15 Amazing Disney Secrets!

 

15 Amazing Disney Secrets!

 15.

 The Actually Haunted Mansion With Disneyland being such an integral part of the lives and childhoods of millions of people around the world, inevitably some people have requested that their ashes be scattered at the Happiest Place On Earth.

 This happens so frequently at the Haunted Mansion attraction, in fact, that Disneyland workers actually have to vacuum up the ashes each and every night.

 Though the ashes get vacuumed up, it’s certainly possible that at least one or two spirits have remained there!

 14.

 Abandoned Theme Parks Many a childhood nightmare has been fueled by the animatronics at Disney’s theme parks coming to life, or by being left alone in an abandoned theme park.

 Well, we can’t say that the first scenario is too likely to happen, but the second one definitely could.

 This is because Disney has actually completely abandoned two entire theme parks.

 The parks, Discovery Island and River Country, both in Florida, were abandoned in 1999 and 2001, respectively.

 The parks were struggling financially and also a new Florida state law required theme parks to chlorinate any standing water within their facilities.

 The law also required that only municipal water supplies could be used.

 Disney determined that the process needed to meet the law’s requirements would be too expensive, and, since these parks were underperforming anyway, that it would be more cost-effective to shut them down.

 Rather than destroy them, Disney chose to just let them sit.

 The result is a couple of places which definitely fit the post-apocalyptic theme.

 13.

 Bone To Pick

 Pirates of the Caribbean is one of Disney’s major global franchises which virtually everyone knows about.

 It’s so big, in fact, that it has become one of Disneyland’s biggest attractions since the films based on the ride were released.

 What most people don’t know about this attraction, though, is that they contained real human remains for a while there, and it’s rumored that they still do.

 Real human skeletons were placed throughout the ride because the Imagineers of the time were upset about the extremely phony looking fake skeletons available at the time.

 This led them to procuring real human remains to use.

 Although the real skeletons were said to have been removed in more modern updates to the ride, sources inside of Disney say that a few of the “props” are in fact real, and even include the remains of previous Disney employees.

 12.

 The Disney Underworld Most people who have been there know that Disneyland is huge, but few people know that it extends underground as well.

 If you’ve ever wondered how cast and crew can seemingly teleport across the park at a moment’s notice, it’ll interest you to know that Disney theme parks also encompass a vast subterranean network of tunnels for the staff.

 These allow cast and crew to move quickly through the park without dealing with the huge crowds.

 11.

 When Mickey’s Away, Cats Play Disneyland quickly grew so popular that it fell victim to a common problem.

 Wherever humans go, rats go as well.

 This problem became such an ordeal for the park that they sought a somewhat clever solution: they released a pack of cats within the park to control the rat population.

 Over the years, the cats bred and intermingled and spread throughout the park.

 Now, generations of feline familiars later, the cats still roam free throughout the park.

 It’s not uncommon at all to see one hanging near the edges of Disneyland’s avenues, looking for any scraps dropped by the unsuspecting visitors.

 10.

 Mourning Mother

 Lots of early Disney films are conspicuously absent of a motherly figure.

 While this may be seen as nothing more than an easy plot device to progress the character along the Hero’s Journey, some suspect a more sinister situation.

 After the huge success which was Disney’s Snow White in the ‘30s, Walt Disney purchased a home for his parents.

 Tragically, a fault in the home’s heating system led to Flora Disney, Walt’s mother, passing away due to carbon monoxide poisoning.

 Disney historians suspect that this is why Walt chose to make the mother absent from so many of his film’s protagonists.

 9.

 Color Us Surprised

 It’s been a long time since color film was first introduced.

 No, really - a long time.

 100 years this year, to be exact.

 What you might not know about the innovation, though, is that Disney actually owned the Technicolor patent for a few years.

 Because of the Great Depression causing virtually every other company with a color film production process to go bankrupt around that time, this led to Disney being the only film company in the world which had the ability to routinely churn out color films for a little bit there.

 8.

 Standing Tall

 During one of the darkest moments in the history of the United States, on September 11th, 2001, Disney World was evacuated in an astounding 30 minutes.

 Disney feared that the park was a likely terrorist target, because of its symbolic importance to western culture as well as the huge crowds it draws.

 Luckily the evil men behind the attack didn’t have anything of that nature in mind, but it’s remarkable how quickly Disney was able to ensure that no one was in harm’s way.

 The crew members then worked through the night to erect the park’s Fourth of July decorations so that the park could reopen the following day with a clear message of solidarity to a nation in mourning.

 7.

 The Disney Look

 Working for a Disney theme park is no joke, and it’s not the job for your average deadbeat dropout who might have otherwise worked at a gas station.

 Disney expects you to maintain what they call the “Disney Look”, and this extends to everything from dress code while at work to piercings, tattoos, hair color, and facial hair.

 In fact, it was only in 2012 that Disney allowed cast members to grow shortly cropped and well-groomed beards.

 They still can’t grow full-on seven dwarves or wizards style face warmers.

 6.

 Hairy Situation

 Sully, the beloved blue and purple beast from Monsters, Inc. marks a turning point in the history of film animation.

 His character model contains more than 2 million individual hairs, each of which was individually animated.

 This is the main reason why rendering a single frame of his animated sequences took more than 12 hours, even on the supercomputers used by Disney’s animation teams at the time.

 5.

 Storm of the Century Due to the difficulty of the hand-painted cel method of animation used by Disney at the time, more modern films released by the company were something of a huge undertaking to achieve.

 This is exemplified by the final film which used this method, The Little Mermaid.

 It’s estimated that over a million bubbles were drawn in the movie.

 In order to keep pushing the envelope and produce more and more astounding content, the two-minute long storm sequence from the classic children’s movie actually took the animators assigned to the project more than a year to produce.

 Luckily modern methods allow for quicker production, but the scene’s classic feel speaks for itself.

 4.

 Stop and Drop

 Toy Story characters at Disney’s theme parks used to drop to the ground and freeze, motionless, when a guest would yell “Andy’s coming!”, in reference to the toy’s behavior in the Toy Story films.

 However, they had to stop this practice when the gag became well-known as a result of the internet.

 Now when a guest yells the phrase, the toys will simply respond with “Andy went to college.” It’s too bad, as that would definitely be something to see.

 Thanks, internet!

 3.

 Shining Example

 Stephen King and Disney don’t have much in common.

 In fact, the two may be as far apart as things can get in terms of common ground.

 This doesn’t change the fact, however, that many people think Pixar’s Toy Story is something of an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of The Shining by Stephen King.

 It’s hard to deny when confronted with the evidence; the exact same carpet pattern was used in Sid’s house and a hallway in the Overlook Hotel.

 An intercom modeled after one which appears in the hotel manager’s office in the Shining is seen in Toy Story 3.

 A security camera’s model number is seen to read “Overlook H237” which is a hotel room number from the Shining . The number 237 also appears as a username for someone Woody chats with online (“Velocistar237”), and also on a garbage truck’s licence plate (“RM237”).

 Creepy!

 Interestingly, the book actually used room 217 but The Timberline Lodge, the hotel used in the Shining movie, asked that the room number be changed to a non-existent room so guests wouldn’t avoid the room.

 Ironically room 217 is now the most requested room at the hotel.

 2.

 Labor of Love or Pain?

 Although Disneyland is often referred to as the Happiest Place on Earth, it’s apparently not always been so for the people who work there.

 It’s easy to forget that the cast and crew at Disneyland are real people who have real problems, but in 2008 these issues came to a head when Disney workers protested outside of the park over unfair wages and working conditions.

 The resulting protests even got physical when police clashed with the workers.

 This led to cast members dressed as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Cinderella, and Tinkerbell (amongst 28 other workers) photographed while being dragged away in cuffs.

 1.

 Freezing A Myth

 Most kids have heard the legendary tale of Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen before he could succumb to the lung cancer which ailed him in his later life.

 Most people probably even believe this to be true; after all, the man had achieved a level of wealth and fame of which most of us can only dream.

 Why would death stop him?

 Unfortunately though, it’s simply not true.

 Diane Disney Miller, Walt’s daughter, felt compelled to finally dispel the notion by opening the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco in 2009.

 While the man may not physically live on at some unspecified point in the future, his works will surely endure for centuries to come.