Little Things: Smoked Turkey

The first time my wife and I went to WDW, on the first night we were there, we went to the River Roost Lounge at Port Orleans Riverside to grab a drink before heading over to the Magic kingdom to try to catch the Main Street Electrical Parade (we didn't make it in time, but walking through the gates at exactly the moment the narration started is a moment I'll never forget). That drink would be the first alcoholic beverage I ever had at WDW; it was a Smoked Turkey, which some enterprising fellows have the recipe for over here.

I've since learned that the Smoked Turkey is one of the standard issue Disney cocktails available in most bars and lounges on-property, but it's old-timey Americana name, dark tobacco-red appearance and hickory taste fit right in with the ambiance of Port Orleans, and the talkative, friendly bar-staff at River Roost made me feel right at home (and 15 years younger, after I got ID'd).

Here's to you WDW Smoked Turkey.

(image stolen from the Bar and Lounge overview at the excellent Disney Food Blog)

Mouse Better Have My Money

We live Germany, but we're from the UK. In Germany, when you say "I'm going to Disneyland" people automatically assume you mean Paris, Euro Disney as I still like to call it. "No" you say, "Florida". " Oh! Isn't that expensive?" They reply. You now have two options, both answers equally true. "Yes" you say, and carry on with your day. No harm, no foul.

Or

"Have you seen how expensive Disneyland Paris is? And how small it is in comparison? I guess you haven't, because, real talk, depending on how you play it, the price of your long weekend on-property in Paris could buy you 2, maybe even 3 weeks on-property in Florida, and equivalently nice hotels even; nicer hotels if the Internet's opinion of several of the DLP resorts is correct! Yes I will explain what on-property means."

You could say that instead.

As UK customers, it seems we get a bunch of pretty good deals - it's the time-honored special relationship of English speaking, culture-generating imperialists I guess. The flip-side of these deals is, as the entire American internet has widely acknowledged,  British people come to WDW for a long time. The flip-flip-side of that is the tendency to feel like one has to come for 2 weeks or you will be missing out in some way (oh well, twist my arm, as we say and I have no idea whether Americans do). If I want to book a 7 day stay right now for instance, I get another 7 days of park tickets for free! During a time I won't be there! Or else!

The deal with Mickey is this - if you drop the money on flights to come see me, I'll give you a nice long holiday with park tickets and food and stuff for less than you'd have to pay if you were driving in from Atlanta or something. They have to make it worth my while to come, but it's worth it because I'll be on property for two weeks drinking $10 dollar cocktails the whole time*.

The deal with DLP is quite different. It's like they know a certain amount of people will just assume that DLP is cheaper, but Disney holidays in general are pricey, and drop the cash with even checking what they could get at Pop Century. Another certain amount of people will do all those checks, gasp a bit, pace up and down, and then decide that they want to at least experience DLP once and drop the money. And for that money, you get about the same experience regardless of how you tweak it, when you go, how you get there, whatever. It's like they know that those two kinds of people will blow an exorbitant amount of money enough times in a year to keep the gates open, so no need to encourage return visitors, pad the off-season, provide a cheaper venue for bigger families and so on.

*Not actually the whole time

My Disney World, Nov 16

Links, Thinks, Things>

• If you scan a Magic Band with your Disney Infinity (2.0?) base, you unlock building components based on It's A Small World. I like this a lot, especially since I'm planning on using Infinity as my WDW homesickness salve. 
• Big Hero 6 came out on my birthday, but has yet to reach Germany. After reading the latest Marvel event, Original Sins (Spoilers-I hated it), and seeing how it makes pains to align the real Marvel universe with the cinematic universe status-quo, I wonder if we won't see cinema Big Hero 6 taking a more important role in the comics soon.
• The Disney Hipsters make a good point about avoiding Food and Wine at the weekends and on Friday.
• The new German supermarket Disney Christmas Thing starts Monday. I know it starts Monday because despite all the point-of-sale and booster pack things being out on the shop floor, you can't buy them yet because it's not Monday yet and this is Germany.

Magical Construction

Yesterday, @touringplans posted a photo of the Magic Kingdom hub construction, and I was a little bit heartbroken.

It hit me like that because we have a plan to get hotdogs from Casey's Corner the night we arrive. Now, that plan still stands, and I don't think a nearby construction wall invalidates it. Hell, we fell in love with Animal Kingdom while a massive construction wall engulfed what seemed like half of Harambe. We fell in love with the Tangled Toilets under the shadow of the Seven Dwarfs Scafolding.
But still, I was a little heartbroken.

So how do we excuse their pixie dust?
As someone who has now admitted to them self that Disney World is going to be a place I visit regularly, I have to find my peace with it - I mean, I want the parks to live and grow and have new things for me to see, but it must be hard for Disney as a company to accept that for some people, all they'll see is the pixie dust. Maybe that will compel them to come back? Maybe pixie dust has, as they put it in my line of work, a conversion rate?

On tone and Once Upon a Time

Last time I was in the World, the busses had adverts for Once Upon a Time Season 3. There's something about the pop culture hypereality of WDW that makes the media you encounter while there, the songs, shows, trailers and fads of that visit, seem extra special, extra shiny and appealing.

New episodes of Once Upon a Time appeared on Netflix yesterday, just in time for the countdown to our next Disney vacation. A discussion about the (IMHO of course) artistic failure of the Hobbit movies being due to Jackson's, or someone's, or a group of someones' decision to doggedly stick to the tone of the LOTR movies for the Hobbit, led to me considering how much I like the tone of Once Upon a Time.

For as much as initially OUaT was a late Buffy reaction from ABC, and for as much as it appeared to directly be informed by that ghost wife Anna Friel vehicle of around the same time (itself tonally borrowing from Burton's Big Fish), contemporary Once... Has found a tone really unique to itself, as a sort of Buffy for young mums to watch with their tween daughters. Gilmore Girls the adventure serial, if you will.

Which reminds me, I must start work on that Amy Sherman Paladino Silver Surfer pitch I have in my head.