Girls Who Have Played Disney Princesses at Disneyland

HERE YOU LEAVE TODAY AND ENTER THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY, TOMORROW AND FANTASY

— Plaque over the entrance tunnels into Disneyland

To All Who Describe This Happy Place Here, Welcome.

The six Theme Park resorts owned and operated by The Walt Disney Company under Disney Parks, Experiences and Products ^note previously the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts subsidiary until March 14, 2018, when it was combined with Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media to become Walt Disney Parks, Experiences and Consumer Products; the current name was adopted on January 1, 2019, also known simply as Disney Parks. Their best-known attractions include state-of-the-art rides and shows based upon the Disney films, as well as spectacular parades, fireworks and other live performances. You want to make sure everyone knows you're going there.

Walt Disney came up with the idea for his original park when he took his children to a park and noticed the parents hanging off to the side while the children played. He decided to build a place where the entire family could have fun and enjoy themselves. While the idea was met with some skepticism, the execution was resoundingly successful and remains so to this day.

    Disney Resorts

• Disneyland Resort: The original Disneyland Park opened on July 17, 1955 by invitation only, and the following day to the general public. Located in Anaheim, California, it's the only park Walt saw built within his lifetime. It serves as the template for most of the parks worldwide, though fans praise the fact that Disneyland is the only park that had Walt's personal touch. Its companion park, Disney California Adventure, opened in 2001. Between and adjacent to the two parks is the shopping/dining district known as "Downtown Disney." There are not as many resorts around this site because Disney did not have a lot of money when the park was built ^note Although they were already much bigger than most Souvenir Land operators , and by the time the company became the Mega-Corp they are today, the city's property values had gone through the roof because of the tourism Disneyland brought in (Walt was not happy about this irony).
• Walt Disney World Resort: The largest and most popular of the resorts opened in 1971, located in the cities of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista near Orlando, Florida. Includes four parks: Magic Kingdom (based largely on the original Disneyland), Epcot (devoted to science, technology, and cultures of the world; opened in 1982 as EPCOT Center), Disney's Hollywood Studios (formerly Disney-MGM Studios and focusing on movie/moviemaking-related attractions, 1989) and Disney's Animal Kingdom (combo of theme park and wildlife park, 1998), as well as two (formerly three ^note The original, River Country opened in 1976, but eventually became very outdated compared to its sister parks and closed permanently in 2001) water parks: Typhoon Lagoon (1989) and Blizzard Beach (1995). Fans constantly debate which of the four parks is the best, whether they were better in the old days, and so on. Disney World also includes many hotels, an all-purpose sports complex, golf courses, and a few shopping/dining/entertainment complexes like Disney Springs (formerly Downtown Disney among other past names).

  The actual "Reedy Creek" property upon which Disney World sits is huge, and many guests are surprised to learn that it consists mostly of wildlife preserves and undeveloped natural Florida habitat. This "breathing space" is deliberate, to avoid the property lockout seen in Anaheim. Another reason, and the company's official line, is that Walt Disney heard from families who could see the freeway congestion from the Skyway trams at Disneyland, and were leaving early to avoid Los Angeles' typical traffic. He developed Disney World so its parks would be as far separated from "reality" as possible, making it more likely that tourists and locals alike will stay longer.

  The property on which the resort sits on was bought by Roy O. Disney, Walt's older brother. Note also that this is the only resort to have "Walt" in the title. Roy specifically wanted to name the park in honor of his brother rather than just the company. For his efforts to complete Walt's long-in-development Florida Magic Kingdom, there is a statue of him sitting with Minnie Mouse just past the entrance of that park, to complement the famous "Partners" statue at the main hub.

• Tokyo Disney Resort: Opened with Tokyo Disneyland in 1983 in Urayasu, Chiba, Japan (east of Tokyo), it is the first (and only) franchise Disney resort, owned and operated by the Oriental Land Company rather than by Disney itself. Some additions such as Pooh's Honey Hunt and the companion park, Tokyo DisneySea, have become some of Disney Imagineering's most lavishly praised creations. The current Fantasyland expansion, which contains the first ever animatronic dark ride based on Beauty and the Beast, opened in September of 2020. Tokyo DisneySea opened in 2001 and contains seven themed ports instead of lands; Mediterranean Harbor, American Waterfront, Port Discovery, Lost River Delta, Arabian Coast, Mermaid Lagoon, and Mysterious Island. Mysterious Island contains the park's icon, Mount Prometheus, which itself contains the ride Journey to the Center of the Earth. An eighth themed port, Fantasy Springs, based on Frozen, Tangled, and Peter Pan, was announced in 2018, and will open in 2023. Tokyo Disneyland has several oddities compared to other Disneyland-style parks; for example, their Jungle Cruise goes in the other direction than Disneyland and Magic Kingdom's, and the Western River Railroad doesn't circle the park due to Japanese railway regulations at the time of opening stating that trains with more than one stop absolutely had to adhere to a schedule, use fully-enclosed passenger cars, and charge fares, so the railroad only stops in Adventureland and goes through Westernland (Frontierland renamed for Japanese audiences) and Critter Country; said regulations have since been repealed, but there's no room to build out the railroad to circle the park.
• Disneyland Paris (formerly known as Euro Disney Resort and later Disneyland Resort Paris): Opened in 1992, and going for an even more elaborate look (as well as Darker and Edgier for some attractions). Located in the Parisian suburb of Marne-la-Vallée, it includes two theme parks; the original one is now known as Disneyland Park and a second opened in 2002, known as Walt Disney Studios Park. It bombed spectacularly at first, though it eventually gained some legs after the opening of Toy Story Playland and a Ratatouille-inspired miniarea. After opening, the park was hated by the French peopleinvoked, who opposed the poor (by French standards, anyway) working conditions there and viewed it as an example of American cultural imperialism. Despite the initial hostility, today the resort has some of the largest attendance numbers of any European tourist destination, and has started to make a profit after Disney bought most of the shares of the resort and started the ambitious Project Sparkle, a refurbishment project that spans both parks and the hotels and that will culminate with a massive expansion of the second gate Walt Disney Studios Park featuring new areas inspired on Star Wars, Marvel and Frozen. The complex has seven hotels and a shopping and eating district similar to WDW's Disney Springs called Disney Village, although much smaller in size.
• Hong Kong Disneyland Resort: Opened in 2005, its park is very close in design to the original Disneyland, though it's much smaller and only has a few of the iconic Disney attractions, due mainly to budget issues and a notable Troubled Production.invoked Nonetheless, it's gained notoriety for, in essence, having the exact opposite problems that Euro-Disney did. However, Disney embarked on a large expansion project that brought unique attractions to the park, some being new twists on old favorites. The expansion includes Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Carts, which is a twist on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. The story goes that miners discovered gold in the mountain on 1888, complete with friendly bears. Now it's your turn to take a ride through the mine.... The expansion also includes a Toy Story themed land, which is themed to look like Andy's toys in the grass of his backyard, and a Lighter and Softer twist on The Haunted Mansion (due to the culture difference of the Chinese not liking ghosts due to their reverence for their ancestors), set inside a Victorian-era mansion in the jungle belonging to Adventurer Archaeologist Lord Henry Mystic and his pet monkey, Albert. Lord Mystic's just gotten back from another archaeological expedition and brought back an enchanted music box. Then one day, Albert opens the music box and the artifacts in the mansion come to life... Hong Kong's notable for being the only park that has completely changed its castle, transforming it from a even smaller copy of Sleeping Beauty's castle in Anaheim to a new one inspired by Shanghai's Enchanted Storybook Castle.
• Shanghai Disneyland Resort: After years of planning for a resort in mainland China, the project was approved by the Chinese government in November 2009. Ground was broken in April 2011 and finally opened in 2016invoked. The resort is 2-3 times the size of the Hong Kong Resort with room for up to three parks, the first of which will, of course, be a version of the Magic Kingdom; the other two are expected to be ports of Epcot and Animal Kingdom. Aside from Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, the park is comprised of new lands that are variations on other themes. Mickey Avenue fuses Main Street and Toontown into a new entry zone, the hub is a new land unto itself known as the Gardens of Imagination, the Pirates of the Caribbean films become the new Treasure Cove area, and the mysterious Lost World of Adventure Isle is the home of a new Soarin' and a rapids ride home to a malevolent prehistoric beast known as Q'araq. Shanghai Disneyland completely lacks a train circling the park, largely because rail transit is incredibly mundane in China and the Western romantic ideal of seeing the world by rail doesn't really exist there.

In addition to the main theme park resorts, Disney also runs several additional vacation and leisure ventures that spread their influence to just about every corner of the globe and give guests access to more vacation options outside the parks while still maintaining that "Disney feeling":

• Adventures by Disney: Runs guided vacations to various destinations in the U.S. and around the world ranging from Yellowstone Park to the French Riviera, each coordinated by Disney "Adventure Guides" who serve as personal tour guides as well as concierges, giving guests the opportunity to see the wonders of the world while still retaining trademark Disney hospitality.
• Disney Cruise Line: Well, it's a cruise line… from Disney. Currently has a fleet of four ships: Disney Magic, Disney Wonder, Disney Dream, and the newest, Disney Fantasy which entered service in 2012. Originally based out of Port Canaveral, Florida the ships now sail from various ports in the U.S. for cruises to the Caribbean, Europe, Mexico, and Alaska. Caribbean cruises all feature a stop at Castaway Cay, Disney's own private island in the Bahamas.
• Disney Vacation Club: Disney's take on timeshare ownership, and as you might hear about it while staying at WDW, The Best Kept Disney Secret. Members buy into a share of a DVC resort and get an annual allotment of points based on the size of their investment. These points can be put towards a trip, as well as banked year to year or borrowed against the next year depending on the type of trip wanted. For most people, the initial investment pays for itself after a few years. Resorts feature amenities above and beyond those of the Deluxe resorts including Villa style rooms with full kitchens. Members get priority access to their "home" resort when booking, but can also use their points to stay at any resort they choose. Disney also owns three off-site resorts in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Vero Beach, Florida, and Aulani in Hawaii, and contracts with hundreds of hotels around the world that members can visit as part of DVC.

The parks are a rich well of Affectionate (or not) Parody Fuel, often in the form of Souvenir Land. Some of the most popular attractions have even been adapted into movies, with Pirates of the Caribbean being the most successful of them, but also including Tower of Terror, The Haunted Mansion, The Country Bears,Tomorrowland and Jungle Cruise. There's also Escape from Tomorrow, a black-and-white indie horror film shot guerrilla-style at Disneyland and Disney World without the company's permission, The Further Adventures of Walt's Frozen Head, a color indie sci-fi comedy film also shot guerrilla style at the Magic Kingdom, and Some Jerk with a Camera, a review web show shot in the parks.

See also these other works based on the parks:

• Adventures In The Magic Kingdom, a video game by Capcom based on Disneyland and some of its rides made during the late '80s/early '90s.
• The Walt Disney World Explorer, a 1996 and 1998 computer program featuring slideshows and videos about Walt Disney World.
• The Kingdom Keepers, a series of books by Ridley Pearson that take place at Walt Disney World.
• Disney Kingdoms, a Marvel Comics imprint focused on stories based around the attractions.
• Tales From Adventureland, a trilogy of books based on various Adventureland area attractions.
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a sci-fi novel set in 22nd century Disney World.
• Epic Mickey, a video game whose Wasteland is based on the Magic Kingdom parks.
• Kinect: Disneyland Adventures, an Xbox 360 video game ^note with a 2017 Kinect-optional remaster for Xbox One and Microsoft Windows featuring several minigames in a virtual recreation of Disneyland Park in California.
• Tomorrowland, which is inspired by and named after the Tomorrowland area found at the parks.
• Disney Magic Kingdoms, a mobile and computer game that lets players create their own version of the Magic Kingdom-style parks.

Several other video games are also based around the parks, including four that never left Japan that involve Tokyo Disneyland. Also, two DVD sets in the Walt Disney Treasures line have been dedicated to the parks: "Disneyland, USA" and "Disneyland: Secrets, Stories, and Magic".

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Disney Parks are the Trope Namer for:

• Adventurer's Club
• Beware of Hitchhiking Ghosts
• Disneyland Dad
• I'm Going to Disney World!
• Silly Spook
• Tomorrowland

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    Attractions with their own pages

Note: Although all resorts include a Magic Kingdom park, in this list "Magic Kingdom" only refers to the one in Walt Disney World, Florida. The California Magic Kingdom is labeled as "Disneyland" and the Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, and Shanghai parks are referred to by their locations. All the locations for multi-park attractions are ordered based on when they opened in each park.

Parks in bold are locations where the attraction is still operating, or in the process of being added. Locations not in bold indicate that the attraction has been retired.

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• America Sings (Disneyland)
• Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, Tokyo, Paris) ^note Known as Big Thunder Mountain in Tokyo and Paris.
• Captain EO (Disneyland, Epcot, Tokyo, Paris)
• Carousel of Progress (Disneyland, Magic Kingdom)
• Country Bear Jamboree (Magic Kingdom, Disneyland, Tokyo)
• Cranium Command (Epcot)
• Dinosaur (Animal Kingdom) ^note Initially opened as Countdown to Extinction, before it was later renamed after and slightly rethemed to the 2000 film of the same name.
• Doug Live! (Hollywood Studios)
• Ellen's Energy Adventure (Epcot)
• The Enchanted Tiki Room (Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, Tokyo) ^note The full name of the original attraction at Disneyland (and the current version at Magic Kingdom) is Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room. It was known as Tropical Serenade at MK until it was updated as The Enchanted Tiki Room (Under New Management), featuring Iago and Zazu, from 1998 to 2011. The original Walt Disney attraction has since returned. Tokyo's version was replaced in 1999 with their own updated version called The Enchanted Tiki Room Presents: Get the Fever!, which was later replaced in 2008 by its current version, The Enchanted Tiki Room: Stitch Presents Aloha e Komo Mai!.
• ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter (Magic Kingdom)
• Fantasmic! (Disneyland, Hollywood Studios, Tokyo DisneySea)
• Frozen Ever After (Epcot)
• Golden Dreams (California Adventure)
• The Great Movie Ride (Hollywood Studios)
• Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT! (California Adventure)
• The Haunted Mansion (Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong) ^note Known as Phantom Manor in Paris and Mystic Manor in Hong Kong.
• Horizons (Epcot)
• Hocus Pocus Villain Spelltacular (seasonal at Magic Kingdom)
• Indiana Jones Adventure (Disneyland, Tokyo DisneySea) ^note Subtitled Temple of the Forbidden Eye at Disneyland and known as Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull in Tokyo.
• "it's a small world" (Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong)
• It's Tough to Be a Bug! (Animal Kingdom, California Adventure)
• Journey into Imagination (Epcot)
• Jungle Cruise (Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, Tokyo, Hong Kong)
• Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway (Hollywood Studios, Disneyland)
• Mickey's PhilharMagic (Magic Kingdom, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, California Adventure)
• Muppet*Vision 3D (Hollywood Studios, California Adventure)
• Pandora – The World of Avatar (Animal Kingdom)
• Pirates of the Caribbean (Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, Tokyo, Paris, Shanghai)
• Rivers of Light (Animal Kingdom)
• Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin (Disneyland, Tokyo)
• Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom (Magic Kingdom)
• Space Mountain (Magic Kingdom, Disneyland, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong)
• Spaceship Earth (Epcot)
• Splash Mountain (Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, Tokyo)
• Star Tours (Disneyland, Hollywood Studios, Tokyo, Paris)
• Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge (Disneyland, Hollywood Studios, Walt Disney Studios Park)
• Stitch's Great Escape! (Magic Kingdom)
• Superstar Limo (California Adventure)
• The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (Magic Kingdom, Disneyland, Hong Kong, Shanghai)
• The Timekeeper (Magic Kingdom, Tokyo, Paris)
• The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror (Hollywood Studios, California Adventure, Tokyo DisneySea, Walt Disney Studios Park) ^note Not themed to The Twilight Zone at Tokyo, where it's just Tower of Terror.
• World of Color (California Adventure)
• Disney Cruise shows
  • Disney Dreams: An Enchanted Classic
  • Disney's Believe
  • Morty The Magnificent (now retired)
  • Twice Charmed

Also see the Cirque du Soleil shows La Nouba and ZED; which both had residency at Disney resorts (La Nouba in Walt Disney World and Zed at Tokyo Disneyland). A new show, Drawn to Life, is currently being developed to replace La Nouba. Also, a VR company called The Void has locations in both Disneyland and Disney World and features VR experiences based on Disney properties (including Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire), but these are not exclusive to the resorts.

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Tropes used in the parks include:

    open/close all folders

    Tropes A to M

• Aborted Arc:
  • The nods to dragons and unicorns in Animal Kingdom were hinting towards a land that they ended up never building, Beastly Kingdom, focusing on fantasy creatures. Camp Minnie-Mickey originally included leftovers of the scrapped land, including a dragon-shaped rock and a bridge that looks like the entrance to a castle. The park originally offered boat tours that passed by the den of an unseen dragon, but these features were closed within their first year. Also, to the confusion of many a guest, the park's logo prominently includes a large dragon. The concept of including mythological creatures into the park was eventually picked up by Expedition Everest's Yeti, and fully realized with Pandora – The World of Avatar.
  • Some of the Imagineers behind Beastly Kingdom went to work on Universal Studios' Island of Adventure, and many of the attractions in that park's mythology-themed area, especially the Dueling Dragons coaster, were derived from the Disney project. (Much of this area would be incorporated into The Wizarding World of Harry Potter later; Dueling Dragons was rethemed and renamed Dragon Challenge, and eventually closed in 2017.)
  • In the super-secret-invite-only Club 33 restaurant, several disused animatronic animal heads hang from the wall. Walt had planned to be able to speak through them to his guests. The idea was abandoned because it was deemed too silly for a high-class restaurant and because of privacy concerns. The idea sort of came to fruition at the now shut-down Adventurers' Club in Disney World's Pleasure Island.
  • The giant, unused building at Epcot's Japan pavilion was originally built to hold an American version of Meet the World, a charter attraction at Tokyo Disneyland (as the parks' development and construction overlapped). But this Audio-Animatronic/film show recounting Japanese history glossed over the country's role in World War II, and Disney execs realized that it might offend American veterans, so it was scrapped.
• Ace Pilot:
  • Real Life examples are shown in the queue for Soarin' Around the World, which features a pre-show area paying tribute to many a famous pilot and aircraft who've made a groundbreaking impact in aviation history. Among the icons shown are Amelia Earhart, Chuck Yeager, Howard Hughes and James Herman Banning.
  • The ride Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run at Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge allows the guests to become these as they fly the titular ship on a special mission.
• Action Figure Speech: The character performers. Though more recently, costumes with functional mouths (and blinking eyes) have begun to be introduced for cases where they need to speak, such as the Mickey who appears at the opening of the Magic Kingdom and the Timon who emcees The Festival of the Lion King.
• Adaptation Distillation: The philosophy behind designing the "dark ride" version of an animated film is that, instead of rehashing the plot of the film, you should try to recreate the dominant visual/emotional impact of the film using a handful of pivotal scenes taking place in immersive environments. Hence (for example), the bulk of the Peter Pan ride consists of two rooms occupied by models of London and Neverland surrounded by fiber-optic stars, over which riders "fly" in vehicles suspended from an overhead track. The film's actual plot is compressed into a few brief scenes toward the end of the ride, which were only added after the fact because riders kept being confused and upset about never actually seeing Peter Pan on his own ride. (The idea was that, since they were the ones flying through London and Neverland, the riders were Peter, but it didn't come across.)
• Adapted Out: The Fantasia Gardens miniature golf course in Disney World does not have holes based on the Rite of Spring, Night on Bald Mountain or Ave Maria segments from Fantasia.
• Adjective Animal Alehouse: A sign for "The Green Dragon" can be seen in Disneyland's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
• All There in the Manual:
  • A lot of attraction backstories rely on promotional items and books on the parks to understand, and/or familiarity with their source material in the case of rides adapted from films, TV shows, etc.
  • Disney has a website to explain different locales in Walt Disney World's New Fantasyland, as well as a fictional explanation as to why visitors had to wait 41 years after Disney World's opening before going to these places. (After fans of fairy tales outgrew the stories, villains seized the opportunity to steal significant items, activating a curse that hid New Fantasyland from the real world.)
  • In trying to experience attractions through online video, finding versions with the preshows are an important part of getting context for the attraction storylines, especially for projects created since the 1990s.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore:
  • This trope can be felt in the TV commercials for Splash Mountain when it first opened. They play "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" in the background and, of course, feature the huge climactic drop, but that's where the similarities end. The commercial for the ride at Disneyland (opened in 1989) has a very foreboding feel to it and features an announcer (that sounds very much like Don LaFontaine) who says ominously that "the only way out is a long. Way. Down!" By contrast, the commercial for the same ride at Tokyo Disneyland (opened in 1992) has a much more cheerful tone to it. The announcer (speaking in Japanese, of course) also sounds excited.
  • Amusingly inverted by the retooled version of the Sinbad's Seven Voyages ride for Tokyo DisneySea. After the original version drew complaints for being too dark and scary, the ride was drastically toned down and many changes were made to make it more cheerful and upbeat: the sirens luring Sinbad's men to their doom became helpful mermaids, the scary giant ogre and whale became friendly allies, the score was replaced with a new Alan Menken song called "Compass of Your Heart", and most hilariously, Sinbad lost his facial hair to make him more appealing to Japanese audiences.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • At Disneyland's Main Street USA:
    • Several walkaround characters such as Alice and Mad Hatter are allowed to roam through the land despite not being from that period or location.
    • The Main Street Theater plays Mickey Mouse cartoons that wouldn't be released for twenty to thirty years after the land's early 1900s setting.
    • The Jolly Holiday Bakery, based on Mary Poppins (which is not even from the same location, either), is in the land a decade before the film took place.
    • Main Street's 2012 background music loop includes "Married Life" from Up, a film that begins in the 1930s. It is arranged in a turn-of-the-century style to match other music in the loop, however.
  • The Market House on Disneyland's Main Street, the Main Street Bakery on the Magic Kingdom's Main Street, and the Trolley Car Café at Hollywood Studios sell Starbucks Coffee. While the Starbucks brand began in 1971, these three stores use the original logo ◊ outside of the store to look period-appropriate in the context of the respective areas. ^note Fountain View at Epcot and Creature Comforts at Animal Kingdom use the current logo, while the Fiddler, Fifer, & Practical Café at California Adventure does not use the logo at all.
  • The DINOSAUR ride, despite being set in the Late Cretaceous period, mixes in several dinosaurs from different eras, including ones that go all the way back to the Late Jurassic era.
  • A minor example, but the final scene of Carousel of Progress set in The '90s accidentally became this when the TV broke, and since analog tube TVs are no longer manufactured, they replaced it with a very 2000s-ish flatscreen.
  • The "Season of the Force" overlay at Tomorrowland technically speaking doesn't fit the land's name, as Star Wars takes place a long time ago, not in the land of tomorrow. That doesn't stop attractions such as the Jedi Training Academy, Star Tours, and Hyperspace Mountain from being located in the land anyway.
• And Now For Something Completely Different: Countries in the World Showcase at Epcot include Mexico, Japan, Italy, Norway... and Arendelle. It's sort of integrated with Norway, but still.
• Animal-Eared Headband: The classic Mouse ear hat is a famous variation on the concept. There are also more traditional headbands with Minnie's bow, in several different themes and designs.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The "Attractionistas" souvenir dolls are friends who wished to embody their favorite rides. They are:
  • Carrie (Fantasyland Carousel)
  • Pearl (Pirates of the Carribean)
  • Maddie (Mad Tea Party)
  • Gracey (The Haunted Mansion)
  • Nellie (Jungle Cruise)
  • Celeste (Space Mountain)
  • Holly (The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror)
  • Briar (Splash Mountain)
• Anthropomorphic Shift: Some meet and greet characters such as Pluto and Marie, Toulouse, and Berlioz can now walk on two legs.
• Apocalyptic Log: One of the radio transmissions in the queue for Jungle Cruise has a skipper warning the dockmasters about the natives attacking passing boats, cracking in and out before being lost in static.

• Arc Welding: Since the 90s, it has been common for attractions sharing a land to be woven together into a larger storyline for that area. In recent years though, the Imagineers have gotten more ambitious, taking the Society of Explorers and Adventurers storyline at Tokyo DisneySea and starting to tie it into almost every original attraction with pulp adventure and supernatural themes. Besides SEA's main home bases at Tokyo's Tower of Terror, Hong Kong's Mystic Manor, and Orlando's Miss Adventure Falls, the organization has ties to The Jungle Cruise, The Haunted Mansion, Big Thunder Mountain, and even the Indiana Jones franchise.
• The Artifact:
  • The current scientific theme of the Imagination pavilion at Epcot is an artifact of its former Honey, I Shrunk the Audience film. The Magic Eye Theater has cycled through so many shows that even its name is a remnant of its original charter film, Magic Journeys.
  • The reason that Epcot's parking lot is so massive is because it was intended to be the location of a second, larger Transportation and Ticket Center. In the plans, the Epcot-to-Magic-Kingdom monorail loop would have been joined by two other loops - one that would have serviced the Epcot hotels, and another that would have taken guests to the Walt Disney World Village shopping center (now Disney Springs).
  • If you've ever seen the Electrical Parade, most of the people around you were probably murmuring "Who is that?" when the Pete's Dragon float came by. The Pete's Dragon float that is immediately followed by an America's Bicentennial float! The Electric Water Pageant also sports a Bicentennial-themed finale.
  • The aforementioned mythical creatures in the Animal Kingdom iconography.
  • Huge chunks of Disney's Hollywood Studios' acreage became this once it stopped operating as an actual film/animation studio, and the Studio Tour (downsized to a fraction of its former self) finally shuttered in 2014. These became home to expansions based around Toy Story and Star Wars.
  • The replica of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and entrance to The Great Movie Ride, was originally supposed to be the centerpiece of MGM Studios. However, the structure's importance was increasingly downplayed as the park rebranded itself into Hollywood Studios and shifted its focus away from film production, with the Sorcerer Hat taking its place as the park's icon for a good decade and the front of the building regularly getting blocked off for stage shows. In 2017, The Great Movie Ride was closed and replaced with Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway, giving the replica even less relevance to the park; the Hollywood Tower Hotel is considered the park's main icon now.
  • A case similar to the above is Grizzly Peak, which was originally supposed to be California Adventure's main centerpiece, featuring prominently in its original logo. Grizzly River Run, its associated ride, was originally meant to be one of the park's big "E-ticket" attractions alongside California Screamin'. However, while it's not an unpopular ride, later additions like the Tower of Terror and Radiator Springs Racers ended up overtaking it in popularity. That, combined with the trees planted to create Forced Perspective starting to outgrow the artificial mountain, caused it to be swapped out for the Carthay Circle as the park's main icon after the 2012 redesign.
  • When Mine Train Thru Nature's Wonderland closed in the 1970s for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, much of the rockwork unaffected by the new attraction was left up. Cascade Falls was demolished in the 90s due to water damage, but much of the Living Desert's rockwork became a backdrop for Big Thunder Ranch's petting zoo and barbecue place. Some of this was torn out for the Star Wars expansion, other bits were retained.
• Artifact of Doom: The Shiriki Utundu idol in DisneySea's Tower of Terror was powerful enough to possess the whole hotel and smack Harrison Hightower into another dimension. Also a mystic gem in the Indiana Jones sequence of the Great Movie Ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios. And no matter what, DON'T LOOK INTO THE EYES OF MARA OR THE CRYSTAL SKULL. That could be dangerous. Very dangerous. And then there's the enchanted music box at Mystic Manor, which makes the artifacts come to life to try and kill Albert the Monkey and the guests, and wrecks the mansion.
• Artifact Title
  • Disney's California Adventure, which started out with a lot of California-themed attractions, has gradually lost them. Even the signature Soarin' Over California has been replaced with a world tour. Bountiful Farm, the winery, the tortilla factory, and the Golden Dreams film are all gone. The pier area is now Pixar Pier, and soon it will be gaining the Marvel-themed Avengers C.A.M.P.U.S. Aside from seasonal returns of the original Soarin', the only remaining opening day ride as of 2021 is Grizzly River Run.
  • Disney's Hollywood Studios (formerly Disney/MGM Studios). It hasn't been a working studio for years, and the signature The Great Movie Ride and the studio tram tour are gone. The main focus now is on Pixar and Star Wars attractions.
  • Same goes for Disneyland Paris' second gate Walt Disney Studios Park. Although it never was a functional film studio, it did house Disney Channel France's main studios, included with a studio tour that featured interactive attractions. Both shut down in 2006 to make way for new attractions for the resort's 15th anniversary.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions:
  • Hearing Spanish instructions can feel this way in the American parks: the English voices are all very expressive and in-character. The Spanish announcements by comparison sound almost like a text-to-speech announcement. However, there are rides that noticeably avert this—a great example is "it's a small world", where the foreign language announcements are very nice and fit the theme quite well. Radiator Springs Racers has Ramone give out the Spanish safety instructions, while Mater's Junkyard Jamboree's are bumbled by Larry the Cable Guy in-character as Mater, and The Pixar Pal-A-Round has its Spanish instructions given by the Mexican dub voice actor for Miguel.
  • The "Exit" signs in some attractions and Dark Rides can be like this, too...but really, there's no reason to not make them visible, or to have some way to fix the ride/rescue stuck people.
  • The Animatronics can also seem this way. When they fail, it's either quite hilarious at best or downright scary at worst.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: The chanting in a made-up language in the Tapestry of Nations/Tapestry of Dreams parade was meant to evoke the feel of African or Native American languages to give it the world music feel it needed without being very specific of its origin.
• Ascended Extra: Dr. Nigel Channing (played by Eric Idle) started off as an original character in Honey, I Shrunk The Audience, then given a prominent role in the preshow of Tokyo's version of the attraction Microadventure. When it was decided to apply Arc Welding to the Imagination pavilion attractions at Epcot, he became the emcee of the two retools of Journey into Imagination (albeit becoming a Straight Man to Figment in the current iteration), expanding the universe HISTA is set in.
• Attention Deficit Creator Disorderinvoked: The former World of Motion depicts Leonardo da Vinci as having this, with the lady posing for the Mona Lisa and rapidly losing her patience due to Leonardo getting distracted by other projects.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Walt hated the commercial development that grew up next to Disneyland. In contrast, guests at the Magic Kingdom in Disney World wouldn't go directly to the gate. Everybody would be whisked by monorail from the Ticket and Transportation Center to the Magic Kingdom. Buses coming from resorts off the monorail were also dropped there. Unfortunately, the monorail just didn't have enough capacity and long lines formed. A ferry across the lake was added, and finally Disney started having buses drop guests at the Magic Kingdom entrance. Subsequent parks allow guests to go directly from the parking lot to the gate.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Tokyo Disneyland and later Walt Disney World had a show, Cinderellabration, depicting Cinderella's coronation into a princess. The festivities included guest appearances by the other princesses, and fireworks that viewers could see even in the daytime.
  • Disneyland's King Arthur Carousel has The Sword in the Stone. They used to have a ceremony where Merlin would invite guests to try to pull it out. They would invite a couple of big guys to try and a little kid, who would succeed and be declared the king of all England.
• Bat Scare: The first lift on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad leads through a cavern full of screeching bats.
• Beneath the Earth: DisneySea's Journey to the Center of the Earth, the portion of Disneyland Paris' Phantom Manor where the Doombuggies are Buried Alive and you see a bunch of corpses rising from their underground graves.
• Bears Are Bad News:
  • Played fairly straight with the bears in Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars at Hong Kong Disneyland, in which bears inadvertently send riders on the wrong track and later blow up some TNT and sending riders off on another track.
  • The various Country Bear shows more or less avert this, being Beary Funny instead; except for in the Country Bear Vacation Hoedown, which has a line in one song, "The Great Outdoors", in which the bears sing that "if y'all don't join us, we'll chase you up a tree!"
  • Grizzly Peak and the surrounding Grizzly River Run attraction in California Adventure; the peak itself is a forbidding icon (which can look downright terrifying when seen from Paradise Gardens Park, where the peak appears as a gigantic bear's snarling face), and the ride includes some scary bear noises and is the roughest water ride at the resort.

• Belly Dancer:
  • The World Showcase area in Epcot features the Morocco pavilion, designed to appear like a real-life street, where tourists can catch belly dancing shows either in the courtyard or inside the Restaurant Marrakesh. The Souk-Al-Magreb shop also offers books that can teach its reader how to belly dance.
  • The Tokyo DisneySea park from Tokyo Disney Resort had a dinner show attraction called A Table is Waiting, which showcased different food dishes from cultures around the world. One of the countries shown was India, where performers dressed as belly dancers would sing about spice and curry with the song "Spice Up Your Life".

• Bigfoot, Sasquatch and Yeti: The Matterhorn Bobsleds stars the Abominable Snowman, while Expedition Everest instead features the Yeti.
• Bilingual Bonus: Prevalent in many parks, most notably in Animal Kingdom, where the African portion features signs in mostly accurate Swahili.
• Blatant Lies:
  • "Do you know Disney's best kept secret?" That's how they ADVERTISE the Disney Vacation Club timeshare program. (They have prominent kiosks in the parks.)
  • The Disneyland riverboat announcer claims that he's been touring these parts of the Rivers of America for years. However, come 2018 this didn't apply in reality because "these parts" had been open less than a year, having been closed for a year and a half as part of the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge expansion. Amusingly pointed out in Some Jerk's on-location vlog of the 2017 Frontierland update.
• Bowdlerise:
  • Pirates of the Caribbean has been hit with this the hardest, as there have been multiple changes since The '90s to tone down and eliminate implied sexual assault by the pirates. It started, for example, with pirates chasing women. Then the women were given food so that would be what the pirates were after. Then the pirates were given the food instead and the women chased them to get it back. Another scene that was changed originally had a woman hiding in a barrel and a pirate holding the dress he tore off her; now both the woman and the pirate's object have been replaced with other things. In the late 2010s, the scene where pirates auctioned off wenches became one where they auctioned off stolen goods; and one of the "wenches" in question — the much-demanded redhead — was now a pirate herself.
  • Animal Kingdom got a taste of this before it even opened. Kilimanjaro Safaris originally had a prop representing the corpse of Big Red after she is killed by poachers, and the dragon cave on the Discovery River Boats originally had dead knights lying around it! Both were removed after they received extremely negative response during the park's employee previews.
  • After the death of a toddler at the maw of a local alligator in 2016, Walt Disney World briefly removed all references to crocodilians in their theme parks, including the mascots of their two water parks, a now unfortunate one-off line from the Jungle Cruise saying to "Watch your children, or the crocodiles will..." and even removing Tick-Tock Croc from appearances, including the Electrical Water Pageant. These references gradually returned, with the exception of the Jungle Cruise line.
  • Jungle Cruise cast members were also instructed to direct the direction of the guests somewhere other than the crashed plane after 9/11.
  • A non-censorship variant: when Disneyland reopened after a 13-month closure due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, California state regulations required indoor rides to be no longer than 15 minutes to minimize the risk of viral exposure. As a result, sections of Rise of the Resistance had to be significantly shortened to meet the requirements.
• Bright Castle: The iconic Sleeping Beauty Castle (or Cinderella Castle, if you're in Florida or Tokyo, and Storybook Castle in the case of Shanghai and Hong Kong) in each of the Magic Kingdom-style parks.
• Bulungi: The hub of the African portion of Animal Kingdom is set in the town of Harambe, in the fictional nation of East Africa, which judging by a bench received independence in 1961.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Skippy, the cute and fuzzy little alien from the pre-shows of The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter and Stitch's Great Escape!. In Alien Encounter, he was teleported from one tube to another, but got fried in the process, then disappeared indefinitely when being re-teleported to the previous tube. He does not suffer any physical harm in Stitch's Great Escape, even though he has been arrested for "jaywalking between Mars and Jupiter".
  • Albert at Hong Kong's Mystic Manor is a literal example. After opening an enchanted music box acquired by his owner, he soon becomes a target for some of the things brought to life by the magical music, from the tikis shooting arrows at him, to Samurais trying to decapitate him and even the jade statue of The Monkey King/Sun Wukong creating a vortex trying to suck him out of the mansion.
• Bunnies for Cuteness: So far Thumper and Miss Bunny are the only Disney rabbits that play this trope straight during meet and greets.
• Calling a Rabbit a "Smeerp":
  • All Disney employees in their businesses, including shops and theme parks are officially called "Cast Members" in order to give an extra level of show-biz imagery to the franchise. Similarly, specific to the parks:
    • Customers are "guests" (this one has caught on with most businesses these days, along with "team members" for employees)
    • Employee uniforms are "costumes"
    • Employees aren't assigned to jobs, but "roles." They don't apply for these roles, they "audition."
    • The employee-only areas are "backstage", while the guest-accessible areas are "on stage"
  • In 3D attractions from Honey, I Shrunk the Audience onward, the necessary glasses are given other names to match the story of the ride/show, as the presence of the audience is central to the story.
    • Honey, I Shrunk the Audience: "Safety Goggles" ^note Which is appropriate, as The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You!.
    • It's Tough to Be a Bug: "Bug Eyes"
    • Mickey's PhilharMagic: "Opera Glasses"
    • Star Tours: The Adventures Continue: "Flight Glasses"
• The Cameo:
  • The current version of "it's a small world" in California and Hong Kong includes "small world" versions of Disney characters in the corresponding areas. Some are really obvious (Ariel and Lilo & Stitch in the tropical area, The Three Caballeros in South America), some not so much (you specifically have to be looking to find Peter Pan and Tinker Bell flying way overhead in Europe, and it may take a minute to realize some of the jungle's animals are Simba, Pumbaa, and Timon due to the different art style).
  • The Incredible Mr. Limpet is in the The Little Mermaid (1989) ride. Though not a Disney characterinvoked, it is a nod to him showing up as a background character in "Under the Sea" in the movie.
  • Mrs. Potts and Chip appear near the end of Tarzan's Treehouse, as a nod to their appearance in the "Trashin' the Camp" sequence in the film.
  • Three characters from Country Bear Jamboree can be seen as taxidermy in one scene of the Disneyland Winnie the Pooh ride, which replaced the Jamboree. (This doesn't necessarily imply they were hunted and killed by the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood, since that's how they appeared in the Jamboree also.)
  • Plenty of Disney characters who do not have a specific attraction dedicated to them show up in and around the park, whether it be in restaurants, signage, merchandise, shows, or as meet-and-greet characters.
• Canon Welding: although it was less of a priority in the early days of the park, new parks, lands, and attractions at least make an effort to create a cohesive narrative with their surroundings - take, for example, the advertisements for the Tip-Top Club in the Fiddler, Fifer, and Practical Cafe on Buena Vista Street, or the Jungle Cruise's acknowledgement of the Temple of the Forbidden Eye right next door. Generally speaking, the "canon" of the parks is that every attraction and character co-exist in one continuity, with everything that implies.
• Captain Ersatz: The alien from The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter was one for, well, the Xenomorph from Alien. Apparently, it was originally planned to be a Xenomorphinvoked, and an actual Xenomorph shows up on The Great Movie Ride.
• Captain Obvious:
  • The narrator of the extinct semi-educational ride Adventure thru Inner Space gave a few gems such as:

    (While the car is surrounded by giant snowflakes) "These are snowflakes!"
    "And yet this wall of ice only seems smooth and solid. From this tiny perspective, I can see that nothing is solid, no matter how it appears!"
    "Yes... these are water molecules! H₂O... Two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single oxygen atom."

  • Parodied on The Jungle Cruise.

    Skipper: And now I'd like to point out some of my favorite plants here to you. [points at random plants without saying anything]

• Character Tics: Cast members point with two fingers. This comes from when Walt Disney used two fingers to hold up his cigarettes, and also because pointing with one finger is offensive in some cultures.
• Chef of Iron: At the full-service dining restaurants in Disney's parks and resorts, the chefs who work there have to be a specific type of culinary badass. In addition to all of the usual stresses of being a professional chef, these guys face crowds that would make chefs in restaurants in the outside world cringe in fear. They have to be on the ball, quick, and precise to a level that is rarely seen outside of such an environment. To give you an idea, consider that in an average restaurant, a dinner service that sees 1000 customers is considered a one-in-a-million oddity that was very likely a near-disaster for the restaurant that likely came close to running out of food. Now consider that 1900 Park Fare at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort averages 1500 people per dinner service, and isn't considered unusually busy until it hits around 3000 customers in a single night. It's not even on the list of Top 10 Busiest Disney Restaurants.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome
  • A number of meet-and-greet characters have undergone this, usually when their source show doesn't prove to be wildly/enduringly popular. Examples include Flower, Doug Funnie and Patti Mayonnaise, Oliver and Dodger, and a whole lot more...
  • Averted in the overseas parks. Obscure characters like the Pinocchio villains and the Aristocats are extremely popular in Japan, and Disneyland Paris regularly houses events where several less seen characters are up for meet and greets.

• Composite Character: Although they're the obviously not characters, several of the rides can be described as this.
  • The 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ride combined elements from Verne's novel, such as the presence of Atlantis, the trip under the Ice Cap and the Graveyard of Lost Ships, which weren't in the movie, but were in the book.
  • The Indiana Jones Adventure ride in California takes place in India and is clearly an Expy of the Temple Of Doom, from it taking place in 1935 India, to having an Indian influence in the architecture, a (malfunctioning) Descending Ceiling and a Hindu deity, while Tokyo's has it in South America. But the boulder from the first movie shows up, and some rooms are similar to the Temple in the Last Crusade.
  • Star Tours: the Adventure Continues technically takes place between Episodes III and IV. However, as of 2019, characters from The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker also appear, making it a mashup of a variety of different time periods. By now, you can be chased by Darth Vader in the opening, receive a message from Finn and BB-8, and crash land on a prequel-era Naboo.
• Compressed Adaptation:
  • A few newer dark rides such as The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh, Monsters, Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!, and The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure have eschewed the Adaptation Distillation approach of earlier dark rides and instead just retell the movies scene-for-scene with animatronics.
  • California Adventure featured a breakneck-paced 40-minute stage show version of Aladdin.
• Content Warnings: In a sense. On the park maps, some attractions have warning symbols if they're likely to frighten children; however, it's inconsistently applied (using Hollywood Studios as an example, The Great Movie Ride gets the warning, but not Star Tours - The Adventures Continue).
• Cool Old Guy: Dreamfinder, Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain in "The American Adventure", and the Sage of Time from Tapestry of Nations.
• Cool Boat:
  • The Mark Twain Steamboat seen in the Rivers of America.
  • Captain Hook's Pirate Ship in Fantasmic!, which has been replaced by the Black Pearl in the Disneyland version. The Disneyland version used the Columbia for both ships, making it qualify as well.
  • Disneyland Paris' replica of the original Disneyland Hook boat.
  • Many of the boats servicing the Walt Disney World Resort, including the Launches and Cruisers that sail on the Seven Seas Lagoon and Bay Lake.
• Cool Car:
  • The cars of the Autopia at the "Magic Kingdom"-style parks.
  • The six-passenger convertible used in Test Track and Radiator Springs Racers.
  • The steam-powered drill in Tokyo DisneySea's Journey to the Center of the Earth
  • The 12-passenger jeep in the Indiana Jones Adventure and its time-traveling counterpart, the Time Rover, in Dinosaur.

• Cool Starship:
  • The StarSpeeder 3000 from Star Tours as well as its forerunner, the StarSpeeder 1000 from Star Tours: The Adventures Continue. Also, various Star Wars ships have appeared throughout the ride's history, including the X-Wing, the Naboo N-1 fighter, Boba Fett's Slave 1 and the Falcon.
  • The "Rockets" on Space Mountain and the Astro-Oribter.
  • Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, is a resort set aboard a luxury Star Cruiser Halcyon, which also has shuttle transports that can take guests to Batuu, the setting of Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge.
• Cool Train:
• Cosmetically Advanced Prequel:
  • Star Tours: The Adventures Continue (2011-Present) is set in the Star Wars universe roughly a year or two before the events of A New Hope whereas the original Star Tours (1987-2010) took place sometime shortly after Return of the Jedi. Various technologies and the overall look of the attraction appear slightly more advanced and sleeker than its predecessor. You might say this is because the ride is now set at a time when the Star Tours spaceline was in its prime whereas in the original attraction, the company, like the rest of the galaxy, may have undergone some wear-and-tear after constant Imperial oppression. On a side note, Captain Rex (RX-24), the original ride's Starspeeder pilot droid, is now seen in the Sector 2 area of the queue as a defective "prototype" model. ^note As of 2019, Rex is now working as a DJ in Oga's Cantina on Batuu. However, this now might be subverted with the inclusion of characters and locations from the Star Wars sequel trilogy. The ride can now take place at any point in the Star Wars franchise from the events of The Phantom Menace all the way to The Rise of Skywalker.
  • Stitch's Great Escape also fits this trope, since it takes place before the events of the first Lilo & Stitch film, as it features Stitch's first run-in with the Galactic Federation.
• Cosplay:
  • A decent amount of merchandise involves Mickey and friends (and Stitch) as characters from non-Disney Animated Canon movies, mainly Star Wars but also Pirates of the Caribbean, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Indiana Jones.
  • Averted with non-child guests. Anyone over the age of fourteen is not allowed to enter the parks if they are wearing Disney character costumes. The reasoning is two-fold: the first being that they don't want to confuse kids about who is a cast member and who isn't. Say little Johnny gets separated from his parents and was told by them if he gets lost to find someone who works there, they want him to be able to find someone who actually is a cast member and not a stranger. The other is for fear they would be mistaken for (and thus compete with) the official characters whom they pay by other guests for photos, signatures, and such (this did lay down some extra rules for Anime Expo the one year it was at Disneyland; see Fan Convention below). The exceptions for adults are during the Halloween parties as well as all day on Halloween day. Cue the DisneyBound phenomenon, in which fans visit the parks wearing outfits that vaguely resemble character costumes without replicating them. This rule also doesn't exist in Tokyo since Disney doesn't own the resort.
• Counting to Potato: At the entrance to Toontown in Disneyland, there's a population counter which is constantly cycling through numbers...and screws, stars, dumbbells, TNT, and various other random things.
• Crapsaccharine World: Main Street, USA, of all places. It's hard to hear the audio bits played from certain second-story windows, and sometimes they aren't played at all, but some of them reveal, among other things, that the local dentist is life-threateningly incompetent at his job (and doesn't seem to care if one of his patients is seriously injured during a procedure), the fire chief (who is also the postmaster and general store owner) cannot begin to comprehend the idea that a fire is a dangerous emergency that requires IMMEDIATE action, the town populace is extremely prone to spreading gossip and will openly and offensively insult one another on occasion, the police have totaled their new paddy wagon and are engaged in a cover-up to keep the Mayor from becoming aware, and the piano teacher is physically abusive to the children she teaches (that last one, unfortunately, could be considered accurate for the time period Main Street is set ininvoked). It's all Played for Laughs, but when you think about it too hard...
• Creator Cameo: Imagineers and other attraction developers often reference themselves in the projects they work on. With filmed projects, they often act as extras. For example, in "Honey I Shrunk the Audience", director Randal Kleiser appears in the audience when a camera points toward the auditorium.
• Creepy Circus Music: The soundtrack for California Screamin' is a downplayed example. It starts off as a cheery fairground organ tune that turns sour, then launches into a gritty rock song that retains some fairground elements.
• Cultural Translation:
  • The parks are an interesting case of this trope. While Tokyo Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland are similar to the American parks thanks to Disney's sizable audience in those regions, Disneyland Paris and Shanghai Disneyland both adapt to the cultural standards of their respective regions, shaking things up considerably.
    • Paris dedicates more space to Frontierland due to France's love for the Western genre (even locating its version of the Haunted Mansion there); Tomorrowland becomes the Steampunk-styled Discoveryland, inspired by European thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne. Their version of the Storybook Boats, Le Pays des Contes de Fées, doesn't have a narrator (since many guests don't speak either French or English) and relies on music to help the guests remember and tell the stories to their children themselves. Paris also doen't have New Orleans Square, Critter Country or Liberty Square areas to make the park seem less centred on American culture and more open to European elements.
    • Shanghai eschews all of the typical lands associated with Disney's "castle" parks except for Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. For example, the entrance is "Mickey Avenue", while the hub is based on the Chinese zodiac and is known as the "Gardens of Imagination". Even Tomorrowland lacks the iconic Space Mountain, instead having a high-tech TRON Lightcycle Power Run coaster take its place.
  • The Haunted Mansion becomes the darker, Western-themed Phantom Manor in Paris, and the more whimsical, ghost-free Mystic Manor in Hong Kong.
  • Soarin' Around the World, while mostly sharing the same ride film between regions, adapts its preshow setting to the park. The US versions at California Adventure and Epcot is presented in an airport-style terminal, while Shanghai's version (located in Adventure Isle) takes place in the observatory of the fictional Arbori tribe and involves shamans casting a spell of flight. There's also a Tokyo DisneySea version in the works, located in the Mediterranean Harbor; the hang gliders resemble Leonardo da Vinci's proposed flying machines. In addition, the final scene has unique footage for each park, showcasing the region it's located in.
  • World Bazaar in Tokyo is an adaptation of Main Street USA that houses no train station and is covered by a glass pavillon.
• Cute Kitten: While there aren't that many cute Disney cat characters, Marie along with her brothers Toulouse and Berlioz pretty much fit this trope.
  • Also Figaro, who isn't a meet and greet character but is featured in Pinocchio's attraction and merchandise, as well as Bolt's Mittens in her rare appearances.
  • There's also the stray cats that roam the parks. They don't appear much, and tend to only be visible during early morning, late at night, in lower-trafficked areas of the park, or on low-attendance days. Naturally, they have a small fan base regardless.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Magic Kingdom's former The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter was far more adult-oriented than the other attractions in the park, being about a blood-thirsty alien getting unleashed among an audience of guests, with the attraction even giving the illusion of it licking you. The original Snow White's Adventures ride was pretty dark, too.
  • Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland's Space Mountain: Ghost Galaxy Halloween overlay is much darker than the normal attraction, as it depicts you getting chased by an evil cosmic entity that makes some particularly hellish-sounding moans and growls, complete with a more horror-themed soundtrack. The monster falls under the Celestial Body trope, but since the graphic used is a salmon-orange, it looks like a skinless ghoul.
  • Hong Kong Disneyland's Haunted Halloween event, while not reaching a Halloween Horror Nights-level of scary, certainly pushes boundaries of what you would expect from Disney, as it has featured several haunted houses and scare zones that have delivered some pretty solid scares.
  • The Hong Kong Disneyland exclusive The Nightmare Experiment, is a haunted house maze that features twisted and creepy depictions of Disney and Pixar films. Especially the 2017 incarnation, where you see a miserable Pinocchio becoming a performing slave and trying to ask guests for help, only to get interrupted by a clown who is working for Stromboli.
  • The Villains Unleashed event at Disney's Hollywood Studios featured a show called Oogie Boogie's Freaky Funhouse, which attracted some controversy from parents, as it featured things like some rather provocative fire dancing, wild sword swallowing, horror-themed crossbow shooting, and even some sexual innuendos.
  • The storyline in Phantom Manor is somewhat darker than its American Haunted Mansion counterpart. It was inspired by The Phantom of the Opera.
  • The Tower of Terror in general, Twilight Zone or otherwise, not at all meant for those of, at least, a single-digit age.
• Deadpan Snarker: Every boat ride operator in the Jungle Cruise is this, by design. Most of the fun of the ride comes not from the animatronics or the jungle atmosphere, but from the boat's operator.

  "Now if you look off to your left, way out in the distance there, you will see absolutely nothing."

• Death Mountain: Big Thunder Mountain, the Matterhorn, and Expedition Everest's Forbidden Mountain all fit the trope pretty well.
• Dem Bones: Found in Pirates of the Caribbean. Cheerier skeletal characters are in both versions of the Mexico pavilion's boat ride in a Day of the Dead scene.
• Demoted to Extra: Frequently happens in the dark rides, as not much of a story can be told in only a few minutes, and even major characters (such as Flounder on Voyage of the Little Mermaid and anyone who's not Mr. Toad on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride) get reduced to an animatronic or two.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • Disney California Adventure, which was at least initially a California-themed theme park in the already California-themed California. Reportedly, its creation was based on trying to capitalize on vacationers, giving them a single resort with replicas of other tourist attractions in California so visitors would stay on site longer and have no reason to spend their money elsewhere. It went over as well as you'd expect, and this was one of many complaints guests made when it opened in 2001.
  • Fritz, from the Enchanted Tiki Room:
  • Appropriately enough, given the narrating actor's background: From the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience preshow: "But please, for your safety, do not put on the safety goggles [3D glasses] until you are safely seated safely inside the theater safely."
• Disney Acid Sequence: Some straight from the movies, and some unique to the parks:
  • The Heffalump and Woozle room on the Winnie-the-Pooh attractions.
  • Pretty much what World of Color is. Even with the deletion of the Alice sequence.
  • Mr. Toad's Wild Ride takes you through HELL. Literally.
  • And then, there was Magic Journeys...
  • The "Tomorrow's Child" sequence from the Walter Cronkite version of Spaceship Earth
  • The entirety of the original Journey Into Imagination ride, and the finale rooms of the third version.
  • Disneyland's Alice in Wonderland ride.
  • Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin.
• Disneyfication: Disney did this to one of their own attractions: The Sinbad ride at Tokyo DisneySea, which went from a rousing adventure in a Mary Blair-esque visual style to a musical that took out all the danger in Sinbad's adventures, gave him an adorable sidekick and basically went full Small World.
• Disproportionate Retribution: You looked into the eyes of the Crystal Skull/Mara on Indiana Jones Adventure? In that case, please stay in your transport while the god attempts to blow up a bridge, send undead warriors/dart-shooting skulls and a giant snake demon after you, plus a rolling boulder.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom:
  • The ride vehicles on The Haunted Mansion are called "Doombuggies."
  • The scary part of the Indiana Jones Adventure begins at the "Gates of Doom."
• Downer Ending: Mr. Toad's Wild Ride ends with the vehicle colliding with an oncoming train, then being sent to Hell. Some of the sting is taken off by the implication that it's All Just a Dream, given that the ride ends safely in Toad Hall.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty:
  • General Knowledge (played by Corey Burton) from the now-gone Cranium Command show.
  • Averted with Sergeant 90210 in Stitch's Great Escape!.
• Drives Like Crazy: Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride are both themed around cars being driven crazily, in the former case because its tires were damaged by Dip.
• Dropped-in Speech Clip:
  • The attraction films The Walt Disney Story and Walt Disney: One Man's Dream are "narrated" by Walt himself through audio from interviews of him discussing his life and career.
  • The opening to the Disneyland's Remember... Dreams Come True fireworks show features audio of Walt Disney reading the park's dedication plaque ("To all who come to this happy place, welcome...").
  • The ending of EPCOT's American Adventure includes audio clips from JFK and MLK, along with parts of the Apollo 11 landings.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Disney's done this with whole rides. The Sleeping Beauty Castle walkthrough at Disneyland opened several years before the movie, It's Tough to be a Bug! opened a few months before A Bug's Life, and Countdown to Extinction featured Aladar and the Carnotaurus from Dinosaur about two years before the movie came and the attraction was renamed for the movie (though they have nothing in common otherwise).
• Early Installment Character Design Difference: Many of the costume characters look incredibly strange back in Disneyland's early years compared to now. Especially Mickey and Minnie's costumes, who both look downright creepy ◊ in the park's first years ◊. The strangeness of the early costumes was largely due to the costumes being burrowed right from the Ice Capades and them not being designed for the theme park in mind. It wouldn't be until the sixties and seventies and after some trial and error that the costumes begin to start resembling their current selves. Mickey also lacked his tuxedo for much of the fifties, and would not gain it until the early sixties.
• Early Installment Weirdness:
  • Disneyland had a circus?
  • From 1957 to 1961, there was an area within Disneyland park called Holidayland that was only accessible from outside the park's gates. It had its own separate admission and featured playgrounds, picnic tables, a baseball field, horseshoe rings, and volleyball nets, among other recreational activities - and unlike Disneyland, the area actually sold beer. After four years it was torn up in order to make room for New Orleans Square, annexing the land back into the park.
    • The land also has a pretty funny story behind it. In the middle of the area's planning stages, Walt decided to allow the sale of alcohol here due to the fact that it was outside of park limits. When one of his lower executives kept pestering him about how bad of an idea it was he shouted, "God damn you! This is my circus!"
  • The backstage tour at the Disney-MGM Studios was originally two hours long and consisted of a tram tour, a walking tour, a closing film portion and a break to relax at various restaurants and shops between the tram and walking portions. The tram portion was shortened significantly a few months after the park opened when New York Street (now the Streets of America) was made accessible to guests who were not on the tour, and the singular tour itself was broken up into two individual tours in 1991. Eventually these were closed and mostly replaced with rides; the last remaining individual tour, the tram tour, closed for good in 2014.
  • Compared to the huge, imposing castles at other Disney parks, the original Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland is downright tiny at only 77 feet tall, under half the height of the other castles (none of which are under 160 feet tall). In modern times, the palace is dwarfed by the trees growing behind it, making it look rather more like an elaborate fun house or mansion than the Bright Castle it should.
  • In its early years, Disney World had a number of large watercraft that would sail the Seven Seas Lagoon, including a pair of "Osceola"-class steam-powered sidewheelers and a Chinese junk boat, none of which lasted beyond the 1970s.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: In the old Tokyo DisneySea show 'Over the Waves' the main characters, Tonio and Maria, seem to get this.
• Easing into the Adventure: The purpose of Main Street, USA in the Magic Kingdom parks is to give guests something cozy and relaxing to enjoy before presenting them with the more exotic environments of Adventureland, Tomorrowland, etc. This was especially important when Disneyland opened, as no one had ever seen anything like it before.
• Easter Egg:
  • Entire books have been written about the so-called Hidden Mickeys, inconspicuous images of Mickey Mouse or his silhouette placed in various unexpected locations around the parks. It is also very common, when one attraction is closed and replaced with another, for the Imagineers to include an unobtrusive tribute to the old attraction in the new one.
  • In Disney's Hollywood Studios, if one looks up at the Tower of Terror from the Fantasmic queue area, they can see a silhouette in one of the windows.
  • In The Haunted Mansion, a strange light can be seen moving through the mansion at night, as if someone was walking through it holding a candle.
• Eccentric Mentor: Dreamfinder was this to Figment until the attraction was updated to remove him.
• Ego Polis:
  • Does this trope really need explanation? The entire theme parks are smothered with Walt Disney's likeness, including the name!
  • Strangely enough, Walt Disney himself tried to avert this. He named Disneyland after himself (or more accurately after his company) but he didn't want his image to appear anywhere in the park, and during his lifetime it didn't. It was only after his death that "The Walt Disney Story" was installed in the Main Street Opera House, complete with a mural featuring a huge grinning portrait of Walt. More portraits, statues, etc. have been added over the years, but Walt wouldn't have wanted any of them.
  • Hong Kong Disneyland's Mystic Point, named for Lord Henry Mystic, though it is more of a small explorer's outpost that serves as the base of operations for Mystic's adventures that he's opened up for visitors curious to see his vast collection of art from around the world and a meeting place for the Society of Explorers and Adventurers.
    • Same with Tokyo DisneySea's Tower of Terror and fellow explorer Harrison Hightower, except due to Hightower's mysterious disappearance, the New York Preservation Society handles tours of his former hotel.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: Each park has a certain landmark that's used to represent it: ^note Imagineers call such visual magnets "weenies." Really. Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty Castle for all "Magic Kingdom"-style parks, Spaceship Earth for Epcot, the Hollywood Tower Hotel for Disney's Hollywood Studios, ^note this has fluctuated; originally it was the Chinese Theatre, which shared its status with the Earffel Tower, but both were dethroned by the Sorcerer's Hat in 2001. The Hat was removed in 2015, then the Earffel Tower was removed in 2016; although the Chinese Theatre remains, the Hotel is now the park's primary icon the Tree of Life for Animal Kingdom, Mount Prometheus for Tokyo DisneySea, and the Carthay Circle Theatre for California Adventure ^note originally Grizzly Peak; similarly to the Chinese Theatre, it was dethroned while remaining in the park, presumably because the trees that originally made it look taller grew tall enough to dwarf it. They serve two main purposes. The first is having something to get your picture taken standing in front of. The second is so that no matter where in the park you are, you can look up, note where the landmark is in relation to you, and instantly know where in the park you are (which can be very important, as many rides have exits nowhere near their entrances).
• Elaborate Underground Base: The Magic Kingdom is built atop a massive maze of underground corridors (called "utilidors") that allow employees to quickly travel across the park, discreetly dispose of garbage, and keep other backstage processes out of sight. When you're walking up to Cinderella Castle, you're actually 108 feet above sea level.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: From "Yo-Ho (A Pirate's Life For Me)", the theme song for Pirates of the Caribbean:

  We're devils, blighters and ne'er-do-well cads
  Drink up, me 'earties, yo-ho
  Aye, but we're loved by our mommies and dads
  Drink up, me 'earties, yo-ho

• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs:
  • Probably the only reason Epcot's Universe of Energy has a massive dinosaur sequence, which itself was based on Disneyland's Primeval World diorama that serves as the finale for the Disneyland Railroad.
  • DinoLand U.S.A at Animal Kingdom.
  • Has your theme park developed the technology to create a free-moving, independently walking, lifelike animatronic figure of an animal? Obviously the animal in question should be a dinosaur!
• Everything's Better with Sparkles: "it's a small world" contains a very high ratio of glitter to total surface area. Many of the parade and stage show costumes ramp up the glitter quotient as well. And then, there's the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique...
• Everything Is Trying to Kill You: The nasty side effect of the enchanted music box on the artifacts in Mystic Manor at Hong Kong Disneyland, from Norse Gods freezing up to the room, huge Venus Flytraps snapping at you, cannons and giant crossbows firing at you, Tikis shooting arrows at you and Albert, and the Monkey King statue creating a massive vortex trying to suck you and Albert out of the mansion.
• Evil Brit: S.I.R. in the second version of the ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter preshow.
• Evil Elevator: They call it the Tower of Terror for a reason.
• Expansion Pack: Disneyland alone has had New Orleans Square, Critter Country, Toontown, Downtown Disney, California Adventure, and Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge added since its inception. This is much harder to do in California specifically because they couldn't buy as much land when they started out - by the time they could have bought the land to make it mirror the Florida resort and other worldwide parks, third party hotels and restaurants had already gobbled it up and capitalized on it.
• Expy: Some of the original park characters bear a striking resemblance to each other.
  • The dogs in Living with the Land, Carousel of Progress, Horizons, and the dog holding the keys in Pirates of the Caribbean all look identical.
  • The caretaker in The Haunted Mansion and one of the men getting poked by the rhino on the Jungle Cruise both share the same face.
  • The lava monster in Journey to the Center of the Earth and the alien in The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter both look very similar aside from different skin colors and the former not having wings.
  • Starting from 2015, Tokyo Disney Sea's "Villains Halloween" event has introduced expies of famous Disney Villains ^note Eight-foot Joe for Ursula, Marfie for Maleficent, Apple Poison for Queen Grimhilde, Jack Heart for The Queen of Hearts, Mr. Dalmatia for Cruella de Vil, Farja for Jafar, Hock for Captain Hook, Veil for Claude Frollo, Pretty Scar for Scar, and Mr. V for Dr. Facilier as their lackeys.
• Facial Profiling: Averted on "it's a small world." The same mold is used to make the faces for all the dolls, regardless of ethnicity. This is of course entirely deliberate, since the idea being promoted by the ride is that humans are all essentially the same no matter where they come from.
• Fairy Tale Free-for-All: Fantasyland at the Magic Kingdom-style parks is this by design. It is home to characters and stories from Disney's fairytale movies.
• Fan Convention: The Disney parks actually played host to a few of them.
• Fanservice: Usually unintentional (it's Disney after all), but some of the female parade dancers wear pretty short skirts for being in a Disney Theme Park, especially the parade dancers in Europe. This equally goes for some of the male actors portraying musclebound, open-shirted characters.
  • Ariel and Jasmine are also infamous for this, to the point where Jasmine got a makeover to put her in more modest clothing.
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: Body Wars. Was taken further in Adventure Thru Inner Space, which went down to an atomic scale.
• Fantasy Ghetto: Averted in that classic fantasy aspects are a major part of the parks - Fantasyland is even front and center in the Magic Kingdom-style ones. Affirmed in that, more than ever, the fantasy aspects are almost all fairy-tale princesses and, well, fairies intended to appeal to young girls. You want stuff like knights, sorcerers, or non-cutesy dragons, you're pretty much out of luck. (A common theory for why Disney acquired franchises like Star Wars and Marvel is that they couldn't come up with a set of in-house characters that appealed to boys in the same way, though they briefly came close with the Pirates of the Caribbean pirates thanks to the movies inspired by the ride.)
• Far East: China & Japan at Epcot's World Showcase and Asia at the Animal Kingdom.
• First-Name Basis: All the cast members are required to use their first name, and not use "Ms" or "Mr". This comes from Walt Disney himself — he was Walt to his employees, never Mr. Disney.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Several examples:
  • The giant cobra on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland (named, in fact, Fluffy).
  • The dragon used for Maleficent's transformation in Fantasmic! is called Murphy. ^note As in Murphy's Law, as the dragon was originally known for technical issues amongst the cast members.
  • Harold the Yeti on the Matterhorn.
  • Space Mountain has a temporary overlay for Halloween, called "Ghost Galaxy." Its star is the charming fellow seen in this photo ◊. His name is Bob.
  • The Yeti at Expedition Everest is named Betty (fans have christened it "Disco Yeti" for the flashing lights of B-Mode meant to give the illusion of movement).
• Forced Perspective: Many of the structures utilize different scales on multiple layers to create the illusion of depth or great height.
  • One example is the portrait corridor in The Anaheim Haunted Mansion which shrinks as you move toward the loading area, but it looks like a much longer hallway.
  • The buildings in Main Street USA use this for the upper halves of their facades.
  • The Matterhorn at Disneyland give the appearances of a much bigger mountain when the structure itself is only 1/100 of the real mountain in the Swiss Alps.
  • This page shows and discusses how the park employs this.
  • Inverted for The American Adventure. The building is five stories tall but the windows, doors, and other external components are oversized to make it look half as big from a distance.
• Foreign Remake:
  • Phantom Manor is the French version of The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland Paris (in a house awfully reminiscent to Bates Manor in Psycho) and is set to an original backstory integrated with the themed Frontierland it's located in.
  • Similarly, Mystic Manor at Hong Kong Disneyland is a take on the Mansion that has no happy haunts at all, due to Chinese culture revering the dead. The ride instead involves antiquities that come to life after a monkey named Albert plays with an enchanted music box.
  • Tower of Terror at Tokyo DisneySea has no affiliation whatsoever with The Twilight Zone—it's themed to "Hotel Hightower" in 1890s New York instead of 1930s Hollywood.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: A recurring theme of several rides; Rule of Funny is mostly in effect, but scarier rides such as the Tower of Terror and Alien Encounter play the Fridge Horrorinvoked for all it's worth.
• Frivolous Lawsuit: Too many to count; hardly any are successful. A lot of people only saw the Theme Park Version of law... so as a result they thought they could sue for absolutely trivial things. One of the more hilarious ones is a woman who claimed to have gained 50 pounds after The Three Little Pigs apparently fondled and harassed her - the charge was dropped when the costumes were found to have had inoperable stub-arms.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow (Walt's intention for the site, but after his death the company reworked the idea into a World's Fair-style theme park). There of course have been jokes about other things it could stand for, like "Every Person Comes Out Tired", "Employee Paychecks Cut On Thursday", or "Experimental Polyester Costumes Of Torture".
  • From the franchise that brought you S.H.I.E.L.D., Avengers C.A.M.P.U.S. is the Centralized Assembly Mobilized to Prepare, Unite, and Safeguard. And within the land, the Spider-Man section features W.E.B., the Worldwide Engineering Brigade.
• Fur Against Fang: The theme of 2012's Halloween Celebration at Hong Kong Disneyland.
• Gag Nose: On The Mad Hatter and Captain Hook.
• Gangplank Galleon: Pirates of the Caribbean.
  • With Bubblegloop Swamp in the form of the Blue Bayou portion in California, Tokyo and Paris.
• The Genie Knows Jack Nicholson: In the vein of the original movie, the Aladdin stage show that used to run at California Adventure kept its pop-culture references up to date.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: This is supposedly how the hidden Mickeys started. Epcot was intended to be an adult-oriented section of Walt Disney World, at which alcohol would be served. As such, the higher-ups did not allow the company's classic characters to appear at Epcot, thinking it would be inappropriate. The imagineers responded by sneaking Mickey Mouse icons in wherever they could. The restriction is no longer in place, but the workers continue the tradition.
• Ghost in the Machine: The premise of Cranium Command.
• Giant Eye of Doom: The iconic "back on visual" eye from Adventure Thru Inner Space.
• Gone Horribly Right: The construction of Disneyland Anaheim created a land value boom across the city, transforming it from a quiet rural community to the tourist attraction of Southern California. This came at the dismay of Walt Disney, who was not only unable to expand his park, but also felt this new development detracted from the magical atmosphere his park was vying for. He kept this in mind when plotting out construction for Walt Disney World.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The standard plot twist of every Disney thrill ride after Star Tours opened in 1987, of all the 3D movies from Muppet*Vision 3D onward, and of both ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter and the Stitch's Great Escape! retool.
  • 1955's Rocket to the Moon show (and its subsequent updates Flight to the Moon and Mission to Mars) would use this trope (via the ship getting damaged in some way) as a reason to force the guests to fly back to earth before being able to land on and explore the Moon/Mars.
  • Subverted in the third/current version of Journey into Imagination in that the stuffy tour of the Imagination Institute labs getting completely derailed by Figment's mischief is presented as a good thing.
  • Before Great Moments with Mr Lincoln was opened, Disney's demonstrated their new animatronic technology to a group of Illinois government officials. They were not amused when the Lincoln figure broke down and started leaking red hydraulic fluid from its head. From then on all figures were switched to clear fluid.
• Green Aesop: Contained in Epcot's The Land pavilion, especially from The '90s onward (originally it focused more on agriculture) and almost the entirety of the Animal Kingdom park.
• Guide Dang It!: Some of the Hidden Mickeys are in very hidden locations. How do people find these without a guide like these?
• Have a Gay Old Time:
  • The Gran Fiesta Tour ends with a cut-down rendition of the Three Caballeros' theme. Despite being clearly a brand-new recording made specially for the ride, the line "three gay caballeros" was left intact.
  • Disneyland's "Christmas Fantasy" parade's theme still includes the line "Hearts are gay and merry!"
• Hell Hotel: The Hollywood Tower Hotel a.k.a The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Also, "Hotel Hightower" at Tokyo DisneySea.
• History Repeats: "It was shut down after a few years because it was prone to breakdowns, had a low hourly capacity and was difficult for guests to figure out how to use" is an apt description of either Disneyland's Flying Saucers or its Spiritual Successor attraction Luigi's Flying Tires built nearly fifty years later.
• Hollywood Atlas: The pavillions themed around certain countries at EPCOT, as follows: Mexico, Norway, China, Germany, Italy, The American Adventure, Japan, Morrocco, France, Britain, and Canada.
• Hooray For Hollywood: The Hollywood Studios theme parks, and the Hollywood Land section of California Adventure, all started out built on this trope. They've generally had some Network Decay that has shifted them more to the magic inside the movies instead of the making of the movies.
• Hub Level: In the Magic Kingdom parks, the Central Plaza at the end of Main Street is a real-life example and possible Trope Maker.
• Hula and Luaus:
  • The Enchanted Tiki Room and Walt Disney World's Polynesian Village Resort. Also, the Tahitian Terrace and its successor the Tropical Hideaway ^note though in between the two, the space spent several years as the Arabian-themed Aladdin's Oasis at Disneyland.
  • There's also Aulani, a Disney resort in Hawaii.
  • The Tribal Arts room of Hong Kong's Mystic Manor lifts elements directly from the Tiki Room.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • Happens with glorious frequency on the Jungle Cruise.

    "And here we see the back side of Schweitzer Falls, named after the back side of the famous explorer, Dr. Albert Falls."

  • Also noticeable in the Aladdin-based stage production in California Adventure.
  • Not to mention the extinct Kitchen Cabaret/Food Rocks show at The Land pavilion.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Not "characters" per se, but several iconic rides heavily associated with their respective parks weren't built until years after the parks themselves.
  • With Disneyland itself, the earliest example is the Matterhorn Bobsleds; they opened in 1959, four years after the park opened. Other examples include it's a small world, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Haunted Mansion; all opened over ten years after Disneyland itself, in 1966, 1967, and 1969 respectively.
  • When Walt Disney World opened in 1971, it famously didn't have Pirates of the Caribbean, with the intent to add a similar ride called the Western River Expedition in Frontierland instead. After many complaints from tourists, plans were changed and an abridged "greatest hits" version of Pirates was built on the quick, opening in 1973.
  • Space Mountain is the icon of Tomorrowland, but didn't open at Disney World until 1975, followed by Disneyland in 1977.
  • The Tower of Terror didn't open at Hollywood Studios until 1994, five years after the park opened; it has since become the park's most iconic ride.
• Illogical Safe: One of the many gags befalling Mike Wazowski in the preshow for Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor.
• Ignored Expert: Poor Professor Dorje puts up all those nice displays in the Expedition Everest queue warning people of how dangerous the Yeti is and yet they still walk right by and get on the train headed into its sacred domain...
• Improv: Turtle Talk with Crush, the Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor, and Stitch Encounter are all entirely this, as they involve digital puppeteers interacting with an audience in real-time. These shows do have brief scripted bits, however.
• Incredible Shrinking Man:
  • A Bug's Land, a part of California Adventure themed to the movie A Bug's Life, was built to make guests feel bug-sized, with giant shamrocks, benches made of popsicle sticks, and restrooms disguised as a giant box of tissues.
  • Any Toy Story themed attraction also involves this, especially the Toy Story lands at various parks around the world. Themed to Andy's backyard at the scale of a toy, they include larger-than-life versions of classic toys like RC Car and Slinky Dog as attractions; bamboo shoots are used to represent blades of grass.
  • Honey, I Shrunk the Kids became the basis for a playground/set walk-through (Hollywood Studios) and the 3D show Honey, I Shrunk the Audience (Epcot/Disneyland/Disneyland Paris/Tokyo Disneyland).
  • Body Wars (1989-2007) took you on a mission inside the human body within a ship miniaturized to fit within a blood vessel.
  • In the long-gone Disneyland ride Adventure Thru Inner Space, riders were "shrunk" small enough to travel inside an atom.
  • Referenced by a cafe in Avengers C.A.M.P.U.S. themed around Ant-Man, who has this as a power; though the gimmick is that it's the food that's shrunk (or grown - the point is that everything served is the wrong size).
• Indian Burial Ground: Combined with Never Say "Die" in some versions of Big Thunder Mountain. There's a curse on the mountain due to it being a "sacred place" to the natives. The Haunted Mansion at Disney World is also said to built on one of these.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • Show-business terms are constantly used throughout the parks. Park employees are all known as "Cast Members", whether they're dancing on a stage or serving corn dogs; public areas are referred to as "on-stage", and restricted areas are referred to as "off-stage"; the guidelines employees follow are called "good show"; and so on.
  • A similar but separate case applies to the character actors; rather than "I play Tinker Bell", the preferred terminology is "I'm friends with Tinker Bell", so as to maintain the kayfabe.
  • Early ads for Animal Kingdom insisted it was not a zoo (or rather, "nāhtāzū").
  • The rides aren't "rides;" they're attractions. An exception may be made for those that have "ride" in the title.
• Intercontinuity Crossover:
  • Walt Disney World's former Enchanted Tiki Room (Under New Management). The new management? Iago and Zazu. The Tokyo version is instead invaded by Stitch.
  • Fantasmic! is an even better example, with several Disney Villains from various films attempting to attack Mickey Mouse via his dreams, and a few good guys helping him out.
  • Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, an interactive game hosted by Merlin that sends guests around the Magic Kingdom park to battle the various Disney villains that are working together.
  • Occasionally, the walkaround Disney characters will interact with one another. For example, on YouTube you can find several videos of Alice and the Mad Hatter interacting with Peter Pan and Wendy.
  • The new stage show, Mickey's Royal Friendship Faire, is one that features Mickey, Minnie, and the rest of the gang interacting with characters from Disney's more recent movies, including The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, and Frozen.
  • The stage show at Disneyland, Mickey and the Magical Map, has Mickey, Yen Sid (the sorcerer from The Sorcerer's Apprentice), Tiana and Louis from The Princess and the Frog, Sebastian from The Little Mermaid, King Louie from The Jungle Book, Pocahontas from Pocahontas, Mulan from Mulan, Rapunzel and Flynn Rider from Tangled, and Stitch from Lilo & Stitch.
• Internal Homage:
  • Increased a lot after the original park hit 40 years or so, especially as so many rides have gone away. It's not uncommon to see a nod to Horizons around today's Epcot, an attraction which itself had a Continuity Nod to Carousel of Progress. In fact, one of the biggest Horizons tributes in Florida is not in Epcot at all, but rather in the post-show for Space Mountain after the ride was overhauled in 2009.
  • Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage in particular is packed with references to the original Submarine Voyage, which was based on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. From Atlantis to the Graveyard of Ships, to a trip into a cave evoking the trip to the bottom of the sea in Submarine Voyage, to the Angler Fish being an Expy of the terrifying Giant Squid in 20,000 Leagues, and even two rock formations that deliberately look like a Sea Serpent and a Mermaid... there's even an old diver's helmet that is another reference to 20,000 Leagues as well!
• Invisible Backup Band: Sonny Eclipse's Space Angels at Cosmic Ray's Starlight Cafe
• Irony: Animal Kingdom's Tree of Life is built on an oil rig. Obviously, the structure isn't actively pumping oil, but rather, it was chosen to withstand hurricane-force winds.
• It Will Never Catch On:
  • A running gag in the current version of Carousel of Progress, thanks to its Technology Marches Oninvoked plot.
  • Also, people once said this about Disneyland, back when Walt was trying to get funding to build it. They couldn't have been more wrong.
• I Will Find You: A common plot in Disney World attractions built during the Turn of the Millennium was some variation on "X is missing and/or causing trouble, and Y and Z are looking for X." While the plot does predate that particular time period (being used as far back as Splash Mountain in 1992), its use in a succession of attractions (and attraction redos) starting with Kilimanjaro Safaris and Countdown to Extinction in 1998 and going on to Stitch's Great Escape!, Mickey's PhilharMagic, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Seas with Nemo and Friends and Gran Fiesta Tour Starring The Three Caballeros firmly date it to the early/mid 2000s, cemented by the fact that attractions made after Gran Fiesta Tour typically don't use it.
• Jungle Japes: A major portion of Adventureland and Animal Kingdom, plus the African section of It's A Small world.
• Kayfabe: Enforced. It's called "character integrity" among the staff, and it's treated extremely seriously. As far as every cast member is concerned, that is Mickey Mouse, that is Cinderella, that is Gaston, et cetera.
  • The cast members not only never break character (unless it's an absolute emergency), but they're also quite careful to make sure you never see two of the same character at once. For example, if you're on line to meet Queen Elsa, the line is likely to end in a large waiting room—then one group at a time will be taken from the waiting room to the actual audience chamber where Elsa is waiting. There might be four audience chambers, each with its own Queen Elsa, but the kids-of-all-ages will never know.
  • Members of the Star Wars land all have individual backstories, from the canon characters like Luke Skywalker to random smuggler characters that you'd see in the background. And like every other cast member, they never break character. If you need help, or to talk to them, expect the cast member to speak as that character and nothing else.
• Kid-Appeal Character: Marty Wazowski in Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor, Mike's nephew who usually interacts with the youngest kids in the audience.
• Large Ham: The non-speaking characters often make exaggerated gestures and do goofy things.
• LARP: The Legends of Frontierland game in Anaheim is one of these, right down to the standard convention of using Rock–Paper–Scissors to simulate a fight between players.
• Lighter and Softer: Mystic Manor at Hong Kong Disneyland is much lighter than its Haunted Mansion counterparts (and definitely much, much lighter than Phantom Manor), featuring an adorable little monkey, much brighter lighting, a musical score more adventurous than spooky (and by Danny Elfman, no less), a tone of general whimsy rather than dark comedy, and as a matter of fact, no ghosts whatsoever-just magic. Apparently, this was done due to Chinese cultural views regarding spirits of the deadinvoked; that is, they're deeply respected and revered, and certainly nothing to laugh at.
• Light Gun Game: Toy Story brings two of the theme part equivalent: Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters and Toy Story Midway Mania.
• Literal-Minded: Face characters will sometimes develop a severe case of this when asked for an autograph.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: Well, of course. Some of them have become subject to Chuck Cunningham Syndrome, including Doug, Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Darkwing Duck, Perry the Platypus, and the Power Rangers ^note who aren't Disney property anymore as of 2010, thus justifiably retired for copyright reasons. Some characters are exclusive to each parkinvoked, such as Huey, Dewey and Louie along with Berlioz and Toulouse for Disneyland Paris, and Chef Louis for Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo Disney Sea. In recent years, characters such as Clarice from "Two Chips And a Miss" and Marie later made appearances at Walt Disney World,Disneyland, and other parks starting in 2011 and 2012.
• Looks Like Jesus: Dreamfinder according to one child.
• Lost World: In Shanghai, Adventure Isle's Roaring Mountain is very much this, complete with mysterious isolated tribe and a Prehistoric Monster of a crocodile.
• Mad Scientist:
  • The Timekeeper starred a robotic one voiced by Robin Williams.
  • Dr. Seeker from Dinosaur takes riders back in time minutes before the meteor that would eliminate the dinosaurs hits, despite the safety restriction imposed by Dr. Marsh. He thankfully has the sense to return the riders to present day before the meteor actually makes impact.

• Matrix Raining Code: Shows up in the current version of Spaceship Earth at the start of the descent. This probably wasn't meant to be unnerving, but...
• Meaningful Name: Pretty much any other character in the park who isn't from a pre-existing Disney movie or TV show is named meaningfully or punnily. For example, the two talent agents from The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management are named William and Morris.
• Mega-Corp:
  • Disney itself falls into this with the amount of power that they wield at Disney World. Just look up "Reedy Creek Improvement District" and be astounded at the amount of power that the state of Florida gave Disney for its operations there. There's a reason why snarky Floridians call it "America's Vatican".
  • Root of All Evil declared Disney to be more evil than SCIENTOLOGY. Well, it is a whole lot bigger, wealthier, and influential, and thankfully hasn't caused anyone's death. Not on purpose, anyway. That we know of. Less litigious, too.
  • In terms of in-universe examples, there's X-S Tech in the now-gone ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter attraction at Magic Kingdom.
• Merchandise-Driven:
  • If it's a popular movie or other Disney property that sells a lot of merchandise, odds are you can expect to see an attraction based on it — if not now, then certainly in the near future. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is hotly debatedinvoked.
  • Every ride built for the last several decades ends by dumping you right into the gift shop for that attraction. And some were actively remodeled to dump you into a gift shop when they didn't before, such as "it's a small world".
  • Snow globes were HUGE sellers for Disney World in the late 1990s/early 2000s. So much so that the Magic Kingdom's centerpiece for the 100 Years of Magic celebration (honoring Walt Disney's 100th birthday) in 2001 was the "Share a Dream Come True" parade ◊, whose floats were nothing but giant snow globe set-pieces with popular Disney characters inside. This ended up happening at the worst possible time: the September 11th attacks took place a month before the parade debuted, which not only slowed tourism but also led airlines to make restrictions on what items flyers could take on planes, with snow globes being one of the first banned souvenirs. This effectively killed off the booming Disney World snow globe business, and the parade limped on for five years before it was reconfigured into the "Disney Dreams Come True" parade, which was the same parade as before but minus the snow globe tops on the floats.
• Mickey Mousing: ^note Har-dee-har-har.
  • California Screamin's music swells and falls alongside the coaster, especially when climbing the second lift hill, and when going over the smaller hills above the Midway.
  • Many parades sync the effects on the floats, as well as the movement of characters and dancers, to the soundtrack.
• Mine Cart Madness:
  • Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
  • The Big Grizzly Mountain attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland.
  • And in the Magic Kingdom, there is the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train.
• Monster-Shaped Mountain: Grizzly Peak in California Adventure.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The "Celebrate a Dream Come True" used to have a villain float where they talked about their dreams coming true.
  • Also happened in the Disneyland version of Snow White's Scary Adventures, which cut immediately from the witch falling off a cliff to a giant storybook reading, "...and they all lived Happily Ever After." The successor Snow White's Enchanted Wish added a transition in which the prince wakes up Snow White from the Sleeping Death.
• The Movie:
  • One is currently stuck in Development Hellinvoked, titled Magic Kingdom, directed by Jon Favreau, about a family that gets trapped in the park after dark a la Night at the Museum.
  • Escape from Tomorrow, a black-and-white "guerrilla movie" about a man slowly going crazy (or is he?) during a family vacation, was secretly filmed at Disney World and Disneyland. The director was amazed he, his actors (who hid their scripts on their iPhones), and crew wasn't caught; then again, what's one more a guy with a camera at Disney World?
  • Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof produced a 2015 sci-fi flick titled Tomorrowland starring George Clooney and Hugh Laurie. The title referred to an alternate dimension inhabited by visionaries. Oddly enough, the Disney attraction most prominently featured in the movie (It's a Small World) is not actually in Tomorrowland. (It's kind of in a corner between Tomorrowland, Toon Town, and Fantasyland, and is generally considered to be part of the latter.)
• Multiple-Choice Past:
  • As noted below, the burning shack on Tom Sawyer's Island.
  • The same might be said for the various incarnations of The Haunted Mansion with the exception of both Phantom Manor and Mystic Manor since their respective backstories are explored in great detail. Walt and the Imagineers initially went for a vague narrative of the mansion being a "retirement home" for ghosts, but as to how the mansion itself first became haunted, who previously owned the mansion, as well as the profiles of several of the ride's characters (except for Constance Hatchaway maybe) are left total mysteries.
• Munchkin: There is a certain class of fan that treats a day at the park like a game. Most time on rides and least time in line wins. With the addition of FastPass, the strategy has become even more Serious Business.
• Mythology Gag: Several to the original source material of the rides featured at the parks.
  • The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror contains props referencing the original series.
  • Cars Land has a streetlight that blinks yellow, and every third blink is slightly slower.
  • The new Soarin' Around the World film passes over Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, which is often credited as an inspiration for the original Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland and all subsequent Disney castles.
  • The current onboard narration for the Disneyland Railroad mentions traveling by stagecoach and pack mules as well as riding through "Nature's Wonderland" when traveling along the new track through Frontierland. In Disneyland's early years, guests could ride stagecoaches, pack mules, and the Mine Train through Nature's Wonderland in Frontierland.
  • Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor allows guests to submit their own jokes by texting them to the number 42319. That's 4 twenty-three-nineteen!

    Tropes N to Z

• Never Trust a Trailer: Sometimes, commercials for the attractions feature things that are not at all included in the actual attraction for obvious reasons other than for perhaps, dramatic effect.
• Nice Guy: Practically a prerequisite for working in a Disney park, and a big part of Disney's corporate policy. It's incredibly hard to find someone working there who doesn't genuinely enjoy doing their job (or at least do a decent job of acting like it), from the costumed characters to the guys who walk around with brooms and dustpans who keep the place obsessively clean. It should be noted that they certainly don't get paid extra to smile. It is pretty much understood that when auditioning as Cast Member, the person auditioning enjoys being around, better yet playing with, and is understanding and patient with children.
• Nice Hat: Mainly (but not exclusively) the iconic mouse ears. It started with the classic Mouseketeer style and exploded from there. You can get one for practically any conceivable occasion or character now.
• The Nondescript: "Go Away Green", the special color of green that Disney uses to "hide" electrical boxes, ride buildings and anything else that guests are not meant to see. The way it works is that the color is so neutral that the eye just glances over it. Disney refuses to release the exact shade/formula for the color.
• Non-Ironic Clown:
  • When New Fantasyland first opened in 2012, they used to have a group of clowns outside of Dumbo's Storybook Circus called "Giggle Gang Clown Troupe" during its first few years.
  • Also, the clowns seen in the former 3D attraction "Magic Journeys" at Epcot's Imagination Pavilion.
• Nightmare Face: In Indiana Jones Adventure, Mara can now do this.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The Pirate Zombie Robot part, anyway—audio-animatronic pirate skeletons on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
• Obvious Beta: Whenever the parks are undergoing major refurbishment, such as California Adventure from 2007 to 2012 or Hollywood Studios from 2016 to 2019, it can feel like you've stepped into one of these. California Adventure even earned the derisive nickname "Wall Street, USA" during its reconstruction.
• Official Cosplay Gear: One of the many things available as souvenirs, with one of the most famous being the hats with the Mickey Mouse ears that originated on The Mickey Mouse Club.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: Dreamfinder played one in the Tales of Terror sequence of the original Journey Into Imagination (the twist, though, was that since the section was about literature, the organ resembled something of a huge typewriter/computer). There's also the atmospheric music in the Haunted Mansion, which even has an actual pipe organ being played by a ghost in the ballroom scene (which, in California, is actually the same pipe organ from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea).
• The Oner: Honey, I Shrunk the Audience is built around two long, continuous-appearing shots to pull off its premise (see the trope page for details).
• Open Secret:
  • Disneyland's Club 33. It's secret in theory and doesn't advertise, but it's not like Disney can prevent people from talking about it. Even if you never get to go (and most people won't—it is highly exclusive), you can learn as much as you want to know from various books and websites. That said, while the original Disneyland club is well-known, the locations that have subsequently opened in other parks around the world are much more obscure. ^note Specifically, Walt Disney World has Club 33 lounges within Magic Kingdom's Adventureland ("Captain's Quarters"), Epcot's American Adventure ("Constellation Club"), Hollywood Studios' Brown Derby ("Spotlight Lounge") and Animal Kingdom's Africa ("Harambe House"). Disney California Adventure has the 1901 Lounge, next door to the Carthay Circle Restaurant. There's also a Club 33 in Tokyo (in Center Street off World Bazaar) and Shanghai Disneyland (on Mickey Avenue, near Disneytown).
  • The Disney Vacation Club advertises itself as "Disney's best kept secret".
• Oracular Head: Madame Leota in the Haunted Mansion. Also the Shrunken Ned fortune telling machine at Disneyland's Adventureland.
• Orange/Blue Contrast: Spaceship Earth, at night, is lit up blue at the top and orange at the bottom. Tomorrowland Cast Members also wear blue and orange uniforms.
• Original Generation: Many attractions around the different parks are original concepts not tied to pre-existing films, resulting in numerous original characters, prominent examples including Figment and Dreamfinder, the Orange Bird, the ghosts of the Haunted Mansion, the Country Bears and the Society of Explorers and Adventurers.
• Our Founder:
  • The iconic "Partners" statue of Walt and Mickey holding hands. There are also two companion statues: "Sharing the Magic" features Roy O. Disney and Minnie Mouse sitting on a bench, and "Storytellers" depicts a younger Disney arriving in California, with the earlier pie-eyed Mickey standing on his luggage.
  • Cars Land also includes the statue of Radiator Springs' founder Stanley, as shown in the movie.
• Our Ghosts Are Different:
  • The Haunted Mansion's spirits are said to be from all over the world, with the Mansion itself serving as a supernatural boarding house/retirement center. But in the Tower of Terror, the ghosts seem to be permanently stuck in the hotel as a result of the elevator accident. Then in Phantom Manor, we've got the ghostly villain taking on three forms throughout while tormenting the bride into old age.
  • In fairness, Tower of Terror (at the U.S. parks) is based on an intellectual property that Disney had to license, so discrepancies could arise from that situation. The movie also states that the ghosts can't actually leave the hotel grounds due to the curse that caused the accident in the first place.
• Out of Focus:
  • The first iteration of Epcot's Journey Into Imagination attraction took guests on a hypothetical journey through the human mind's creative process (hence the title). The second iteration kept guests mostly in a laboratory, and focused on how optical illusions tricked people into seeing things that aren't really there... in order to (somehow) make the guests more creative. The third iteration ditches the first-person guest narrative entirely and instead spends (or at least attempts to spend) most of its time discussing how the five senses can trigger the imagination.
  • The message of the attraction has changed with each iteration as well, and seems to match up with whatever message the park itself was trying to push at the time it was made. The message of the 1983 version has the very 1980s Epcot message that "imagination and science can work together to solve the world's problems", while the message of the 1999 version had the very 1990s Epcot message of "science is totally awesome, and it can be used to analyze the imagination", and the message of the 2003 version has the very 2000s Epcot message of "science is boring, but imagination is totally awesome and the two should be separate".
• Oven Logic: In the last part of the current version of Carousel of Progress, though unintentional, the oven was programmed to automatically set the temperature if it hears numbers spoken aloud (that's one hell of a design flaw) and the father was talking about the Grandmother's score in a video game.
• Pantomime Animal: Cast members in character costumes who roam the parks. (This doesn't include "face characters", like Alice or Snow White.)
• Parental Bonus:
  • Disneyland has (or at least had) a few areas where parents could take a breather and enjoy some relatively tasteful atmosphere and fine dining, complete with (gasp!) alcoholic drinks. Oh, and the Submarine Lagoon used to have comely Mermaids in there to wave and smile at passing men. There also used to be a working Pharmacy, a tobacco store and a shop selling women's underclothes.
  • Prior to 2012, Disney World's Magic Kingdom had a very, very strict "no alcohol, EVER" policy. Beginning in 2012 it was relaxed at one new venue, the Be Our Guest restaurant, and only at dinnertime. 2016 saw four additional sit-down venues serving alcohol and by 2018 all sit-down restaurants in Magic Kingdom served alcohol. Animal Kingdom has its own beer, and "Drinking Around the World" (guests attempt to try the signature alcoholic beverage of each country in Epcot's World Showcase) is a popular extra-curricular activity for some guests. They even let you bring a margarita on Mexico's El Rio del Tiempo until it was replaced with the Gran Fiesta Tour in 2007. Combined with the rising popularity of the Epcot Food and Wine festival, seeing drunk people wandering around the World Showcase is more common than ever.
  • As for Disneyland, you'll probably have to head for California Adventure or Oga's Cantina in Galaxy's Edge, unless you're lucky enough to have a membership to the uber-exclusive Club 33. There, you'll find the more complete bar in any Disney Park.
  • In the Aladdin stage show at California Adventure, Genie's lines were often pop-culture references that could go over kids' heads.
  • A former band of holiday-themed street performers in the Hollywood Studios park in Florida performed a song about what they would build the perfect gingerbread man out of. After singing an overly-long description of how he bites the gingerbread man's arm off, a rather effeminate man completes his portion with the line "and a gummy thong!"
  • Journey into Imagination with Figment includes a handful of references to older Disney films going back to the 60's and 70's, including The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.
• Plot-Demanded Manual Mode: At the end of the Mission: Space ride, an autopilot failure means the riders need to use the joysticks to pilot their ship in. (As with the other controls, nothing happens if the riders fail to operate them properly.)
• Politically Correct History:
  • Pretty much any attraction with a historical setting, although Pirates of the Caribbean and The Hall of Presidents are major offenders. Upper management seems to think that people don't come to theme parks to be disturbed or have their consciences bothered, and they're probably right.
  • Pirates is noticeable for once containing scenes that were considered less politically correct (brides being sold, pirates chasing wenches, a naked girl hiding in a barrel) that have since been replaced by "family friendly" versions (townspeople forfeiting their belongings, women chasing pirates away with brooms, Jack Sparrow hiding in a barrel). Disney Legend X Atencio famously decried the changes, saying that the ride is called "Pirates of the Caribbean", not "Boy Scouts of the Caribbean".
  • Averted with the now-defunct Golden Dreams in California Adventure. The show didn't pull any punches regarding the treatment of native Indians by the conquistadors, the dangerous circumstances under which Chinese railroad laborers had to work during the Gold Rush, the overt racism against the Japanese (especially "picture brides") during the early part of the 20th century, or the hardship and borderline hostility towards migrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas during the Dust Bowl. (It often played to near-empty houses and has been replaced by a dark ride themed to The Little Mermaid (1989), though the film was also used as part of Disney's Youth Education Series of lesson plans.) Golden Dreams was intended as the Spiritual Successor to Epcot's still-running The American Adventure, a retrospective on U.S. history through World War II that does take a few moments to point out that women, blacks, and Native Americans often got the short end of the stick compared to white males.
• Polly Wants a Microphone: The Enchanted Tiki Room features talking parrot animatronics as the hosts. The theme song even includes the line "all the birds sing words".
• The Power of the Sun: Parts of the design for Sage of Time from Tapestry of Nations were meant to evoke sun god imagery, particularly his headdress
• Pretty in Mink: The cast members who are cast as a Disney Princess get warmer dresses in winter, with the collar and cuffs lined with white faux fur, and Belle's actresses getting a white fur shoulder cape.
• Product Placement: A rendition of the song "Dear Old Donegal" that was sung at Disneyland's Golden Horseshoe Theater swapped out the word "whiskey" for "Pepsi" in the lyrics. Given Walt Disney's somewhat cavalier attitude towards alcohol in his films and theme park attractions (despite refusing to sell it in the park), this was less Bowdlerization and more of a shout-out to the Theater's then-sponsor Pepsi-Cola.
• Progressive Era Montage: Disney parks love this trope; many of their areas and attractions involve starting in the past and working forward.
  • Carousel of Progress at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom, examining the evolution of technology, jumps roughly 20 years with every new scene. It starts in the 1900s and originally ended in the 1960s, though an update later pushed the finale scene to the 1990s.
  • Spaceship Earth and the former World of Motion, both at Epcot, do the same thing for communication and locomotion respectively.
  • In terms of theme park areas, the Rivers of America are architecturally designed to take guests through time. Frontierland starts in the 19th century, with building numbers representing the specific year. At Disneyland, this moves forward into the late 19th century with New Orleans Square, while at Walt Disney World, this works backwards into the 18th century with Liberty Square.
  • California Adventure, while not strictly adhering to this rule, themes most of its lands to match a particular decade. Starting with the 1920s-themed Buena Vista Street, the architecture slowly works into the 1930s-themed Hollywoodland, with the Carthay Circle bridging the gap between them. Opposite to Hollywoodland is Grizzly Peak, which takes design cues from the 1940s (most apparent in its interior design). Pixar Pier, at the far end of the park, is inspired by boardwalks of the early 1900s; next door is Cars Land, which carries the same 1960s design aesthetics as its inspiration.
• Promotional Consideration:
  • Attractions at the parks are occasionally sponsored by outside companies, which are prominently displayed on its signage. At Disneyland, this was due to financial issues at the park's opening date, so this is less often seen in the other parks.
  • Sponsors will sometimes not renew their contract, which requires the ride to remove all references to the sponsor. The success of this can range from a seamless removal of all corporate references to a slapdash covering up of the former logos. Some rides may gain a sponsor or change sponsors. ^note For example, The Living Seas was originally sponsored by United Technologies. The sign out front featured the company's name and logo and the Hydrolators also had the company logo. When United Technologies stopped sponsorship in 1998, the sponsorship sign was removed and the company logo on the Hydrolators was replaced with the pavilion's logo until the pavilion was given the Finding Nemo overhaul.
  • In at least one case, a former sponsor remains a part of their attraction; since Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress was originally sponsored by General Electric, it uses multiple appliances from the company as props, which retain the GE logo to this day.
  • Thematic advertising can be seen in other places, like the signs on construction walls, shops, restaurants, and elsewhere.
• Prop Recyclinginvoked: happens a lot to save on costs, both from films and old rides.
  • From rides:
    • When America Sings closed, many of the animatronics traveled over to Splash Mountain, as the designs (vaguely anthropomorphic animals) could be reused pretty easily. Two geese, however, made a shorter trip to Star Tours, were stripped of their feathers and beaks, and became "G2 Repair Droids" in the queue, where they remain to this day.
    • In the same ride, Captain Rex, the former pilot in the original version of the ride, can be seen in the queue as a disused prototype following the ride's revamp.
    • When the disastrously bad Superstar Limo invoked became Monsters, Inc. Mike and Sulley to the Rescue!, several of the celebrity animatronics were given yellow clean suits and became Child Detection Agency monsters.
    • The hearse in front of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion had been purchased during planning of a proposed stunt show inspired by The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, but when the decision was made to focus on the Indiana Jones Adventure, it was placed in front of the Haunted Mansion instead.
  • From films:
    • The chairs from the dining room of The Haunted Mansion can be seen in several places throughout the parks. One was added to Pirates of the Caribbean following the Jack Sparrow update, in the treasure room before the ramp back to the surface. Another can be seen in the attic of The Haunted Mansion, following the addition of Constance Hatchaway.
    • The organ from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea can be seen in the ballroom scene of The Haunted Mansion.
    • The hearse in front of Magic Kingdom's Haunted Mansion was used in The Sons of Katie Elder, almost 30 years prior.
    • The jeep in front of Indiana Jones Adventure in Disneyland was used in a car chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
    • The Backlot Tour in Disney's Hollywood Studio's contained several screen-used vehicles: two, a tank and a kubelwagen, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and two spaceships from Flight of the Navigator, one of which eventually became the Cool Ship in Tomorrowland.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: The Jungle Cruise skippers proudly show off the Back. Side. Of. Water!
• Race Lift: At the Asian parks, even at their American- and European-themed areas, you'll hardly find a non-Asian, non-character cast member.
• Randomly Generated Levels: Star Tours: The Adventures Continue has several layers of this. The bulk of the ride consists of two randomly-selected destinations, which are divided by a randomly-selected intro sequence (where a "Rebel spy" is chosen from the audience) and a transmission from one of several different characters. In all, there are around 100 possible adventures.
• Raptor Attack: A new raptor character serves as the mascot of Donald's Dino Bash. To their credit, he is depicted with feathers (albeit still missing a body covering), since the attraction is based on the close relationship between birds and other dinosaurs. A featherless raptor can also be seen in the Dinosaur attraction.
• Rattling Off Legal: Parodied in Star Tours: The Adventures Continue, where the disclaimer for all the astronomical incidents the agency will not cover lasts for almost half a minute. It is the Evil Empire's reign, after all...
• Raygun Gothic: Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland, and Hong Kong Disneyland. Tomorrowland at Disneyland ("updated" in the '90s to wild indifference) is closer to Zeerust, and Tomorrowland at Shanghai Disneyland is more TRON-inspired Cyberpunk. Discoveryland at Disneyland Paris goes an entirely different direction and falls under Steampunk.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: While normally the scenery would attempt to be as believable as possible, the (real) restaurant opposite of the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride, The Blue Bayou, could easily be mistaken as part of the scenery.
• Recurring Location:
  • Almost every resort around the world has their own version of the Magic Kingdom in generally the same layout, starting with Disneyland and going all the way to Shanghai. They (usually) each have a Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, Adventureland, and Frontierland, although the appearances and attractions of these lands can vary wildly.
  • Rides are also often recreated between parks so that, for example, guests in California can enjoy an attraction without having to travel all the way to Florida. For example, the Haunted Mansion appears in almost every park (in Hong Kong, it's been replaced by Mystic Manor, and is called Phantom Manor in Paris), and Space Mountain does as well (in Shangai, it's replaced with a TRON-themed attraction).
• Recycled IN SPACE!:
  • Space Mountain is pretty much The Matterhorn IN SPACE, sans monster (save for a spooky look for Halloween). This is even more apparent in Florida's version, where the vehicles only fit one rider per row, just like the Matterhorn.
  • Disneyland Paris' version of Space Mountain however is completely different. Featuring an outdoor load/unload area, an inclined launch up the side of the dome and even inversions! If it wasn't for the fact that it actually opened about half a decade prior, it would probably be more accurate to call it "Rock N' Roller Coaster IN SPACE"...
• Retcon:
  • Attractions would be updated with new scenes or elements which become integrated into the storyline. This is typically done out of necessity for maintenance and/or to regain appeal. A notable example is the ghostly bride in the attic of The Haunted Mansion who got her own complex backstory in 2006 after decades of being an amorphous, nameless character. See also Updated Re-release below.
  • The original Star Tours was continually updated with better graphics for a while before before being fully refurbished into Star Tours: The Adventures Continue. This was mainly to include references to the Star Wars prequel and sequel trilogies.
• Retraux: The 2008 Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough at Disneyland uses all kinds of special effects to recreate a mid-50s attraction. Meanwhile, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln utilizes audio from a 1964 World's Fair exhibit with an advanced audio-animatronic.

• Right on Queue:
  • The lines at especially popular attractions range into the truly absurd, especially for newer rides. The FastPass system is Disney's way of combating this, which reduces the wait times to no more than 15 minutes. There are also several ways that they keep guests in the standby line entertained: videos to watch that set up the plot, details such as sight gags and puzzles to keep your eyes busy, and—more recently—interactive elements such as touch screen video games.
  • The longest ride queue to date occurred in Walt Disney World Christmas day (one of the busiest days for the park) in 2009, when one of the theaters for Epcot's Soarin' broke down. The resulting line from fans of the ride soon grew to SEVEN HOURS! For those keeping score at home, a flight from Orlando International Airport to LAX is only five hours. (Hard mode: Leave the end of the broken-down Soarin' line in Florida, hop on a real plane to LAX and arrive in Anaheim to get in line for their Soarin' Over California before you would've gotten to go on the Florida version!)
  • Radiator Springs Racers at Disney California Adventure Park - quite literally every. single. rider. knows. this. Two-hour waits are quite common on the weekends, and fast passes for the entire day are gone by lunchtime. Couples will often get on the much shorter "single rider line"—when they get to the front they'll be split up to fill up the six-person cars, but with any luck they'll end up racing each other.
  • The queue time for Frozen Ever After at Epcot could get up to five hours long during the ride's first summer due to the massive popularity of the attraction's source material. It eventually mellowed out to a more reasonable level of around an hour's wait, though it can go higher on peak days.
  • On the opening day of Pandora – The World of Avatar, people waited for over two hours just to get into the land, with the wait time for Flight of Passage peaking at 250 minutes (over four hours). FastPasses for the ride are still difficult to get, and the standby wait time averages around two hours even years later. In an attempt to avoid this for Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, a virtual queue system was implemented to get into the land and "boarding passes" are given out for the hugely popular Rise of the Resistance.
• The Roaring '20s: Buena Vista Street, the revamped entry plaza to California Adventure, is themed to Los Angeles at the time Walt Disney first arrived there on the cusp of The Golden Age of Hollywood.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Well, what else would you call the costumed versions of Mickey, Minnie, and other such characters?
• Scaling the Summit: Every now and then, a group of climbers will ascend the Matterhorn, helping complete the Yodel Land theme. Though it's an artificial mountain, it's still a challenge and the climbers have to be certified before they are allowed on it.
• Scenery Porn: Some scenery looks very artificial... but many of the resorts and rides are very elaborate.
  • Special mention goes to Storybook Land in Anaheim. Those plants you see in there? There's a good reason they look so realistic — they are real.
  • Also, there are herbs growing throughout the parks in Anaheim, but there's a lot in Tomorrowland. There are herbs growing such as lavender, sage, and basil; fruits such as bananas, grapes, pomegranate, and oranges, and even peppers and coffee beans. All selected based on an "Agrifuture" concept for the area's landscaping.
  • In the Animal Kingdom park, the designers even made sure the streetlights and power poles looked correct for the regions of the world the park sections represent. And the entry rainforest contains plants from every continent.
  • Both versions of Soarin' fly you over gorgeous scenery.
• Schmuck Bait: The only reason why Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye doesn't end sooner is because most, if not all, of the guests will look into Mara's eyes despite the warning.
• Scotireland: Anecdotal evidence suggests more than a few Merida face characters don't know the difference between a Scottish and Irish accent.
• Scrapbook Story/Story Breadcrumbs: Outside pre-shows and the occasional outside Manual is provided, all attraction backstories are generally conveyed through details scattered throughout their queues such as pictures, props, and documents that the observant can piece together into a greater whole.
• Script Wank: Ellen's Energy Adventure. The original Universe of Energy spent a lot of time discussing alternate energy sources, such as the solar panels on the attraction itself. The 1996—2017 version may well have been titled I Love Fossil Fuels.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • The park staff often takes pot shots at "it's a small world". It's somewhat of a whipping boy. The Lion King (1994) even lampshades this when Zazu sings the theme song to Scar, who reacts with disgust. Sonny Eclipse, Magic Kingdom Tomorrowland's resident alien musician, describes the song as being used on his planet "to break the enemy".
  • The Magic Kingdom park staff similarly used to take shots at The Hall of Presidents. The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management! had Iago mention he's heading to the Hall for a nap. This stopped after the implementation of the 2009 refurbishment, which made the show considerably less boring and preachy.
• Serious Business:
  • Pin trading, for those who choose to participate in it. There are multiple stores in the parks dedicating to pins, and cast members always carry a few on them. Rare or exclusive pins tend to fetch high prices online.
  • The parks take their kayfabe very seriously. In public areas, breaking character is frowned upon, and removing any part of the costume (especially as a "fur" character) is a major offense. The characters are trained to ensure they can handle any situation in-character, no matter how demanding.
  • Understandably, going into out of bounds areas or entering onto the abandoned sections of the park is not something taken lightly by the park staff, and they will mark you a trespasser and get you permanently banned from entering any of the parks. They have cameras everywhere, so don't think you won't get caught.
  • In the parks' more conservative years, the staff had no tolerance for any image defacing or even parodying Mickey Mouse on a t-shirt. Cartoonist Scott Shaw recalled an incident in the '70s where a staffer threatened to eject him from the park without a refund for simply wearing a Mickey Rat t-shirt, but allowed him to stay if he bought an official Mickey Mouse t-shirt from the local gift shops. A similar but even more bizarre incident occurred in the '90s, where staff who worked on Runaway Brain were not allowed to enter the park because they wore their crew shirts from working on the film, which had the monstrous Julius-Mickey depicted on front.
• Sexy Silhouette: Naturally Ms. Toonservice herself, Jessica Rabbit makes one in the queue to Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin.

• Shown Their Work: In addition to most of the science in the Animal Kingdom being accurate, the scent pumped into the theater for It's Tough to Be a Bug's stink bug scene is actually what a real stink bug smells like.
• Shrunken Head: The Jungle Cruise has a native witch doctor at the end holding a few of these, seemingly to sell to passing tourists. River guides at this point will usually insert an Incredibly Lame Pun.
• Sigil Spam: The Mickey symbol is everywhere. Fans have raised finding all of them, no matter how small or subtle, to an art form.
• Signs of Disrepair:
  • In Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!, as Wayne's hovering machine malfunctions, it slams into the neon sign reading "INVENTOR OF THE YEAR AWARD", which knocks out some letters leaving only "NERD" before shorting out the sign entirely.
  • The Tower of Terror: The neon sign of the Hollywood Tower Hotel is left damaged from the lightning accident with one or two of the letters flickering when lit up at night. Also the lobby directory had several missing from the bulletin board...with the missing letters spelling out "evil tower u r doomed" at the bottom.
  • Another California Adventure example: A playground area themed to a decrepit boat named the S.S. Trustworthy...except that the initial T had fallen off.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Matterhorn Bobsleds, Expedition Everest, the Blizzard Beach water park (according to the backstory Ice Gator is the park's mascot because he inspired the developers when he was seen sliding down a slushy hill), and any attraction based on Frozen.
• Souvenir Land: Parodied by Chester and Hester's Dino-Rama, though the area itself would grow to be hated by park fans owing to its silly, carnival-style rides.
• Spectacular Spinning: A lot of rides are all about spinning around, with the most famous example being the Mad Tea Party.
• Spiritual Successor: New attractions will come up that replace and/or greatly remind you of a previous attraction that A: Are thematically similar, B: Utilize the very same or similar technology, C: Were produced with the involvement of notable creators from a previous attraction or D: Simply just have a multitude of attributes in common. These attractions may even exist in the same park, no less.
  • The Haunted Mansion is easily one to Adventure Thru Inner Space (in more ways than one, you might say). Both are Omnimover/"Doom Buggy"-type dark rides narrated by legendary voice actor Paul Frees, opened in the late 1960s.
  • The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is seen as one to The Haunted Mansion: two classic, popular, dark, horror-themed, Disney attractions set within haunted venues and narrated by disembodied voices.
  • The Indiana Jones Adventure to Star Tours and, by extension, Captain EO since they're all adventure-themed collaborations of Disney and George Lucas.
    • While we're on Star Tours, consider Epcot's beloved Body Wars. The interior of the Bravo 229 vessel mimics that of the Starspeeder so much, you couldn't help but automatically think that you're on "Star Tours only inside the human body". Even the instructional video was a clone. This is because Star Tours opened at Disneyland in 1987, but didn't arrive in Florida until December 1989 (Metropolitan Life, which sponsored Epcot's Wonders of Life where Body Wars was found, insisted on opening that ride first, which it did in October of 1989). Body Wars copied the technology and arrived shortly before the original did, at a different park — one that, at the time, was trying to plus up its image with kids via more exciting attractions.
  • Luigi's Flying Tires and Radiator Springs Racers of California Adventure's Cars Land to Disneyland's Flying Saucers (1961-1966) and Test Track (currently-running Epcot attraction), respectively ^note Amusingly, Luigi's Flying Tires eventually shut down for the exact same reasons that Flying Saucers did.. Radiator Springs Racers also brings to mind the short-lived Rocket Rods from the '90s.
  • Mickey's PhilharMagic is a successor to The Mickey Mouse Revue: they're both theater shows featuring Mickey Mouse as an orchestra conductor and other characters from various Disney animated classics performing medleys of their songs, and the Magic Kingdom version of the film runs in the same building Revue did.
  • Epcot's Future World is essentially a successor to Tomorrowland, taking its initial goal of displaying future technologies more seriously and holding off on Zeerust slightly longer. Horizons was a grander version of the Carousel of Progress, and Mission: SPACE is one to the former attraction Mission to Mars at Tomorrowland, which was already one to Disneyland's former attraction Rocket to the Moon.
  • Animal Kingdom's Expedition Everest to Disneyland's own Matterhorn Bobsleds.
  • California Adventure's World of Color uses the water projection technology from the earlier Fantasmic! on a grander scale.
    • Also, the park's Buena Vista Street evokes the feel of Main Street U.S.A., only that it's set in 1920s-era Los Angeles.
  • Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin to Mad Tea Party (a.k.a. "the teacups").
  • Pandora: The World of Avatar at Animal Kingdom appears to be one to the abandoned Beastly Kingdom, at least on the concept level of a land where imaginary animals live.
  • The entire concept of Animal Kingdom in of itself is one to not only Adventureland, but also to the Jungle Cruise, which Walt had initially considered to feature real animals until he opted to use Audio-Animatronics in their place.
  • The Skyliner at Disney World is one to not only the defunct Skyway, but also the PeopleMover. Like the Skyway, it's a gondola lift system that transports guests between different destinations. And like the PeopleMover, its cars form a continuous chain at the stations as guests load and unload and break off from said chain when they depart the station. It also doubles as a Mythology Gag, as Walt Disney's initial plans for EPCOT included a PeopleMover system to transport guests through the city in a similar manner.
  • It can be argued that Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind is one to Captain EO at EPCOT as both attractions involve a space adventure and feature music-loving heroes who command a Ragtag Band of Misfits.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad:
  • Disney has revamped large sections of its parks to make room for a lot of new Star Wars attractions, overtaking the former Walt Disney Studios animation building at Hollywood Studios and even replacing parts of Frontierland at Disneyland.
  • Before 2012, the Tower of Terror was considered California Adventure's most popular ride, and was regarded as an unofficial symbol for the park. And then Cars Land opened and quickly became the most popular land in the park, with Radiator Springs Racers regularly reaching two-hour wait times daily.
  • As of late, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a similar cash cow (even though they legally aren't allowed to use most of the characters in the Floridian and Japanese parks, due to Universal Studios' existing contracts). Guardians of the Galaxy, in particular, became the basis of the first Marvel-themed attraction at the American parks, with Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT! replacing the beloved Tower of Terror in California. The series is heavily marketed at Disney World, especially, since it's one of the few properties they are allowed to use in Florida under Universal's contract.
• The Starscream: The Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom game shakes things up and has Maleficent play this part to Hades, who serves as the Big Bad. Jafar and Ursula are also trying to take the Crystal of the Magic Kingdom pieces for themselves or shake off Hades' leadership.
• Steampunk: The unbuilt land Discovery Bay was set in a steampunk San Francisco Bay area with an emphasis on the works of Jules Verne and the film The Island at the Top of the World. Despite not being built, it would inspire a number of attractions down the line:
  • Discoveryland at Disneyland Paris features much of the Verne elements of Discovery Bay, serving as a means for the park to celebrate one of France's greatest authors. It also incorporated the Hyperion airship into a restaurant.
  • Mysterious Island at Tokyo DisneySea expands on Nemo's lair on Vulcania with gusto.
  • Dreamfinder's technology in the original Journey into Imagination also features a steampunk theme, with the character having been derived from a Discovery Bay character named Professor Marvel.
• Stock Dinosaurs:
  • Disneyland's Primeval World diorama and EPCOT's Universe of Energy depicts, in order, Dimetrodon (not a dinosaur, but certainly a Stock Prehistoric Reptile-Like Thing), Apatosaurus, Pteranodon (see above parenthetical), Triceratops, Struthiomimus, Stegosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus. Most of them are none too accurate, but then the animatronics were built in the 1960s.invoked
  • Fairly averted with Animal Kingdom's DINOSAUR: Countdown to Extinction which depicts a Styracosaurus, a Alioramus, Parasaurolophus (called a "Hadrosaur", which isn't inaccurate, but Hadrosaur is the family name and not the genus), a Velociraptor (called just "Raptor"), a "Saltasaurus" (called just "Sauropod"), the Pterosaur Cearadactylus, a Compsognathus, an Iguanodon, and of course the Carnotaurus, which is stock now but was not at the time of the ride. Most of them hold up pretty decently today. The Velociraptor lacks feathers but is the correct size.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Mostly in shows, and not just fireworks displays.
• Stylistic Suck: Chester and Hester's Dino-rama, a Crappy Carnival full of cartoonish dinosaurs to juxtapose the serious and scientific Dino Institute down the road. As a point of fact, the parking lot it's built in is fake — there was never a real parking lot there.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: The Red Car News Boys on Buena Vista Street are very reminiscent of the Newsies. If not for the fact that Buena Vista Street is located in LA, and the Newsies in New York, they might as well be the same (not that that ever stopped Disney before: see Alice, Mary Poppins, and Cruella De Ville showing up on Main Street, USA).
• Take That!: In The Great Movie Ride, upon preparing to enter the Nostromo, the gangster from The Public Enemy will often note it's getting horrific… and quip "Jersey?".
• Technology Marches Oninvoked: A natural conclusion for a theme park that has been open over sixty years.
  • The Audio-Animatronic figures have become incredibly sophisticated, even within the last few years. Early figures were basically statues (see: most of the Fantasyland dark rides) and made loud clacking noises whenever they moved (anyone who's been to the Enchanted Tiki Room can attest to this). Nowadays, they are incredibly lifelike in both appearance and movement, and some models (supposedly in development for the Marvel lands opening around the world) can swing through the air and even do flips. Projections within Animatronics also allow for even more expressive faces, such as on the cars in Radiator Springs Racers and Elsa, Anna, and company in Frozen Ever After.
    • The difference between old and new technology becomes especially apparent when old rides are retrofitted with new figures. Compare Redd and Jack Sparrow to the other pirates in Pirates of The Caribbean, or Jack Skellington to the year-round ghosts in The Haunted Mansion Holiday.
  • While the US parks' version of Autopia feature loud and smelly gas-powered vehicles, the Hong Kong version of the ride features smooth and silent electric powered vehicles, with a new Green Aesop to back it up.
• The Bus Came Back: Some Disney characters who haven't been seen in the parks for years such as Huey, Dewey and Louie and Mrs. Bianca and Bernard have returned to doing meet and greets. Unfortunately, they are only exclusive to Disneyland Paris or Tokyo Disney Resort.invoked However Thumper did return to doing meet and greets at Animal Kingdom sometime in the late 2000's since he hasn't been seen at WDW or Disneyland since the 1970s. Flik has also returned to doing meet and greets in Animal Kingdom.
  • The Ringmaster from Dumbo vanished from the Disney Parks sometime in the early 1980s. He returned in 2008 for the "Jubilation!" parade created to celebrate Tokyo Disneyland's 25th Anniversary.
  • The King of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland also vanished from the Disney Parks in the mid to late 1970s. He returned for Tokyo Disneyland's 30th Anniversary parade "Happiness is Here" and their 35th Anniversary Parade "Dreaming Up!".
  • Mr. Walrus (from The Walrus And The Carpetner) also disappeared from the U.S. Parks in the early 1980s, but can currently be seen at Disneyland Paris. However, he only shows up at the park on extremely rare occasions. ◊ The March Hare also returned to the parks sometime in the 2010s decade at Disneyland Paris and showed up for the "Dreaming Up!" Parade alongside The Mad Hatter.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Some of the characters that guests can meet, including villains, are a lot nicer and not as mean or mischevious as they were in their original source materials and depending on the characters. For example, Marie the cat is energetic, sweet and loves showing affection to guests, while in the film she debuted in would mostly act like a Spoiled Brat and arrogant around her brothers.
• The Talk: Yes, Epcot's The Making of Me was real. While this site does not include the film, it does have a photo of the hilarious disclaimer outside the theater. Still to be answered: is an already overstimulating Disney World vacation really the best time to have this subject brought up, possibly for the first time for some kids? That said, Martin Short actually handled it pretty well.
• Temple of Doom: The Indiana Jones attractions. At DisneySea, it's complimented by the Raging Spirits coaster.
• Tempting Fate: Common in performances of Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular.

  Jafar: [...]we can't just sit around and wait for someone to burst into the palace, blow a trumpet, and announce that they've found the love of your life—
  Genie: [blowing a trumpet] Burst! Presenting Prince Ali Ababwa, the love of Princess Jasmine's life!

• Thememobile: The Disney Stars and Motorcars parade at Disney's Hollywood Studios featured popular Disney characters (and characters licensed by Disney for the parks) riding in themed cars. This concept was revived during the COVID-19 pandemic as a substitute for traditional parades and meet-and-greets with the characters.
• Theme Park Version: Trope Maker. The characters were already Theme Park Versions of the original stories, and then they go through an additional layer of this when they're actually put into the theme park...
• Time Marches On: The reason for the many changes in story as to how the settler's cabin on the banks of Disneyland's Rivers of America caught fire. In the original 1950s version, the settler had been ambushed by an "unfriendly Indian" who burned his cabin down and shot him with an arrow (complete with the settler's corpse splayed out on the groundinvoked with an arrow sticking out). In the 1970s this was changed to the less offensive story of the settler being ambushed and killed by river pirates (the corpse remained, but the arrow was removed). In the 1980s someone apparently decided that this was too depressing and the settler instead became a moonshiner whose still exploded and set his cabin on fire (the settler's body stayed but guests were assured that he wasn't dead, just passed out drunk from his own liquor). In the 1990s the settler became a careless moron who not only set fire to his own cabin by accident, but even worse, was threatening the home of the wildlife around him (his body by this point had been removed). There are some allegations that at one point, the backstory was simply "It's made of firewood." As of the 2000s his cabin is no longer burning — stricter emission standards in California caused Disney to turn the flames off, and the cabin was turned into the home of Davy Crockett's friendly rival: Mike Fink, King of the River.
• Title Drop: Every ride and parade will somehow try to work this in.
  • "it's a small world after all", "Welcome, foolish mortals to The Haunted Mansion", "I'll turn his dream into a nightmare Fantasmic", et cetera.
• Toon Town: There's a land inspired by the Trope Namer at Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland, inspired by the trope namer Who Framed Roger Rabbit It's considered a children's area, even moreso than Fantasyland.
• Totally Radical: In the late '90s and early 2000s, Disney was trying desperately hard to be "hip", which resulted in a number of controversial decisions (such as having The Enchanted Tiki Room in Florida be taken over by Iago and Zazu). However, the biggest offender was the initial version of California Adventure. This was a major complaint of park guests and led to a five-year refurbishment to bring the park up to Disney's regular standards. For example, the "look-at-us-we're-cool" coaster Mulholland Madness was re-themed into Goofy's Sky School, now calling back to an old cartoon instead.
• Toy Time: Obviously, any attraction where Toy Story is involved. This includes Toy Story Midway Mania and the Buzz Lightyear light gun rides, as well as entire Toy Story lands.
• Trademark Favorite Food: There are numberous fan-favorite snacks and meals at Disney parks. They include the Main Street corndogs, churros (especially special-edition golden churros), Dole Whip (traditionally pineapple frozen yogurt swirl, but many variations now exist), the New Orleans Square Monte Cristo sandwich and Mint Julep, and the infamous giant turkey legs.
• Treehouse of Fun: The Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, which was replaced by Tarzan's Treehouse in Disneyland.
• Tron Lines:
  • The 2012 redo of Test Track is about as close to a TRON attraction as you can get without actually being a TRON attraction.
  • During the Halloween season, spooky light shows are projected on the outside of Disneyland's Space Mountain, including some that outline the entire cone with Tron Lines.
  • Shanghai Disneyland's Tomorrowland is covered in these, but of course they're most prominent on its TRON Lightcycle Power Run coaster.
• Under the Sea: The Submarine rides, the Finding Nemo attractions and The Little Mermaid dark rides.
• Updated Re-release:
  • Quite a few rides have been altered over the years. Although whether or not this is a good thing is up to debate, most have just received technical upgrades. This also helps keep some rides from getting too old, not only because they're over fifty years old, but also for safety purposes.
  • Among others, the Star Tours ride got retooled to include more scenes and characters from the entire Star Wars film saga. When The Force Awakens was released in 2015, a journey to Jakku and a transmission from BB-8 were added into the ride's potential show scenes, and then when The Last Jedi was released in 2017, scenes involving the battle on Crait were added.
  • The Enchanted Tiki Room in WDW got infamously updated to become The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management, featuring Iago and Zazu as said new management. It changed back to the original in 2011.
  • In 2017, the Disneyland Fantasmic! was updated while it was down for the construction of Star Wars Galaxy's Edge. It returned with updated animation, a revamped soundtrack, new effects reminiscent of World of Color, and new segments based on Tangled and Pirates of the Caribbean replacing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Peter Pan, respectively.
• Variable Mix:
  • Many of the rides with iconic theme music have that music change slightly from scene to scene, utilizing different instrumentation, rhythm, and even chords to provide the right atmosphere for the visuals. "It's a Small World" is the most famous example, but an even better one is "It's Fun to Be Free", the jaunty theme song from the now-defunct World of Motion attraction. You can sometimes catch it on MouseWorld Radio.
  • Many of the parades do this. For example, the Main Street Electrical Parade has a unique theme for each float, and the sound system smoothly segues between them as the floats move down the route.
• The 'Verse:
  • Many attractions at some of the parks will make references to other attractions, or even share a themed narrative suggesting they're all part of the same world. One example of this is Frontierland at Disneyland Paris, which has a large backstory integrating its version of Big Thunder Mountain with Phantom Manor into the same storyline.
  • Speaking of Disneyland Paris, the same can be said about Discoveryland as initially built, since it was originally designed entirely based around rides inspired by the works of Jules Verne.
  • Tokyo DisneySea also went to amazing lengths to do this for nearly every attraction in the park. Among other things, it introduced the Society of Explorers and Adventurers, an organization whose members now tie together numerous attractions across the globe.
• Villain Song:
  • The Hallowishes show. Some of the Halloween parades as well.
  • "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life For Me)".
  • "Grim Grinning Ghosts come out to socialize..."
• Visual Pun: Being this is Toontown, it's practically a given, but one of the first scenes riders see in Disneyland's Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin is a Toon Bull working in a China Shop; the "Bullina China Shoppe" no less.
• Wardrobe Malfunction: Unintentionally during a Disneyland Paris welcoming party on July 14, 2021, Minnie's bloomers fall while dancing, causing her to run off mid-performance.
• The Wild West: Frontierland; also, Westernland at Tokyo Disneyland and to a lesser degree Grizzly Gulch at Hong Kong Disneyland).
• Wooden Ships and Iron Men: This exact phrase is used in the recorded narration for the Sailing Ship Columbia attraction — a full-scale replica of the historical ship.
• World Tour:
  • It's a Small World takes guests through various countries around the world.
  • Epcot's World Showcase features scaled-down versions of eleven famous countries around the world.
  • There was once a Circle-Vision show called Magic Carpet 'Round the World, which played only at Walt Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland very early on in their respective lives.
  • Whereas the original Soarin' focused entirely on California, Soarin' Around the World takes passengers across the globe.
• World Tree:
  • The Tree of Life, the centerpiece of Disney's Animal Kingdom.
  • The "Tree of Technology" in Anaheim's Innoventions attraction also seems to have a bit of this vibe.
• Yodel Land: No, this isn't a new park area. Disneyland literally built a replica of the Matterhorn as one of their attractions, the Matterhorn Bobsleds. In addition to a thrilling ride to meet the Abominable Snowman, climbers frequently scale the mountain's sides and yodelers will entertain guests below.
• Your Size May Vary: A recurring problem of Toy Story based attractions and the Toy Story Lands is a very inconsistent scale relative to the movies. Guests are generally treated as being somewhere between the size of a Green Army Man to a standard 3.75 inch action figure, but the size of the main characters varies with statues representing Woody and Buzz towering over characters like Rex, who in the Florida installation, is small enough to perch comfortably on a tower of Jenga blocks.
• Zeerust:
  • Tomorrowland and Epcot fell into this over time. The former was originally how people in 1955 thought people would be living in 1980; the latter, how people in 1982 thought people would be living in 2000. The Tomorrowlands were eventually overhauled to reflect "the future that never was", an invocation of this trope but with a more acceptably retro feel.
  • The revamp of Future World announced at D23 2017 appears to be abandoning the 20 Minutes into the Future premise altogether. Outside of Mission: SPACE and the new Guardians of the Galaxy ride, the sci-fi elements will be scaled back significantly, and Innoventions will be torn down in favor of redeveloping the central plaza with more greenspace. The end result shifts the philosophy of the park to a more holistic idea of "the future" that's more about celebrating progress made and embracing progress to come.
  • Actually Discussed and then reconstructed in the old Epcot attraction Horizons, which reminisced about some visions of the future that were off the mark, then goes ahead and made some slightly less absurd (at the time) predictions of its own.
• Zeppelins from Another World: Dreamfinder's Cool Ship was one of these.

    Spectro Magic Parade

SpectroMagic was a nighttime parade that ran from 1991 to 2010; replacing the classic Main Street Electrical Parade. The parade was exclusive to Walt Disney World and debuted during the resort's 20th anniversary in 1991.

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• All There in the Manual:
  • There is actually a backstory to SpectroMagic, mainly for Mickey and the SpectroMen.

  The SpectroMen are keepers of light. They hold the parades magical light and transform it for you in the midst of the night. They come from a land called LightSpriation where everything is filled with rays of light and magical bursts of color. They were always afraid to come out of hiding and share their magical light, until one day, Mickey, the SpectroMen King, asked if they would join him in a nighttime festival of magic and light, and come and bring the magical light for everyone to see. Scared to confront people, they hesitated. After much consideration, the SpectroMen agreed. They brought along their magical SpectroBalls and Light-Trumpets to spread the joy of their magical light to everyone. Mickey controls the light they magically create and powers the parade through his Electro-ball, changing it from night to day, or crystal to multi-color.

  • Also, the four SpectroMen on the whirly balls are named Hyper-Chic, Lo-Ball, Rapper and Opera.
• Keet: The SpectroMen all act very energetic and giggle a lot.
• Mood Whiplash: The brilliant finale of SpectroMagic comes just after a scene devoted to Fantasia, whose last float depicts Bald Mountain, complete with Chernabog opening up and closing his wings periodically.
• Nice Hat: Some of the SpectroMen wear hats with big feathers.
• Non-Standard Character Design: The SpectroMen look a little out of place compared to the other Disney characters. There faces used to change color, act and move very energetically, and all their hair was fuzzed up. They later got redesigned in 2008 and became face characters.
• Speaking Simlish: While the SpectroMen do sometimes talk in English, they mostly communicate by singing or speaking with made up words.
• Vague Age: The SpectroMen appear to be fully grown adults. While it's easy to tell by their voices some of the Spectromen sound very young.
• Vocal Dissonance: Some of the SpectroMen have voices that won't match the appearance depending on the one you encounter.
• Vocal Evolution: In the early years of SpectroMagic from 1991 - 1995 the SpectroMen used to have robotish voices but changed in 1996 to be easier to understand.

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See you real soon!

— Exit sign at World Drive when exiting Walt Disney World

Girls Who Have Played Disney Princesses at Disneyland

Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ride/DisneyThemeParks

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