TSMM: Girls and Their Toys (and Kevin!)
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�We had about a dozen other ideas for various locations that will remain unnamed but everyone really sparked to Midway Mania!� Show Producer Chrissie Allen explains. �For Paradise Pier the thematic conceit is already there for the attraction and the original design for the park left room behind the coaster for an attraction of this size. We also thought it made perfect sense to use the Toy Story characters as the hosts.�

Toy Story Midway Mania! is the first Disney attraction to be simultaneously developed and constructed at two of the company�s parks. The west coast version is sited in Paradise Pier whilst the east coast counterpart resides in the former home of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Play It! For that latter location Midway Mania! is the first attraction in a new Pixar Studios mini-land that has been drawn up. As the attractions are positioned in different thematic environments at the Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World Resort the conceit is slightly different.

Andy gets a Midway Games playset as a gift complete with booths, carnival trams with spring-action shooters mounted on them, food carts and a backdrop. Andy and his family have gone to Pizza Planet for dinner and the toys have decided to set up the games in Andy�s bedroom. We are being invited to join them which require us to board our own carnival trams with each guest having their own spring-action shooter which is color-coordinated to the projectiles. Andy has torn the cellophane out of the Midway Games box and it is propped up against the load area. As the trams leave the station they pass through the hole and are magically shrunk to the size of a toy. The trams stop in front of the first midway booth where the Toy Story characters appear in 3-D to introduce the practice round for guests to become acclimatized to their spring-action shooters. As the practice concludes the trams whirl off to the next midway booth for the first of four classic Midway games with a Toy Story spin each approximately 30 seconds long. The finale is a double-length sequence prior to a rapid-fire bonus round.

The version at Disney�s California Adventure park unfolds in an open-aired Victorian-themed pavilion which architecturally harks back to the romanticism of American seaside resorts in the 1920s. This Roaring Twenties depiction is to be rolled out to the rest of the land including the remaining original seven midway games of which three have been removed for a covered queue for Midway Mania! and the remaining four will be re-themed during the course of the year.

�At Disney�s Hollywood Studios this attraction has given us the opportunity to create a new backlot idea with a studio within a studio,� Chrissie reveals. �We are calling the concept Pixar Studios and it will have a front lot/back lot conceit. As this is Pixar they don�t make movies in the same way as other studios and so it will be fun and exciting. I should add that this isn�t the studios that John [Lasseter] and his folks work at but the studios where the characters work and play. The attraction is physically housed in a typical soundstage box although the exterior does look like the Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville [California]. However once you walk through the soundstage doors you magically become the size of a toy and are transported into Andy�s Room. We had a lot more room to play with in Florida than at DCA and so we were able to create a more elaborate traditional Disney queue area and set up the story much earlier. As guests snake through the air-conditioned lines they find themselves in Andy�s toy-box and everything is over-scale with these giant murals, electrical sockets and toys � you will see everything from the point-of-view of a toy. However once guests board the carnival trams the attraction experience is exactly the same as the west coast version.�

Interactive Disney attractions are developed in a different manner to traditional dark rides that are driven by story and art direction. For Toy Story Midway Mania! it was critical to understand guests� expectation for an attraction necessitated by game-play. The responsibility for ensuring that the contests are enjoyable for all fell to Sue Bryan whose previous projects have included Mission:SPACE and the recent renovation of Spaceship Earth both at Epcot Center. �It is very important that the whole family can play, have a good time and feel successful � and that last factor cannot be underestimated as when you play a game you really want to feel like you did well,� Sue begins. �Six weeks after we learnt about the concept we built a basic mock-up using some software to prototype basic games. It was very primitive with spheres being used to knock down blocks of geometric shapes but it was essential to our understanding of how guests on a vehicle with their own interface would shoot into this virtual carnival midway booth. We then had to play-test the software through multiple revisions and listening to guest response to our efforts. We must have tested the games with over 400 people.�