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How We Broke Disneyworld Part V

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RECAP: If you’re just now joining us, where ya been? OK here’s the deal: me and the family went to Disneyworld with a dollar and a dream. Our dream was to see magic! We snatched Peter Pan and tried to make him fly…from the top of Cinderella’s castle. We made him fall. From the top of Cinderella’s castle. And then we ran. We got chased by the Mickeys (Disney’s mouse-eared security force), stole a tram full of weary patrons, made our way to Hollywood Studios, got stopped by stormtroopers, The Honey Badger became a rebel spy, The Boy had an “accident,” my Wife stole the ruby red slippers, we rode the Tower of Terror (and then it broke down), Tanner fell (HARD), and the Space Rangers took The Boy into custody. And we’re still stuck in the park…

Shit Shit Shit.

Now what are we supposed to do? My first inclination is to just walk and leave The Boy as a down payment on Peter Pan’s round-the-clock medical bills. I hope the fairy has AFLAC because there’s a pigeon chasing us, singing “Pays the doctors, Boyeee!!” But that actually isn’t gonna fly with my wife so we have to come up with a strategy to get him back.

Shit.

After mouse-eared Mickeys, leapfrogging Space Rangers, fat Han Solo, and Janey and Tanner’s bullshit, I think a full-scale, hair-raising, skin-of-your-teeth, stunt mission is in effect. Lucky for us Disney can afford to license the premier motion picture stuntsman: Indiana Jones. Off to the show.

The Indiana Jones Stunt Show & Casino showcases a small selection of the Raiders of the Lost Ark stunts we’ve come to know and love. There’s the big-ass ball, spears that shoot out of the walls and floor, flames, the Nazi brute and the plane fight. It was pretty cool…well, it would be if time had been kind to Indy. It hasn’t. Indiana Jones has gotten a little old over the years. And fat. And drunk.

See, the stunt show has changed a bit as time as passed to accommodate Indy’s “maturation.” The ball is really a great big Whopper, spears are Nerf darts the size of potbelly pigs, and, to make Indy run, the attendants hide caches of Pabst Blue Ribbon throughout the arena. This is our solution?

Godammit.

But we have to find The Boy and I have no idea where to start. I lose it, grab the first freckled-faced stagehand clad in puffy clothes I can find and try to shake the teeth out of his head. “Where is my kid?!” He starts to cry because no one at Disney is ever upset, he tries to run and, in the process, I rip his shirt. Tattooed on his back, in glittering ink, is a full-color map of Hollywood Studios complete with a sticky You Are Here jewel. And then I see it.

In the center of the map.

The Big Blue Hat.

I spread the kid out on the ground, smooth him out like the map he is. “That’s where we have to go.” But the show is starting and Indy is shakily leaping over Nerf spears, shuffling toward a rocky ramp with a golden idol at the top. The idol! Wife starts moving before I do, pinballing through flashes of flame, smacking life-size Nerf darts aside, and crashing into Indy. “Hey!” he says. “Beer!” she says, pointing. “Where?” he turns and she’s gone, dashing up the ramp. She grabs the idol.

There is no beer. Indy says, “Give me the idol!”

“Help me find my kid!”

The crowd thinks it’s part of the show. They say, “Help me find my kid, I’ll give you the idol!”

Indy relents. “Where’s the beer?”

“In the Big Blue Hat,” the Wife says.

We’re off and running. Down the ramp to the Nazi warplane in the back. When we get back there, the big burly guy is laid out and the Honey Badger is in the pilot seat. I don’t even ask what happened but her knuckles are bloody. Fine. Whatever. We pile in. Indy finds a six-pack in the cockpit and we roll out of the arena to the center of Hollywood Studios.

We round the man-made puddle called Echo Lake into the 138th parade of the day. While the kids are singing old High School Musical numbers, Muppets and Monsters Inc. characters frighten the multitudes of children just trying to leave the park. And then we see The Boy. He’s underneath the Big Blue Hat, surrounded by a bunch of kindergartners dressed like Ewoks and the savages from the Recess Kids, getting slow-roasted over a bunch of multicolored glow sticks like Rotisserie Gold.

“You gotta help save him,” I say to Indy.

“There’s beer back there,” my Wife says.

“I’m too old for this shit,” says Indy.

The Honey Badger pops the cockpit, stands up and sings the Indiana Jones theme song: “Da-da-da-Daaaah, Da-da-dah, Da-da-DA-DAAH, Da-da-da-da-DAAAH!”

And Indy’s feeling it! He snaps out his whip, flips it around a powerline above and executes a beautiful Spiderman-style swing for The Boy. It is majestic! And poorly aimed. He misses. Badly. The parade stops. The crowd goes “Oooh!” The fake Ryan Seacrest from the American Idol pavilion says, “THIS is American—oooh! That’s gonna leave a mark.”

But Indy falls on the edge of the rotisserie and The Boy is flung in the air. He flips end over end, tumbling above the crowd and lands on the wing of the plane. Perfect!

But now everybody’s pissed. We screwed up the parade, stole the idol, broke Indiana Jones, deprived the kindergartners of their lunch (and they are cranky–waaaaayyy past nap time!) They turn on us like we spoke Voldemort’s name.

I yell, “Hit it!”

Honey Badger pounds the gas and we rumble out of Hollywood Studios followed by a fake Ryan Seacrest, imitation Troy and Gabriela, Mike and Sully, and 2 Space Rangers, and the extras from Indiana Jones

Good times.

Now the thrilling conclusion!

How We Broke Disneyworld Part III

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RECAP: If you haven’t been keeping track (and who wouldn’t—this story is awesome, right?), we took a vacation to Disneyworld last week and became embroiled in the Peter Pan Affair: we snatched Peter Pan, took him to the top of Cinderella’s castle and let him go. Petey didn’t fare too well—he couldn’t fly but I’m actually surprised he bounced as high as he did. I didn’t know pavement was that buoyant. So we became fugitives—ran from Magic Kingdom, kidnapped a bunch of people on a parking tram, tried to make Tanner sit down, and escaped into Hollywood Studios.

I said it was gonna be easy, right? That our getaway could be fast and simple? Wrong. Running into the park to find a ride to get us out of the park proved to be an exercise in futility. For an amusement park dedicated to the movies, Disney’s Hollywood Studios has a whopping 4 rides. FOUR. OK there are 5, but you won’t be riding Toy Story Mania at Disneyworld, not in this lifetime. People are camped out in the line with tents and shit like they were introducing a new iPhone. Screw that.

But there’s Star Wars! The tag line is “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” right? I can either a) go back in time and choose never to pick up that little bastard at all; or b) get the hell outta Dodge. Star Tours it is.

For something they don’t own, Disney takes its Star Wars shit seriously! Darth Maul is prowling around outside, scaring the crap out of Janey and Tanner; stormtroopers stand posted along the line, cradling blasters; little people—Ewoks or Jawas or munchkins fleeing the Great Movie Ride—keep cutting in front of us. We try to drop our eyes and ease past the stormtroopers.

UNSUCCESSFUL!

We run on the ride amid a cacophony of Stop! Freeze! and heavy Darth Vader breathing. It’s us and about 10 assorted Star Wars characters—stormtroopers, droids, a chubby Han Solo whose vest is ENTIRELY TOO SHORT and that white shirt is sheer (yeah, try to get that image out of your head), and a man who takes up 2 ½ seats with a Yoda shirt that says Judge Me By My Size, Do You? A little bit, yeah, I do. You know the rules: click, click, everybody’s strapped in, guns are stowed below the seat and the ride begins.

This is no trip to the stars. At all. Hyperspace doesn’t actually take us anywhere. Instead we get C3PO moaning and crying, Artoo yelling “Whoooooo!!” anytime the ride moves, the fat Han Solo breathing hard and having “a bad feeling about this.” The ride takes us from the loading dock through 2 battles with X-Wings and TIE fighters and then back in time with Clones and droids (I don’t know how that works). Then, just as we bounce through the remnants of Alderaan, the Honey Badger gets branded a rebel spy! They post her picture on the ride, outside the ride, on t-shirts that say I Was The Rebel Spy. Everywhere.

Godammit.

We’re first off the ride (because stormtroopers’ guns keep getting stuck in the stowage nets below their seats) and barrel into the gift shop. The Wife pushes the annoying woman aside (no, I don’t want to see my face as Han Solo or Princess Leia) but does snatch her pin of Stitch as Emperor Palpatine (I’m a Star Wars geek—can you tell?). We are met by a group of stormtroopers. One of them stops us. “Hey,” he says, “aren’t you the ones who broke the fairy?” The person dressed like a droid next to him raises her weapon, “Roger, roger.” Janey says, “He’s not a fairy. Tinkerbell’s a fairy!” The Boy laughs, “They called Peter Pan a fairy.” I put up the hood on my Tigger sweatshirt, wave my hand, and say, “These aren’t the people you’re looking for.”

The stormtrooper cocks his head, “These aren’t the people we’re looking for.”

The droid says, “Roger—what?”

“We can move along,” I say.

“Wait—what?” The droid takes off her helmet. “Doggone it, Bill, he’s not really a Jedi! You know this isn’t rea—!” But she doesn’t get to finish her sentence: Darth Maul clubs her in the head with his plastic lightsaber and she fakes her death.

“Move along.” And the stormtrooper waves us past.

Out in the open, we hear: “Star Command, we have them now!”

The Rangers are back.

Unlike Peter Pan, these cats can really fly. Kinda. It’s actually a game of leap frog using glider wings but they keep swooping down on us like crows. Time to run.

Since the Mickeys are tied to the movies here in Hollywood Studios perhaps the best place to escape to is the Great Movie Ride. This is a thrill ride only in the sense a grocery store scooter-paced perusal of the 99¢ aisle at Blockbusters is thrilling. We tumble into the ride and the Rangers pursue, but they run like the gravity is really low—bounding along like they’re on the moon. The four of them file into the car behind us and we’re all taken through a slow-motion exhibit of great movies that combine real live sets, live action (and flames!), and animatronics that predate World War I.

The ride was so slow, I fell asleep. Until we got the Alien segment. Alien is my favorite movie of all time and the ride features a life-size replica of the cargo hold of the Nostromo, complete a shivering Ripley, Jones the Cat stuck in a box, and Mother counting down the self-destruct sequence. Oh yeah, and there’s a full-size Alien in there too. I think The Boy lost control of his bowels. He’s curled up in a tiny ball, trying to re-enter the womb, while this Alien with only half a body moves 7 inches toward us. Seven. He screams. The Rangers scream. The ride stops and we carry his funky tail through the Nostromo, past Humphrey Bogart and Ilsa, out the yellow brick road (but my wife did snatch the ruby red slippers from the Wicked Witch of the East) and we’re back into the park.

Now where?

“There!” says the Honey Badger. She’s pointing at the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.

Shit. I hate that ride.

Part IV

How We Broke Disneyworld Part II

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RECAP: In the last installment of How We Broke Disneyworld, your intrepid vacationers (us) ventured to Disneyworld—Where Dreams Come True. Our dream was to see Peter Pan fly. We caught his little ass, took him to the top of Cinderella’s castle, and let him go. He didn’t fly. We watched him fall. Hard. He’ll be eating out of a straw from now on. So Disney sent the Mickeys after us—6 security guards chasing us with mouse-ears and cartoon voices. We tried to shake them: went on a couple rides, threw a trashcan at them, and tried to blend in with the crowd. We were almost home-free until we got stuck in the dumb-ass Transportation Center and had to hijack a packed parking tram to get away.

You are joining our escape, already in progress.

We’d been on the run in this stupid tram for a whopping 3 minutes and the vast majority of the riders couldn’t figure out we’d commandeered it at all. Kids were crying, throwing shoes and tantrums, losing balloons. Parents were oblivious. That glassy-eyed stare had bewitched them all and they just took it in stride like it was all part of the Disney experience: “Look Janey, they pushed that man off! Isn’t that cool? Tanner! Get down! I’m not telling you again.” The elderly just sat, didn’t move, didn’t blink. I think some of them were dead.

Until I skipped that first stop.

I did not slow for Hook or Jafar or Scar. I pressed the pedal to the metal and coaxed the full 8 miles per hour out of that puppy. But when I breezed past the first set of yellow safety pegs and my wife never said, “Please grab your personal articles and supervise your children (or repeat it in Spanish),” folks got upset. Kinda. What I got was a litany of half-hearted protests: “Mabel, isn’t that our stop?” “Why isn’t he stopping?” “John, should we say something? Didn’t we park at Jafar 41?” “Well, where is this?” “I don’t want to go!” “We have to, sweetie, the park’s closing.” “No!” It was the most apathetic response to a kidnapping ever.

And then the Mickeys came. Slicing through the parking lot in their white SUVs, going only 15 MPH (that’s one-five, not five-zero. Fif-TEEN people!) Hanging out of the sunroof is a guy waving red and blue flashlights actually going “Whee-oo! Whee-oo!” as they chase us. They get on the loudspeaker and, still in Mickey voices, shout, “Pull it over there, buddy!” Then to a patron, “Watch your step, ma’am.” Back to us, “I said stop right there!” They’re trying to move through the parking lot and cut us off but I have the straightaway to the exit. It is the slowest getaway in history but we eke past the SUVs and are out onto…what kind of shit?

Disneyworld labels its streets between the parks in a way that makes sense to them and only them: Epcot Resorts Drive. World Drive. Buena Vista Blvd. And then they dot the sides of the streets with advertisements FOR THEIR OWN PARKS! It’s their own shit! Like I would ever say, “Wow, that Magic Kingdom was so nice, I wish they had something with more animals. Wait, what’s that sign? They have an ANIMAL Kingdom? Let’s go!” If you’ve sold all the plasma you legally can and mortgaged your house to make the damn trip, who doesn’t know what’s here?

Dropped between those advertisements are street signs for other areas of the park. Not the Department of Transportation reflective green with white lettering, mind you; Disneyworld signs are purple and red and lit by the freaking candlestick from Beauty and the Beast. It’s nighttime. I’m not a fucking owl; I can’t read that shit in the dark! And by the time I get close enough to read them, I realize the 47 things listed on the sign are broken into 3 groups—Left Lanes for this random collection of stuff, Straight Ahead for another unrelated group of locations, and, for that stuff you actually want to do, Right HERE, Turn NOW, GO!

Good thing for us, the Mickeys chasing us are Magic Kingdom Mickeys—they’re lost too. Over the loudspeaker I hear: “…I don’t know. I haven’t been over there before.” And “ I reckon that’s the Hollywood-thing-a-bob.” Still can’t understand what the Donald Duck guys are saying. No one’s doing anything fast. I whip the tram to the right and it jack-knifes, Janey loses her Mickey ears, Tanner still will not GET THE FUCK DOWN, John hasn’t said shit to me yet, and I’m looking dead at my wife. She snatches the 2012 Epcot Flower & Garden Show commemorative pin and belt buckle playset from Mabel’s 10-foot long lanyard, makes a heroic, stuntman-like 4-foot jump from the rear of the tram to the driver’s area and we are rumbling toward Hollywood Studios.

Disney’s Hollywood Studios are a testament to the movies. Well, they’re actually a testament to a) things Disney already bought (Pixar and the Muppets); and b) stuff Disney can’t afford to buy. Yet. (Which is anything George Lucas and Steven Spielberg made). We’re miles ahead of the Mickeys, who probably took the wrong turn and are stuck in the Jungle Trek in Animal Kingdom, abandon the tram and are about to cross the gates when we meet the Hollywood Studios versions of Mickeys: Space Rangers. These cats drop from the sky clad in Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger gear from head to toe, pointing their fists at us and talking, like Tim Allen, into their wrists.

“Star Command! Freeze right there!”

Star Command? Serious—fuck it. I just put my hands up.

We all do. Except The Boy.

The Boy is 12. That means he has ninja-level “Blank Stare” abilities, superhuman laziness, and feet entirely too big for his body. Which makes him clumsy. He’s also resolute in his refusal to grow up. He sees the Space Rangers and shouts, “It’s Buzz Lightyear! Mom, take a picture!” AND THESE FUCKERS POSE! The Boy runs up, he’s hugging them and shit. He gets an autograph from one and they tousle his hair and send him on his way with a “To Infinity and Beyond!” Flashbulbs go off and I hear, “Look, Janey, it’s Buzz!” I also hear, “Godammit, Tanner!” and “Mabel, I need to take my back pill.” and “John, the car’s not here!” And while an impromptu character sighting line queues up, we run willy nilly into the park.

Heh heh heh. This is almost too easy.

Part III