Padding through Pandora

We’re off this week on a school band/orchestra trip that took us today to Walt Disney World and Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

DAK has always been the red-headed stepchild of WDW. Built at a time when Disney was strapped for cash, the original plans were scaled way back (including putting off one of the areas of the park, the “Beastly Kingdom” of Fantasy). As it result, it’s often felt like 2/3 of a park, difficult to stretch into a full day’s entertainment.

When I read a few years back Disney’s plan to partner with James Cameron to create a land at DAK based on the world of Pandora in Cameron’s film Avatar, I thought it was the silliest idea ever — the movie was a decade old, nobody much cared about it, nobody was sure whether any of Cameron’s planned sequels would ever occur, it wasn’t a Disney property — in short, it sounded like a recipe for disaster.

For the record, I am still uncertain about Avatar as a movie franchise, but Disney has done one hell of a job in creating the Pandora area of DAK. The whole area is thoroughly and richly themed, with the foliage heavily laden with both exotic plants that look alien, and actual crafted artifacts that look even more alien. (This all looks great during the day; at night, a ton of the plant artifact glow with apparent bioluminescence. It’s gorgeous.)

This is overlaid with artifacts both of Na’vi native decor and Earth military/industrial notes.

The centerpiece of the area is a series of floating islands, as in the movie. The illusion isn’t perfect, but the results are still pretty cool, and the remarkable cantilevering gorgeous.

There are two rides in the zone. The premiere — and the draw for very large crowds at DAK — is Avatar Flight of Passage, which had lines of over two hours even before the park opened for general admission, and which increased at times to four hour wait times on stand-by (no FastPass could be had for love or money, ever since it was opened for pre-registration up to a month in advance).

We went ahead and queued up in the late morning when the estimate was showing three hours. That time didn’t include the queue outside the ride queue (occupying the entire path to Africa), so it took us more like 3.5 hours.

That said, it was actually worth it. AFoP is sort of a cross between Soarin’ (simulated flight before a big screen) and Star Tours (physical action to augment the projected reality), with 3D thrown in. In story, it’s about telepathically hooking up to an Avatar that is flying a Na’vi “Flight of Passage” ritual, while riding a small motorcycle-like seat that “enables” the hook-up and provides further physical feedback to enhance the illusion.

Though there are 8 folk lined up on these seats per run, the sense of personal flight — physical movement, 3D, etc. — was very well done, and, even for a 4-5 minute ride, it felt worth the 3.5 hours we’d waited, especially with the excellent (as expected) theming Disney’s done in the various parts of the queue.

It was definitely a high point of the day, and while I’m still not sure that Pandora won’t feel like some oddity in 5-10 years, the overall zone (including the very nice restaurant there) is worth the visit now, even with the crowds.

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