Mousekingdom Blog

You have all done it at least once I’m sure; you have brought friends, family or maybe loved ones in a Disney themepark and have given them a tour!
It’s one of those things all Disney dweebs, like myself, simply love to do, programming every detail of your trip, from the hotle to the restaurants, just to get your friends (or sometime we should say “guine pig “;-) ) hooked onto the Disney magic.

I myself try and tailor my tour around the people I have with me so no two times will actually ever be the same.
Obviously the background of each person I have with me already helps me a lot in understanding where to spend the most time; when I’m with my parents for example I try and balance my stories between references to the old Disney movies which they saw in there childhood and the more business or engineering aspects of Disney!
My friends are mostly involved in the “escapisms” from real life aspect of the place, and obviously want to be moved around by Space Mountain so my main points touched during those type of trips are trying to give them a perception that Disney is more than Mickey Mouse and “that space roller coaster”.
But the one thing I love most is sharing my love for Disney, and the man Walt Disney, and for the people who designed the place. I like telling the stories of Walt’s nine old man and how some of them , like Marc Davis, rose up to create some of the most loved characters in movies like Tinkerbell or Cinderella and then where able to create real life stories and characters like pirates, ghosts and bears, which roam the themepark.
I love, in Paris, showing the level of detail and Imagineering which went into the place, from the firehouse silhouette which reflects the Disneyland original castle, to the back-story of thunder mesa.

No Disney tour guide could not mention the stories of the windows on main street, the cinema like effect Walt wanted to create with his park and the dream of EPCOT the city – but the one thing which I always end all my tours with is that one single sentence;
“I hope we never loose sight of one thing…that It was all started by a mouse.”….
From there , normally, they are hooked and want to come back (and I leave them craving for more
So what is you “tour guide” plan?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Disney Theme Parks, Disney in General. 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.