January 7 - Voyage of the Little Mermaid

Image copyright Disney

On this day, in 1992, Voyage of the Little Mermaid first invited guests to travel under the sea at the Disney-MGM Studios. When the studios first opened in 1989, the Backlot Tour was half of the available attractions. When the park proved to be more popular than anticipated, pieces of the Backlot Tour were slowly taken off the tour and made into their own stand alone things. One of those pieces was a theater at the end of the tour.

At that time, Disney was in negotiations with Jim Henson to acquire the Muppets. In anticipation of that deal, two attractions opened at the Studios featuring Jim's characters. One of those attractions, Muppet*Vision 3D is still running. The other was a live stage show with life size Muppet characters that opened in that little theater located just off Animation Courtyard. That show was called Here Come the Muppets and ran for just over 15 months. The show that replaced it is one of my favorite shows in all of Walt Disney World.

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Now is a good time for full disclosure. I'm more than a little biased when it comes to VoLM. I performed in it more than 7,700 times over a three year period. That number sounds impressive when I say it but it's really not. There are performers still there who have been with the show since the beginning and have logged well over 25,000 performances. Compared to them, I'd barely started. I am immensely proud of the not only the work I did while part of the cast but of everyone I worked with, most of whom put me to shame with their talent. So even though VoLM is getting shiny patches on the knees of its pants and looking a little haggard when it crawls out of bed each morning, I think the world of it.

And, for the most part, so do guests. They might not all appreciate the fact that Ariel is singing live rather than lipsynching to a track. They might not care that being able to watch nine puppeteers ply their craft at one time doesn't really happen much anymore, or anywhere. They don't even notice that the show doesn't make much sense if you've never seen the movie (let's be real, though, who hasn't seen The Little Mermaid?)  But I do think they enjoy the show completely and wholeheartedly. After all, audiences have been consistently showing up, day in and day out, for 27 years now. In fact about a third of all guests who come to the Studios each day find their way through the little theater near the back of the park. To put that in perspective, about half of all guests will find a seat in the much (much) larger space that houses the park's premiere show Fantasmic. VoLm does more than all right for itself.

There are constantly rumors afoot that Voyage of the Little Mermaid is on the brink of closing. The reasons are always varied: it's so old, so tired, it would cost too much to properly refurbish it, Disney is getting rid of all puppeteers, etc. etc. etc. A couple of years ago, more than one blog even reported as "fact" that it was done that Labor Day. As the Studios are in a constant state of flux these days, those rumors get more rampant the closer Star Wars Land gets to opening but so far they remain rumors. Will there be a place for VoLM in the new Disney's Hollywood Studios? I'm sure at some point it will go the way of Legend of the Lion King and Here Come the Muppets, but don't count this little slice of undersea adventure out just yet. And when you do go to see it, if you run into Max, tell him an old friend says hello.