April 12th - Where's that Disney magic?

Tuesday April 12^th  - Disneyland paris

So we decided to experience Disney Parisian style.  It is relatively easy to get to Disneyland Paris, just take the one of the regional rails to the end of the line, about 90 minutes total travel time and the rail station is just yards from the Disney entrance.

 I was very curious to see how Disney plays out overseas, and since we have been to Disney numerous times, we have a good basis for comparison.  Katie is 11 and to the best of my knowledge this is her 8^th time to Disney.  Her first time was at age three, and her most recent trip prior to today was a joint Disney/Universal studios trip to Orlando five months ago for my 41^st birthday.  We have done Disneyworld Orlando just about any way you can think of. We’ve been to all four Disney parks, both Universal parks and Sea World.  We’ve stayed at moderate priced Disney hotels, at pricy Disney hotels, at the competing Nickelodeon Suites, in a condo, at off-site hotels near Disney, at off-site hotels near Sea World and at off-site hotels near Universal.  And I’m not even mentioning all our times to our local amusement park – HersheyPark.   So we tend to know our way around a theme park.  With all of this experience, I can say hands-down that Disney is head and shoulders above all the others.  Disney manages the entire experience in a way that makes you happy and able to believe in the magic.  Disney is hyper-organized and no detail ever goes overlooked.  So I was surprised to find this magic missing at Disneyland Paris.

I’m not sure why this Disney Park was different from the rest. I love Disney. I want to believe!  So I don’t think that I went into it with a skeptical attitude.  Some of it may have been the language barrier, but not all of it. This park when built was called Euro-Disney, and is still marketed throughout Europe.  In line we regularly heard other patrons speaking English (lots of Brits in attendance), Italian, Spanish and German, plus I heard some Slavic languages as well.  Many of these guests were not French speaking, and although the main language of the park is French, it is easy to find help in many languages and all signs and announcements are made in both French and English.  The Disney cast members all wear little mouse ear pins with the flags of the countries whose languages they speak in addition to French and English. So I don’t think it was the language barrier.

Some of it was perhaps cultural, and in this case, our extensive Disneyworld experience could work against us. For instance, most of the Disneyworld rides exit into a gift shop. Perhaps this is considered gauche in France, and the rides here did not do this.  In fact, there was significantly less merchandise overall in the park, and the vendors were not particularly enthusiastic about selling what they did have.  This did bother Katie and me.  We actually like exiting into the gift shops – we’ve been culturally conditioned as good American capitalists – and really missed it.  Katie was super surprised that even Pirates of the Caribbean didn’t exit into a gift shop and remarked on it.  Where was all the cool pirate stuff??    We came prepared to buy a souvenir, but left empty-handed.

Some of the odd requirements that we experienced I’ll also chalk up to cultural issues.  Everyone (!!) was required to wear a seat belt on the carousel.  Which is odd, since it was also the     s l o w e s t       carousel I have ever been on.  The horses were really cool but since they moved so   s l o w l y   it ruined a lot of the fun. I love the carousel but this one was just wrong. 

Katie felt the same way about the teacups.  From line we wondered why no one was spinning their tea cups very fast. Once we got on the ride it was clear that the cups simply can’t be spun the way we do them at home.  It was as though the emergency brake had been applied to the system and no one could really move.  Again, very disappointing.   Do the laws prevent certain speeds of rides?  Is seatbelt use on carousel horses mandated?  They checked us pretty carefully to make sure we were all belted up, so I think so.  The Stars Wars themed simulator Star Tours was also moving at much slower rate than at home. Is this mandated or cultural?  Do Americans need their thrills bigger and better than the rest of the world?

So I’ll admit that some of it was cultural expectations, and some of it was also disappointment that while the park seems at first glance to be a copy of the Magic Kingdom with many of the same rides, it is significantly smaller and some of our favorites were left out.    No Mickey’s Philharmagic, no Winnie the Pooh ( or great Pooh Bear gift shop), no Aladdin’s Magic Carpets, no Toontown and no Jungle Cruise, among others.

But bigger than either of those, were the problems that seem to plague the park, things that led to annoyance and irritation to the level that I haven’t seen happen at any other Disney park, and led to the experience seeming much more like a regular day at any amusement park, like Universal or Six Flags, rather than a day at Disney. 

An unusual number of rides experienced problems that affected our visit, from having to change simulators at Star Tours, to being stopped midway on the Haunted Mansion (or as they call it Phantom Manor). Overall we experienced breakdowns, or observed them from the line on Star Tours, Phantom Manor, Autopia, Big Thunder Railroad and It’s a Small World which is a pretty big number of affected rides.  Autopia is the racecars that the kids drive with adults as passengers around a set track. It’s one of Katie’s favorites, and a ride I have never seen break down.  But here we saw at least five cars just stop working and an attendant needed to go out on the track, pop the hood and restart the engines!

Plus the crowd control and fastpass management was the worst I have ever seen at Disney.  Peter Pan’s ride is always incredibly popular, and only one fastpass machine was working.  It was at the point where I thought the 30 minute line for the ride was shorter than the line for the fastpass machine.  The same thing happened at Big Thunder railroad where we waited over 20 minutes in the fastpass line.  Other places the crowd control was really poor. This would really never been seen at Disneyworld and I’m not sure why it was OK here. Does Disney run this park to different standards than would be acceptable at home? It was readily apparent that it just wasn’t up to normal Disney levels, and that really took the shine off it for me.  Even Katie could tell it was fun, but not super.

But that being said, we did enjoy the day, and found a few things that were *almost* better than their Orlando counterparts including:

·         It’s a Small World had a great section on the US and Canada that isn’t a part of the ride at home.  The Canadian boy and girl on the hockey rink were great, as were the sets of NYC and Hollywood.

·         The starry sky in Peter Pan’s ride was great.

·         Alice in Wonderland’s labyrinth garden was a fun new addition, and we hit several dead ends in the maze. Katie really liked some fountains that seemed to leap from one spot to the next.

·         Parts of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride had really great sets that were different than those in Orlando.

Overall, I though one of the oddest differences occurred at lunchtime.  Katie picked out a table while I ordered our lunch, including coffee for me.  I paid for the lunch and moved to the pickup counter. The cast member working there asked me if I wanted my coffee “now or later”.  Really?  I know that Europeans like to linger over coffee after eating lunch, but at Disneyland??   Will they really decide to go eat their hamburger and then get back in line to pick up their coffee afterwards?  Choosing to wait in line twice seemed like a really bad choice so I took my coffee “now”.   On the bright side of things, with my purchase of coffee for “now” I got a coupon for use at any restaurant in the park between 3:30 and 5:30 for another coffee, so I could also have one “later”.  Which I did.