The Blue Lagoon — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

The Blue Lagoon

The new Fan­ta­sy­land expan­sion at Walt Dis­ney World’s Magic King­dom opens on Decem­ber 6^th, but I have another shot from my time there on the Annual Passholder’s Preview. The Blue Lagoon is part of the queue lead­ing into The Lit­tle Mer­maid ride. I’m guess­ing that Dis­ney expects this to be a pop­u­lar ride with a long wait because they added a lot of inter­ac­tive stuff once you get past the exte­rior queue. You’ll see var­i­ous dis­plays with crabs that keep mov­ing things around, but they appar­ently aren’t smart enough to know if the stuff they’re hold­ing is some­thing they should move. If you point at the crab, it freaks out, drops what it has and splits. If you like scar­ing car­toon crabs, this is the ride for you.

I’m not sure that I’m a fan of these inter­ac­tive queues, though. That’s because they tend to slow down a line that could be mov­ing faster. Dur­ing the passh­older pre­view, you should have been able to pretty much walk to the front of the line. Yet I kept hav­ing to wait as one per­son after another stopped to play with every scene that had a crab in it. Per­haps I’m too impa­tient, but how many times can you point your fin­ger at a car­toon crab before it gets old? Pick up the pace and move the line, already.

Appar­ently I said some­thing like that out loud, because the folks in front of me turned to look as they sud­denly started mov­ing faster up the empty line. What can I say? I’m here to help. The help we needed was to get the line mov­ing again.

Over­all, it was a nice lit­tle scene for the queue line. One thing I’ve noticed Dis­ney does here, and also on the large water­fall com­ing down from the Beast’s Cas­tle, is that they add some blue lights in parts of the water­fall. Doesn’t really seem nec­es­sary to me. Maybe some­one will change their mind and turn off the light some day, but you never know. It’s showbiz.