Welcome to Extinct Attractions. This week, we’ll be taking a look at an attraction that isn’t quite closed yet, but will be extinct starting this coming Monday.
Last week, Disneyland Resort announced that their Annual Passholder system would be coming to an end, with a new membership system set to arrive at some point in the future. Thus far, we haven’t heard much about what this new program will look like, but I think it is safe to say that it will involve some type of reservation system, especially when the park reopens because of how high demand will be.
Personally, I was a Flex Passer before Disneyland closed, and it worked really well for me. The park definitely had an overcrowding problem with the number of APs eligible to go so often, so hopefully this revamping of the Passholder process can help solve that issue and help people embrace being at the parks as more of a gift than a necessity.
Speaking of Annual Passholders, Disneyland has never had an interactive game scattered around the park for guests to play. This fact always surprised me because it seems like something that APs would love to do as an activity to help dive into some of the nitty gritty details of the park.
However, Walt Disney World, the more tourist-driven domestic resort, has had a few of them over the years, most notably in Epcot with Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure and Agent P's World Showcase Adventure, not to mention the soon-to-come DuckTales World Showcase Adventure (well hopefully). The Epcot Adventures were a bit more kid-focused to help keep the little ones entertained while their parents enjoyed some adult beverages around the “world.” But on February 22, 2012, Magic Kingdom joined in on the fun when Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom launched, aimed at an older audience with its more sophisticated gameplay.
Via WDW Magic
Merlin recruited you to his team to help stop Hades from accomplishing his goal of taking over the Magic Kingdom and making it his summer home. To keep Hades out, you needed to recover a magic crystal that would create a forcefield of sorts to repel Hades and all of the villains he had recruited to his cause. Unfortunately, Hades had already tried to steal the crystal but bumbling Pain and Panic botched the job (of course) and it had split apart, with pieces scattered in lands all across the Magic Kingdom.
Before you could take down Hades in a final boss battle, you had to go all around the park to defeat various other classic Disney villains, with fan favorites like Scar and Maleficent as well as under-utilized gems like Yzma and Governor Radcliffe. All in all, Hades got eight classic villains to join his cause, all of whom had plenty of henchmen to defeat as well. To make matters worse, Merlin was generally off doing damage control right when you needed him.
Luckily for you, not all was lost because though main man Merlin was no use, all of the villains’ nemesis showed up for the cause. That meant you got the chance to have some of your favorite characters like Sebastian and the Genie around to help defeat the baddies and just provide some moral support on the quest. Now that you know your goal, the question is what do you need to accomplish your goal?
Via D23
To take on Hades and his cronies, you need a few things: a MagicBand, map and Spell Cards. Your MagicBand would track your progress through the adventure, while your Spell Cards had different powers all of which would prove useful in defeating the villains. Luckily, you could get your starter pack of five Spell Cards for free by visiting the Firehouse. With your tools in hand, you were now set to go about the park and find the magic portals into the animated world using your map.
To use your Spell Cards, you would simply show the Spell Card you wanted to use to the magic portal and the magic of technology would implement your spell. On the Easy level, it wouldn’t matter that much which Spell Card you used because the villains didn’t really have weakness or strengths and were vulnerable to any type of attack.
Once you moved to Medium, the difficulty increased with villains having specific strengths and weaknesses, so it became necessary to have a wide swath of cards like you can see above. On Medium, these attributes were fixed, but they became randomized on Hard to up the difficulty even further.
To acquire more cards, you had a couple of options: buy them from Disney (or eBoy eBay) or get a new starter pack the next time you visited the park (though you needed to open a portal before you could get the pack). Disney also started putting out special edition cards at events like the Halloween and Christmas parties.
All in all, I thought that Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom was a pretty cool idea, but I was never drawn to the experience when I was there. I played it a few times after it had first opened, but on subsequent visits I had less and less interest in revisiting it because there were simply so many other things to do at Walt Disney World. If anything, I wish that there was a version of it at Disneyland because as a (former) Passholder there it is definitely something that I would have found myself appreciating a lot more.
All that being said, if you never experienced the attraction, you still have three more days to get yourself to the Magic Kingdom before its final day on January 24, 2021. There is no replacement currently planned, and I would be surprised to see any version of it appear any time soon as it seems like its closure was a cost-saving move due to COVID-19 as well as just a lack of interest.
Via Screenrant
Well, that’s all for today’s soon-to-be extinct attraction. As always, don’t forget to check out my interactive maps of the Disney Parks throughout the years where you can watch or learn more about all the attractions from the domestic parks, with Japan newly added.
Thanks for reading and have a magical day!