At heart I'm just a kid, and one of the things I most look
forward to every year is trick or treating with my young daughter. The first
year we took her out, age 2, I realized how much I had missed it. Seems silly,
doesn't it? One of the nice things about having a child is that you get to
reclaim parts of your own childhood-if for just a few years. It's a short-lived
gift, but a rich one.
The Walt Disney Company has been slowly figuring out the
same thing: adults like Halloween just as much as kids, and parents enjoy
Halloween with their kids. But I don't really want the bejesus scared out of
me, so Universal's Halloween Horror Nights are too horrible. They conflict with
the Halloween that became part of my psyche many decades ago. There's an
innocence to "my" Halloween, one that meshes perfectly with my love of Disney
theme parks. Put the two together and you get my little patch of heaven: going
to Disney during autumn when their Halloween decorations have transformed the
parks into celebrations of orange and black … pumpkins and ghosts, friendly
witches and non-threatening vampires.
In the United States, Disneyland in Anaheim inaugurated
"Mickey's Halloween Treat" in 1995, but abandoned it after 1996 until the event
reappeared at California Adventure in 2005. Walt Disney World has been holding
"Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party" for over a decade. Both are hard-ticket
events, meaning that currently you have to pay between $54 and $59 per adult at
Disneyland, and $70 at Walt Disney World. The past two years have also seen the
event at Disneyland Paris for between $36 and $45. (The event in Paris has its
own distinct flavor, with fewer Disney characters and little more "edge.")
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rights reserved
At the Tokyo Disney Resort you pay … nothing. The event runs
day and night from September 9 to October 31 and includes special parades,
shows, fireworks, meals, souvenirs, and a park so thoroughly and impressively
decorated it's almost impossible for an American to imagine, and you get it all
included in your regular theme park admission (which in Tokyo is less than at
any American Disney park).
Photo by Jack Thornton
Tokyo Disneyland's Halloween celebration started slowly because the
holiday, prior to Disney's introduction of it, was little known in Japan. It's
not a Christian culture and has no history of the All Hallows Eve in Ireland
and Scotland that transmogrified into Halloween in the U.S.A. as immigrants
from those countries assimilated into our culture in the early 1900s.
Photo by Jack Thornton
In 1999 the Oriental Land Company, owner of Tokyo
Disneyland, tried a modest event limited to the Toontown and Haunted Mansion
area aimed at children and their parents, who were invited to dress in costume.
The event took place only on October 31 and consisted of two parade-style
antique cars each containing four Halloween-costumed Disney characters (I guess
you'd call them the "Fab Eight"), 400 costumed guests, and a few cast members
in scarecrow costumes dancing in front of a single float of a Mickey pumpkin head
at the end. Titled the "Happy Halloween Twilight Parade," you can watch it here on
YouTube.
Photo by Jack Thornton
While Halloween has grown in popularity in Japan in the
ensuing decade, for most participants it consists of dressing in costume and
going to parties in other's homes, or celebrations in school for children-trick
or treating from door to door does not exist. That's important to note because
it changes the dynamics of the event between the American and Japanese parks.
Photo by Jack Thornton
The Tokyo Disney Resort, like Disneyland in California, is
essentially a local park-most of the visitors live within a few hours' distance
by car or rail. The Oriental Land Company has mastered the art of seasonal
events that draw their customer base to the parks in an almost frenzied way.
Every season has a major event with new park décor, parades, shows,
merchandise, and so much more that it exceeds anything, even for Christmas,
done at either Disneyland or Walt Disney World, because in Japan almost
everything changes each year.
Photo by Jack Thornton
Cute is what the Japanese crave, the opposite of the
Chinese, whose Halloween celebration at Hong Kong Disneyland has zombies,
ghouls, and aliens more akin to the horrors at a Universal theme park. And on
"cute" Tokyo Disneyland delivers in an enormous way. Virtually every building
in every land (Tomorrowland oddly excepted) is decorated in orange and black
bunting, banners, signs, all with Halloween characters. The park is filled with
statues of happy ghosts cavorting and thousands of pumpkin characters. And
almost every year the theme, costumes, parade, and artwork change completely.
Photo by Jack Thornton
The enormous hub is filled with various scenes of Disney
characters enjoying Halloween dressed to match that year's theme. In 2010 there
were three tableaux: the main one with Mickey and Minnie and a hearse pulled by
ghostly horses (along with a few ghostly sewer workers peeking out from beneath
the ground); the secondary one with a graveyard featuring images of the Fab
Five, but these were no ordinary tombstones and statues. Like the busts in the
Haunted Mansion, all follow as you walk past-an amazing illusion; the third
tableau is also based on an optical illusion, that of a Mickey-eared Jack o'
Lantern that only appears whole when viewed through a lens directly in front of
it. From the side it's a hodge-podge of seemingly unrelated columns. Life-size
ghosts sit on various benches, waiting for you to pose beside them for a photo.
The pieces ultimately come
together … Photo by Jack Thornton
… once you look through the lense. Photo by Jack
Thornton
The souvenirs are endless, and are highly collectible
because they change every year. Among the most unique are the Halloween Disney
character cellphone dangles which can be personalized with your name. There are
also special small ceramic plates and cups decorated with the year's
Halloween-themed artwork featuring roll cake and mousse. Numerous
Halloween-themed meals are offered around the resort, the most creative being
DisneySea's rice dinner in the shape of a skull. Halloween flavors abound:
there are pumpkin churros, pumpkin soft-serve ice cream, Mickey pastries filled
with pumpkin custard, and pumpkin soup.
Photo by Jack Thornton
In 2004, The Nightmare Before Christmas
overlay from
Anaheim's Disneyland, having proven hugely popular, was brought to Tokyo
Disneyland as "Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare" to create an actual Halloween
themed attraction for the seasonal event. With Tokyo's Haunted Mansion a
plussed-duplicate of Orlando's rather than Anaheim's, there are quite a few
differences and improvements in the Tokyo version, including additional
Audio-Animatronic figures. Its popularity means routine wait times of 70 to 120
minutes. And there are dozens of new souvenirs every fall to accompany its
reopening-and they're not just the generic Nightmare Before Christmas themed
merchandise you find at Disneyland, but fully themed to the attraction itself.
Photo by Jack Thornton
The Oriental Land Company, finding Tokyo Disneyland
overwhelmed with Halloween celebrants while next door DisneySea sat relatively
empty, last year decided to expand the seasonal event. The Halloween stage show
moved from in front of Cinderella's Castle over to the park abutting
DisneySea's Tower of Terror and turned into Mysterious Masquerade, a show so
popular that there is often a wait-time of 60 minutes just to attempt to get a
ticket by lottery. The first season of Halloween at DisneySea was confined to
only the front of Mediterranean Harbor, the American Waterfront, and Cape Cod
areas. This year the decorations have spread into Lost River Delta, a
South-American themed area, with Day of the Dead decor and a mini-parade
featuring Chip and Dale. It fits perfectly and I think we can expect Halloween
to expand to the other "ports" in DisneySea in future years.
Photo by Jack Thornton
The result of the Oriental Land Company's free seasonal
events now at both Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea keeps the parks packed almost
year round. Because trick or treating isn't part of Japan's Halloween culture,
the lure of having candy stations all over the park for tricks or treats isn't
something the Japanese necessarily understand or want-and I think that giving
away enormous amounts of candy to kids is a big part of what justifies paying
such a high price for a ticket to the Halloween events at Walt Disney World and
Disneyland. Imagine what would happen if those shopping bags full of free
candy, all that "trick or treating," were removed from the events at the
American parks … the Walt Disney Company would have a much harder time selling
tickets. Halfway around the world, the only evidence of trick or treating at
the Tokyo Disney Resort are one or two caped cast members in DisneySea, holding
pumpkin buckets and handing out a single small piece of hard candy in a
Halloween-event-dated souvenir wrapping.
Photo by Jack Thornton
Do I miss the enormous haul of candy to be had at the
American parks for half a C-note? Not in the slightest. I'll take the new
themes, decorations, parades, music, shows, special dinners, desserts, and
souvenirs at the Tokyo Disney Resort-included with my normal-priced
passport-any day.
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All rights reserved
Personally, I think that there's one more attraction just
begging for a Halloween overlay at Tokyo Disneyland-does anyone out there not
want to see the Country Bears singing "The Monster Mash"?
Photo by Jack Thornton
Your thoughts?