Given that what was to the right of Walt Disney Studios’ “Hub” offered little to impress, perhaps we can assume that the real meat and potatoes of the park is instead sequestered to the left, up the other diagonal of the “Y” shaped layout.
Production Courtyard
Bruce Vaughn – then head of Imagineering’s Research & Development; today, Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Imagineering – recounted in The Imagineering Story that the park was based on “this idea that people wanted to go and see how entertainment is created, how movies are made. [Unfortunately though,] the reality of filmmaking is that unless you’re there at the very moment they’re shooting the stars or doing stunts, it’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait – quite boring. […] There are moments of excitement and the final product is exciting, but the actual process isn’t as glamorous as people think.”
And lo, welcome to PRODUCTION COURTYARD. Animation Courtyard was meant to signify that “Courtyard” will be this park’s nomenclature for, basically, small plazas, because the same is true here. Also like Animation Courtyard, the Production Courtyard includes three total “attractions” including just one ride.
Mirroring the Animagique theater is Production Courtyard’s twin sister: the Cinémagique theater. It’s another 1,110 seat performance venue. But rather than a live stage show, the theater contains the eponymous Cinémagique – a sort of high concept, light-language mix of a live performance and the excitement of a theme park 3D movie, all centered on a somewhat brilliant premise of exploring the impact of film as an artform.
To explain, Cinémagique invites audiences into a sort of ode to the history of film, with an usher kicking off a montage of black and white cinema sourced from actual icons of Hollywood history. But when a rude guest (truly a planted Cast Member) yapping on their cell phone becomes distracting enough to draw the attention of of-screen characters, a magician (played by Alan Cumming) zaps the interloper into the screen (where he’s played by Martin Short) who consequently finds himself navigating through scenes from movies from Angles with Dirty Faces to Some Like It Hot; The Magnificent Seven to Mary Poppins; The Exorcist to Titanic, all in pursuit of a would-be romance with French actress Julie Deply (so the two can trade off on essential bilingual dialogue) en route to the Wizard of Oz finale.
You might position Cinémagique as a sort of equivalent to the Lost Legend: The Great Movie Ride at the original Disney-MGM Studios – a love letter to the history of and the great moments at the movies, here presented in a more language-friendly film format and with that quintessential “European” focus that makes the attraction more relevant to audiences for the resort. Like its animation counterpart, the show ended its initial run in 2017 (returning for a limited time encore from 2018 to 2019), and certainly was and remains one of the most enduring and beloved aspects of Walt Disney Studios.
Which, unfortunately, juxtaposes quite harshly against the Production Courtyard’s other attraction… You have to remember that by 2002, Disney had pretty much abandoned any hope that Walt Disney World’s Disney-MGM Studios was actually going to be a real production studio where actual movies and television shows would be filmed… But that didn’t stop the Declassified Disaster: The Backstage Studio Tour from continuing to whisk guests through an continuously-shrinking “studio” facility, keeping up the tissue-paper-thin guise that you might really see a real celebrity filming just around the corner!
That’s why it’s fairly shocking that even so, Disney made the would-be anchor attraction of Walt Disney Studios Park Studio Tram Tour: Behind the Magic. Pretty insurmountably the worst Disney ride of the 21st century (so far), Paris’ version of the studio tour was unique in the sense that it existed despite the clear fact that no one was even pretending that any movie might ever be produced at the park. Unlike Florida’s tour (which at least included on-foot visits to warehouses, soundstages, and even a vestigial animation studio), the closest Paris’ version got to seeing “behind-the-scenes” was when the tram buzzed along the outskirts of a Cast Member costuming building, suggesting riders peek through the windows to see costumers at work.
For the most part, the Studio Tram Tour spent its ambling 20 minute runtime driving past a “Boneyard” (a musty, rotting, would-be prop yard set haphazardly in laws along the roadway to give the impression they might’ve been used in films), stopping to gaze at ambiguous “sets” littered with faux cameras and dollies (including a stop by the set of ABC’s Dinotopia limited series released in the park’s opening year, but essentially forgotten as soon as it aired), and through the only real “events” of the tour: a copy of Catastrophe Canyon (borrowed from Florida’s tour)…
… and a stop at the “set” (not really) of Touchstone Pictures’ 2002 box office bomb Reign of Fire (remember that one? No?). In the post-apocalyptic film, digging in the London Underground would awaken long-dormant dragons such that in the far off year of 2020, humans would stage a last stand against the fire-breathing foes to try to restore civilization. Thus, the tour would pass through a destroyed London set where a single flamethrower burst would ostensibly show how Hollywood movies do special effects (even though, y’know, the movie definitely used burgeoning CGI).
For those keeping track, the Front Lot, Animation Courtyard, and Production Courtyard have so far netted us two rides – Flying Carpets Over Agrabah and the Studio Tram Tour. The third of three awaits in the most desolate of corners…
Backlot
When Bruce Vaughn was first toured through a completed Walt Disney Studios Park in 2002, he remembered a conversation he had with his tour guide (Imagineering’s Peter McGraw) as the last Cast Members milled about after a day of operation.
“I was like, ‘When are we going to be in the park?’ And he turned to me and he goes, ‘You’re in the park.’ And he pointed at the Armageddon marquee and I’m like ‘I’m onstage?’ He’s like “You’re onstage.’ I’m like ‘It’s just a bunch of gray warehouses.’ [He said,] ‘Yeah, it’s supposed to be like a studio.'”
Vaughn’s response? “Oh, god… You gotta be kidding me.”
For certain, the industrial heart of Walt Disney Studios Park was the ominously-named BACKLOT – a vast, blacktop plaza of industrial lighting rigs, corrugated steel warehouses, and enough asphalt to make one forget they stood just a few hundred feet away from the Fantasia Gardens and gorgeous warmth and greenery of Disneyland Park. The Backlot offered a smorgasbord of experiences, each offering to take guests behind the gritty, technical scenes to show how real movie-making happens.
Approximately 3,000 guests could cram into the amphitheater hosting Moteurs… Action! Stunt Show Spectacular – a live stunt show showcasing the acrobats of stunt cars and motorcycles. (A copy of the show would be “gifted” to the Disney-MGM Studios in Florida as part of the Disney Parks’ “Happiest Celebration on Earth” in 2005.) Frankly, it’s worth saying that the waterfront Italian village serving as the stunt show’s backdrop might’ve been one of the more pleasant settings in the park if it weren’t subject to continuous in-show explosions!
Housed inside of “Studio 7” on the Backlot was Armadeggon – Les Effets Speciaux. In the vein of Universal’s fabled special effects demonstrations (a la Twister… Ride it Out, Poseidon’s Fury, or Earthquake: The Big One), this experience is themed to Touchstone Pictures’ 1998 Michael Bay sci-fi disaster film Armageddon (perhaps best remembered for Aerosmith’s soundtrack contribution “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”).
Inside, guests are transported to the Russian space station seen in the film for a five-minute immersive special effects demonstration that includes sparks, liquid nitrogen fog, fire effects, and wind (simulating a space “vacuum” effect when the ship’s hull is breached.) A collapsing ceiling and a drop-out floor bring the experience to its conclusion.
Speaking of Aerosmith, a final, familiar sight for Disney World visitors resides at the far end of the Backlot – Rock n’ Roller Coaster avec Aerosmith. There’s a unique twist in this third of three rides for the park, and the one most clearly copied-and-pasted from Florida. Given its location on the industrial Backlot, Paris’ version of the attraction does away with any insinuation that you’re visiting a recording studio and even the razor-thin plot of racing through Hollywood to attend a red carpet premiere.
Instead, we’re maybe meant to imagine we’re embodying the emotional highs and lows of rock music by boarding “Soundtrackers” – our trains that will trip the light fantastic as we rock out to Aerosmith’s high energy hits. While the track layout is identical to Orlando’s, the ride itself takes place in a void of spinning, flashing, undulating lights that give the ride a sort of emotional abstraction, like if the Windows Media Player visualizer from your home computer became a ride.
Ironically, dropping the bulk of the “race through Hollywood” storyline and its somewhat cheesy blacklight cut-out set pieces ended up benefitting Paris’ version of the ride.
The intricate and ambitious light show that occurs around riders has to be seen to be believed, and you can watch it take place above. The more abstract style actually holds up better than the blacklight cartoon-perspective of Orlando’s. (So for the first time yet, advantage: Paris?)
If you’re keeping score, Walt Disney Studios Park has now presented to us two stage shows (“Animagique” and “Cinémagique”), two “special effects” presentations (“Moteurs… Action!” and “Armageddon”) and three rides (Magic Carpets Over Agrabah, the Studio Tram Tour, and Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster). Mix in a few accessory experiences for good measure, a couple of quick service eateries, and voila! You have seen all that Walt Disney Studios Park has to offer. The model below, believe it or not, contains the entire guest accessible footprint of Disneyland Paris’ second gate as it appeared in 2002.
Impressed? Or are you left wishing you’d just spent the day at Disneyland Park next door instead? Or worse, that you’d spent the same amount of money to fly to Florida for a week?
Studio sours
That’s the park that guests stepped into when Walt Disney Studios officially opened on March 16, 2002. According to Stewart’s DisneyWar, while the first members of the public were milling about, Disney’s Board Members – invited for a pre-opening soirée and tour – convened for lunch to celebrate. Philanthropist and Board director Andrea Van de Kamp allegedly turned to then-President and COO Bob Iger at the tour’s completion and reported that she had some concerns. “I’m not sure there’s enough here. There’s not enough substance to keep people for a full day. People are already leaving, and the park has only been open a few hours.”
Eisner himself reportedly strode up to her minutes later and said in a cold tone, “I understand you’ve been griping.” Van de Kamp was allegedly surprised and hurt that Iger had betrayed her confidence so immediately. Within a year, she was excused from Disney’s board, claiming on the way out that she had been singled out for turning against Eisner.
With Van de Kamp’s candor now seen in the context of the park, I admit to taking some amount of umbrage to 2022’s The Imagineering Story for quoting my review (not by name, mind you) of Walt Disney Studios for a freelance writing assignment years and years ago as follows:
A typically-nasty Disney-centric blog post called it “Disney’s most disastrous theme park ever; a park that dispensed entirely with immersion, fantasy, and romance in favor of blistering blacktop, industrial backlots, metal lighting rigs, electrical poles, and big, boxy, tan soundstages.
Because sure, I wrote those words. But I offer that Theme Park Tourist was far from typically-nasty, and that above all, I was right. There was no question that Walt Disney Studios Park was – far and away – the worst Disney theme park on Earth. Indeed, one might wager that it was among the worst major theme parks on Earth, period. And the numbers bore that out…
Remember, the key question was whether a second theme park would help transform Disneyland Paris into the multi-day destination it had aspired to be – one where guests opted for its luxury (but ultimately, agricultural) accommodation over the City of Lights itself. Disney’s hope had been that the resort’s 12 million-person annual attendance would jump by at least 50%, to 18 million. But given that that second gate ended up being Walt Disney Studios, it’s not difficult to divine the results…
Disneyland Paris’ trend of profitability that had begun in 1995 with the opening of Space Mountain ended with Walt Disney Studios. In 2003, the S.C.A. reported a $66 million loss. Compounded by the global tourism downturn spurred by the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York City, Disneyland Paris’ overall attendance actually fell by a million visitors between 2001 and 2003. Worse still, the resort was now saddled by an underbuilt theme park that would required focused investment for decades to even hope to pull its own weight… if it ever could at all.
By 2004, the Euro Disney company was back at the table with its banks – just as it had been a decade before – to renegotiate another bail-out from its loans to avoid bankruptcy. Not only had Walt Disney Studios failed to be the solution to Disneyland Paris’ problems; it had become a new cause. And given that Disney was in the midst of turmoil across its studios and theme parks, it looked like the best Disneyland Paris could hope for was to survive long enough to be able to afford a fix…
the strangest thing about this whole project to me is the fact that paris didnt attempt to fight or even redesign arendelle so they weren’t left with the worst of the three lands as its lynchpin 2 years after the others opened.
For most people who’ve visited both the consensus seems to be hong kong has the vastly better land while tokyo has the vastly better ride. Then Paris is coming along and getting hong kong’s lesser ride and half of the land it has and nothing from tokyo. I know that guests are overwhelmingly local but still youd think paris would want something unique about their arendelle but instead they seem to be basing the expansion off of half of hong kong’s land.
the whole strategy here just seems so weird
Absolutely true. Even from the earliest artwork of the park’s big expansion, people were zooming in and going, “Wait, it’s only half of Galaxy’s Edge, too?” That artwork has what would typically be the Millennium Falcon Smugglers Run half of the land, but with an X-Wing instead of the Falcon, so it was like, “Okay, so… it’ll be Black Spire Outpost, but with Rise of the Resistance?” I really do this that was their M.O. here the whole time – basically “sampler” versions of the “Living Lands” designed for other parks.
It’s not like the Sliding Sleighs ride in Hong Kong is a masterpiece, but yes, it’s totally nonsensical that Frozen Ever After – Frozen Ever After! – is what awaits at the end of the literal and metaphorical journey for this park. Even when that ride debuted at EPCOT and all the talk was about how Frozen was too new to have a permanent ride in a park (that “mindset” at Disney feels ancient now…) I said that Frozen definitely deserved a ride… it just deserved a better ride than even the best makeover of Maelstrom could produce. And now we see that ride recreated two more times by choice, which is wild… As you said, especially because Tokyo’s exists. I don’t think Disney is at all interested in paying for that (not to mention, OLC probably has a multi-year exclusivity window), but even so, it is somewhat depressing that at the end of this, Walt Disney Studios’ multi-billion-dollar makeover took seven years to result in… (checks notes) Web-Slingers, Flight Force, two flat rides, and Frozen Ever After.
yeah i can accept lesser rides (very very likely that OLC does have an exclusivity clause) but usually id prefer them to be paired with more developed lands. Like HK’s arendelle isnt winning awards for its rides but its arguably the best “land” either Disney or universal has put out in decades just because its absolutely overflowing with everything else that makes a living land
Im concerned these ‘sampler’ lands simply wont be immersive enough. Like HK’s arendelle isnt that big despite how packed it is and its twice the size with you being able to look over the harbour at more land. Pride lands is barely more than a ride with an immersive outdoor queue.
They already tried the “sample disney and if you like it go to a better disney” with original HK and it failed miserably, i hope they dont go that route again
Agreed. In my mind, it’s because the intentional strategy was to get “mini-lands” rather than full copy-pastes from elsewhere. (The early concept art seemed to be signaling that their Galaxy’s Edge would be just the “village” half, but with Rise of the Resistance instead of Smugglers Run.)
Theoretically, when this all sums up in fifty years, that would’ve created “sampler” sized” lands comprised of 1 ride, 1 restaurant, and 1 shop each, so you could cram four, five, or six of those around the lagoon whereas the more sprawling Frozen land in Hong Kong or a full sized Galaxy’s Edge would mean you could only ever amount to having two or three.
Again, I have no reason to know that was the intention, but it’s the only explanation I can come up with to explain why – to your point – they’d build all of that to conceal what’s ultimately a copy of the mediocre boat ride. I think the land itself is phenomenal, but surely even the quality-starved visitors in Paris will get off Frozen Ever After and go “Oh… that’s… that’s it?”