50 Things You Didn't Know About Disneyland

[Loomis]

http://www.mickeynews.com/News/DisplayP ... _11255Know

"In honor of Disneyland's 50th anniversary, we present 50 cool, obscure and simply odd things you probably didn't know about the self-proclaimed Happiest Place on Earth."


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Chances are, you will probably know them. Especially given that the list has been floating around in various forms for a while. But it is a fun one...

[Robin Hood]

This one was kind of wierd:
15. Disneyland is home to feral cats - nobody knows how many - that come out at night, after visitors leave. Years ago, more than 100 were discovered living inside Sleeping Beauty Castle.

[memnv]

I don't remember seeing any cats except the ones in the parade last week, but then it was extremly crowded

[Escapay]

Chances are, you will probably know them.

Yeah, most of them I recognized from Mouse Tales, which they cited. Others I learned from other books. I think the only one I didn't know was

19. Untold thousands of the old A, B, C, D and E tickets are still in circulation, moldering away in people's drawers. From time to time, guests still show up at the park with them, and they're given the face value of the ticket. (At their most expensive, individual E tickets went for 95 cents.) A better bet is to sell them on eBay, where they fetch many times that amount.

And this one I knew:

23. In New Orleans Square, near the Pirates of the Caribbean exit, a door marked "33" leads to an ultra-secret, ultra-exclusive private club. Club 33 is the only place in the park that serves alcohol (including a Chardonnay specially bottled for the club by Fess "Davy Crockett" Parker). Its 480 members pay an initiation fee of from $8,000 to $27,000, and yearly dues of $4,000 to $15,000. The current waiting list for membership is said to be seven years long.

But I read it in the first Mouse Tales, back in 1994. It was listed then that the waiting list was three years long, I believe.

And this one still cracks me up:

30. Late at night on rides such as Pirates of the Caribbean and It's a Small World, amorous couples regularly try to make the Happiest Place on Earth even a little happier. They're apparently unaware that virtually every inch of every ride is observed by security cameras or hidden employees. Sometimes they're startled by a warning from a loudspeaker; occasionally they're greeted at the exit by applauding employees.

In Mouse Tales, there's a story about that. During one Grad Nite, PoTC was empty, and an amorous couple started going at it as soon as they left. Castmembers called everyone they could to watch them on the monitors, and when the couple came back fully clothed, they were greeted with thunderous applause, and a castmember came up to them and said something like "Thanks for giving us a great show, here's your tickets back!"

Escapay

[Loomis]

Yup, re-reading them now I can say that all of those nuggets somehow made their way into my noggin.

These crack me up though:

10. Fittingly, one of the original Tomorrowland attractions was Crane's Bathroom of Tomorrow.

24. An early Tomorrowland attraction was Monsanto's House of the Future, made entirely of plastic. It had the requisite picture phone and other Jetsonsonian appliances, but the most-talked-about feature, according to "Mouse Tales," was the microwave oven. "Nobody believed you could bake a potato in three minutes," said attendant Dick Mahoney. Years later, when Disneyland tried to tear down the plastic house, the wrecking ball just bounced off.

44. When it opened in 1967, Pirates of the Caribbean used real human skeletons as props. In an upcoming book, imagineer Jason Surrell writes, "Because the original imagineering team felt that the faux skeletons of the period were just too unconvincing, the grotto sequence originally featured real human remains obtained from the UCLA Medical Center. The skeletons were later returned to their countries of origin and given a proper burial."

I kind of like the last one. I think I'd like my last resting place to be Disneyland. Or at least have my ashes scattered over there.

It's better than being flushed down the Toilet of Tomorrow.

[Timon/Pumbaa fan]

28. Originally, Mr. Toad did not appear in Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, nor did Peter Pan or Snow White feature in their own rides. Disney's idea was that riders would view these attractions from the lead character's point of view. Hardly anyone understood this concept, and now each character makes a brief appearance.

Actually, this one is an error! Mr. Toad STILL doesn't make an appearance in his ride. I mean there are statues of him in the line, and pictures of him in at the "Toad Hall" scene, but he himself doesn't actually show up in the actual ride!

I kind of like the last one. I think I'd like my last resting place to be Disneyland. Or at least have my ashes scattered over there.

Did you see this guy yet?

As for the article overall, I already knew the majority of those(at least 40 of them I've heard dozen of times) but the ones I didn't know were quite interesting!

[Escapay]

Did you see this guy yet?

OMG! I met him at World of Disney at Downtown Disney! Jenny Lamb and I were on a day off and decided to go to Earl of Sandwich for dinner, then we went to WoD to browse until we had to meet Rachael, James, and Joyce for a movie. Anyways, in the kitchenware section, I notice a really tattooed guy, and I'm telling Jenny, "Oh my god, it's that guy!". Jenny of course has no idea who this guy is, so I tell her that he's got like 1001 tattoos of Disney characters on him, and his house is all Disney and everything. So I go up to him and I just go, "Are you that guy?" and he says yeah, and we have a brief conversation and Jenny takes a picture of us on her camera phone (but she couldn't e-mail it to me, so it's still there as far as I know).

Escapay

[blackcauldron85]

Uhhh, this doesn't really go here, but out of all the Disneyland threads, this seems to be the best fit:

The Disneyland 1953 Sales Pitch
http://www.mouseplanet.com/9312/The_Dis ... ales_Pitch