Stories Untold: An Armchair-Imagineered Build-Out Reimagining of Disney Adventure World at Disneyland Paris

Before: Production Courtyard / World Premiere Plaza

With our new frame story of stepping out of the Grand Library and into the worlds of books, we obviously have a lot of work to do as embodied by the space we’re left with on the opposite side.

This wide concrete plaza – once the navigational Hub of the park, from whence the two diagonal ascenders of the “Y-shaped layout” diverged – has lived many lives. Lest we forget, in the wake of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror’s addition in 2007, the land (then known as Production Courtyard) was “plussed” by adding false front facades attached to scaffolds and a few planters with flowers. Let me repeat: the faux plywood exteriors and flower beds were the plussed version.

Disney Adventure World revisits the space for a third time, bestowing the “World Premiere Plaza” name, new trees, and the insinuation that this is the “Theater District” for the park.

Its contents, therefore, are the two theaters that flank the enclosed Main Street (now our Library), the flexible “Studio D” theater, Tower of Terror, and the “Disney Animation Celebration” exhibit. The land also absorbs the Magic Carpets of Aladdin spinner by necessity given that when “Toon Studio” became a part of “Worlds of Pixar,” Aladdin was exiled from the land it’s geographically a part of.

We’ve already acknowledged that a few things must remain:

• The two 1,100 seat theaters, one of which we’ve already accounted for by cutting off access from the outside and instead making a contiguous part of our indoor Library, thus leaving us with one still to rethink;
• The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, whose deletion would propel our Build-Out into a realm of pure fantasy given that it’s a very expensive, popular, signature ride for the park;
• The Magic Carpets ride, which we can certainly retheme, but should probably seek to hold onto because there’s no reason to toss out good ride capacity if we can make it work

But this is our chance! This is where we can have guests emerge and immediately sense what this park is about; what it will offer; how it’s been changed! Here is our reintroduction; a space that’s no longer the core of the park, but the start of a journey through storybook worlds and the way Disney animators have brought them to life! So we will force ourselves to work with what we’ve got, and provide a new Chapter 1 for this park…

Chapter One: THE ROYAL FOREST

Imagine now that we push through the great doors of the Grand Library and find ourselves overlooking a dense fairytale woods. This is the Royal Forest. As we step down from the library’s plaza and into the courtyard below, we’re entering into the pages of a fairytale.

Which ones? That becomes apparent with the notion that the former “Partners” statue has been spiritually replaced here by Snow White Courtyard, centered on a flower-encased wishing well with a bronze statue of the princess.

A fairytale feels like a very good place to start, not only because fairytales shared via oral tradition really are the start of modern storytelling, but because the story of “Snow White” in particular inspired Disney’s first full-length animated film. That makes Snow White a perfect springboard into not just our park inspired by stories, but our timeline of Disney’s adaptations of those tales…

Let’s handle the hardest thing first: trying to make sense of the ride system of The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. I renamed this ride THE QUEEN’S FORTRESS: MIRRORFALL. Let’s just put it out there: Elevators have no role in the story of Snow White. (Actually, the story was first published 45 years before the first modern elevator by Otis was installed in 1857 – who knew?) Likewise, the Tower of Terror structure sort of rejects the notion that it should be a castle, where a tapered shape topped in spires is exactly the opposite of the “T-shaped” building required to house the drop ride’s mechanics.

But “Sleeping Beauty Castle” has little in common with the one seen in 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, nor does “Cinderella Castle” resemble the one in 1950’s Cinderella. And besides, while we’re happy to use the Disney animated film as inspiration, this is meant to be about the story, right? So I think it’s okay if we sort of loosen our expectation that this foreboding incarnation of the castle from Snow White needs to precisely align to the one seen in the film. So even though we’re maybe starting on a low note, I need you to be okay with this.

Because actually, I think it’s compelling to imagine the experience here… Think of the hotel’s lobby becoming the Queen’s Throne Room; of the library becoming our audience with the amoral Magic Mirror, who goads us onward into the boiler-room-turned-dungeon.

And that once we step aboard the castle’s dumbwaiter lift, we rise to find ourselves looking over the Queen’s shoulder in her dismal laboratory where – shocked by our arrival – she turns and casts a spell, plunging us into a twisted mirror dimension of black magic. I honestly think it works, and allows us to reuse Tower of Terror for an equally-eerie, thrilling adventure that fits here in the Royal Forest and can remain a highlight of the park’s thrill lineup.

Contrasting with the darkness and shrieks to our left, to the right we gain the grassy rolling hills, frothing waterfalls, and delightful joy of an adapted Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, which here will actually be encountered a little later on in this land, and with a new IP. Still, the result is that our step down into the Royal Forest provides us with fairly instantaneous sense of what this new park is about. We are transported. Deep in a forest reigned over by the Queen’s Fortress, with mine carts swirling past. Even those who knew Walt Disney Studios Park well would hopefully be flummoxed as to how that could become this. It’s an intentional reversal of the former aesthetic.

But even here in this fantastical setting, we can turn around and see behind us the stalwart exterior of the Grand Library, with its great pyramid tower on top. Yep, like a lighthouse, the Library will be present and visible even from here; a place we can return to, always there on the edge of the Royal Forest, ready to serve as a portal out of these literary worlds and back to ours.

Anyway, though there is a path forward between the drop ride and the mine train, a true journey around Story Realms would begin by approaching the remaining theater (formerly home to “Animagique” and “Mickey and the Magician”), now integrated as THE THEATER IN THE WOODS – a space for fairytale retellings. (This gives us a nice “catch-all” for everything from Disney Cruise Line’s “Tangled: The Musical” to the Broadway-engineered “Hercules” or a new stage adaptation of “Mulan.”)

Then, as we continue around the bend and head toward the former “Toon Studio,” the Royal Forest changes from the woods of Snow White into the gardened chateau estate of Cinderella. Aha! Royal Forest will be our “Living Land” devoted to Disney’s first three fairytale adaptations.

The anchoring attraction is LE CONTE ENCHANTÉ DE CENDRILLON. I actually placed this on the footprint of Crush’s Coaster, but this is a from-scratch build – not a redress of that coaster. My thinking was that it’s just too difficult to conceal the big, tall showbuilding needed to contain that ride, and that ultimately, its “off-the-shelf,” low-capacity experience isn’t worth the hassle. (If anything, I think we could tell ourselves that our hardware copy of Seven Dwarfs Mine Train easily fills its place in the park’s lineup.)

That allows us to give this section of the park a “weenie” in Cinderella’s Chateau – a lovely, ivy-adorned French manor revealed as you round the corner from the theater – which can contain this park’s first Fantasyland-style dark ride. These super classic dark rides are such a cornerstone of the Disney Parks experience that even Shanghai Disneyland basically ported the classic Peter Pan’s Flight (with just a few technological embellishments). I like the idea of extending the treatment to Cinderella – a film that’s quintessentially-Disney, but too easy to swap out for the even more historic Snow White, which is ever-present in Disney Parks.

So here at last, we get to step into the chateau, climb aboard a carriage, and ride through a lovingly simple and classic retelling of the tale with the beloved blacklight, flats, and simple figures you’d expected of a timeless counterpart to Snow White’s Adventures or Pinocchio’s Daring Journey. C-Ticket, mid-tier rides like this are harder and harder to find (and harder and harder to justify building), so I think it would do this park a great service to establish attractive and accessible capacity like this early on in the park’s roster.

It also gives us an anchor point from which to create a sort of Cinderella-themed mini-land within the Royal Forest, utilizing the two flat rides of “Toon Studio” (Magic Carpets Over Agrabah and Cars Quatre Roues Rallye) to build-out the Chateau’s grounds a bit.

First, there’s the Magic Carpets. Frankly, I have no good reason to remove this ride other than lingering embarrassment that it comprised a third of the park’s ride count back in 2002. But it doesn’t make sense to lose ride capacity over a grudge, and a hardware equivalent to “Dumbo The Flying Elephant” is one ride that I genuinely think every Disney Park should have. (Hell, Magic Kingdom has four.)

Luckily, Cinderella gives us a decorative wrap to beautify the otherwise quite mechanical ride by placing it in the princess’s romantic gardens (above). Here we end up with a lovely area defined by Italian cypress trees, urns, columns, and marble terraces.

It allows us to dress the ride up as an elaborate marble fountain with a real water feature pool at its base. The result isn’t really so different from the treatment the ride got at Tokyo DisneySea (where it takes the form of “Jasmine’s Flying Carpets” swirling around an Arabesque fountain), but of course, our French version would replace the carpets with pearlescent bubbles, creating the lovely BIBBIDI BOBBIDI BULLES.

My only other consideration here is that this ride could differentiate itself from Dumbo with a little interactivity. I’ve always been fascinated by the (mostly broken) promises made around Islands of Adventure’s version of this ride (“One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish”) which theoretically sings a song instructing you to rise or fall based on the color of your fish, or else be sprayed by laminar flow fountains.

In theory the result would be a choreographed dance of fish and riders acrobatically moving up and down. (Magic Kingdom then did the more chaotic version on its Magic Carpets ride, where camels can theoretically spit at random.) I’m not sure either ever successfully found a way to add this element to the ride experience, but maybe we can create a clever, no-language version by having the central fountain and elements around the ride spit bubbles, creating areas to aim for rather than to avoid.

On the surface, the Cars Quatre Roues Rallye ride is a more difficult canvas to paint on because the dizzying, turntable-switching spinner is a little more thrilling, chaotic, rumbling, and loud than you typically expect from Princesses. (This, you’ll remember, is basically a pint-sized version of Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree in California and Alien Swirling Saucers in Florida.) At a glance, that feels a whole lot less likely of a fit for the Royal Forest and our accumulating Cinderella area.

But I think we can make it work by transforming the ride’s queue structures (a somewhat shoehorned and out-of-scale model of the drive-in overhangs of Flo’s V8 Café) into an old carriage house. Then the ride itself becomes PUMPKIN CARRIAGE SWIRL where we climb into half-transformed gourds and are caught up in the swirling, dizzying magic of the Fairy Godmother’s musical spell. It gives us yet a third no-height-requirement family ride for the Royal Forest, and something a little “edgier” for the boys-under-7 set.

Finally, we can dedicate a third sub-section of this Royal Forest land to 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, completing our trifecta of classic princesses and an early establishing of the “timeline” that the rest of the park will be centered on. So here, in this lovely forest dedicated to Aurora, we can put our clone of the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train to use as AURORA’S WOODLAND ADVENTURE.

Now, we climb into mine carts to ride throughout the forest, with musical woodland creatures all around. We can also dedicate the ride’s compact, built-in, mini dark-ride scene to the film’s lovely “Once Upon a Dream” sequence, with Animatronics of Aurora and the Prince (borrowed from Tokyo’s Beauty and the Beast ride) dancing together in an Eyvind Earl-stylized sequence as we slow for a moment to pass by. We can even re-use the wonderful gag of having the cottage alongside the final brake run to provide a final scene where we see Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather preparing for Aurora’s party, including zapping her dress back and forth between pink and blue.

Finally, I wanted to carve out at least a small meet-and-greet space here, and decided that if Aurora and her Prince get this area’s E-Ticket family mine train, than the meet-and-greet should probably be dedicated to the Mistress of Evil, Maleficent. As a result, I envisioned this meet-and-greet disguised as a half-decayed chapel covered in the thorny briars associated with the dark fairy. This SORTS D’OMBRE AVEC MALÉFIQUE would provide an interesting opportunity to give a Disney Villain a full-scale “play-and-greet” experience.

If you’re counting, our Royal Forest occupies much of “World Premiere Plaza” and the former “Toon Studio.” In this transformation, we lose Crush’s Coaster. However, we give Paris’ second gate a lot, too. We re-theme Tower of Terror, Magic Carpets Over Agrabah, and Cars Quatre Roues Rallye into a suite of attractions stylized around Disney’s first Princesses, then add a version of the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, a classic bus bar dark ride, and a meet-and-greet, too.

And just as importantly, we build the backbone of this park – that we’re descending into stories plucked from the shelf and brought to life by Disney animators. And having traveled from adaptations of the 1930s to the 1950s, we now leave the Royal Forest behind to see what other Story Realms lie ahead…