The Dark Side of Disney (18 page)

Test Track – You go through the main queue but take a separate path after the theater that effectively bypasses the second half of the queue. Not exactly FOL, but if you have a FastPass it ends up being quite a timesaver.

Living With the Land – There is a separate handicapped line that completely bypasses the normal line. Definitely FOL, and each boat can accommodate wheelchairs in the front row so no excessive waits like Small World.

Disney Hollywood Studios:

The Great Movie Ride – You go through the first section of the queue, past all of the memorabilia, with everyone else. But once you get into the big room with the trailers showing, you get to bypass the long winding portion of the line. However, only one wheelchair can fit in each vehicle, so you might end up waiting a long time if there are a lot of wheelchairs ahead of you. This one is a toss-up depending on the crowds.

Toy Story Midway Mania – This handicapped queue completely sucks! You go through the queue with everyone else but split off after picking up your 3D glasses. You’re routed to a waiting area where you wait FOREVER because they have to re-route a ride vehicle to a side track. It seems like they only route every 200
^th
car, which might be an exaggeration, but if there are three or for wheelchairs in front of you it can literally take an hour to get on the ride. If you can go through the regular queue on this one definitely do it!

Animal Kingdom:

Dinosaur – This is setup a lot like Test Track. Wheelchairs go through the main queue, around the big dinosaur fossil, and into the theater. After the theater you take an elevator down to the vehicles, completely bypassing the regular winding line. Quite a timesaver!

Kilimanjaro Safari – This is another horrible handicapped queue. You go along the regular line up to the point where it turns and starts doing switchbacks in front of the loading dock. You’re redirected to a separate loading dock, where wheelchair-accessible busses are diverted. However, there are obviously very few of these special busses, and it can easily take 10x longer than the normal wait time if there are a bunch of other wheelchairs in front of you. Even if you’re the only one there chances are your wait time will be longer than the normal queue. Lame.

Taking the Resort Monorail:

At the beginning and end of the day at Magic Kingdom the lines for the monorail and ferry between the Main Gate and The Ticket and Transportation Center are absolutely insane. You can literally wait an hour to get to the park or back to your car.

However, there is an alternate, although circuitous route to and from the Ticket and Transportation Center via the Resort Monorail. It takes a little longer since it stops at the resorts (The Polynesian and Grand Floridian on the way to the gates, and The Contemporary on the way back to the TTC), but you rarely have to wait for more than one monorail. I’ve never had them check that I was a Monorail Resort guest, although I have heard that during the busiest seasons they sometimes check for your room key.

The Resort Line Monorail pulling into The Contemporary

Usually at the end of the night after the fireworks even the Resort Monorail line is insane because everyone is flocking at once to get back to their hotel. And if it is the busy season and they are checking room keys, you’re not getting on anyway. There is a way to get around both of these issues, however: take a relaxing and scenic five minute walk over to The Contemporary and board the monorail there! When you exit the gates of The Magic Kingdom simply go to the left and follow the well-marked trail of red bricks that leads past the busses (where a bunch of suckers are waiting for hours, probably), across a road, and around the resort’s parking lot. Go into the hotel, up to the fifth floor, and hop on the monorail, no questions asked (why would you be getting on the monorail at the resort unless you were a guest there?). Nobody at The Contemporary will be going to either the TTC (because for normal guests there it makes no sense) or to MK (because it’s closed), so the stop will be nearly empty.

Trail from MK to The Contemporary

SCAMS

FastPass Scams:

Wow, there are a ton of FastPass scams out there!

First up is the most obvious, namely counterfeiting. Sure, you can counterfeit FastPasses; it’s not like they’re embedded with holograms or even barcodes. Supposedly counterfeiting was a big problem at first, and Cast Members were instructed to feel the edges of the ticket to make sure there were perforations in the proper places (the top and bottom). Apparently a lot of people were printing them out on cardstock at home and using a paper cutter to cut them out of bigger sheets, not realizing that actual FastPasses are distributed from a perforated roll. The obvious solution here is to use perforated cardstock (the kind used for business cards) or even better, rolls used for garment labels, which can be ordered online from a myriad of distributors. In order for this to be effective with the business card-type cardstock you’d buy from Staples, you’d still need to use a paper cutter to get clean edges on the sides, while retaining the perforation on the top and bottom.

Frankly, going through all of this time and effort to counterfeit FastPasses isn’t worth it, unless you plan on selling them to suckers on eBay (which from the look of recent auction listings happens on a regular basis).

The better scams are the simpler and more clever ones. For example, there’s the infamous “button” on the back of the FastPass machines: when you press it, a FastPass magically spits out! This only works if the CM on duty left the button unlocked, which in the past seemed to be done almost by default. Unfortunately too many people were using this scam and the CMs got wise to it and started locking all of the machines in a FP queue except for maybe one. So for this to work you’d possibly have to press the button on the back of each machine before you found the one that was unlocked, by which point the on-duty CM would have likely realized something was up. And the rumor mill now says that anyone caught pressing this button will be immediately escorted from the park. So probably not worth it.