Day 2 of the Expo…

The Expo is sold out today, so there’s even more people. So far I can’t tell if things are going a little better today or if I just don’t care as much.

People started lining up OUTSIDE the convention center I don’t even
know how early to get into the Walt Disney Studios presentation,
which was scheduled to begin at 10:30. When I arrived in the
convention center around 9:00 the line inside already stretched most
of the way across the lobby (plus whatever was in the normal queue
that I couldn’t see), and they were telling people that both the
primary and standby queues were full, and they wouldn’t get in. And
at that point the General Admission folks weren’t even allowed in
the building yet.

I hadn’t planned to go to the Studios presentation anyway so I
decided to wander the exhibit floor instead, since I hadn’t a chance
to see much of that yet. There were still plenty of other people
around who weren’t going to the Studios presentation, either. I
started at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Carousel of Projects.

There’s a model of the Fantasyland expansion at Walt Disney World – it’s too big to get all in one photo. This is the Dumbo/Casey Jr. section:

Snow White’s Cottage and the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train with the Beast’s Castle and Ariel’s Underwater Adventure in the background:

And a full-size model of a car on the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train ride.

They had the Madamoiselle Minnie figure that will go in the
Atrium on the Disney Fantasy.

Lots of things from Cars Land…

One of the mini tractors from Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree:

And the car that it pulls:

And a ride vehicle from Radiator Springs Racers:

I asked the Imagineer there about the attraction and its similarity
to Test Track – he said in the end they probably only kept 20% of
the Test Track components, and everything else was new/different.

There were several car hoods painted by Chip Foose which will
hang in Ramone’s House of Body Art. This one has hidden mickeys on
it somewhere. Or so the Imagineer told me.

Here’s a model of Buena Vista Street:

And a larger model just of the Carthay Circle Theater.

There’s not much about Shanghai Disneyland – just this model.

The most fun thing is The Amazing Destini. This is an
artificially intelligent audio-animatronic fortune teller. There’s
no “man behind the curtain” – it interacts with guests based on
what it detects from facial expressions, height, proximity, etc.

On this screen off to the side you can see its “brain” and what it
is sensing. In the middle panel are all the faces that it is
tracking, and what it was sensing for things like age, eyes
open/shut, mouth open, happy, sad, angry, surprised, impatient, head
angle, talking, etc. (If you click on the photo you can see the
full-size version where you can read it a little better.)

I ran into fellow AllEars Team Member Erin Blackwell, and we chatted
for a while – it’s been a very frustrating experience for her, too.

I wandered around the Disney Living area a little bit. This is some
cute Prep & Landing merchandise from Hallmark.

And an interesting facade here.

A huge cupcake display at the Celebrations booth, where they were doing
some cake decorating demos.

I liked these big balloon decorations!

Quite a large booth dedicated to Pirates of the Caribbean: On
Stranger Tides (coming soon on DVD and Blu-Ray) which included
some props from the movie.

And how can you not smile at a Lightning McQueen constructed
out of Legos? 🙂

The line to get into the Archives exhibit was long, so I went to the
queue area for the Once Upon a Time screening. Which was
still an hour and a half away, but it gave me time to write a lot of
this blog.

I really enjoyed Once Upon a Time. And thank goodness, it
only started 5 minutes late!

The show was created by Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, who were
the executive producers of Lost. In it, the storybook fairy tale
world of Snow White and Prince Charming and Rumpelstiltskin and
Little Red Riding Hood collides with our modern world of traffic and
email and credit cards and cell phones. It was really fascinating and
I think we were all drawn into it – I didn’t hear ANYONE talking
during the show! It’s really a very rich world with a lot of detail.
I’m not sure about it being a weekly series, though – I think it
would work better as a movie or a mini-series than as an on-going
serial. At some point it will need a resolution or I think people
will get tired of watching it.

There was a short Q&A period with the producers and Disney Geek
Jeffrey Epstein at the end, in which they ‘fessed up that there are
a lot of references to Lost in the show (since I never watched that
one, they were “lost” on me.) We’ll see a lot more fairy tale
characters introduced in future episodes. The show premieres on
ABC on Sunday, October 23 at 8:00 p.m. At this point ABC has
ordered 12 episodes, and then we’ll all see. I’ll be watching!

I hoped to get into the “Good Look at Buena Vista Street” presentation -but it filled up more than an hour before it started while I was still in the screening. I found out later that they unveiled this maquette of a new statue of Walt and Mickey that will stand on Buena Vista Street – a “bookend” to the Partners statue in Disneyland.

I met up with Lee and DebK and we went down to the exhibit hall to shoot some video of the show floor and some of the exhibits, so we hope Lee will have that edited and posted soon.

Around 4:00 they announced that the regular queue for the 6:30 “Imagineering’s Guide to Creativity and Innovation” session was full, and at 4:30 they announced that the standby for it was ALSO full. Ridiculous. We thought we’d go to the Archives but that had a long line (probably 30-45 minutes), so we called it a day.

So let’s see…in my almost 8 hours at the Expo today I toured the show floor twice, waited for a session for over 90 minutes, saw a one hour session and, um…well, that was all. Yeah, just another typical day at the D23 Expo…

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