without the proper ticket. There was a sign out front indicating this was a special preview, but I guess they felt they could ride it anyway. Some tried showing their regular park hopper passes to get into the ride. Some were fine being turned away, as they seem to understand, but it looked like one person wasn’t too happy about it. He showed his park hopper, and it seemed like he thought because he paid admission to get into the park, he had the right to ride everything that was open in the park. The cast members seem to handle it very well. No fights broke out. Too bad…I wanted to see Mr. Potato Head put the smack down on that guest.
So that was Saturday. We were leaving Sunday, but since we didn’t have to leave early, we decided to go into California Adventure for an hour or two. Usually we ride the Hollywood Tower of Terror a couple times and that’s it. This time, we decided to head towards California Screamin’ first. We were basically the first people in line. We then rode Maliboomer. Nobody was in line. Nobody at all. I hear this ride will be taken down when the park expansion/enhancement starts. At least we got to ride it one last time. After that, we headed over to Mulholland Madness, which is scheduled to get enhanced too. Much to our surprise, we got Dream Fastpasses as we excited the ride!
At that point, we were going to leave soon, but now that we got the Dream Fastpasses, we decided to make the most of it. No point in getting this prize and letting it go to waste, right? So we get on Soarin’ over California, eat lunch, then head over to Disneyland for all the major Fastpass rides. We ended up staying much later than planned, but it sure was worth it.