55 and 50 Party - Disneyland and Zlick!

[innerSpaceman]

Bwahaha, she's 28 now - and there are pictures of her dating back to age 5 or so. Mwahahahah.

Then, of course, there's a handful of me at age 10 - on my first visit to Disneyland. And some really embarrassing ones of me at age 16 on a summer-before-space-mountain high school trip from new york. Gak, what a dweeb I was!










(No cracks about "was.")

[innerSpaceman]

By the way, all this talk of new Haunted Mansion movie reminds me (because the music is going thru my head), there's a revision of the Disneyland 50 fantastic CD set for Disneyland '55. Discs 3 and 4 have some new stuff!

Appropos to the new movie talk, the epic "Fantasbelieveremembric" track now features the Haunted Mansion mash-up music that's currently going through my head. It's a great piece, and I'm sorry I didn't include it before. I think I was trying not to overshadow the actual attraction music earlier in the set, but that was just silly - the Remember score for the Haunted Mansion segment is awesome.

The release of the Disney at the World's Fair CD set inspired a couple of other changes. Since there was already some World's Fair music in the small world segment, I considered it fair game to include some of this non-Disneyland stuff for other attractions that were brought to Disneyland after the World's Fair.

So there's a great bit of a super-swanky Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow instrumental that I combined with some previously unused Progress City music for a new track in the Tomorrowland section.

Also I swapped out the Mr. Lincoln pre-show narration for the World's Fair pre-show song "Illinois" - an absolutely hysterical and rad piece of music that's totally awesome and 60's.

I found a bunch of Peoplemover music that was far better quality than the stuff on the original discs. So "Peoplemover Medley" has been completely re-mixed, and a couple of other rad Peoplemover songs are now in the Bonus section.


If anyone wants to upgrade their sets with new Discs 3 and 4, just let me know - and I'll gladly get those out to you.


New updates every five years!

[innerSpaceman]

And the rest.

For the final post on the rad decorations, lets add some pictures, huh? A picture speaks a thousand words ... but, me being me, I’m still gonna speak the thousand words.


So what’s left?

Well ... there were actually 3 bathrooms in the suite, and I wanted each of them to have a different theme.

The least visited was tucked behind the bar on the way to the kitchen. We made this the Adventureland Bathroom. Simple stuff, hung with vines and decked out with some tiki and small art pieces.













It was keith’s idea to dub this the Restroom Formerly Known as Prince, in a nod to one of our Park in-jokes.







The kitchen was decorated pretty rudimentarily - with some Disneyland memorabilia - just a nod to how we’d typically decorate the entire suite for one of these birthday parties back in the day.






We included the New Home for Koi Fish snafu, which we figured was a perfect Disneyland Hotel / food joke that was perfect for the kitchen here, and pretty recently funny.



The middle bathroom was themed to the Haunted Mansion. This was, of course, just a bunch of stuff left over from our Haunted Mansion party two Halloweens ago, but it was a good amount of stuff to cram into a bathroom and its entry hall.













One thing that doesn’t come across in pictures is ... sound.

Starting with the Haunted Mansion bath, we had sound loops playing in all the themed environments. The loop of stuff in the Mansion bathroom was pulled from the various sound loops playing at the Haunted Mansion Party.

In the Pirates Lair, we used the half-hour piece developed for the Disneyland 50 CDs.

And in the Tomorrowland Bathroom, I put together a really fun loop, mostly from the Disneyland 50 CD, but also from some other sources. I think the sound really helped sell the environment. The Mansion bathroom was downright spooky when you were in there alone with the door closed.

And the Tomorrowland Bathroom was really sold by the sound. This back space of the suite was divided into several segments - Inner Space, Outer Space, and Liquid Space.






The shower was especially fun because you could literally add water to the environment. Every once in a while you’d be in the shower, with all the seaweed and fish (it was decorated on the inside, too), and the Submarine Voyage track would come on the sound loop, and you’d have water rushing over you ... and you were just about as “immersed” as you could get. I think that happened to only 3 people - but that, to me, was success!







The Outer Space room was pretty funny. We re-papered the walls in the tiny chamber with the toilet and (Cosmic) bidet, with a moonscape I had on my bedroom walls in the ‘80s! It’s been sitting in a tube for 30 years waiting for a second life, and this was it. It was not reclaimed from the walls, so this was the moonscape’s swan song. Best of all, our own paper on the walls meant we could renew our traditional glujeslime ritual - which we did during the After-Party.







Basically, you cut open glow sticks and sprinkle the glow juice all over the walls and floor and ceiling. It ends up looking like a psychedelic star field, and this is when our outer space room really shone ... but of course, the outer space cosmic bidet joke was pretty rad.











Of course, Inner Space is my personal favorite, so I went all out with the lattice-paper snowflake, the lighting effects, and the molecules.











The snowflake ended up blocking the mirror effect I wanted to reproduce from the attraction, where the molecules are frozen in endlessly-repeating strings - - but we found that if you stuck your head into the “set,” there were indeed mirrors on both sides, and the endless rows of molecules effect was achieved! Of course, the giant atoms in the bathtub turned out great - made, quite obviously, from colored exercise balls and hula hoops. TeeHee.









The last room in the Tomorrowland Bathroom led to Toad Hell. We never got around to making the flames for the walls of the sauna, but the heat really sold it - as I’d hoped it would. The devils turned out to be among the hardest things to come up with. When I first came up with the idea, I thought it would be quite simple to find devil dolls - but no. We searched and searched and scoured the internet. In the end, we used baby dolls, painted red, added beaks, new eyes, horns, a tail, paper wings, and the stuff used to hold gift cards to floral arrangements as the pitchforks.




This was the joke that started it all, and I’m glad it turned out funny as it did.


I really liked the environment of the Tomorrowland Bathroom - - and was very happy people ended up hanging out back here when we decided to make it the smoking room. (There’s a $250 fine for smoking in the suite, even on the patio - and we thought it would be a little obvious out there, so I just picked the room I’d like best to get high in ... and was happy to find people hanging out in there during the party!)






I really wish the skyway would have lasted beyond the party night, but it was obviously a cool element on the beautiful patio. Decorating the carousel meant it couldn’t spin (it was hard to turn anyway) - so I hope people grokked that it was a spinning room. (I don’t think anyone read either of the warning signs we worked so hard on - - we made a number of signs for the party, but the Carousel signs were our most elaborate. I haven’t come across any pictures of them. I have a feeling the joke never panned out.)






As for the rest of the suite, we just tried to make it festive, and less bland than it’s unfortunately become over the years. I brought along my original Inner Space poster for behind the bar. And we strung really big mardi-gras beads all over the walls. We had a cool slide show going near the food spread. I don’t think many people realized that we had to bring the flatscreen display unit. There’s nothing but tiny old tube TVs in the suite. Pfft.






The table centerpiece on the was perhaps our biggest piece of “themeing” in the main rooms. It’s a combination of the old Sears Playset we’d been using for rudimentary Disneyland models at some of these parties in the past, and ideas inspired by Disneyphile’s fantastic wedding centerpieces. I supplied a lot of the pieces for this, but a ton more were made by my sister Leigh, especially for the event. I think it turned out phenomenally.

















... and please excuse these last two shots, from the staging area and not the actual party, but fantasyland and frontierland came out great, and largely escaped guest photography it seems.














And I’m pretty happy with how fantastically the suite was decorated for the party. I was trying to induce a squee pleasure effect, and I think we had some success there. There was certainly a very large scope to this project - featuring salutes to so many Disneyland lands and attractions, as well as generally decking out the suite, and bringing everything from, like I said, our own video display screen, to every dish and glass and fork, pot, pan and sponge inside the suite. It was a huge undertaking to bring all this stuff into a hotel suite, set it up, play with it, tear it down, and take it away. There were 50 boxes of stuff (a great coincidence), and several large items like the headboard, the tv, several large pieces of art, and a couple of ladders. Plus tons of food and drink brought into the suite separately. This was on a vast scale - even for me!




But, yeah, I loved it. My apologies and deepest thanks to all the crew and volunteers. There’s zero way this would have happened without you - - as you well know from being in on the near-chaos.


And Thanks to everyone who came out for the fun. It was a pleasure to share this unique weekend of hedonism with you guys. I hope you enjoyed yourselves, and I suspect that you did. Yay!





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[wendybeth]

I'm just looking at all these great pictures, and am in absolute awe.

[Gn2Dlnd]

The America Sings warning signs were read by many, and oft-explained. At one point, the revolving gazebo was redubbed the Gayzebo, cause that's where all the cute boys were hanging out. I loved that there were major set pieces for everyone to get, and "Easter eggs" to be found only after a bit of exploring.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Just seeing the pics and reading your wrap-up makes me still feel the glow.

I totally noticed the America Sings WARNING signs - they were the first thing I spotted on the patio. Genius, and sold the immobile red-white-and-blue pod immediately.

The Skyway was one of those things you didn't see immediately and after I discovered it, I noticed several other people having that discovery moment themselves. The party was filled with things like that, as Gn2 says.

Steve isn't overselling the importance of soundtrack. I'd say decor made things festive, but the music evoked the emotion of actually being on these rides. The first time I hit the Mansion bathroom for some real business, the door creek sound effect happened to match up with me closing the door! At a later visit to the Mansion bathroom I was disappointed to notice the sound was off, taking the entire experience down from a 10 to a 3, selling me on the cd-player-in-every-space concept. We spent ages lounging in the Pirates room and that loop was so expansive and full of memories that we didn't mind hearing it again and again (and reciting the spiel, and giggling, again, and again...).

I seriously felt that our time spent in the suite was a decent replacement for a day in the park, especially since the park was apparently jammed full, and certain rides are still sullied with annoying additions.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Mansion bathroom was by far my favorite element. Sure, lots of other things had components that surpassed the Mansion bathroom, but what sold the bathroom for me was the fact that the attraction itself is supposed to be a residence...thus it would HAVE a bathroom. And I was taking a piss IN THAT BATHROOM! Clearly there's something wrong with my brain, but if so I don't want to be right, because that weird little thought made me smile every time I used the facilities.

[innerSpaceman]

Hahahahahahahahaha, that's awesome!



Oh, and the CD player in the Mansion Bathroom (which came with the suite, btw) was the only unit that didn't have a Repeat function, and so was dependent on a couple of drunken caretakers - and hence spotty.

[Kevy Baby]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

We included the New Home for Koi Fish snafu, which we figured was a perfect Disneyland Hotel / food joke that was perfect for the kitchen here, and pretty recently funny.

I hope you left this sign in the suite. I want to think it lasted until suite gets demolished/refurbed.

[innerSpaceman]

Heheh, sorry, no, I kept it. I laughed too hard over the incident not to want this semi-permanent momento.


Maybe when the hotel refurbishment is done, I'll put it up in the area where the koi pond used to be.