Thursday, July 27, 2017

D23 and Disneyland 2017 Trip - D23 Day 2


Day 2, also known as DuckTales, Ooo Ooo! 

Tales of Daring-Do, Bad and Good Luck Tales!

We woke up at 5am again on Saturday, our second D23 day, ready to take on the world! Well, really sore and exhausted and a bit curious about what we'd find before us on this second day.

This would be the "world premiere" of my new Disney cosplay...the Mickey Pants Kitchen Sink Sundae! (Not the briefest of titles, I know) I am so very proud of this costume, and how it turned out. A future blog post will be coming on how I created this bad boy, but for now, just check out this collage of all the details.


As I said, we were curious what we'd find on our second day arriving at D23. This day, instead of having a single line snaking around the building, those of us who got there early enough were let into this "holding pen" area. There were barriers up around it so people couldn't get in, and there was one place to enter, where the security scanners and bag checkers were set up, outside this time. Once you got past security, you were standing or sitting in this sea of humanity, waiting for the doors to open at 9. 

This was the line behind me at about 8:00 in the morning.


And this was the line in front of me.


Of course this would be the day I did NOT bring my black umbrella with me. I had it with me on the previous day, when we were stuck inside a nice air conditioned room, but not on this day. (sigh)

I had made up buttons to give out to people who recognized my costume, and I wound up giving almost all of them out. I'm glad it wasn't quite all of them, because that meant I got to keep one. :)


Finally we were let into the hall! I made a beeline for the Duck Tales money vault, figuring maybe if I got there this early, I would have a more tolerable wait. Sure enough, I only had to wait about 40 minutes to jump iiiiiin! Even then, they were trying to convince people waiting in line to take wrist bands to return at a later time instead, sort of their own fast pass system. But by the time they were doing this, I was 3 people back from the front of the "standby" line, so I declined.

While in line, I flipped out over this Wasabi cosplay! Wasabi is my favorite character from Big Hero 6, besides Baymax of course. Honestly? I think it might be because I think Wasabi has OCD, and I actually do.


Finally it was my turn! I was allowed to take my shoes off, even though the rules say shoes on, because I was wearing tights. Thank goodness...those shoes are NOT made for jumping in solid plastic coins! I also had to fill out a whole liability waiver, and once I jumped it made sense, as the coins are kind of poky, and it also was a total nightmare to try to get out of the coin pit. Having said that though, it was SO FUN, and probably my favorite moment of D23!

Tom video'd the experience.



And here is my actual 3-d photo from the experience!


We didn't have much time after this...we knew we wanted to try to attend one of the big Hall 23 panels at the expo, and had decided it would be the Parks and Resorts panel at 2:30 that day. But that's a pretty popular panel, so we knew we should keep an eye on the line. At around 11:30 it was already pretty long, so we got into the line. On our way down the length of the line, we walked by Fresh Baked Disney! We had to get our photo with them. They have been a really fun YouTube resource for Disney news, especially Disneyland for our trip. We've seen countless videos of these guys walking around the parks on a daily basis.



Finally we had our first opportunity of the convention to see the famous "holding cell" as I called it. The room directly below Hall 23, which is the largest room of the expo hall, is used for overnight lines, big event lines, etc. So basically, this was our life for the next three hours.



It was COLD, the floor was hard. It wasn't fun. But we had nice people around us to talk to, and chat about Disney. So we made it through. And finally we got moved up to the expo's largest program room.


The parks and resorts panel was fun! I'm glad we went, though I'm not sure I would have spent 3 hours sitting and waiting for it again. Most of the announcements, in fact virtually all the announcements, were things that were already rumored or leaked ahead of time, but it was still fun to be there as they were confirmed, information was shared, and a few surprises happened. John Lasseter made a surprise appearance, and that was also fun to see.




All panel attendees got pins from Disney parks around the world! I got the Tron Lightcycle one from Shanghai, which is perfect because one of the confirmed announcements was that Disney World would be getting a Tron Lightcycle Coaster at Magic Kingdom.


Everyone in the panel was also invited to have special reserved seating for weekend previews of the newly returned Fantasmic show at Disneyland. The grand reopening of the updated show was supposed to happen the Monday after D23, but these were special previews. We had no park tickets for the weekend, so we declined, but the passes themselves are really nice, so we kept them as mementos.


After the panel, Denise of MouseSteps took a photo of me in my costume. Sadly, this photo shows how the hours of sitting on the floor put terrible wrinkles in the shorts. Wearing my proudest cosplay on the day I'd be sitting on the floor for three hours and off the expo hall floor for people not to see it...it wasn't the smartest of timing on my part. Oh well. Hindsight and all that.


Back to the expo show floor we went! We found this heretofore undiscovered photo op of Baymax.





And saw some great cosplay!




I also spied Tiff, from Thingamavlogs. She also owns Whosits and Whatsits, the company that made one of my favorite shirts, the Lumiere's Culinary Cabaret shirt.


I also saw this most impressive Baroque style Lumiere cosplay. I first saw him from the back, and sometimes when characters like this turn around, it's a bit disappointing, but his costume was even more impressive from the front!


On the previous day, the Marvel booth had these statues covered with fabric. Tom suspected who they were meant to be, and it was confirmed. This is the Black Order, the followers of Thanos. The maquettes were highly detailed and beautiful.


Tom and I went to the upstairs hall to see if we could get in a panel that was already closed. But we did get to take photos of these giant banners Tom liked a lot. Three of his favorite characters were all in a row.




With that, we left D23 a little before closing that day. As we left, we saw a few more notable cosplay...namely Ariel, who is apparently dating Deadpool...


These beautiful Disney princess brides, which I later found out were done by the costumer I admire, David J McCarthy, who I saw in passing a few times over the weekend and in Disneyland, but didn't get a chance to tell how I admire his work.



This "Street Rat" Jasmine was beautiful too.


After we got back to our hotel, we went back out, both for dinner and also to check out this Pizza Planet truck, which we heard was parked in a nearby pizza shop parking lot. Not gonna lie, it was Justin Scarred of Randomland who posted about the truck, and said he'd be stopping by there after D23, and we were hoping to catch up with him and meet him, since he's one of our favorite YouTubers. No such luck, but it was fun to see the truck.


And thus did day 2 of D23 end! This is a much shorter blog post than yesterday's, but it's because a good chunk of the day was taken up either waiting for, or being in, the Parks and Resorts panel, and there's not much to show about that.

Tomorrow would be the final day of D23! And what would it bring?

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