Speaker 2: 0:15

How do you do everybody it's a little late August mini-sode to sort of paper over the cracks between our last episode, the Jaws episode, and our next one. Pete and I have a couple of things planned out. It should lead us through October real nicely. I hope you're going to enjoy all that. Summer gets a little busy for us. We both have kids and it turns out that you have to feed them and entertain them during the summer, which no one showed me in the initial contract. But there you are, oh, and also Pete's like a magical being. I don't know if you guys know this about Pete, but um, it's, he's like. You know, um, did you?

Speaker 2: 0:55

If you ever watched days of our lives in the eighties I'm dating myself now and remember the character of Eugene, which was uh was John Delancey's first big role. He was a character that would show up every once in a while and say, hey, I found this amazing ancient artifact that no one's seen forever. And he keeps doing it until you start to realize that he has a time machine and eventually he says I'm going to go back and do this one amazing thing, and evidently he does it. So Pete's kind of like that. He sort of shows up and says, hey, it turns out I'm building a massive haunt in the old Mint building in the center of San Francisco and you go, what? Okay? And then next time he comes back, he goes, goes, hey, now I'm a children's movie host okay. So he's busy and he has, uh, child rearing, uh, uh duties as well. So, uh, god bless the guy, um and uh, I'm about to head out to new hampshire for a weekish and after that we'll regroup and get some new episodes.

Speaker 2: 2:03

Hey, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Disneyland Forward, which is a fascination of mine. I've done a lot of writing on it, I've done a whole bunch of research on it, and if you don't feel like going through and reading Anaheim zoning documents through the 90s and 2000s, I got your back. Disneyland Forward's super interesting. It's not exactly what it's being promoted as. What it really is is a zoning document, that a significant one. But a lot of the promotions suggest that, oh, this means Disneyland will have a whole bunch more space to use for theme parks, or Disneyland will have a whole bunch more space to use for hotels or whatever different experiences. Not exactly true. What Disneyland Forward does is allow the Disney company to use pre-existing zoning that they already have in the Anaheim Resort area and move it around. So they cannot actually make another single square foot of attraction zoning. They cannot make a single new hotel room, and this is actually spelled out explicitly in the Disneyland Forward planning documents. All they can do is move their zones around.

Speaker 2: 3:28

Now the real reason that Disneyland's super gung-ho about Disneyland Forward is that they are trying to build up a new shopping and commerce center, downtown Disney, on steroids. What they want is to build a new Disney Springs. That is going to eventually happen where the old Toy Story parking lot outside of Disneyland is Well, about a mile outside of Disneyland is. That is the red meat for them of Disneyland Forward. Some other cool stuff will happen, some of which is Disneyland Forward oriented and some of which is just new plans. But the scenario is kind of this they are going to start building a parking lot, a multi-level parking lot, north of the Toy Story lot that is going to lead into an overpass that will go across over the top of Harbor Boulevard. And this was a big sticking point. When they tried to run this stuff through in the early 2000s, when Anaheim was a little less friendly with the company, the people in Harbor rebelled and they said, hey, we're going to lose all of our foot traffic and the city stopped it. Now Anaheim's a little more Disney-friendly. There's been some allowances made to getting to the local Harbor businesses as well from the lot and the entrances to the overpass, so they sort of reached a perestroika on that. But they're going to build this new lot. It's going to have a loft that goes over the top of harbor and then actually it seems like what they're planning now is it will go past kind of the esplanade or not the esplanade. It'll go past the tram and parking areas and enter into some sort of new kind of esplanade that they've got there. What's happening and this is Disneyland forward. What's happening that was a surprise to me is that the old parking and tram area it looks like is about to get eaten up with the Avatar experience attraction land, whatever they're calling it these days. So that is going to come out of the Hollywood Boulevard side of California Adventure and lead and extend into that parking lot area. It sounds to me like that harbor overpass might go over it, but I'm not positive about that. Nonetheless, that area seems to be going away and turning into an Avatar experience and, as we've already heard, the Monsters Inc ride is going away and pretty much all of the rest of that Hollywood Boulevard area is going away because that is being retooled as Avatar. At the same time, there is a new Coco attraction going in over in the old Paradise Gardens area of DCA. It's going to. It's going to kind of cross from Paradise Gardens from the very end, you know, sort of past Goofy's Sky School. There it's going to. It looks like enter there and then the queue or whatever the sort of mini Cocoa area is will lead behind Paradise Pier and then a bit behind the Incredicoaster and that's where a new Coco boat attraction will be.

Speaker 2: 7:04

Notably, this is not part of Disneyland Forward. This is using already zoned areas, theme park zoned areas, so they won't need to employ any zoning booth. What they're going to be doing heavily is moving theme park zoning. That's both north and south of the Disneyland Hotel complex. Weirdly, there's a couple of empty blocks that are zoned as theme park both north and south of the Disneyland Hotel. They're going to take those chunks of theme park zone and move them. So assumedly some of them, some of that's going to get moved into that parking area. So you know, parking's going to turn into theme park. There's some more empty chunks around and it'll be interesting to see what they do with them.

Speaker 2: 7:57

My suspicion and this is long term we're probably talking 7, 8, maybe even more years my suspicion is that we will get the new parking lot in the next couple years. The overpass will get built, they'll start working on Avatar, they will start tearing down Toy Story. They will put in Disney Springs, disney Springs West down Toy Story, they will put in Disney Springs West at Toy Story and at that point Downtown Disney will be superfluous. There won't be a whole lot that they can do with Downtown Disney at that point, because you've already got a center that's bigger and better just down the road. So my guess is, long-term, downtown Disney is not going to be there and that will probably also get turned into theme park, some sort of theme park or some sort of multi-use attraction.

Speaker 2: 8:51

Because another thing about the Disneyland forward plan is that they can also overlay zones. So they can put a commercial zone and a theme park zone and they want to have a hotel zone, though they can't add any hotel rooms They'd have to take some away from somewhere but they can put them on top of each other. Potentially, downtown Disney could have something like that, where it's like commerce and theme park or part of you know, the Grand Californian could extend into it and it could be a sort of more exclusive theme park era, who knows?

Speaker 2: 9:27

But that's kind of what's going on with Disneyland forward right now. The only thing that we're seeing theme park wise, that's related to it, is this avatar thing, and we don't know a great deal about that. I am appreciative that they are giving us some theme park right away, because it is pretty clear and you'll see this in all of the promotional material that Disneyland was using to sell Disneyland forward for a couple of years. You'll see that Toy Story, disney Springs thing front and center. So that's kind of the goal. Anyway, just an interesting thing that I've been following for a while and thought I would let people know, as long as we're in this little midsummer break, what I thought about it, because I know that you all care. Anyway, we will see you in probably two, three weeks with a new episode. I believe it's going to be Disneyland centric and then we'll see what's happening heading up into the spooky season. Thanks a lot for listening everybody. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.