Following are my fairly disjointed thoughts on Tokyo Disneyland, but mainly just focusing on the Tiki Room. Written the day we went to the park, but posted today.
My basic impressions of the Tokyo Disneyland park: it's small; the gift shops are *much* better than those at Disneyland in LA; it's not crowded on a weekday in winter; it's really fucking cold.
And, in Tokyo, they give the Tiki Room the respect it deserves.
The Tiki Room was huge, much bigger than the one in LA, and it didn't look all run down and dusty. Now, the Tiki Room is one of my favorite attractions at Disneyland LA, and it's one that Mena always loved, and it makes her cry, because of memories and all that. It's sweet, and charming, and cute, and relaxing, and just plain fun. But it's also somewhat run-down--at least, compared to much of the rest of Disneyland--and has a real unloved feel to it: it feels very neglected. And hardly anyone ever goes to it, and every time we go to Disneyland, we wonder if the TIki Room will have gone to Old Ride Heaven.
The Tiki Room in LA still plays the (mostly unchanged) original show, with a set of 3 or 4 songs (they actually shortened the show a couple of years ago--it used to be 5 or 6 songs, I think). This is both its blessing--for people who love the original show, because of its charm, because of memories, etc--and its curse: frankly, the ride is not very popular, and while changing the show may not help, it might at least temporarily get a bigger audience.
The Tiki Room in Walt Disney World has a new show. According to someone who would know, the new show actually makes fun of the birds in the old show (or at least, the contents of the old show). This is very sad, and it's not something I would particularly want to see (nor Mena).
So when we got to the Tiki Room in Tokyo Disneyland, we were happy about the size of the attraction and its presentation, but non-plussed to find that they were playing a show called "Get the Fever". Mena knew about this, and probably told me about it, but I forgot. It's a Latin-themed show, which sounds absolutely awful. And, to top it all off, while waiting for the show to start--instead of the tiki gods introducing themselves in the waiting area, as in LA--two of the birds come out in hip-hop attire and do a little rap. This sounds horrible. And it's not a joke.
But actually, it was fairly catchy.
When we got into the show itself, we saw the bird's names: "Buddy", "Danno", "Scats", and "Lava", who looked like a pimp, but was actually intended to be a girl, I guess. Scats had this scratchy voice. Danno sounded kind of like Brian Ferry, at least when signing "Hot Hot Hot". And from that you get an idea of the New & Improved Tiki Room show: they had the original introduction, though changed slightly; then "Hot Hot Hot", "Fever", and a couple other songs in a Latin medley; then the big cacaphonous finale before giving way to the thunder and rain.
And the thing is, it was really pretty good. I expected to hate it, absolutely hate it. But the birds were charming, and the whole thing looked well-cared-for, and it seemed like they actually *tried* to keep some of the original around, even with the massive updates. And it helped that it was in Japanese--I think Scats would've been much more annoying if he had an American accent (not that the original birds have American accents, of course--and frankly I could imagine someone finding them just as annoying, and honestly more offensive even, than something like Scats. But to me that's part of the attraction: they're so completely odd and weird that it's really fun).
So the point of this is, I guess, I'd whore out the Tiki Room for some more visitors. Well, maybe not--I think I would feel differently if they did this to the LA Tiki Room. But in the end, updating it might be better than removing it entirely.
As long as it's in Japanese.
