Chapter 124
Legends and Celebrities

(Originally posted December 19, 2013)

Here were the lanyards Tracy and I were wearing for the day, by the way. It made us feel so “official” wearing our tickets around our necks.

We realized we should probably try to eat lunch, so we looked at our guidebook to find the nearest food vendor. The one closest to us was The Inn-Between BBQ. We’d initially planned to get a burger, but the bratwurst ended up looking pretty good when we got to the front, so we decided on that instead. Also a side of mac and cheese.

We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of this meal. Being convention food served out of a makeshift tent, I didn’t know what to expect, but the brat was quite tasty.

After eating, it was time to go line up for the panel. Though we were guaranteed a seat, we figured we should still try to be a little early so we wouldn’t end up in the back. Our timing ended up being just right—about 30 minutes early guaranteed us a good spot in the line.

We sat down on the floor and caught up on everything else that was going on at the Expo via Twitter.

I can’t pretend we weren’t jealous to find out that Idina Menzel had performed “Let It Go” from Frozen at the animation presentation. And we were also hungry to learn about all the new information surrounding the upcoming Disney-Pixar projects. Still, we were happy with our decision to skip that event. We were getting used to the flow of the Expo, and I think it would have been difficult to do that if we’d been in the arena all morning.

This was the holding room for the StagePass line for Undiscovered Disneyland.

About 15 minutes before it was set to begin, they led us into the actual room (this particular panel was being held in Stage 23).

As we walked in and took our seats—about halfway back and pretty close to the center—they were showing footage from helicopter flyovers done at Disneyland beginning in the ‘50s and spanning thru at least the ‘70s. It was so cool (though the motion of it all made me feel a little ill after a while).

Right on time, the lights dimmed and the presentation began. Here’s the description of what we had in store, taken from the official D23 schedule: “Proving you can absolutely never get too much of a good thing, creative advisor to Walt Disney Imagineering and soon-to-be Disney Legend Tony Baxter returns to the D23 Expo, along with Imagineer Josh Shipley, with still more treasures from hundreds of hours of never-before-seen color footage of Disneyland shot in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.”

Now, while I will obviously go through some of the highlights I remember from these panels, I HIGHLY recommend watching at least this one for yourself here on YouTube:

[kad_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNqsGUtJZ1M” ]

Anyway, as the lights went down, Undiscovered Disneyland appeared on the screen.

Soon, Disney Legend Tony Baxter and Imagineer Josh Shipley entered and took their seats.

For those of your keeping count, the number of Disney Legends we’d seen live now rose to 2.

Everything these two talked about was pure gold. From the ridiculousness that was “Holidayland” to the old Frontierland Mine Train ride (complete with footage of people riding the mules past it). We also loved getting to see the opening day footage from the Flying Saucers attraction—it’s crazy that every day used to look like Dapper Day at Disneyland!

I think the best part of it all, however, was just realizing that this man in front of us was the person responsible for some of our favorite attractions in the Disney parks on both coasts. Tracy considers Big Thunder Mountain and Indiana Jones as her two favorites, and he spearheaded BOTH of them!

At the end of the panel, we got to see a recreation of the original Journey into Imagination that allowed us to finally understand who the Dreamfinder was (we were definitely too young to appreciate this attraction before Disney screwed it up…).

At the very end of the presentation, of course, Tom Staggs came out onto the stage—as you’ll remember, Tracy and I are pretty good buddies with old Tommy-boy Staggs after our resumes crossed his desk last year. Just kidding. Still, it was fun to see such a powerful figure in the company in person.

Cooler still was the reason why Tom Staggs was there. He was revealing that Tony Baxter would officially be getting a window on Main Street!! I can’t think of anyone more deserving of this honor, and it was great seeing the reaction, both in the crowd and on Tony’s face.

Tracy and I found ourselves saying that this panel alone had been worth the cost of today’s admission. We’d learned so much, gotten to see such cool footage, and been in the presence of one of the greats. There’s just no way to explain how RIGHT it felt to be at the Expo—surrounded by other people who thought all of this stuff was cool, just like we did!

Exiting this first panel, we headed back out onto the show floor. We were just passing through when we noticed a very familiar face being ushered past us.

It was Phyllis from The Office!! Her real name is ALSO Phyllis—Phyllis Smith to be precise. She was here promoting her role in the upcoming Disney-Pixar film Inside Out, but for now, she was just meeting and greeting some of the fans that recognized her. Tracy and I posed with her.

My lightsaber balloon actually fell out of my backpack while we were meeting Phyllis, so she picked it up and played with it for a minute. It was all a very fun interaction.

At this point, we were once again unsure what to do next, so we decided to go get our next StagePass for the day. We’d been having trouble deciding what presentation we wanted to get guaranteed seats for this afternoon/evening, but we’d just about settled on the Broadway and Beyond concert. Then we got a notification on the D23 Expo app that the StagePasses for this event had all been distributed. Blast!

Always having a backup plan, we decided to get StagePasses for the Marty Sklar presentation—why not see another Disney Legend in action after all? As we arrived at the distribution area, they warned us yet again that there was a good likelihood all passes for this presentation would be gone by the time we reached the front. What impeccable timing we have, eh? Luckily for us, once again we JUST made it to the front of the line before the StagePasses were gone, so we had “tickets” in hand for Disney Imagineering Legend Marty Sklar Presents… Dream It! Do It!

Our plans for the afternoon starting to take shape, we decided to go check out the Expo Dream Store to see if there was any merchandise we just HAD to have.

The line was a little long, but nowhere NEAR as bad as the one for the Disney Store’s outpost. Obviously. I’m not good with lines (and today was full of them), but I did at least wear my compression socks to the Expo in the hopes that I could stand as long as possible for me. It worked, and I rarely found myself getting TOO dizzy during the two long days.

Tracy had worn her Wendy bow today, so she looked cute.

Making it into the Dream Store, we looked around at all the merchandise. We decided that while it was all really cool, nothing jumped out as a “must-have.” Mind you, since we had already blown so much money on simply GOING to the Expo, our budget for souvenirs wasn’t huge. We were mostly just looking around this store to see if anything was particularly interesting. We did really like these Disneyland “skeleton keys.”

They’ve actually appeared for sale at Disneyland recently.

Deciding (probably for the best) that we weren’t going to buy anything—at least just yet—we went back out onto the floor. It was getting to be time to go line up again, so we made our way upstairs to the third floor for the first time and found the holding rooms for Stage 28.

We seemed to have a pretty good spot in line yet again for this presentation.

While in line, we actually met Craig from the DIS Unplugged podcast. We had JUST watched the interview with Jess (Disneyfreak508) a couple days before, so it was cool seeing him in real life.

As we got let into the room, they tried to usher us to a seat in the back corner even though the bulk of the good seats were still available. We were having none of that, so we asked if we could move to a better spot. Luckily, we got to our new seat in the nick of time because the event was completely full by the time it started.

They asked people to refrain from photos/video during this event, so I can’t link you to a video to watch, but here was the summary from the official D23 schedule: Disney Legend Marty Sklar presents a fascinating half-century journey creating Disney’s magic kingdoms in his new book, Dream It! Do It!, launching exclusively at D23 Expo by Disney Publishing Worldwide. Marty will take guests through a presentation that recounts his epic Disney adventure, including working as Walt’s literary right-hand man for the Disney parks, writing a film expressing Walt’s philosophy for Walt Disney World project and Epcot, and helping to open nine of the 11 Disney parks around the world. A signing will follow this event.

So this event was completely different from the first panel we went to. Marty Sklar (our 3rd Disney legend, for those keeping count) was heavily promoting his new book, so everything about his talk revolved around that fact. Still, there were some very cool moments like when we saw some footage of Marty giving a tour of his office and discussing some of his history with the company—which had been made exclusively for internal use at the time. He also told several stories about how his book came to fruition, which made me excited to read it! I wish this talk had been a little less based around the PowerPoint presentation and had been a little more free-form, but it was still very exciting seeing someone with such a storied history in the company talking about his experiences. We were glad we had gone.

Once the presentation had finished, Marty was still onstage taking some questions, and I took that opportunity to sneak one picture (to prove we were there).

Coming out from the panel, we weren’t really quite sure what to do next.

As we walked back onto the show floor, there were some professional yo-yo performers doing their thing…

We decided to walk back to the WDW Radio booth to see what they were up to. Lou and Beci were interviewing Kingdom Keepers/Peter and the Starcatchers author Ridley Pearson.