For Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, which opened in 1976 and has been heralded as one of the all-time greatest theme park accomplishments, annual refurbishments are to be expected. Audio-animatronic figures will be tuned up, costumes will be repaired, faces will be “powdered” (since the characters tend to get “sweaty”) and props will be refreshed.
But when the park re-opened the ride less than two week ago, fans quickly realized this was a different kind of upgrade — and they weren’t happy about it.
Walt Disney Imagineering, the arm of the company responsible for the theme park attractions and cruise ships, had quietly added a new pirate to the ride without any fanfare (and certainly without a typical heads-up meant to build anticipation).
The new pirate appears in “scene 11” — an early part in the cavernous opening moments of Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s before the second drop sends you into the rambunctious past, full of pirates looting and cavorting. This is the more solemn portion of the ride, as you drift past skeletons of once-great pirates. Where once a pirate skeleton sat atop a mound of gold and treasure, there now sat a new pirate.
This pirate was very much alive and, picking up a piece of cursed Aztec gold (a bit of storytelling that originated in the attraction but was more fully developed in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films), is immediately turned into a skeleton. He drops the coin and returns to life but clearly hasn’t learned his lesson (or maybe part of the curse makes him forget). He picks it back up. Turns into a skeleton. And repeats.
The fan backlash was instantaneous as videos of the animatronic spread like the fire that engulfs the town at the end of the attraction. As soon as there was footage of the new pirate, there were opinions about the new pirate. And those opinions were not kind.
Longtime Disney YouTuber David Erickson, who is unerringly positive, said the new animatronic was “not for me.” “I’m not happy,” said Allison Raffie of SoCal Travel Tips. And Theme Park Nerd, a YouTube channel, updated its “Top 5 Worst Animatronics at Disneyland” video to include the new pirate. Peter Sciretta, one half of the Ordinary Adventures YouTube channel, told me, “The update looks like something from a completely different ride. It doesn’t fit in aesthetically and feels out of place story-wise.”
The backlash underlines a bubbling problem for new Disney CEO (and former Parks head) Josh D’Amaro as he plots a technology-forward future for a company with a revered past. Insiders told TheWrap that there was dissent inside Disney over the change, as some were pushing the new tech — a result of Disney’s ongoing partnership with Epic Games — while others cautioned it would harm the ride’s reputation, risking fan backlash. There might have been a reason why the company didn’t announce the new pirate figure prematurely, as it anticipated there’d be just as many “arrrghs” as there would be cheers for the new character.
“Josh D’Amaro is interested in gaming. This is an opportunity to apply it to a figure. There are two parties who aren’t in complete agreement. There’s a side that says, We have this great technology, it’ll wow people. The other side of the house says, This is really out of place. It violates the classic that has been there over 60 years. You’re replacing a Marc Davis vignette with this and you’re destroying the story,” said a former Imagineer who knew of the dissent within Disney about the addition.
Embracing the new
For its part, Disney is proud of the new pirate.
Joel Peavy, an executive with Walt Disney Imagineering’s Research & Development department, said in a promotional YouTube video that the brand new audio-animatronic technology “combines projection with a partially articulated mechanical face to make our figures come alive.”
He stressed that the character isn’t new; it’s the same character that has been there for the past 59 years.
“But now, with this new technology, we’re able to tell his full story – the story that’s always been there,” explained Peavy in the WDI video.
In an official statement, Disney added that the transformation, “is made possible by the installation of innovative next generation audio-animatronics technology, combining real-time front projection with a mechanical head to create a highly detailed and expressive figure. This next-generation audio-animatronics technology allows Imagineers to expand their storytelling repertoire and enable a whole new level of immersion for guests visiting.”
The new tech is a collaboration with Epic Games and the Unreal Engine technology, which is also used on the Millennium Falcon attraction in Smuggler’s Run. It looks much better and more realistic than previous attempts at combining audio-animatronics and projection mapping, and Disney sees this as the future of the park: Elsewhere in the video, another Imagineer basically admits that this is the test run for a technology that will be used more extensively (and one imagines more dazzlingly) in future attractions. (There is a “Coco”-themed attraction being constructed across the esplanade at Disney California Adventure that seems ideal for this kind of thing.)
As one former Imagineer explained, “It was a proof of concept of the new technology that they had of next-generation projected faces. It’s a way of getting that technology out there. This is something that Disney does. The question is not about the technology, it’s about where they put the figure.”
“For a ride centered around a loose narrative, threaded through funny and unique gags, each created by excited artists showing off their high tech skill, you can’t fault them for doing what they did,” said Dan Becker, a self-described theme park historian/comedian with a very entertaining YouTube channel and podcast.
But the ire that the new pirate figure has attracted has dwarfed any technological achievements or synergistic breakthroughs, much less any of the mild guest excitement or interest that accompanies a new element to a beloved Disney attraction. Instead, the bad word-of-mouth and commentary from the fan community could do something that no Kraken or Naval ship has been able to do, for nearly six decades — it could sink Pirates of the Caribbean (IS THIS TOO DRAMATIC? IT’S NOT LIKE THIS WILL CAUSE THE RIDE TO BE SHUT DOWN OR PEOPLE TO STAY AWAY).
A history of change
Pirates of the Caribbean is known as the last Disneyland attraction that Walt Disney was personally involved with. It opened a little more than three months after Disney’s untimely death, on March 18, 1967, in a new parcel of Disneyland known as New Orleans Square. Originally meant as a more modest walkthrough exhibit, sort of a next-generation wax museum, it quickly blossomed into something more elaborate and awe-inspiring, full of carefully curated vignettes and stuffed with expressive audio-animatronic figures.
Since it opened in 1967, it has been cloned around the world – the Walt Disney World iteration opened in 1973, after protests from early parkgoers who wondered where the East Coast resort’s version of the beloved attraction was; the pirates washed ashore in Tokyo in 1983 and said “bonjour” to Paris in 1992 (with the rest of the sprawling Euro Disney campus). There was even an interactive attraction, Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for Buccaneer Gold, that opened at DisneyQuest, an ahead-of-its-time indoor arcade at Walt Disney World, in 2000. (It closed in 2017 with the rest of DisneyQuest.)
When Shanghai Disneyland opened, the mainland Chinese audience, unaware of the original version of the attraction thanks to decades of a western media blackout, instead had an enhanced version of the attraction more centered on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, instead of the legacy property.
And it’s not like the attraction has stayed the same over the decades, preserved in rum-splashed amber just as Walt had imagined it. Pirates of the Caribbean, it turns out, is far from sacred.
In the mid-1990s, some of the more outrageous elements of the attraction were toned down – instead of pirates chasing women through a ransacked town, the women would now chase the men.
In 2006, audio-animatronic figures of characters from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, including several of Johnny Depp’s iconic Captain Jack Sparrow, were added to the attraction ahead of the release of the first sequel, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”
And in 2018, a scene where pirates auction off women was changed and a new character, Redd, was added. She’s a feisty pirate woman who now feels like a kingpin. She even inspired a walkaround character who occasionally prowls New Orleans Square. Just a few years ago Disney added a cool optical illusion where a pirate is trapped in a cage – from one vantage point, he looks like a skeleton, but as you pass him, he turns into a living person.
But this latest alteration is, admittedly, different. There is no cultural or promotional force driving the change. And it certainly serves no storytelling purpose, instead raising more unnecessary questions. (“Why, for instance, aren’t the other skeletons caught in a loop?” asked Los Angeles Times theme park reporter Todd Martens in his thoughtful, deeply conflicted write-up.)
Maybe it’s just another pirate, something that most guests to Disneyland (particularly those who visit infrequently) will ignore or offer mild appraisal of. But for the Disneyland faithful, of which there are many, it’s a heretic, unnecessary addition to a true theme park masterpiece. As KTLA pointed out, “Across Disney fan blogs and social media accounts, comments have been largely scathing, with many saying the new addition has disrupted the otherwise somber, haunting scene. Others criticized the technology.”
Even those who aren’t outraged express befuddlement at the new pirate.
“I don’t hate it. I don’t understand it,” said theme park YouTuber Chris Provost, sounding uncharacteristically defeated.
His was one of the gentler commentaries.
Outrage Washes Ashore
Mike Celestino is a writer and editorial director for Laughing Place, one of the oldest and most in-depth Disney fan sites on the internet. Few people live and breathe Disney like Celestino does. By his own estimation he visits Disneyland two or three times a week; sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure. He is a generally positive guy, taking a sanguine approach to the constantly-shifting nature of the parks. (“I was a fan of Splash Mountain. I like Tiana’s Bayou Adventure,” he tells me.)
All of this made the editorial Celestino published on Laughing Place that much more shocking.
The piece, titled “Disney Just Gutted My Favorite Tableau in Theme Park History and It Might Represent the End of a Lifelong Love Affair,” reads like a breakup letter from someone who was once previously in love but has been betrayed beyond potential reconciliation. He went to Disneyland on the day that the attraction reopened to take some video and maybe make a note of the changes, but what he was instead greeted with was a “gut punch of one of my favorite things in the world being taken away from me and everyone else who admires theme park design as an art form.”
He wrote the post and published it from Disneyland.
While the pirate was a surprise, Celestino noted that a few people had actually been privy to the technology early. A few months ago there was a small media event where press and influencers were invited into the hallowed halls of Imagineering and shown the technology. Celestino was there. “The figure wasn’t clothed or decorated to look like a pirate. It was kept a mystery as to what the intent for it was,” he explained.
“That little section between the drops and the bigger set pieces has always been my favorite section of the ride. It was so disappointing to have that taken away,” Celestino said.
He’s not a Pollyanna. He knows that things change at the theme parks. But he feels like this change is unnecessary. “What bothers me personally besides the story is the shattering of the mood in the pirate treasure scene and the captain’s quarters. It’s all very somber and quiet and low-key and now there’s a goofy pirate moving back and forth and making those grunting voices. It didn’t feel tonally appropriate.”
For most, the change to Pirates of the Caribbean feels like a financial or technological decision rather than a creative improvement.
“Imagineering today has a brass ownership of a ride’s narrative intention, they literally are so used to rewriting existing IP canon and twisting it into the constraints of a theme park, that they have become totally fine with bastardizing their own legacy cornerstone evergreen pieces of art where nuance was king, because they are emboldened by the finance department to offer something new every two quarters,” said Becker.
Hey, anything for a few gold doubloons.
Reasons & responses
There are those within Disney who are unhappy with the new pirate.
“That’s something that people in the company are upset about it. The powers that be were given options about where to put it. But the idea was that they would get publicity if they put it in the treasure scene,” said one former Imagineer. “Looking at Haunted Mansion – one more ghost is one more ghost. But they wanted it there. Because it would be clicky. This is the social media side of Disney.”
Still, social media engagement isn’t a guaranteed win, as evidenced by the backlash to the new pirate and negative sentiment surrounding Universal’s latest park outside of Frisco, Texas, where social media videos have shown visitors complaining about the lack of shade, lackluster attractions and little effort that has been put into general theming.
“My point of view is if you want to make things more technologically advanced, that’s fine, but you don’t choose an iconic moment. You don’t choose something that is wildly represented on merchandise to the point where there’s a Christmas ornament coming out this year,” said another former Imagineer. “They need to establish a testing ground facility even if it is in the parks, which I can only assume is why this was updated – something coming down the line will all have these heads. But there was absolutely no need to do that figure in any way, in any world.”
This former Imagineer points to things like Innoventions, a former attraction at EPCOT and Disneyland that would be a showcase for new technologies, where Disney could tinker and toy with things in a public setting, getting real-time feedback from paying guests –“you could go in there and test these things and do it all day long with no stress and no pressure from the internet.”
“If you’re going to replace something, great, but you have to make it better,” this former Imagineer said. He also points to the odd timing of the addition to Pirates of the Caribbean. Recently, they removed the projection faces of Anna and Elsa from Frozen Ever After in EPCOT (it was a different, more finicky technology), replacing them with traditional audio-animatronic heads, while adding the projection-faced pirate to Pirates of the Caribbean.
It used to be that you would have to wait to see a living pirate. Now there’s one almost immediately.
“You see him waving a prop from the first Pirates movie. On its surface it’s interesting but it doesn’t make the ride better,” the former Imagineer said. He noted that the “real-time rendering” is “remarkable.” But that doesn’t answer any of the other questions associated with the new character.
“Was it better before or now? Did it fix a problem? Does it increase guest satisfaction? Is it maintainable?” the former Imagineer asked.
When it comes to the last question, at least we have an answer.
B-mode ahoy
Over the busy Fourth of July weekend at Disneyland something miraculous happened – the new pirate reverted back to its skeletal form.
It wasn’t that the projection had broken. It wasn’t the head with the skeleton projected onto it. (As Walt Disney Imagineering pointed out in that YouTube video, there are actually two projectors that beam the image onto the figure, with one acting as the failsafe for the other.) No, the actual mechanism within the head had broken, which led Disney to swap out the brand new, high-tech head for a different skeleton head.
Peace, somehow, had returned to the bayou.
While the animatronic was only down for about a day, it was still quite something to see people celebrate the return of a static figure. Some had even guessed that, due to the outpouring of discontent from the fan community, Disney had already made the brash decision to take the figure out entirely.
Sciretta, who runs the Ordinary Adventures YouTube channel with his partner Kitra Remick, wrote on X, “So is this the only time when a Disney attraction has B-mode and almost everyone thinks it looks better than A-mode?”
Sciretta was joking but he was also right. B-mode refers to when an animatronic or show element is broken and replaced with a stand-in. B-mode is never better. But in the case of the new Pirates of the Caribbean pirate, it might be preferred.
A day or so after the new pirate went down, he was brought back to life – picking up the coin, turning into a skeleton, putting down the coin. Round and round he goes. Maybe one day he’ll be gone for good, his use as a technological showcase worn out, replaced by something even more technically complex and visually showstopping.
But for now, the pirate remains, stuck in his loop, just like the rest of us, forever reaching for that elusive, cursed coin.
Maybe that’s why so many folks visiting the park are so annoyed by the new figure – in a world defined by fantasy, the cursed pirate reminds us too much of ourselves.
The post Disney Quietly Gave the Pirates of the Caribbean Ride a Tech Upgrade. Fans Revolted appeared first on TheWrap.
