Minisode: What's coming and Disney's Zoning Magic Trick

It's a brief, Mid-summer (Don't get in the bear!) minisode.

Ever wondered what's really happening with Disneyland Forward? Dive into this revealing mini-episode where we crack open the truth behind Disney's highly publicized expansion plans in Anaheim. 

https://boardwalktimes.net/disneylandforward-what-exactly-is-it-3f4c79bf93c4

A new full episode in a few weeks!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:15):
How do you do everybody it's a little late
August mini-sode to sort ofpaper over the cracks between
our last episode, the Jawsepisode, and our next one.
Pete and I have a couple ofthings planned out.
It should lead us throughOctober real nicely.
I hope you're going to enjoyall that.
Summer gets a little busy forus.
We both have kids and it turnsout that you have to feed them

(00:39):
and entertain them during thesummer, which no one showed me
in the initial contract.
But there you are, oh, and alsoPete's like a magical being.
I don't know if you guys knowthis about Pete, but um, it's,
he's like.
You know, um, did you?
If you ever watched days of ourlives in the eighties I'm dating

(00:59):
myself now and remember thecharacter of Eugene, which was
uh was John Delancey's first bigrole.
He was a character that wouldshow up every once in a while
and say, hey, I found thisamazing ancient artifact that no
one's seen forever.
And he keeps doing it until youstart to realize that he has a
time machine and eventually hesays I'm going to go back and do

(01:22):
this one amazing thing, andevidently he does it.
So Pete's kind of like that.
He sort of shows up and says,hey, it turns out I'm building a
massive haunt in the old Mintbuilding in the center of San
Francisco and you go, what?
Okay?
And then next time he comesback, he goes, goes, hey, now

(01:44):
I'm a children's movie host okay.
So he's busy and he has, uh,child rearing, uh, uh duties as
well.
So, uh, god bless the guy, umand uh, I'm about to head out to
new hampshire for a weekish andafter that we'll regroup and
get some new episodes.
Hey, I wanted to talk to you alittle bit about Disneyland

(02:07):
Forward, which is a fascinationof mine.
I've done a lot of writing onit, I've done a whole bunch of
research on it, and if you don'tfeel like going through and
reading Anaheim zoning documentsthrough the 90s and 2000s, I
got your back.
Disneyland Forward's superinteresting.
It's not exactly what it'sbeing promoted as.

(02:32):
What it really is is a zoningdocument, that a significant one
.
But a lot of the promotionssuggest that, oh, this means
Disneyland will have a wholebunch more space to use for
theme parks, or Disneyland willhave a whole bunch more space to
use for hotels or whateverdifferent experiences.

(02:55):
Not exactly true.
What Disneyland Forward does isallow the Disney company to use
pre-existing zoning that theyalready have in the Anaheim
Resort area and move it around.
So they cannot actually makeanother single square foot of
attraction zoning.

(03:16):
They cannot make a single newhotel room, and this is actually
spelled out explicitly in theDisneyland Forward planning
documents.
All they can do is move theirzones around.
Now the real reason thatDisneyland's super gung-ho about
Disneyland Forward is that theyare trying to build up a new

(03:40):
shopping and commerce center,downtown Disney, on steroids.
What they want is to build anew Disney Springs.
That is going to eventuallyhappen where the old Toy Story
parking lot outside ofDisneyland is Well, about a mile
outside of Disneyland is.
That is the red meat for themof Disneyland Forward.

(04:02):
Some other cool stuff willhappen, some of which is
Disneyland Forward oriented andsome of which is just new plans.
But the scenario is kind ofthis they are going to start
building a parking lot, amulti-level parking lot, north

(04:22):
of the Toy Story lot that isgoing to lead into an overpass
that will go across over the topof Harbor Boulevard.
And this was a big stickingpoint.
When they tried to run thisstuff through in the early 2000s
, when Anaheim was a little lessfriendly with the company, the
people in Harbor rebelled andthey said, hey, we're going to

(04:43):
lose all of our foot traffic andthe city stopped it.
Now Anaheim's a little moreDisney-friendly.
There's been some allowancesmade to getting to the local
Harbor businesses as well fromthe lot and the entrances to the
overpass, so they sort ofreached a perestroika on that.
But they're going to build thisnew lot.

(05:04):
It's going to have a loft thatgoes over the top of harbor and
then actually it seems like whatthey're planning now is it will
go past kind of the esplanadeor not the esplanade.
It'll go past the tram andparking areas and enter into

(05:26):
some sort of new kind ofesplanade that they've got there
.
What's happening and this isDisneyland forward.
What's happening that was asurprise to me is that the old
parking and tram area it lookslike is about to get eaten up
with the Avatar experienceattraction land, whatever

(05:48):
they're calling it these days.
So that is going to come out ofthe Hollywood Boulevard side of
California Adventure and leadand extend into that parking lot
area.
It sounds to me like thatharbor overpass might go over it

(06:09):
, but I'm not positive aboutthat.
Nonetheless, that area seems tobe going away and turning into
an Avatar experience and, aswe've already heard, the
Monsters Inc ride is going awayand pretty much all of the rest
of that Hollywood Boulevard areais going away because that is
being retooled as Avatar.
At the same time, there is anew Coco attraction going in

(06:31):
over in the old Paradise Gardensarea of DCA.
It's going to.
It's going to kind of crossfrom Paradise Gardens from the
very end, you know, sort of pastGoofy's Sky School.
There it's going to.
It looks like enter there andthen the queue or whatever the

(06:51):
sort of mini Cocoa area is willlead behind Paradise Pier and
then a bit behind theIncredicoaster and that's where
a new Coco boat attraction willbe.
Notably, this is not part ofDisneyland Forward.
This is using already zonedareas, theme park zoned areas,

(07:14):
so they won't need to employ anyzoning booth.
What they're going to be doingheavily is moving theme park
zoning.
That's both north and south ofthe Disneyland Hotel complex.
Weirdly, there's a couple ofempty blocks that are zoned as
theme park both north and southof the Disneyland Hotel.

(07:36):
They're going to take thosechunks of theme park zone and
move them.
So assumedly some of them, someof that's going to get moved
into that parking area.
So you know, parking's going toturn into theme park.
There's some more empty chunksaround and it'll be interesting
to see what they do with them.

(07:57):
My suspicion and this is longterm we're probably talking 7, 8
, maybe even more years mysuspicion is that we will get
the new parking lot in the nextcouple years.
The overpass will get built,they'll start working on Avatar,
they will start tearing downToy Story.

(08:18):
They will put in Disney Springs, disney Springs West down Toy
Story, they will put in DisneySprings West at Toy Story and at
that point Downtown Disney willbe superfluous.
There won't be a whole lot thatthey can do with Downtown
Disney at that point, becauseyou've already got a center
that's bigger and better justdown the road.

(08:39):
So my guess is, long-term,downtown Disney is not going to
be there and that will probablyalso get turned into theme park,
some sort of theme park or somesort of multi-use attraction.
Because another thing about theDisneyland forward plan is that
they can also overlay zones.

(08:59):
So they can put a commercialzone and a theme park zone and
they want to have a hotel zone,though they can't add any hotel
rooms They'd have to take someaway from somewhere but they can
put them on top of each other.
Potentially, downtown Disneycould have something like that,
where it's like commerce andtheme park or part of you know,

(09:20):
the Grand Californian couldextend into it and it could be a
sort of more exclusive themepark era, who knows?
But that's kind of what's goingon with Disneyland forward right
now.
The only thing that we'reseeing theme park wise, that's
related to it, is this avatarthing, and we don't know a great

(09:41):
deal about that.
I am appreciative that they aregiving us some theme park right
away, because it is prettyclear and you'll see this in all
of the promotional materialthat Disneyland was using to
sell Disneyland forward for acouple of years.
You'll see that Toy Story,disney Springs thing front and
center.

(10:01):
So that's kind of the goal.
Anyway, just an interestingthing that I've been following
for a while and thought I wouldlet people know, as long as
we're in this little midsummerbreak, what I thought about it,
because I know that you all care.
Anyway, we will see you inprobably two, three weeks with a

(10:24):
new episode.
I believe it's going to beDisneyland centric and then
we'll see what's happeningheading up into the spooky
season.
Thanks a lot for listeningeverybody.
We'll talk to you soon.
Bye.