As much as I’m not necessarily a fan of getting jabbed in the back, this is an attraction that I probably do just about every single time I visit the Animal Kingdom!

What can I say? It’s fun, it’s sort of educational to learn little tidbits about all of the different bugs, not to mention it’s a great way to get an up close look at some of the neat carvings around the Tree of Life. Admittedly the 3D in this one isn’t quite as alluring as it might be in some of Disney’s other 3D offerings like Mickey’s PhilharMagic or even Muppet-Vision 3D, but it’s a cute, little story and the use of Flik and Hopper as animatronic figures in the room pretty much make up for any short fallings in the film itself.

Unfortunately, the one critique that I have for Bug! that just never seems to go away … I honestly don’t know how in the world this attraction was tested for kids prior to actually opening! Seriously – I have never, ever, ever gone through this movie without finding myself surrounded with children screaming and crying because hands down, the scene where Hopper unleashes his evil minions upon the honorary bugs is just too. freaking. scary.

I mean, really – wasps jabbing you in the back?! Life-like black widows dropping down from the ceiling?!?! What were they thinking?!?!?!

It makes me feel bad for all of those families because I’m sure most of them don’t read the signs outside and even if they do, how do you know ahead of time whether “may be frightening for children” will, in fact, “scare your little ones into a hysteric frenzy that only ice cream and character greetings can hope to calm”?! And it’s too bad because really it is an incredibly well-designed attraction otherwise and I myself enjoy it a whole lot, but then again, I also haven’t been eight years old for quite a while now! 

My best advise for parents – unless your kid is really into Halloween, and we’re talking about scary Halloween, not funny Halloween, then you might just want to steer clear. If you don’t believe me, stand outside the exit and wait for a show to get out, then look at all of the children in tears and decide if your kid resembles one of them… 

More Favorite Photos:

(roughly 3.3 million, by the way)

So for something a little different this month, I thought it might be fun to collect a few of my own favorite Disney World stats that I’ve seen boasted throughout the years, covering everything from the parks to the resorts to even the cast members who work there! Now as just a quick caveat, I should probably note that I can’t officially vouch for any of these numbers here myself … I’ve compiled these from a number of typically reliable websites online, including disneyworld.com, but just to be clear – it’s not exactly like you might’ve seen me walking around the Magic Kingdom with a clipboard counting ice cream bars with a certain starring mouse’s resemblance!

But hey, we’re all here for fun anyways, so even if we’re off by a couple of thousand frozen treats here or there, it’s still pretty staggering to think that the Nestle factory that produces those sweet treats cranks out a cool 8,100 bars per hour when the production line is in full swing! 

And if you think that’s a lot of awesome, then you ain’t seen nothing yet…

Around the Magic Kingdom…

• 189-feet tall - height of Cinderella Castle (though it looks much taller by means of forced perspective)
• 16.97 million - guests who visited the park (in 2010), making the Magic Kingdom the #1 most visited theme park in the world
• 46,493 - average number of guests in the park on a given day (rumored maximum capacity is 100,000 people)
• $465 million - cost of the current Fantasyland expansion which will more than double the footprint of this timeless favorite
• 575,000 - estimated number of lights that make up the shimmering spectacle that is the Main Street Electrical Parade

Around Epcot…

• 11,324 - isosceles triangles found on the surface of the 165-foot tall geodesic sphere that is Spaceship Earth
• 5.7 million - gallons of saltwater that the aquarium at The Seas pavilion holds, 2nd largest in the world and big enough to fit Spaceship Earth inside!!!
• 45 minutes - duration of Ellen’s Energy Adventure, the longest attraction at Walt Disney World
• 22 - nations that poured water from their homelands into the Fountain of Nations during Epcot’s dedication ceremony on October 24, 1982
• 350,000 pounds - weight of the video globe that projects over 300 moving images throughout each presentation of IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth

Around Disney’s Hollywood Studios…

• 104 - celebrity hand prints that can be found in the cement around the replica of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre
• 124 – movies mentioned throughout the 22-minute duration of The Great Movie Ride
• 2.8 - seconds it takes Rock ‘n’ Rollercoaster’s cars to scream from 0 to 60 mph as your race to see Aerosmith perform across town begins
• 2,400 gallons per minute that the water screens in Fantasmic! put out to serve as projection screens for the very best and worst of Mickey’s imagination
• 20,000 - man-hours needed to put up over 5,000,000 lights from the incredible Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights

Around Disney’s Animal Kingdom…

• 102,583 - man made leaves – over a foot long each! – that hang from the 14-story canopy of the Tree of Life
• over 4 million - trees, shrubs, and other foliage that were brought in from every continent except Antarctica to make up the park’s lush landscape
• 6,000 pounds – amount of food fed to the park’s animal residents every single day – enough to feed a human for 4.5 years!
• 259,000 - pounds of thrust behind the yeti in Expedition Everest (…when he’s actually working, that is…)
• 403 acres – the size of the Animal Kingdom, making it almost 4x larger than the Magic Kingdom and the largest animal park in the world

Around Walt Disney World in General…

• 51 million - total number of guests who visited Walt Disney World (in 2010), more than twice the attendance of Universal, Busch Gardens & SeaWorld combined!
• 25,704 - total rooms available through 24 Disney resort hotels located on property
• 66,000 - total number of cast members, making Walt Disney World the largest single-site employer in the United States
• 43 square miles – amount of land originally acquired by Walt Disney and his team for building Disney World, twice the size of Manhattan and about 150x larger than Disneyland
• $5 million – the bargain price Walt paid for that land in 1964 by buying in small parcels and using dummy corporations to hide his true intent
• 52 months – original construction time before the Magic Kingdom, along with the Contemporary & Polynesian Resorts, opened in 1971
• 14.7 miles – length of track available to Walt Disney World’s 12 monorails, transporting an average of 137,000 guests every single day!
• 15 million – number of miles driven by Disney World’s fleet of 270 buses each year
• $3.50 – admission price to the Magic Kingdom on opening day in 1971 (now $85/day 41 years later in 2012…)

Cuisine:
Home-Style Cooking

Overall Rating:
3 out of 5 stars

The Setup
I must admit that honestly I wasn’t super psyched about coming here, mostly on account of being a wee bit nervous that I was going to end up being the subject of all of the old fashioned scolding that this particular eatery is known for, but my wife has been bugging me about it for a while now and, well, you know how that goes…

THE VIBE
Ok, so to catch anybody up who might not be familiar – the basic theme of the ’50s Prime Time Cafe is a recreation of Mom’s kitchen from the 1950s. The restaurant does a great job of recreating that classic dining room table, your dining options are all the sorts of things that my parents probably ate growing up (meatloaf, pot roast, chicken pot pies, etc…), and the most significant icing on the cake, the waitstaff all treat you like you’re the kids and they’re the adults!

See my point of contention? Certainly a blast for a family when the kids get to giggle at Mom and Dad getting told not to put their elbows on the table, but for three adults in their 30′s with no kids in sight???

Well, thankfully it actually ended up being a lot of fun and yours truly didn’t exactly find himself getting picked on too much! When we were first seated, we were told to “set the table,” which meant picking out our silverware and plates from a pile in the middle. I did catch a little wind when Mom caught me checking the wait times for attractions on my phone at the table, but luckily she was gracious enough (or maybe I was just sneaky!) to let my food pics for this review slide! I also got a kick out of when after asking for a refill on my water, she brought the entire pitcher and filled up 3 glasses for me, stating, “I’m not going to keep running back and forth for you all night!” 

As you can see, though, I make extra sure to clear my plate to avoid any further altercations…

The Food

• (appetizer) Blue Claw Crab Cake
• (entree) Dad’s Traditional Meatloaf
• (entree) Aunt Liz’s Golden Fried Chicken
• (entree) Cousin Barry’s Olive Oil Poached Salmon
• (dessert) Dad’s Brownie Sundae

As for the food, however, and don’t tell her I told you this, but frankly – Mom’s cooking could use a little work in places. On one hand, I absolutely loved my crab cake and was pretty impressed with how beautifully it was presented, but then my meatloaf showed up and there wasn’t really anything special about it at all. It was technically food, but the flavor certainly left something to be desired and the same was reported by my wife and her sister, who had gotten the fried chicken and the salmon, respectively.

Don’t get me wrong – I ate it all anyways - but a lot of that was more of a desire not to find my dessert tainted with green beans for not having finished them!

The dessert, granted, did very much make me laugh when it showed up because I thought that the caramel corn and M&M toppings were just really cute and made for a neat touch … really something I could see Dad doing because I have memories of my Dad spoiling us with all kinds of crazy chocolate chips and whatnot in pancakes before it was more commonplace to do so!

Final Thoughts
Ultimately I think if it hadn’t been for the lackluster entrees, the Cafe probably would’ve gotten 4 stars from me because it’s still a fun concept and the waitstaff really does do a great job of running with the shtick while also not crossing that line of you still being a paying customer! And it’s not like it’s impossible to make an above-average meatloaf or memorable piece of chicken – I don’t think it’s unreasonable when paying Disney prices to expect entrees that are at least a step or two up from a Hungry Man microwave dinner or the $5.99 bucket of chicken that you can get from KFC.

You’re paying for the ambiance, which is definitely a hoot, but a guy also likes to sit down to a nice plate of food when he’s on vacation, too!

Review based on a dining experience from April 2012.

We actually found ourselves wandering back a mere month later to the same park that we had visited not so long ago, mostly on account of my wife’s sister wanting to get one last pass at Disney’s version of thrill rides before her annual pass expires. Truth be told, we ended up getting a pretty late start, so there’d be no double Toy Story runs this time around, but we did manage to make it on both the Tower of Terror and Rock ‘n Rollercoaster with plenty of time to spare, which was the main goal on this here adventure.

But first … sustenance!

Like Dinner at Grandma’s House…
Our late lunch/early dinner ended up being the result of me caving into my wife’s relentless demands because she’s been wanting to eat at the ’50s Prime Time Cafe for quite some time. Me, on the other hand, not so much, and mainly because I just had this feeling that yours truly would likely end up being the brunt of Ma’s illicit scoldings, as they were and of all the themed restaurants to be enjoyed around Walt Disney World, a nag-filled dinner just didn’t seem particularly appealing to me!

That said, I did end up having a good time, so I implore those like-minded to myself to give it a whirl anyways before you slap it down by default! Our waitress, Ma, was fun and I think offered just the right amount of shtick - at one point she brought me three glasses of water because she “didn’t want to bring me refills all night long” and then later gave me a little grief about looking up wait times for attractions on my phone at the table. Thankfully I was still able to snag pictures of our food for my upcoming review – now that might’ve been the last straw!

P.S. Our dessert was pretty cute and unexpectedly topped, too!

iPhone vs. Point & Shoot Camera Experiment
Now one thing that I’ve been meaning to try out, even though I was hoping that I’d get considerably better results, was that for a while now I’ve been curious as to whether it would be ok to stop bringing my traditional point & shoot camera and instead rely more on just using my iPhone to take pictures while we’re running around the parks – to cut down on the amount of things that I have to carry in my pockets.  My regular camera is a few years old – an 8 megapixel Canon PowerShot; my phone – a 5 megapixel iPhone 4.

And so I tried actually shooting most of my photos for the day with my iPhone. And the verdict? I won’t be doing that again anytime soon.

You see, I love having everything else built into the phone where I can post them to Twitter or my MoBlog here right away, but the problems I found were pretty significant:

• iPhone pictures are fine at lower resolutions (i.e. on a small screen), but start to look pretty bad the bigger you make them. Really ugly at full screen!
• iPhone’s digital-only zoom is terrible compared to having both digital and optical on my regular camera.
• iPhone doesn’t really have any cool macro settings, which I use almost exclusively for my close-up food pics.
• iPhone also doesn’t perform well in low or dark light where I might still get away with not using a flash with my normal camera.

It was definitely one of those things where if you only ever viewed your pictures on a mobile device, it’d probably be fine (well, resolution, not the other issues…), but when I like to bring ‘em home and blow them up to full-size on my 24″ desktop display, the artifacting starts to be pretty significant and it became clear that we’re not there quite yet. I’d actually be curious to do the same testing with an iPhone 4S, which is supposed to have a considerably better camera both in terms of the sensor and the lens that’s being used. In the meantime, I’ll still definitely be taking the occasional camera phone pic when I want to share something right away, long before we ever return home, but it also means that I’ll be switching off between my iPhone and my regular camera, and just for the record - I’m not a very good juggler!

Here are some samples from my last two trips if you’d like to try and see for yourself – top row are iPhone pics, bottom row – point & shoot pics…

A Need for Better Late Night Dessert Options
And as so many trips tend to do, our Hollywood adventure this time around ended with one final snack before leaving the World …  though is it just me or is the Studios making this harder and harder in the evening hours??? We decided to stop doing attractions and locate our treats around 8:30pm, so granted only 30 minutes before the park was scheduled to close, and yet once again I found it incredibly off-putting to find several different counter service eateries and snack carts around the park were already closing up shop for the night. Do they just assume that in the evening everyone filters over to Sunset Blvd. for Fantasmic and whatnot anyways, so there’s no sense in keeping stuff on the other side of the park open? Again, we typically spend more time at Epcot, and then the Magic Kingdom, and we just never see this kind of thing there – in fact, most people wait to do their Main Street USA shopping until the park starts closing!!!

Anyways, to say the least, I don’t necessarily approve, but nonetheless – dessert-type-stuffs! We actually ended up first at Sunset Sweets where I procured the awesomest new Rice Krispie treat I’ve ever seen!, but then ended up making a side journey over to Downtown Disney for ice cream when my wife wasn’t able to find what she wanted anywhere else in the park. I’m telling ya – last time we wanted to checkout Starring Rolls Bakery, but they were already closed, too, and ended up all the way back at the Writer’s Stop just to get a couple of baked goods to munch on during Fantasmic.

Don’t get me wrong, after that carrot cake cookie, the exercise was certainly warranted, but nonetheless…

You have a problem, Studios! Stop closing your stores before you close the actual park - the people demand their giganticly ridiculous Butterfinger cupcakes!!! 

I thought this was a pretty nice shot – might become the new wallpaper on my iPhone! 

“Unless you’re looking for trouble, you’d best be moseying along there, partner…”

Frankly, this is a ride that I just love to be absolutely terrified of…

I mean, I’ve ridden it so many times that it’s pretty much plain as day when to expect the drops … by now I’ve got my wincing down to a science! And I’m not really a fan of heights, either, but there’s just something about this classic Disney attraction that keeps drawing me back, despite the fact that I’m typically one of the loudest screamers in the car even when little girls and the elderly happen to be present!

Case in point – the last time we rode, we did the obligatory stop by the photo booth to see the picture that we’d never in a million years pay $14.95 for … our party in the front row – left, with me visibly screaming like a madman; the party in front row – right … a group of little girls, all clearly laughing their little heads off as we plummet 13 stories to our untimely doom. 

What can I say, though? The themeing in and around the tower is absolutely impeccable – probably second-only to Everest, off the top of my head – and it’s truly an iconic attraction that Disney really hit the ball out of the park on when they added it to the Studios in 1994. Granted, I can’t exactly take the chicken exit and still maintain my manhood just to check out the decor inside the hotel every time we visit, and so plummet and scream will likely continue to be the modus operandi of yours truly for this hair-raising thrill ride for many, many years to come…

More Favorite Photos:

Lately it seems like whenever we set foot inside a Disney park, my wife and I often times catch ourselves playing the “When was the last time we were here???” game and let me tell you, for the Studios it’s been … a while! Disappointingly we never quite made it over at Christmastime to see the Osborne Lights, and even looking further back into my trip report archives I’m not really seeing any semi-recent documentation of such a trip, so I guess you might say that this particular juncture was considerably overdue! 

The Day’s Take…
All in all, it was a good, solid afternoon, though – we arrived in the early afternoon and first made a bee-line for lunch … just a quick bit to eat at the first place we came across, which happened to be the ABC Commissary. After realizing that Star Tours had been updated since we’d been there last, we ended up making that our next stop. My commentary? It was cute, although the story seems to make a little less sense now, seeing how Darth Vader just showed up as we were getting ready to leave the hangar!  I mean, I get that the goal is to expose more people to the characters because that’s who they remember from the movies, and the effects are definitely a bit snazier than their original 1989 predecessors, but I just feel like they sacrificed a bit of story to put the characters more out in the forefront…

Anyways, following our intergalactic adventure, we popped on over to Toy Story Mania – a must-do for both of us, although I do wish that the queue times would start to back off and occasional resemble the other big-ticket attractions instead of consistently clocking in at 60+ minutes no matter what time of day it actually is!   After getting beaten like I usually do, we made our way over to Sunset Blvd. to hit both Coaster and Tower before catching the last showing of Indiana Jones and then proceeding back to Sunset again to watch Fantasmic. In hindsight, we did an awful lot of criss-crossing the park because we didn’t have a clear method to our madness, but then again, a little exercise was probably a good thing when you consider what we had for dessert!

Fantasmic
It’s also been a while since we’ve seen Fantasmic, so it was good to see after so long, and frankly it’s also nice to see that they’ve taken a hint from the ridiculous wait times that folks have to line up for World of Color out at Disney’s California Adventure and added some in-crowd warm-up entertainment to help pass the time. It wasn’t much – just a couple of cast members with mics walking through the audience, picking people and playing silly games, but it was a distraction from otherwise just sitting there waiting in the amphitheater, and it really did seem to work! 

I also ended up being pretty happy with a couple of the photos that I managed to grab from the actual show itself…

The After Party, Starring Gourmet Hot Dogs
Now before we could leave, there was one thing that I’d been itching to try ever since  I read about them last summer – the gourmet hot dogs at Fairfax Fare! I had actually hoped to eat here for lunch, but it was kind of out of the way and also distinctly not air conditioned, so nighttime was clearly the way to go. I ended up getting a taste of both the Mac & Cheese and BBQ Pork varieties, as my wife decided a few bites in that she didn’t want hers (blasphemy!). I’m going to have a separate Dining Around the World Quick Pick up about them later, but my overall review – I do like the concept and the flavors were pretty good, but at the same time they were a real mess because traditional hot dog buns simply aren’t made to contain that much food! I’d definitely grab one again, but also make sure that you grab a fork to go along with it… 

One Last Toy For the Road
And last but certainly not least … I mentioned that my wife is a bit of a fan of Toy Story Mania. Well, just before leaving I happened to glance down at my new Disney Mobile Magic iPhone app (LOVE THIS THING!!!) and saw that, as the park was getting ready to close, Toy Story Mania only had a 30-minute wait! 30 minutes or less is pretty much our preferred threshold for waiting in line vs. moving on to something else, so it was a pretty easy decision … and even better yet, we ended up getting directed to follow the handicapped lane halfway through the queue to get everybody through quicker, so we maybe waited in line for 15 of those 30 minutes, max!!!

Mind you, I still lost when we finally got to the actual ride, but as far as the wait was considered, I definitely considered myself a winner there! 

Featured Favorites:
Gourmet Hot Dogs

Overall Rating:
3 out of 5 stars

Who doesn’t love a good hot dog?!

But this is Walt Disney World, so these can’t just be any ordinary hot dogs! I’ll admit that I was somewhat skeptical when I heard the claim that the Studios had created an offering of gourmet hot dogs, and I was scratching my head all the more when I saw that one variety happened to be covered in macaroni & cheese, but being a fan of the beloved frankfurter just as much as the next guy, I knew that I just had to give Fairfax Fare’s new treat the good, old-fashioned college try…

I ended up getting a chance to sample both the Macaroni & Cheese, Bacon, and Truffle Oil and Barbecued Pork and Coleslaw versions, on account of my wife not being able to finish hers, and while I’d likely get either one again if I found myself on Sunset Blvd. in need of a quick bite before dropping 13 stories deep into the bowels of The Twilight Zone, I must admit that I do believe I enjoyed the macaroni & cheese dog just a bit better. I think it was the coleslaw on the other – the BBQ pork was great, but coleslaw anywhere other than on the side??? Not so much!

One minor critique that I did have – these puppies are messy, namely because hot dog buns were traditionally designed to hold … a hot dog … and that’s it! The giant mountain of toppings doesn’t really take to the form of the bun well and I ended up eating about half of it out of the container afterwards. Not really a showstopper by any means – unless Disney wants to find themselves bigger buns to accommodate these gargantuan gourmet goodies - but it would pay to grab yourself a fork proactively rather than waiting until your hands are all covered in macaroni & cheese… 

Food Gallery: