Customer Reviews

Disney's California Adventure Detective: An Independent Guide to Exploring the Trivia, Secrets and Magic of the Park Dedicated to California

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Here is a book for all Disney Park fans. The refreshing thing about the Disneyland Detective,and California Adventure Detective books, is that they are written by a fan for fans. It is full of the little things that a fan truly wants to know about the parks they so dearly love. NOT a book that THINKS it knows what a fan wants to know. Disney's California Adventure is a park that is not as popular as Disneyland. It is thought to have a couple of perks, like California Soaring, but compared to Disneyland, if given the choice one would most likely, attend the latter. Disney's California Adventure Detective unlocked for me, many hidden secrets of a park perhaps a bit misunderstood. For example,it opened up a whole new insight to "Twilight Zone's Tower of Terror," as it lists where to look for actual props from the popular TV show hidden throughout the cue. My favorite, the chalk marks on the wall from the episode"Little Girl Lost." When I saw that, and put my ear to the wall, I heard that little girl... Wow! If you like discovering secrets, then this book will rock your world!

Disney's California Adventure is the lesser known and less well regarded second park at the Disneyland Resort. Located across a large esplanade from Walt's original theme park, DCA (as it's often referred to) clearly is secondary to Disneyland, but is, nevertheless, an interesting entity on its own and deserving of a little background information. And this is just what is provided in this light and entertaining book.

Author Kendra Trahan divides the book into seven chapters, the first being a general history of the park, followed by five devoted to the themed areas of the park and the last a short description of the impressive Grand Californian hotel which is adjacent and associated with the park. Each ride and attraction is described, and most are accompanied by a picture (the black and white photography by Debbie Smith does a fine job of illustrating the book). The book is replete with "Treasure and Trivia" paragraphs that provide interesting background information on the topic; being a frequent visitor to the park and already familiar with it, I found the information in these paragraphs to be the most valuable. Any "Hidden Mickeys" in the area are also noted, should the reader wish to track them.

Slightly less useful are the "Lesson to Learn" notes, which aim to provide hard facts and background to the park's attractions. Some are only tangentially related to the topic, and in at least one case, factually wrong. (The section on the naturalist John Muir states that he died in 1894 after Woodrow Wilson signed the Raker Act into law allowing for the Hetch Hetchy Dam. The events in question took place 20 years later. Similarly, two long appendices cover the props in the in Tower of Terror and their relation to various Twight Zone episodes, and the background of the aviation heroes and aircraft referenced in the Soaring Over California queue. The latter is almost 20 pages long (longer than any of the individual area chapters) and provide biographies of the pilots and aviation industry pioneers, and descriptions of the aircrafts shown in the queue area. It's quite a lot of background information that isn't park specific, so it's up to the individual reader to determine the value of their inclusion in the book.

I have two small criticisms of the book. While the writing is generally light and snappy in tone, it is sometimes repetitive in construction and word use. Also, the book would greatly benefit from the inclusion of a map of DCA, so that the reader who hasn't visited could get a better idea of the layout and design of the park.

Overall, a useful and interesting, if not definitive guide to Disney's California Adventure.

I was really looking forward to this book, as I've often thought that there hadn't been much written about California Adventure. Whilst the book was interesting, there was a lot of information that was rather general or unrelated to the park and I didn't really learn much about the park that I didn't already know. That being said I did get to think back to my visit at the park which was good.

This was a great read. It will be interesting to look for some of the items mentioned in the book when I take my annual trip this year.

Disney's California Adventure Detective: An Independent Guide to Exploring the Trivia, Secrets and Magic of the Park Dedicated to California
This is an excellent researched and fun book to read. I throughly enjoyed the hidden Mickey's...now I must go back to the park and see all of them for myself.

Ca is undergoing major changes, hope a new book will include these updates!
Following is an article from an Aussie News release:

In Classic Disney style, "World of Colour" springs to life with 1200 fountains spraying hundreds of litres of water into the air and dozens of cannon shooting columns of fire into the night sky.


Much-loved movie scenes play out on a misty screen, measuring 1765 square metres, and the cheeky face of Mickey, emblazoned on a massive Ferris wheel, beams through the smoke and vapour.

Aladdin and Princess Jasmine embrace on a watery magic carpet, Pocahontas rides the rapids in a canoe, Bambi gambols through the forest and the watching crowd hoots its delight when the rakish face of Captain Jack Sparrow, aka Johnny Depp, bursts on to the screen.

World of Colour, a $US 75 million light and laser spectacular, premiered on June 11 at Disney California Adventure (DCA), the theme park adjacent to the original Disneyland, and is set for a long run.

Host Mickey Mouse, resplendent in tuxedo and flanked by Disneyland heavyweights, Disney president Bob Iger and chairman Tom Staggs, orchestrated opening night events. When darkness fell, the multimillion-dollar mouse used his magic baton to set the show in motion.

World of Colour is Disney's newest attraction but its name comes straight from the Disney archives. It commemorates the television series Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, which premiered on NBC in September 1961, just as the channel cut over to colour broadcasting.

The new spectacle, termed a hydrotechnic show, pays tribute to those early days, beginning with a series of 1960s television scenes projected on to spheres of light floating above the park's Paradise Bay.

Walt's image, trapped inside a shiny disc, has a few words of wisdom: "Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination," he tells fans, as coloured balloons of light display happy kids and scenes of frivolity that hark back five decades.

When the nostalgia fades, hundreds of geysers explode into colour, as Ariel, the Little Mermaid, dances and swims while her sidekick crustacean, Sebastian, breaks into the catchy number, Under the Sea.

For the next 25 minutes, snippets from Disney's most popular animated films, including the 1940s classic Fantasia, fill the night sky.

Little Mermaid fans should be delighted with the brand new animated scenes portrayed in the mist, while the countless swirling and swaying fountains will dazzle ballet fans.

Their rhythmic movements were choreographed by Australian dancer Joshua Horner, a former member of the Australian Ballet, who last year starred in Billy Elliot on Broadway.

The creative director at Walt Disney Animation Studios, Dave Bossert, says many of the scenes were "reanimated" to fit on to a concave screen some 116 metres long and 15 metres high, while brand new scenes were added to The Little Mermaid, as well as a few other cartoon segments.

"At Disney, we're obviously always striving to come up with the next big thing," he told media the following day. "We conceived the idea five years ago and we've been working on the animation for 18 months. No one has ever combined water, lasers, animation and flames before."

The show is "awesome", as the southern Californians love to say, but I am more awestruck by the fireworks that explode over Sleeping Beauty's Castle in the original Disneyland park, next door to DCA.

The fireworks, which feature Tinker Bell and Dumbo careening across the sky on trapeze ropes, take place every (northern) summer.

As a newcomer to Disneyland, I proudly wear my "1st Visit" badge and line up in front of the castle to watch it change colour a dozen times as cascading pixie dust and a million lights rain down on it. It's hard not to stifle a tear as sweet sentiments of magic, love and joy echo across Fantasyland.

Disneyland will celebrate its 55th anniversary on Saturday with even more whiz-bang explosions but I'm just glad I finally made it to the park tagged "The Happiest Place on Earth".

Like thousands of Aussie kids, I watched Disneyland every Sunday night on television and thought the Mouseketeers (we watched reruns of the The Mickey Mouse Club for years in the 1960s) were the coolest kids on the planet.

Now, decades on, I want to see all that stuff, go on the Jungle Cruise, walk through Frontierland and get up close with the cute characters.

The "Walking in Walt's Footsteps Tour" provides that wistful experience and I follow my tour guide Albert along Main Street as he dispenses trivia and historical titbits. He points out the top floor of the fire station where Walt kept a private apartment during the park's construction phase.

We learn that opening day, July 17, 1955, was something of a disaster and nicknamed "Black Sunday" and "Walt's Follies" by the critics. Park patrons apparently got their high-heels stuck in the still-wet pavement cement and while only 24,000 tickets were issued, counterfeiters issued fake tickets and 10,000 unexpected visitors turned up.

But things were smoothed over, Albert extols, and within a few weeks Walt was advertising on television and 1 million people had walked through the gates.

Today roughly 20 million visit the original park and DCA (which opened in 2001) each year, and Australians make up the third-biggest international contingent after the British and the Japanese.

The writer travelled courtesy of Disneyland Resort and Air New Zealand.

The next big thing

World of Colour is part of a $US 1 billion ($1.18 billion) DCA expansion. New attractions and enhancements will include:

The Little Mermaid - Ariel's Undersea Adventure, where riders will travel under water in clam-shaped carriages, opening in 2011.

Cars Land - a 4.8-hectare attraction that recreates the town of Radiator Springs from the Disney Pixar film Cars.

Buena Vista Street - a Los Angeles street from the 1920s and '30s, a re-creation of the Carthay Circle Theatre, where Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937.