Genie+ vs. Universal Express: Which Theme Park Upcharge Is Worth Its Price to “Plus” Your Trip?

If we told you two years ago that FastPass would be a thing of the past, you probably wouldn’t have believed us. But here we stand, at the precipice of the Year of the Genie. Disney’s new paid-for priority boarding system is the talk of the town, both for ways its serves as a return to the tried-and-true rules of the past and how it requires a PhD level dissertation to understand. It’s probably a good time to examine how Disney’s line-skipping system works today… and to compare it to its nearest neighbor, Universal’s Express Pass.

Today, we’re diving deep to dissect both Genie+ and Universal Express to see how these two systems approach priority boarding very, very differently. We’ll dig into the pros and cons of each, examine how each one works, and ask you for your input – do you prefer Genie+’s low-cost system dictated by rules, reservations, technology, and microtransactions, or Universal’s high-cost, all-in, VIP solution for guests willing to spend big to get stuff done?

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.



This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!

If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.


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The ’71 Club: Opening Year Landmarks of the “Vacation Kingdom of the World,” 50 Years Later

On October 1, 2021, the Walt Disney World Resort officially launched its “Most Magical Celebration on Earth,” commemorating 50 years since its 1971 opening. Plenty has been said about the 18-month celebration – including how the occasion has largely been marked by slashed guest perks & new upcharges, a focus on animation over attractions, and the company seemingly forgetting to celebrate Walt Disney World history during their celebration of Walt Disney World history

But for just a moment, put all that aside. Behind the glimmer of “Beacons of Magic;” the frustrations of Disney Genie+; the McDonald’s Happy Meal tie-ins, and the “EARidescent” sparkle that gilds it all, 2021 also serves as the 50th Anniversary of something a whole lot simpler: the “Vacation Kingdom of the World.”

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.



This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!

If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.


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“A Genie By Any Other Name” – The Nonsense Naming of Disney Genie+… And An Idea to Fix It

Shakespeare’s Juliet once mused, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet!” She was right, of course… But had Juliet been responsible for explaining how to grow one to a family from Brazil, she might wish she had concise, clear, and intuitive language to use.

That’s the reality faced by Cast Members responsible for helping guests at Disney Parks to understand why they’re several steps away from being able to access the sold-out Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance Individual Lightning Lane they’re blocking the entrance to.

Stand-by. Virtual Queue. Lightning Lane. Individual Ride Reservations. Boarding Groups… The language of waiting in line at a Disney Park in the 2020s is enough to leave even the most ardent theme park aficionados puzzled. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Let’s take a glance at the Disney Genie Glossary and propose a quick fix that would sure help clear things up…

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.



This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!

If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.


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What If Disney World’s 50 Golden Statues Honored RIDES Instead of Movies? Here Are Our Picks…

If we’re being honest, it’s pretty understandable that Disney World’s “Golden Anniversary” is lacking some of shine fans had hoped for. Still mired in a tourism downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the timing just couldn’t have been much worse for the resort to launch a global marketing campaign around the 50th Anniversary. Stalled construction and pared-down budgets have left Disney World woefully short on the major projects once envisioned for 2021, leaving specialty food and souvenirs, two nighttime “same”-tacularsrising prices, and a lot of new upcharges to make headlines instead…

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.



This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!

If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.


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The Waiting Game: A Brief History of Queueing and The Many Lives of Lines at Disney Parks

What’s as classically-Disney as Mickey Mouse, Dole Whips, and spinning tea cups, but never shown on a Disney Parks commercial? Waiting in line.

From day one, waiting has been an essential (and for many, frustratingly memorable) component of any visit to Disneyland or Walt Disney World. And for nearly seventy years, generations of Disney’s engineers, experience designers, show writers, and executives have been trying to make guests’ waits shorter, more entertaining, more interactive, and – to the point of today’s tale – more managable.

In the great balance of guest experience, operations, and per capita spending, FastPass, FastPass+, Disney Genie+, and Lightning Lane have all taken swings at solving Disney’s supply-and-demand capacity dilemma. But altogether, Disney’s quest for the perfect virtual queue may still be ongoing, and the journey from standard queues to Genie+ is a wild ride in its own right… Today, we’ll dig into the history of waiting and explore how Disney’s 21st century solutions have created as many problems as they’ve solved.

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.



This article and hundreds more are available for Gold and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!

If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Gold and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.


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Ticket to Paradise: Disney Parks Prices from 1955 to 2024

Our world moves in cycles; predictable patterns of ebbs and flows, beginnings and endings, life and death… like the phases of the moon, some things can just be counted upon as tried, true, and sure. And so it is with annual price hikes at Disney’s two resorts in the United States. Truly a tale as old as time, you can bet your bottom dollar that come hell, highwater, war, recession, or pandemic, somehow and some way, the cost of a day at Disneyland or Walt Disney World will rise.

Continue reading “Ticket to Paradise: Disney Parks Prices from 1955 to 2024”

AVENGERS: Custody War – Disney & Universal’s Co-Parenting Plans for MARVEL Super Heroes

“Avengers… Assemble!” Well… if only it were that easy.

Forget Thor and Loki; Wanda and Agatha; Iron Man and Thanos. When it comes to Marvel superheroes, one of the most cosmic clashes of all time isn’t been heroes and villains at all. Instead, it’s between two entertainment titans engaged in a decades-long war over control of Central Florida, now embroiled in an unlikely custody battle over a teenager from Brooklyn… with web-slinging powers.

For those outside theme park fandom, it’s one of the oddest bits of “fine print” in modern pop culture: that somehow, despite Disney’s $4 billion purchase of Marvel outright in 2009, the company is forbidden from using its own heroes at its flagship resort. To make matters worse, not only is Disney practically powerless in leveraging its pop-culture-dominating IP in its own theme parks, but those heroes have somehow been ceded to their comic-book-esque archnemesis just a few miles north.

So how can Universal hold Spider-Man hostage? What’s the legal asterisk that explains the slow drip of Marvel heroes into Disney Parks across the globe… including Florida? What does the future hold for Disney and Universal’s uneasy co-parenting of Marvel heroes in theme parks? Like all custody battles, it’s… complicated. So we may as well start at the beginning…

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.



This article and hundreds more are available for Gold and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!

If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Gold and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.


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Potter… Nintendo… Star Wars… WHAT’S LEFT?! 12 Untapped IPs Perfect for Theme Park Lands

For at least the last few decades, multimedia companies like Disney, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, and WarnerMedia have been engaged in an all-out war. The goal? Purchasing, licensing, conglomerating, trading, and protecting the most precious resource of the 21st century: intellectual property. In fact, one of Park Lore’s recent Extra Features took a look at 9 surprising IPs that are now officially Disney’s thanks to its acquisition of 20th Century Fox!

But away from the studio, one battlefront in the ongoing IP War has been Disney and Universal’s respective theme parks, where a new era of “Living Lands” has plucked places right from the highest-earning franchises in history like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel, and Disney Princesses to go head-to-head in billion-dollar theme park projects.

A few years ago – after so many major acquisitions – we might’ve wondered aloud, “What’s left?!” Then came Nintendo. How had we missed it?! Nintendo was the kind of integenerational, widely-recognized, timeless brand and character catalogue few movies can match. It’s perfect for creating an immersive world. And of course, it doesn’t hurt that between Mario and Donkey Kong alone, Nintendo’s top two franchises have amassed $40 billion in revenue (more than the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe)…

The surprising coup of Nintendo has left lots of theme park fans wondering aloud, “What else have we missed?” and more importantly…

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.



This article and hundreds more are available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!

If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.


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MyMagic Minus: The Rise and Fall of Disney’s Billion Dollar Pre-Planning MagicBand Empire

Standing in the sunset glow of Batuu… alone; gazing up at fireworks from a Main Street that’s… empty; a family perfectly sized to capture that Splash Mountain photo… with no pesky strangers in the log. Anyone who’s made the mistake of mentioning “Disney World” in earshot of a smart speaker or so much as Googled the possibility of a trip will quickly find their browser filled with these rosy images of a Disney Parks vacation. In the alternate reality Walt Disney World depicted there, there’s an unspoken guarantee: your family will find a Disney trip as effortlessly magical as all those ABC sitcom families in the ‘90s did.

Of course, anyone who’s actually been to Central Florida will tell you that those dreamy plans quickly evaporate upon arriving on Walt Disney World soil. There, reality checks you fast. Pathways surging with people; restaurant reservations sold out six months in advance; multi-hour queues in parks notoriously short on rides yet packed with E-Tickets; transportation, ticketing, theming, and infrastructure from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s butting up against one another in continuous conflict.

Image: Disney

In the mid-2000s, record crowds (and record prices) were beginning to break the spell of “The Most Magical Place on Earth,” sullying Disney’s reputation for courtesy, efficiency, and show. MyMagic+ was the sleight of hand that would bring the magic back… An abstract-but-ambitious billion dollar undertaking, Disney World’s all-at-once modernization was meant to add ease and simplicity back into a visit; to make Disney World as frictionless as promised; to leave guests effortlessly traversing (and spending money) across Disney’s Central Florida campus. Did it work? Well…

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.



This article and hundreds more are available for Gold and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!

If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Gold and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.


Log In ​or Join Now

“Yep, That’s Disney Now:” 9 Surprising Acquired IPs En Route to Disney+… and Maybe, Disney Parks

CONTENT IS KING – that was the title of a 1996 editorial by Bill Gates, who wrote that the Internet would disrupt entertainment in a way unmatched since the home television a half-century earlier. He reflected that in television, “the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.” To Gates’ thinking, the Internet offered the same opportunity… and as such, he suggested that the wise would invest in entertainment on the then-new World Wide Web. 

Now, a quarter century later, we can see that Gates’ prediction wasn’t just right on the mark; it was practically prophetic. Spurred by the 2010 opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, we can see the battle of content play out as Disney and Universal each reach for high-earning film (and video game) franchises to translate into “Living Lands” stocked with in-universe souvenirs and snacks But even as billion-dollar theme park projects clash in battle, the war is even larger. The “Content Wars” have redefined entertainment in the 21st century. Accelerated by the pandemic, streaming has usurped all other forms of traditional media, and he who has the most valuable IPs has the lead.

Continue reading ““Yep, That’s Disney Now:” 9 Surprising Acquired IPs En Route to Disney+… and Maybe, Disney Parks”