What GD and CP REALLY did in Paris...

[Ghoulish Delight]

Hmm, two pieces of the Disney portion of the trip that neither of us has mentioned: Disney Village and Disney Studios Park.

The much maligned Studios Park was in some ways far better than I expected, but in many ways just as bad as you've heard. What there is to do there is rather entertaining, and the entry building is beautiful (it's what Hollywood and Dine should have been). But there's simply not enough to do (we did the whole park in about 4 hours. It literally is the size of a land), too much of what there is to do is shows, and the theming is completely nonexistent. It makes Hollywood Picture Backlot look like the Indy queue in comparison. And their "backlot tram tour"....yikes.

But even with that...I'll take the Studios over Disney Village any day of the week. Holy god what a craptacular travesty that is. 100 yards of pure ugly and unadulterated tack. The fact that it's got the Disney name on it is shameful. It needs to be bulldozed.

[Matterhorn Fan]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

And their "backlot tram tour"....yikes.

Details, please. Surely it can't be worse than what's left of WDW's backlot tour. Can it?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Matterhorn Fan

Details, please. Surely it can't be worse than what's left of WDW's backlot tour. Can it?

Oh, I bet it can. Here's the run through:

You are guided on video by Jeremy Irons and some French actress. Honestly, their spiel is entirely forgetable. Standard "Hollywood is great, isn't amazing to see the things that go into this oh-so-important business" crap.

First, you pass a few large props from what's purportedly a set from Dinotopia. You arrive at their earthquake effects setup. That's actually pretty decent. Lots of fire, lots of shaking, lots of water. And you even get taken around behind it to see a bit of the hardware.

Then you loop back around, past the loading station, see a few props strewn around, and arrive at a destroyed city set. You're told it's for a movie in which a dragon attacks London. Odd, but full of promise. The set is very detailed. We couldn't WAIT to see the awesome animatronic dragon, spitting fire, come up from behind the buildings!! But alas, all we got was a big flame thrower from a hole in the ground. Yawn.

And finally, you're taken past a fake costuming warehouse and are supposed to laugh as Jeremy Irons is shown in some stupid costume on the video.

And that's IT. That's the whole thing. MAYBE 15 minutes? And we saw the wait time up over an hour at points. We only waited about 15, thankfully, by taking advantage of a rather odd queue arrangement. I would NOT have been very cheery had I had to wait an hour for that.