Tokyo DisneySea
Jun. 15th, 2024 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinWe just got back from a ten-day trip to Japan, divided between Tokyo and Osaka. As a theme-park fan, one of the highlights of this trip for me was a one-day visit to Tokyo DisneySea, a park sometimes described as the best theme park in the world.
I can't say for sure that it is, but it is an astonishing place. As a Disney park, it's obviously not geared to thrill-seekers, though there are some rides with a thrill component there. It does have some of the most extravagant immersive theming I've ever seen, outstanding even by Disney-park standards.
That's probably because the Tokyo Disney resort has an unusual corporate status: while it appears in every way to be a Disney resort, Disney doesn't own or operate it. They just hire out Imagineering and license their IP under contract. It's owned and managed by OLC, a Japanese company whose largest owner is the Keisei railway, an operator of a number of rail lines including the Skyliner airport shuttle. OLC's sole job is basically running the Tokyo Disney resort, and its pockets are apparently deep. It's not competing with all of Disney's other cost centers and it's insulated from Disney's sometimes dunderheaded recent management decisions. What you see there is what you get when the ideas Disney Imagineering comes up with actually get fully funded.
The resort has your basic Disney resort setup: a bunch of hotels, a free-admission shopping area, and two large theme parks (Disneyland and DisneySea), all connected by a themed monorail. Unlike the Walt Disney World one, the Tokyo monorail is not free and has tickets and fare gates like any Japanese rail line, but fares are reasonable and you can get unlimited day passes.
Tokyo Disneyland is the classic Disney "castle park", closely patterned after Orlando's Magic Kingdom. I've heard great things about it--my sense is that it's a superior version--but we didn't go there. We'd allotted Disney one day out of our Japanese vacation and we wanted an experience you can't get anywhere else.
Tokyo DisneySea has its roots in a failed project to build a second California Disney park at Long Beach, as part of a development around the Queen Mary called Port Disney. That didn't happen, but many of the ideas ended up in Tokyo. There's even a replica ocean liner at one end of the park, the "S.S. Columbia", resembling the Queen Mary and containing a restaurant. The areas of the park all have port and sea-related themes, a couple of which are American: there's an "American Waterfront" which is themed after New York City in the early 20th century, and "Cape Cod", which is generally Massachusetts (there's a hilarious statue of Mickey Mouse as the Gloucester Fisherman, who is not on Cape Cod but I'm not going to quibble). So now I've been to Disney's Florida version of Japan and their Japanese version of Massachusetts. The theming is well-done and, as Sam noted, extends to planting vegetation approximating the various regions of the world.
Probably the biggest area is generally Italy-themed, with aspects of Venice and Florence. One of the most charming rides is just a Venetian-style gondola ride on a real boat with a real gondolier, who banters with riders (in Japanese, but I could appreciate the atmosphere at least). I found it more pleasant there than in the actual Venice, but that was probably more down to the season than anything else. Here's Michael Mastrile's video with a POV:
By freakish coincidence, the best day to go on our itinerary happened to be the opening day of a new large expansion called Fantasy Springs, a sort of second Fantasyland with attractions themed after Frozen, Tangled and Peter Pan. Access to Fantasy Springs was only possible with a special pass, and we decided to just not bother with it--the whole park was new to us, and Fantasy Springs would probably be jammed with people. This turned out to be a stroke of brilliance. Crowds at the rest of the park were quite light and even standby lines for the very biggest rides were not running over 40-60 minutes.
On top of that, we had some good luck: some English-speaking tourists who were visiting on some kind of resort package, and happened to be leaving early, gave us ride tickets that allowed us to use the local equivalent of a Fastpass or Lightning Lane queue (I forget the name) for a selection of rides, including Indiana Jones and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Were they supposed to do that? I don't think so. Were we going to pass up that windfall? Also no.
We went on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea twice, because we liked it so much and it was a mild ride we could all enjoy. It's one of the rides in the park's centerpiece area, Mysterious Island, which is Jules Verne-themed and built around an enormous fake volcano, Mount Prometheus. 20,000 Leagues seems to get some shade because of misplaced expectations: people seemingly expect it to be a major thrill ride and it's not. Instead, it's a suspended dark ride inspired by Submarine Voyage, but with only simulated submarine action. I think theme parks need these kinds of rides and they're a good complement to the more thrilling ones. You ride in submarine-themed ride vehicles that ride under the track, looking through large bulging portholes with bubbling fluid effects embedded inside of them, simulating passage in and out of the water and giving the ride an underwater appearance. We fight a giant squid with electricity, witness shipwrecks and underwater creatures and ultimately visit a strange Atlantean civilization (the book had Atlantis, but not living Atlanteans!) There's some kind of audio narrative that, like all of the rides here, is mostly in Japanese, but I didn't get the sense I was missing much by not understanding it. Here's LMG Vids:
Depending on where you sit, you may be looking out the front or side windows of the vehicle. The best view is from the front, but there are animatronics and figures in the scenery that are designed to be seen mainly from the side portholes, which adds to the re-rideability.
The tickets didn't get me into my #1 bucket-list ride, Journey to the Center of the Earth, so I had to do the full standby queue there. My wife and kid took one look at the ride's one visible moment (when the vehicles pop into the open near the top of Mount Prometheus, then plunge into the climactic, roller-coaster-like drop) and noped out of riding. So I went solo. The queue is entertaining, though, all indoors in a simulated cave with lots of steampunk scientific bric-a-brac and illustrations of the wonders to come, with English text.
Aside from some general flavor, the narrative here has almost nothing to do with Jules Verne's novel of the same name: in the ride continuity, Captain Nemo has been running a side project from his volcano base to burrow into the Earth with tunneling mole vehicles (more like Edgar Rice Burroughs' "At The Earth's Core"), and is now equipped to give you a tour of his discoveries. The ride system is the same one used in Epcot's Test Track or Disney California Adventure's Radiator Springs Racers. The vehicles are powered slot cars, actually running on bogies hidden under the visible floor, and the ride is divided into a dark-ride section and a fast-moving thrill-ride finale. In the dark ride, we wind through subterranean caverns with glowing crystals and mysterious fungi and other creatures, then encounter an animatronic lava monster like a giant segmented arthropod. That leads directly into the thrill-ride section: instead of Test Track's straight launch followed by curves, the ride vehicle is blasted up a fast spiral ramp (with strong lateral forces), then emerges into the open for an instant and plunges back into the darkness in the ride's final drop. It's an impressive ride with some mild thrills, nothing too extreme, but enough that my family didn't want to ride it. Here, again, is LMG Vids:
The last real thrill ride we rode was DisneySea's version of the Indiana Jones ride, which also exists at some of the other Disney parks. At Animal Kingdom, its counterpart is Dinosaur, a ride with a time-travel and dinosaur theme, but apparently that's going to be rethemed into yet another Indiana Jones variant. Anyway, Tokyo's is "Temple of the Crystal Skull." In these rides, you're in a ride vehicle that is also basically using the Test Track system, except that the vehicles also have a simulator motion bed that allows them to tilt and jostle around, simulating a jeep moving over rough terrain. You progress through a spooky temple with various traps and supernatural goings-on, occasionally encountering an animatronic of Indiana Jones, who urges you on through the ride while he tries to extricate himself from whatever trap he's fallen into. In this case, it's all full of angry skulls and skeletons (Attractions 360 video):
This was just a great ride. I rode it with Sam and I was worried that it might be too much for her, but she loved it. The physical thrills aren't on the roller-coaster level and it really puts on a show.
I did not get any creds, as the coaster enthusiasts say, at this park: the one large coaster here, Raging Spirits, is reputed to not be very good, and given that I preferred to hang with my family riding milder rides. But while I was off riding other things, my wife and kid did get rides on Flounder's Flying Fish Coaster, in the park's particularly gorgeous Little Mermaid-themed area:
I can't say for sure that it is, but it is an astonishing place. As a Disney park, it's obviously not geared to thrill-seekers, though there are some rides with a thrill component there. It does have some of the most extravagant immersive theming I've ever seen, outstanding even by Disney-park standards.
That's probably because the Tokyo Disney resort has an unusual corporate status: while it appears in every way to be a Disney resort, Disney doesn't own or operate it. They just hire out Imagineering and license their IP under contract. It's owned and managed by OLC, a Japanese company whose largest owner is the Keisei railway, an operator of a number of rail lines including the Skyliner airport shuttle. OLC's sole job is basically running the Tokyo Disney resort, and its pockets are apparently deep. It's not competing with all of Disney's other cost centers and it's insulated from Disney's sometimes dunderheaded recent management decisions. What you see there is what you get when the ideas Disney Imagineering comes up with actually get fully funded.
The resort has your basic Disney resort setup: a bunch of hotels, a free-admission shopping area, and two large theme parks (Disneyland and DisneySea), all connected by a themed monorail. Unlike the Walt Disney World one, the Tokyo monorail is not free and has tickets and fare gates like any Japanese rail line, but fares are reasonable and you can get unlimited day passes.
Tokyo Disneyland is the classic Disney "castle park", closely patterned after Orlando's Magic Kingdom. I've heard great things about it--my sense is that it's a superior version--but we didn't go there. We'd allotted Disney one day out of our Japanese vacation and we wanted an experience you can't get anywhere else.
Tokyo DisneySea has its roots in a failed project to build a second California Disney park at Long Beach, as part of a development around the Queen Mary called Port Disney. That didn't happen, but many of the ideas ended up in Tokyo. There's even a replica ocean liner at one end of the park, the "S.S. Columbia", resembling the Queen Mary and containing a restaurant. The areas of the park all have port and sea-related themes, a couple of which are American: there's an "American Waterfront" which is themed after New York City in the early 20th century, and "Cape Cod", which is generally Massachusetts (there's a hilarious statue of Mickey Mouse as the Gloucester Fisherman, who is not on Cape Cod but I'm not going to quibble). So now I've been to Disney's Florida version of Japan and their Japanese version of Massachusetts. The theming is well-done and, as Sam noted, extends to planting vegetation approximating the various regions of the world.
Probably the biggest area is generally Italy-themed, with aspects of Venice and Florence. One of the most charming rides is just a Venetian-style gondola ride on a real boat with a real gondolier, who banters with riders (in Japanese, but I could appreciate the atmosphere at least). I found it more pleasant there than in the actual Venice, but that was probably more down to the season than anything else. Here's Michael Mastrile's video with a POV:
By freakish coincidence, the best day to go on our itinerary happened to be the opening day of a new large expansion called Fantasy Springs, a sort of second Fantasyland with attractions themed after Frozen, Tangled and Peter Pan. Access to Fantasy Springs was only possible with a special pass, and we decided to just not bother with it--the whole park was new to us, and Fantasy Springs would probably be jammed with people. This turned out to be a stroke of brilliance. Crowds at the rest of the park were quite light and even standby lines for the very biggest rides were not running over 40-60 minutes.
On top of that, we had some good luck: some English-speaking tourists who were visiting on some kind of resort package, and happened to be leaving early, gave us ride tickets that allowed us to use the local equivalent of a Fastpass or Lightning Lane queue (I forget the name) for a selection of rides, including Indiana Jones and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Were they supposed to do that? I don't think so. Were we going to pass up that windfall? Also no.
We went on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea twice, because we liked it so much and it was a mild ride we could all enjoy. It's one of the rides in the park's centerpiece area, Mysterious Island, which is Jules Verne-themed and built around an enormous fake volcano, Mount Prometheus. 20,000 Leagues seems to get some shade because of misplaced expectations: people seemingly expect it to be a major thrill ride and it's not. Instead, it's a suspended dark ride inspired by Submarine Voyage, but with only simulated submarine action. I think theme parks need these kinds of rides and they're a good complement to the more thrilling ones. You ride in submarine-themed ride vehicles that ride under the track, looking through large bulging portholes with bubbling fluid effects embedded inside of them, simulating passage in and out of the water and giving the ride an underwater appearance. We fight a giant squid with electricity, witness shipwrecks and underwater creatures and ultimately visit a strange Atlantean civilization (the book had Atlantis, but not living Atlanteans!) There's some kind of audio narrative that, like all of the rides here, is mostly in Japanese, but I didn't get the sense I was missing much by not understanding it. Here's LMG Vids:
Depending on where you sit, you may be looking out the front or side windows of the vehicle. The best view is from the front, but there are animatronics and figures in the scenery that are designed to be seen mainly from the side portholes, which adds to the re-rideability.
The tickets didn't get me into my #1 bucket-list ride, Journey to the Center of the Earth, so I had to do the full standby queue there. My wife and kid took one look at the ride's one visible moment (when the vehicles pop into the open near the top of Mount Prometheus, then plunge into the climactic, roller-coaster-like drop) and noped out of riding. So I went solo. The queue is entertaining, though, all indoors in a simulated cave with lots of steampunk scientific bric-a-brac and illustrations of the wonders to come, with English text.
Aside from some general flavor, the narrative here has almost nothing to do with Jules Verne's novel of the same name: in the ride continuity, Captain Nemo has been running a side project from his volcano base to burrow into the Earth with tunneling mole vehicles (more like Edgar Rice Burroughs' "At The Earth's Core"), and is now equipped to give you a tour of his discoveries. The ride system is the same one used in Epcot's Test Track or Disney California Adventure's Radiator Springs Racers. The vehicles are powered slot cars, actually running on bogies hidden under the visible floor, and the ride is divided into a dark-ride section and a fast-moving thrill-ride finale. In the dark ride, we wind through subterranean caverns with glowing crystals and mysterious fungi and other creatures, then encounter an animatronic lava monster like a giant segmented arthropod. That leads directly into the thrill-ride section: instead of Test Track's straight launch followed by curves, the ride vehicle is blasted up a fast spiral ramp (with strong lateral forces), then emerges into the open for an instant and plunges back into the darkness in the ride's final drop. It's an impressive ride with some mild thrills, nothing too extreme, but enough that my family didn't want to ride it. Here, again, is LMG Vids:
The last real thrill ride we rode was DisneySea's version of the Indiana Jones ride, which also exists at some of the other Disney parks. At Animal Kingdom, its counterpart is Dinosaur, a ride with a time-travel and dinosaur theme, but apparently that's going to be rethemed into yet another Indiana Jones variant. Anyway, Tokyo's is "Temple of the Crystal Skull." In these rides, you're in a ride vehicle that is also basically using the Test Track system, except that the vehicles also have a simulator motion bed that allows them to tilt and jostle around, simulating a jeep moving over rough terrain. You progress through a spooky temple with various traps and supernatural goings-on, occasionally encountering an animatronic of Indiana Jones, who urges you on through the ride while he tries to extricate himself from whatever trap he's fallen into. In this case, it's all full of angry skulls and skeletons (Attractions 360 video):
This was just a great ride. I rode it with Sam and I was worried that it might be too much for her, but she loved it. The physical thrills aren't on the roller-coaster level and it really puts on a show.
I did not get any creds, as the coaster enthusiasts say, at this park: the one large coaster here, Raging Spirits, is reputed to not be very good, and given that I preferred to hang with my family riding milder rides. But while I was off riding other things, my wife and kid did get rides on Flounder's Flying Fish Coaster, in the park's particularly gorgeous Little Mermaid-themed area:
Two things about the "20,000 Leagues" ride that I completely missed when I was there
Date: 2024-06-15 08:25 pm (UTC)1. The little joysticks in front of the ride seats aren't entirely for show; there are searchlights that you can move around with them. That's clever!
2. They use "20,000 leagues" as a measure of depth. They're cruising for a stern lecture from Kelsey Grammer Nemo!
Other Japanese parks
Date: 2024-06-15 11:51 pm (UTC)Our trip was evenly divided between Tokyo and Osaka, which is where Universal Japan is. We were first contemplating the Japan trip back before the pandemic and had been thinking about hitting Universal because my kid was very interested in their Super Nintendo World area. But she's a bit older now and that isn't quite as fascinating as it was--besides, there's now a Super Nintendo World in California and another under construction at Universal's new Florida park, so you don't have to go to Japan for that any more.
I also had a crazy dream of taking a side day trip to Fuji-Q Highland to maybe ride the intense thrill coasters there--Eejanaika, Fujiyama and Takabisha. But given how far we were from home physically and culturally, Sam was initially a bit leery of our splitting up into ones and twos on this trip, the way we often do, and I was the only one with any interest in Fuji-Q Highland.
Once we'd gotten our bearings in Japan, she was more comfortable with getting around there and we were able to sometimes split up for adventures of more specialized interest. But our schedule ended up pretty full and exhausting as it was; we even ended up nixing a side trip to Kyoto that we'd originally planned on taking. I felt like I had relatively little time to experience Tokyo once we'd shaken off our initial jet lag, and aside from the Disney trip (which involved getting out to Chiba prefecture) we kept that portion of the vacation in the city.
If I ever get back to Japan, I'd like to have the time to visit some other parks--Nagashima Spa Land looks like I'd enjoy it greatly. But there's a lot there that I'd still like to do.
Re: Other Japanese parks
Date: 2024-06-16 09:17 am (UTC)Re: Other Japanese parks
Date: 2024-06-16 12:50 pm (UTC)If I went back, though, I might concentrate on Tokyo just because I feel like we were jet-lagged out of our minds most of the time we were in Tokyo and sometimes couldn't do much beyond get sad bachelor food at 7-11 and crash in the hotel. And the Disney park also took up a day (though, somehow, we did manage to have enough energy to hit a genuine Tokyo ramen joint after we got back). We were in a proper state of mind and body to enjoy the city around the last day we were there, so we were kind of speedrunning Tokyo before we had to whisk ourselves away on the Shinkansen.
Re: Other Japanese parks
Date: 2024-06-16 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-16 04:39 pm (UTC)Now I'm old and I can't abuse my body like I used to, and I prefer my vacations to spend more time in fewer places. Even doing two major cities in a 10-day trip is pushing it. There are things we could have done to manage it better, like doing an open-jaws itinerary where we didn't have to get back to Tokyo at the end (we did that with Madrid and Valencia several years ago).
Re: Other Japanese parks
Date: 2024-06-25 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-16 12:12 am (UTC)Clearly the next step is for Disney to build a Massachusetts version of Florida to close the loop.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-16 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-16 05:58 pm (UTC)A secret of "Journey to the Center of the Earth"
Date: 2024-06-25 12:34 am (UTC)Re: A secret of "Journey to the Center of the Earth"
Date: 2024-06-25 12:56 am (UTC)https://parkvault.net/tag/journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth/