It’s pretty rare that Disney can slip a change past my eagle eyes. I have the eyes of a hawk. My owlish night vision is unprecedented. Birds take one look at my six pairs of freakish eyeballs and tremble.

So it came as a shock to me earlier this week when I suddenly realized that an entire rain forest had disappeared — and more to the point, it has been gone for years. I know what you are thinking: throw in an evil logging company and this sounds like a great idea for a white water raft ride. But it really caught me off guard.

You see, I happened to be browsing old maps of Animal Kingdom, because that’s what all the super cool people do on a Friday night. And something jumped out at me. Something that I remember as plain as day from AK’s early years, but hadn’t thought about in probably a decade. Below is a progression of a section of Animal Kingdom guide maps, focusing on a section at the very front of the park.

Guide Map Progression Studies. It’s Not Just for Jocks and Cheerleaders Any More.

For those of you who forget about it (I know I always do), that’s the Rainforest Cafe. At one time, it was the only full-service restaurant in the park, and it wasn’t even run by Disney. I’ve never been Rainforest Cafe’s biggest fan. I find its food over-priced, under-quality, and non-nutritious (which also happens to be the order of importance in food criteria for me). I think the robots are laughably bad, and the buzzing, chattering interior is just too loud and obnoxious for my fine dining tastes. The only thing that could be worse is a bunch of poorly animated rubbery dinosaurs.

I think I have eaten at Rainforest Cafe twice in my entire life, and the last time was probably around 2002. Like I said, not the biggest fan.

But I always gave the Animal Kingdom Rainforest Cafe credit for one thing: An elegant exterior. Rainforest Cafe debuted on Disney property over at the Downtown Disney Marketplace well before the AK version opened, and I hated its weird mix of papier mache  volcano and shaker shingle roofing. Throw in some average rock work, cartoon elephants, and a few retention ditch fountains, and it just reminded me of a pricier version of Chuck E. Cheese.

But the Animal Kingdom location was not like this at all. Its rock work matched the quality of the park itself (forget Radiator Springs; Animal Kingdom is positively bursting at the seams with fine rock work). The hokey volcano was gone, and in its place was a shimmering, panoramic waterfall, draping over the entire facade of the building.

As much as I loathe the restaurant itself, that waterfall exterior was exquisite. I’ve never seen anything like that before. It was like dining inside Niagra. It made for one of the prettier, abstract visuals of a trip to Animal Kingdom.

And at some point in the last 15 years, it has vanished.

When I came across that picture in the guidemap, I immediately flashed back in my mind to memories of this thing, and then immediately wondered if I had exaggerated them. Because ever since I moved down to Florida, I can only remember the exterior of the Rainforest Cafe looking like this:

To find this restaurant, you only need two things: a compass and a machete.

You can’t even see it now. The building is completely obscured by jungle growth. Venture back to the restaurant entrance and you will see two waterfalls, but the rest is just stone and bamboo. It’s much more like a real rain forest now. There are no good picture taking angles anywhere. This is the best I could do.

Pictured: Breathtaking waterfalls. Also weird frog.

And here’s another one, taken from outside the security gates, where you once had a clear view of the Rainforest building (that structure on the left is the hexagonal shop shown in the guidemap pictures above).

Fine dining with a touch of rampant overgrowth.

The entire building has been erased from existence by the lush foliage. It’s interesting to me that Disney has gradually redrawn the Rainforest building on the map. At some point in the not too distant past, they were still sticking with the image of a waterfall building. But in today’s version, they have finally narrowed it down to the 2 remaining flows. In all three versions of the map, the shimmering pool of water on the building roof is just artistic license. It was never that way in real life.

I did find an old picture by chrischris on flickr of the building in its former glory. It was quite a sight, and it makes me sad that they got rid of it. Even today, when studying the current facade, I couldn’t tell where exactly the changes had been made. Obviously at some point they either added more rock work or ripped down old structures. The picture below certainly made the building seem taller than it looks in real life today.

If you’re interested, you can spot a few more images here and here. I’ve never once missed eating at Rainforest Cafe, but I’m pretty amazed to find out I’ve missed this icon of Animal Kingdom’s early years. I still wonder how I forgot about it. Maybe they’re putting something in the food.

But as Walt says, it’s kind of fun to do the impossible. Even if it’s silly.

Nevertheless, the show must go on, and I finally made my way over to Animal Kingdom this week, where construction cranes have moved in and mounds of dirt have moved out. The picture I took apparently got munged up, but if one were to view the Africa bridge from the Asia bridge, while playing bridge and listening to a musical bridge and wearing britches, one would see the familiar brown walls of a major undertaking. The whole area behind the Tusker House and Dawa Bar is now hidden from view, and they are clearing out a whole lot of space.

That, my friends, is the first real Avatar activity we have seen since James Cameron paraded through the park with a host of Disney execs over a year ago.

Is it Pandora? Are the Hallelujah Mountains being constructed just beyond that wall?

Actually no. This is merely the construction of the new theater for Festival of the Lion King. Disney — surmising that an African-inspired musical show fits better in Africa than in a cobbled together summer camp — is in the process of relocating the show. And thus clearing the way for the Na’vi to move in.

This whole post is really just an excuse for me to indulge my bad Photoshop urges.

This strikes me as rather commendable. It’s not often you see them go through such efforts. Shows have been moved around before to temporary locations, or had their theaters enhanced. It’s happened quite a bit at Animal Kingdom. The current Lion King theater has already undergone one major renovation to better enclose it from the elements, as has the Theater in the Wild over in Dinoland. We’ve posted before about the revival tent that housed Flights of Wonder for one season.

Other attractions have been packed up and moved across the country, such as when Carousel of Progress moved from Disneyland to the Magic Kingdom, or when the Mickey Mouse Revue relocated to Tokyo, or when the Iguanadon became a zombified corpse in Paris.

But I can’t think of too many times when Disney has simply built an entirely new facility to relocate a major attraction only a few hundred feet away from its existing spot. The few times they have done it, the rides were rather portable to begin with. Disneyland’s Teacups, being the Wonderland deadbeats that they are, have been evicted to a new home at least once. And Dumbo recently relocated at Magic Kingdom. The Festival of the Lion King requires a much larger footprint than any of those. I’m impressed that they’re going through the effort.

It’s a wise first step, since it makes sense to have Simba in Africa regardless of whether Avatarland actually comes to fruition. If you want to get super technical, it’s actually step #2 for clearing out Camp Minnie-Mickey. A character greeting area is under construction in one of the old Discovery Island shops, to relocate some of the more popular character trails. But Lion King’s switch is the first earth-moving project.

There’s been a lot of speculation that Disney doesn’t need Avatar, since it bought the ultimate Potter-killer last year in the form of major action adventure franchise Red Tails. But at least this proves that they’re serious about making room in Animal Kingdom for something. I wonder if they will find new ways to improve Festival of the Lion King even more. It has to be the most successful live stage show in theme park history, and now that they’re starting from scratch, I wonder if we’ll see a more elaborate set up. One hopes they at least improve the seating. I’m so tired of the theme park torture benches (looking at you, Fantasmic and Beauty and the Beast).

I am self-diagnosed with OCD, which means I just offended everyone who is professionally diagnosed with OCD. But I love a good fixation, and Disney gives me many opportunities in which to sink my teeth, as if I were a vampire and the theme park was a nubile young neck, throbbing with plasma and begging for a bite.

Vampire water park

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve decided to go for WDW47. It’s a challenge. A complex puzzle. A seemingly unsolvable equation. It has consumed a lot of my time lately. Teevtee and I have had some marathon brainstorming sessions on how to complete it, and we keep coming up empty. There are some fundamental roadblocks we just can’t seem to get past. The parks are their own universe, with their own laws of physics. Some of them, you just can’t violate.

I’m dying to tell you what WDW47 is, but for now it must wait. It’s simply too early. Expect to hear me tease this thing for the next month or so. I promise I will give you fair warning before the actual attempt. Just as NASA must carefully plan launches, waiting for everything to align, so must WDW47. There is a window, but it’s a tight one, and it doesn’t come along for several more weeks. In the mean time, I will need something else to fixate on.

Like flying elephants, for instance. Like I said, I’m drawn to the details, and occasionally I’ll hit upon an idea to plus things. It might be big, or it might be infinitesimally small. This is one of the latter.

Unlike the Magic Carpets or Triceratops Spin, which use numbers on the ground to assign you to a vehicle, Dumbo uses tokens. There are 16 Dumbos, and so there are 16 tokens. When the ride operators are planning for the next group, they hand a token to each party, and when they run out, they know they have enough people. It’s a nice way to keep track and improve loading efficiency.

I don’t mean to complain, but the tokens handed out at Magic Kingdom look something like this:

Pictured: Utter Lack of Imagination.

In case you count tell, that’s my rendition of a plastic green rectangle. Now as we all know, plastic green rectangles are important in the story of Dumbo, because when Dumbo falls asleep after drinking some kind of hallucinogenic clown beverage, he and Timothy Mouse dream about an endless parade of green rectangles. Later, the green rectangles show up as Animal Control agents, who shoot the Ringmaster on sight. It’s one of the real highlights of the story.

Or maybe it’s just a cheap way to create tokens for a theme park ride.

I have been ranting to close loved ones for years that Disney should choose something a little more imaginative than plastic green rectangles as tokens for Dumbo. These relatives are no longer close, and have tried to have me institutionalized. But the point still stands. Is it possible that there is some little item in the Dumbo story that actually could work well as a token for flying Dumbo? Let’s see, if I could just think about it for one minute…

This is the part where I shout “Ta-Da!” in a triumphant, sing-song voice.

Yeah, so it turns out Disneyland actually uses my magic feather idea. I discovered it during my trip last December. I love them for it. Sure it’s just a cheap plastic black rectangle, cut in the shape of a feather. But it’s a wonderful little detail, and is exactly what I have been preaching for years. I think Disneyland management has been in contact with some of my relatives. I had this idea first, I’m telling you. Disney must have a tap on my phones (because I’m pretty sure I have pitched this idea over the phone to a random telemarketer). Anyway, I’m keeping an eye on them. If my next brilliant idea for the Magic Kingdom parking lot shows up soon, I’m filing a lawsuit.

As plagues go, giant snails is several levels below zombie apocalypse, but still ahead of the Duffy invasion. If the state can relax the poison rules when it comes to enormous hard-backed slugs imported from Africa, why can’t it declare open season on awful bears imported from Japan?

Awfully cute, you mean (photo by Nagi)

Giant snails have roamed Disney World for a few decades now. If I had to point out the most obvious example, it would be at Voyage of the Little Mermaid, where four gleeful calcium-deficient nightmare creatures partake in a little song-and-dance number, proving that nobody is happier than when they are glowing with florescent space goo.

One to devour each limb.

But I’ve had a secret favorite animatronic snail for awhile. I think he has existed since Epcot’s first days, but I only noticed him a year or so ago. His grotesque little eye stalks actually wiggle, and if you listen closely, you can actually hear a dedicated slurping audio track as he sucks the life out of a defenseless child from the previous show.

He’s very hard to spot. Snails don’t like the light. They prefer the darkness, where evil lurks and dreams decay. This makes it virtually impossible to snap a picture of him, especially since I always obey the flash photography rules, except when it suits my purpose not to.

Below is the shot of the snail during my obey-the-rules phase. In spite of my best attempts to brighten the picture, it refuses to look like anything other than the neon vomit from the Little Mermaid snails. I think in the years to come, this picture is destined to become the “Bigfoot Evidence” equivalent of the entire giant snail invasion myth.

You can just barely make out some blurry eye stalks and a shell.

Honestly, I’m sorry I couldn’t get a picture, but I do encourage you to keep an eye out for him the next time you ride Universe of Energy. He is high up on a rocky ledge, on the right, after passing the Tyrannosaurus vs. Stegosaurus battle. It’s a transition area, before you reach Ellen and the giant Elasmosaurus. Even when you’re looking for him, he’s difficult to spot.

It’s so weird to think that they actually created some dedicated mechanics for this thing. He’s hidden, barely moves, is unlit, and frankly not doing a whole lot. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if it wasn’t an animatronic at all, but a real giant snail, trying to take down Universe of Energy from within? Perhaps he’s calling for his brethren snails right now. Suck. Slurrrrp. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha. (I laugh when I’m scared).

I did not come to this decision lightly. In fact, it is the culmination of years of training. My wife has already told me it cannot be done. And she may be right. At this point there are too many variables, too many unsolved problems. But due to my own schedule and that of the theme park overlords, the next window is not for another 2 months. I have time. There are experts who can be consulted. Trainers who can prepare me. If all else fails, there is magic.

Fun fact: 47 is a prime number.

I’m not yet prepared to disclose what 47 is. That defeats the point of talking about a top secret project on the internet, especially since we are almost 70 days away from the event horizon (and I’m not even sure I’m using that term correctly, but it sounded cool). Suffice it to say that it relates to a seemingly impossible task that nobody except theme park geeks will care about, and the jury is out on whether they will care anyway. Maybe if I make a t-shirt (snap judgement: I’m making a t-shirt).

Fun fact: 47 is the answer to a jokey math problem which says that all numbers equal 47. It was developed by somebody at Pomona College, and a whole bunch of Star Trek writers loved the joke so much, they injected the number into almost every episode. So says wikipedia.

As a point of clarification, this has nothing to do with Run Disney’s recently announced Dopey Challenge. That one is 48.6 miles. Which does not round down to 47 (unless one is rounding down to closest prime number). Also, that one involves lots of running. Also, it’s crazy.

Fun Fact: Disney’s fan club is D23. If you were to double that and add 1, you get 47.

Anyway, consider this very early advance warning. I’ll talk more about it in the coming months. But for now, just be aware that #WDW47 is the top trending hashtag on Twitter right now (it isn’t, but maybe if you all tweet about it at exactly 4:07a.m. tomorrow, it will be. What? Don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to help this thing go viral?)

That’s all for now. Regular parkeology posts will resume later this week.
#WDW47