Driving Miss Karen

A blog about our travel

Tokyo Disneyland Part 1: Familiar but Different

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DisneySea is unique but Tokyo Disneyland (TDL) is very much a copy of the WDW Magic Kingdom park. It was the first overseas park and is the only park that Disney has no ownership stake in. It is 100% owned by Oriental Land Company but Disney has creative control. It looks very similar to WDW but “feels” different if that makes sense. I apologize for the length of these posts but we were really looking forward to this and it didn’t disappoint.

The familiar castle like WDW. The unfamiliar line all the way from Beast Castle in Fantasyland (110 minutes but we had Premiere Access)
Sleeping Beauty Fairies
Karen in her happy place in front of her castle
Belle on her Celle
Lots of people fully dressed up throughout both parks. Even minor characters like Gideon from Pinocchio had lots of followers
Alien invasion by Stitch in the Tiki Room
As a singer, Stitch is very tough to understand but he is a mean ukulele player
Tiki Room is re-themed to incorporate Stitch. Nice but I kind of miss waking up Jose
Minnie channels her inner Thriller. The characters and cast members had tremendous enthusiasm
Spooky dance by unknown female chipmunk. Anyone?
Mary Poppins flying during Dreaming Up
There was a short “Spooky” parade and a longer “Dreaming Up” parade during the day
I don’t remember this from California
Everything was very meticulously done as you would expect from Disney and Japan
This looks familiar though

There was a nice overlay of Nightmare Before Christmas in the Haunted Mansion similar to California’s

Well there’s your problem!
Showing us what a paddle looks like and how to hold it. We paddled honorably
Just the canoe ride was worth the trip 🙂 It was different paddling on the left and going counter-clockwise and laughing politely when others did
The castle was nearly identical to WDW except ours has s new color scheme
The second floor houses a display area ehere you can try on the glass slipper. Turns out glass slippers do not come in 4E width
These two Ariels even had blue contact lenses
The Beast Castle was really nicely done
There were layered landscape backdrops for a 3D effect
Besides the enthusiastic fans, the best thing really was Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast which will be covered to death in the next post

Jose

AKA Alfred

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