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[Anthony]

This is an interesting read:

"DCA is about to undergo a massive redressing and retheming of most areas of the Park. The improvements and updates they just did to the Hollywood section in anticipation of Monsters Inc. opening are a small scale test of that stuff, and it all went very well. First the main entrance will be changed, with the Golden Gate bridge removed from the monorail beam and the entire entrance area rethemed with California Craftsman architecture like the Grand Californian Hotel. The whole "stepping into a postcard" at the main entrance thing is going away. Giant redwood trees and a lot more vegetation are being planted in that area too, to help with the Craftsman architecture. That all starts in February, and should be done by the start of summer.

Then, in September, the Sun Plaza area gets redone too. The sun icon and wave fountain is going to be removed and sent to the junk heap. The entire area is going to be redone with more Craftsman architecture and the modern look to the area is going away. An old fashioned train station structure is going to be built where the small hill behind the sun icon is now. They will move the Golden Dreams show to a new, smaller theater in that building. The incoherent and jumbled architecture styles currently in that plaza area will be redone and all rethemed to period-specific Craftsman architecture, and a trolley system will be installed throughout the park. The trolleys will leave from the "station" in this area, and the new entry plaza will be a "transportation hub" for the trolleys going to the rest of the park.

Then, likely in winter '07, the Condor Flats area will be rethemed. The high desert airfield theme will go away, and the redwood forest theme of Grizzly Peak will be extended into this area. More redwoods and forest vegetation will be installed, and the sparse desert landscaping will go away. The hangars will remain, but the area will be rethemed to a forest airstrip rather than a high desert airfield. (For those not from the Far West, the high deserts of California and Oregon are rather sparse places, and I don't think a theme park version was really what the paying public was clamoring for. Apparently WDI now feels the same way.) Soarin' stays, but the area just becomes themed to the forest rather than the desert, with small changes to existing buildings and structures and big changes to area landscaping and props.

Then a new E Ticket ride themed to The Incredibles opens in the area currently used as The Farm. The whole farm theme goes away, and The Incredibles will extend the theme of the adjacent Pacific Wharf area instead. The new ride opens around '08, and it's said to be a "family thrill ride", a robotic arm with seats attached to a roller coaster track is heavily rumored to be the ride system used.

During the '07-'08 period, the Paradise Pier area also gets rethemed and reworked. Instead of the modern day look, they'll retheme the area to the 1920's jazz age. The same types of changes that happened to Condor Flats and The Farm will happen here; buildings will be heavily remade and redressed. Facades will be changed, and area accesories will be replaced with ones themed to the 1920's. The Route 66 area is rumored to disappear completely, and since the Golden Dreams theater will be empty with the show now playing in the theater at the park entrance, that's a big chunk of land. The San Francisco area, one of DCA's weakest, will be extended into Route 66. Since the Golden Gate bridge is being torn down in February, San Fran will be beefed up with a new ride and larger area to represent California's second largest city."

posted by Grandmath on Disney Central Plaza

[Kristof]

Project Placemaking continues at Disney's California Adventure park.
The new Craftsman-style they're talking about, is a bit similar to the WDS Frontlot style and DCA Tower of Terror.

From Miceage:

The DCA Placemaking project, which had its proverbial pause button pressed when major executive shakeups swept through Imagineering (WDI) and Burbank a few months ago, is now back on track. They've finally come to a decision about how to make over most of the DCA main entrance and entry plaza.

As we noted before the Golden Gate Bridge is out and set to be torn down, and design work on a Craftsman-style bridge to hide the monorail beam is still ongoing. The entire Sun Plaza area will be remade into a 1920's California Craftsman/Mission "village," and any facade in that area that doesn't currently have a Mission or Craftsman feel to it will be ripped down and replaced.

The plain, metal shade structures over the entrance turnstiles (above) will be rebuilt, and Craftsman style wood trellises are planned to be constructed in that area with flowering vines growing over the trellises.

The Greetings From California store and the EnginEars Toys store will be rebuilt and remade into the new Craftsman style. Most of the current train station area will remain, including the streamliner train, although the Santa Fe Station styled information booth that Guest Relations currently staffs will be bulldozed.

The hubcap sun fountain will be torn out, and in its place another new Craftsman structure will be constructed to house the new, smaller Golden Dreams theater that we'd told you about last year. In front of the Golden Dreams theater will be a new "transportation hub" themed as a 1930's Mission style bus depot. It's from this new building that DCA's new fleet of vehicles will arrive and depart, and currently they have plans for jazzy 1930's tour buses and open-top convertible limousines to shuttle visitors up and down the DCA parade route. The functions of the Guest Relations booth that was over near the train will take up residence in this new bus stop building.

The entire look of this new entry plaza area is supposed to look more traditional, more charming, and more literally themed to a specific time period, rather than the abstract and modern "hip" look that DCA opened with. Instead of throwing several different architectural styles and references in to the area, all clustered around a rather bland cement plaza with one of Disney's most unattractive pieces of artwork, the new DCA entrance is meant to evoke a return to California when Walt first arrived here and made a name for himself in the late 1920's and early 1930's. They are even designing in a specific location for DCA's own Christmas tree that would greet arriving holiday visitors front and center each year, much like the Town Square location Disneyland has for its famous Christmas tree.

This next round of Placemaking, on a much bigger scale than what was accomplished back in the Hollywood section before Monsters Inc. opened, will all get underway in the Fall.

http://www.miceage.com/allutz/al032106b.htm

[Anthony]

This could maybe have a topic of its own - MiceAge article mentions a new  dark ride for Paradise Pier, apparently featuring Pixar characters in a shooting gallery-style ride.  Seems an odd choice with Buzz across the esplanade and Monsters in the same park, but Al Lutz says it's green-lighted already...

Buh-Bye Burritos

Meanwhile that DCA Placemaking project continues down its rather unglamorous path, and Burbank and TDA are trying to figure out exactly how to package this unflattering concept for the media. While the 30 Million dollar budget this project has initially been given continues to see its influence shrink, there are folks both in WDI and TDA that are trying to get as much bang for the buck as they can. It's no secret amongst the Internet crowd that DCA has been troubled from its inception, and has struggled in the marketplace since it opened to yawns. Even Bob Iger admitted as such when he told the audience assembled for this years Shareholders Meeting that in regards to DCA "In the spirit of candor, we have been challenged". But such a massive makeover of a young theme park is unprecedented in Disney theme park history, and usually five year old theme parks just get new rides instead of dramatic remodeling and totally re-themed lands. It's going to require Disney to eat a bit of crow however they announce it, and Burbank wants to make sure it's handled just right. (Of course the fact that most major media outlets that cover Disneyland also read websites such as this apparently sends Burbank and TDA suits into a state of denial).

Up until now the Placemaking concepts have revolved around simply re-themeing and re-branding existing areas of the Park, such as the plan to turn the contemporary themed entrance area into a time-period specific section themed to the late 1920's and the era when Walt first arrived in California. But there are also plans for the later phases of Placemaking that will add new attractions to the park. When Placemaking makes its way over to Paradise Pier in a few years, and replaces all of that strip mall cheap stucco and bland vinyl signage, they'll also open a new attraction to kick it all off. The current working title for this new ride is "Midway Mania", and it's planned to be a shooting gallery dark ride featuring Pixar characters (who else?).


We won't miss the bean burritos.

What's interesting is that they'll be carving the entrance to this attraction out of the current location of the defunct Maliburitos restaurant (shown above). Maliburitos was closed in late August, 2001 after DCA's first disastrous summer. The Foods department refused to give up the space however, and they've been using it as storage as well as cannibalizing the kitchen for appliances and parts for other DCA kitchens over the years. But now, five years after DCA opened, they realize they still have too many restaurants than they know what to do with and they are willing to give up the location for good.

There were several key people in WDI who tried to ring the alarm bell in the late '90s that DCA was being overbuilt on the stores and restaurants, and underbuilt on the attractions, but they were pooh-poohed by the senior leadership of the time. Some of the most notable casualties in this huge error were Hollywood & Dine and Soap Opera Bistro. But five years later they still have to swallow some pride and turn restaurants into attractions. But at least now they have recognized the huge errors initially made with this park.

With the restaurant gutted and turned into the attraction entrance, the attraction ride track itself will be winding around through the support structure for California Screamin' behind the restaurant. Chalk up the popularity of the Monsters Inc. ride as another reason this Paradise Pier dark ride was recently given the green light, as it seems that little dark ride in the corner of Hollywood has had more impact on DCA than some of the recent bigger budget additions like Tower of Terror or the Block Party show.

And to think just two years ago Matt Ouimet was still planning on re-opening Superstar Limo for the summer of 2004.

http://www.miceage.com/allutz/al041806c.htm

[Anthony]

Well the placemaking project below was postponed whilst Disney kinda "took a step back" and looked at what DCA *really* needed to improve, and here's some new info about the current Lasseter-ized project:

That last item on the list mentioned previously, expansion of California Adventure (DCA), is the one that offers up the most hope and will likely be the first to get off the ground. Previous to John Lasseter taking over the design direction for WDI's plans for Anaheim, the conventional wisdom held that DCA needed to be rebranded and redesigned to make it more exotic and fanciful. This was the original thought behind the famous "Placemaking" projects that were initially slated to get started earlier this year in and around the main entrance of the park. But Lasseter has decided that the original Placemaking plans didn't quite go far enough, and they've all been shelved for now.

Instead, Lasster and pretty much everyone in WDI has lined up behind the idea that DCA needs to ditch the contemporary reality-based theme it opened with in 2001 and go for fantasy based themes and concepts throughout the park. The last idea for Placemaking was already headed in that direction with the main entrance proposal to transform the area into a 1920's themed transportation hub as a stepping off point for the rest of the park. With the exception of moving Golden Dreams into a smaller theater at the park entrance, and adding 1920's tour buses that would drive around the park, none of the old Placemaking plans really added any new rides or attractions. It was all about fixing the mistakes made by Paul Pressler's team that left the park feeling uninspired and not up to Disney standards. But now Lasseter wants to focus first on the back of the park first and give people a reason to buy a ticket to DCA in the first place.

First up is the new Midway Mania ride in Paradise Pier, an attraction that has yet to be formally acknowledged by Disney but is already under construction and on track to open in Anaheim in less than two years. But the big stuff is planned for the 2008-10 timeframe when pretty much everything from the Orange Stinger to Golden Dreams is torn out and replaced with a new San Francisco concept. At the same time the remnants of Paradise Pier located within the footprint of California Screamin' get the full Pixar treatment with the characters of Toy Story taking over the boardwalk.

The focus for all of this is squarely on the family market, with the intense Maliboomer space shot type of ride even being turned into a much tamer parachute drop similar to the one Knott's Berry Farm had for many years, except this one would be themed to the Green Army Men from Toy Story. With the Orange Stinger, Golden Zephyr, Jumpin' Jellyfish and Mulholland Madness all removed, there would be room for Lasseters big-budget family E-Ticket based on the movie Cars and themed to San Francisco, including cars zipping down a remade Lombard Street. The folks at WDI were impressed with all of the attention John Lasseter has been giving to the Submarine Voyage, and they're even more impressed with the bigger budgets John is able to get from Jay Rasulo simply due to the political clout he has with Bob Iger.

http://www.miceage.com/allutz/al091206b.htm

So... more Pixar for DCA?  Maybe the jokes about "Pixarland" next to "Disneyland" weren't jokes?  At least they're *finally* doing Toy Story attractions, though.

[Anthony]

There's a new article at MiceAge about the "beefed up" placemkaing project, which now aparrently has a budget of $650m! That's more than WDS cost to build!

This was a classic example of Lasseter taking the blueprints home with him for the weekend, and coming back on Monday with a much bigger and better idea. The end result was that the 30 Million dollars that had been budgeted for the 2006 Sunshine Plaza redo was kept in the bank and the backhoes and painting crews were called off. Over the course of the spring and early summer John sat in on several key planning meetings and was part of the planning group created to tackle what is now called "The DCA Problem."

The end result, after much work and even some bickering amongst the WDI divas, is a broader DCA master plan that dwarfs the phased Placemaking plan. The budget John Lasseter has now shepherded through the WDI design process has swelled north of 650 million, to be spent over the course of just over five years. For those keeping score at home, that figure is almost as much as the entire park cost when it opened to underwhelming results in early '01!

That's not to say many of the original Placemaking ideas aren't still slated for DCA. They've just been beefed up and tied together in a much more cohesive package. The Sunshine Plaza would still become a late 1920's salute to Los Angeles, as Walt would have found it when he arrived from Kansas City. Antique tour buses, open limousines and trolley cars would leave from this "hub" on routes that would deposit riders in various areas of the newly re-themed park. The 1950's streamliner train and many of the store fronts would be changed. But the area would take on a streetscape look, which was always a problem for the original Placemaking budget.

More: http://www.miceage.com/allutz/al100306b.htm

[Anthony]

It's funny how plans have changed since this topic began! The news of the rumoured $1 billion budget for DCA's makeover has hit a much bigger audience today:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119257768823361264.html

It provides a very good summary of all the rumours. Some quotes:

Just as Main Street harks back to Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Mo., in the early 1900s, California Adventure's new entrance will trace the footsteps of Walt Disney from when he arrived in Los Angeles in the 1920s, these people say. Similar to Disneyland's iconic castle, the redesigned park will feature a replica of Hollywood's former Carthay Circle theater, where Walt Disney premiered the movie "Snow White" in 1937.

The new-look park also will be expanded by around 12 acres and will bulk up its attractions, with a heavy emphasis on animated movies created by Pixar, including "Cars" and "Toy Story."

This summer, Disney hired theme-park consultant Bob Weis to oversee the new project. The remake is a complex undertaking, according to people familiar with the situation. Disney plans to keep California Adventure open during the five-year project, a plan that will require visitors to navigate construction zones and initially go in through a temporary entrance. Disney has no plans to discount ticket prices during that period, they say. Though prices vary, an adult ticket for a day at either park now costs $66, while a combined ticket is $91.

Mr. Weis will add a new area called Cars Land, which will re-create the fictional town of Radiator Springs from the 2006 Pixar movie "Cars," say people familiar with the plans. The centerpiece will be a cutting-edge attraction in the style of Disneyland's popular "Indiana Jones" ride.

Addressing criticism of Paradise Pier, Mr. Weis plans to add a flagship ride based on the 1989 animated movie "The Little Mermaid" and another on the 1995 feature "Toy Story," the people say. The Mulholland Madness ride, which re-creates a careening drive along a famous Los Angeles street, will be rethemed featuring Disney characters. Others, like the Maliboomer thrill ride, are likely to be axed.

It is still unclear what will happen to the name, as the company sees appeal in the words "Disney," "California" and "Adventure," these people say. But there is a big risk in leaving it the same. That said, some unusual relics will be left untouched for now, including the tortilla-making factory and a bread-baking demonstration. A person familiar with the plan says the Golden State area isn't considered as thematically out-of-place as others in the new plan and won't be changed in the near-term.

And... Discuss! :shock:

[Dlrpfan]

$1 Billion  :shock: whooo I really dont see the point in completly redesigning the park its fine as it is! yea it could do with some new attractions but i like the current themes of the lands/areas at DCA and dont get why they're re-doing them

[Anthony]

$1 Billion  :shock: whooo I really dont see the point in completly redesigning the park its fine as it is! yea it could do with some new attractions but i like the current themes of the lands/areas at DCA and dont get why they're re-doing them

I like the look of DCA too, I'd quite like to visit. But if I'd lived in California all my life, it might not seem quite so interesting or magical. It'd be like a Disney's Cornwall Adventure to us.

Obviously the CA theme is staying, but making it time specific (1920s, etc), wrapping it together with backstories, more detailing theming,etc. sounds like it'll really up the "magic" factor.

[Kristof]

I wonder how they can tie in The Little Mermaid with California?  But I won't complain, since it's a step closer for us to get it?!

[Owain]

I wonder how they can tie in The Little Mermaid with California?  But I won't complain, since it's a step closer for us to get it?!

Offtopic but, how does it mean a step closer for us ?

Im a bit dumb  

[Patrick]

I wonder how they can tie in The Little Mermaid with California?  But I won't complain, since it's a step closer for us to get it?!

Offtopic but, how does it mean a step closer for us ?

Im a bit dumb  

The blueprints would be in existance, therefore would push down the construction costs.  As there would be less of a need for Imagineers to design a specific show building for Paris alone :wink: .  It would already be in existence in another park.

Though on the note of how Little mermaid fits into DCA, I don't get it either, perhaps they thought the idea of the mermaid worked in TDS therefore it can be placed in DCA :lol: .  Or the more logical idea, as some famous Imagineer's say "Idea's never die at Walt Disney Imagineering" :wink: .

[penfold12]

Cynical again, but it will take more than a few Disney Characters to make Mullholand Drive a Disney Park quality attraction! Its a simple wild mouse ride, out doors. So even a Crushes Coaster type overlay is not possible!

[Kinou]

The article has some errors! It's California Screaming which would received Disney characters not Mulhland Madness which WILL GO.

[Kristof]

Didn't the Lutzer write some time ago about a possible Villains make-over for  California Screaming?

[Anthony]

Didn't the Lutzer write some time ago about a possible Villains make-over for  California Screaming?

Yes indeed! This would be quite a nice idea really - at long last bringing that "Villain Mountain" rumour to reality.

Paradise Pier should logically be the "Fantasyland" of the park, sort of a "Disney does fairground", with their quality and characters. So yes, I really do hope Kinoo is right and Mulholland gets the chop.

The 1920s "Walt arrives in California" street to open the park is an excellent idea. I agree The Little Mermaid might not fit, depending on how it looks - if it's part of Paradise Pier it would logically fit with the water/fairground.

Carsland I really hope isn't called Carsland. Radiator Springs would fit much more logically along with Golden State and Paradise Pier.