Podcast: The Ride - Frontierland with Dennis McNicholas

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Dennis McNicholas (SNL, Batman: The Audio Adventures) joins us for an wide-ranging look at Frontierland. Featuring pack mules, tall tales, the Western River Expedition, and the Big Thunder Mountain script Dennis wrote for Disney. PTR Post Office (No Mike) episode up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: http://foreverdogpodcasts.com/plus 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. Warning, partner. This here episode may whisk you back to a rough and tumble time when there was nary a podcast in sight. You may encounter Western rides that were never built, a Big Thunder movie that was never made, and a plan involving Main Street that should probably never be attempted. SNL's Dennis McNicholas joins us for a rootin' and possibly tootin' tribute to Frontierland on podcast This Here Ride. Welcome to Podcast The Ride, a theme park podcast hosted by three men who would gladly pay a premium to drink bottled water dredged from the rivers of America. I'm Scott Gairdner, joined by Mike Carlson.

Hello. I am here. Yes. If they could, I wish, it's sad that Disney Store is going away because I do feel like that was the spot for niche products like this for theme park fans. But they had done such mass marketed, you know, Marvel stuff, Star Wars stuff. They weren't really doing like dirty pirate water, dirty splash mountain water. I know't call it dirty but you know what i'm saying yeah yeah yeah we would have that would have been the street terminology but yeah you can't say that on the shelves

of course even just like vials and they could like like holy water type thing like where you just kind of bless yourself with the water of pirates of the caribbean for somebody in the midwest who doesn't get to the parks a lot. Yeah, it's just, it's a little, it's a little splash maybe to wake you up in the day. It's like a cologne and it gives you the confidence that you'd been on one of these rides. Cologne as a whole, that's another, I don't want to get us off on a tangent,

but that's a whole nother market they haven't even smelling like these places. Jason Sheridan, are you on board with this line of products? I would have loved to have a bottle of Rivers of America water, which comes with a certificate of authenticity and also Legionnaire's disease. Like, you get like three. You gotta get it Sunday.

You know, you gotta get it Sunday. Of course, discovered in Philadelphia. Discovered at a big Legion conference at an old hotel in Philadelphia. Is that what it is? And Legionnaire's equal? It was a Legion? What is a Legion conference? It was a Legion. legion conference at an old hotel in philadelphia is that what it is and the legionnaires equal it was a legion what is it was a legions an american legion uh really like yeah i didn't know that and they found it in the the air conditioning system wow and then they gifted the world of famous disease yeah man hometown pride i guess for you for that hometown pride for the legionnaires

disease cream cheese legionnaires heads and yeah a great disease um now what what what neck of the woods year-wise is that because his legionnaires disease a product of the the era that the land today is tributing um eight seventies i think so there was certainly like activity going on in in the land you know a lot of change a lot of change going on 70s not 1970s uh no in 1970s oh this isn't an old timey thing uh it hasn't been named that well now i'm gonna i'm gonna have to look into this i have no idea i'll check back in in about an hour as I go down this rabbit hole. Go do some separate research while we pull the wagons up to today's topic, which is Frontierland. It's an episode all about Frontierland and about Frontierland's past, the Frontierland that never was, how it stands today, and the future.

A future which is, in a way, in question. Like, will there be a Frontierland again? Will new rides be built in the Frontierlands we have? This is all the stuff we're going to discuss, full deep dive, and we're doing it with a fantastic guest. So happy to have him. He is an Emmy-winning longtime writer for Saturday Night Live. He is the current producer of Weekend Update

and the writer-director of the podcast Batman The Audio Adventures, which is about to come out very soon on HBO Max. Dennis McNicholas is here. Hello. Hi, thanks for having me, you guys. Of course, thanks for doing it. No, I wanted to do this for a while. Oh, fantastic.

So happy you could. Because, full disclosure, I mean, you know, doing this podcast and, you know, kind of having ears out for who is a theme park fan in the world of comedy. Uh, um, it's having spoken to you, uh, uh, to, to a big extent for a number of years now, I can't, I'm not, I feel like you're one of the top theme park nerds in the comedy world, I have to say. I can't, it's hard for me to think of somebody with a vaster wealth of knowledge. Well, you wouldn't probably

want to meet that person, I'm suspecting, because any more, and well, actually, it's you guys that I admire, because the one time I went to the park with you guys, you know, I have been along with showbiz people before who got VIP treatment. But, like, you guys were, like, operating on street level. Like, you were talking to cast members.

And it was like, it really was like, it was Hucky baron and ally type stuff you guys were executing and i was all about it we went on the um we went on the very first day the rise of the resistance resistance yeah yeah you remember this for that yes indeed and i'm really glad i was because you guys took care of us yeah i think it took seven or eight of us refreshing apps But we ended up doing it because we had a man on the inside like we would have gotten it but not till like 9 p.m 5 a.m. Because we didn't know how it's gonna work. So yeah, it did take us to do it within any reasonable amount of time We did have our man on the inside. I don't know if machinations. Yeah, there were some yeah There was standing around waiting some a lot of whispering i feel like as well like are we gonna get to do it or so maybe

if we go over here like there's a lot i'm not i didn't have a carton of cigarettes to exchange for it but it felt like i did it felt like that was the deal i was making like i slipped a prisoner a bunch of cigarettes and we got to ride rise of the resistance earlier than we would have uh normally so we're the uh i guess we're big in the disneyland underground is what you've taught us yeah i i love that too because that makes i sometimes i am worried we're like because we're talking about the park and we get to go a lot we feel like we're elitists but that just that says we're not i don't think so at all i think you guys were operating you it was it was populist uh parks bulan king i think well thank you i i really that makes me feel good that makes me feel well uh authentic i guess wow yeah yeah credibility uh uh much appreciated but like uh but as i as i was

saying dennis let's not you know undersell uh your wealth of disney knowledge which i feel like if you have a, I mean, there's a thousand things you could have talked about on the show with us, but it feels like your major in general is well, like, well, I mean, there's Frontierland and everything, but it also like you, you grew up in Florida, you were in Disney world in the seventies, a lot like, like early, the first 10 years of Disney world, I feel like, is a passion area for you. Yeah, I love it. And I was there as a child, as a young child.

I probably made it, my first visit was probably in 75. I was three. And I probably went once or twice more before 1980. And so dim memories. And they did away with so much of that stuff. You know, it's sort of, Scott, you and I have talked about how they had real ambitions of being a cosmopolitan adult retreat,

you know, the vacation kingdom of the world. Oh, yes, your boats and your water skis and your top of the world club. And yeah, the white dinner jacket, carved prime rib at your table and all that stuff. And they figured out what people were coming for and then the Eisner thing. And you guys know more about this than I do, I'm sure.

But all of that lost sort of 70s leisure, I absolutely love about the Florida property. You look at those pictures is unbelievable it's so the brochures uh it's so many of the pictures from those brochures of that era are not families it's young fit couples that look like they've either just made love or about to go pack up to go back to the room to make love. No question. You know, I was just at the Disneyland Hotel, and I love that if you sneak back by the convention center and where the steakhouse is,

they've got a big photo collage of the history of the hotel and everything. And yes, from the 60s, uh my girlfriend and i uh focused on a one shot that was two women and a man playing cards and smoking cigarettes in a hotel room at the disneyland hotel and i mean it looked nothing so much like an adventurous marriage it is like that like in the old days we've've talked about this, like, you know, it was date night at Disneyland, which was like the high end adult crowd. Like, I feel like they get these like once every so often they get it. Because even I think Pleasure Island, you would say, is the 90s version of that, of like, we need to get adults. We need to make this place cool.

It's obviously 90s cool and not like smoking a cigarette in the 1950s cool, which is the ultimate cool. But it is interesting. They haven't had it. Disney Springs is the closest they've had for a while where it's just like, let's make a uniform shopping center for people. But that's far less cool than any of the other things we were just talking about. Well, that's what, you know, adults with disposable income like now.

They like gastropubs and Uniqlo. That's true. You're right. Tastes change. That's a good point. So I guess they're on point. They're catering to, yeah, yeah, the current era. But, like, yeah, the days are gone of the giant Jell-O molds with grapes in them

and with, like, ranch dressing for the jello molds that's kind of thing that just that way people ate in the 70s uh like high-end 70s dining and it seemed like disney world was was front and center another thing to bring up dennis but it was while you're here uh um you know to give you a platform to do so because we've talked about episodes that you could do and i like that you you proposed something that felt like on the more obscure end, even for us, and I want to give you the platform to say anything you want about it, which is the Columbia Harbor House, the restaurant at Disney World, which not to preclude a full episode that could come.

I absolutely will talk about the Columbia Harbor House, and I can kind of bank it into the Frontierland conversation. Oh, yeah, they're very close. Yeah, yeah. Square, just off of the Haunted Mansion exit queue and all that stuff, right on the border of Liberty Square and Fantasyland. And it's got so much real estate. It's a counter service restaurant, but it's got like nine dining rooms, and it is loaded with nautical antiques of the sort that you know that in sometime in the 70s they just pulled a truck up to someplace in Maine and just put every anchor and ship's wheel that they could

find in the place and sold yeah and they just piled it all in there. And from what I can tell, it remains popular. But to me, and this came up kind of recently when they opened the Skipper Canteen for the table service restaurant in Adventureland. Adventureland. Yes. And I thought, oh, well, this is really interesting. They're branching their rides out into restaurants. And I immediately thought of Columbia Harbor House because it's adjacent to the Haunted Mansion.

And it's ridiculously large and could be easily outfitted as a table service restaurant if they wanted to make a Haunted Mansion themed restaurant. And, you know, they wouldn't have to change it much. It's all old and 19th century and nautical, and they've got the space for it and everything. And to bank it into the Frontierland discussion, I was talking with a cast member around that time and saying that it was a great idea to sort of expand rides into the restaurant space into the more completely immersive

and interactive type environments. And they said, yes, there was a rumor that there was going to be a haunted mansion restaurant amongst the cast members but it wasn't going to be columbia harbor house it was going to be on the back island behind tom sawyer's island and you were going to take a water launch from the keelboats the defunct keelboat landing, which used to be able to take little watercraft called the Mike Fink keelboats. Oh, we know all about the keelboats.

We learned about Mike. Fire-prone keelboats. Exactly. So the keelboat dock remains completely functional from what it looks like. And the rumor was you'd take a little launch from there to the back of the Fort Wilderness Island, or the Fort Langhorne

Island, and there would be a restaurant out there and you'd have an interactive experience and so on and so forth. I think that's probably never going to happen. That doesn't sound like the sort of thing that they uh would you know you know volunteer for the trouble of but uh right but the reason that it fascinates me is that island is huge and there's nothing on it uh except at the very front of it they've got the you know the replica fort and uh i can't even picture the space you're

talking there's a secret island in disney world well yes okay so tom sawyer island is really two islands um there's the front island that has all the the caves and the um uh you know the uh the windmills and so on and so forth. Then you go at the back of it, you take a bridge out to a second island, and at least in Florida, there's a fort. There's like a log-like fort, like Frontier Fort out there. And there used to be a companion, the same thing in California,

and it's still out there, I think, but you can't get out there anymore, and I think the structure is condemned. But yeah, if you look at a map, there's this vast second island behind Tom Sawyer Island in Florida, and there's nothing on there. It's just woods, woods, woods. And over on the left side of it, I guess they have some show pieces for the um for the riverboat and stuff like like the burning cabin and and stuff like that uh oh sure sure there's a perpetually burning cabin that

they used to point out but which which also brings up like all of the fun of of frontierland or all these things that are just do not fly anymore. It's just exploding whiskey stills and, you know, stagecoaches getting attacked by vengeful locals and things. I mean, it's just

hard to entertain around the subject. Yeah, it's a more it's like by its nature and subject matter, a very like rough and tumble world for sure um i mean uh just to start to get into it a little bit because i was looking up like what was frontierland like in 1955 and i was struck by the like sort of like I mean, it was the Wild West in a lot of ways. It feels like it was like kind of undeveloped, like a lot of it was just field initially at Disneyland in 55, like some greenery a little. But like that wasn't the I feel like a lot of original Disneyland was just here's a vaguely themed field or a non themed field. And we just gave it a name,

which is I think literally what they did with the Matterhorn space before it was the Matterhorn, just like holiday Hill. That's something right. Sure. Close enough. Um, but it feels to me like Frontierland initially was like, was just kind of dirt. And then it wasn't like a, there eventually was the mine train through nature's wonderland which is a more organized ride but initially what you had is just like mules and horses running around um who like i mean of course look there's there's there's pony rides a place we know this stuff but it seems like very strongly notoriously in early frontier land it was just mules like peeing and shitting like constantly all day

and they would just like get mad they would kind of buck guests off of them they would like just stop in the trail and their only solution to that was like a guy having to come out and yell and like so truly it was like a extremely like just like all yeah lawless is a great word yeah just in a land that that kind of didn't work but if you're after a wild west experience then uh that's what it gave you i think in addition well i i think when we first started talking about this i was like yeah it is interesting to think about that like Westerns at the time were like one of the biggest things in popular culture. Like my dad was born in the early fifties and he's like,

he still loves frontier land because it's like, it's his equivalent of me walking into Marvel superhero Island and islands of adventure because it's just like, Oh, well giant Adam Kubert art will just, just imprinted on me at like 10 to 12, and that just hits different, you know? Right.

It's just what hit me at the most impressionable age, and, you know, the Davy Crockett stuff, and all the cowboy shows and movies and all, like, they were the Marvel movies of their time. Extremely, and like the most like extremely relevant right then davy crockett was brand new and a giant phenomenon on television and the song was a hit song which kind of strikes me funny that that all in general that like disney had chart-topping hits with like davy crockett and who's afraid of the big bad wolf these were these were big pop

songs at the time uh uh it's hard to imagine something so like novelty being or like a song like a nonsense song that the minions sing uh like if a minion speak song topped the charts it would be a little strange yeah but like but the Sherman Brothers are the equivalent of like Dua Lipa or whoever's popular. Chain smokers, yeah. They were probably genuinely chain smokers, but not just in name, like these fake chain smokers. 100% they were chain smoking, yeah, for sure.

But that's a question Dennisis is like were you like i like were you were you fond of of westerns or of any of this like disney material that kind of fueled the original frontier land you know it's interesting because i my father was is a little older than that and likewise huge westerns fan as a kid he actually rode horses and stuff so he was a little closer to it but like when he was before he was before he could ride real horses he would sit on a fence rail and pretend he was you know riding a horse and it was just like all he wanted was boots and six shooters cap guns and all that stuff and I'm not an expert on it, but from what I gather, that was, you know, like Mike TV and Willy Wonka

wearing the cowboy hat and all that, watching his Hopalong Cassidy or whatever it was. I think it was that way until Star Wars, which displaced cowboys. Because, for example, I was born in 72, and Star Wars was out in 77. And so I was five years old, and the cowboys never really took root. I can remember being very young and having some of that stuff pushed on me. But basically, from the time luke skywalker on there was just no western presence whatsoever but you had it hanging on

and all that stuff and everyone i knew knew the knew that song the davy crockett theme song for example i'm sure i never saw an episode of davy Crockett as a kid, but that was still around there enough. And you still read Tom Sawyer. That was pushed on you at the school library and stuff like that. So the stuff remained... It didn't seem odd as a kid that we had this stuff. And at least in Florida, they opened Big Thunder in 79 or 80, and then you still had Country Bear,

which is still there. You had all the Tom Sawyer stuff, and then the Shooting Gallery, and it felt like it had its thing going on. Whereas nowadays, I don't know it the reason I wanted to talk about this today is that it's all about the real estate in these parks for me and what they can do with the space that they have and this is just a big chunk of real estate that they've got all over the world. And they're just, they have no properties that,

um, no, no outside properties that they've grafted on. And then the country bears and stuff that they have, they're not interested seemingly in, in promoting. So, you know,

they've got an opportunity and, you know, I've got ideas. Sure. Sure. I, are you aware? Wait, we'll cut this if we, you can't talk about it, you know, I've got ideas. Sure, sure. Are you, wait, we'll cut this if you can't talk about it, but like you have made attempts at trying to like revive, like do something in the frontier land mythos.

So a very long time ago now i think probably 2007 it was around the time uh it was before the pirates sequels had come out but it was after the black pearl had come out i went in and uh i because subsequently uh i became a fan of like spaghetti Westerns, uh, you know, as an older film watcher. And, uh, you know, for my money, like good,

the bad, the ugly as a comedy, it's really funny. Uh, and it's got comedy set pieces just all throughout its length. And, um, I,

I saw a, a cowboy flavored Jack Sparrow adventure set at Big Thunder Mountain. And I happened to go into the Disney executive that was meant to hear this pitch because he had a gigantic

Italian Once Upon a Time in the West Sergio Leone poster there. And Once Upon a Time in the West was actually what I was basing it on to a large extent. And so it was the perfect meeting to have. It just worked out perfectly. And I got to write the movie. They bought the pitch and I got to write the movie. And then that was the end of the happy story.

Because subsequently, there was interest and things look good but uh uh the lone ranger and jerry bruckheimer came along the lone ranger which like as far as disney attempting to do anything western today didn't work then and now it is like the most cancelled movie on multiple levels continues to be cursed who knows what while we're recording this two other things about it now are problematic i'm sure random guys in the background have been tweeting unsavory things the only more cursed things are that Phantom of the Opera set where people just kept getting hurt

at Universal Studios backlot and that Crow movie. Like, those are the most... The other most cursed. The Crow. The Crow, yeah. The Crow. I couldn't remember

if it was the first one or the sequel, but yeah. And the Spider-Man musical. That one, yeah. Well, yeah. i you know from a certain angle we were blessed with that but um yeah no some people would describe it as curse some people who might still have hospital bills might describe it as spider-man themselves yeah jason feels the injuries were worth it actually is what he's saying

to get that song to get that letterman performance it's reasonable sacrifices but so okay so that came along and killed them but this is this is kind of wild that you're i'm glad you're willing to to talk about it i know the non-disclosure agreement end of it but that you wrote no you wrote a some idea of what big thunder man the movie is i did i wrote the i did two drafts of a screenplay and believe it or not this was um before iron man and i wrote it for robert downey jr when he uh he let me put it this way i pitched robert downey jr to the studio and they said how about vince vaugh? So that's where everyone's career was at that time. But I had in mind Robert Downey with a big push broom mustache and sort of being a sarcastic, cantankerous, rascally Jack Sparrow

in a cowboy outfit, basically. And we had some, um, we had some cursed gold in there as well. It was sort of a different deal, but, the magic gets loose and the dinosaur skeleton comes to life, uh,

from the, uh, from the ride and everything. And yeah, yeah. Oh, that's skeleton. Yeah.

Oh wow. So that's like embedded in the mountain and then it starts running around, peels loose. And, wow. So that's like embedded in the mountain and then it starts running around? It peels loose and like, it was like sort of an adobe dinosaur. It still sort of had the rock and the petroglyphs and all the Native American adornment and stuff. And I think it could have really been a, it would have looked unlike any other dinosaurs in the movies, but it had all that fun. My pitch was they still make Westerns, but they have completely stopped making the sort of Saturday matinee Westerns,

the family adventure, you know, Indiana Jones, but with cowboys. And I said, let's get back to that if they if the kids want to dress up as pirates now which was something i think all of us didn't have as a kid people playing pirate that wasn't uh oh that's true yeah that if they can manufacture that out of nowhere then why not sort of yeah find something new in the Western mythos to dredge up? I think it's possible. And I think all the thrills are there from any of these kinds of movies. And anyway, I had my shot and maybe it'll come back around someday.

But, you know, I had all the fun characters in there. There was a young inventor and, you know there was a evil industrialist and all the fun stuff it was good can i ask uh if the goat was the goat of the dynamite what was 100 we had the goat in there it was great okay i'll tell you since it'll probably never see the light of day the gag was the hero is tied up in the mines and he goes he's his hands are tied behind his back with rope and he goes over to the goat wanders in and he goes over to the goat and tries to get the goat to chew his bonds off but when he turns around the goat's got the dynamite in his mouth and then he's like no no no no no and the goat backs away and knocks over a lantern

and lights the fuse and so then we've uh we've got tnt action for the yeah that's great great yes the mischievous nature the way like there is an error to that goat like it knows what it's doing or like you question is that yeah is it somehow aware so you're kind of playing with it that's pretty great yeah so you know and then it just there's there was uh in the florida version at least of big thunder you know there's the town scene with the flash flood it's it's all more articulated i feel like in a narrative sense in florida because and again and again, I'm not an expert on this, but I think they, didn't they graft it onto a mine train and through nature's wonderland in, in California. Like a lot of the real estate.

Yeah. Is, is from that ride. Yeah. The little town. Yeah. The little town was part of the old ride, right?

Is that? I think that's, yeah, I believe so. Maybe it might have even predated there being a ride that might be like 50s even pre-mind train i see like griffith park uh mini train uh type thing yeah yeah i just those little flats and i think people were fond of and it made sense within within big thunder uh um i i guess i you know one more thing to ask about the the movie but because now some of this oh i guess the creation of this would have been after i think at the time there was no barnabas t bullion the uh the character who resembles tony baxter who is like the supposed owner of the did you in some other way define

who is doing who is doing, who is doing the mining operation? Like, was that up to you? Like you, you could have maybe defined it, uh, uh,

pre Barnabas. I, well, that's interesting. There was no other than the original Imagineers notes, which made, um, which made reference to,

to their being cursed gold in the mountain and that the mountain thundered when you stole the gold. That was all I knew, really. And other than that, I went around the ride and wrote down names and stuff that are used in the theming and stuff.

I just spun stories out of that. So I actually don't even know about the... i know that there have subsequently been comics and and other things that have elaborated on big thunder but i gotta be honest i don't know what they are so you know if this is part of that sea stuff or that's exactly it is yes okay i you know i i should know and i don't uh all that stuff but i noticed you guys did a whole show on it which i'm looking forward to listening to uh we sure did we broke it down we know too much now we know barnabas and his friend jason chandler

and uh various i think like there's like parrots and monkeys that are members of c it's not entirely human uh we know too much now yeah it's the most uh it's one of the most impenetrable podcasts we've done it does have you guys had the uh opportunity to go to the skipper canteen in florida because that you know that that seems like ground zero for that mythos. I don't know much about it, but that whole thing looks like it was constructed to tell that story. Yeah, it has a room specifically for C. I was really building it up in my mind about how awesome... I think it's cool, but I was building it up as some like amazing thing with like secret rooms, like a secret room.

And then there's like a glass case with fezes in them. And that's kind of the biggest, coolest part of it where you're like, Oh, I know that's Dr. Albert falls is fez. And you're like, very nice.

Yeah. So it's cool. But yeah, it's not Magellan'sans i think in tokyo disney sea is the much more elaborate cool version of like their hangout so i think that's the place where you might the promise might be realized interesting yeah i get yeah like so you're starting to see you're aware of of c and it is this mythology that's meant to tie together not just you know like

there's frontierland rides in there but a lot of adventure land obviously and you know um even i think in the eventual show of it it seems like the matterhorn will be connected to it um so it's a way to tie together anything that's sort of like older adventure based or whatever but were you like in your head was your attempt at a big Thunder movie like because you've talked about it, like maybe like wanting to light up all of Frontierland in terms of relevance by by starting there? Was it possible to you that then it like there's like you're building some kind of Frontierland expanded universe that ties in even the restaurants or the Golden Horseshoe or somehow the bears are part of it too if the if the bears could possibly be part of the same mythology as robert downey jr the uh cocksure cowboy absolutely i i had a you know an idea that uh for making the big thunder thing into a trilogy that actually was going to culminate in um a subject that you guys might

know about uh it was going to be a play on the winchester mansion yes yeah the the the elaborately built uh um the insanely built mansion that was made to house the ghosts of those who were killed by the Winchester rifles. And it was going to be sort of, I was going to go through the weird West. And sort of that was going to be it, because that's sort of my bag. But it was going to be the folktales, ghost stories, and basically all the folklore of the West, the campfire stories, tall tales which they've already got, you know, in

Florida they got the Tall Tale Cafe Pecos Bill Tall Tale Cafe, which I had the opportunity to have a closer look at recently and they've got a lot of theming in that, they've got, lot of theming in that they've got you know little the idea is that all of pegas bill's tall tale friends gifted him um mementos to decorate

the uh cafe so you've got a giant axe um from paul bunyan that's like signed to my friend Pegas Bill on the handle and stuff like that. But it had like Zorro and then even things like Annie Oakley. And it really ran the gamut of all the sort of colorful characters of the West. And, you know, you definitely could put something together for that. The problem is just the idea of taming the frontier is, is pretty gnarly. And in all respects, you know,

there's, there's just, it's like neither taming the land nor subjugating the, the locals, you know, are, are things we, we,

we care to celebrate anymore. So it's problematic. That's why I thought you go to stories and folklore and uh and we all know ghost stories and campfires oh sure so if it's it's more the wild west of the imagination and this exaggerated like the the tales they told uh not the real people who were probably did not probably who were bad bad things but things you don't want to celebrate worker yeah it wasn't like deadwood meets big thunder mountain yes the pitch the blood meridian the uh no country for old men disneyland's disneyland's no country for old men right The Golden Corral is full of prostitutes.

There's just no way around it. It has to be the case. It's funny you say the Winchester Mystery House because that's, it seems like you were ahead of that too because then isn't, correct me if I'm wrong, everyone. Mystic Manor is based sort of on the Winchester Mystery House. I believe. The Disney Dish podcast has been discussing it recently because

like walt and i think it's ken anderson one of the early imagineers went to the winchester mystery house and just kept taking tours all day once just as they were coming up with how to do a haunted house so like and how first off how do people behave in this environment uh in like a walking tour and then also how do they react to like ghost stories and hauntings and that sort of thing so it's been alive in the company for many many years it's been i guess it's probably influenced every haunted house they've made any haunted mansion and mystic manor and everything like that yeah i think i think it was very early um you know roadside attraction kind of like uh uh ghost story roadside attraction sure sure sure well

it seems like that's where because like some of in talking about frontier land uh uh it like yeah where it stands currently is like it's it's all sort of the lead up to big thunder mountain. That's in, in all of them, at least in the first four part in the, the American ones in Tokyo and Paris. Um, and then it's like,

and, and we're not like, it's all been light in new attractions for sure. Since about 1980 or even before, I mean, the frontier lands always been sort of an attraction light area. It more about but the vibe um but like yeah it they've basically they've kind of like stopped doing them like shanghai does not have one and then hong kong disneyland opened without one and now there's kind of an equivalent which is the whole area is called Grizzly Gulch, I believe.

Okay. Which is where this, it's, and I don't have the name ready to go, but what is their grizzly ride that's sort of like Big Thunder? Oh, right, right. It's called the Big Grizzly Runaway Mine Cars. Mm-hmm. So pretty good at spelling out what it does and then paris has the frontier land uh which is the thunder mesa town that ties together the story of phantom manor and all and they also have uh the legends of the wild west show has been going since the mid 90s there so it

it's interesting to see how the wild west is presented at the disney parks internationally yeah it's kind of like catered to like the the place where they're building the park and what is the awareness of even any of that like uh in tokyo there's the thing that they don't really know the word frontier that doesn't mean anything to them so it became western land it's completely changed there um but i guess i guess what i'm getting at is like it's like for there to be anything else in this area for disney that they have to go more fantastical it's got to be here's a weird like mine car situation where bears are causing havoc uh to your right or like is is mystic manor in their version of frontier land or is that its own i i

don't think i know probably what land it's in no it is not okay okay i don't think it is which is funny because in tokyo you can buy merchandise that is just like you stepped in the 1950s as far as frontier land is concerned you can buy like what tomahawks and things yes honestly like i think you could buy like maybe a headdress like that could be totally wrong but you could buy like little figurines just as if they were from the 1950s like it's totally like they just haven't the memo hasn't gotten there yet that like you should probably not do this well even into the 90s i bought like like fake flintlock pistols or like six shooters like in frontier land and they're like it's crazy now to think about like carrying those back in a in a duffel bag on a plane um but i i think i think

even then my parents were like put that in the checklist don't carry it on the plane but i while we were talking about that you know i i have been thinking about researching for this episode i was like what was my reference for westerns growing up like because i had a spaghetti western phase two in college watching all the sergio leone movies and i was like what was it before that and besides syndicated television i'm like it it is frontier land this simulation i went back and reread i talked about a while ago like the idea of simulation and simulacrum which simulation is you know a recreation of a real life thing simulacrum i've seen it described as a copy without an original and sometimes that's like you're so far removed from the original and

that's kind of what a lot of the frontier land stuff is but i was like oh yeah i knew the davy crockett song in the late 1980s because of frontierland and like repeats on the early disney channel yeah that's that makes sense that's probably my first like big thing with it too where i was not i was a star wars kid and star trek kid superhero kid so that was probably my oh this is good like i like this because i walked through it a facsimile of this place that was in movies that other generations liked well and like theme parks it feels like a like it's such a like uh you know like a constant theme park presence is i feel like at least in america almost every theme park probably has some something that is vaguely western themed it's like one of the like one of the primary things maybe in a way one of the easiest themes

to do because if you don't have a lot of money it can just be like here's a shitty looking house yes a bunch of planks of wood but if you do it right if you do it to the disney level it's not just shitty is what it is everything is unpainted so you know at the very least you save on paint oh yes yeah sure if that's what's yeah prohibiting you from a great theme park oh yeah no um no i i hadn't thought about this until you put it this way scott but really the approach is not different than what they did with tomorrowland to sort of remake it from a showcase of new technologies to this imaginary spaceport that, you know, I don't know if you guys remember before they changed over into the, you know, when it was the Wedway People Mover and not the Tomorrowland Transit Authority.

But basically, they overlaid an entire theme of Tomorrowland being a spaceport for visiting aliens. And none of that was present when I was a kid. None of that fantasy element. It was supposed to be, I mean, pre-Epcot, it was supposed to be the world of the future. It was supposed to be this is what we are headed towards. But then they put the overlay of making, oh, it's the future, but it's put the overlay of making, oh,

it's the future, but it's, it's silly made up future. This is the same thing. I mean, it's the past, but, you know, go into things like all that folklore,

like, you know, gremlins and whatever, all they have. You could mine the history of Americana for a million kinds of native folklore. I mean, even getting into things like Bigfoot and stuff like that would be suitable

for Frontierland. There's a ton of things they could do. The wild places are still wild, so everyone's got their local folklore. That just to me seems like the answer. Sure. Jersey Devil and Swamp Ape. Everyone's got their local folklore. That's just, to me, seems like the answer.

Sure. Jersey Devil and, you know, Swamp Ape. Yep. All that cryptozoology stuff. Yes, yes, absolutely. It's like, you have to lean into fun theatrical nonsense. You can't go to the realism of what the future's going to be like, because it's always wrong. It's obsolete within five to ten years. And it's same way with like a land like frontier land where it's

like it's it's based on what humans used to be like well they used to be very bad you know how they're bad now they were very bad back then so it's like the best person was pretty bad yeah exactly you would you know he'd be a gb like prison in two seconds today best you know what was even worse medicine so you've got bad people you've got no medicine everything smells like shit the food tastes like shit you know yes the safest thing yeah the whole world stinks the whole world smells so bad but it's like everyone's probably doing their best to try to make the balance right between being culturally appropriate making sure everything is represented correctly and also just like yeah and then there's a goat there's a fun goat like yeah it's all

there's there i think everyone from what i understand at disney and every all these other companies are like doing their best to try to hit that perfect balance well yeah you know there used to be a gold polished brass plaque outside of uh pirates of the caribbean in florida and it said it was uh you know it was there to entice you to go in as if that was necessary but it said see a band of fun-loving pirates sack and burn a caribbean seaport and that always made me laugh those fun-loving guys just out to sack and burn a caribbean seaport it's not there anymore but uh it's insane really to think about it that way because there's no here like now jack sparrow is on the ride but the ride doesn't have a hero in it there's no one like it's a celebration of bad behavior yeah exactly like rise of the resistance like you're the hero and finn is there and ray is

there but like it's good and bad yeah yeah and then like you get out of the ship right but the pirates are just like hey let's go party with these maniac killers let's just go have an ale with them yeah yeah we're kind of telling you the whole lesson you you caught it right that the it's just like hey let's go party with these maniac killers let's just go have an ale with them yeah yeah we're kind of telling you the whole lesson you you caught it right that the lesson is don't do this because you'll have all those riches and you'll be alone i think is that the message yeah yeah yeah let's have a party with these maniacs yeah be careful you might turn into a skeleton which sorry okay we're realizing now that is awesome. Fuck, we messed up. We were going to turn it to a badass skeleton. Yeah, they're a skeleton on top of like a pile of money,

which is awesome. It's like they're not even, they didn't even die alone. They died with just a bunch of cool stuff around them with like their like friends. I guess maybe they're not necessarily in the cave next to each other, but it doesn't look that bad.

My body's not going to be holding like a cool chalice. I'm just going to be like dead in a field or something. Yeah. Like I, yes, to be preserved as the pirates are. It's so cool. It's funny.

They didn't think about that because I think one of the reoccurring themes in, uh, these parks is the people behind it overthinking about stuff because when they opened Walt Disney World, the one thing that I kept coming across that plays into the unbuilt Western River Expedition attraction,

the one thing that kept coming up that they'd run into was people would approach cast members and go, where's pirates where's this pirates ride we've heard so very much about and they're like oh that's that's the other one that's on the other coast and they and then they real quick turned around and cloned pirates for walt disney world because it's like yeah sometimes it is as simple as people want to go on the thing they've heard so much about, you know?

For sure. I heard even more to that story, which is even more overthinking, which is they reckoned that Eastern audiences would want us, that they would find cowboys exotic, whereas they'd find pirates a part of their local culture so like if you're on the east coast you already know all about pirates you've seen a bunch of pirates growing up places like I don't know Savannah things like that I mean there were like there were pirates

as part of that local culture but yeah they thought nobody on the east coast is going to want to see pirates they're going to want to see cowboys due to proximity to the Caribbean. They're going to want to see cowboys. Due to proximity to the Caribbean. You grew up in Florida, Dennis. I can't imagine there were a lot of pirates in your childhood. No, negative.

Although a little of that sort of thing you'd see like in St. Augustine and stuff. So, I mean, it's not completely insane. The local, the tchotchkes that you could buy as a Florida tourist in that day, there would be probably some pirate coins and that sort of stuff. As much as you would find cowboy hats and, you know, bowie knives or whatever out west uh you know but but but it's still crazy idea um to think that they were serving a need by uh regionalizing the uh the entertainment like that they're not gonna care it's just pirate this pirate that wherever you are in florida and georgia and north carolina i that is so funny because I hadn't heard that about pirates, but I've heard other Imagineers say stuff like that, and I always think of it, oh, yes, they are 100% correct.

There's no way they could possibly be wrong about it. And the one that pops to mind was like, in France, people in France liked comedy and ghosts, but they did not understand when ghosts were funny. They did not understand when it could be like haunted and comedy. And went oh yes of course that must be correct and i was like wait a minute maybe that's not correct maybe there's just a weird overthink imagineer like brain where it's like we must anticipate and it's like if it's good the audience would like it that's really at the end of the day but they want to make sure. The two haunted mansions in America, the New Orleans Square one at Disneyland, you know,

is a big Southern plantation house because like, this will be wild for California. They don't have this kind of house here. And then in Florida, it's like, oh, they got all these column houses. Make it look like this one in Baltimore, you know, make it look like the Northeast. Right. Yeah, it's strange i i know well let's let's talk a little about western river expedition because we've talked about it a little on the show and it's probably a full episode to be done about it but um yeah if you don't know that mythology that there was going to be this there was this whole expansion pad that was meant to be a whole original land thunder mesa that was like an outgrowth of

frontier land but it was going to be this multi-ride campus that resembled big thunder mountain and it probably would have had a big thunder-esque ride but then also an equivalent of pirates of the caribbean with mark davis at the helm great imagineer known for his like especially being especially good at like comedy tableaus and there was going to be this like just wild animatronic rich attraction that i feel like that's it's got to be in the top five of uh oh if it could have been like an unbuilt attractions it seems like and from art that exists and just rumors about what it could and if it truly was pirates level i mean it could have

changed the the fabric of the park were it to exist the huge yeah it's like it seems like it would have been giant it would have been like i mean i know i've heard there's like i'm sure there would have been stuff that has to change about it as far as like theming and characters and stuff but like it definitely feels like it would be in the top five or ten things i feel like that's the vibe from it would have been like that's that would still be there today that's one of the mega things even like pirates are on a mansion that like it's untouchable maybe yeah i i think because of the nature of that that's one of the like half dozen things that sunk the project where it's like it would have been such an expensive undertaking.

It would have had like, they were talking about doing a backwards segment, you know, and, and all these animatronics and, uh, uh, you know,

I think tastes were already changing. The Western was kind of already on its way out. And there was concern, uh, you know, starting about the portrayal of native americans and like oh are we going to be able to have that in this uh uh area so like there was a lot of things working against it and then when they're like we got to get something

else we needed another attraction in here and people keep asking for the pirates so just make a shorter pirates right right i so what we ended up with was like a minimal like it like tony baxter took the reins and said i think there's a version we could do that is the mine train roller coaster and it's only that and it's pretty wild to look at the concept art where like well there's that but it's bigger and there's a boat ride going in and out and it would have taken up the space that at disney world is currently not only big thunder but also splash mountain like all of that is one huge campus with this this super ambitious ride yeah and the the the it kind of comes back around later on in in terms of big picture like they want when they

wanted to do the indiana jones ride at disneyland that was going to be a massive thing and the jungle cruise was going to go through that so they've definitely like aimed for the stars before and then inevitably the grandeur gets scaled back when you're like, well, we have a time frame and we also have a budget. So let's start chopping away at this, you know? Right, right. Dennis, do you have like a favorite in terms of like in your theme park wanderings? Is there like a most intrigued thing that never opened? Is it this or is it something in the in the westcott world or like

is it do you have like an unbuilt that comes to mind i have spent probably more time thinking about western river expedition than anything else fascinated by it like you say it would have they were trying to outdo themselves on pirates so i think it just would have been outstanding i mean it's just such an interesting for starters just the the idea of a river ride through the wild west it's kind of weird to begin with uh and uh it seems like they were stuck on the pirates model and didn't completely switch it over so just uh that being the beginning of it and from what i gather the thunder mountain portion of it was on the roof of the show building and uh it just as you say it would have been this this vast thing but you know sort of uh adjacent to uh this uh i heard

and maybe you guys can fill in some details, this fascinated me. If I was going to pick something other than Western River Expedition, I heard rumors that the Disneyland Railroad was going to stop in Frontierland or at the Frontierland Station and enact a version of the first act of, or the sorry the cold open of the uh indiana jones and the last crusade where river phoenix is uh uh doing the shoot them up on the uh wherever that is monument valley and stuff i had heard that they were going to have a show scene um that re reenacted that that indiana jones segment uh while you were riding the train do you have you guys ever heard anything about that i always heard of it as like an amphitheater kind of show and and yes the train they may have tried to they're like oh we can't run the train and we can't use it in the show simultaneously. Yeah. They were trying to do the math of like,

could there be a version where the train goes through a like water world type show? And that's part of it, which is insane to think about. God knows if they pulled it off, but like, how do you, how do you possibly.

It's a fascinating idea. And I love the idea of, of linking these attractions and stuff. You mentioned that the jungle cruise going through the Temple of the Forbidden Eye or whatever, however they used to have it. It's a fascinating idea. I love that the Paris

Haunted Mansion is the guy who owns Big Thunder Mine or whatever. Isn't that the backstory there? Isn't the house supposed to be the home of the mine owner? Yes, I think that's right. Yeah, I didn't know any of this.

I just figured all this out in researching for this. Yeah, it's not, there's no Barnabas bullion there. So this might have been the first to find who owns Big Thunder Mountain. Henry Ravenswood. Uh, and then his, his daughter, uh, factory,

like his daughter is the bride in phantom manner. Who's they're engaged to be married. Wait. After his daughter, Melanie fell in love with a penniless minor, Mr. Ravenwood's vengeful spirit killed the would be groom. Wait,

it's the debt. So it's the evil big thunder owner is the phantom is the phantom i believe that is the fight yeah wow the sort of vincent price voice depending on when you've been on it phantom um wow just because he like didn't like the because okay because it was a penniless miner. So imagine if you're the owner of the mine and then it's some miner bumpkin who's gonna marry my rich daughter.

He's upset because of the socioeconomic disparity. There's only one solution. I have to... I gotta kill this guy. And then he's like eternally punished for having... Which is... That's not a good... If you're like if your daughter's getting ready for the wedding don't kill the husband i can't imagine many scenarios

where that's a good idea no no don't do that um but that's interesting i i don't actually don't know how it fits into c i really wonder if that's a big problem and they'd like to retcon that more for c so it fits neatly into the the barnas canon or maybe not. Maybe they don't care. They're going to have to. They're going to have to cast Ravenswood. They'll deal. But this is all Ronald D. Moore's problem, I guess now. It's probably keeping him up at night. How do I

come? A universe where there is Ravenswood and Boolean? It can't be done. What writer could ever? But isn't that cool? Oh, and wait here's some other stuff in that version they do acknowledge the stealing of the land from uh from native america so in this world there is this factors in so he's like punished by being a phantom in phantom manor and then meanwhile all the shit's hitting the fan at big thunder because they stole that land from the shoshone people

and therefore angering the thunderbird there is a big thunder bird spirit over there and that's why there's earthquakes and things exploding and everything like so they do this is an example of like they're tying all the rides together and they're acknowledging you did bad stuff so you're gonna get punished by a an angry bird spirit i mean that's i don't know that you maybe pick up on all of that if you just go on at once i would say you pick up on zero of it no it's only reading a wikipedia of it later but right right you can't That is up to you to do. Yeah, it's there, which is nice. But even like in that Frontierland, which is, you know, I've definitely tucked my share of shit about Disneyland Paris. And I will say their Frontierland, which could be the last new Frontierland potentially.

And so that was like the kids who grew up on old Frontierland get their shot. And I think they did it so beautifully and tying everything together. It's like it's so ornate and the coolest place in the park to be. And also like the restaurants are part of it. If you read the full mythology, like, well, the saloon is where they would blow off steam. And then and then the fancy steakhouse is owned by this guy's brother. Like they managed to connect like the restaurants and the stores it all actually makes sense in a proto galaxy's edge kind of way which i was like excited to hear all that and dennis i know you're like probably your ideal of a theme park experience it has all of this math

worked out and where there's characters walking around and there's a backstory and it is you you almost in are in like a weird alternate reality that does make logical and thematic sense. So they did kind of do it there. That's yes. I love that. And, you know, you'd be I was surprised to find out that that technique is seemingly applied everywhere. I some years ago I was staying at the boardwalk in, in, uh, Florida, uh, the Disney boardwalk and they advertised, there was a sign in the lobby that said, take a

guided tour of the hotel and, uh, you know, 9am or something like that. And so I show up down in the lobby at 9am and I'm the only guy there at all for the, for the tour. And I got a very knowledgeable cast member who was excited to have someone to tell everything he knew about. But what I was struck by was he pointed out in the construction of the hotel it was made to um simulate uh it having been built over decades there being uh additions onto the building and so on and so forth even down to the where like certain hallways don't align properly because they reckon that they would have had uh you know structural problems

adding a new wing onto the building so they they sort of engineered fake problems they had to solve and uh yeah so from what i could tell just something as as seemingly non-narrative as the boardwalk in seems to have its whole history of the, of the structure planned out. And why not? I mean, I was saying if I was in charge of galaxy's edge or, or sort of looking at a way to, to show run galaxy's edge, like I would find like blaster marks on the walls and ceilings and stuff and make stories of like who shot the gun that uh you know and and so that you just and who cares if any of this gets

written down or or passed on but you know you point out insignificant details and you give stories to them and then i think you know everyone's having a great time uh we went and saw last time i was in the florida park we went and saw you guys probably heard about the miniature door uh at outside gaston's tavern no no no no about this no i don't might be stumping us interesting Well, okay, I'll break this story here. Oh my gosh. Because I had just heard about it on Snopes or something, and I happened to be there. And it's very much like what you described with the Figaro sign in one of your other episodes.

Pulling the rope. Oh, yes, yeah, yeah. Figaro pulling the... It's in the wrong spot in Fantasyland and Disneyland, but then they put it in the wrong spot in fantasyland and disneyland but then they put it in the right spot in disneyland paris and he's giving an okay sign like i did it right this time which is fantastic i had never most of the most mundane information in in my brain easily i loved it i loved it but likewise it evidently and in the area uh backed by gaston's Tavern in Fantasyland, they built a building too close to a manhole cover. So the edge of the building was sitting on top of the manhole lid.

So it wouldn't have been able to raise the manhole lid. So what they did is they cut a little piece of the wall out so that you'd be able to lift the lid. But rather than just make a little hole or something like that, they made a tiny door. And it's seemingly this purposeless, bizarre, little 12, 14-inch high door over there. But as you say, they made a mistake, and they came up with a whimsical, clever way to sort of fix the mistake.

So what's the door for, do we think? Well, the door is just so you can remove a piece of the wall so that you can lift the lid of the manhole cover. Okay, yeah, yeah. But there's no mythology of this is where somebody lives. Not that I know of. That's what I was thinking. Is it LeFou's door?

It could be LeFou. It could be that leprechaun we were talking about, the little man at Disneyland. Oh, yeah. That's true. It's a summer place. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

One that was, I didn't know that one for the longest time. Yeah, I think Mike and Jason both did, and I was stumped on Little Man of Disneyland. But together, all of us are finding every, certainly every obscure door. We're going to know the story of every door there is by the time this is all done. Dennis, we should also give you credit for alerting us to the tangled restroom area, which we did on the second gate. Which was fantastic. You inspired that dissection. Well, exactly.

And why not? Why not build a restroom complex with features? Yeah. It's detailed. I mean, if you're like us and go this much Like the details It's like the thing that keeps you going back I feel like

If it weren't for that If it weren't for a themed toilet Why go back? Yeah I guess that's what I'm saying Exactly In terms of details And we can cut this

If I'm thinking of the wrong person. Dennis, Scott told us something once. Did you come up with the idea for something, a day plan called Exile on Main Street? Yes. Yes, okay. So this was my... Because I have been thinking,

I think Scott told us this years ago and I think about it, it just bubbles into my mind every few months. Because I think I could do it. I would love to do it with you guys. I think we should do it and document the experience. And I think it would be maybe a little easier out here than it would be in Florida.

I think so um for the uh those who don't know my the my idea would be to have a day at disneyland called exile on main street and the rules would be that you would be forbidden from uh going beyond the confines of main street you have to spend the whole day in the park from park open to park close on main street and you you'd have to try to entertain yourself through through the duration and i think with the cinema running and uh if they're making candy apples and stuff uh you know i think you can get around uh and uh you know dapper dans and some carriage rides omnibus omnibus i think every type of transportation yeah every type of transportation and i i think according to

the rules i set out you were allowed one ride on a ground a 360 ride on the railroad but no stopping you don't get off and you can't ride the railroad all day no stopping. You don't get off in the land and do anything. And you can't ride the railroad all day is what I think I figured. But yeah, we should try that sometimes. I know the Florida Park, for example, they blow glass in the...

They have a working furnace where they're shaping glass and burning glass and things like that. They've got that in Disneyland. Do they have that here too? Yeah, there's a little show. We all get silhouettes. We all get silhouettes.

Eating is easy. You can go to the... At some point you eat at Carnation Cafe. At some point you eat at the Plaza. And then you got Holly Jolly for I think that counts. Holly Jolly Bakery. Okay, that's the boundary probably.

That would be the boundary, I think. Plaza Inn Chicken you could do. There's the other. So there's decent food in there. You could have a decent day's worth of food there. You got Starbucks. Market House. Sorry, Market House. Starbucks. I like that Starbucks. It's a nice Starbucks. We've said too many things. Honestly, I don't know if we'll have time for all of it on that day.

It's got to be three days. Might have to do three days, yeah. Exactly. I don't know. I actually, I think I came up with the idea because I was killing time once while my girlfriend had to do a business call or something, and I didn't want to get too far away. I don't know what my reason was but i ended up spending about two hours with nothing to do on main street and uh you guys

probably know this but some of at least one in the alley there on whatever they call that center street or whatever uh that one of the buildings has a whole little audio program of the occupants of the upstairs rooms and everything. And that's the stuff. Going back to Frontierland, the log cabin fort that is still standing out in the Florida version has animatronics in it and everything there's a there's a guy sleeping in the um in the guard uh in the guard house and uh guys hammering uh uh horseshoes and things like that but like it's they've got all that uh those those background atmosphere sound effect loops going and everything that's just great yeah uh that would be i mean that is a day that i've wanted to do is really just focus like and this i'm truly not joking at all want to focus on the loops in

the park i want to go like listen to the loops for like 20 minutes and pinpoint where all of them are this is i that no i'm not joking loopy for Well, loopy for loops. Correct. The market house. I, I think they kept it when they switched to Starbucks, but there's a phone in there. Yes. You can pick up. That's a party phone.

Yes. Yes. I listened to the entire program on this occasion where I was killing time. And it is, it's very funny. And they, they sketch out like a whole Springfield of, of, of town residents that have got, you know, that are, I can't remember what any of the jokes were, but they had running jokes in the thing.

And it was a well-produced, I don't know who wrote it or, you know, whether, the thing is they mentioned coffee a lot. So I almost think Starbucks maybe... Punched it out? Paid for a little coffee play. Exactly. But that sort of thing. Yeah, the squawky old phones was the best. Wow.

Yeah. And then maybe you also do Lincoln, like, a couple times. Like, make sure you see, you get a full sense of what he looks like on all sides, from the back. Yeah. Just every vantage point. Front row Lincoln, back row Lincoln, in the pit, in the GA pit. Learn if he plays to the entire crowd or like, does he not really have like the sense of the space that a performer should have. That's true.

Yeah. Get to Lincoln, get in the pit, you know. Look up his nostrils. And then we take, okay, we go and you know look up his nostrils and then we take okay we go we do we see lincoln but then we take like ecstasy we take molly and then we go back to see lincoln again and see what the experience is like that way and then so lots of drugs are part of excel on mainstream well that'd be different yeah yeah that that makes yeah go ahead go ahead no no i was just gonna say that might make it seem eternally long too you never know either either would help you pass the time or it would make it when do we leave until i'm in 45 minutes

and you spend you spend like a couple hours like passed out on a toilet just like shaking in a fetal position freaking out uh well you have described something it certainly sounds like something we would do uh we have punished ourselves with the with less with less to do so it's actually i think we totally good well right because didn't you guys devote an entire show to every retail outlet and universal city walk didn't you we did well a lot of episodes just 19 it was just 19 19 just a clean 90 that's when i that's when i met scott and i was tremendously impressed with that i uh yeah well usually we were working together and i would do it almost every day of that run was like listen i gotta go i gotta get up to city walk again we're doing yogurt land or 16 handles gotta go try some menchies that's the job but

that worked out very well because denn Dennis, when we were working together, I feel like there were so many days where you would, like, you know, mid-afternoon say, like, want to head to the park? What do you think? Is this a park day? That's right. I like this guy's speed. This is great.

Indeed. Mom, Mom, did you see my race? Of course I did, darling. Look, you did your best. You tried. The thing is, it's not about winning. It's about taking part. Next year you might do better.

But I did win, Mom. You did? When it's sunny, make sure you can still see. At Specsavers, get two pairs of glasses from $149. And one can be prescription sunglasses hey the sun won't wait visit specsavers.ca for details conditions apply i let's let's let's get a little more frontierland in before we wrap it up i i guess like in in terms of like um like like what have we missed i you know so one of the thesis, I think, of talking about Frontierland for a while is, like, is there relevancy to it?

Like, are we, have we seen all the Frontierlands get built that we're going to see? And is there ever going to be a new attraction in a Frontierland? Could you not see a world where Frontierland as it is now and has been for a couple decades does not change per se? Other than, like, eliminating things. That's the dark potential future. Yeah. for a couple decades uh does not change per se other than like eliminating things that's that's the the dark potential future yeah um i've heard i mean i've heard just from people friends who have inquired about things to to pitch or whatever i do think disney is still trying to figure out big thunder something like at least that's what they were told so maybe they're like i don't know

but they're probably trying to figure out big thunder something i think that they'll probably still make attempts to make the places in disney relevant through like disney plus or a movie or something but barring that yeah i don't i could see them just being like you know we could get rid of that whole land but i think that yeah if anything else doesn't happen i mean i don't know i think everything pink things aren't as untouchable as people think they are that's what that's the sense i get i could be totally wrong but you know 10 10 20 years from now i wouldn't bet money that it's there well a few years ago they there was a temporary attraction called the Heroes of Frontierland, which was like a game, an interactive game where you would go and interact with characters

and go to locations and stuff. And it's not dissimilar to kind of what the Knott's Ghost Town, there's elements of that in Knott's Ghost Town. But I think after the fact, I heard, was play testing for star wars stuff for like right you know which they kind of scaled back the interaction at galaxy's edge but it could also whatever lessons they learned from that frontier land testing they could be applying at the you know um the hotel yeah big big thunder is the thing i think keeping frontier land alive yeah because it's just so beloved it's So beloved it's insanely

Popular it's not even like The historical nature of it's just like Oh it's a big roller coaster That everyone likes like Yeah that every age can go on Any coaster willingness yeah it really Is like perfect in that regard If Galaxy's Edge like extends back

I mean Galaxy's Edge already swallowed some of Frontierland it swallowed a part of Jason's favorite part of Frontierland, which is goats. There used to be goats. The goats. That you would see in Frontierland. And Jason and I, many, many times over the last decade, he would go, let's go back and see the goats. If there was a wait, I mean, you could always walk in and see the goats. You needed somewhere quiet, you know know somewhere to be around nature they did keep the bar the pond the mossy pond with the big old tunnel um from previous attractions

that survived the mechanical fish there's usually a mechanical fish right there yeah that's right a little guy oh boy there's some these are some deep corners the the um i but yeah i don't know like yeah things have already gotten swallowed like i i think no land has lost more uh like territory than frontier land if you think about it because some of it becomes new orleans square some of it becomes bear country which becomes greater country and then like the big expansion pad i feel like it was always a weird thing about like clearly the air the biggest area they had to work with was that big thunder ranch zone um and like that's always like this could be the big the biggest expansion disneyland ever does and of course that ended up being galaxy's edge and i think the reason

nothing happened sooner is that it was it kind of something back there would have had to be frontier land and western themed and there's only so many things that that can be and they never had a hit movie that that prompted something to to go back there um there was the we've heard that rumor of like an oz stunt show or something based on the james fr franco osland that was gonna be like riots too yeah you segue you can segue from like rural frontierland or rural kansas to the goal you know the emerald city you had the show in a little it sounds by the way other than the franco movie connection it sounds awesome because you go in a little tent there would be a little like medicine show type thing the tent would like spin around while you were in there then the thing would open and you

were in oz and it was full oz land with like for i think it was a tony baxter interview where he didn't even want to reveal the ride technology that it was because it might still be used eventually for something or maybe it has been at this point but it sounds like there was a crazy ticket oz ride with a very very themed land back there yeah since you mentioned tony by the way there is video online of him giving a presentation from d23 a while ago going through the concept art for western river expedition and saying like so then this would happen and this would happen like this is a sample like song that they used when discussing it. And like, and, and kind of, uh, uh, associating it with Pirates of the Caribbean. It's like, well, this is sort of the equivalent of the big, you know, chase scene that would

be this scene instead, you know? Right. Oh, gotcha. Um, oh, and that, you know what? Also real quick, um, Tony also talked about the other thing that might have been in Frontierland, which is Geyser Mountain. Geyser. Do you know about Geyser Mountain, Dennis? I don't.

I've heard rumors about a fire mountain over the years, but I've never heard Geyser Mountain. I don't know about a fire mountain. Fire Mountain, I've heard, too. I think that would have gone somewhere else. But Geyser Mountain was basically like you were a group of tourists on a tour going below the surface to take a look at like miners what they're doing down there so you'd go down i think they were actually going to build it so it was kind of underground partly so basically it's the tower of terror but it's like half of the tower is more underground and the other half's

above and it's this big like mining rig so you'd go down and you'd see animatronics and miners and miners and all of a sudden they would like you know alarms would go off and there's a geyser. And then water would shoot up all around you as you shot out of the ground up. And then you could see like all of Disneyland. And this is before they built Tower at California Venture. But that was very much, I think, possible that it would go of like around that area of Galaxy's Edge and the barbecue restaurant and everything. Yeah, yeah. that it would go of like around that area of galaxy's edge and the barbecue restaurant and everything. Yeah. Yeah.

It, um, it looked like there is like more concept art of that than I knew I was finding it recently. And where like, that is like tower of terror in Florida where the car is moving from room to room. And then you end up in the launch.

Oh, it was like, you're like forward and stuff too. It wasn't just amazing. So cool. Um, and like the other thing that sounds great about this is that this was like it was more recent than i realized they wanted to do this in like late 90s early 2000s um which in like with that air you have maybe the people who end up

like you're in the same like late 90s dis prowess as Disney Sea. Like, so if that kind of had the vibe of Journey to the Center of the Earth or one of the many other great attractions at Disney Sea, if it was done to that degree, but then 9-11 happens, DCA is struggling, let's just clone Tower and do less of it and that's what it ends up being. And then it'd be redundant to have two similar things and one is more expensive. But this was like like this might even top

Western River Expedition to me this sounds So good yeah From what I've seen yeah that sounds amazing It sounds really amazing and it's Western River partly Felled by the economic downturn To yes coming At like we just the seven economic

Downturn happens in the 70s it's like We just spent all this money to build a whole resort we cannot build another massive ride after we built all these other rides yeah it sucks i mean media consolidation is really bad and these companies shouldn't do it but maybe the telecom should just buy disney so we can just get as many rides every year regardless of the economy maybe that's the solution gets us rides we'll we'll do it um but i guess you know all this to say like these these were these were our shots now there's just less frontier land there's there's not really uh um you know there's no bigger expansion you could do that one all that geyser mountain also almost went to paris but didn't

quite happen there because paris is always struggling and they got tower ultimately. But like, I don't know, I like have we seen the last of Frontierland and how do you like I is there a possibility of a bright future for Frontierland? Well, you know, here's my thought i i have a co-worker with small kids and he said his son and daughter who are maybe in the five year four year range they love their favorite thing in disney world was tom sawyer island oh and um i was thinking about this on the way over. There's sort of a defunct spur of, of imagineering that they used to have, which was something a kid knew, but like a insane gonzo version of it,

you know? So like Swiss family tree house, like kids know what a tree house is, but this is the most insane tree house you've ever seen in your life. Or the old river country was supposed to be a swimming hole like you might have in your community, but this is the most insane swimming hole that's all tricked out and got all this stuff. And so I was thinking there were these things like that. Kids love to run around outside and explore the woods and stuff. And it seems like they may not need to spend that much money

to hit a target, which is the kids running around, unstructured play, just environments. Disney used to excel at doing that sort of thing, and they seem to have dropped off, no doubt because of liability issues and other things like it but i mean kids you know like the youngest kids they still want you give them an environment to play in and they're going to be down with it so my my two pitches for for them if they were looking to revitalize what they had on a budget

would be to invest in gamifying those playground areas, whether something along the lines of the Star Wars datapad game that they have where you interact with the environment, or the way you, i think some of that uh harry potter wizarding world where you're able to the magic wand can make uh things little effects happen all over the windows and the doors and those you know endless delight if you're a kid and you use your cell phone to make a gopher pop out of a hole or something like that but you know those those kind of cheap tiny effects like they have at the shooting gallery um you know that you could affect

on your own uh i i just feel like you know make it an interactive playground gamify everything but then you know they have a pirate treasure hunt in florida that is self-guided that operates little animatronic effects that you activate with your magic band and it doesn't seem like that was a hit doesn't seem like you always see people doing it but i guess they determined that was not the future of theme parks but uh it seems like it should be because kids play video games. And if you gamify the experience and give them collect digital collectibles, you know, send them around Tom Sawyer Island on a scavenger hunt, for example.

Yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's not, there's not like one experience that like encapsulates,

like there's no collect them all kind of thing to do there. It is interesting that like you say, like there's no collect them all kind of thing to do there. It is interesting that like you say, you know, everyone has a phone where they can play like high end games on them now, essentially. But the shooting gallery, like an infrared shooting gallery where you shoot a tin can that's like on a pole and it rattles.

There's still people over there. like they haven't gotten rid of it it's still there it's still popular there's still a list on the disneyland a disney world website as hard as it is to navigate uh that website of like here's where all the playgrounds are and they're they keep cannibalizing you know taking, taking the land for other attractions and all, like they did with the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids movie set play area. But it's like, yeah, kids still need to run around and burn off energy so they take a nap. You know, like that has not changed.

Right. Nothing has replaced napsaps and hopefully never will and and i saw an aerial photo of um of mine trade through nature's wonderland that had some of tom sawyer on it uh visible in the photo and a lot of it was a gigantic like rock pile that there were just all these children scampering on a gigantic like pile of rocks it looked like uh and it was it had to have been two dozen kids on this vast sort of like sort of uh boxcar sized pile of rocks that uh you know and if they you know made that sort of thing a little safe, kids will have fun with that all day long. Scott, I feel like I called you once when I, for the first time, I visited that ranger, park ranger out, what I call the Tom Sawyer Island of DCA. Oh, yes.

Oh, you mean the, yeah, yeah, the Redwood Trail Challenge Trail. Yeah, yeah. It's tremendously thoughtfully constructed. It's just got the most boring theme that I could ever imagine. I mean, it's just... Some people will take umbrage. My friends Tyler and Keo will defend the slice of the tree, the slice of the sequoia to their death. That's their favorite thing in the park. but yes some people i don't yeah yeah some people might not disagree a lot of park ranger brown and uh and things like that you know yeah but but as far as a playground i mean the kids

were going nuts and it's multi-level and it's very removed from the park it it's got an immersive feel and i don't know, like, you know, like I said, there's gotta be a million liability issues, but, but not forgetting that Disney used to do stuff like that,

provide sort of superior versions of, of sort of common childhood, uh, pleasures, you know, bigger, better, crazier playgrounds yeah yeah absolutely

that is the stuff i can't wait when my son's old enough like i'm already ready he's gonna go nuts for all those things we're talking about uh um yeah so that's irrelevant uh yeah go ahead mike i was just gonna say the other thing and it's kind of stealing what knots is doing but what i do like knots as a ghost town it's you know it's frontier land but when knots what's fun about knots is doing but what i do like knots has a ghost town it's you know it's frontier land but when knots what's fun about knots is that it's just populated with like knots original characters now like the mayor and you know the they have a new character whittles who's the old prospector he's not a face like a human character but he's like a cartoon character but it's like they just keep throwing like character and backstory at their ghost town the maze they had a couple years ago and they're having it again this year

at the not scary farm is an origin story for the actual town like with a witch that looks like the witch from wizard of oz uh i feel like you could like really make frontier like that to me it's like the the fastest way to make it feel really like fun and vibrant and alive is like adding more characters adding more people performing I don't think they're ever going to do this but like steal from knots and just like have like a blustery

mayor yelling at people as you walk by in Frontierland or something like it's great it's real fun I think they used to oh go ahead Dennisis no i was going to say they still i know on main street they still have uh actors and actresses that pretend to be sort of colorful locals uh and i feel like they yes i feel like they might have that on hollywood boulevard at and hollywood studios as well like you know i you know the period people

1930s people so why they wouldn't have that in in frontierland is beyond yeah i feel like they used to have shoot-em-ups on the roof when i was yes but you said above country bear in florida like there was there was some kind of stunt show they would have just impromptu uh like they're robbing the bank and someone would chase the bad guys across the roof and there'd be some slapstick but uh you why that stuff isn't going on constantly i mean there are enough trained improv actors sure not hey we'll do it we'll do it we'll do it we're ready to do that. Have a shootout.

I think a lot of the parks in Southern California are equity actors and they're not exactly cheap, but it's cheaper than building an e-ticket ride. Look, Jason and I were on a terrible team for three years. So I think we're ready to do this.

Old West Improv. Are you kidding me? No current references. a terrible team for three years so i think we're ready to do this okay old weston prob are you kidding me oh entirely no current references no modern references no absolutely not no judge roy bean and stuff judge roy bean diamond lil a lot of uh you know you can you can reference like oh susanna you just you know you can talk about songs you can do song parodies it's just got to be of oh susanna all the dippity-doo dab yeah all the old hair pomades yeah just hair pomade brand names alone will eat up a 10 minute set and if we want to say like if we're like if our brain wants to say like iron man or something we'll we just replace it with Zorro.

We just say Zorro. Zorro. Yeah, it was snake oil. Yeah, buy the snake oil. Head into the Emporium. Get your commemorative snake oil. Find out who the president was back then. If you're ever tempted to say Biden,

just like, was it Andrew Johnson? I'm not sure what year i don't know what 1850 is but find it out and those clowns those old so-and-sos in washington and the crowd's just losing it just going crazy yeah well i think we've made a real good case that we should be these performers yeah yeah so well as as many things that we solve on the show the solution is of course us us yeah that's always not a single no one has taken us up on the offer which about every other episode we say like you know we'll write that ride or we will be the characters in the park and no one has taken us up on it yet

always unbelievable um yes uh well it's that and it's to make dennis's big thunder do it nat look downy jr needs another act do a little didn't work this is his way to be an old-timey an old-timey guy in the right way so all of deploy all of us and we'll we'll make it all work i think a quick i think a quick rewrite and do little could be on big thunder mouth it's true it's true and then um what was his other uh mordecai what was her what was that oh that was johnny depp that's right i forgot about that well you know teaming those two up do little and mordecai seems like you're getting well yeah why not that was the sleep well if you think of it all as just prequel like of course they didn't do well it was only like it wasn't

the sum of the parts but once you put them together that's that's the new dynamic duo yeah crossover yes yeah yeah uh okay well great ideas left and right dennis no dennis mcnicholas sorry about the stumble dennis mcnicholas you survived podcast the ride thanks so much for for doing this so fantastic oh for sure and uh oh yes sure. When in Orlando, visit the Columbia Harbor House. For your chicken and seafood. Recently reopened. It is up and running.

So it's closed for a while. They were serving their menu at the Tomorrowland Terrace in the interim. But I'm glad to hear it's back. Oh, gotcha. Let's exit through the gift shop because you definitely have something to plug. Tell us a little bit about Batman The Audio Adventures,

which I believe is coming out, I think as this episode comes out, this is a thing you can check out tomorrow on HBO Max. September 18th, which I learned via your press release, is Batman Day. I feel bad I never properly honored Batman Day before. Well, you know, it's a quiet, you know, contemplative evening with family is most traditional. Spend it with the ones you love.

But no, that is correct. On September 18th, all 10 episodes of Batman The Audio Adventures will be available on HBO Max. And it is something like an old-timey radio play, something like Saturday morning cartoons. It's fun. It is not a spoof of Batman, but it is not a serious Batman. It is a Batman that acknowledges the absurdity and the ridiculousness of the entire premise. And I've got an amazing cast. Jeffrey Wright is Batman, Rosario Dawson is Catwoman, I've got

John Leguizamo as Riddler, and just about all your favorite SNL alums are in there. We've got John Laguzamo as Riddler. And just about all your favorite SNL alums are in there. We've got Jason Sudeikis, Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, Bobby Moynihan. The list goes on and on. Jeez. Paul Scheer, our friend. Paul Scheer does a wonderful job, plays the Joker's right-hand man. Oh, wow.

And the Joker is played by Brent Spiner frominer from star trek fans wow oh i don't know if you knew that one mike i did not know that and of course he played a very joker-like character on the upn show deadly game of course which is the uh which is the show with christopher lloyd playing the character sebastianal. Terrific. He's great on this and everyone just really brought it and had a super fun time. And there are 10 episodes. Total

run time is about six and a half hours. So you get a big fat chunk of Gotham City and hopefully we'll be back sometime next year with a second season. so jump on board geez fantastic yeah and i know like a thing long in the works for you and a dream come true to get to do this is an officially sanctioned batman to do batman in a in a way that you're guiding and uh i'm sure it's awesome i'm uh they'll be excited to check it out i would be honored to have you

listen uh geez thank well and all the other hope is that it paves the way for more Batman offshoots, because I know, I don't want to just call Mike out on it, but I, you know, I do know that Mike has had a dream for a long time of his specific Batman spinoff, which is Batman forever to doing more in the Batman forever universe

specifically, which I'm fully on board with. So if there, if we're like opening up avenues to like you know many different little side streets of batman uh yes hopefully that could be one i have it already sketched out a bit uh yes it's a long time dream i don't know that we yeah you can't maybe do it as a movie anymore but another medium another piece of media yes prestige maxi series that's yes sure yeah yeah that's the way yeah yeah yeah uh yeah get people for a limited time and um

uh and and like way more chase meridian of course to nail nicole kitman down but you'll get she's got a very important role in the in the new one in batman forever 2 my batman forever 2 yeah for sure we'll look out for that eventually but that the course on that will be Oh, she's got a very important role in the new one. In Batman Forever 2. My Batman Forever 2. Yeah, for sure. We'll look out for that eventually. But the chorus on that will be paved by Batman and the Audio Adventures. Check that out on HBO Max soon and other platforms after that. As for us, you can find us on all the socials at Podcast The Ride.

Merch is available in our TeePublic store. And for three bonus episodes every month, check out Podcast The Ride, the second gate at patreon.com slash podcast the ride. And evidently, probably also Exile on Main Street. Oh, yeah. Let us know what you think. Let us know what we should do. Let us know some ways to spend the day because I guess we'll need them or we won't.

Or we'll like that day will fill up quicker than we think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Send it if you want. But honestly, I don't need it. I don't think. I don't.

I'll be begging for it after my day run entirely by the disney genie so gc genie on main street where you just choose like well what would you like to do today uh stay on main street hey did you mean to select another land no no please proceed to anything else why are you the genie's like why are you still here No. No. Please proceed to anything else. Why are you still here? Turn your phone off at that point. It's what we want. We're going to do it. Genie be damned.

All right. Thanks so much for listening. Dennis, thanks for being here. So long. Bye bye. Bye bye. Forever Dog. This has been a Forever Dog production.

Executive produced by Mike Carlson, Jason Sheridan, Scott Gairdner, Brett Boehm, Joe Cilio, and Alex Ramsey. For more original podcasts, please visit foreverdogpodcasts.com and subscribe to our shows on Apple Podcasts,

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