Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room

Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room
Ride statistics
Attraction type	Theater in the round featuring audio-animatronic characters
Designer	WED Enterprises
Theme	Polynesia
Duration	16
Pre-show duration	10 minutes

Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room
Ride statistics
Wheelchair accessible

Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room
Ride statistics
Wheelchair accessible

This article is about Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room an attraction at Disneyland park. For the attraction at the Magic Kingdom see The Enchanted Tiki Room (Under New Management).

Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room is an attraction in Disneyland at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California.

History

The attraction opened on June 23, 1963 and was the first to feature Audio-Animatronics, a WED Enterprises patented invention. The attraction's first commercial sponsor was United Airlines but sponsorship soon passed over to Hawaii's Dole Food Company who remains the sponsor to the present day. Dole also provides the unique Dole Whip soft-serve frozen dessert sold at a snack bar near the entrance.

The attraction was at first separated from Disneyland insofar as Walt Disney personally owned it through his own company, WED Enterprises, instead of the rest of Disneyland which was and still is owned by the Walt Disney Company (then Walt Disney Productions). The show was originally going to be a restaurant featuring Audio-Animatronic birds serenading guests as they ate and drank. The "magic fountain" at the room's center was originally planned as a coffee station (there is still a storage compartment within the base of the fountain) and the restaurant would have shared its kitchen with the now-defunct Tahitian Terrace in Adventureland and the Plaza Pavilion restaurant at the corner of Main Street, U.S.A. since all three are actually part of the same building. Since ownership of the attraction was separate from the rest of the park, a nominal admission charge of $0.75 was levied.

Since computers have played a central role in the attraction since its inception, Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room was also Disneyland's first fully air-conditioned building. The attraction opened in an era when all things Polynesian were popular and was an immediate hit. It houses a Hawaiian-themed musical show "hosted" by four lifelike macaws whose plumage matches their implied countries of origin. "José" is red, white and green and speaks with a Mexican accent, voiced by Wally Boag; "Michael" is white and green with an Irish brogue, voiced by Fulton Burley; "Pierre" is red, white, blue and has a French accent courtesy of the voice talents of Ernie Newton while red, black and white "Fritz" has a German accent provided by Thurl Ravenscroft, who also voices Hawaiian god "Tangaroa" near the attraction's entrance. The four macaws as well as all the other birds are plumed with real feathers with the exception of chest plumage. The chests are covered in custom-woven cashmere which allows the figures to "breathe" in a lifelike manner. The choice came quite by accident; in a planning meeting, Harriet Burns noticed a cashmere sweater that Walt Disney was wearing which moved at the elbows exactly the way the engineers envisioned.

Attraction

The presentation features a "cast" of over 150 talking, singing and dancing birds, flowers, the aforementioned magic fountain, tiki drummers and tiki totem poles that perform the attraction's signature tunes, The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room by the Sherman Brothers and Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing. The finale has every Audio-Animatronic figure performing a rousing version of Hawaiian War Chant. The choice of exit music is somewhat unusual, namely an arrangement of Heigh Ho from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with lyrics thanking guests for watching the show and which hurry them along on their way to the exit. So innovative was the technology by 1963 standards that an Audio-Animatronic talking "barker" bird once located near the walkway to beckon visitors inside caused enormous traffic jams of visitors trying to catch a glimpse of it.

While waiting outside in a lanai area for the show to start, visitors are serenaded by Hawaiian music which at one time included that of Martin Denny and Bud Tutmarc. Hawaiian gods are represented as well around the perimeter of the lanai and each has a story to tell via Audio-Animatronics. A brief documentary of the history of the pineapple is presented as well. The story, filmed in the early 1960s and updated at the end with a Macromedia Flash presentation of a parade of Dole products, is shown on a screen on the rear of the roof of the Dole snack bar at the entrance to the lanai. Other than the removal of a minor musical number set to the "Barcarolle" from Jacques Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffmann and the final verse of Let's All Sing Like The Birdies Sing, the show has remained otherwise unchanged since its 1963 inception due to a stipulation in the sponsorship contract with Dole that the attraction remain unchanged. As such, the attraction is arguably dated. One chorus of Let's All Sing Like The Birdies Sing has José crooning like Bing Crosby, Fritz scat-singing in a gravelly voice like that of Louis Armstrong and Pierre singing like Maurice Chevalier. Still, the attraction remains among the park's most popular.

The show re-opened in March 2005 with the original seats for crowds after a seven-month refurbishment, commissioned by new Disneyland management in a bid to restore the park to its former glory for its 50th birthday. Previous park management had let standards all over the park (and in fact the entire resort) slip; feathers were regularly falling out of the Audio-Animatronics, the thatched roof of the building was breaking away in broad daylight, and the movements of the Audio-Animatronics were noisy and slow. After the renovation, the original show and storyline remained but with a digitally remastered audio (remastered by the same person who remastered A Musical History of Disneyland (2005)), a new sound system both indoors and out, and completely new Audio-Animatronics. These look the same as the previous ones, but have a completely different infrastructure. Updates in technology allowed Walt Disney Imagineering, the descendants of WED Enterprises, to create a show to satisfy 21st century expectations while retaining its classic look and feel.

Attraction Facts and Figures

Exterior of attraction

• Grand opening: June 23, 1963
• Designer: WED Enterprises
• Sponsor: Dole Foods
• Show length: 16:08
  • Pre-show: 10:00
• Ride system: Theater presentation with Audio-Animatronics

According to the book Disneyland Detective by Kendra Trahan, the "cast list" breaks down as follows:

• 54 singing orchids
• 4 totem poles
• 12 tiki drummers
• 24 singing masks
• 7 birds of paradise (the plant variety)
• 8 macaws
• 12 toucans
• 9 forktail birds
• 6 cockatoos
• 20 assorted tropical birds

Cultural References

• "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing" is mentioned in the movie Happy Feet.

See also

• List of current Disneyland attractions
• Magic Kingdom attraction and entertainment history
• Tokyo Disneyland attraction and entertainment history

External links

• Disneyland attraction (official website)
• Video of show posted by copyright holder