Sketches from Disneyland

Last Sunday, July 17th, 2016, I spent the day at Disneyland with friends. It was the Park’s 61st anniversary of it’s opening day. The Disneyland Resort has bag check security gates that visitors (guests) must pass through before entering the courtyard where the ticket booths are and exist still outside of the parks’ entrance gates. In the morning, the bag check gate lines were longer and slower than the entrance gate lines by a factor of about 8.  These sketches are an almost hourly account of my impressions of the day.

Our group of 3 got in the stand-by line for the first performance of the new “Frozen” live stage show in Disney California Adventure (DCA) theme park.  If you catch this stage show, Disneyland’s Disneyland Forever fireworks and DCA’s World of Color water fountain show, you can hear the song “Let it Go” three times in one day’s visit.

Sometimes, as with this drawing of Merida, what I draw has more to do with samples of nearby conversations than actual sights or attraction experiences. I saw the Disney Junior puppet show for my first time and was pleasantly surprised, as much with the young audience’s engagement as with the show itself.

Hopping back to Disneyland, we enter Tomorrowland, which is pretty much temporary “Star Wars Land” now. Hyperspace Mountain is the same good attraction of Space Mountain with John Williams’ music. Okay, it’s a little more than that.

Returning to DCA at our Fast Pass time to the renewed Soarin’ Over the World (Formerly Soarin’ Over California). It’s both better and cheekier than the original attraction movie, which in my eye cancel each other out for a “meh” experience. Mr. Kylo Ren was looking at me from the Park guide.

Main Street was starting to fill up with folks for the night time Paint the Night parade, and we headed to the magical Peter Pan Flight dark ride. Here’s Tuff-Girl’s pup Wichita with Tinker Bell. Then the parade, this time viewed not from a Main Street vantage but in the it’s a small world mall. Disclosure: Snow White is not in the parade. Disclosure #2: this is not how you paint the night with magic.

Disclosure #3: this is not how you “step into the magic” as the parade’s song encourages. And then... time to go home.

But hold on, I didn’t. I hung around a bit more, lingering in the Disneyland Gallery and later meandering through Tomorrowland. It only just hit me that night that the Starcade shop in Tomorrowland is 100% Star Wars themed merchandise. Then I went home.

The next day I drew this bonus drawing. According to the information on the internet, both Tom Sawyer Island (as an attraction experience and not merely an island in the Frontierland located Rivers of America) and the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes celebrate their 60th anniversaries this year. Here Little Tuffy and the Tuf Gurlz celebrate the original Disney Park.