Photo TR: Three days at Disneyland Paris

[Canobie CoasterWhy do I still have a donkey title???]

Great photos! I have to make it out to Disneyland Paris someday. While the Disneyland/Magic Kingdom park looks to have a poorer ride selection when compared to the US counterparts, every shot I see of this park is a beauty.

[dylanreichLost My Veganity on the New Hotness trip.]

Great trip report and I enjoyed meeting you and visiting Disney Paris with another first-timer as well!

[cfcI've gone pantless!]

It's been a long tome since I visited Disneyland Paris (2008). I enjoyed myself there, as I do at other Disney parks. It's beautiful, and its versions of some classic Disney attractions (such as Pirates) are great. Then again, it also has the two worst coasters ever built at a Disney park (Space Mountain and Indiana Jones), and service left a bit to be desired.

Still, I need to get back there someday.

[viking86Why do I still have a donkey title???]

^And if you ask me I'd say that (Hyper)Space Mountain is the best ride at the whole resort. Now, I can easily imagine that with the old trains with OTSR it was probably a rather unpleasant experience. But the 2017 version of the ride is AWESOME! I will get back into details about that in a later update, for now I got the Studios Park coming up very soon.

[viking86Why do I still have a donkey title???]

Part 2 - Walt Disney Studios Park

For the second part of this trip report I’m taking a look at Walt Disney Studios. The park is located right next to Disneyland Park, and it only takes a few minutes to walk between the parks.

Now for the park itself.... well, it’s not great! It has a couple of good rides, but throughout most of the park it’s very obvious that it was built on a budget, and it’s a stark contrast to the beautiful park right next to it. Don’t get me wrong, I had a good time and there are definitely some positive things about this park, but after some hours I felt very done with it and didn’t really have any great desire to go back.

Se let’s get onto the pictures shall we??

The entrance arch to the park.

And this is the entrance gate.

Sorcerer Mickey Statue inside the entrance gates, with the Earful Tower in the background.

I must honestly admit it was very strange to see a statue of Walt in this park. While I normally don’t agree with how people normally use this statement, I couldn’t help but think “It’s not what Walt would have wanted” about this park...

Pro-tip: Head to Crush’s Coaster first thing in the morning, as the line builds up very quickly.

This is basically a spinning coaster in a box, with a little bit of theming outside. Inside it’s mainly dark with little theming throughout the ride.

It was a lot of fun though! And there was a lot of funny faces to be seen on the outdoors part, particularly for the riders facing backwards.

Moving on to my favorite ride in the park, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. The first thing that strikes you is the rides location, its right in the center of the park. This feels very strange compared to it’s siblings, and it also means that you are able to walk around it and see the tower from every angle. I don’t know any other parks where you can do this.

The ride is located in the center of the park, and can be seen from all of the park.

Is this the only Tower of Terror where you can walk all the way around the building?

The entrance is right in front of the building.

Once you get inside the queue feels pretty much identical to it’s WDW counterpart. While I don’t remember the exact specifics, the lobby, library and boiler room feels exactly the same (which is not a bad thing). One thing I found interesting was the preshow in the library room, sometimes it would be in English with French subtitles and sometimes it would be in French with English subtitles. Maybe they had one version in each of the library rooms, but I wasn’t able to confirm this.

The hotel lobby is a very familiar sight.

As for the ride itself, I was pleasantly surprised. I kinda has this thought it my head before riding that it’s not a “proper” tower, but it was a huge amount of fun. Yes, it lacks the 5th dimension scene, but it’s still a really good ride. The drop sequence is just sooooo much fun, bouncing up and down the tower, and has the whole ride vehicle screaming with laughter. So all in all, setting my expectations unreasonably low made it a really good experience for me.

Moving on past ToT, you get to Armageddon: les Effets Spéciaux. This is a special effects show where you are on a space station in the path of an oncoming asteroid. The experience itself is quite fun, but it has a stupidly long and boring preshow.

The building for Armageddon

The vehicle shown outside was cool though!

Next door is Rock’n Rollercoaster avec Aerosmith. The ride itself has an identical layout to its WDW counterpart, but theming and story is a bit different. And as you can see from the exterior, it’s extremely obvious that this park was built on a budget. The ride was a lot of fun though, and also felt slightly more intense than what I remembered from riding the WDW version.

The extremely cheap facade of Rock’n Rollercoaster. The line in front is for the stunt show, Rock’n Rollercoaster was close to walk-on so they didn’t even bother with opening the fastpass/single rider lines.

Our onride photo!

Most of the park feels like this. Various attractions just plopped down in random spots with no coherent theme and a severe lack of atmosphere. To the left is the stunt show, I skipped it since I’ve done the one in Orlando and I believe they are identical.

Tower of Terror looming over the park.

I decided to go for a ride on the backstage tour. Oh boy, was this a boring ride. The Catastrophe Canyon part is very cool, but the rest of the ride mainly consist of driving on a road through the woods at extremely low speed with a few random movie props here and there. And once you are finished with the cool stuff you get to drive all the way back again, yay!

The vehicles for the backstage tour, which took forever to load!

Catastrophe Canyon. This part is really cool, consisting of fire, water and moving props.

Did I say water? I meant LOTS of water!!

At the other end of the studio tour they have another scene of a ruined London. It looks nice, but other than a little fire there is nothing exciting happening here.

Alright, let’s have a look at Toy Story Land! Here’s Buzz, watching over the entrance.

The parachute drop was closed for maintenance, but we saw it testing on multiple occasions.

The park has an Intamin Surfrider called RC Racer. It’s a fun ride, and with the 4-across seating the single-rider line moves very fast. This is also the only ride at the whole resort to feature bins in the station, as bags and backpacks are for obvious reasons not allowed onto the ride. However they have smaller bins with lids onboard the trains for smaller items.

The ride itself has a very short ride cycle, but it's very fun once it gets going!

The ride goes fairly high up, so if you’re in the backseat you get a pretty decent view of the park for half a second.

Oh look, they have a slinky dog coaster here! Actually, it’s just a very slow Music Express ride which we skipped.

Okay, let’s have a look at the newest, and also by far the best section of the park; France! When making an area themed to their own country they surely didn’t half-ass this one, because this area is BEAUTIFUL! I hope this is a sign of things to come for this park, because this was the only area in the whole park where I felt like I was in a proper Disney park.

This area is also home to the Ratatouille dark ride. This is a trackless dark ride which is a ton of fun. I also liked the fact that even without having seen the movie, you can easily understand what is going on. I’m sure this ride will be a perfect fit for the France pavilion at Epcot.

The entrance to Raratouille. I did get a bit dizzy on the ride though, so while I had fun I didn’t really feel like going again.

Oh look, they have Cars Land here! Well, one ride that is... The ride vehicles spin around in a figure-8 pattern, and I must say the ride was actually more fun than it looked.

They still have the hat here. #hatwatch

So yes, that was a quick look at Walt Disney Studios. Yes, the park has some flaws. In fact, it got quite many flaws, the most noticable one of course being that much of the park was built on a budget. It’s also a very small park and I was pretty much done after half a day.

However that didn’t prevent me from having a fairly good time at the park, but on it’s own it’s not a park I would have travelled for. But to end this report on a positive note, here are my main positive things about the park:

- Tower of Terror, despite being ackwardly placed and not being a “proper tower”, is still a fantastic ride and the theming inside is top notch!
- Rock’n Rollercoaster, RC Racer and Crush’s Coaster are all very fun rides!
- The France area is awesome and hopefully any future expansions of the park will follow the same level of quality.
- SINGLE RIDER LINES!!! Almost every ride in the park has a single-rider line, thumbs up for that!

I’ll end this update with a picture of Sorcerer Mickey! In the next and final update we’ll head back to Disneyland Park for a look at Discoveryland, as well as the afternoon parade and nighttime spectacle!

There is so much more space and potential for the Studios to improve, figure out what it's actually for,
and then then improve upon, what they did with Ratatouille and it's surrounding "land"scape. The
Toy Story Mini-Land is fine. But they need to axe some old stuff and just re-think the reason for it all.

Great tour you gave us through the Studios. I find the Armaggedon Effects Show and the Stunt Action
Show as one-offs. The RnR Coaster still rawks, every time I've been there. The Cinema show was always
updated and good. The Rat ride was fun and great. And the black light Animagique was good for it's years.
I know it got a re-do, and that's great

Great TR of DLPR!

And once the Hollywood Studios in WDW announces it's new nom de plume... Paris' Studios "might"
follow suit, toute suite!

[Canobie CoasterWhy do I still have a donkey title???]

Great report! I know Disneyland Paris is a park I'll make it out to someday, so hopefully they can continue to improve the park with new areas like France.

That backside shot of Tower of Terror looks really strange.

[viking86Why do I still have a donkey title???]

^Thanks! DLP is definitely worth a visit if you're in Europe. I wouldn't say it's like WDW where the resort alone is worth travelling across the Atlantic for, but as a part of a larger Europe trip? Definitely!

And yes, seeing ToT from the back was strange. Particularly since they didn't theme it to anything else, it still just looks like the back of a building...

Great tour you gave us through the Studios. I find the Armaggedon Effects Show and the Stunt Action
Show as one-offs.

Definitely one-offs! I made the mistake of doing Armegeddon on my own before meeting up with the other guys, and they hadn't done it yet so I actually ended up doing it twice!

[ThemeParkJunkie51290Challenge me at Donkey Kong...I dare ya!]

Love it! The Disney's Studios park seems nice! Well . . . from my point of view. LOL. I'm glad I was able to visit Disney's Hollywood Studios in FL and took a ride on The Studio Tour before it closed. The water rushing all over the place was my favorite part! If I'm ever in Paris, I'll be sure to make a visit at both parks.

^ Do it, if and when you can! My current opinion, is that the Studios has vastly improved, from when we first visited it....in it's first six months! Not even (to us) a 1/2 park back then. It was more like a 1/3 park, LOL. But extending the animation part of it (that's what Cars, Aladdin and Crush were for), and the "mini-land" of Toy Story, and definitely the entire "Land of Remy", and still the RnR coaster, all the more enjoyable. And hey - if you haven't done Armaggedon, do it, and then you can tick that off the "Attractions List."

(Pardon the SideBar on whether to visit it or not.)