Up all night at Disneyland
Dawn-to-dawn foray offers goofy view of park and fans
ANAHEIM, Calif. — If Disneyland weren’t the happiest place on Earth, nobody would dare spend 24 straight hours in it. There’s a reason they usually shut down the place at midnight.
And the reason is to protect the glassy-eyed Disney faithful from themselves. Some people just don’t know when to go home.
Leave the place open for 24 hours — as Disneyland does once a year — and there will be tens of thousands of Disney fanatics shuffling around like Sleepy the dwarf from one happy place (waiting time two hours) to another happy place (waiting time three hours) before plopping down for a nap in the middle of Main Street under the watchful eye of Goofy, who knows a thing or two about odd behavior.
If Disneyland weren’t so darn happy, nobody would line up at 6 a.m. in a queue that wrapped itself around the Matterhorn 3½ times in order to ride, for the zillionth time, a stately seniorcitizen roller coaster that first opened in 1959.
If Disneyland weren’t the most happy place ever in the whole universe, nobody would pay $99 for a ticket to all that happiness and then sack out on the steam train, or at the robotic parrot show, or in the 3-D movie about the
stinkbugs — because there may, in fact, be a physical limit to exactly how much happiness any one person is capable of enduring in a single 24-hour period.
To kick off the park’s 60th anniversary, the park was open dawn to dawn. It is perhaps worth noting what happens when Disneyland and its kid brother, California Adventure, invite customers to stay for 24 hours. They actually do stay. Nobody leaves. One might think the crowds would arrive later than the posted 6 a.m. opening. They don’t. One might think the crowds would thin out around, say, 3 a.m. They don’t. They wander around, as if trying out for “Night of the Living Dead,” one of the few movies not in the Disney oeuvre. There was a job to be done here, and some fans even wore their best Disney pajamas to do it.
The crowd began surging down Main Street at the stroke of 6 a.m. and, within a short time, the line to ride the Matterhorn had wrapped around the 147-foot-tall concrete mountain three times. A uniformed Matterhorn pixie estimated the wait at three hours. The ride itself hasn’t changed. But there is a new mechanical Abominable Snowman inside, and that apparently was enough to persuade the hard core — there being no other variety of core at that hour — to queue up.
There was no shortage of other 6 a.m. lines. Among the most popular was the line for popcorn. It may seem hard to believe that hundreds of people would want popcorn at 6 a.m. but that, too, is Disney magic. For special occasions, the park creates commemorative “popcorn buckets” that sell for $12.50. The faithful have deemed these to be “collectible.”
Standing in line for sunrise popcorn at the end of Main Street were Gina Gogue and her 84-year-old mother, Virginia, who have 14 collectible popcorn buckets at home, not nearly enough. Like everyone else, they didn’t want the popcorn itself, only the bucket. The oil from the popcorn soils the bucket, which this year was a giant hollow set of plastic mouse ears. So the actual popcorn was dispensed separately, in an ordinary popcorn box. Gina and Virginia stashed away the precious bucket, then gazed upon the yellow popcorn that they had waited half an hour to buy as if it were a poison apple.
“You want some free popcorn?” Gina asked a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, who will eat anything at any time, and the popcorn changed hands.
Another very long early morning line turned out to be for a store selling “limited edition” Disney pins to the slightly unfathomable subset of Disney fanatics devoted to the endless stream of enamel Disney pins. There was a new $20 pin that commemorates the Space Mountain roller coaster, and the line to buy that pin was two hours long, but the line to ride Space Mountain itself was, at that hour, only 20 minutes long. The folks in line wore their pin collections on special vests, like cartridges on a bandolier.
Mandy and Floyd Hicks of Escondido, Calif., said they already have 300 Disney pins, not nearly enough. They said they will stop collecting Disney pins when they have a sufficient number, which, Floyd said, would be “somewhere around 2,000.”
There was also a substantial line for the hoary Haunted Mansion, which first began scaring the current customers’ grandparents in the 1960s. Apparently a long-decommissioned mechanical ghost has been restored to life by Disney fixer-uppers and has been ensconced in the cemetery scene. That scant morsel of novelty had the faithful queued up for 90 minutes.
And yet another line that snaked a full block down Main Street was for nothing less than the right to rent a storage locker to stash all the popcorn buckets, pins and mouse ears until the sun should rise over the kingdom once again.
The thing is, you need a locker in order to stockpile all the rhinestoneencrusted trinkets that Disneyland is seeking to unload in this manicured, merchandised and stagemanaged 60th season in the happiness business. And this is true although the number 60 — unlike an even 50 or a nice, round 100 — isn’t really one of those numbers for a sorcerer’s apprentice to conjure with. Even with the “diamond anniversary” sales job, the number 60 is still a second-tier number.
But it’s good enough for the cadre of Disney “imagineers” who spent a long time imagineering how to extract the maximum cash return with a minimum of capital outlay and absolutely no actual diamonds. (Sticklers might have noticed that Disneyland’s real 60th birthday doesn’t fall until July 17. That’s halfway into the busy summer season, however, so the “birthday” got bumped up by nearly two months, fantasy being big in these parts.)
Scrape away the rhinestones sprinkled around the park like powdered sugar on a New Orleans Square beignet and there are some diamond-hard truths about the park’s diamond birthday. There are no new rides. The last new ride worth tossing rhinestones over — the spectacular Radiator Springs Racers — opened three full years ago. New rides, unlike rhinestones, cost money. This year, the park did upgrade its nightly parade, light show and fireworks. But a kid sitting on his old man’s shoulders — the preferred viewing spot for all the above — is unlikely to notice much beyond the same parade, light show and fireworks his parents always drag him to — just before they announce it’s time to head for that last glorious ride of the day, the homeward-bound parking lot tram.
The new parade looks much like the old Main Street Electrical Parade on steroids. It’s got new floats gussied up with 1.5 million LED lights (about the only hard number the Disney bean counters will release) and the customary retinue of mermaids, fairies, princesses and other cleavage-free denizens of the realm. The new fireworks show (“presented by Honda”) has been synchronized to accompany a bank of searchlights that ply the heavens and make it look as if Disneyland has gone into the used- car business. The new light show has got the ubiquitous Neil Patrick Harris projected on a curtain of water vapor — the medium of choice for Disney spectacles — and the revelation that all of this amusement park real estate used to be orange groves before the good old carousel of progress took a few figurative spins and did them all in.
The premiere of the three spectacles was a big deal to the dawn-to-dawn crowd. There were so many fanatics waiting to experience the parade and pyrotechnic tweaks that not everyone could get in, and the line to clear the airport-style security checkpoint stretched nearly a quarter mile past the Downtown Disney strip mall of souvenir emporia where, happily, a shut-out fan could buy 60th anniversary Disneyland souvenirs without having to enter the park.
All in the kingdom is up for sale, not just the stuff on the store shelves. The rides themselves have sponsors — Disney has optioned its talking parrots to a pineapple company and its Small World puppets to an electronics cartel. The restaurants’ sponsors are constantly changing — ask Aunt Jemima or the Frito Kid what happens when you miss a payment. Even the paper towel dispenser in the men’s room has a sponsor (“Dry hands thoroughly using paper towels — Hand washing tips provided by Sparkle.”)
With the new parade still hours away from stepping off, some folks decided it would be a good idea to plop themselves and their blankets down on the Main Street sidewalk and reserve viewing spots. This was allowed, and the loungers had ample time to gaze reverently at the castle, which has been swathed in rhinestones and which twinkles in the late after- noon sun like a poodle’s collar on Rodeo Drive. (“We diamondized it,” explained a Disney exec.)
As the sun went down and the 1.5 million LEDs lighted up, the parade, fireworks and light shows went off flawlessly (except for one burned-out bulb that hadn’t gotten the memo). After all that was over and done, there were still 10 full hours to go before the 6 a.m. closing time.
A Disney acolyte could ride a jungle boat at 2 a.m., a spaceship at 3 a.m. and a teacup at 4 a.m. There was the 3:30 a.m. screening of the “Mary Poppins Sing-Along.” There was the 4:45 a.m. comedy show at the Frontierland saloon. Anything to keep going. Once you bought a “Being Up All Night Makes Me Dopey” T-shirt for $30, you were committed.
You could do anything except drink. Sobriety is the enchanted Disney magic that keeps a crowd from trashing the premises. There’s a reason the mint juleps have got nothing but mint.
The only kerfuffle came at 3 a.m., over the crushed penny machine on Main Street. Crushed penny collector Rich King, who already possesses 4,000 crushed Disney pennies at home, had more or less taken it over and was making crushed pennies one after another. Not everyone was happy about having to wait.
King, who takes his crushed pennies seriously, was inserting uncirculated pennies into the machine with Lincoln’s face on top. (Otherwise the columns on the Lincoln Memorial side can stretch and make the image “look like it’s behind bars,” he said.) The lesser penny mavens took notice, should they ever get a chance of their own at the machine.
With 30 minutes to go before closing time, the army of street sweepers and power washers emerged from wherever Disneyland employees emerge and began preparing the park for another day’s worth of visitors, who had every right to have Main Street in its usual spotless state that’s clean enough to eat spilled popcorn from. A veteran custodian said disinfecting Disneyland is usually an all-night job but, with a few extra waves of the magic power washing wand, it was just possible to coax every kernel, gummy bear and sunflower seed shell to disappear in time for the next influx of paying customers.
“We’ll get it done,” the custodian said. “We have to. We know what Disneyland is supposed to look like in the morning.”
And then the Disney artisans made the sun come up in the east, and the long night of rhinestones was done. “You did it!” said a booming voice coming from hidden park loudspeakers precisely at 6 a.m. — witching hours being a big deal in a place that traffics in Cinderella — and there followed the playing of the now-it’s-time-to-say-goodbye dirge from the Mickey Mouse Club march as the security folks began the final bit of friendly but firm ushering toward the exit gate. There, so many glassy-eyed fun seekers were reluctantly waiting to depart that there was one last line to stand in.
“We hope you’ll come back and visit us again soon!” said the cheery voice on the speakers.
There was no irony in that, for Disneyland doesn’t do irony. It was a most serious and heartfelt suggestion. Even after 24 straight hours, there was little chance of its not being accepted, with so many lines still to be waited in and so many mouse ears still unbought.