Word: parkes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Inside the Tree is one of the park's few structured entertainments, It's Tough to Be a Bug!, a 3-D film with in-theater effects on the order of the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience attraction at EPCOT. Inspired by characters in this fall's film release A Bug's Life (from Disney and Pixar, the tandem that made Toy Story), this creepy-crawly mini-epic features a cast of zillions and plenty of clever insect asides. But the kids will love the gross-out effects. One tiny creature, the Termite-ator, blows "snot" at the audience...
Take a stroll through Gorilla Falls, which executive designer Joe Rohde, who dreamed up the park, carefully calls "a representation, not a reproduction, of an African habitat." Stop to gaze at--then try, just try to tear yourself away from--the terrarium of mole rats, burrowing or eating or just collapsed in a pile like a failed pyramid of cheerleaders. In a cloudy tank, two hippos float with hefty grace. Meerkats (completing The Lion King's "hakuna matata" trio) stand sentinel on a hill, gazing through glass at suspected predators: us. Finally, an ennead of gorillas--four bachelors...
...show. Rohde, 42, an intensely jaunty adventurer with a silent-movie villain's mustache and enough gigantic native earrings dangling from his left lobe to fill a display case in a Nairobi Tiffany's, is a fine artist whose drawings from his world travels cued many of the park's lustrous images...
...Andy Devine voice. Comstock is one such creature; he has drummed for rock bands as well as designed rock gardens, and he punctuates his remarks with urgent gesticulations, as if he were on strings maneuvered by a mad marionetteer. It was his job and pleasure to dress the park in 4 million trees, shrubs and grasses from six continents...
Rohde and Comstock help fulfill an old Disney credo: the park is the ride. If the wait time is too long for the big attractions, you can have a blast just glomming the architecture and atmosphere. That is truest in Animal Kingdom. The backrests of park benches are carved as turtles, eagles, crocodiles. Harambe, the African "village" near the safari ride, is not idealized in Magic Kingdom fashion. It is stylized: worn, with cracked pavements below buildings of a Moorish-Disney design that might be called "mosqueteer." For visitors with an antic mind and a free year or two, Dinoland...