Mouse Extra

Sometimes it feels like all you do at Walt Disney World is wait.  You wait on line for rides.  You wait for food.  You even wait outside the gate before opening so you can go inside and start waiting.  It can be maddening sometimes, to say the least.

But Disney has done a good job in making the waiting a little bit easier to handle.  They have broken up lines, added interactive elements to queues and have created many terrific pre-shows.  But there is one attraction that is severely lacking a pre-show, even though it probably the one most prime to have an especially good one.

To get a decent seat at Fantasmic, even during the slower periods, you have to be there early.  For forty-five minutes or more, you need to sit on incredibly uncomfortable bleachers, probably sweating, and just stare at your watch.  There is no pre-show nor any interactive games to ease the pain.  There simply is nothing to make the time go by faster.  Every time I go to the show, I can not help but asking myself how this could be.

Right next door at the Beauty and the Beast show, there is an a cappella group that performs for the waiting crowd.  Festival of the Lion King at least gets people to do the “hand jive”.  It may not be mind blowing excitement, but it’s at least a distraction.  And both of those shows have much shorter wait times needed to get a good seat, and significantly fewer people in attendance.  Why would Fantasmic not have something twice as good as these shows?

In my opinion, Disney is missing a huge opportunity here to make the best pre-show possible for a huge and captive audience.  Fantasmic! is an amazing show, and worth seeing on every trip to Walt Disney World.  But it can also be a very time consuming and frustrating experience.  And I know many people who attend during the more crowded seasons that simply do not want to wait there with their kids for over an hour staring at an empty stage.  A well done pre-show would go a long way to solving this problem.

So it is time for the Imagineers to get to work and help the waiting masses sweltering at the Hollywood Hills Amphitheater.  Make us a pre-show that is a worthy introduction to Fantasmic!.  Such an addition could make a night spent at Disney’s Hollywood Studios a truly terrific experience.