May 18, 2012
Location: Africa, Disney's Animal Kingdom
Sometimes you will stumble across something in a
Disney park that you will find hilarious. Most of the time it is a
crazy sign, weird paint job, or, my favorite, bad puns. While most
of the time you know Imagineers hid these treasures on purpose,
other times you may question what they actually mean. Let's head
over to the Harambe Train Station for today's Fun Find Friday (which
cracks me up every time).

Just after passing through the turnstiles head
towards the left load platform. While here you will find a bulletin
board with several notifications, dealing with Harambe and the train
station, posted. The one I want to focus on today is on the far
right.


As you can see on the above notification, the train
service has stopped going to Shabi, an actual place located in
Zimbabwe. So what's the joke? I'd like to preface this by pointing
out that this is my interpretation of it, and if the Imagineers put
this up the way I think it's done then this is hilarious! We need a
good ol' story time to realize how I got to this point.
So a little over a year ago I was studying like
crazy for the D23 Scavenger Hunt. In the process I would travel to
the parks, take loads of pictures, and then write trivia questions
dealing with what I saw. I took a picture similar to the one above
and turned the question into: "What location does the train no
longer have service to?" The way I'd always answer the question was
by saying, "Not to Shabi" (not too shabby). Not too shabby is a semi
common slang phrase which fits perfectly with the location of Shabi
in the fictional town of Harambe.
So who knows if that's what Imagineers wanted us to
take away from the sign, but if it indeed was, that my friends was
definitely not too shabby on their part!
May 11, 2012
Location: Storybook Circus, Magic Kingdom
That's right folks, we have entered Storybook Circus
once again! It's amazing that an area that isn't even complete and
is still relatively small has so many fun finds just waiting to be
discovered. Today we are headed back to The Barnstormer as we take a
little look at the history of Goofy!

When the Barnstormer used to be in Mickey's
Toontown Fair the airplane was pretty basic and had no true story to
it, besides being a crop duster:

While the new plane hasn't had a lot of upgrades,
it has had an interesting addition to the back of the plane in the
form of having both planes (yes, there are only two ride vehicles
for The Barnstormer) by having both planes be numbered. What are the
numbers? As you can see below 32 and 19. But what's the significance
behind these two numbers?

So why are these two numbers so important? We
need to go back to the Mickey Mouse short cartoon entitled Mickey's
Revue. In the short Mickey is trying to put on a performance but one
dog in the audience continues to laugh and laugh and laugh
distracting everyone in the audience. Who was the dog? Dippy Dawg of
course. Eventually Dippy Dawg would be renamed Goofy. Why is all of
this important? The year the short cartoon debuted was 1932 (the two
numbers found on the backside of the planes)!