GhostHost wrote:what exactly happened to the Haunted Mansion and other things during "down and out in the magic kingdom"?
Well it's long and complicated, but I'll try and summarize it:
In the future, no one dies, because if you're dead, you're just cloned and restored from a "backup" of your memories. But any time between your backup and your restoration is lost, though you may get third-party memories and such. So people like to back up often. Of course, this means that you're somewhat cybernetic, in that you have all these electronic gizmos that are a part of you, such as your HUD (it's like your own personal computer within your mind), which allows you to store memories, view people's Whuffies, etc. Also, communication is also done via some type of mechanism in the ear, so you don't even have to speak (it's something called "subvocally") when you're on the "phone' with someone.
Whuffies are essentially a type of currency, though no one outright says it. It's based on other people's...views of you. If you have a high whuffie, people think highly of you and will offer you whatever you want. If your whuffie is low, you don't get as many benefits. So people often like to check each others whuffies via HUD's, while also trying to build up their own.
How this relates to Disney...
Somehow in the future, everything is pretty much run by The Bitchun Society, whose definition I never understood. And Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom is also taken over (as is all the other Disney parks, including the fictional-though-it-may-be-fact-one-of-these-days Disneyland Beijing). This one area of Magic Kingdom, Liberty Square, had gotten a revamp at Hall of Presidents. Rather than watch the Animatronics and the zooming in and out of paintings, people sit down in the theater, and their HUDs somehow access some type of file (never understood it), that allowed them to *believe* they were the characters in HoP. Essentially, rather than viewing the attraction, they became part of the attraction.
The same people that did HoP wanted to move on to Haunted Mansion. But one person (forget his name, I haven't read it in awhile) realized that by turning all the rides into HoP (in that everyone becomes the attraction), that there's some magic lost, because they'll all experience the same thing (instead of viewing the same thing and judging it themselves). So he devises his own plan for Haunted Mansion, in which guests not only *become* part of the attraction, but guests viewing it will have wholly different experiences, because it's never the same guest twice that's playing one of the 999 ghosts.
It's a very interesting read and there's a lot more beyond what I've written (there's a murder mystery, which is funny because as I said before, people don't die unless they choose not to be restored from backup), and is well worth the read.
Escapay