The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Places on Earth (96 page)

Guests’
bateaux
glide under another bridge, past a quartet or quintet of singers:  Three pirates and a dog, or donkey, or dog
and
donkey, depending upon whether either of the animals is
backstage
for maintenance.  They’re all singing, barking, or braying the song that pervades and unifies the attraction instrumentally and vocally:
Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)
, crafted by
Imagineer X.
Atencio
and
George Bruns
.

This is where Guests notice, if they haven’t already, the beautiful clouds drifting in the night sky above.  These
look like real shifting clouds–only they can’t be.  Right?  Because, despite all appearances to the contrary, we’re
indoors
.  Paradoxically, the delicate, impossible clouds anchor the Guests’ sense of the reality of the
Pirates
’ fantastic world.  The clouds, simple as their secret is, remain one of the great technical and artistic achievements of this attraction.

Guests are now nearing the fiery finale of the attraction
; they drift into a harbor ringed with buildings that are ablaze.  The effect is incredibly realistic.  One pirate is trying to get the heck out of the burning port, balancing loot in his arms and on his head as he prepares to board his
bateau
.  A couple of other rogues, singing arm in arm, are having too much fun to worry about the flames (frankly, they look like they might have started the inferno!).  Yet another rogue has collapsed in a stupor and is snoring among pigs who snort accompaniment to the
Yo Ho
song.

Your
bateau
floats under a bridge, on which a hairy-legged pirate balances, looking perilously close to toppling onto Guests’ heads (although he never does).  The boat slips into a dark, foreboding stone prison, where Guests witness jailed pirate prisoners whistling to a little dog (the same one that spotted
Captain Jack
hiding in the barrel, and the same one we see in the
Pirates
films).  The dog holds the cell keys in his mouth, and the pirates use whistles, coaxing words, and a large soup bone to tempt the mutt to bring them the key.

Your
bateau
drifts deeper into the catacombs under the port city.  You hear timbers groaning and embers sizzling.  You see flickering flames and burning wood.  Above your head, floorboards have given way and a chair and a bottle teeter precariously, looking as if they might fall on you at any instant.  This is an incredibly well-imagined and well-executed
tableau
; nearly every sense is engaged, and even local
Passholders
who’ve ridden through
Pirates
many times might feel a bit nervous amidst the flames and structures that look and sound as though they’re going to collapse at any moment.

Guests suddenly find themselves in the explosives room of the port armory–not a place anyone wants to be during a fire! 
And, just to make it
really
interesting, you’re in the middle of a drunken pistol fight.  Pirates fire flintlocks at each other, and the effects have been progressively enhanced in recent refurbs, to the point that they are very good indeed.  When the pirates fire, red light and smoke flash from the guns’ muzzles, and objects (shields, helmets, mugs) “ping” and tremble from the force of the bullet.  All an illusion, of course, but it looks and sounds like a real gunfight as you pass through the middle of it.  Some Guests close their eyes and shy away from the gun muzzles.

Guests’
main concern, of course, is what will happen if any of the bullets hit the many kegs of explosives scattered around the chamber!  All of the containers are clearly marked “Explosivo” to heighten the tension.  But don’t worry; the
AA
pirates aren’t firing real bullets.

Guests are happy when their
boats are chain-pulled up a watery ramp, out of the line of fire and past the final set piece:
Captain Jack
, in the midst of a massive treasure trove, nonchalantly balancing on a chair as he toasts himself and his piratical brethren.  The figure is so uncannily fluid and the voice is so well synched to the mouth movements that you’ll almost believe it’s really
Depp
. 
Blackbeard
’s voice (previously
Davy Jones
’ voice) taunts departing Guests; green-eyed rats peer from the shadows.

The cl
ickety-clack sound of the chain-pull psychologically primes Guests for another flume plunge, but there is just a very shallow little slide into a placid canal which curves into the muted sunlight of
Lafitte’s Landing
, where more Guests are queuing for the attraction.  Voyagers have journeyed to the exact spot where they began their adventure; the voyage is complete.

For many years, Guests returning to
Lafitte’s Landing
sailed past a squawking
Audio-Animatronic
parrot.  In November 2010, the author’s sister discovered that the parrot had been removed and reported that a Cast Member said the parrot had been retired due to Guests’ complaints about its annoying voice.  However, by January 2011, the parrot was back at its post, resplendent in vivid blue and green feathers and more talkative than ever.  And the parrot is still there at the end of 2013.  This is a good example of taking all
Disneyland
stories, even those delivered by Cast Members, with a grain of salt.

At 16 minutes this is one of the longest
adventures in the park, and in many Guests’ opinions, the most rewarding.  The cruise across the eerily realistic bayou, the multiple plunges down flumes into watery caverns, the skeletons (some of which, like the skull above the
Captain
’s headboard, are real), the treasure cave, the battles, the smoke, the cloudy night skies, the pirates and, of course, the culminating inferno, unreeling over 16 minutes, in such detailed set pieces–it all transports Guests to another time and place and is nothing less than stunning.

Many
’s the time I’ve begun the journey with people chatting–teenagers, housewives, business people, etc. apparently unable to put aside their daily thoughts and cares, discussing prosaic things when the cruise begins.  But
Pirates
mesmerizes anyone who takes the journey.  By the time Guests drift through the pirate caves, just about everyone has fallen dead silent.  Any conversation is hushed and relates to the scenes slipping past the boat.  There’s laughter at some of the gags, and quiet conversation about mind-blowing effects like the moving, realistic clouds in the night sky, and the burning port which the
Anaheim
Fire Department
once considered almost
too
realistic.

I
won’t tell you how the fire effect is achieved, because until you know how it’s done, it’s seamlessly beautiful, but once you know, it never looks real again.  If you really want to know how it’s done, you can easily research the effect online.

Pirates of the Caribbean
, the attraction, long pre-dates and loosely inspired the phenomenally popular
Disney
movies of the new millennium, to wit:

Pirates of the Caribbean:  The Curse of the Black Pearl
(2003)

Pirates of the Caribbean:  Dead Man’s Chest
(2006)

Pirates of the Caribbean: 
At World’s End
(2007)

Pirates of the Caribbean:  On Stranger Tides
(2011)

Allof the movies were commercially successful and were greeted with enthusiasm by multitudes of fans.

Dead Man’s Chest
and
At World’s End
have been criticized for being overlong, overproduced, and confusing, but the moviemakers’ hearts were in the right place, trying to stuff everything including the kitchen sink into these sequels.  If a joke could amuse, a stunt thrill, or an effect dazzle, it was kept in the films.  In contrast, critics called
On Stranger Tides
too slow and dull (you can’t please critics, it seems).

Dead Man’s Chest
and
At World’s End
were shot, but not released, back-to-back, and therefore were understandably more coherent to their creators than to the audience that had to wait a year between them.  Legions of fans, however, were forgiving.  Who cared about a few confusing moments or a bit of bloat when you were devouring such lavish cinematic feasts? Savvy?
At World’s End
, in particular, broke box office records and made more than 960 million dollars worldwide.  And
On Stranger Tides
, released in May 2011 in 2D and 3D, made more than 1 billion dollars worldwide by July 2011.

We’ll see what critics think of
Pirates 5
, due in theaters in July 2015.

The Curse of the Black Pearl
, which launched the franchise, is the best of the films from a critical standpoint, ravishingly shot and scored, well and tightly written, and thrillingly paced.

It opens with the prow of a ship cutting
toward us through a heavy mist.  A well-dressed little girl on the foredeck sings a pirate’s song,
the
pirates’ song,
Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life For Me)
.

This is the governor’s daughter,
Elizabeth Swann
, and we realize at once that this is no ordinary little girl, and as her character is developed over the first three films, it is a fitting and logical conclusion, at the close of
At World’s End
, that she has become both the wife of
Davy Jones
,
and
the supreme Pirate ruler (known in that very masculine boys’ club as the
Pirate King
).

The song
Yo Ho
is the first of the films’ many nods to the
Disneyland
attraction;
Imagineer
X. Atencio
crafted the tune’s lyrics for the attraction in 1967.

Other affectionate allusions
to the attraction in the first film include prisoners using a bone to tempt forward a dog holding the cell keys in its mouth; much boisterous cavorting (and a certain red-head) on the island of
Tortuga
; the grisly skeletal forms of the cursed pirates; and the image of
Captain Barbossa
standing atop dunes of golden coins and loot in the treasure cavern.

More than the visual and musical references, what the films
most profitably harvest from the
Disneyland
attraction is the pirate spirit.

The original
Pirates of the Caribbean
at
Disneyland
had no
Captain Jack Sparrow
, no
Elizabeth Swann
,
Will Turner
,
Captain Barbossa
, or
Davy Jones
, but it did have a roguish spirit that celebrated ambition, derring-do, ingenuity, a hunger for adventure and an eat-drink-and-be-merry attitude.

One of the challenges for the
Imagineers
who designed the original
Disneyland
attraction, in particular for
Marc Davis
, a genius at intelligent and hilarious sight gags, was how to make filthy, gluttonous, thieving, drunken, violent pirates the primary subject of a journey at wholesome, family-values wellspring
Disneyland
.  According to
The Imagineering Field Guide to Disneyland
,
Walt
himself had concerns about an attraction based on such unsavory characters.

Davis
was the right person to take the lead on the concept, precisely because of his sense of humor.  The only way to make the subject palatable to and appropriate for impressionable kids and their elders was to tone it down and lighten it up with clever humor.

The other key
Pirate
’s
Imagineers
, including sculptor extraordinaire
Blaine Gibson
,
Audio-Animatronics
geniuses
Roger Broggie
,
Fred Joerger
, and
Wathel Rogers
, the endlessly imaginative
Claude Coats
and
Yale Gracey
, and costume designer
Alice Davis
(incidentally
Marc Davis
’ wife) all took their cue from
Marc Davis
’ humorous designs.  The pirates in the attraction would still be gluttonous, thieving, drunken, and violent, but they would be funny, so it would all be OK.

Lest there be any doubt that
Disneyland
does not promote such behavior, the pirate skeletons trapped in the eerie caverns near the beginning of the attraction provide darkly humorous cautionary images.  Originally there was going to be dialogue spoken by the skeletons, warning Guests of the fates the pirates suffered because of their greedy and thoroughly bad behavior, but the dialogue was ultimately scrapped in favor of the
Atencio
-penned, destined-to-be-an-instant-classic pirates’ song
Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)
.