It appears Disney has already tested the Wall-E living character that will start appearing at Disney’s Hollywood Studios over in Los Angeles. Here is a video of the amazing character’s short test:
Wall-E Spotted in LA! from Blink on Vimeo.
From the Orlando Sentinel:
Looks like Disney may have changed the name of the new time-share tower the company is building next to its Contemporary Resort.
“Bay Lake Tower” has replaced “Kingdom Tower” as the name of the project, at least in filings with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
What’s more, earlier this month Disney filed paperwork to create a “Bay Lake Tower at Disney’s Contemporary Resort Condominium Association,” presumably to manage the resort once it is sold off to individual owners. Disney had created a “Kingdom Tower at Disney’s Contemporary Resort Condominium Association” in January.
Disney still has not publicly announced its plans for the partially-built Contemporary addition, which now stands 14 stories and will be linked to the resort’s main A-frame building by a pedestrian bridge. A spokeswoman said the company had nothing to announce today, either. But Disney has indicated in documents submitted to the state that it intends to use the tower for Disney Vacation Club, the company’s Celebration-based time-share arm.
The “Kingdom Tower” name was criticized by some Disney fans when it first surfaced in those documents. Some posters on Internet forums said it evoked religious overtones, noting that “Kingdom Hall” is a term for a place where Jehovah’s Witnesses worship.
“I think a lot of people were drawing comparisons to Kingdom Hall,” said Tim Krasniewski, publisher of DVCNews.com, a website devoted to Disney Vacation Club.
Krasniewski said he was personally fond of “Kingdom Tower,” which most assumed referred to the Magic Kingdom theme park that sits next door to the Contemporary. But he said he likes “Bay Lake Tower” — which refers to one of the lakes that the Contemporary and its addition overlook — even better.
“I think it’s a wonderful name,” he said. “I think everybody’s familiar with Bay Lake, with the fact that Bay Lake is right there. It has a Disney feel to it.”
Scott Joseph | Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
When The Wave, a new full-service restaurant at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, opens next month, it will boast an unusual wine cellar. Besides stocking no California labels — those wines are available upstairs at the California Grill — the ground-floor restaurant will feature wines of the Southern Hemisphere, including vintages from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and Argentina.
But that’s not the most unusual aspect. The Wave will offer only wines that have screw caps; no wines with corks will be available. One exception will be sparkling wines, which are not yet available with screw caps. John Blazon, master sommelier and manager of wine sales and standards for Walt Disney World Resort, said he wants “to show middle America that you can enjoy a great bottle of wine despite how it’s sealed.”
Blazon said he has collected 80 wines of various varietals and price points to present at the restaurant’s opening, which is scheduled for June 7. Once considered an indicator of low quality, screw caps, also known as Stelvin closures, have been gaining popularity among premium wine producers for several years as a more reliable means of sealing a bottle of wine.
We’re hearing that the new Disney Vacation Club add on to the Grand Californian will be called the Villas at Disney’s Grand Californian Resort & Spa.
Of course, this name could change at any time, so stay tuned!
NEW YORK (May 13, 2008) — Aligning the world’s No. 1 family vacation destination with the worldwide leader in sports, Walt Disney World Resort and ESPN are joining forces to re-brand Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex with the ESPN brand, creating an entertaining and immersive experience for the nearly 2 million athletes, coaches and spectators who come through the Disney sports complex each year.
Plans for the re-branding initiative — which was announced today during the ESPN upfront presentation to advertisers and sponsors — are still in the development stage, but initial concepts involve renaming the sports complex and incorporating the signature elements of ESPN throughout the 220-acre facility, which is a leading venue for amateur and professional sports in the country. The project aims to enhance the experience of both athletes and spectators by connecting them to their favorite ESPN programs, personalities and elements. It also will provide advertisers new sponsorship opportunities at the grass roots level.
“This is a natural and exciting pairing of two powerful brands to create a one-of-a-kind, immersive sports venue that will enable athletes, coaches and guests to experience sports in a whole new way,” said Jay Rasulo, chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts. “This project builds on our collaborative successes and positions us to explore more opportunities with ESPN to create new experiences for guests at Walt Disney World Resort.”
“Our involvement in the Disney sports complex will provide greater opportunities for us to connect directly with athletes, coaches and fans in a highly immersive way,” said George Bodenheimer, president of ESPN Inc. and ABC Sports, and co-chairman of Disney Media Networks. “Our involvement also provides us with a unique and exciting new media platform that will enable our advertisers and sponsors to reach new customers and bring their products and services to life.”
The re-branding of the Disney sports complex is the latest initiative in the growing sports business at Walt Disney World Resort. In December, the sports complex debuted additional outdoor playing fields for football, soccer, lacrosse and field hockey competitions. And this summer the sports complex will open Jostens Center, a new state-of-the-art field house that will allow Disney to accommodate twice as many indoor sports events each year. Additional expansion plans are being explored.
The Disney sports complex annually hosts more than 180 events in 50 different sports involving athletes from more than 70 countries. Among those events are the Atlanta Braves spring training season, a Tampa Bay Rays regular-season series, the Major League Baseball Draft, the NBA Pre-Draft Camp, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers training camp, Chelsea Football Club events, the Pop Warner Super Bowl, AAU National Championships, Varsity All-Star Cheerleading competitions, USSSA events and the Walt Disney World Marathon, one of the top marathons in the nation. ESPN televised 20 sporting events from the complex in the last year. Walt Disney World Resort and ESPN also annually work together to host the popular ESPN The Weekend event at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Multiple sources have confirmed that the new Journey Into Narnia: Prince Caspian exhibit at Disney’s Hollywood Studios will be opening this Friday as the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian movie is released in theaters. The opening of this exhibit marks the conclusion of 5 months of total inactivity for the right-east corner of the park as Toy Story Midway Mania enters a full-time soft-openings schedule beginning, as well, on Friday.Â
WDW News Today has just been informed that after the conclusion of the long-running Year of a Million Dreams celebration in December 2008, Disney Parks will begin a new, smaller scale promotional program. The new promotion will be titled “Magical Celebrations” and is scheduled to begin in January 2009. The only part of the celebration that has been mentioned (still unofficial) thus far for the Walt Disney World Resort is the addition of Disneyland’s Parade of Dreams to the Magic Kingdom. No additional information is available at this time, but stay tuned to WDW News Today as more becomes available.
From montgomeryadvertiser.com:
Picture the Manhattan skyline filled with Nike swooshes. Or the golden arches of McDonald’s gently drift ing over Los Angeles.
A special-effects entrepreneur from Alabama has come up with a way to fill the sky with foamy clouds as big as 4 feet across and shaped like corporate logos — Flo gos, as he calls them. Francisco Guerra, who’s also a former magician, developed a ma chine that produces tiny bubbles filled with air and a little helium, forms the foam into shapes and pumps them into the sky.
The Walt Disney Co. will use one of the machines next month to send clouds shaped like Mickey Mouse heads into the air at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., Guerra said.
“It’s a shock factor when you look up and there’s a logo over your head,” said Guerra, whose company, Snowmasters Inc., makes machines that churn out fake snow and foam for Hollywood movies and special events.
He developed Flogos at his small factory in northern Alaba ma — a perfect place for research and development, he said, partly because there aren’t many people around to ask questions about the foam shapes that float above the building on test days.
A Flogo machine works a little like a Play-Doh Fun Factory, the $5 toy kids use to squeeze colorful putty into stars, circles and other shapes.
A boxlike contraption produces a specially formulated white foam in a big round tub and forces it up ward through a stencil. Once the foam is several inches thick, a met al cutter slices it and a faux cloud floats into the sky.
“You want some wind because you want them to travel,” Guerra said. “If there’s no wind they just spiral upward slowly. We’ve got a ghost (stencil), and on a calm day it looks like everyone is going to heaven.” Guerra’s company is working on a version that will spit out 6-foot clouds.
The foam is environmentally safe because it’s mostly water, air and a soapy agent that creates bub bles, Guerra said. Flogos pop just like bubbles and disappear when they hit a tree or building, some times leaving a powdery residue that blows away.
A single Flogo can travel as far as 30 miles and as high as 20,000 feet, Guerra said, and a machine can produce one every 15 seconds. Guerra said he could put a half-dozen machines together and fill the sky with almost any shape a company orders. Imagine a line of drifting Flo gos shaped like the Honda logo leading to a car dealership and you get the idea.
A professor who specializes in environmental issues and public policy said Flogos didn’t sound like a pollution hazard if they’re really just specially formulated soap and water.
“It sounds like it’s harmless, but there’s a lot of stuff that we thought was harmless that turned out not to be,” said Jerry Emison, a professor of political science and public administration and Missis sippi State University.
Kathleen Bergen, a spokes woman for the Federal Aviation Administration in Atlanta, said she had not dealt with the compa ny before but it appears Flogos would fall under FAA rules per taining to events like balloon launches. She said a local FAA of fice would need to be contacted be fore a Flogo launch so that pilots could be notified about it.
The company has lined up in ternational distributors in Aus tralia, Germany, Mexico and Sing apore. A machine rents for about $3,500 a day, Guerra said.
Matt Leible of New York-based Generation Outdoor, an ad agency specializing in outdoor advertis ing, said companies can spend $5,000 a day for a big banner with graphics towed by an airplane, and skywriting can cost $4,500. Want to rent a blimp like Good year’s? That’s $250,000 a month, and companies typically want a six-month minimum, Leible said.
James Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida, compared Flogos to airplanes pulling ban ners over football games, spot lights with corporate logos and an old imagined scheme to put an ad vertisement into orbit that would be visible at sunset. “It’s been done before. Well, kind of,” Twitchell said in an e-mail interview.
One expert said the idea sounds catchy, but wonders how Flogos will fare against a backdrop of con trolled airspace, environmental sensitivity and concerns over legal liability in case something goes wrong, like a pilot being distracted by a swarm of floating tomahawks above an Atlanta Braves game.
“I think people will look at them. The question is what hap pens after people look at them,” said Leonard M. Lodish, a market ing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Penn sylvania. Lodish said Flogos would no doubt draw attention. But it’s hard to say whether they will be a com mercial success. “The real question is what is the cost benefit versus other alter natives like banners or blimps,” he said. “How many people will see it and what is the impact for those who see it?”
Only a few people have seen Flogos so far, including a crowd at the local ballpark one day when the company was testing. There was no way to ignore the test clouds as they floated lazily over head, said Augie Hendershot, po lice chief in Lexington. “Everybody thought it was neat,” he said.
Here are some little know facts Disney has released about the new Toy Story Midway Mania attraction at Disney’s Hollywood Studios:
Game:
Nice to Know:
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Every day, Disney cast members invite guests to play special roles in entertainment throughout the Walt Disney World Resort. Other immersive experiences include such roles as starring in a parade down Main Street, U.S.A., learning dance moves from the Disney Channel sensation “High School Musical 2,” dueling with Darth Vader and many more.
“These experiences transport our guests deep into the magical realms of what Disney parks are all about,” said Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. “Rather than imagine being in a Disney parade or what it’s like to sail with Captain Jack Sparrow, these transformational experiences put our guests right in the heart of their dreams.”
It’s a Disney tradition that goes back to the very beginning of Disney Parks — the opening of Disneyland in 1955 — and is a consideration every time the famed Disney Imagineers huddle to fathom new magic.
In the latest immersive-entertainment experience, Toy Story Mania! guests are transported into a 4-D world where they compete in virtual midway-style games hosted by characters from the Disney-Pixar films “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2,” including Woody, Hamm and Rex. Donning 3-D glasses and using spring-action shooters, guests launch virtual darts at balloons, rings at aliens and eggs at whimsical barnyard targets to see who can rack up the most points. Guests may even experience some special 4-D effects during different parts of the game.
And the interactive fun doesn’t stop when guests put down their toy shooters. Here’s a sampling of other immersive experiences happening every day at Walt Disney World Resort:
Also happening in the theme parks every day:
And that’s not all! Coming in winter 2008:
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