Podcast: The Ride - Unlocked: Epcot's Splashtacular

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Enjoy this sample of P:TR - The Second Gate. Find even more Second Gate episodes at Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide We take a look at Epcot's short-lived but very elaborate fountain show. Featuring Mickey storm troopers, a cosmic witch and The Exterminator. In-person and Livestream Tickets on sale for Podcast: The Ride's Big Vegas Groove Blender! https://thespacelv.com/event/podcast-the-rides-big-vegas-groove-blender 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

Welcome to Podcast The Ride, The Second Gate, a show where we are proud to present a celebration of the power and grandeur of some of the more off-the-beaten-path theme park attractions. I'm Jason Sheridan, Scott Gerner here. You know, so serious. So soft. You scared me. I thought you were about to announce something.

Mike Carlson also here. also here hello the demise of michael eisner trying i was trying to summon the narrator the narrator that you only hear for 10 seconds oh yeah he's topic ah sure yeah yeah and it is about power and grandeur power and grandeur and the uh i guess the power of splitting the difference on the topics you're talking about. Checking a lot of boxes. Water and color. We're talking Splashtacular, Epcot Splashtacular. Yeah, and here's one where there'll be listeners who know and there'll be listeners who do not know at all.

And this is one where I got to say say get educated and we'll help you get educated this is bonkers this is a show that ran at epcot center in 1993 and therefore spent most of its runtime in not epcot center but rather epcot 94 something we've spent uh too short of time talking about the brief window where the idea was epcot's going to be a new every they'll change it every year to epcot 94 95 and that was it i think it stopped there there was no epcot 96 well the millennium was coming and they had to melt fat yeah yeah we all we all turned our eyes to that but this is this is peak epcot 94 i think this attraction it is but that very same narrator does refer to epcot center oh so they weren't even 94 so messy still little messy yeah i mean that's

kind of part of the charms of this this show rocks it is very messy i really like it i i for once i feel like i got an explanation i figured it out uh-huh uh-huh and yeah the the backstory helps you piece together like why is there this like there's a there's a real paper trail for how we landed here um let me just this but you know it's not often that we have really good just summaries done for us but in this case there's a a great ad that was posted by retro wdw and this uh all right so this this tells you the story will it help you understand it maybe not exactly did you guys see this ad i did yeah uh yeah that's a mic if you okay Okay. I think I did. Here we go. The aliens imaginable have arrived. There's something we have

that they want. Something you can find only at Epcot. Introducing Splashtacular. A brilliant new world of leaping fountains and Disney magic. Splashtacular. It's magical.

It's wonderful. But how long will it be ours find out for yourself at epcot yeah yeah wow that's exciting that's a real trailer they have something away we have something they want yeah um now the the narration doesn't really tell you what we're dealing with specifically, which we can keep to. It's basically there's an intergalactic battle that happens to play out and interrupts what is supposed to be just a fun celebration with Mickey and his friends of the beautiful Epcot fountain and the idea of color. And who could ever want to destroy such a sacred, easygoing event as that? Well, these villains who will still, we can unfurl them as we go. Because, boy.

But that's basically what we're dealing with. A battle between good and evil. And if you don't know what that looks like, I don't blame you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I just say it to roll i want to give all of these characters they're due yeah yeah you want to walk through a little bit carpet welcome yeah there's one picture there's a notable picture yeah that's a promo picture of it yeah of dancers and um chrome tom of finland guys and a couple villains and uh the the space bar is in the background the fountain's

going off uh if you search epcot splash tag this picture will come up immediately i will say yeah um yeah if you're not say if you're somebody who just listens and doesn't look at these photos uh i got immediate captain eo vibes from some of this some of the costumes extremely like a live captain eo a little bit after the fact yeah yeah from the yeah the the villainess and the right um i you know the there's we got a lot of like silver dancers slash uh guard warrior he's on our guard yeah stormtroopers i mean that's the mickey's chrome mickey has people in chrome mickey faced shaped like bulletproof chrome vests and knee pads yeah every bit of that they turn around and you can see that their boots are studded with mickey heads yeah they're on stilts so they have long legs which is a rich

has room enough to put to stack like three chrome mickey heads that's just on the back of the legs how many how many mickey heads per soldier i mean at least 20 yeah this this is a peek into the future in like 10 years when bob chapek like somehow buys the u.s government and we're all under the rule of disney and the disney police are policing the streets in these chrome mickey outfits and that's these will be the uniforms of who goes and invades you know abu dhabi dubai like the places where they have non-disney theme parks right disney will mount invasions right we'll slowly take them over and there will be no more flintstones boat ride right like that that's ours those are mickey heads now right yeah so yeah these

are i will say these are cool outfits yeah i really like these outfits i like a lot of this sure sure sure i agree it's great it's it's weird i there's a disney fandom page for this that that actually does a pretty good job of summing it up too and i think one of the things i was kind of thinking about again that i got an answer for is a guy complains on it's like some of this looks like rip off power rangers and there's kind of a reason for that oh i don't think i know the kind of reason interesting i it it is around the time of power rangers starting but it all it also goes back to like well a lot of this is from the tokyo disney 10th anniversary show it's magical yeah a lot of it kind of poured it over possibly flown over uh and then tweaked a bit tweaked yeah it was a 10th

anniversary tokyo show yeah that they took a lot of the elements from yes and like so much else you can find a better quality of the tokyo version the video of it's magical is very good quality yeah there's this channel we got to dive into this channel that's all pro shot it somehow has professionally felt like clearly from disney footage pristine perfect footage of these it's all stage shows at tokyo disneyland but then also disney sea who they every year they mount a new massive thing on the lagoon with so many boats that have to be coordinated and planes like flying kites past those things are so mega scale so we got to watch a lot i think on this channel yeah i think the best i watched a couple splashtacular videos and

there's a lot where people set up a camera on a tripod seemingly but far away and it's hard to figure out what's going on but there's the user sean lock uploaded a video called 1994 disney spectacular fountain show at it cuts off uh but it's got like 6.2 thousand views that's a pretty good like cut um i think they videotaped the last day, a couple of the last day shows of Splashacular and then cut it together. Okay, okay. Yeah, there are pretty good.

That isn't just one long take. Well, but I knew this because they did a filmed cut down version on a very merry Christmas parade in in 1993 that's why i knew about the splashtacular show um so it's one of those regis parades and they throw over to epcot 94 it's almost 1994 and they go to bill nye the science guy uh bill nye is in like a yellow rain slicker and he's in the other he's in a different epcot fountain and he's getting wet and he's trying to tell you about epcot splashtacular at epcot 94 and you're like boy does disney just have this guy in a vice yeah at this point whatever they

want he will he will say that solar energy isn't ready he doesn't give a shit he'll talk about this weird splash show cash the check bill uh yeah yeah whatever they ask so uh and then they do a really great cut down and when you look it's fun to watch the 20 minute version of this but when it all unfurls over the course of a minute and a half it's so bonkers like wait a minute where are we okay it's fountain and then it's they're singing about colors red yellow and blue and then how quickly do you turn a corner to guards and stomp stomp stomp scary chrome mickey guards oh my god it is such a whiplash because you there's like you've seen tropes from all of these shows in different element different uh media obviously it starts out with like you imagine like a cheesy disney singing dance show and then there's a hard left until the guards oh cards there's an alien here and

like and then yeah it turns into power range like it's great it's such a wild drastic shift yeah yeah um which is good the the watching this watching it on the special, I believe I had a vacation. Maybe I didn't know yet. No, no, no. I went to Disney World the next year, but Splashtacular remained fused in my brain the whole time. And spoiler, it didn't make it. It made it seven months.

So this thing was not available to see by the next Christmas. But I didn't know that. So I got to Epcot and my first thought was where do i see that crazy show with the chrome mickey guards and the big and the creature i won't reveal the creature yeah not yet but i was so and i was like i didn't quite remember the name so i'm just like looking at every map is there some show i may have even made my parents ask can you ask if there's still the show with the guards tell them i want to see the guard show and they don't think they i don't think disney employees knew what i was talking about they were told don't ever bring it up again do not answer questions about splish tagular but it was a distinct disappointment to me on my second ever

trip to disney world that i didn't get to see this live that's that's crazy because this was not on my radar at all was it before we brought it up no i don't think so i think jason seemed to know because you were excited i would say yeah i hadn't i caught a little of it i think like six months ago or so okay i saw the picture first and then i saw you didn't know when you were a kid no i didn't know it as a kid i think it was again i was just thrilled at free sega games to try out interventions like that was one of the things because this this went like end of the year 1993 to start of summer 1994 not typically a time theme parks close attractions the start of the

summer season oh sure yeah yeah because anything that eats people yeah you want to right wasn't working i don't know i don't know what happened. When no one was watching it, I guess, they decided to get rid of it. I would have been. From the fandom, this I thought was interesting. Though intended as an exciting new offering to rejuvenate Epcot's attendance, it would be quickly scrapped when management decided it clashed with the modern, cutting-edge image of the newly opened interventions

couple things there uh uh interventions a famously aesthetically consistent area not a big weird mess also fountain shows not exactly a huge driver of attendance yeah if that was their plan maybe like new in event we were all like oh cool what's this you know kind of it sometimes it's very simple uh new rides drive attendance yeah that's it like do that yeah yeah yeah um so yeah not getting all these costumes from from tokyo um so well maybe to explain that transition a little more and this is that's brought up the user rob plays did a youtube video about this that's that's pretty good um so sort of what the tokyo version was kind of a post phantasmic where mickey has a

celebration he's trying to do but in this case literally maleficent as in phantasmic shows up there's a lot of magic and it was called it's magical and there were magic tricks like mickey's elevated in a big uh there's a big cage that's empty and then a flash and then mickey's in it or maleficent appears up in the castle but then uh puff of smoke and then she's down at the bottom so they had a second one waiting down there um and then the drag she turns into a dragon and that's your big showstopper just like phantasmic appears up out of the stage then a big mickey balloon unfurls at the end it's pretty good version's great and it still has the guards yes so the guards were an

innovative and it would and it makes it make sense like the weirdness of it when you think of it is through the prism of japanese weirdness, like, okay, totally. You'd be right. And how that can not translate the best to Florida. The genre name is tokusatsu. And that refers to like, not the genre name of the show, but like Power Rangers, Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider, other Godzilla movies movies you know uh sci-fi special effects shows

could be like superhero shows or monster shows or or magic girl show you know those sorts of things yeah and it very much has that vibe totally the costumes and stuff yeah maybe even more so in splashtacular than it's magical yeah because what it basically what happens in the translation and as rob breaks down this is a show done in front of the castle and it's with uh characters from sleeping beauty with fairy tale characters but now we've decided to port this over to future worlds in epcot where you can't do maleficent and these care where you have like a shorthand of this is a witch that i know from yeah the fantasy movies and i know the dragon i've seen this before they have to keep going into the sci-fi direction away from the fantasy direction right which requires them to

invent a lot more and the inventions are probably what made it bad for them at the time but it makes it great for us now perfect right in our wheelhouse oh so exciting who you get to meet some real this is boy custom ip for this one seven month show um has it, well, I was going to say has it in spades, but then also it's not the most fleshed out. No. In one case, literally not. Yeah. It's not.

I mean, I do think like Leonardo Columbus, who we've discovered in the past episode, might be a little more fleshed out than a lot of this stuff. But very much a piece. But yeah. It's very Leonardo Columbus- columbus yeah um but also yeah and also yeah as far as like talking about why it went away it does still feel a little old it feels like i looked it up starlight express also it feels like starlight express boy we not fully early we gotta do starlight express yeah for sure i really don't know a lot about i

don't either i know i know a little but i don't know trains i know trains are involved i know roller skates are involved i can't imagine that you as a kid when you're as a train enthusiast you wouldn't like i want to see the musical about the human trains i'll tell you when i i i kind of like two ships passing in the night just missing each other you know why starlight express story is that a teacher uh when I was in high school it's my freshman English teacher for a number of years before for a few years in a row had taken students on like a week-long excursion to London and I thought this idea sounded so cool. And she's like, I think I'm going to do it again next year. And I was so excited by the idea. Like she showed the itinerary, like, you know,

what it would be like about how much it would cost. There were sample itineraries, one of which was a showing of Starlight Express. And I was like, oh, a musical in the West End? Like, great. Wow. And then did not have enough interest. So I had to real scramble real quick and sign up for the like trip to dc that every schmuck yeah boring really boring if you live two hours from dc and i've been there three or four times as an adolescent

you know now i just get to do it with worse accommodations with kids i don't like um that's okay well we're gonna learn about starlight express and the young but obsolete steam engine rusty who wants to impress the first class observation car pearl oh my god yeah why have we not gone deeper andrew lloyd Webber was just so powerful at that time. I feel like, right. It was him. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Oh, so crazy. Okay. But we got our own awesome Chrome IP here, which is, um,

the, so one thing to know right off the top is that a lot of the show involves Mickey navigating a sparkly cherry picker. He's's in a as if he was going to fix some power lines yeah he is in a cherry picker i'm sitting alone watching it i said out loud to myself is that a cherry picker this is unique to the american production yes not in japan no that magic trick this one has a crane that he's riding around with a pushing a joystick around copperfield magic trick gone cherry picker in its place some crows were gnawing on these power lines again i gotta get up there and fix it

so yeah with he's though he's he doesn't end up doing any electrical work he does uh go up there to turn on the fountain uh conduct the phone i mean does he i guess he turns it on and conducts it yeah again it's sort of i mean what excited me about it because i love phantasmic so much as a kid yeah so i was like oh they have a they have one in epcot now that's custom and it's futuristic yeah that sounds great so just buying it on face value and that's what it is oh my god i gotta see it so and it's mickey conducting he's experimenting but then something goes awry and it's kind of that but yeah he waves his arms if you want to see mickey conduct that you get to see that he does do that the fountain built for this right

was it was it or i'm not sure graded it you know it you've all seen it it's the fountain of nations is what they call it now yeah from and the boy meets world yeah boy meets world episode and and the the the lights and the splash like the the shooting dancing waters were i believe put in for this show. That stuck around. I think they had it in 82. It looks like, again, I'm pulling up this research now. I thought the body of water, I don't know the capabilities of the body of water before. I thought that the water was there before,

but I could be wrong. I think what I saw was that if it was there before, everything, the upgrades done to the fountain stuck around for the show. They weren't doing shows with it till 93 is what this, which might be this. So it could be that. It might be, yeah, there was a fountain, but it didn't do all this stuff. So they probably enhanced it.

So Nikki's showing us what the fountain can do. There's a song about how it gets. Shoot water up in the air. Yeah, which is one thing that the fountain can do is shoot water around. And that is the one thing. Yeah. Join in. There's a song called, they say join in a lot.

And there's lines like, it's Disney magic. Everything's going great. That's nice. That's what Bob Chapek listens to every morning debatable yeah i don't know well at the time you know hey this is pre-frank wells dying everything was going great yeah um they do like sing like the fountain shoots in sync with like red yellow blue this show is done in broad daylight so you cannot see if there's colored lighting you can't see it yeah yeah that's a curious choice about it yeah then we get into the color separate okay so

fountain but let's celebrate color and then all the characters come out and much brighter kind of your neon crayola there it's it's you know it's super bright green and and minnie's in an extra pink pink and donald's got a bigger blue hat than normal it's like bigger and flatter yeah and then in so in the in the tokyo one all they had to do was have them in the bright clothes and that's the change but here they had to spacify them too so minnie is in kind of like a hoop dress like a jane jetson sort of thing and uh so on top and then uh chip and dale wear these weird hats that to me look like unfurled condoms okay like just kind of these odd these domes make them look real dopey saying a really aggressive verse about green they all kind of represent a color they're all really

everybody's everybody picks a color and like as if like a mock trial or debate they like to make a case why this color is the best and in japan donald and goofy really go at it of like orange versus yellow i feel like but uh so in epcot again what i alluded to with splitting the difference the japan show just about color, the magic of color. The Epcot show is about, again, to quote the narrator, the power and grandeur of water, the most phenomenal element in our world. You know, water abounds with life and in its movement and reflective qualities are found all the colors of the rainbow. So kind of splitting the difference it's about water and also colors and water isn't really mentioned again no it's jumping color water is gives us color colors in water well sometimes especially if there's like a bit of oil in it

it's got that glisten that's true or yeah you dye the lake green on saint patrick's day sure this water in this show does not have color people have colors in front of the water describing its movement and reflect reflective qualities is like all right you've done too many drafts yeah you've written too many drafts go back to the second one because that does not sound human well this is all kind of underscoring mickey just sort of calmly walking into position like a conductor starting a yeah an orchestra show yeah yeah and he hooks himself to the the cherry picker yeah gotta get that little belt around mickey can't fall that'd be that's that's the show's canceled immediately cherry picker does look a little shaky though he's conducting i'm like it is i mean i know it's supposed to bob a

little bit but it is moving i was a little that would stress me out and the bad guy goes up in it later yes yeah yeah there's a there's a switch um so the they're talking about colors um there's these dance the dancers are also chrome i call them the drop heads though like they're it's the women have kind of a it's sort of like a full uh like plush thing on their head that gives them the shape of a drop but it also looks like a kind of a bat like a uh if you bought a halloween store cone heads yes it looks like costume yeah that was my feeling they're silver cone silver cone heads um so that's strange they uh also everybody talks as if they're getting on a spaceship like like mini says greeting space travelers yeah oh yeah that's so weird they're talking about space immediately as if they're

going somewhere to space real Real quick about the look. I realize now that all the dancers look like Lalandra from X-Men. Oh, yeah. Who's Professor X's. The Empress of the Shi'ar Empire. The Empress of the Shi'ar Empire who is Charles Xavier's girlfriend at a certain point. But she has a kind of a silver helmet with colors on the side of it. Okay. I'll look up a picture. Could have been inspired um so things are going great they're on a unmoving spaceship

talking about water and color but then what there's like a boom over in the planter just given the physical space of how they had to do this, because it has to just be regular manicured Epcot grounds during the day. So often the planner, like standing in the mulch, there's an explosion and then it reveals how do you pull up of that photo? If you have, would you even begin to describe he's a lot like there's stuff like this in the Mario brothers movie,

right? Where it's a big old head body and like this in the mario brothers movie right where it's exactly body and then a tiny head yeah yeah it is like um some of the more abstract illustrators a comic book artist draw bane it is like the super villain bane it is like a rob leifelder like yes type he's an artist from he's still around yeah he created deadpool like the most horrific table drawing you can find and like the tiny heads and like yeah it's this very 90s looking thing yeah and that yeah specifically that shot even looks like it was like i had x-men cards that looked like that yeah and and so and matt so yeah he pops out of a planter and like 20 feet away inside. A planter.

Huh? I just wanted to underline. A planter. A planter. A bunch of like plants. Landscaping. Yeah. I just, yeah, sorry to cut you off, but I just wanted to underscore that it doesn't

look like something should be coming out of this area. This just looks like a nondescript. Aliens landed in a planter. Yeah. Asymmetrically off to the side in in future world yeah like when when everyone was doing drive-through halloween haunts and like a frankenstein would just burst out of like a bunch of plants in a field that they kind of set some cones up for you to drive through like that's kind of what it looks like and then imagine inside the brand new interventions the redone communicor people are on like the biggest desktop computer you've ever seen and they're like it's called the world wide web and it's going to revolutionize daily life what a time what a time i love epcot 94 yeah perfect place

perfect tiny and he kind of shows up and then just like shimmies that's all he does right just shakes around and then but so the the motion he literally doesn't go he's just their driver 30 seconds of screen time of stage time basically a very cool design get him out of here so the chauffeur this intergalactic chauffeur comes around drops off a character what's the character there's i believe that the well okay let's let's describe her first yeah i i wrote down the phrase condor woman you remember the bombed uh dark era disney live action film condor Man. It's kind of color wise and feather wise, kind of like a condor woman, but also a space witch, an evil sorceress. Cosmic sorceress is the phrase that I saw.

Sorceress. So you are already in the red. I feel like you are already like, okay, it's a sorcerer and they come from space. It could not be Maleficent. Maleficent just couldn't show up at Epcot. Yeah, just can't. You can't. These boundaries are drawn.

This will ruin everything. Things can't be Disney. Things can't be one thing over. Peter Quill, not Epcot. Mandalorian, not Galaxy's Edge. Oh, man. Do you remember when the Space Empress came to Epcot Center? Oh, man.

That was so awesome. Do you remember also the characters were all talking about their favorite colors, like red and blue. Man, that was so sweet. Oh, I loved it. I can't wait to go see the Splashtacular. He rules. Oh mickey and a cherry picker get out of here that was amazing i've heard there's a new place called reflections cafe

i can't wait to eat what is surely one of the best sandwiches i've ever had oh man the electric umbrella god i can't wait to use that thing well donald had a flatter bigger hat hat i was so psyched i ate so many hand witches i freaking puked if you don't know what we're this is we're kind of quoted we have not been on the new guardians ride no yet but this is for the pre-show where they they assuaged everyone's fears but saying there's gonna look epcot the guardians you've been to Epcot, okay? So don't get mad that we're building it here. Peter Quill grew up, loved it.

And then the evidence of that is this strange teleprompter sequence with Chris Pratt, which I have to say is one of the only times, we just kind of snarked about it on Twitter. And it's one of the only times in Podcast of the Ride's social media history that I've seen reply guys who do not follow us oh man we are i have heard as you approach 10 000 followers the app gets less usable uh and we are coming up on it uh but yeah there's been a couple people

recently who have like just missed the joke by a country mile the more well that's what happens on twitter you like start with a core of people we're having fun right you understand jokes and that things are said in jest and ironically and that the purpose of this platform is not to uh lay out a bunch of facts and proof and evidence and that is all that you do here yeah i i was it's like sorry yeah sorry he doesn't know about epcot like a bunch of 30 year old guys is really into it it's like man i don't know if that's what we were concerned about so much as the delivery so much as the like yeah look the naturalism of like read your script a couple times man yeah look peter quill had to go into the memory. He's not like us, us dorks.

He doesn't remember what Splashtacular is. He had to go into his mind and look at a really specific spot five feet away from camera every time that he remembered all of a sudden what the Epcot specific was. And an iPad Pro gaffer taped to a c-stand and honestly like i like honestly if i could choose it being like this version or like the nice smooth version this one's better yeah i do like it look yeah we love the show with the strange mythology and the mistakes and a bit of a tiny head dinosaur man writhing in a planter yeah i think this actually now that you mentioned it is keeping epcot weird and we're not necessarily hating it no no yeah it's just funny it's funny that

obviously he doesn't know what he's talking about that's all it is and it's what could be more in theme park pre-ride video spirit than a mistake that people that thousands of people watch every year yeah it's great odd little moments that just all right that's the bible now yeah and then there was no animatronic they they some of the art had like animatronics in the queue apparently that's out there's no animatronic in the queue oh and the blue sky version i think i was like oh yeah they'll put like the different like you could put like old characters in the queue where they could put all pieces of memorabilia no none of that so we're hanging our hat just on the barely script yeah about old epcot oh man i love riding the space shuttle earth

look peter quill's busy finding the space monsters k he doesn't know all this shit like you peter quill he's not real calm down also why are you doing this you don't follow us yeah you came here to do this just quote tweeting or just so we all felt the same yeah just like searching tweets like i'm today i'm gonna defend that take that's what i like uh like to a person the people who decided to not be happy that i made a joke about ricky gervais and his wonderfully progressive views on the trans community that like all of a sudden i have like because every time i clicked on what's this guy what like none of them follow me none of them follow anyone so the their purpose today was like i'm gonna get in there i'm gonna be in the army of my hero uh british billionaire ricky

gervais i'm i'm gonna be a proud american and defend a guy who hasn't done anything funny since 2008 that's my patriotic duty today recent events have shown that you need to do the math of like is this a human or is this a wing of the daily wire astro turfing organization yeah that's true there are humans doing it and i i eat i think it's it's a branch of a thing that i have been concerned about lately where like i think it probably started with that let people enjoy things comic strip got very out of hand and now if you make a joke about any big budget movie someone's like come on let people enjoy it it's like what is a joke like hey man you don't need to defend morbius like what are you talking about like what's going on this isn't via like not necessarily violence to tease

jurassic world dominion but i think it may have started with like you know comedians are the heroes or truth tellers like it just might be the logical conclusion of like well no uh teasing stranger things you're hurting people's feelings it's like what let them enjoy it am i not do what thou will cause no harm like yeah i don't i'm letting everyone do whatever they want yeah i'm not i'm not some evil space sorcerer that this is the problem is this person now why haven't we named this character well because the dialogue that occurs is mickey who are you none of your business. Oh, great trick. Very funny. Great.

Not even a name. Character unnamed. Not even a name. No, we owe it to, they got to start rehearsing it tomorrow. Curry, get it off there. Get it on the printer. So, don't know who it is. She quickly explains some backstory.

Some of what was alluded to in that commercial that I played. Intergalactic wars have robbed my planet of all color and life so we are here to take yours um i don't know that i would come to a fountain show to take color i might go to like a paint factory or a museum sure yeah that's where you would yeah or uh yeah rainbow painted desert that's good yeah again i hate to keep going back to this well skittles factory when it's a skitter that's great um uh in it's magical the tokyo disney show maleficent shows up and just pretty much goes like i'll take your color or like i'll show you color and you know it's maleficent you know it's just evil it's just a shitty things like the space witch with wars on cosmic And it's Maleficent. It's just evil. It's just a shitty thing.

The space witch with wars on cosmic planet, it's like, I think you've written yourself into a corner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Though, I mean, quickly. But even that, that's a key couple seconds to explain all that. And then also the fountain. We don't know why she wants the fountain. That's just extra.

And I might as well throw that in the cart, too and that one really minnie is so hurt by this no no very fraught yeah she's very i mean the craziest line comes in a little while there's probably the maybe one of the craziest things mickey has ever said but is it about magic well no it's we'll get to it yeah because there's a fight there's some fighting earlier in the show he just he goes manny you look great this is nice they're complimenting each other there's a little something on it though that i felt like was too much too too bawdy come on can't say what just saying you look nice well at the end of the show see she says what a mouse but like the the recording of the line makes it sounds like she said what a mouth

and i was like what the fuck mickey mouth oh i've been meaning to say that here's i'll drop this that that uh russi taylor i believe passed away the the one-time voice of yes um i was talking to my friend's dad who did a lot of animation work in the uh late 70s early 80s who not for disney but other things uh russi taylor was around a lot he was uh very fond of her like oh she's the coolest ever to work with but apparently extremely profane wow just constantly just like and i would have to apologize in front of my friend who was a child at the time just like like oh god damn motherfucker okay yeah shit oh sorry to do that in front of you okay uh try that again so the so the voice of minnie would drop a lot of bombs that's great that's great piece of insider info yeah walt again walt spinning in the grave when you tell that but he should have while he wasn't around to if somebody

had vetted her right we've hired a profanity to voice our our beloved mouse that's right um so anyways well what i was gonna say this all right so uh the scary sorceress is struck and then so mickey says i've got a little magic of my own guards and then is so by magic he means uh private security guns hired guns with spears out hell's angels like giant stamps Private security. Hired guns. Hired guns. Stomp, stomp, stomp, clomp out. Hells Angels? Like giant staffs. Giant staffs with silver Mickey heads on the top. And a massive change from the original Tokyo production.

They are coordinated stilt walkers. Oh, you're right. The stilts were not in the, yeah. The stilts were not in. And, yeah. Make your weapons in my image i want people to get stabbed with my face this is my rifle this is my gun this is for fighting this is for fun yeah but mickey wouldn't it be more if you literally have i mean you have a blunt shape of a head but wouldn't you rather have points than you're, because a point could impale somebody. That's better than, I mean, I'm just asking, do you want us to make it a spear more so than your round head?

I want them bludgeoned, not impaled. Listen to me. It's like a hammer, not a knife. Okay, just don't bludgeon megeon me okay i'll get right on it um so yeah uh weapons made in his image they stomp out but then the unnamed sorceress has the ultimate ace up her sleeve and up through the opposing planter behind plants. Again, the planter. And it doesn't look imagineered or anything like, oh, something's coming out of that. It is just some bushes.

Like it would be in an office park. Right. In Warner Center and Woodland Hills. Yes. Is what it looks like. Well, the kids who, like, this was their thing. This was a thing they had to do. Or they had a VHS tape of,

I think I saw someone say this was broadcast on Disney channel at some point. What was this? Like, were they scarred by like, I can't go buy that plan or her like just in their neighborhood. Like I can't go buy his plants. There might be a thing.

So uprises from the planner, a giant robotic dinosaur. It's so crazy. There's a lot of details to talk about here. One, the, so, it is robotic, but a lot of the head is flesh. Right. But the lower, the bottom jaw is metallic. So, he's kind of, it's sort of a bionic dinosaur um the there is an angle that

the very merry christmas parade has that is up behind his head and that gives you an especially good look that he has an exposed brain yeah there is just pure open brain and in and from that angle you can also see that it's kind of this plugs kind of shoved in there so this dinosaur is jacked in like the matrix right this is a it's a very disturbing do we think that they've grown the brain because i think dinosaur and this could be wrong but isn't dinosaurs like it would have like a t-rex would have a smaller smallish brain for its skull that could actually be wrong but uh i've heard it somewhere when i was probably a kid do we think this is the t-rex's brain that has grown or are they implanted i think they've implanted uh like a big brain into it i could be wrong but i don't know and i don't think

the narrative explains so oh i see i see because dinosaurs are small yeah yeah so they they grew an extra big brain or some sort of a giant alien yeah brain they've implanted that might give him greater powers although because he moves really slow and does not speak really so he's smarter from the design flaws with whatever this experiment which is what it is yeah yeah i he looks awesome uh yeah Let's be clear. His head looks awesome. Yeah, the body, they kind of give up a little bit. They give it up. So it looks like a head, a spine, a rib cage that it's opened out, and nothing else.

Yeah. Is that your theme? Because I always add that question. Is the metal on his body, is it a bunch of little arms with no hands? Or is that a flailed out rib cage? I think it's that my question was is this the design on paper or did they start building it go you know what looks good enough yeah let's scrap it let's leave it there and let's just leave it as is yeah yeah maybe there were more parts but they were a little bit again clock sticking we gotta get this thing

storyline rise the rest of them could have just been blown off in the many wars cosmic wars that have been going on yes clearly battle damaged did we say the name of this dinosaur officially well i don't i know what it is i don't know how to say it yes this is an impossible mystery well yeah i have it written down. Let's all just try. Okay, hold on. You got it? Yeah. Tell me when. One, two, three. Terrasoex. Terrasoex. Terraso. We landed around the same thing.

Terraso. Yeah. Terraso. It's probably not so because the X is uppercased. I think it's an X in the place of Russ. Yes. The X is uppercase. I think they's an X in the place of Russ. Yes. The X is uppercased. I think they want you to say X.

There's no R. But if it was a lowercase. X. But if it was a lowercase X, it would be like Terra-so. Terra-so. But that's not what it is. I think it's like Terra-saur. But with an X at the end is what we're.

There should be an R in there. That's the problem. Yeah. It would be easy. There should be an R and then a dash. Terra-saur X x that's better yeah pterosoics pterosoics pterosoics well like i got used to it yeah all right we got it we knew we had to muscle through it so we're all dreading this coming in the notes oh yeah pterosoics um

yeah so terrifying in his appearance and spelling prasoics shows up and oh my god to be i mean i think i think a kid would have been very scared of this it's big yeah it's an impressive piece i think wow it looks like that wow um it means business and it looks when they film it cinematically in that commercial that i played earlier. I mean, you think this is going to be the best show you've ever seen when you're zooming a camera in and out. But just the way that it is kind of in nature is sort of it's just distant. It's in a planter. And that hurts it. These aliens should have found.

I mean, I guess they needed a place to hide, but maybe they should have just like crashed into the center of the stage. But instead, it is what it is. And Pterosoics. Mickey thinks he has it handled with the Chrome Army. But Pterosoics shows up. And I think now I bet I know what you're going to say as the Mickey insane. Well, the stormtroopers take their staffs and shoot sparks at him. That does nothing.

They all do. Yeah, much like our modern does nothing they all they all do yeah much like our modern police they all attempt to uh to do section no i'm not i'm sorry further than our modern police they attempt to do something sure sure they actually do something they one by one they fail um and then uh but then mickey's got. Yeah, so Mickey has a solution. He says, quick, Minnie, give me the exterminator. What a Mickey line. One of the weirdest Mickey lines I've ever, give me the exterminator. And she hands him like. You know when they're doing a gender reveal party and they shoot the blue dust out of a handheld cannon?

Yeah. That's sort of what this is i feel yeah in it's magical he uses a whirly gig uses a pinwheel that shoots sparks he comes back later and uses a sword little cleaner and this it's an exterminate which is just a crazy staff looking thing that also seems to shoot shoot spark or sparks appear somewhere yeah yeah um yeah so mickey's got the exterminate this is canon mickey has something he knows about they've talked about it yes it's like the fantastic four has a thing called the ultimate nullifier which is just a little handheld box that supposedly is the only thing that can kill the mighty galactus and it's just a mcguffin it's like the um maltese falcon or whatever they're chasing in north by northwest it's just like an all-powerful thing but you never quite see it do anything

you know yeah well not this you see you see the mickey the exterminator yeah and what the exterminator does is like shoot a flare into the pterosoics his chest yeah it's just like shooting him in the gut uh-huh this is i heard where the exterminator mickey gifted it to bob jpeg and he's got it now in the office so So if that executive he just fired tries to get in, dude, you try to come back. Mickey, give me the exterminator. Glad somebody finally appreciates the power of this thing. They only let me use it once in Epcot.

They canned the show because they said it was scary and weird. I don't think so. They asked for it. I took it down to Church Street Station, got free drinks all night, baby. It's like a firework show, basically. Yeah, it's deadly, but it also looks cool. It's just a chance to shoot this thing at Chippendale if they messed up their lines. Shoot at those varmints.

You want an exterminator around, just shoot at the varmints. Space var exterminator around to shoot at the varmints space varmints you don't want to ban this if whatever it's your space varmints then in florida there's snakes that can swim do you know how fucked up that is just thinking about it makes me sick the exterminator? How did that make it? Even in that year. Then our all-American hero asks his live-in girlfriend to hand him a big staff called the exterminator. Hey, you look smoking hot today. Give me the exterminator.

Look, the costumes are done. The costumes are done. The Thanksgiving holiday weekend's coming up. Let's just get the show on we can't babe babe give me the exterminator we're here to wrestling we have to send it in the bushes i think it's an alien again no it could just be might just be a mouse you're a mouse you don't want to shoot a mouse yeah i do that fucking mouse he dead to me. He's exterminated. The show must go on. They skip the addition by subtraction past of the script.

The past where you remove things to enhance the show, not add more things. Where's that Mortimer? Where's that Mortimer that's been courting you? Give me the exterminator. Mickey, no. Mickey, please. Please.

He's fine. He's nice. He's nice. He's harmless. He's harmless. You can't fire that thing that close. Think about it. What would it do to Terasaurics? Go, go. Make him go soak his head. Pluto, get over there and put this apple on your head. I'm

fine. I don't have anything else to drink. My name's Crane. Here, watch. Just a flower pot. I didn't have anything else to drink. My name's Crane. Here, watch. It's just a flower pot. I didn't shoot the dog, okay? Maybe you've been drinking from the... I'd be mad, but... You've been drinking from the fountain again. You've gone crazy. What the...

The colors are perfectly natural. It's potable. Potable water. Mickey is the lizard queen. This is our Mickey. Drunken 3 a.m. This is a window into the Mickey that we want. That's the Mickey of Epcot 94.

Mickey shoots a space dinosaur in the chest who slowly crumbles back into the planter he came from. That's insane. I don't remember what becomes of the sorceress, the unnamed sorceress after that. Well, doesn't she zap Mickey and he drops in a trap door? Oh yeah, Mickey does disappear for a minute. That's when she takes the cherry picker.

She takes, I am taking this thing for a ride. And she is this thing that is much lower tech than what I, a veteran of intergalactic space wars, want the cherry picker. There's one thing I want more on this earth and colors. I want to see the tops of the central air conditioning units of interventions. I want to see with all the bird splats. I want to replace a billboard, one ad with another. The only way I can do do it with this cherry picker

i need a plastering work she's fun by the way i really want to say she's got a lot of energy really um gesturing wildly and she's talking like this and i'm so evil very reader repulsa yes extremely not as true reader repulsa uh the um the maleficent there's like two maleficents clearly in the it's magical show and uh the one who appears on the balcony twice in the show that must have been an easy gig because you appear at the beginning you step backstage and then you come out at the end and go like ah and that's a big break if somebody were to draw a nancy cartoon of you watching that it would be like you're watching it and you go when you think about it and like you're now maleficent like you walk out

you walk back and then you just go and collect your check glass of lemonade backstage while the other maleficent walks in i'm sweat on the brow ah i was hoofing at that old time god i'm calling for fan art In the style of the Nancy comic strip Why has there never been Jason In the style of Nancy Yeah really Boy

Jason is a sluggo Often I'm Yeah I characterize as a sluggo But I'd be happy to be Nancy In this case Jason fantasizing about

The Maleficent job Where you just have to sit Stand on a balcony We make the same money As the other Maleficent We make the same money as the other Maleficent. We make the same amount. The shitty break room with two Maleficents.

Maybe they switched off each performance. Oh, my back's a little achy today. Can I do balcony? I'll wait you next time. Don't worry about it. Throat's a little scratchy. I don't really want to sing

Can I just do balcony tonight Would that be a big problem So Then I truly don't know what happens to the witch I assume she falls into that trap door But quickly this is all over and It's resolved and then there's a song that's like Mickey makes your dreams

Come true With the exterminator Yeah well Mickey comes back out with an unmentioned i guess broad magic wand shoots sparks at her and that gets her okay yeah again pinwheeled a sword little cleaner than exterminator to unnamed item so what happened to this witch was she's fought in many many wars the the cult the wars have eroded the color from her planet and she there's probably a lot of like you have to do something do something you who shall not be named i will you don't think i have a plan i'm going to orlando i looked it up on google maps there's a bunch of color in there i saw the overhead it's gonna work great what if you encounter a what if you encounter a mouse with a with an extermination wand don't

oh shut up in orlando hardly i'm more scared if he has a second unnamed one that's the bigger problem he's gonna if he if this supposed if this hypothetical mouse has an exterminator he's gonna if he if this supposed if this hypothetical mouse has an exterminator he's gonna blow all the extermination juice on pterosaurics here that's that's pretty good i mean um a couple of the dancers all come back with brightly colored butterfly wings i don't know why they didn't do shit during this big fight scene but they're not war they're not guards i guess those wings aren't practical but then at the end mickey stands in center stage and there's a bunch of fog or mist and stuff and he disappears in a puff of smoke he goes through the trap door which looks pretty cool in a close-up yeah what's the implication of the implication there though just like magic

he's magic yeah yeah he turned into what he He was water. He turned into vapor. I'm vapor now! Yeah, but show's water and color. What do you care? What business is yours? You don't have the exterminator. You're not holding the exterminator in this conversation. Don't make me turn into vapor again.

I'm turning you into mist. Let's get let's merge our mist mist Let's merge our mist Let's do it misty style What a mouse What a mouth What a mouth What a mouth

Okay We have to Let's wind this down But did you guys find the other The epilogue If you can imagine The insanity is not over I think I know what you're talking about I think I banged the epilogue if you can imagine that i think i know you're talking about banged the epilogue for later the tomorrowland show that's what you're talking about

right yeah yeah but we gotta bring it up yes of course yeah we can bring it up but i was like oh this is 25 minutes no it is a full it is a full episode sadly it's a full episode all right okay but here's what happened this show closed after seven months and then what i didn't know is that over in tomorrowland a couple months later that all the same costumes started appearing in an outdoor show there in the magic kingdom called galaxy search this was a star search but for intergalactic acts um it is uh a it lends itself to lines like, ladies and gentlemen, Minnie and the Mobots. Yeah.

And then she performs Aretha Franklin's Respect with a bunch of robots with weird featureless dark heads. Yep. And what this builds to is that Goofy brings on his singing partner, which is a big robotic dinosaur, a familiar-looking big robotic dinosaur. But in this case, it is further modified with Elvis glasses. Glasses.

Elvis's glasses. Elvis's famous glasses, yeah. It's his triple glasses and an Elvis wig, referred to as the king. and they do a duet of uh i just want to be your teddy bear oh yeah i just want to be your teddy bear yeah that goofy mostly sing because everybody's scared of the dinosaur but then goofy mostly sing so insane now goofy mostly sings it but sometimes the the robot the dinosaur robot elvis will just go like i just want to be your teddy bear yeah that's right oh that's what i'm saying

yeah and that's something that happened at disneyland or disney world i will say this that feels like a 90s show to me. Not Splashtacular. That feels 80s to me. Yeah. This feels like they have repurposed all of this stuff for a dumb sounding 90s show. Yeah. Which I do. I did not watch all of it, but I saw the highlights.

But yeah, I didn't know that existed. I had no idea. No idea. Yeah. And we don't like, so you got Sunny E eclipse and then a few feet over a big robot dinosaur with an exposed brain is also elvis yeah in a in an intergalactic star search what a time i think maybe i need to declare with all this that disney world peaked in 94 these shows people actually sat and watched sunny eclipseclipse, not just the weirdos among us who remember.

This is all the insanest stuff ever. This was great. I love it. Yeah. And I'm always happy they do live entertainment. Again, I don't know if it's the biggest, like, we need to get more people here driver. But I think people are really happy, like, as the parks reopened, like, oh, good live entertainment's coming back.

It does add something to the park. Yeah, like, oh, good, live entertainment's coming back. It does add something to the park. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Did you guys also see that then pterosoics is just rotting in the, a la Botanicus. This is with dramatic lighting, like in the sunset. Oh, my God.

This was just, I think if you worked at Disney World until like 2006 and you parked in the employee parking, you would pass by this non-moving dinosaur robot and most people didn't know what it was because nobody remembered splashtacular just sat there rusting away for a long time and i again met the magic that even when it's gone even that like at one point yeah i work at a place where i park my car and then there's a rusty dinosaur dying in the Florida humidity.

I did not have any idea about that. Don't ever let your union strike because Disney's negotiator is Tarasowex. Watch out. Guards! Watch out, Equity. Watch out, AFL-CIO Teamsters. Bludgeon them! I'm gonna say this this is how i feel after at the end of this year this is my favorite thing we've talked about in months

i love this i found it funny and i've liked on spooling this i don't know how the audience feels i love this show you know what i love the only thing that is lacking and i guess we didn't even really talk about it as much as the music isn't as good as i would want it to be not really it's pretty generic it's pretty generic disney if the music were like a little bit better i think i would completely agree with you i only have like 75 agree with you because yes aesthetically yeah yeah aesthetically yeah like if yeah aesthetically it's it's right up my alley as i said on the power rangers episode like is my favorite genre of any entertainment so so we've got that we've got very cool looking

mickey's guards it feels like some crazy nonsense even like sometimes when you see some and i have not really played the kingdom hearts games, but I do like the idea of like the recontextualization of the Disney characters in this bizarre, like other narrative. I like that. So I like a similar way where like Mickey has guards for no reason. Like I like the idea of this bizarre reality.

And yeah, it's all, it's, it's great. It's great it's great i love that there's people who are like oh not really disney people but who when i was 13 i know everything about kingdom hearts yeah i know people mention kingdom hearts and i got close to playing it it's hard with video games i have i have switch and i have a ps5 but it's like it takes me a lot to get really invested if it's news big zelda i'll do it if it's

a new big mario like the main mario 3d games i will do all of it i was never an rpg guy but like whoever was like we should mash up final fantasy with disney stuff like whoever probably deserves a lot of money like yeah they hit just the right time where all that could happen and there's multiple games i mean there's certainly stuff for us to investigate there because i bet we would find some weirdness like this moments that yeah yeah mickey does what yeah well let us know any alert us to anything especially crazy and just play it in hearts but does it top the exterminator is is the exterminator one of the craziest things crazy yeah it's done like right along i along with yelling okay you asked for it yeah we're discovering we just keep peeling back layers of and i hope that this is our

best defense against being accused of being disney adults that it's not like i just love him and i want to hug him and i want him to be at my foodless barless wedding oh man that was a can of worms i can't even yeah i mean if you're if you're a regular or like you're like you're a little internet savvy and just like every you know you like to read about movies and tv and stuff and then every now and then you just come across something like i spent all my money on mickey and minnie for my wedding there's no food like yeah you're gonna be a little weirded out that's kind of weird and religious uh studies professor who's like let's not pathologize this i was like you are being very weird professor like you are weird strangest defense now hang on let me defend the

people yeah who didn't get food at a wedding or a bar at a wedding but instead get got mickey and minnie to take pictures with them for half an hour and then when pressed on this their defense was wait there were vending machines oh man i missed that was in their poster like the grounds of the hotel had plenty of vending machines the guests's so funny. The guests could have helped themselves to three-month-old sun chips, which should be anyone's expectation at a wedding. Is that bait? Was that fake? Maybe it's possible.

Maybe it's bait. The religious professor who's like, I have studied this, and it's sort of like a religion. I'm like, no, no. I tapped out of the thread like three tweets and i was like professor no what are you doing i realize this might not be the best argument that i'm making but i just don't because i don't like being tossed into that disney adult box and

i hope that it helps that my mickey is murderous and holds an extermination rod i think that look i i hear what you're saying and I agree with what you're saying, but when you come before the judge and the judge looks at the number of episodes you've done on Disney-related content, I think, unfortunately,

they're going to- Allow me to make this argument. There are so many episodes that have nothing to do with theme parks. I'm not the judge. Or where do we get away from the stated topic

for hours at a time the judge is going to have to be a listener in order for him to understand the nuances of this or he or her if we are judged in the kingdom of heaven yeah i thought you were talking about saint peter anavia saint peter is going to listen to every episode of podcast the ride and from that determine yeah yeah so anything's possible and then he's then he speed listens hmm i see and then speaks okay you asked for it and cast us to hell uh-huh well you survived podcast the ride thanks for subscribing to the second game hey if you want to dig even deeper join us on our new patreon tier club three where you get one more bonus episode every month chosen by you

the audience and our regular episodes, ad-free. It's just three more dollars a month. On one of these places, we will be doing Starlight Express sooner than later. That's, yeah, because I don't want to say goodbye to chrome soldiers. No. Not anytime soon.

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