Walt Disney Studios Park

We let the kids spend a good long time this morning playing in the soft play and ball pit area of our hotel, only to realize, soon after, that we had made a severe strategic error in letting the kids exhaust themselves utterly before entering a theme park.  Joey clued us in, crying all the way to the park because we didn't let him buckle his own seat belt.  Because we're mean, mean parents: Mean!


It's our last day here, and we'd planned to spend it in the other Disney park, Walt Disney Studios.  

We arrived there early and went straight to the line for a ride called Crush's Coaster, a Finding-Nemo–themed roller coaster that is a bit like Space Mountain, insofar as it's in the dark, except your roller coaster car, which is shaped like a turtle shell, spins uncontrollably as you race in the dark. This was the final ride that Alex had picked for his list of three: funnily, he was about twenty-five centimeters too short to ride Space Mountain, but he easily passed the hight restrictions for this crazy ride.


Unfortunately. 


The line, when we joined it, was calculated at being 110 minutes long, and that doesn't count the time we spent waiting before the park officially opened and the line started moving. At least Disneyland offers baby-swap tickets: I was given a pass that allowed Dennis to cut to the very front of the line, just as soon as I got off the roller coaster. You know, just as soon as I finished waiting for two hours.  But, happily, that pass was good for two people, so Alex would get to ride a second time with his Dad.


I didn't give the kids iPhones to play with until 50 minutes into that line, which I counted as a minor triumph.  And, reflecting (because I had a long time to reflect), I supposed that, if we had to wait in a long line, it was good to get it over with early, while the kids still had some patience in reserve.  


The little coaster cars were built with two pairs of seats, facing back to back.  I'd planned to sit next to Alex, but Ella got nervous at the last minute and wanted to sit by me, too, so, instead, I threw the two of them together and spent the whole ride wondering if they were freaking out.  It turned out that Alex absolutely loved it; Ella had her eyes screwed shut the entire time, but she said it sounded like it was fun.


Right next to the coaster ride was an Aladdin-themed flying carpet ride, in the style of the Dumbo ride.  Evidently, Disney anticipated this ride to be just as popular as the Dumbo ride, and had it rigged for crowds, with a fast-pass dispenser and a streamlined system for loading and unloading.  However, the fast-pass was disabled, and the wait calculator never rose past 5 minutes.  But the kids loved it, and took good advantage of that short line, riding it a couple times.


Dennis parted after lunch. He left me with three kids so that he could do the laundry, and we both believed we'd gotten the better part of the bargain.  And call me crazy, but I wasn't particularly worried about having three kids by myself in Disneyland.  They always seem to behave a little better when they're with just one of us: they take pity on us, I think, when we're grossly outmanned.


Besides, most of the attractions at Walt Disney Studios are shows, so the kids had a lot of concentrated entertainment and not a lot of waiting in lines. We went to a car stunt show that had all three rapt.  Ella was overly concerned with figuring out the plot of the car chase, trying to determine who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, and what their character's motivations might be, and whether the people  who had to play bad guys got to switch off and be good sometimes, because, really, who wants to be play a bad guy.  The boys were a little more, well, masculine in their approach to the show.  Alex, waved and clapped furiously, cheering frantically, and saying "WOW," over and over.  And Joey simply couldn't get past the part of the show when the lit a small lake on fire.  He kept saying "Fire! Water! Fire! Water! Fire on water!" It blew his mind.


It was so interesting to me how Disney handled the language issue in each of these shows. They had to communicate to a vastly multilingual audience and keep the pace exciting at the same time.  In this particular show, there were two hosts, one who spoke English, and the other, French. They would play off one another, essentially repeating what the other said, but in a very conversational way: "This driver has to be especially careful, wouldn't you agree?" "Oui, le driver doit être très prudent."

Lining up for a parade

In another show, a stage performance called Animagique, with a lot of costumed Disney characters, they split the characters: Mickey spoke French, and Donald, English, and never mind that the dialogue, therefore, made no sense to anyone.  The did put a little French into Donald's lines as well, sneaking it in with his quacking.  I found that particularly funny since Alex, when he was first trying to pick up German, would always eventually break into a donald duck voice, his best approximation of the phlegmy, throaty language.


Other shows with smaller auditoriums, like Stitch Live! (which Ella decided was the best thing at Disney, hands down) had different scheduled seatings, half for English and half in French. 


And one show, called CinéMagique (dealing with how animated movies are made), was a movie that was originally in English but was dubbed into French. However, there were earphones in the seat that allowed you to listen to any of five different translations including, of course, the original English. 


So we had a lot of fun: things didn't really break down until the last half hour, when we decided to wait in line for a spinny little Cars-themed ride.  Joey ran amok in the line, ducking under barriers and trying to join other families.  He was absolutely livid that I wouldn't let him just go to the front and take his turn: anyone reasonable would have said it was okay.  I finally, finally calmed him down by talking to him about his new favorite subject, fire water.

I'm not exaggerating.

Dennis came back to have dinner with us at a little snack stand outside the park.  Next door, there was a Ben and Jerry's shop, and we decided to reward our three well-behaved kids.  The cones we ordered should have cost about 4 euros a piece, with two scoops of each.  But the scooper, the Robin Hood of Disney Village, gave us about five heavy scoops of ice cream each, and then charged us 10 euros for the whole lot.  The kids could not believe their luck.  

Translation FAIL

So that was a sweet ending to a really nice leg of our vacation.  

I crack myself up.