The Brickers’ “Retro” Disney World Trip Report

In general, World Showcase was not all that memorable for me as a small child, for the reasons stated on the last page. About the only thing I did like was Maelstrom, and even then, the troll creeped me out. I also really like Disney Characters on Holiday, a bus that went around World Showcase with characters, and the accompanying meet and greets it brought. I don’t imagine World Showcase is appealing for many kids, except those child prodigies who love world history at age 6. The rest of Epcot (actually, EPCOT Center as it was at the time) was a totally different story. The Living Seas was another favorite pavilion of mine, as I loved manatees. I remember playing on or around props from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in Seabase Alpha. The attraction itself I don’t remember all that well, though. I grew to love aquatic life so much that once I was Scuba Certified (SSI), we actually did DiveQuest at Epcot. Since I want to keep this somewhat sequential, I’ll discuss that in depth later.

Future World, on the other hand, was a perennial favorite. I absolutely loved Kitchen Kabaret/Food Rocks, World of Motion, Body Wars, Cranium Command, Goofy About Health, and Spaceship Earth. We spent most of our time in the Magic Kingdom, I believe, so it’s surprising that these attractions stand out the most to me. I guess that’s just a testament to the quality of good ole EPCOT Center!

Ever since I can remember, and likely before I can remember, we toured Commando Style. Armed with the latest edition of the Unofficial Guide (yeah, it’s been around since the 1980s), she devised a plan of attack for us each morning. I remember these to the greatest extent at Magic Kingdom, where it seemed like we always started in Tomorrowland or Frontierland. I can recall several mornings where Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was a walk-on for us because of this. Oddly enough, I don’t seem to recall ever riding Dumbo as a child, so the “Dumbo or Die” touring plan must not have been her favorite!

To be honest, though, I don’t remember a lot of attractions at Walt Disney World. Part of this is a faulty memory on my part, part of it is that I don’t think we did attractions multiple times if my mom didn’t like them. For example, I remember seeing the 20,000 Leagues Lagoon and its outdoor queue as we passed through Fantasyland one day, and when I asked my mom what it was, her response was that it was something along the lines of, “a fake underwater ride with cardboard cut-outs.” I don’t remember the 20,000 Leagues attraction at all, but having since seen videos online, I wish we would have experienced it more.

The same goes for Horizons, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Delta Dreamflight, Mission to Mars, and probably a whole host of other attractions I can’t think of right now. Maybe I just can’t remember them, but my guess is that my parents did not like them, so we didn’t visit these attractions much.

Beyond giving us plans for our trips, in the pre-internet era, the Unofficial Guide and vacation planning tapes gave me a life-line to what new and exciting things I could expect on our trips. The years that we first visited Splash Mountain, Tower of Terror, Rock ‘N’ Rollercoaster, Alien Encounter, and Timekeeper were like the coolest things ever. When Tower of Terror opened, it was like the Studios doubled in size. Since this was my mom’s favorite park, this was a great thing, as it gave us much more to do.

Even before Tower of Terror, I thought the Studios was a pretty awesome park. Back then, (I feel like an old man shaking his fist at some “young punks” while rasping, “In my day…”) the Backlot Tour was actually a tour of a backlot, and an enjoyable tour, at that. I remember the first time I experienced Catastrophe Canyon; it freaked me out, to say the least. Superstar Television was equally entertaining. I don’t know if I actually recall it, or if it’s just that I’ve been told this enough times that it “feels” like a memory, but a highlight of our visits to Superstar TV was me being chosen to participate in one of the sketches.

I was always typically at the lower end of the height chart for people my age, and this really stunk when it came to Walt Disney World. It seemed like an eternity before I could ride Space Mountain, which, as best I can remember, was the attraction at the time with the most stringent height requirement. Even after I could finally ride every other attraction, it seemed like another year or two before I could ride Space Mountain.

Of course, maybe that’s all in my head because I wanted to ride it so desperately. For Space Mountain, my parents took advantage of the Rider Swap system, and passed me off to the other person while they rode. When I asked why this was, they explained that it was “single” seating, which I took to mean that they were in some kind of room all by themselves. I don’t know why I pictured it this way, but for the longest time, Space Mountain to me was an isolated chamber that seemed really odd. I think because of this, I wanted to ride it all the more. When I finally did experience it, it was nothing like I expected, but awesome nonetheless.

For the first few years we went to Walt Disney World, we stayed at Fort Wilderness. The reasons for this were two-fold: my parents loved camping, and a campsite is a good deal cheaper than a suite at the Grand Floridian. We went camping so much as a child that it’s difficult for me to differentiate my experiences camping at Fort Wilderness from camping elsewhere, but I loved camping. Riding my bike around the loops (often *gasp* unsupervised as I was responsible and my parents were neither overbearing or overprotective), playing in the various play areas, and just generally exploring nature. To this day, I love Fort Wilderness and I hope it still has its underdeveloped allure when Sarah and I have kids (boys).

A stay at the Fort always seemed to entail a trip to the Hoop De Doo Revue. The show was a hoot, even though I think it’s safe to say I a good portion of the humor went over my head at the time. (I haven’t seen it since, so that’s just a guess; I imagine it to be something like Calvin & Hobbes—funny for both kids and adults, but on different levels.) My parents absolutely loved the show, although after returning in 2009 following a long absence, they no longer seemed so enthusiastic about the show. I can’t really speak to that, although I’m not too surprised given some other downward trends at Walt Disney World.

During these years, about once per trip, I would find myself at the Neverland Club at the Polynesian while my parents went off to consume illicit substances at raves on Pleasure Island. (Okay, I don’t think that’s actually what they did, but if you read some accounts of Pleasure Island, you’d certainly get the impression that there was some sort of egregious sinning going on there!) The Club was cool, and I remember being really impressed that it had arcade video games that I could play. Although this probably wasn’t that awe-inspiring to most kids, my parents didn’t allow me to have video games, so whenever I got the chance to play them, I was incredibly excited. Although, since I had 0 practice playing them, I usually wasn’t too good, and got trounced by the other kids. Still, it was a fun time!
During these trips, we would always visit a water park for at least one day. Our water park of choice was undoubtedly Typhoon Lagoon. I remember playing in the wave pool, trying to swim as far forward as I could. I wasn’t exactly an Olympic swimmer, and strength wasn’t my strong suit, so I never did get too far towards that goal. But how I tried! We tried River Country, and later Blizzard Beach, and both were fun for what they offered, but Typhoon Lagoon was the clear winner. Sarah doesn’t like visiting water parks, but even now, I still call Typhoon Lagoon one of my favorite parks. (I certainly like it more than Animal Kingdom!)

At some point during our yearly visits, we discovered the Department of Defense had acquired a hotel, dubbed Shades of Green, from the Walt Disney Company. This hotel, previously a Magic Kingdom Disney Resort known as the Golf Resort and later the Disney Inn, became our resort of choice from roughly 1994 up until the time we stopped attending as a family.

Since we mostly camped when we traveled elsewhere, Shades of Green was just about the coolest thing ever the first couple of times we stayed there. Not only was my bed not also a convertible kitchen table, but it was actually comfortable. Beyond the room, the resort offered so many amenities which I had never experienced. The most exciting of these, without a doubt, was a restaurant called Evergreen’s.

Evergreen’s was a sports bar & grill at Shades of Green that, in my recollection, was secluded and always a good outdoor walk from our room. Every time we would eat there, I would get dinosaur nuggets. I realized these were made from chicken, but the idea of dinosaur shaped nuggets as a child was almost incomprehensible. Why had no one thought of this before?! I could have the dinosaurs fight one another and bite parts of each other off. Not only was dinner delicious, but everyone was a winner (except all dinosaurs involved in the battle, who invariably all somehow lost the battle) as dinner was also entertaining! On top of that, Evergreen’s had an awesome game room.

Typically, my game of choice in this game room was Twilight Zone pinball. From a young age, I was a fan of the original series (between that and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I watched a lot of the SciFi Channel!) so the pinball machine was right up my alley. On a later trip, this pinball machine was gone and Daytona USA became my new game of choice. I spent many a quarter in this game room!

A trip we took with my younger cousins in late elementary school, probably around 1995, is one of the most poignant trips in my mind. The trip was a surprise Christmas gift to them that we took over Spring Break a few months later. They had never been to Walt Disney World before, so obviously it was an exciting prospect.

As an only child, it was neat for me to experience the trip with other kids (even if they were two and four years younger than me, and thus, as I thought then, “far less” mature (ha!)). Yet, this was far from the highlight of the trip for me this time. The highlight was the all new (at least to me) ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. The attraction was closed on and off while we were there, so it felt like something special when we finally did get to experience it. And what an experience it was. I was at an age where I could grasp some of the dark humor in the pre-show, but not so old that the attraction didn’t scare me a little. It had everything that made an attraction awesome to me: an interesting story, an entertaining wait in line, and most important—an awesome character in Skippy! My older cousin was terrified of even the prospect of going on the attraction, but did, and ultimately cried, after receiving peer pressure from his younger brother and me. Oops. To date, this is still my second favorite attraction in the history of Walt Disney World behind the original Journey into Imagination. We even put on brave faces and experience Stitch’s Great Escape every once in a while just to see the pre-show and my friend, Skippy.

After exiting the attraction, I flew into its gift-shop and snatched up the largest Skippy plush I could find. I had been saving up money I had earned for the past year (in my lucrative career cleaning up dog poop for my grandpa) just for such an investment! (I’ve glossed over a lot of them, but you may be noticing the recurring them of me buying plushes and other toys—I bought a lot of them, and they often provided me with more entertainment than the actual attractions themselves!) I still have that Skippy to this day, complete with his original “MousekeToy” tag.

This trip also marked the first time, as far as I can recollect, that we visited Blizzard Beach. It was a really cool place, and the theming was exquisite, but with the lack of an awesome wave pool, it couldn’t hold a candle to Typhoon Lagoon. Plus, on either this trip or the next trip we took (or maybe the trip prior if this wasn’t our first time visiting Blizzard Beach), the place was FREEZING! Just thinking about that visit gives me goose bumps. Even with the cold, though, it was pretty fun.

Another memory—and frequently recited story in my family—was when we were rushing down the monorail ramp and my dad told my younger cousin to do (or more likely, stop doing) something. My younger cousin did not relent, and in the ensuing confrontation, my cousin asked my father if he, “wanted a knuckle sandwich.” I was far from perfect as a child, but that’s something I would never have said to my father. My dad was a military-man, stoic, quiet, and a strict disciplinarian. There were many times that I had felt his wrath after acting in similarly inappropriate manners, but never had I said anything quite so disrespectful. Anyway, yada yada yada, my cousin was the picture of a perfectly behaved child (something I had never before, and never after, saw from him) for the remainder of the vacation with us. The event that transpired on the monorail ramp that evening has become legendary in my family.

This is definitely not the type of person you ask if he, “wants a knuckle sandwich.”

That trip overall was pretty awesome. My “coming of age” (the time when a child can ride all of the attractions at Disney) had happened a couple of trips prior, so it was really cool being an “adult” as my cousins could and could not ride certain other attractions.

On our next trip the following Spring, Shades of Green had overbooked, so the resort moved us to a resort called Dixie Landings (now Port Orleans Riverside). Although the rooms were not as nice, this was a great experience, as the place was more interestingly themed than Shades of Green. While Shades of Green was a cool home-away-from-home with awesome amenities, it wasn’t starkly different than other hotels at which we had stayed, with perhaps the exception that it was somewhat more spread out. Conversely, Dixie Landings had an unmistakable Southern feel to it, and it felt like being down on the bayou. For whatever reason, my most vivid memory of this place is the frequent meals at its food court, and the delicious Cajun fries they served.

If I recall correctly, we only took one additional trip in the 1990s (it’s difficult to tell since these trips almost blur together), in 1997. This trip might as well have been dubbed, “The Year of Disney Sports.” During that trip, we visited the Official All Star Café at Disney’s Wide World of Sports. This restaurant, now closed, was owned by Wayne Gretzky, Joe Montana, Shaquille O’Neal, Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, and most importantly, KEN GRIFFEY JR! I was a huge baseball fan as a kid, and Junior was my favorite player. I loved the Mariners—heck, I even liked Alex Rodriguez back then! We went there, I used probably an entire roll of film taking photos of various Griffey memorabilia, and had lunch.

Then, we attended an Atlanta Braves spring training game. I loathed the Braves, but it was the first Major League Baseball game I had ever attended, so I was incredibly excited. I got a ball signed by various no-name minor league players, and just generally had a blast. The sports fun didn’t stop there, as we later saw their all-star closer, Mark Wohlers, at Downtown Disney!

As icing on the cake for the Year of Sports, we hit the new ESPN Club for an event that I cannot recall, which absolutely packed the place. The Club was packed, and awesome. It had more television sets than I had ever seen in my life. You couldn’t throw a rock in the place without hitting a TV. Accordingly, it was a bad idea to throw a rock in the place, lest you wanted to pay for a broken TV. I know we ate at Spoodles and I built my own pizza, but I can’t recall if that was the same night as ESPN Club, or if we visited multiple times that trip (or perhaps we visited again in 1998 and I have my years off? I know we definitely visited in 1996 for the 25th Anniversary Celebration!).

On one of these trips in the 1996-1999 era, we visited Fulton’s Crab House. This was quite a extravagant meal for us country folk’, and was easily the nicest meal I’ve eaten with my parents in Walt Disney World. It was definitely a complete experience for us. We were seated upstairs, in a bit of a quiet corner, and my parents told me to order whatever I wanted. I had probably only had crab spelled with a “c” instead of a “k” a handful of times in my life, so I ordered that. It was delicious. It was tender, buttery, succulent, buttery, flavorful, and did I mention buttery? Unfortunately, the reason this meal is probably so memorable for me is because it’s one of the few meals in my life that caused me to get sick. I guess that’s what I get for dousing every bite in a pound of butter. Shoot, if I would have marketed that, I could have beaten Paula Dean to the punch, and I’d be rich right now!

It was a few years before our final trip as a family, in 2001. I mentioned DiveQuest earlier, and on the last trip I took with my parents, my dad and I experienced it. I had taken a SSI course a few years prior to the trip. (Likely because my dad didn’t have a partner on vacations since my mom is afraid of the water.) Ever since seeing an old two-part Full House episode on WDW that featured the Living Seas dive area prominently, I had wanted to dive there, so the experience was like a dream come true. I’m not a jetsetter by any means, but we’ve gone diving in Hawaii and Jamaica, and neither one of them could compare to the artificial environment of the Living Seas. To be sure, it did lack some of the giant animals we saw in the other places, but “cool animals per square foot” (a common term used to judge the quality of a diving location), the Living Seas beat them all. You couldn’t move your fin without kicking a clownfish!

Although I didn’t remember doing this until being reminded recently by my mother, but apparently after our dive (at the time, admission to Epcot for the day was included), my dad and I went and hit Test Track and a couple of other attractions. I don’t think my mom was too amused. In my defense, I was just a kid, and my dad, as the responsible adult, is to blame.

This trip would also be the one on which I became a racing expert on Daytona USA. As mentioned above, I played this game frequently one night during dinner at Evergreen’s. One of the next days was our “resort day,” and while my parents lounged by the pool, I fed quarter after quarter into the Daytona USA arcade machine, only taking breaks to refill my supply of Coke and grenadine from the Evergreen’s bar. By this time, the embargo my parents imposed on video games had been lifted, and I was the proud owner of a Sega Dreamcast. Immediately upon returning home I purchased the newly-released Daytona USA 2001 for the Dreamcast. Sadly, it didn’t hold a candle to the arcade purchase.

For a boy in early high school, going to Walt Disney World with your parents is not the “cool” thing to do. Because of that, these things would be the highlight of the trip and the last trip. The rest of the trip, I had that “too cool for this” teenage attitude, and I never really let my guard down to have much fun. There were fun aspects, like the thrill rides, but even those are fairly tame at WDW. The ironic thing was that our previous trip was to Hawaii, and I was bored there because it was too adult. In retrospect, we agreed that we probably should have flipped the trips (taking the WDW one first, then the Hawaii one) to make things more enjoyable. That trip would also be the last trip I would take with my parents until 2010. And that closed that chapter of my life, ending my love of Disney, but at the same time providing some fond memories…

…Okay, since you’re reading this DISNEY website of mine, you know that’s obviously not the case. “Act II,” as it might as well be called, of my love for Disney began in 2006 when Sarah and I seriously contemplated visiting Walt Disney World together. I had joked about visiting in undergrad with some friends, but, to put it mildly, the idea was not well-received. Sarah was much more receptive, and following our trip in 2006, we visited twice in 2007, twice in 2008, twice in…

Well, while this Act is far from over, I think you probably know the story from there…