Disney's Hollywood Studios

Since our last visit, Disney's MGM Studios has been renamed to Disney's Hollywood Studios. While it makes sense in that the park doesn't have anything to do with MGM and at the moment I don't think it's a good thing to be associated with MGM, it makes it kind of hard to know what to call it for short. We used to call it MGM. "Hollywood" is confusing and "DHS" is pretty opaque. I guess the most appropriate name is "Studios" but even that isn't completely clear to someone who's used to it being MGM. I suppose we'll all get used to it eventually.

Whatever you call it, the park has a bunch of new additions which I think round it out nicely. Toy Story Mania is pretty cool, although the wait times we saw posted in the middle of the day were pretty insane. I'm not sure I'd wait two hours for what is essentially a souped up midway game.

The American Idol Experience was very well done. I really felt like I could have been in the filming of an Idol episode. My only complaint is that Disney didn't advertise very well that you need to get there half an hour before the scheduled time to (a) get the full experience of being filmed screaming and dancing and (b) to be assured a spot -- we tried for the 7pm show our first time but it was full so we had to go to a daytime show another day.

Somehow I messed up my planning and scheduled Tower of Terror for the day before the start of Summer Nightastic. I'm not sure whether we ended up getting the new version or not. I can't remember what it used to be like well enough to tell the difference. But it was fun either way.

There's also a new parade since our last visit (although we saw the Christmas version of the last one anyway). It has a bit of the dance party feel that Disney parades seem to be shifting towards. I'm not really sure what the point of this is -- in a daytime parade I really just want to see the characters. And while I have no objection to Pixar characters, I did miss the Muppets. Also got to see the giant size version of Lotso. He's... very pink.