Tiny Twourists - Bringing the Parks Home

To prepare my daughter for her first trip to Disney World, my parents (who are DVC members) began bringing her gifts from their trips when she was a few months old. The first two purchases were personalized pink Minnie ears and a Disney Parks Music CD. She wears her ears around the house all the time. On our last Walt Disney World trip, the ears did not leave her head except to sleep. The CD is often in the car, however she prefers compilations of Disney's Greatest Hits. I have some from the mid-90s that she listens to, and we also check out more recent versions from our library. She prefers the greatest hits to the Parks CDs because they contain less instrumental tracks.

At a year old, my parents bought her a Disney Sing Along DVD that we let her watch before our trip when she was 18 months. There are several DVDs in the series, some of which show kids in the park interacting with the costumed characters. The characters can be either a big hit or a big miss with young kids. I think this DVD helped her be familiar with the costumed characters as opposed to just cartoon characters. There are two downsides to this DVD. While the DVD packaging is for Disneyland's 50th anniversary in 2005, the movie was originally released in 1990. Secondly, the movie takes place in Disneyland, not the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. Our library also has this DVD as well as others in the series that she regularly checks out. Other Sing Along Songs DVDs cover Animal Kingdom, Fort Wilderness, and a Beach Party.

A great free souvenir is a park map. Be sure to pick one up from each park. You may want to pick up several as they do wear out with frequent use at home. My daughter loves to look at it and pick out her favorite rides. She also loves to look at the pictures of our trips.

However, as of this weekend we can experience part of a ride at home. The Toy Story Mania game for Wii is based on the Toy Story Midway Mania ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios. In the ride, Andy's toys have set up a series of carnival games that you proceed through. On the ride, you will be stopped in front of a giant screen where you will pull the string of a launcher to simulate launching darts, rings, or balls at targets on the screen. In the Wii version, you use the A button on your Wii controller to shoot at the targets.  The ride is a 3D experience. You can play certain portions of the Wii game in 3D. However, we found the 3D to be of poor quality especially in regards to the color. There is no requirement to play in 3D, so we are going to hide the glasses and hope our daughter forgets about that option. Aside from the 3D, the game is a nice recreation of the ride. The Wii game has additional games which do not appear on the ride.

You can play the game in a "story" mode which automatically proceeds from game to game. Each game has two goals. The first goal is easier to reach and allows you to proceed to the next game in Story mode. The second goal is harder to achieve and unlocks the game for the Free Play mode where you can select which game you want to play at any point. We have played it a few times and I have one major complaint about the story mode. You start at the beginning each time and have to proceed through the games that you already beat before you can get to new games and unlock them. Each game is timed so that there is no way to proceed through the story faster. I also found the instruction booklet to be woefully lacking in details.

Aside from those two flaws we really liked the game. The game is very similar to the ride. Since this is a new ride, and has a relatively slow throughput, it is really nice to be able to play it more often. Now that I have played the Wii game, I am interested to go on the ride again and see if any of the goals for the Wii game give you bonus points on the ride (for example popping all of the apple tree balloons in Bo Peep's Balloon pop game).

How do you bring the Disney Parks home?