Friday evening the Shareholders’ Club members were invited to enjoy the all new Toy Story Playland at Walt Disney Studios Park after park closure. Considering the late nightfall and early park closing of the Walt Disney Studios the event was the first opportunity to enjoy the new addition to the park with its lighting design in full display.

During a visit to Toy Story Playland earlier in the day numerous additional, temporary lights were found to be standing in the new area, however, those turned out to be not necessary at night and were not used. Most propably they had been placed in TSPL already in anticipation for the major press event scheduled for Saturday night. But then for Friday’s Shareholders’ Club event the regular lighting needed no extra add-ons. This also had the big advantage that guests could enjoy the light design as it was intended by Imagineering…

The main light sources throughout Toy Story Playland are the multi-colored, oversized christmas lights strung across the walkways. The bamboo surrounding the land is also illuminated from within with green lights. As a closer look during daytime reveales the light fixtures for this are rather obvious (which should be solved once the plants grow) regular light sources placed among the bamboo that were retrofitted with green foil to add the required color. It needs to be seen whether this rather simple construction with taped on foil will last the test of time, but then the huge over head lights at Toy Soldiers Parachute Drop are using the same “technique”. In any case right now the effect works – even so photographers are dealed a difficult hand by the mixture of the multicolored overhead lights and the green shining bamboo all around resulting in a very, well, for lack of a better word “peculiar” color fault in many photos.

In addition to this main lighting numerous spot lights hidden in the structures along the walkways put details of the decoration into the limelight and add special effects. Maybe the most surprising lighting effect awaits guests at RC Racer: when RC Racer hits the highest points of its track a spot light is illuminating him (and the guests on board) suddenly. At Toy Soldiers Parachute Drop the lights on the landing zones illuminating the parachutes from below changes depending on the phase of the ride – while the parachutes are hoisted up they are illuminated in red, while the light turns green during the actual drop. The spotlights illuminating Slinky Dog / the ride vehicles at Slinky Dog ZigZag Spin are pulsating as soon as Slinky Dog starts chasing his tail. Overall the light design is adding a whole new layer to the area and its themeing.

Back to the Shareholders’ Club event – guests were invited to enjoy Toy Story Playland but Crush’s Coaster, Cars Race Rally as well as The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Restaurant des Stars as well as the restaurant and the shops in Studio 1 were also open. This turned out to be a good decision since the number of attendants was surprisingly large. No special entertainment had been added for the evening but numerous characters were roaming the area including Woody who so far hadn’t been spotted in Toy Story Playland. Nevertheless after opening with short lines at the three new attractions of Toy Story Playland lines got longer rather fast as the majority of guests moved straight into the area, resulting in waiting times of about 45 minutes for Slinky Dog and about an hour for both Toy Soldiers Parachute Drop and RC Racer. Unfortunately Toy Soldiers Parachute Drop did also operate without the single rider line used during the daytime hours. On the way out of the park at the end of the evening the resort was taking surveys among the guests to check the response to the event.

More Photos of Shareholders’ Club Night Event:

This entry was posted by Dirk on Sunday, September 5th, 2010 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Walt Disney Studios. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.