Podcast: The Ride - Expedition Everest-Legend of the Forbidden Mountain
Episode Date: January 25, 2019A snow-capped episode all about the richly detailed Animal Kingdom coaster. Plus, we explain character paint, Travel Channel voice, and MANswers. Over at the Second Gate, we answer your questions in a... new installment of P:TR Post Office. Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/ FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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FOREVER!
DOG! you think it's over, the episode plummets backwards into a tangent about a shady deep
cable show. This is Expedition Everest on Podcast The Ride, the show hosted by three men who fear and respect the power of the Yeti.
I'm Jason Sheridan, joined by Mike Carlson.
Yep, I respect him.
And Scott Gerdner.
Very much right. You won't hear any disrespect in this episode.
Why do I assume the Yeti is a male?
Do we know what the gender of the Yeti is?
You know, I've read a lot about it getting ready for this.
I don't think I really saw that discussed.
Yeah, it's not specifically said.
Nor the abominable snowman.
Right.
In the Matterhorn.
Right.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I assume,
but I guess that must be
maybe just the sexist thing.
Because it could be like
a killer female yeti.
Well, I don't know.
Based on the size of that animatronic,
if it were male,
that big old thing
would be dangling down
and smacking riders in the face.
Oh, good point.
So, yeah yeah maybe it is
female yeah you're talking about a dick you're talking about a big yeti dick well unfortunately
the hog stopped working about 10 years ago as well so they designed it yeah that was gonna do
so much that was c mode that was c mode was uh the dick comes out i was gonna say
i was just adjusting the levels and i was like i, I got that D-Mode joke geared up, and
then Scott did it.
But yeah.
Yeah.
All set.
Sorry, grandmothers and mothers.
Sorry, grandmothers.
We don't get blue a lot, but...
But we're still not considering this disrespect.
We won't go into D-Mode in terms of disrespect of the almighty Yeti.
No.
We also fear and respect the almighty yeti's
hog uh so uh the damage it could do we're talking expedition everest today yes the e-ticket
roller coaster attraction at animal kingdom and i believe i said this in our text messages
um our first animal kingdom attraction. Yeah, that is weird.
Is what made me go immediately, yes, we need to do it.
I felt a lot of guilt.
What have we been doing?
How have we not represented this park in so many weeks and weeks and weeks of shows?
Well, I think that's fitting because I feel like Animal Kingdom kind of often much maligned.
So like the, I don't want to say redhead.
Unfairly maligned.
Unfairly maligned.
I agree.
Like, I don't want to say the redheaded stepchild,
but like, I think it got a lot of flack
when it first opened of like, not enough rides here.
There's not enough rides.
Well, I don't think that's unjustified
and you're allowed to make that.
I did feel that when I went with my family,
whenever it was open,
I guess we went in 99.
I just,
I remember feeling like not enough to do too much McDonald's and,
uh,
and not enough shade.
Well,
yeah.
Yeah.
So the McDonald's partnership is very bizarre and we could probably do a
whole episode about that or about Disney's various odd,
uh,
corporate partnerships but the
shade that i think has been rectified by uh the passage of time by trees growing yeah and that's
a complaint you would have made about disneyland in 1955 in california adventure got that a lot
they're like why are these redwood trees so tiny and it's like well because you don't just get a
giant redwood tree you gotta let it grow it grow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was going to say for like a kid, because I think I had a similar feeling.
I was very excited about it.
I didn't dislike it or anything.
But when I went as a kid, it was very much like, well, where are the rides?
And I didn't quite get it.
But I think if I had first appreciated it as like, you know, a 34-year-old man who likes to sit around these places as much as go on a ride,
I think I would have appreciated it
for its theming and everything.
But I get it why if you're going there
because you're like,
I want to go on some rides.
And then there's a safari
and there's seeing animals and what is dinosaurs?
Expedition.
But I mean, opening day especially,
isn't countdown
to extinction the like biggest thrill ride the most exciting ride they have there is that one
i think that is that was the thrill ride and expedition everest was like the the big thrill
ride expansion sort of thing so but yeah i think one of the most thoughtfully designed
parks out there i just think like you run into people have expectations now when they go to these places, you know?
Yeah.
Well, and I think it was, you know, I find in general the late 90s to be an unpleasant time in the Disney parks with things like the Too Much McDonald's, weird little cheapo.
Like I felt like they were cheapening
out in some areas. It was not
the golden era
of the early 90s was starting to
decay a little bit. And I can't help but
wonder if Animal Kingdom
would have come out of the gate stronger
with more early
90s spending.
Well, there's the whole...
Beastly kingdom, right?
Yeah.
That's too much to talk.
We'll do that in another episode.
But in case you didn't know,
there was going to be a whole thing,
a whole different fantasy area
of fantasy animals.
And that had, I think,
a crazy roller coaster
that went through a castle and dragons.
And there's a whole thing,
which this blows my mind,
there was going to be a maze where you were going to find i think a unicorn i believe yeah i think and you were going
to meet a bunch of mythical creatures in the maze so you'd come over and i don't know what what else
is a mythical uh centaur or something or whatever the minotaur minotaur traditionally guards the
mazes and then you would you would meet all these different characters and then when you got to the unicorn the unicorn would talk to you uh using vibrations in the floor
the idea was that it would be mentally like telepathically communicating with you this is
how i understand at least and they were going to do it by turning like the voice down so low
that you would feel what the thing was saying and not hearing it
so you would feel like a vibration of like thank you for finding me so what true they were the
idea was to make it feel like it was in your head it feels like it might have been unpleasant
but yeah this creeps me out this is like sex with dolphins but this is some weird vibrations and moods everyone would have gotten
very horny from the vibration yeah i think low frequency sounds can sometimes drive people
insane too like if i understand it yeah i mean they're imagineers i'm sure they had a cool way
to do it and we would have blown us away but there was a whole bunch there was going to be an area i
think they probably also felt like well that'll be the part that has all the rides.
That'll be the exciting stuff in the rides.
This is the nature stuff that's real
and you can see real animals.
And now here's our Disney fun fantastical area.
You're totally right.
That's the missing component, I think.
And that was cut from the budget.
But the logic of the park is not dissimilar from epcot except in this case it's like oh the
story we're trying to tell is the animal kingdom conservation in the way that epcot is uh we're
talking about the future and innovation and also like worldwide cultures and stuff and when epcot
first opened it did have more attractions than animal kingdom i'm assuming right that probably
makes sense yeah but added added a lot more over the years where it does feel more filled out now
and certainly animal kingdom feels more filled out with pandora in there yeah well they've only
at they've added you know three big things but they're big they're big old deals and i haven't
been in a very very long time and i'm
like it's probably the now at this point the one i'm the most anxious to go to having not done
avatar and having not done expedition everest i've not been on this ride uh and i i'm dying to
do it now i like having thought of i was i knew it was cool i'm aware it was cool right but just
really thinking about it watching a special about it, watching ride-throughs,
and me being several percentage points braver now.
And there ain't no launch on this one.
And I'm more increasingly okay with launches.
And it's a slower lift hill.
You're good with that.
Yes.
It is not.
The coaster itself is not overwhelming but like the
magic tricks associated it looks intimidating by design yeah and and looks very uh looks very high
it looks i mean when it is it gets it gets up there highest uh attraction tallest attraction
in walt disney world yeah six inches taller than tower tower of Terror and half a foot shorter than the requirement to have a blinking red light on it to alert low-flying planes.
Right.
Wow.
It's 200 feet is when you have to put that on.
This is apparently 199 and a half feet.
And they still, I like that they got it down to inches.
Yeah.
To just inch out Tower of Terror.
Take that, Tower of Terror.
Yeah.
One of my favorite things being on it, I've probably, because I hadn't been on it until
we went for the first time like five years ago.
I've probably now been on it six times.
I feel like six or seven times.
The best is that lift hill.
Not the best, but one of the cool parts of it is that lift hill.
And you just see flat florida
swamp everywhere and then you see tower of terror poking up over here you see the magic kingdom
poking up over here i've tried to see i think i did see universal at a certain point because that
then really like the fourth time i was like okay where's universal at so i'm like looking and that's
a far drive maybe i just saw where it would be i can't remember that's about 12 13 miles north i think you're looking from animal i want to say i kind of saw it but maybe
that's just my memory but that's a i found that to be a very fun game of like trying to find all
the different uh peaks in the whole theme park area it seemed that moment seems so incredibly
dramatic and cool and i can't wait to,
I'm like,
this,
this is like such a priority for me.
Yeah.
Now I really want to go on that too.
There's no catwalks on either side of that lift hill.
That's to me what looks very crazy.
It's just the track.
Yeah,
that's great.
I've written this thing in the rain a couple of times.
Lindsay and I did it in the like pummeling
rain and it god it was fun it was so great getting hit in the face with rain on this thing
i think i went on it because then the line got way short so then i think i went on it again
in the rain i think i did that i remember going in 2012 on the very last day of a trip
got up like very early to make sure my
bags were packed and took the bus from wilderness lodge to animal kingdom to ride a dinosaur and
like this maybe just do a loop a lap around the park before i had to get back and eat lunch and
then get to the airport but i remember getting off this and just being like stunned like that was
great and then walking out of the park going that and this has happened the last time i went to go
and like this is the park i wish i spent more time in yeah i just realized now this is going to be
one of the episodes where i don't think i have much criticism no yeah i was thinking that where
there's not a lot of uh uh vague crapping on the
thing meat on the bone which we can do sometimes but you know i think sheer praise is nice too
yeah i think it's one of those the level of detail there's so much to talk about obviously like
and we've just been crapping we spent the earlier part of the day crapping on it
i'm gonna get drunk the audience uh yeah we gotta get
positive y'all yeah obviously we'll talk about the yeti in a little bit but that's fine uh but yeah
as far as the ride it is like it's it's uh it's one of those disney rides i think where it'll be
up in 30 years and a kid will go and assume it was built at the start like they won't know when
it was built it feels very time like big thunder when i was a kid i didn't realize big thunder
hadn't been there the whole time yeah there was i always should have been there and a
important part of the fabric of the right even like star tours i don't think i vocalized it
but i knew that was that obviously that wasn't there since it opened. I knew that. Well, it's like aesthetically different.
Nothing else in Disneyland is like that.
It's a movie, and it's more angular.
It just feels modern.
But Big Thunder, it absolutely feels like it could have been.
I think the mountains in general need to feel like they were always there.
Yes, yeah.
But even like Splash Mountain, I think I had an idea that that was newer.
But yeah, I feel like Everest, if I was a kid and 30 years going on and i'd be like oh this was here this like i wouldn't know
it's just i think that's always cool to feel like something that truly feels like very timeless in
the park and and i think another neat aspect of it is that it feels like this you know, 10 times plused up version of the Matterhorn.
Yes.
It all is rooted in the Matterhorn,
and it feels like a tribute to it in a way.
And then we took this and took it to this level.
Because there was always question of
when is the Matterhorn ever going to come to Disney World?
And there was talk of it going into a Swiss pavilionavilion in uh in epcot and it never came to pass
and then this felt like i remember even the first time i heard about it like it was even framed
maybe a little more as like it's kind of the it's the uh kind of an amended it's the the disney
world version of the matterhorn it's obviously so much more than that um but it's it's sort of i
don't know it feels like a nice like tribute nice tribute to this very foundational ride in the park's history.
Yeah, for sure.
And yeah, the Matterhorn, of course, we did an episode on that, of course.
But that ride system makes the ride feel dated.
Even though some of the effects are new, just for whatever, that ride system still makes it, you go, this shouldn't hurt this much.
Because it was just banged together by a bunch of grumpy guys in the 50s.
They did their best.
Yeah, a bunch of guys.
They were all building World War II planes.
Sure.
They're making a roller coaster.
Yeah.
But this is top tier technology and stuff that no ride in the Disney Park ecosystem
had ever done.
Never before this a Disney ride that goes forward and backward.
I believe. Unless there's
the Indiana Jones thing in Paris.
The small Indiana Jones coaster
in Paris
was briefly ran backwards
for a short period of time.
But this runs forwards and backwards
on the same ride
in the same experience.
I think we all watched this
travel channel special where we learned about the the piece that makes this possible that it's this
hulking like very special part that so so the the point that we were talking about where you can see
all of the swamp land it rises to the the car your car rises to this apex sits up there for what
feels like a while and then and then comes back down the other way and goes backwards uh by the
time you pass it it has six seconds for this hulking piece it's two two hundred thousand
pounds a two hundred thousand pound piece has to flip over and and turn around and
so that when when you come back down you go down a different track yeah like a turn like a train
when it switches tracks like it's a full big mechanism that has to arrange so another thing
go also as far as the weight is concerned one or two of the times that I did it, up at the top, when you're stuck at the top, that can pause for a long time.
Because if something, if a car is taking a while to load or something, like any variable there.
So we were up there for like a minute.
Really?
Like a long time.
It feels, I mean, even when you're up there just for the set amount of time, it feels long. We're talking about at one point in this ride, you are riding through the mountains and you come to a point where the tracks are turned upward.
The Yeti has ripped them up and you are at the top of a hill looking down on stuff and you're just hanging there.
It's shocking.
Your expectations for a roller coaster like this is scary this is shocking
there's no more track i wish i have a big pause like that yeah it's a new beat you know in a
roller coaster you never really absolutely i wish i didn't know that when i went on the first time
but of course i had like seen videos of it but that does seem like such a fun surprise well they
were never hiding i mean in the travel channel specials it's in the opening credits like but it's still like insane to experience and then that you go
backwards and then forwards again like you keep switching uh and you're in the light you're in
the dark like yeah it has and i think i've i don't know if i've said this i guess i've said
this on the show it feels like i feel like ride, I feel like it doesn't matter necessarily about the length of the ride.
But I feel like to have a really satisfying experience, it has to have three moves.
It has to have three nice parts or moves to it to make it feel like it's a satisfying experience.
Maybe the three is not the number.
Maybe just it's different pieces that all feel like you've gotten a nice well something we can go maybe it's not
even it's like can you make a list of like when this happened this happened yes that's probably
a better way to describe it like uh in credit coaster is very like there's you know it's it's
launch it's loop it's and the really crazy drop in the middle right i think i and you had not been in japan yet
i think i said something similar on the japan episode about one of the rides and i said it was
missing a big something i don't know what that is okay but it felt like another thing would have
made me feel satisfied with it uh-huh uh-huh so this one just this is one of those rides where
you have like such satisfying things and it changes it up.
The first lift hill is so cool.
The line we'll talk about a lot.
The queue is awesome.
And then there's just such a variation on what it does that even though the
ride itself is actually pretty short,
I think,
or is it four minutes?
What is it?
Uh,
I forget what the length is,
but it's,
it does seem long as far as it seems right.
Yeah.
It seems very long,
but I don't think it's super long.
And I think it's because every piece is satisfying.
And then you feel like you've done, there's been moves.
There's three moves on it.
Now you're backwards.
Now it's this.
Now there's a big robot.
Now all of it adds up.
When you're also just exploring just crazy wilderness, it takes advantage of the undeveloped nature
of a lot of the Disney World property.
And it reminds me of the Beast at King's Island,
which I've talked about where you're like,
I feel like far away from the park.
I'm just going around random trees
and no civilization is around me.
The ride is two minutes 50 seconds not four
minutes it's so short but it feels like such a long thing because of how many different things
and like your your brain keeps getting stimulated and then by the end of it whether it's two minutes
or five minutes if it feels like it's had enough fun stuff it feels good i think it covers a lot
of grounds yeah it's the ultimate it also i was also thinking about how compare this to big thunder mountain which we all obviously like a lot but it's clearly
um in disneyland or space mountain the disneyland roller coasters are all about we don't have a lot
of space but we're going to turn you every which way within this little piece of square footage
this thing is so big in its scope and wide
and explores so much.
It takes advantage of how much land there is
in the Disney world.
Let's start in the queue, I guess, a little bit.
I guess so.
I mean, even leading up to the queue, yeah.
The Asia area section of the park is just...
I mean, all of this park is like so
detailed and like so thought out.
What else is in Asia?
What else is in Asia?
I have a park, a current park map, current-ish park map in front of me.
Asia also has the Maharaja Jungle Trek.
I think that's a walking tour.
The Kali River Rapids
is the other big attraction.
And it's where the Rivers of Light show
is now. I see.
Yak and Yeti, the restaurant, is there.
I still haven't eaten there, even though everyone says that's good.
Although Tiffin's, I think people like
better.
Tiffin's, I thought, was more by
Pandora.
I could be wrong um yeah what are the
lands of animal kingdom at this part of pandora that's what's funny to me asia africa pandora
yeah asia africa discovery island dino land the oasis and yeah dino land usa you know that
actually counteracts one thought i had was that this is one of the parks in Florida, excuse me, at Disney World that doesn't have like, for lack of a better term, America town.
Because the Magic Kingdom has Liberty Square.
Epcot has America.
Hollywood Studios is pretty much just about the history of American filmmaking.
Like all lip tributes to different parts of L.A.
Different parts of LA.
Yeah, there's not a lot of French New Wave
in that film park.
But I guess Dinoland USA is kind of America?
It doesn't quite know.
There was like Camp Mini Mickey before,
which is what Pandora replaced,
which that's something.
They really should do a Griffith Park section
for Animal kingdom or
runyon canyon uh ride just because you really the la yeah i need as many la references yeah
the greek theater uh show build like you could have a show in the made like the fake greek
theater at animal kingdom i was thinking how the grizzly grizzly peak is sort of a nod to big bear really uh-huh
like the bit the grizzly peak recreation area when you see signage about that right so that's
a little but i guess california adventure entirely is right california nods disney park
parks love california yeah it's got more California. You'd think they were designed 10 minutes down the road or something.
Oh, yeah.
But not that.
Here you traverse the jungles of Asia.
Yes.
Yeah.
So, well, see,
I don't know much about the line
because I haven't done it.
It's pretty boring to watch a video of it.
God bless these theme park archivists on YouTube
who cover every nook and cranny of all these places, but I'm not going to sit and watch a video of a look. God bless these theme park archivists on YouTube who cover every nook and cranny of all these
places, but I'm not going to sit and watch a video of the line.
Well, it's themed to like you are traveling to the Himalayas.
And of course, the Himalaya Mountains touch upon five countries in the world.
Go ahead.
Of course.
I have it right here.
The thing that you wrote down.
Come on, Jason.
Time is of the essence.
Nepal, India, Bhutan, China, and Pakistan.
They're a very long stretch and include, of course, the famous Everest among them.
But then there's this weird thing that the ride is not meant to be on everest itself no you are in the forbidden mountains
and we should and technically the name of the ride is expedition everest legend of the forbidden
mountain right yeah because you need these things to be as long as possible which is interesting
because that is like a that's it this is a joe rody uh ride. Imagine Joe Rohde. And then he was behind Guardians of the Galaxy, which also is a long title.
Guardians of the Galaxy.
It's got sort of an aftermath.
I do wonder maybe if that's his.
We'll ask him.
We have to have him on.
Come hell or high water, we will have Joe Rohde on the show.
So does he like a long title will be one of the first questions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's actually an interesting thought to bring up.
Although another roadie thing, we've talked before about how his rides tend to have a lot of plot.
This does not.
This is very simple, yeah.
It's very simple and is more world building.
So you're going through the office of a company that does tours of these mountains and and a yeti
museum and yeah so here's this uh this is what i want to say about actually about the line i'm not
going to describe there's tons and tons of cool like artifacts artifacts like real things they
went and found household items that they bought from people right they would they said they would
go and they would clear out like little marketplaces and be like,
we'll buy all these bowls or something.
And people are like, oh, okay.
And they just take all these bowls and then put them there.
There was something interesting in that special too where they were talking about how they
would take stuff and then they'd have to make it look more beat up.
So there was a way to make like, they almost felt bad because some of the things they would
buy, they wanted it to look too nice because it was new. But they wanted to make it look more like,
oh, they had found this and it was
on a hillside for 60 years.
So they'd have to dirty up something.
We'll post a link to this thing.
Sure, sure.
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uh that's all let's go back to talking about fake rocks
so we're going so the first time i had been on it lindsey and i were going through the main queue
and we're looking at all this stuff and up until the art like the fake newspaper clippings about
the yeti i went huh is all this stuff real is all
are these articles real like it does a really good job of easing you into the fakes yeah there you go
um so like we're looking and i'm like oh wow he's all these expedition huh so like these explorers
they were never found again that's interesting like i truly like it makes me sound like probably
an idiot because you'd probably probably look at it again and go oh that's look at it's a it looks like one of those
old west's like photo like it looks like a fake thing you'd find at a fair or something newspaper
but like for a couple rooms we're like oh this is interesting like we've i never heard about this
story before that's the written kind of hidden story of like the lost expedition yeah and then
like it's there's an article, another one was like,
Yeti attacks, and I'm like, okay, got it.
I'm an idiot.
I'm an idiot.
Got it.
But it's so good.
I guess it feels authentic because of all the artifacts they've got
and all the different things they've bought.
Okay, so maybe we should talk about Rhodey a little bit in general
because he clearly is the guy driving the ship for these incredibly detailed world traveling kind of rides.
Because Rhodey gets a lot of credit.
I mean, I never know the positions, but you sort of attribute all of Animal Kingdom to him.
Yeah, he was the lead designer of this attraction, and I think Animal Kingdom at large.
Right, at least so, and then pandora so like i do feel like with roadie more than other cases like other than original walt disney disneyland and uh hard rock park with uh what's
his name benkowski benkowski uh this is it's sort of an auteur park in a way and and no
park obviously can be made or single-handedly right i'm sure he would but you and he i'm sure
he would say all of the hundreds of people right part but like um i don't he does seem like such a
major driving force behind and and where it's like and if you follow him on instagram this he is he
is very much a world traveler and very detail-oriented.
And you just, I don't know.
He clearly is bringing in so much of himself, too.
Yeah, it's hard not to, yeah, if you just have a light understanding of him or have looked at a few posts on Instagram or seen a few interviews with him, it's hard not to see him all over this place.
Like, it's hard not to see him all over this place like it's hard and by the way just
just to say if you don't know who we're talking about and you're vaguely familiar with behind the
scenes videos or park specials it's the guy with the earring yeah he's got the earring and then
most people you've seen him you know yes yeah um but yeah i mean it almost feels like i mean
obviously we've talked about a lot of famous imagineers but it does feel like now his footprint
because it's a whole park yeah you sort of associate with his aesthetic so like I don't know is there any other
than Walt Disney himself yeah other Disney park where you're like Tony Baxter in Paris maybe yeah
to some extent but it's still like Walt's the original land is very Tony yes yeah but it's just
a land yeah yeah so it's interesting a land. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's interesting.
I wonder how he feels about that because it does like his,
he has a park kind of.
Like his voice is one of the parks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Also going to say,
I found out a bunch of crazy
roadie stuff.
So this I knew
and I've interacted with him
on Twitter because of this.
Joe Roadie went to my high school.
He went to Chaminade, which is in West Hills, California.
By the way, the alumni list of this high school, very strange.
I mean, my favorite ones, Rohde and David Page from Toto,
who wrote two of my favorite songs, Africa and Human Nature by Michael Jackson.
Also, didn't know this one.
Dean Ween from Ween went to Shawmut a lot.
Wow.
And wait, who else on the list?
I mean, several of the kids from Seventh Heaven who were there when I went there.
And Jonathan Taylor Thomas went there when I went there.
One that I didn't know about uh linda hogan
yeah weird hogan's ex-wife yes linda hogan uh-huh that's crazy uh uh star of hogan knows best went
went to chaminade and uh an old sky gardener as well but i didn't so i just i just thought that
was cool and i think i learned he went there because of an alumni magazine that I am forced to receive.
I don't think I have a way to not receive it.
But I didn't know that his Disney story totally stems from my high school chaminade,
which is that he graduated chaminade, went to Occidental right before Barack Obama went there,
graduated from there, started working back at Chaminade as doing theatrical set design for the theater program,
which I participated in many decades later.
And among, so he's like doing sets for the plays.
Right.
And the sets for the plays
are better than they have any right to be.
They're just oddly complicated
and very well done.
And let me see.
He said the theater department
at the time didn't have very big budgets.
We made these rather impressive,
elaborate productions
in terms of set and costume design. one of roadie's students uh his father was john zovich who was the uh the vice president
of engineering for imagineering so he goes to see one of his kids plays goes what's going on with
the sets is super impressed finds roadie talks to him uh goes into roadie's
office and says you're wasting your time here kid you should be working for walt disney imagineering
and roadie's reaction because he by his own uh admission is like i'm like a free spirit hippie
world traveler guy like disney would hate a guy like me he takes the job and he is wrong they love what
he's doing he's able to totally put his personality into everything and he's like a rising star there
very quickly so had he not made crazy sets for uh for my high school i don't know if it was in the
same facility the the bob hope center where i uh and not an alum bob hope uh no no Bob Hope didn't I don't know why
something's named after him maybe he drove by the school
once or something yeah yeah yeah close enough
he woke up on the lawn once
alright rough night
so anyway he's like
right out of the gate kind of like a
valued imagineer
first thing he did he there was tons
to do at Epcot so he was a
scenic painter for the Mexico Pavilion,
which, think about that painting in there.
Yeah, yeah, great.
All these murals.
I don't know what he did exactly, but, yeah, murals are great.
That boat ride we love.
Worked on the refurbishment of Fantasyland.
Did concept art for Captain EO.
Worked on the Norway Pavilion,
and then eventually building up to working.
Is he, like, the main guy on the Norway Pavilion and then eventually building up to working is he like the main guy on
the Adventurers Club?
The beloved now lost
Pleasure Island. I believe that is
right. Was one of the
main guys. It was hard to find.
Pleasure Island stuff not cataloged as well.
We were saying like the plaques and stuff
throughout Pleasure Island has a
very roadie kind of vibe
to the backstory.
He loves his backstory.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alani, I believe, is also.
Yeah, that's him.
He was in charge of it, too.
So I guess,
and I might be wrong about specifics here,
but I think that in 84,
Eisner has taken over
and he needs to pitch the Adventurers Club, or maybe it's something else, but I think it's the Adventurers Club, to Eisner has taken over, and he needs to pitch the Adventurers Club,
or maybe it's something else, but I think it's the Adventurers Club,
to Eisner, and he comes into the pitch with an actual Bengal tiger.
And Eisner's like, wow, this guy, he's got panache, he's exciting.
So he gets on Eisner's radar pretty quickly,
and they're talking about what is the ultimate thing you would want to do.
And I think that was Animal Kingdom.
Because it was like a trick.
Yeah.
I was going to say, that's a real power move.
And would come back later when they were doing The Lion King,
and they would always show the behind-the-scenes animator
sketching a lion just in a conference room.
Yeah.
That footage is crazy.
Yeah.
I remember taking the tour
of the animation studio when like uh what would have been like christmas uh 92 or 93 i forget when
but i remember them saying and and next week it's very exciting because we have some real jungle
animals coming in and the animators are going to draw them and i remember thinking what's that
going to be for and uh there you go. Clearly Lion King.
I think it was like, didn't he say something like the biggest,
like that's the biggest thrill is seeing like an animal?
There was something along the lines of like he wanted to impress upon
Michael Eisner that like this is as good as a ride is seeing this thing up close.
Oh, gotcha.
This could be from a different meeting or a different thing.
I'm misremembering.
Because that's another thing you appreciate with Animal Kingdom when you're older is like how close you are.
Like a zoo has a lot of barriers between you and the animal.
And they made an effort at Animal Kingdom to try and use bodies of water or natural stuff to make it feel like you are closer than you really are when we went
on that safari the first time a couple years ago since i had been out in the early late 90s
uh i was like a little uncomfortable by how close the animals were yeah sure you're like oh god this
is what's the actual deal with that hotel where they show you footage and it's like a giraffe's
gonna walk up to you i don't know i don't know if that's true, if the giraffe really will like you.
Oh, my.
Good morning, Mr. Giraffe.
And he's up at your window.
I think he knocks on the window to wake you up.
And he pulls the sun out with his teeth.
I haven't stayed there close.
I think you're still pretty far away.
But it feels like you're a lot closer.
That hotel is amazing wonderful
restaurants the design incredible the main restaurant in there yeah is insanely yeah
this is a quick side note i last night had a dream that i was price comparing hotels for disney world
you were checking in your dream this is this is not why i remember you weren't even there i remember figures too and i you're not supposed to be able to like read in your dream? Jesus Christ. This is not a lie. I remember figures. You weren't even there.
I remember figures, too.
And you're not supposed to be able to read in your dream.
But I remember looking at a website that's Yacht and Beach Club, and it said $7.25.
And I was like, too expensive.
And then I looked at Polynesian or something, and I saw $300.
And I was like, oh, it's getting better.
But it's a very specific
I woke up going oh my god
I'm thinking of the website
to book Orlando hotels
in my dreams
I want to help you George Washington
even your dreams are late
I wasn't even at the park
it wasn't like oh my gosh
I'm at Disney World
enjoying the rides
I'm dreaming about
booking the fact that you well because you have you like do you do you like booking for people
from afar i do yeah giving them tips and that's one of the and then now to know that it's in your
dreams i have never i don't remember lately at least most of my dreams I don't have vivid dreams very often
I usually forget them by the time I'm up uh not this one I woke up and had so I have such a clear
memory of this like a like facsimile website that my brain constructed in my head right now
with the number 725 and then the Polynesian website with 300.
I remember it so close as if it was real.
And these numbers are how accurate?
Not accurate.
The numbers are not.
It would be better if.
What a wild dream.
Not so far off.
Not far off for the Polynesian.
That's a deal.
Yacht and Beach Club is not 725.
Unless there's a suite.
You could have been looking at suites.
In my brain, I could have been examining the suites at the Yacht and Beach Club.
And maybe, yeah, if it was like a big family suite, it could be 725.
So who knows?
So when you die, your heaven is a world where you can sit at the right hand of God and be his personal checker.
With a MacBook Pro.
Yeah.
Find me.
Not even a cloud-shaped computer. Not a fancy heaven thing. No, like a MacBook Pro. Yeah. Find me a... Not even a cloud-shaped computer.
Not a fancy heaven thing.
No, like a 2018 MacBook.
It's an 18-inch.
It's pretty light, you'll find.
Please, find me a good deal for the Caribbean beach.
Recently refurbished, Michael.
Please give me a lagoon view.
I have some Rhodey stuff.
So Rhodey, the theatrical background adds to one of my memories.
And Mike, correct me if this is someone else.
Please correct me.
Sure.
Isn't there a video of Rhodey playing the Dream Finder?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a video of him in the full dreamfinder get up like talking to
you and he's so anime he's a very engaging speaker but he's fully committed to the character of the
dreamfinder so that he has a theatrical background makes a lot of sense yeah a lot of people there
are not a lot but a handful of people and imaginary like different people have played
dreamfinder in different media like in different media like there was a walk around dreamfinder
for a while but then there's like in different videos and there's been multiple your next dream
will be uh applying spirit gum to a beard and placing it on an imagineer's face so he can play
the dream finder yeah i don't get to like meet dreamfinder and fly with him in the flying machine
not real no you're helping somebody
into a costume you did get into the makeup artist union which is good because they in my dream yeah
in your dream it's a nice little mixer at the end of the year yeah whole it's like i lived a whole
lifetime in my head of going to makeup school yeah and then you wake up feeling um lost because
you're like that is a life i'll never never can I'll never live, yeah. You never can go back to that life.
Sure.
Dreamfinder is, you know, if we really think of Dreamfinder as much like Hamlet or Othello,
like multiple actors have taken the role.
Oh, and made it their own.
The Joker now, of course, is the new version of this.
And maybe, yeah, so many more hopefully people will get to play.
Just jamming in another joker
reference right on the money well yeah that's look the internet has been on fire with that
joker joke with they've just been hammering me with it so he's talking about everybody's
lighting me up on social media it's really hidden that mike is or likes the joker yeah
no just likes it a lot okay just like no. Just likes it a lot. No, like your dreams.
You don't get to be anything exciting.
Okay.
You just get to be adjacent
or trying to purchase it.
So hopefully all three of us
will get to play Dream Finder
at certain points.
Yeah.
We can anytime we want.
Anytime we want.
Let's just do it.
Let's not even do it for the podcast.
Next time we're hanging out,
let's all be dressed like the Dream Finder.
We'll go to a bar.
Everyone will be buying us shots because they'll think we are so cool yeah i think yeah maybe a patreon exclusive is that we all do monologues as the dream finder
what's our take on yeah what is the dream finder monologues yeah you know the dream finder monologues
mine's gonna be a tom waits uh dream finder i think he's kind of a grittier dream finder monologues mine's gonna be a tom waits uh dream finder i think he's kind of a
grittier dream finder oh okay what if we all didn't tell each other what we were writing we all ended
up writing gritty dream finder it's like a very lazy movie it's like how a lot of the superhero
movies like a lot of superhero comics in the 80s and 90s went through like this character but gritty
and then it kind of 20 years later hit the movie versions and right hopefully we're coming out of that um mine's gonna wrap oh okay
you're going for hamilton yeah yeah very very edgy uh um so uh the other roadie thing i i watched a
walk through there was a tour i guess there was a limited time uh tour um of expedition everest
and sort of the surrounding areas in animal kingdom and um a very interesting imagineer
colleen i did they said i couldn't catch the last name but she was the head of character paint
uh for imagineering which is not a term that i had heard before but character paint is using color to tell stories because they use dozens and dozens of colors of paint thousands
of bucket gallons of paint to paint everest and they said there's four shades of gray alone to
to do the snow to do the different gradients of snow wow um uh but they someone asked about roadie
and they said well uh joe's not in the park right now.
You know, he kind of splits his time between Orlando and Glendale.
But even when he is not where he travels for the for Imagineering, but even when he's not working, he loves to travel.
So last we heard, he's in Mongolia tracking snow leopards.
Wow. So it's a good instagram also if you know
amazing instagram very thoughtful uh captions and so he writes a lot too and and post his
sketchbook sometimes he's very intense sketchbooks and all it's interesting i find it fascinating
that story with the high school because that's one of those instances where he wasn't looking
for disney it's just happenstance that that happens unless there's more of those instances where he wasn't looking for Disney.
It's just happenstance that that happens,
unless there's more of the story we don't know.
But he isn't like Tony, where Tony's a super fan,
and he was on a collision course with his talent in Disney
because he worked there, he's obsessed with it.
Just by happenstance, this interesting designer man gets swept up,
and then he takes to it.
I mean, maybe...
Yeah, that's true he wasn't like
romanticizing disney specifically right it's just he was into what he was into and able to bring
that all those influences to the i would yeah what i would imagine it was like yeah he figured out
like how to make it your own or whatever you would like. He figured out very quickly, like, okay, I can do what I like,
but here in this.
We didn't set out to be podcasters.
We just love talking.
We just talk about all this shit all the time anyway.
You get drafted into it more than you had a dream to do it.
It's a calling.
It's a calling.
Now, checking.
Dreaming, doing, living. Checking. dream to do it it's a calling but it's a calling now checking dreaming doing living checking here that's that is what it is i do i i as i'm thinking about it now i do get an endorphin rush
from thinking about trying to find a good deal on like i'm thinking about it now describe what
you're feeling physically well physically i'm a little tired today my voice a little hoarse but if i think about it if i think about like oh i'm gonna go
to disney obviously it's mixed up with the disney world trip that is somewhere in there buried in
the feelings of the checking is knowing oh i'm gonna get to stay in the hotel i'm gonna get to
go to the parks but the idea of that website that doesn't work very well the orlando you know what
i'm talking about have you tried to book like hotels on the disney world website oh it's clunky it's clunky it does it's like the
same thing that they've had it since like 2000 it doesn't make any sense why it's like that i
my family has had good luck calling them like calling the travel because disney has a full
travel infrastructure and even universal now has a pretty intense travel structure um but yeah
and there's a whole confusing thing if you're in if you have like there's like discounts and if at
the time when i was a premier pass holder you have to go around there's a whole way you have to log
in to see if there's a discount that you'll get from being the premier and it's not easy
it's a whole clunky way and then you can get like an extra five percent off the normal sale price that you'd originally get so it's it's now to now you're just turning
into a big glass of wine to me now i'm just i'm just leaving the building your brain is trying
to soothe you it's seeing something unpleasant in front of you and it's like well what'll calm
him down all right got it uh to me you look like uh briar's ice cream at the height of the summer when it's uh 250 a gallon or 250 a quart right now see we're
in the middle winter right now at the grocery store ice cream was like six dollars a quart
nice oh really yeah it's that different it is that different 250 to six dollars yeah are you
like on your stocks app can you like
there's here's the price of gold here's the price of steel is the price of ice cream the price of
ice cream price of price of one of the the cost of living could i get that like it's you know loaf
of bread gallon of milk can we get ice cream in there too do you always have i think we've covered
this you always have like a little thing of ice cream in the in the freezer uh and it depends okay this is a sincere answer that's
all i ask for it depends on how much other sweets are in the house so if you're so if you got a lot
of cookies and candy yeah i don't right now because i have a lot of stocking stuff for candy good time of the year good time of the year yeah um so you have like when you say
candy is it like like a may style or what's uh the other one sweet oh uh no i like like like um
dove bars or or you know the christmas tree shaped reese's or just like stuff you could fit in an actual stocking.
Cadbury bars are really good.
We're recording this.
It's like two and a half weeks after Christmas or so.
Is it that you, how much candy is in that stocking though?
Because I went through my candy in the stocking.
Well, you have to remember my parents are divorced, so I have two stockings.
There's stocking in each one.
And then my stepdad usually, my mom and stepdad live out in Amish country. And all of those country, kitschy Pennsylvania Dutch stores are just filled with bulk candy and stuff.
Oh, so your stocking is loaded up.
So stocking or gift bags and stuff.
Oh, interesting.
So do you ever have dreams about
them getting divorced thus creating a third a third i i assuming you would go visit i think
i would have other concerns uh yeah i'm not saying it'd be the first thing but just like
to give you solace in the ining emotionally, like, well, maybe third stocking.
Yeah.
Maybe.
I had never considered that possibility until this very moment.
I should not be wishing that.
I'm certainly not wishing that.
No, yeah, I know.
The only silver lining.
But, you know, I will say I don't often buy, like,
a thing of non-Perels or chocolate espresso beans for myself.
Although Mike has been with me when I have bought a scoop of chocolate espresso beans.
Wait, what am I talking about?
This is what you need.
You need a girlfriend to get married because then you've got in-laws.
That's your ticket to.
Oh, right.
They get divorced.
I'm just trying to design as many stockings for you as possible.
Also, like how emotionally attached you got to the you know he's the mother-in-law's right i've learned from stand
up comedy the most insidious thing in the world is the dang mother-in-law i learned that in driving
school i had a driving school instructor who was slipping in a lot of mother-in-law jokes
i love that all driving
instructors trained in the borscht belt like i also had like a tricky roads up there yeah i had
my driver's ed teacher also was like a hacky comedian guy like have we talked about this in
the show before i think we have talked about it but yeah i mean is that a common because there
is specifically stand-up uh driving schools but I think maybe in general they attract like...
That's interesting.
Weird people who just want, like, oh my God, I got an audience.
Let me try some stuff out.
A small audience.
Yeah, yeah.
Of people who hate being there.
Right.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
All right.
Well, I'll keep designing stocking plans for you.
Oh, thanks.
Doing math.
So, yeah.
So there's this Imagineering tour.
I was saying I watched this Imagineering tour video.
I thought all the talk about, like, how they use color to tell stories,
and they had to, like, use the color red shows up a lot in the queue
and around Expedition Everest because, as they say in the special,
it's considered a protective color.
So you'll see it in Nepal, and it's around doorways and windows in the corner of buildings.
It's very subtly dusted on.
Yeah, kind of.
That's one, I feel, you know, you could take the same structures
of this ride and have worse painters do it,
and it would have 50% the impact.
These things are really just beautifully touched up. have worse painters do it and it would have 50 the impact like there's such oh yeah these things
are really just beautifully um touched up to the point they said in one of these videos that like
you know because they were using a lot of plaster and trying not to use a lot of wood because wood
is very rare around the himalayas so wood is they they were saying you see it as accents to buildings
or on top of buildings but they they don't have so it's a lot more like mud and clay and that sort of thing and there was like one of the colors of
of the plant they were trying to they thought they had the texture right to recreate it but
it wasn't looking right so the one time roadie went back to uh the himalayas he asked them like
how do you do this when you do the buildings? And they were ladling it out.
They had been trying to scoop it out.
They were using like a soup ladle kind of thing.
And when they did that with the version they had recreated, then it looked right.
So it's like that level of attention to detail.
Jeez.
That, you know, like rare is the person who would recognize all of these, you know,
methods and why they're being done.
And,
and I,
you know,
most tourists or what most people going on that don't really just kind of
washes over him,
but you,
you'd be able to tell if it wasn't done with this degree of detail.
You really could.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
God bless him for like being so to the letter.
Yeah.
And,
and I think, and then from from my perspective i have not
traveled a lot uh internationally at all and but but respectful to the cultures too like i would
very curious to hear about like how uh roadie learned to travel like that so you're not like
just you know the white colonizer kool-aid inning to a cut like
kool-aid man his way like dr livingston i don't know where you were going with that just bursting
into a country like dr livingston in africa i see hmm well it's i do like cool at kool-aid
manning as a term for being like not delicate in your uh arrivals and presence.
Yeah, I think it's a very useful term for Hollywood,
the way some executives or producers or writers behave,
where they just burst in and start shooting their mouth off.
Right, yeah.
But let's not go ascribing negative qualities to the Kool-Aid man.
No, the Kool-Aid man is benevolent.
He gives of himself.
He is filled with the delicious nectar.
Drink of my blood.
Yeah.
And he always brought a party with him.
So it's like it's not, it wasn't, it was destruction with a purpose.
I watched just a montage of like 50 Kool-Aid man burst-ins that I was so happy by.
I could watch.
If I wish there were a full 24 hours worth, I could watch.
Is he still bursting?
Are there new commercials where he's bursting through walls?
I don't know.
They're probably all Geico rip-off now,
where they're just like odd and still and awkward or something.
I don't know.
I think there's been some pretty recent
you know what i appreciate they were doing the burst ins so early in the 60s it was probably
so hard to do that stuff and he had the animated face how hard was that to do it's probably drawn
on the film right yeah easier in the 80s um yeah i will get into who may I would love to find out the personnel behind the Kool-Aid man
yeah the madman kind of guys who are behind the Kool-Aid man Kool-Aid man never in a theme park
or a ride I don't think so seems perfect for something a weird out of the way thing so I
haven't why isn't Hershey hit up if i don't think that's in the same umbrella yeah
no i don't know who owns kool-aid i although speaking of company company-based rides were
were uh just a week or so no not even a week just a few days past the the consumer electronic show
in vegas and a lot of people were mentioning that google google built a dark ride i haven't really
watched it yet but but I don't,
I mean, I don't have the best opinion of tech companies right now.
But they built a dark ride.
But they did build a ride.
So maybe they're good.
Yeah.
That's what I thought.
Yeah, I know.
It's a runaway train, just like the ride itself.
You know, we're talking about painting and stuff we talk a little about the uh uh i think we probably all learned about
the how the mountain itself was built which this this again in like you know matterhorn is the demo
and this is the full realization of it that they were able to our beloved fake rocks were in fake rock territory
and they were able to for the first time use digital technology to print the surface of the
fake rocks and they're like so every it's all these like slats there was a term for it and i
forget what it is now um but like terabars or something or not the scaffolding they because
they had a very interesting scaffolding.
Oh, yeah.
It's all these panels that are all applied to the big steel structure,
but they're all different because they're randomized by computer.
So it's this very 3D printed.
They were able to specifically design the texture of all of these many thousands of blocks of fake rock paneling.
And then installed it all, but then went in and covered everything tinfoil in order to make really perfect and randomized craggy rock texture.
So they laid that in and then painted it.
I forget how the tinfoil
came into effect.
All that stuff is truly something.
If they put you in a room,
how would you even know
where to begin?
It's so detailed. That special
really breaks it down in detail
of how crazy
this job is.
Yeah.
How hard and insane it is.
You also in the special meet the people behind the sound.
I think sound is a real, we haven't talked about this much, but you really are in the Disney parks never thinking about where the sound is coming from.
Right.
When a parade is in motion seriously where is it
sometimes it's in the float is it below you is it in the street is it hidden in planters it's
very very hard to tell and you're not you're not supposed to know but in this in this ride yes
like sometimes it's below the track sometimes like when you hit that that giant peak it's
that's hidden in the rock work on either side of you. And there's so much going on in terms of Yeti sounds
and atmospheric sounds.
And this has to be a low rumble.
So it's got to be this kind of speaker and go under here.
And it's hard to appreciate because it's hidden.
But there's such crazy artistry to it.
I feel like there was a few years before I even realized
that that Indiana Jones vehicle engine is fake.
Like, that's how, I mean, again, maybe I'm making myself sound stupid.
But, like, after a couple years, I feel like I was like, oh, yeah, that's a gas engine.
That's obviously a noise to make it sound like a Jeep.
It's not like actual sound.
Obviously, I think I knew the stalling out was fake because that couldn't be real.
But I still think that I was like, oh, yeah, there's all these sounds that I'm just taking for granted that are adding to the atmosphere of this thing.
And I don't even realize it.
Well, and they said on Everest, they built steam pipes in the, you know, the station.
But it's like built into the ground so that when the car, you know the train comes up it looks like it's
coming out of the train steam because like the roller coaster cars you don't want to build a
steam right generator in a roller coaster car that you don't need there so but uh and then they had
to the the woman talking about coloring to tell a story, then on the train, they had to paint in the soot that like,
you know,
and they've,
well,
and they've talked about how they've wanted and allowed like physical,
not mechanical,
but physical wear and tear on the vehicles,
because then it looks like a beaten up,
uh,
piece,
you know,
beaten up old train,
uh,
uh,
you know,
as opposed to a shiny new
just built and installed in Florida.
And in the special,
it's super cloudy and rainy one day
and Rhodey's looking up excited.
He's like, it looks even better.
It looks like the real place now.
So this thing
has incorporated the elements
in a cool way.
Yeah, and then it's like
with the mountain stuff
and Big Thunder stuff that's
based in reality, like it does
as long as there's upkeep you have to do to it
but also it does get more character as the years
go on. Yeah. So like it does add
to it that it looks like a little junkier.
Just as the trees
grow and fill in gaps that
weren't there and maybe that's the whole thing.
Maybe like, well I'd say
definitely with Everest now and much more recently with Avatar gaps that weren't there and maybe that's the whole thing maybe like well i'd say definitely
with with everest now and and much more recently with avatar like probably animal kingdom seemingly
is at its peak now yeah it's like whereas there's probably other parks that have the opposite
effects that come out of the gate perfect and shiny and then aren't kept up right or like
nobody is thinking yeah yeah yeah epcot center
has gotten worse hollywood studios has needed like a reconceptualizing of what it even is
which is but animal kingdom is only improved and improved and improved it's a little like
engine that could islands of adventure i think had a lot more detail and certainly a lot more like
port of entry kind of stuff throughout or like in there used to be those junk boats that
would go across the lagoon and all of that's so quickly faded away i mean i'm sure some of it you
could chalk up to islands of adventure opens 99 september 11th happens that like orlando took a
hit hard i mean disney had hotels closed like They had so many issues. Did something close entirely?
I think some of the smaller hotels,
some of the mid-range hotels might have closed for-
You mean like temporarily?
Temporarily.
Right, right.
And then construction, a lot of some of the all-stars,
their openings were delayed years.
They were just left as construction shelves.
And that's another thing about this ride
is that i i've said it before i think there was a real dark period for theme parks
after september 11th with the tourism diving with less money coming in and just disney's disney's
already getting cheap and california venture was so cruddy when it opened. Like, think about the, like, in the, this is 2006 is when this opened?
Yeah.
Like, what else was good in the parks leading up to this?
Like, there's things, Mission Space, obviously a big, you know, like, super technological
Marvel attraction, but, like, not very well regarded.
Right.
You said good.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, yeah.
What else was good?
An interesting swing yeah
interesting building but everest is like seems like something you'd make in a golden age and
it's surrounded by a lot of nothing and a lot of them going well let's celebrate the anniversary
because we don't have a new ride uh uh but this this feels like right because like disneyland
was kind of garbage i can't think of anything they added from like 03 to 06.
Because when I hadn't been in 10 years, the stuff that I hadn't gone on at that point was Mickey's PhilharMagic and Everest.
And I think that's it.
I'm pretty sure that's it as far as new stuff.
And I hadn't been in 10 years.
There might be one thing I'm pretty sure that's it as far as new stuff and I hadn't been in 10 years there might be one thing I'm forgetting
but that's nothing that's not
two rides in 10 years right
it's crazy yeah
Everest really carry on the torch
there it is that's the last one
but I mean it's all on
Everest in the 2000 this is
this is the ride of the 2000s
it's a good one
it is interesting i would be
interesting interested to know like how do they get it through is it just because of the anniversary
and then i guess maybe they also like had surveys that said like you know people would like a thrill
ride here i yeah i bet maybe it was always part of the plans maybe it was one of those like
tier two will be their phase two will be this right i think i think also i wonder
at that point because i think they always intended to build the beastly kingdom stuff
or at least for a few years too and i wonder if that was still i wonder when that finally went
away for good because i think it was supposed to be where pandora what is now yeah i didn't come
across a lot for this ride of like where did the idea come from like
what what was the impetus for this as opposed to like a different animal themed coaster or something
sure yeah yeah what you mean i mean it's a day yeah it's like a mountain which is a disney
tradition so i mean that all makes sense but yeah i wonder if what else i haven't seen anything
about like what other ideas were thrown around.
It is.
I mean, they had land based, you know, Asia.
So like it makes sense to the Himalayas.
The Himalayas are in such a large part of Asia.
So like it's there.
It makes total sense like why it is there.
Looking at a recent Animal Kingdom map,
I think it's interesting that if you look at Animal Kingdom from above,
this is sort of at like four o'clock on a watch
and Pandora's kind of at like seven o'clock.
So nicely spaced apart.
You have like the e-tickets far apart,
which is good for crowd control,
like good for crowd disbursement.
Sure.
Wow.
Yeah.
This one has, I think this line is usually the second, well, I guess now third longest.
Although I guess sometimes the safaris get a little long depending on what time of day
it is.
But yeah, I mean, these are, this is a very popular obviously because it's, I would assume
this is one of those things that if you're a family, you've got to go do this one, like
this and the two rides in Pandora.
Yeah.
And this is potentially a family.
This isn't seeming like the most intense coaster.
No, it's not.
I mean, you go...
It's pretty fast.
It is fast.
And you go backwards, and I felt like that rocks you a little bit.
But it's not so crazy.
It's also like...
I forget.
They say it on the special.
It's sort of deceptively...
The mountain is deceptively tall looking the drop is called forced perspective and it makes smaller things look
bigger like that was the one thing about this special i was like oh we're getting a lot of
2006 travel channel narrator mansour mansour's uh yeah the guy that you don't know jack guy
like what do you think this is?
How does this coaster's top speed compare to a dick going, a dick's thrust?
That was just the style of the times.
Did you catch what he said about Rhodey when they first introduced Rhodey in the special?
No.
I forget.
Can you tell by the earring this guy thinks outside the box what if i had an earring that's that's that's
that's pretty wild thinking yeah oh mansers you never did mansers right jason no i never did
anything for mansers that was a little before my time at UCB.
I was starting to fish because when I realized
somebody had Funny or Die,
that their girlfriend or wife was the casting person.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
I was like, is this my in?
Can I start a trip?
But I think it was a little too late.
Oh, you were going to try to be on it. I wanted to be on it very, very badly. But I was not like
I've never been like a pure actor, so there's no reason why I would have
done it. I was just like, what strings can be pulled? Look, I know I'll
be a nerd. I know I don't look like a bro. You just wanted to
be, you wanted to join a carnival sideshow for like one day.
Yeah. You wanted to be one of mr barnum's
freaks for a single 14 hour day for a hundred special dollars i cannot stress to people do
not look up the clip that i'm involved in on mansers do not look it up don't try to find it
i don't think mansers is particularly well archived the I tried to find it the last time it came up. I think it's off. I think it's off the line.
Yeah.
I even, you know what?
I don't think I told you this.
I bought a couple episodes of it.
To try to find it?
I forget why those.
I was like, based on your vague description of what it was, I looked at what were the
topics, but nobody out there is really keeping Mansour super archived.
I was hoping to just run into it and be able to show it to you but i couldn't but i like bought the only place they're
available is on amazon so i piecemeal bought three episodes of mansers now they're it's great
entertainment regardless but i will i'll i'll say this i'll tell you about one that i didn't do
because this person you're mentioning who was casting called me once and she was one of a very nice person and she said all right now you don't you feel free to say no to
this and by the way if people don't know what mansters is it was a show on spike tv where it
would answer like guys questions and it would always be like about shit or sex or piss or like something like a beer you know guy stuff shit piss
sex piss the shit of the dick
like that was everything and so it would be like shit could your dick
piss well hold on scott you got very close to what i was about to say
uh she goes all right now you don't have to so every
segment would be a different question it would be like how much beer could you drink before you died
like would you blow up like a giant balloon like that girl in willy wonka like stuff like that
and it was like she goes all right so feel free to say no to this um but would you be interested in being in the segment can you poop
out your penis whoa and i said thank you for offering no thank you she said i totally understand
don't worry about it oh if i if only my number had been next i would have loved to have uh i don't
know what it would have entailed but the first time i
did it i was uncomfortable so that's why especially i was like not i think i ended up doing like i was
in the background of a bar scene that season okay and you know you made a nice 110 dollars for that
the whole that was it sweet wait wait oh so what was the man sir oh i Oh, I don't know. I never saw the episode. I do know who did it, though.
But it had been turned down by, I think, over 10 people.
Whoa.
I wonder what it would have had.
Shirtlessness, oddly, would have counted me out.
But this doesn't seem like it would require shirtlessness.
It could have.
They found a reason.
There was a lot of shirtless people.
Thank God. If it had been, can you shit out of your nipples, I'm out for sure. Yeah. it could have been they found a reason there was a lot of shirtless people thank god you know if
it had been can you shit out of your nipples i'm out for sure yeah but i think the answer was yes
though i think i did ask i think the answer was yes i don't there would be like well you know
look if a doctor went in there and redirected some some pipe i don't know like i don't know
if that was the answer but it was something like if you had a switch track all law expedition everest if joe roadie went into your intestines well i was
gonna say this is like turning joe roadie's inquisitive eye on trash culture and i would be
i'm curious to ask him like joe what's your poison what's your tread like are you vanderpump rule you
bar rescue what's your what's your garbage like i know you can't just you're not all read ancient
scrolls all day long you gotta have something to cut it with okay we'll see we'll have to ask that's
maybe that's the question number one what's your poison what's your poison joe road yeah i love
ridiculousness i love that was to see a laptop uh elevate laptop built on a giant scale
and to have a man serve as a finger,
stepping from key to key.
Well, you can't argue with that.
I mean, I caught an episode or two of Ridiculous
on cable over the holidays,
and it just bleeds charisma.
I mean, there's one word you're thinking of.
It's very popular.
What's up? I'm Rob Duda and this is ridiculous.
And then like other,
he's like as much as he can make the sounds technically without actually opening his mouth.
And then like,
and then the,
the girl who just cackles,
she's a professional cackler.
I don't think I've ever seen an episode.
I saw an episode.
This is something else.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I really like.
I saw one with one of the new Power Rangers, with one of the Power Rangers
from the big budget movie, Power Rangers.
Oh, which, what, all five are such
mega stars today. They're such, so recognizable.
You can't avoid them.
They're all into their personal exploits.
Anyway, Expedition Everest.
Back to Expedition Everest.
Back to Expedition Everest. We have to find our
trash in Sidetracks, because we just
like this ride a lot. Yeah, we're trying to find the Forbidden Mountains. We have been find our trash in Sidetracks because we just like this ride a lot.
Yeah.
We're trying to find the Forbidden Mountains.
We have been warned off from going near it.
Well, the story that we've missed is that this was a railroad that was like a tea delivery route.
And this isn't a roller coaster.
This is just a train where tea
is moved from place to place but the yeti did not like right the train tracks going through his
his mountain home right so he tore it up or something but now it's back up and it's these two
these two numbskulls norbu and bob uh who are doing they're taking the old T route and they've turned it
into like a tourist thing
and we're all Norbu's
suckers
well just a bunch of Norbu's
yeah I didn't
know that was the narrative when I was
in the line but I don't think that's so important
this is a good optional narrative
I think this is kind of where theme park stories
need to land.
It's there if you want.
Yes.
But if you need to just be changing diapers for the whole...
Right.
If you need to be feeding goldfish to your kids for the whole line, you don't need to know.
You don't need to pay attention to any articles on the wall.
Yeah.
Dad, let's look.
Okay.
What is it?
Roller coaster?
Got it.
Yeti?
Got it.
That's all we need to know.
Well, it also seems like from what I read about this,
as they're researching this,
they found that there is kind of spiritualism,
the right word,
but the Yeti seems to exist as a concept.
I'll post a link to this.
Mouse Planet had this transcript of a talk
Rhodey gave explaining their theory
behind the yeti um the other challenge that we set before us was making the yeti real making a
yeti that could both seem real and be this other yeti the guardian of the mountain yeti so we did
in fact blend both of these ideas into making our yeti most people in the himalayas believe the yeti
is real it's not like bigfoot it is not
something that like six rednecks in a bar think is real and everyone else thinks they're crazy
that is not the yeti when you go to the himalayas wow it's really hard to find people who don't
think the yeti is either real right now or was real a few years ago the yeti is real to these
people that's wild.
So like there is a spirituality,
there's like a,
in the way that American urban legends,
the Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil are just kind of these, you know, stories.
Like it feels like the Yeti holds more significance.
So is the Yeti real?
And how much shit could he piss?
So then they had to not...
How big is his hog?
We really set that up perfectly at the start of the episode.
To talk about the Yeti pig ass dick.
So how big is the Yeti thong?
We asked this gorilla dick expert.
Well, extrapolating from gorillas penis size.
Whoa.
So there's kind of like a fleeting theoretical version of the Yeti,
and then there is a Western version of the Yeti.
Oh, the Yeti is a big monster, a big Bigfoot-type monster,
and they kind of had to make those both make sense together,
like these local stories,
and then translate that for a mass audience. And that's what we're seeing in Expedition Everest.
So like a reverence had to be included.
It could not be some like arbitrary just grr monster.
Although, you know, once you're on the thing he like well you know they ended up they clearly ended up swinging some of this story into matterhorn with the the way that now uh the
matterhole like the the abominable snowman now has more of this component of he's protecting his
mountain right he's not just yelling at you arbitrarily he's being protective or at least
that's how they explain the backstory and that's made a little more clear with the added projection components at the top of the Matterhorn.
Right.
And that's very much the deal.
He's not out for blood.
He's being protective.
If we got to get off and explain it to him in his language, he would understand.
So it makes sense.
He's not a villain.
He's not a proper villain or something.
Yeah.
And there is a logic to the Yeti too because people have tweeted at him it's like why is the
yeti not white and roadie's idea was that like well there's nothing up there there's nothing
at the snow-capped mount most of uh uh the the himalayas are barren and woods and forests
and like there's not food up there.
So it would probably be down,
further down the mountain.
So, and one of the legends
was that the Yeti could be invisible,
which if he was colored like the forest,
he would be invisible.
He would blend into the forest.
So there is like a storytelling element too
to the color of- He's like Predator? Huh? The so there is like a storytelling element too to the
color predator huh the yeti is like the predator i yeah kind of wow that's awesome which begs the
question like boy disney likes to expand their ips and stuff some kick-ass yeti movie sure and
they own do they own predator now with fox oh i think i don't know oh predator versus predator
yes yeti versus predator versus alien because they got alien too yeah yeah time to add a third
freddie and jason they probably i assume they own maybe yeah it might be a different one uh wow yeah
that's interesting what does i have a question does joe rody believe in the Hmm. Oh. I feel like he would give you a little mystery answer.
I feel like he might not answer that.
Yeah, I think so.
He'd give you a little bit of magic.
Which I guess that's what you want.
You spend enough time there.
You consume enough about this.
I would like to know, because I have a minor fascination with Sasquatch and the Grassman,
which is my favorite name for.
I don't know about the Grassman.
The Grassman is like Bigfoot, but I forget what region they call him Grassman.
And there's a whole thing about finding the Grassman on one of these channels.
And it's all like sort of just everyone's got their own regional version of Bigfoot or whatever.
So it is fascinating to know, like, for whatever reason,
this phenomenon has popped up in different parts of the world and
everyone is it's i mean it's like not unlike religion where everyone has their own version
of it but it's interesting i would wonder from a guy like roadie who's been to so many different
places i'm not truly if he believes that the grass man is real but like what has he seen
what has he experienced with all the people like telling him about it i think his theory was that um you know a lot of
these people uh a lot of the different ethnic groups and stuff had moved and some of the groups
had like over you know years and years had migrated from uh uh different parts of asia
and potentially parts where maybe uh the great ape like giant apes may have been around more in the past.
So you,
as stories get passed down the line and as people,
you know,
move from place to place and pass on these stories like there,
you can like the way storytelling works,
you know,
whisper down the line,
you can logic out that like,
oh,
that could be where the Yeti legends came from.
Right.
The Grassman is Ohio, is Ohio specifically.
The Grassman, also known as the Ohio Grassman or the Kenmore Grassman or Orange Eyes.
And then there's like drawings of specifically like this could be the Grassman who looks
kind of more like a...
It looks like Watto.
But then there's more like a it looks like wado uh but then
there's more like a bigfoot type grass man so it is interesting i'm like this truly honestly all
this ip being turned into movie it's just kind of sitting there jersey devil no one's made yeah
the jersey devil that's fun i don't think i know about the jersey devil oh the jersey story the
jersey devil springsteen has a song or was he covering it
the jersey song jersey devil he did i think so i there's a hockey team the jersey devils too
the jersey devil goes a more back to like puritan times where it's like the devil impregnated a
woman he means business the devil impregnated like goody proctor and the child geez is half
beast half demon, half man.
It does feel like a dark universe
of all these characters is called for.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, no one owns these characters.
How big is the devil's sperm?
Is it pitch black?
Maybe it's just because it's older.
It feels like there is more uh more
of a story of the yeti than like bigfoot like i don't know what bigfoot bigfoot just seems like
he's i think there's more bigfoot though than you realize there's more like mythology and stuff like
i think there is that bigfoot at knots soon meet Bigfoot at Knott's soon enough. Oh, it's so exciting, yeah.
So I guess Knott's is getting in on some of this now that I think about it.
But yeah, it makes sense.
Like Yeti, there's probably a longer time
people have had to develop the legend of it,
which makes it loom a little larger, I guess.
Well, and then you have the legend of the Everest Yeti.
Yes.
Which is sort of the big thing about this ride.
And if you aren't privy to this, if you watch this travel channel special, well, it's okay.
So the Yeti, you hear the Yeti.
Then at some point you see a projection, kind of a silhouette of him tearing the track apart.
The whole thing is kind of a chase in and out of the mountain,
avoiding the Yeti, and then you come face to face with him,
and he is a gigantic animatronic
who is meant to swing and swipe at your car.
And in the Travel Channel special, you see the programmer,
and you see Rhodeyie and you see this thing
in action it is unbelievable it is so surreal it looks like animation is it 30 feet tall like is
it 30 feet it's tall something something like that joe roadie is standing next to it and the
scale of the hand right the claw like next to joe roadie's head is staggering. And yeah, it's like, because I hadn't, it stopped working by the time I went on it.
And seeing it in the special was actually the first time I had seen it working in some capacity.
And it is like nothing robot wise I've ever seen.
I don't think anything has come close to being.
I'm trying to think.
So fluid.
So fluid.
And the scope of it it the size of it
the biggest animatronic imagineering ever made and it's yeah it's terrifying like i i almost
you know i obviously want it i want it to swipe at me but i'm saying like oh god i would have been
so freaked out with this giant robot which of course i want it fixed so i can swipe at me
but yeah it's it's terrifying yeah yeah but
at some point and i maybe you guys know the facts i don't i don't offhand but it was pretty quick
into the operation of this thing it stopped working i think it was on and off two years it
was on and off a little bit and then it just stopped something like that i think it was around
2008 maybe um which you know as the recession is starting like disney not exactly
throwing money around on repair work uh at the 2013 d23 roadie said uh it's really hard to fix
but we are working on i was in the room for this at that 223 because somebody i remember somebody
going when is the yeti going to be fixed and he's like yeah i will i will do it you have to understand it's a giant complicated machine sitting on top of like
a 46 foot tall tower in the middle of a finished building so yeah so the the problem with it that
at least how i understand it is that they just for like what they've done now with the navi
shaman of song for instance is you can pull the
robot out if it needs maintenance they cannot pull the yeti out it is built into the structure
of the ride so whatever the problems are with it they would have to shut the whole ride down
and like rebuild the robot or something like it's just it's not easy to repair it in its current state and some
and you can't get to it i bet the disney number crunchers might say look at the line do you see
a problem with this because what they what they did is that they they the yeti is there and the
figure is very impressive but it doesn't really move and they flash lights at it and this is called the b mode or as fans have dubbed it online disco yeti yeah those lights are just flashing on
it and i think the the disney argument is probably like the satisfaction with this ride is still
extremely high if we shut it down for a long time right we aren't eating those people and like
are are people complaining beyond the
fans who actually know right what it's supposed to do uh and i see that argument however now
having watched that i know yeah it's incredible it's incredible we gotta get it going again he's
i know he said periodically like i think maybe i figured out a way to do it but i think like the
problem is is that whatever is not working on it is so bad that I think it needs to like
kind of be replaced,
but you can't take it out of the ride without a massive amount of
construction.
Now,
eventually you'll hit like the 20 year mark or something like 2006.
So we're at like 12,
12,
13 ish years now so eventually you need to do major maintenance
on all these rides and shut them down for an extended period of time and if i had to guess
that would be when they would do it now last summer in july 2018 someone said how about this
yeti which i'm sure joe loves hearing people say like what's the deal with the yeti um uh uh and he literally tweeted we're still working on it and the articles people
writing articles like the yeti is being fixed and it's like he literally said we're still we're
working on it like that's it's like it's are people that hungry for clicks? Yes. I guess so.
And also, like, clicks from how many people?
That's true.
For how many people?
I guess we would click on it.
Oh, good.
They're fixing it.
Yeah.
But, like, anytime he's asked about it, and he's pretty gracious, he's like, yeah, it was an absurd undertaking.
And it's not insane that it went wrong.
It's so interesting to like
these people are geniuses at making this stuff but then there'll always be something where it
was like obviously this was a huge problem because they didn't allow themselves to like have an easy
way to fix it yeah so you're like oh that seems like a crazy oversight among everything else is
perfect in this for whatever reason they didn't figure out how to do this um and then they learn the lesson with a much smaller animatronic which is
the navi one on the river ride but then i don't know if you've heard i've got this from jim hill's
podcast uh is that the problem with that ride now that they're running into is that the both
flight of passage and the river adventure or whatever it's called they're in the same show
building they're on top of each other on top of each other so if the fire alarm goes off on one
they both have to empty the lines so like that's another thing where you're like ah these are
geniuses and then there's this one thing which of course at the time they were probably like oh you
know it'll be so much easier it'll be one one building. And no one ever thought of, like, oh, shit,
when the fire alarm goes off, both buildings have to clear out,
which really is a big pain in the ass.
And people have booked their flight of passage
many months ahead of time.
That's how crazy this thing is.
And people could have been in line for flight of passage for two hours.
And because, like, something went wrong in the other ride.
They have to evacuate the line.
I don't know if there's a system in place of them like.
Giving them something to come back.
I don't know.
But anyway.
It's just interesting to hear.
Like there'll be one crazy oversight.
Everything else is almost perfect.
And then there'll be just one mistake.
Yeah.
Like 5,000 correct decisions.
Right.
And then one.
That they never thought of.
Because they must have been like, oh, this is a great idea.
We'll put them in the same building.
Because when you are doing unprecedented types of... Of course.
I think that's the thing that I really like about, you know, if a movie is having story problems,
you can look at other movies for inspiration.
You know how movies are generally supposed to go and you can or, you know, if a director drops out, you can bring in another director.
Theme parks are every I mean, the really good theme park rides.
Every one of them has never been done before and to some extent will never be done again.
So how do you solve that?
Do you even think of the problem?
Right.
Exactly.
How would you anticipate i mean
and when we're yeah when we're saying like they thought of so many things how do they anticipate
those 500 things that could have gone wrong and they've they're fine with it and then the one
thing yeah it is why it is crazy because yeah ideally when you're building one of these giant
e-tickets it's so original it's so interesting and creative that the amount of challenges we don't even know.
They're not documented.
There are weeks of just somebody going like, oh, shit, you know that thing we thought was going to be easy?
It's impossible.
Yeah.
So let's fix it.
And then maybe that doesn't get documented.
They may even forget about it because there's so many other terrible, impossible things that they've overcome so it would be crazy like to truly get like a log of from start to finish of everything not just like the truncated version
of going oh yeah there's just like a minor problem with the paint for a month right right like because
that stuff must happen all the time yeah like just unglamorous the unsexy problems well you see in
the special that they wanted it to look like there
was snow blowing off the mountain so then the like they had to figure out how to shoot mist
out so it looked like you know snow that was blowing in the wind i gotcha huh yeah uh it's
yeah it's so yeti i've heard like i think he was saying for a while it seemed like they might be
able to just sort of like put a new arm on it or something and like just sort of have the arm
swiping but it would be a different mechanism perhaps yeah but i don't know if that's i don't
know if that's out the window i'm not sure where he's we'll ask him obviously it'll be a 30 minutes
of grilling rodeo on what have you thought about what have you tried here's some ideas we have yeah but like i mean that i i have to imagine it's frustrating that like you you put some like
you said you put so much time and care in all of this stuff and something goes wrong and everyone
just has the same stupid question that they leave so joe we gotta ask when are you fixing that yet
it's like cool you're jet like there were people that tour god bless
their hearts uh the the tour i was watching where the imagineers are showing them all this stuff
there were clearly some uh knowledgeable ish people on the tour who was like i have a very
specific question and the imagineers were like um yeah i i've been working Fantasyland for about five years now, getting that rebuilt.
So I don't quite know the answer to that or like, yeah, answering other people's questions.
So it's like, just if you're in a situation like this, folks, be cool, be cool, play cool.
That's one that I don't, having looked into this issue a little deeper, I think I have sympathy for this whole Yeti issue more than I did when we
started.
And,
you know,
they pulled off an incredible ride and,
uh,
even the Yeti itself is still very cool.
It's just not that one last,
uh,
yeah.
I mean,
it,
I'm trying to think too,
like without the Yeti,
it is still awesome.
Even if you took the robot out and it wasn't ever part of it,
it's like, wow, what a great ride.
But yes, having a fully terrifying 30-foot Yeti
obviously would be the oomph, the thing that really makes you go, wow.
But it'll be such an...
When they do figure it out, it'll be like,
what a juice-up of this thing.
Like when they added the fire effects to Big Thunder,
it'll be really exciting.
Everyone will be...
And then it'll break in six days and then back to square one. They'll have really exciting. Everyone will be, and then it'll break in six days,
and then back to square one.
But they'll have hopefully figured out the system
to remove it or to fix at that point.
Although there'll be another problem
they didn't anticipate.
Possibly.
It's hard now, too,
to take this down for too long
because anything you can do
to draw people away from Avatar
because the lines are still so long.
It would be nice if they open up another e-ticket animal kingdom and then this could go down like that would feel good
but i don't think this park honestly is probably my favorite of the four right now down there
maybe i gotta get down i gotta see it with the new stuff and go on this ride it's all the things
we've talked about it's like this park ages the best.
It's an original park.
Interesting food and drinks.
It's interesting food and drinks.
It's the theming, obviously, off the charts.
It doesn't have weird vacant areas right now, which all the other ones do.
Right.
And even if it does, it would probably obscure them.
Just because it's so filled with trees.
Beautiful foliage.
And, yeah. Um, and yeah,
so I could see if they ever,
they hopefully will,
but I think,
yeah,
that may be in a lot of ways.
This doesn't need it as much as the other parks.
So Everest will probably be open.
I don't know.
I don't know if there's any refurbishment on the schedule.
Yeah.
Um,
probably not before the anniversary,
at least.
Uh,
you know,
we talk,
we were talking earlier,
uh, while we were recording another show about personnel on rides.
The person doing the Yeti roars, the voice actor, I think, has very interesting theme park roles.
His name is Fred Tatasciore.
I am not sure how to pronounce the last name.
His theme park roles, though, include Space Mountain Safety Narrator,
Star Tours The Adventure Continues, he's a Gungan pilot,
and on Guardians of the Galaxy Mission Breakout, he's Baby Groot.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
So Vin Diesel is not Baby Groot.
Apparently not.
He's the only one that didn't
do the voice i guess this says because i think they all are doing the voices or i thought so i
mean not they all obviously the actors are doing their own voices it's not a different voice in
their body yeah that was the credit he also has a lot of you know video game and animation roles
too cool dude why can't i picture the space mountain what are the space mountain safety
is he like the he like the talking head
Cause there's a guy in the Space Mountain
Yeah Q
But I don't know if that meant Space Mountain in Florida
Or Anaheim
And I can't really remember Florida's
Like Space Mountain is a
Whatever when he's explaining it in the video
I wonder
What's that guy who's roaring
Oh yeah the roaring man uh i like a quick thing like we didn't kind of mention is i like uh much
like on splash mountain there's kind of a fake out in the ride where it goes up and then you see
the the train shoot out of it so if you were just looking at the ride kind of like splash mountain
where if you've never been on it before you don't know the geography so you might assume that that car
is going in and then pops right out the side oh i see um in the in the same way that i think
splash mountain and i don't know if this to be a fact actually is that once you go up and around
you see the first drop and i would imagine if you've been on it you've never been on it before
you might think that's the drop oh sure if you were all discombobulated yeah and another being that
other flume rides are just you go up and then you come down right so hiding all of the the stuff
inside yeah and it's the same thing here where it's like all the stuff is hidden and i think
that's kind of on purpose i think it's for sure on purpose because they mentioned in that special
but yeah you would if you looked at it you'd be like okay i see i go up i come out that thing go around the side and that seems to be it but the
whole no stuff is inside you actually they pointed out you spiral up that big to get to that lift
hill you kind of curve up the mountain usually you spiral down on coasters um so yeah both that
and splash mountain like really hide what's inside,
which is awesome.
The other thing I found out,
I thought there was some sea reference.
I'm obsessed with Disney's Society
of Explorers and Adventurers.
I don't think there's any sea references in this line.
I think this was sort of before
they were going whole hog
with the sea references.
Or they were trying to focus on the authenticity of the reality.
So let's add some sea characters to this.
Let's bring it into the universe, make it related so that it is part of the same adventures club and high tower.
Yeah, E. Everest.
What would his last name be?
No, it would be the Yeti.
Oh, the Yeti is a member of Sea?
The Yeti's like the Hulk.
He doesn't come out that often, but when they meet...
Oh, wow.
That's a whole new element to see that there's monsters.
Or it's Bob and...
What was the other?
Norbu.
It's Norbu and Bob.
I'd rather have Yeti than Norbu.
Yeah, Bob and Norbu does not belong in the Adventurers' Garden Sea.
No. not belong in the adventurous car and see no i heard a rumor that the new soren in tokyo will
introduce a new member of sea so how about that for a rumor soren will have more of a story more
of a backstory now yeah because it's different places and then a man named patrick is taking you on a plane ride? Patrick A. Soren. What if it's just the emperor?
Of Japan?
Yes, the emperor of Japan.
What if we tie it together with the emperor's kiss?
My fake attraction.
Another one of your most popular jokes on the podcast.
All right.
I feel like you're not being 100% sincere with these things.
No, no. I am being 100% sincere with these. No, no, I am
being 100% sincere.
Yeah, I think we'll tie
it into the Emperor's Kiss if we were
doing it, but is the Emperor in Society of
Explorers and Adventurers?
No, not necessarily. No, I think
that's a conflict of interest.
Yeah, I think there should be a different club
that he should be a part of. Another Disney
shared universe club.
Heads of state.
Heads of state.
Him, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, Trump.
He's a head of state.
I guess.
All of the Hall of Presidents and the Emperor.
And then who else is a president type in the parks?
I don't know.
Not off the top of my head.
Well, Mayor Jason.
Mayor Jason.
Mayor Jason, the princesses of Erindale.
Yes, I think that's right.
I guess all of the princesses do have jurisdiction.
They're all heads of state in a way.
Right, and they've all been, they all know each other
because we've seen it in canon in the Wreck-It Ralph movie.
So just throw the other characters.
Well, they all know each other online,
but maybe not in real life.
They're like Twitter friends.
Yes, those are all their avatars.
Princess Vanellope did institute Medicare for All for the Candy Crush Kingdom.
So she's done great things.
I mean, everyone needs it.
They're all eating so much sugar.
She's kind of the AOC of the internet.
That's a good way to think about it.
Well, what else? I don't know. It's just so good. The ride is good good way to think about it. Well, what else?
I don't know.
It's just so good.
The ride is good.
We're talking about it.
I'm like, I want to go on it right now.
It's really good.
Obviously, the plus up is have the Yeti's dick swinging around.
That's the plus up they can do.
You talk about separate mechanisms.
You could attach that.
It could be totally disconnected.
Circa Zong is the name of the mythical village that you are visiting in the ride.
Yeah.
The actual location, if you type Expedition Everest into Google, the first result is a Google Maps summary image.
And it lists the Expedition Everest location as Asia, Kisimi, Florida.
Yes, I saw that, too.
That was fun.
Yeah.
Oh, neat.
Does it say like kill him and
jarro or something too or am i thinking no i don't think so but it's no but it's it's uh adjacent to
rafiki's planet watch train which recently closed so i think it might open again though oh really
yeah that's another rumor that's a thing about animal kingdom it is in like the southwest corner
of the property and can feel far away but it's like pretty close to like the southwest corner of the property and can feel
far away but it's like pretty close to like one or two of the hotels yeah and blizzard beach but
from the magic kingdom area it feels far away yes that's true from there but yeah it's if depending
on what hotel you're at it's not crazy out of the way also if you go like two blocks away from
animal kingdom you hit like strip mall you hit like like Papa John's and like a Publix.
Well, and really close to that and Margaritaville.
Like the Margaritaville.
The village is pretty close to Animal Kingdom.
Oh, it's on that?
I thought it was closer to like the other.
I think it is.
Well, when we go on it, maybe this year, all together maybe, we'll look for them if we can see the margarita village
from the lift hill so i'll do my normal look but we'll look for those water slides and the
gas station directly beneath the water slides and uh yeah all the beautiful houses and so the real
plus up we're looking for it's really up to the geography of Florida to give us this, but we want to be able to see some mediocre water slides from this ride.
Yes, that's what we're looking for.
And until then, it won't truly be the experience we're looking for.
Right.
And hopefully it's not exactly in front of us, like on the other side of the mountain.
But we'll see.
Well, this will be an exciting thing to see when we're there.
If we're there, if we go.
It's possible.
Yeah, I'd like to yeah um well we got
expeditions ahead of us uh this we do it's a hell this this was this is a very fun ride and i hey i
just the plus up i want is to go on it i'm really mad i haven't been on it it's uh it's been fun to
talk about it regardless though i did my opinions hold
no weight other than the pictures look very nice uh and uh you survived podcast the ride thank you
for joining us um hey check us out on twitter and facebook and instagram and subscribe to the
patreon at the second gate at patreon.com slash podcast the ride any other specific uh commands
if you if you oddly have a back catalog of mansers um do not scour through every episode and try to
find mike carlson or bar yeah i mean i could tell you what the segment is, but I won't. Maybe one of these days I'll tell you.
But it is, I will say that my parents, I didn't tell them I did it.
And then one night at like 11 or midnight, my dad woke my mom up
because he was just watching TV in bed.
He said, hey, look who's on TV.
And then it was the embarrassing segment.
Oh, come on.
What are you doing?
What did your dad see you do?
Okay.
Yes.
Now, what's interesting now, I wonder if anybody, like, at the end of the podcast kind of, like, stops when they go, okay, wrapping up, podcast to ride, Patreon.
This is for the real heads.
They turn the podcast off.
So it's possible right now half the audience is out.
They're just going to plug their shit, but we're getting a big revelation,
a big twist right at the end.
A big twist at the end.
So my memory is that I didn't remember what it was before.
I knew the pooping penis thing before,
but my memory is just sort of like there's a couple different segments
you can come down and do it.
Well, we'll see on the day.
It's very casual.
And this is the first thing I'd ever been in professionally.
I went there.
I knew.
I'm like, oh, it's a TV show.
They'll have hair and makeup and stuff.
And no, they won't have that.
I got there.
I was wearing like a shitty American Apparel green T-shirt.
That's what I'm wearing on the show.
No one even took a look at me to see because i remember my hair was a little messed up and i was like oh i'm sure though they have a person to fix all that because this is a tv show um and they did
not so i'm sitting in this bar it was uh uh our bar i believe which was is gone now yeah um was it
our whatever who doesn't matter uh it was small shitty bar before
it opened and i'm sitting just sort of in the booth there's a couple other ucb guys i know
and my memory is that the director or somebody goes all right uh you up here and i was like oh
okay and then they walk over here and then somebody tells me that the answer we're going to be
answering today is why should you never get a hand job from a british chick jesus christ
you know this though right no i didn't remember i knew you were anyone i don't think i yeah you
must have told me that um but maybe they all have dirty tames water on their hands. So there's an actress, like a model-y type lady.
Seems nice.
Very made up.
Very perfumed also is my memory of it.
And I am not given a script.
I'm not told anything ahead of time if you've never seen the
show mansers most of what people do are bug their eyes out yes there's a lot of that a lot of mugging
a lot of that so circa 2008 reality tv production i think it's a little better now but the budget
but still one thing has not changed the budgets. Yeah. And the labor unions are not present.
Not present.
I mean, it's a reenactment.
The lines are blurred.
It's hard to say what's going on.
It's in that reenactment zone.
So the director just says, all right, so here's what's going to happen.
And he's just like, you know, believe it or not, if you're picturing who directs Mansers,
that's what he looks like.
Believe it or not, you know, I'm sure.
Brett Ratner?
Yeah, I was going to go with Ratner, too.
100% this man looked like Brett Ratner.
He had a ponytail, also, is my memory of it.
And the kind of weight that is not because you were born stocky.
It's weight from drink.
Yes, it is.
Yes, it's Jack Daniels exclusively.
So my memories, he goes, okay uh so you guys are gonna
make out for a while here and like that wouldn't be comfortable to me like now uh jason is showing
me a picture of a person we know we won't say who it is mugging for a mancers bit uh so i wouldn't
be like super comfortable with that now but i've been on a lot
of sets and that sounds like i'm bragging but like i've been whatever it would be a little bit but
i'm fresh i'm 22 years old 23 years old you don't know that screen actors guild has certain
regulations for like things like that whatever you're supposed to like give people a heads up
or something of what they're gonna be doing is that okay you ask them is that okay or whatever
oh yeah the whole thing is making out yeah there should at least that should
be in the email it should have been in the email it should have been before it should have been
some warning of some kind even just a like a pa walking over hey we need you to make out in a
scene and it is with a human woman not with mini mouse yeah because I would have been fine with it was was a woman I was
comfortable with sure but uh so so my I'm trying to remember exactly this is 10 more than almost
10 years ago um so you tried to black it out yeah it was I was I felt traumatized after service of
erasing this memory so my memory of it is that the woman who was kind
of not next to me at this point kind of on the other side of whatever the bar area um like walked
somewhere and then i saw a person come up to the director on the set and he goes what she she has
to make out with him she's an actress she has to make out with him that's what
she's here to do and like they're like having this conversation and i'm just like standing
five feet away from this i'm like this isn't a thing i'm supposed to keep like obviously she was
like i don't want to make out with this fucking loser weirdo like it was you you were the problem
well obviously the problem was the situation i'm just
saying she probably was like i don't know what the what do we do i don't want to do that i'm getting
120 dollars so he's so frustrated he goes well and then he just like throws up his arms and he
or the other woman maybe both of them leave for a while and i'm just standing like under the shitty lights with the
camera people just like so i don't know what i'm like what like well it got me i don't want to do
this like i know this is a big mistake i don't want to have to like now somebody who doesn't i
don't want to do this either but this person is like saying she's not going to do it and maybe
she has the right idea because you just like this fuck this thing here and she's talked into it now you have yeah right exactly oh this will be great somebody tried to
leave now we get to make out on camera so all that happens is she comes back on set and then he goes
all right all right we're ready to go and i was like what there's no like this did okay is she
gonna do what is gonna happen there's i swear there's no talk
there's no rehearsal he just goes okay so here we go she's gonna be like kissing you guys are
gonna be like kissing and then uh what's gonna happen is she's gonna like mime taking off no
she's gonna take off your belt and then like she's gonna like put her hand it's gonna be out of frame
she's gonna put her hand like down there and then you're gonna smell shit on her hands
because the answer to the man sir of why you should never get a hand job from a british chick
is that british chicks have poop on their hands all of them what mary poppins
yes especially mary poppins uh she's got shit in that purse. She's got shit in the purse. When she's reaching in, what do you think's happening?
So, yeah.
This is...
Trump is our punishment for this.
For sinning for the culture at large.
The cocky empire we all lived in.
Chickens coming home to roost.
Yeah, so...
So, yeah, the answer...
I guess this was based on some survey they took where there was more fecal matter on British ladies' hands.
I don't know.
They did an unrelated survey of British women and all the survey slips came back covered in shit.
Hmm, maybe this is something to invest in.
Overwhelmingly.
Next time we do a survey in England.
Soaked in shit.
Now, I want to know.
Just paper soaked in shit.
Because it seems like two directors directed most of the answers.
We're not going to say their names.
Now, I'm not going to say their names.
You can look it up.
I want to know if it was the director who went on to work on House Hunters International episodes.
I don't know.
Or the director who went on to direct something called American Guns.
There could be a good movie or something called American Guns.
No, it's a television show about guns.
Okay.
All right.
Well, we'll see.
Maybe those aren't the people.
Maybe those aren't the people.
Welcome to American Guns.
So this one's 500 bucks.
This one's cool as hell.
So what happens is there's no like,
we don't talk it over what we're going to do.
There's no time to talk it over.
She just appears back on set.
The director goes, okay, let's roll.
Let's do this.
And I'm just so freaked out.
Because I'm like, what am I supposed to do?
No, that's not a healthy environment
that's not a safe but any of any sets where someone feels unsafe that's bad so i freeze up
uh and the woman comes in because like at first she was also the whole a lot of the
these great scenes and skits would be a very like nebbishy nerdy guy and like a hot shit like a beer
commercial lady or something and that was this instance so it was like she's gonna be like the
aggressor so i i swear we did maybe two takes it might have been one take she like walks up to me
very half-assly like puts her hands on my chest and pushes me into the
wall a little bit and then just puts her head by my neck and just kind of goes up and down yeah
okay that's how you fake it that's how you cheat it like well sure it is but i didn't know i also
like this doesn't this looks weird it can't look real but i'm still
trying to be like oh i like my face like i like this but this also again i want to stress that
this all happened within minutes so i haven't had a chance to recalibrate i'm also very young and
scared or whatever so she's like her forehead's like hitting my neck or whatever and i'm like and i'm like this must be terrible
and then she like does the belt and then i have to be like like i have to make like a terrible face
and i now that i think about i think we did it twice and it just i sat down and i was like oh
my like it just felt i had i felt violated i felt like really fucked up about
it uh because it was just so weird like it was just you felt like loss of control obviously
nothing really bad happened to me it was just such a mind fuck of an experience that very
extremely tense set yeah yeah so like i sat down i was like oh my God. And then a person we know was there and he's like, hey, how was that?
Like that is pretty fun, huh?
And at first I thought the person who said that was like sympathizing with me.
Years later, I realized he was like, oh, pretty good, huh?
Well, well.
And I won't say who that is either.
Jason. You will when we stop recording i sure will but then to bring it back around you're trying to bury this from your memory and from anyone
knowing about it yeah but your dad sees it so years later huh yeah i don't even tell them they
re-ran this show yeah for years that was the thing i wanted to do it and and strangely now i i realized this would have been
terrible to do uh but i but by the time i i probably watched it in 2010 watching three years
old episodes of mansers were you going to spring it on me in an in a specific way like on a podcast
or something or you just wanted to see it when you were looking for it i don't i just wanted to see
i don't know there was no sneak attack.
I've seen it because we know other people who've been on it,
and I've like, oh, shit, that's so-and-so.
Jason's going to look it up again.
I think I've searched in the last year or two,
and it used to be able to, like, you could see it on the Spike TV website.
Because the big thing that you need to know,
that I needed to know at the time was this is non-union,
and there's no thing that says they can't run it forever so that's so cool so you're getting taken advantage
of yes it's a tent set where you're being barked at and made to mate out with strangers without
asking if it's okay right or even a time just a minute to talk like oh hey preparation or reversal
anything no nothing um but you're but this is on
tv and it's on tv so yeah a couple of years in because i think i i'm trying i don't remember
the even the year might have been 2009 it might have been 10 years ago but yeah i think like in
2011 or something my mom called me and was like i I was sleeping in bed, your dad was watching TV, and he woke me up, he goes, hey, look who's on TV.
And I think my mom just did one, like a very mom thing of like,
it was interesting, or it was okay,
and didn't say what it was.
And I was like, oh my God.
Because I was hoping they hadn't seen it,
because, you know, I didn't say anything about it,
and it's really two minutes or something.
Have you found it?
Well, I haven't found the video, but I found that they were talking about it on the Bungie message boards,
the software company, and also the website I have heard about before, bodybuilding.com,
was also talking about this.
Yeah, that's a web.
A source of some very odd internet paraphernalia.
I'm sure it'll be like repackaged somewhere.
Okay, great.
All the mansers,
and it'll show up on a streaming service somewhere.
Oh, that'll be a big deal.
Well, hopefully Disney Plus.
Some merger will occur.
Oh my God.
Well, if you stick around past the credits,
you really got a nice treat here today.
What an epilogue to this episode about a very nice
wow i'd also like to say that the yeti museum was curated by professor pima dorji uh just to get us
back on track okay and now we can say you've survived podcast the right expedition everest
edition and only expedition nothing else weird on this episode.
Yeah, no bizarre upsetting confessions occurred.
I liked that.
That was like a little Andy Cohen after show.
Yeah.
We got into some salacious stuff now that you're loosened up.
I would love it if we all took turns being the bartender on Watch What Happens Live.
If this show got us to be like, you know.
Well, maybe we'll be like, we could be on the network with andy coleman and we'll follow him we'll do a show we'll do a theme
version of his show but it's all theme park hey jacks what do you jacks from vanderpump what do
you think of uh dumbo yeah which way which row we talking in in Credit Coaster, huh? Yeah, yeah.
Are you a fifth row guy or more than eight?
That sounds like a good piece of television, right?
Yeah, it'll be interesting.
I'll say that.
All right.
Hey, now we've done it.
Hey, I already said all the stuff.
You know what to do.
All right.
Hey, if you have any questions, we'll try to give you answers on our Twitter.
Hit us up.
All right, folks.
Talk to you next time.
Goodbye.
Bye.
Forever Dog.
This has been a Forever Dog production.
Executive produced by Mike Carlson, Jason Sheridan, Scott Gairdner, Brettehm Joe Cilio and Alex Ramsey
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