The West Side of the Kingdom
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And I thought the only Mickey Mouse operation in Florida was Walt Disney World! Perhaps by the time I write the December installment of West Side, we’ll know who won the election! Sheesh!
As we wait for a definitive answer out of the Sunshine State, my thoughts this month turn toward safety and the recent incidents we’re all familiar with of these past weeks at the Disney theme parks.
I want to get into something that is a bit on the sensitive side without drawing any conclusions. It was with great sorrow that I read along with the rest of you about the accident at Disneyland on Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin.
Regardless of who was at fault or what actually happened, it was a tragic, heart-wrenching ordeal to read about and try to imagine. It made me sit back and ponder current safety guidelines and Cast Member responsibility.
When I worked at Disneyland in the late 1980s, safety was our first and foremost concern at all times for our guests. I am most certain that has not changed since then. I look back on all of the times when guests could have been hurt if it had not been for the quick thinking of fellow Cast Members on many occasions. While I did witness some accidents (minor) when I worked at Disneyland, I have never been at the Park when something like the Car Toon Spin accident took place or more recently, the Splash Mountain incident in Florida. My fellow Cast Members and I worked hard each day and night to give our guests the safest, most enjoyable and carefree experience possible. But it wasn’t always easy…
I remember well the afternoon I was loading at Pirates of the Caribbean. It was a busy day and all four lanes of the loading dock were crammed with guests eager to be assigned a row number for the next boat to arrive. That’s when I saw and heard them coming - with a big Italian flag raised in the air, I heard a gruff voice shouting, “GROUPO! GROUPO!”
It was an Italian tour group of elderly visitors. As far as I could ever tell, their count was 72. They all came shuffling up the dock in one of the center lanes and all expected me to fit them together into one boat. Now, do the math with me here; for a perfect, comfortable ride, there would be three guests in row one, four guests in rows two, three and four, four or five people in row five, being the slightly larger of all rows in the boat and two in row six. There ain’t no way I was getting 72 passengers in one boat! And this outraged the group’s guide. I tried explaining that I wanted to split the group up into three boats or so, which didn’t work. The more I tried calmly to explain that there wasn’t physically enough room, the more irate this old Italian guy got with me. Like I woke up, drove to work and waited for him at Pirates with the direct objective of ruining his day and destroying his tour!
To make a long, frustrating story short, the group actually pushed me aside (while making several hundred other guests wait unnecessarily) and tried to cram everyone into one boat. All of the Cast Members were protesting at this point. The group was very loud and was waving all of us off as we tried to get them out of the boat. It was a total mess.
Finally, after about five minutes of sheer chaos, they agreed that they needed more than one boat. So, while everyone else waited, we loaded the group into three separate boats; just like I had wanted to do first. They remained noisy and I am sure didn’t understand a word of the safety spiel one of my partners gave. We dispatched the first two boats into the Bayou. Of course, the two boats full of tourists began freaking that the third boat was still sitting in the station. We did not load the second boat in the station, because we felt that some space between the large tour group and the next load of guests would be smart, allowing for a positive experience for following boats full of passengers. After sending the third boat and fourth empty boat, we proceeded as normal. Of course, 15 minutes later, we heard the group as it was coming up the lift into the horseshoe area before returning to the dock. They were noisy, and I can only imagine that they were incredibly noisy throughout the ride. They all started piling off the boats as they arrived, insisting on waiting for the third boat to come into the station. It was a very crowded unload area - and not terribly safe, I would venture to guess. However, when you have a group of 72 tourists that are completely disregarding Cast Members, what can be done? It was something that friends and I still joke about to this day. We’ll pass each other at the Park and shout out, “GROUPO!” Ah, tour groups!