@@Spax_ There are a couple of shapeland t-shirts listed on the defunctland shopify (I found them by searching "shapeland shirt"), but both are sold out, so I don't know if they were limited or not.
@@Spax_ Apparently yes, if you type "defunctland shapeland shirt" on Google there's a shopify page for two shirts, "Shapeland: Acute place to shape memories in" and "I survived the Triangle at Shapeland". Both are sold out 😔
I see quite a bunch of those shirts while working at Animal Kingdom. I like to ask if they're enjoying their day at Shapeland as a result. One person stated that they rode the Triangle twice; that's impressive!
Honestly the logistics involved in trying to figure out a "vacation" like this made me think of Jim Gaffigan's Disney bit: "You ever go on a vacation as a kid and wonder 'Why is dad always in a bad mood?', Well now I understand."
I’m usually the one behind the logistics on family vacations everybody wants something but no one is entirely aware of the time and what to do if you want to do everything, so I’m usually the “not relaxed one” some years ago I have to stay behind for 2 days while my family was at the Disney’s Orlando resort, I know those parks incredible well, I gave them instructions on when to arrive. Where to go and when... did they listen NOOOO, when I arrived everybody was angry they did almost nothing, they didn’t eat well, etc. Next day when I convinced them to follow my lead every thing went smoothly every one was happy (tired but happy) and since then nobody questions the itinerary XD . This kind of vacations need another vacation just to relax from the previous one.
He was right! My personal favorite line from that bit: "If you've never been to Disney, imagine you're standing in line at the DMV.................and that's it"
Between this and the Jenny Nicholson video about the Star Wars hotel, I’m realizing that my favorite video genre is throwing shade at Disney for making dumb, greedy decisions
I CANNOT get over the phrase "Things like this don't happen to the Dillons" something about it just paints such a vivid picture of the life this man has lived. I'm glad they got their golden fast pass.
I'm convinced Disney addicts are suffering some kind of stockholm syndrome. Disney is holding them emotionally hostage with their childhood memories and in return for draining your bank account and life they give you a 4 minute fun ride twice a day. Juuuussstt enough to keep you on addicted. The same mental tricks mobile games use with cooldown timers.
@@partypete2542 They probably hire psychologist, neurologist or similar profession that make it so people gets addicted to the company product. Some big game companies already did it, so it wouldn't surprise me if Disney also have a team dedicated on making people addicted.
Same. I like Disney's best movies like Roger Rabbit well enough, but I never considered myself a Disney adult/kid, and I was poor growing up anyhow, so I never had any dreams of going to disneyland/world. On that note, this excellent doc makes me very grateful for that as this fast pass BS seems like a nightmare.
My favourite thing about UA-cam is some guy can make a nearly 2 hour documentary on queuing and it doesn't have to get approved to be shown or anything. Like, mad long videoes on random stuff can be made and it turns out that it's all absolutely fascinating.
Yeah, @UA-cam was not always a total dumpster fire of blatant greed and you could easily find quality content just like this all the time.... but that was before the over paid business people in charge decided they knew what we wanted to see, because they had a useless and broken from the beginning algorithm. I love how @youtube suggests I watch the same 20 videos over and over again when there are millions of videos on this shxt platform. I am personally waiting for a new and better service to happen.
If you are feeling like doing something really passive agressive, you could watch this whole video while waiting in line for a Disney ride without the FastPass Heck you could probably binge this many times
We got lucky when we went, about 6 years ago. It was all magic bands and fast pass for a lot of things but somehow we hit a great time and never saw a single line over 1 hour. Fast pass was cool as hell though as you could sign up online the night before. Once everyone had a smart phone in their pocket this hit the big time.
As a kid, I used to collect the paper fast passes. If you stuck your park ticket in when you already had a fast pass, the machine would spit out an invalid fast pass. I made my dad do this at every kiosk. It was so cool because each ride had it's own unique design and they changed over the years. Sometimes we would even ask cast members if we could keep our spent fast passes. Some said we couldn't, but many were really nice, especially when I pulled out my collection to show them why I wanted it. I threw out at the collection a few years ago because I kind of went through an anti disney, "I'm too cool for my past interests phase" and I really regret that.
@@fartknocker5708 Nah. You wrote: "Holy crap. A feature length documentary on queues and FastPass? Let me clear my schedule." You think those are the same?
Pff, the fact that I just finished this and now I end up seeing a video from one of the youtubers I’ve been actively getting back into over the last two weeks is funny to me
Planning 70 days in advance for a 5 minute rollercoaster ride is fucking insane. I used to get pissed I sat in line for an hour for a 5 minute ride. Cant imagine waiting 2 months
That's the most batshit insane part of these Disney "adults" it's a corporation designed to suck them dry of every dime and they genuinely believe it's some magical place that's different from everywhere else... Literally gut churningly upsetting watching those clips of the planning videos where people are sitting with mouse ears 70 days in advance to speak to a guy in a Donald duck suit
When your spending thousands of dollars to visit a Disney park, you better bet they will work hard to get the most money out of it. When I had an AP, I would not bother planning. Just go, and if it was crowded, just enjoy life. Sadly I no longer live near a Disney park, so its a big event, and I will optimize the hell out of those days. Both styles are enjoyable ways to enjoy the park. At least now you have the option. Do work and research for a better experience, or just go and have a chill time. But dont be the latter, expecting the same experience as the former. You get what you put in.
As a scientist, I'm envious of your ability to present so much and such complex data in a coherent and engaging way. It really is such a difficult thing to do. And it goes without saying that your documentarian skills are absolutely top-notch. A documentary that's this well researched and information-dense and fun to watch, yet doesn't speak down to its audience or use the typical condescending tropes is such a breath of fresh air. I've watched this feature-length video about queuing half a dozen times now, while most TV shows bore me so much I'd rather chew my own arm off than waste half an hour on them. That's the power of passion, when you actually care about a subject and about making other people informed and interested in it, as well, rather than simply churning out content to make a buck. I deeply appreciate you and others on this platform who use your passions (and time and energy and resources) to provide free education and entertainment. It really makes me feel more positive about our society and future.
Ok, first off I never knew I needed an entire documentary on Fastpass, but here we are. Second, as a Cast Member who worked during all three eras of Fastpass (Paper, FP+ and now Genie+), everything you said was very accurate in regards to the CM experience with all three. I distinctly remember how rough the My Magic+ launch was back in 2014. One minor correction though. We did in fact have guest celebrations implemented into MM+. We could congratulate guests who were celebrating a birthday, wedding, anniversary, first visit or family reunion as they came through FP. Third, I am not only honored that you wanted to use my song I performed along with my current roommate and CP roommate (especially our bad 2010 music video version before I had any editing skills) but to call it the best Fastpass related parody song… better than ones Disney made? Highlight of my year. We actually did a 10 Year anniversary version last year during quarantine on my channel if you haven’t seen it… Outstanding work as always Kevin. I’ve loved watching your channel since the early days and the passion you have for preserving some of history’s theme park moments, both good and bad. I’m honored you wanted to use our song in such an awesome video.
@@Jaded515 I appreciate the love from y’all so much. My current roommate, my CP roommate and I wrote and performed this parody song back in 2010 for the Disney College Program Talent Show, Night of Stars. It did go viral somewhat back then. We’ve always been proud of it ever since. It’s funny because I always thought it needed a follow up parody song and the right one never came to me… The renewed interest in the song kinda encouraged me to work on one. Yes, it does involve the new Fastpass replacement and yes, it is a parody of a popular song from 2015, but I’m thinking we might have something here… Anyways, thanks again to Kevin and Defunctland for letting this song be a part of such an amazing documentary.
@@ladyalfhildrforestofvioletmist im sure Disney knows all of this already, he just puts it in a condensed video form to show to the public. Disney could care less about PAYING him to do this.
@@GregInTechnicolor Exactly. Although the documentary was very well done, no one would be paying a million dollars to commission it. Several thousand dollars I could see but 1 mil...🤣
I think it's less dystopian and more a reflection of how important wonky things like logistics really can be. FP+ didn't turn the parks into horrific experiences for unprepared guests, but it did make the most anticipated days of some people's lives considerably less happy. That's not dystopian, but it is a very real impact on people's lives. The executive who pushed FP+ has his heart in the right place. He understood that logistics played an easily-underestimated role in people's happiness. But his only strategy was to throw money at the problem. His predecessor, someone with a degree and experience in logistics, created the original FP, which really was very successful. So I think that while talking about logistics in dry, mathematical terms, treating people like little machines on a conveyor belt instead of getting swept up in the sentimentality of it, isn't actually a dystopian way of thinking about things. Instead, it is the level of professionalism and commitment to science and math that really does work that results in systems that take stress out of people's lives.
i heard the rant on statistics and my first reaction was "i'm gonna make that simulation." only to be delighted when it was revealed that it was already made. what a beautiful world.
@@stroberies Yep. Those videos have different rules. Usually it's about half of the watchtime of those shorter videos. UA-cam shorts probably count after a few seconds, but im not sure.
"I know that some might disagree with this conclusion- there you are-" and then highlighting the very low part of the "Percentage of Guests" graph was very funny and underappreciated
As a former attractions cast member I will always miss the paper fastpasses, purely because I used to steal whole stacks of them and discreetly give them to families in standby when I visited the parks on my days off lol. I also used to give them to kids who were scared to ride the bigger attractions as a reward for being brave, or to any guest I saw being really courteous and kind. When mymagic+ rolled around guests honestly started getting really mean and impatient about the whole thing.
Tbh Disney seemed so much more laid back and spontaneous overall back in the 2000's during the era of paper fast pass, now everything is structured like you're practically planning an invasion when you just wanna enjoy a day at the park. It feels like a competition just to get on the rides you want to, while it is a good system for people who really like to plan ahead, if you're a local that just wants to go there on the weekend or like after work, then not so much
@@fireisfire95 local? Why do I have to fully structure a vacation though? Like, that honestly takes a LOT of work (hence the entire industry of planners and bloggers, etc.) but man… I can’t stand it. I’m in VA, near Busch gardens and not far from Kings Dominion (where I used to work!) and while those parks have a completely different vibe and no fast passes, it still completely boggles my mind that Disney, as excellent as it is, is still just a theme park. And people should be able to enjoy it as such. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go watch 1961’s 101 Dalmatians…
Just finished the new Jenny Nicholson video and it gave me a craving to rewatch this one. Modern Disney is literally cannibalizing itself and its a shame but damn if it doesn't make for good web documentaries
It's fascinating watching how capitalism's requirement to not just to succeed, but to *grow* in profits every quarter (because stock value is the primary issue) causes an endless squeezing of the end customer until they've finally had enough. Disney has built up so much Goodwill about providing incredible experiences that they have had a very far to fall to get to the point where customers will reject them. And people will do most anything for their kids. Yet the endless squeeze has made the consumer experience worse and worse while constantly making it more expensive and less appealing. I can't imagine saving so much for an experience and having so many issues with it.
It really is darkly ironic that one of the best-known roles of Robin Williams, a man who sued Disney for using his image without his consent for marketing, is now the face of an exploitative app which charges $15 a pop to skip lines, after a free system which did basically the same thing for everyone was replaced by inherently the same system - but worse enough to 'necessitate' this new app to some people in the first place.
Seconding your sentiments of disdain for the misuse of Robin Williams' image, I suspect that he'd be rolling in his grave enough to power all the Disneylands combined if he was even made aware of any of this.
Well, that marketing was for the movie specifically as I understand it. He didn’t want him/Genie to be the main marketing of the movie. But I get the sentiment of the post regardless.
Was at Disneyland earlier this month. The queue for Radiator Springs Racers was 75 minutes. The genie pass system wasn't availiable because the ride had temporarily closed earlier in the day. So our group decided 75 minutes would probably be worth it. At the same time, Disney offered a $21 fast pass to cut the wait time down to 30 minutes. Because of the influx of people buying the fast pass, the actual time we waited in line was 2 hours and 20 minutes. This led to many moments of exitential crisis. Do we leave the line? No, we are already too committed. Should we have just paid more money to ride one ride? Where are the mid-queue wait time clocks? How big of suckers are we? It wasn't pleasent. The ride was fun when we got on it, but it was NOT worth the wait and mental strain.
lol, this is a great story. if you went to the parks before 2010, there truly was a sense of magic in the air. Kids thought they were in a Disney movie and parents got to experience is vicariously through their child. The focus of Disney on, not JUST making money, but making AS MUCH money as possible has truly decreased the magic of the parks. Imagine telling Walt this story. he would have a heart attack!
@@ConnorEverything1997 I would love to see a system in place that, more or less, garuntees your wait time if you choose the standby line. We definitely felt cheated for time when it was an additional hour and 5 minutes wait. We could have enjoyed ourselves elsewhere in the park had we not been inadvertently duped. I love the parks, but I'll be thinking a little harder on my decision to go back anytime soon. 🤙Take it easy
We went to epcot and waited in the line for ratatouillee for 2 HOURS. We went to universal studios island of adventure and was on a roller coaster 5 minutes after we arrived, with no fast pass.
That sounds exactly like the last time me and my family went to Disneyland tho the reason why the standby line was so slow was they were letting 20 lightning people to 1-4 standby.
@@seeaddy001i remember getting to universal when they opened, and rode the hull ride 4 times in a row before there was even a wait by the time i circled around
The reveal at 1:15:27 was a more impactful twist than any movie I've watched in the past decade. I don't even care about the content of that reveal that much, but the delivery and the music made my jaw drop. AMAZING execution
Every Rollercoaster Tycoon player knows that all it takes to solve long queues is to have TVs lining every square meter of the wait area and a cast member in a panda costume stumbling around. That will magically make guests willing to wait for literal eons.
I think the most important thing he says is when he points out that the original system was designed by operations, people who are trying to make the park work better, while Fastpass+ was designed by marketing, people who are trying to ring the most money possible out of the people who go to the park with no regard for what it will do to the whole experience. Truly a masterpiece video essay, with one of the most solid conclusions I've ever seen.
Sometimes a pair of fresh eyes helps with things. 🤷♀️ The first way was designed to deceit people because it was to "hide the line from sight" so idk why you're trying to make it seem like marketing is such an evil department lol I was in operations at first at my company and any department in the corporate would can have bad characteristics.
@@secretlyamazing Chris' comment was pretty neutral regarding operations. It's pretty common knowledge that marketing tends to not understand what the fuck is going on in the thick of it - they're literally there to ONLY make money. Operations understands what's going on and while, yes, is trying to make money... they're doing it efficiently lol.
What gets me is the blatant lying. Makes you wonder what else Disney has lied about to make it seem like Captain Marvel box office numbers things are going as planned and everyone is happy
The cut at 57:53 may be the greatest edit in any Defunctland video. Can you please sell merch that just says: "Everybody wants to ride The Triangle." With a picture of The Triangle.
I knew it was coming the moment he said someone would have to pay an industrial engineer, but it didn't lessen the excitement at all when the cut happened
How about "I paid an industrial engineer to create a complex computer simulation of a theme park populated with agents, all with unique preferences, riding attractions of varying capacities in order to compare and contrast wait times, number of rides ridden, and other factors with and without a virtual queue system and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."
"Hide-the-queue" is definitely the most insidious strategy lmao, especially if you haven't ridden the ride before. I remember waiting for the Spiderman ride at Universal Studios. The que started snaking outside. You think "oh it must not be that long of a wait" even with it only going a little bit outside. Then you're inside. Must not be long now then, only you enter another room. Then you keep waiting and finally enter...another room. Every room had snaking queues. Repeat like 4 times.
I was a data analyst for Disney during the fastpass+ era and into the pandemic. All I can say is this video blew me away and made sense of so many different experiences I had while there. Incredible work!
@@Supermoneygang12 Because Disney only has one data analyst at all times that has to analyze and understand all data one of the largest companies in the world collects.
@@Supermoneygang12 As someone who is not that guy but is in an adjacent field (operations analysis), there's a shit ton of data in the modern world. Studies these days tend to be fairly narrowly focused. I doubt they'd be interested in re-litigating the effects of fastpass+ after they already implemented it, since they're not going to care unless they're considering removing it, which wouldn't be on the table considering how expensive and ingrained the system has become. Should they know if their system sucks and is making everyone's experience worse? Yes. Will they actually be willing to pay someone who might tell them that their system sucks? No. Especially in a company as cutthroat as Disney, no director is going to greenlight a study that might prove they wasted a billion dollars. The sunk cost is too great to consider removing it, and even if the study never sees the light of day the risk of that information leaking to investors or executives is too much. They're more likely to care about things like "how would the addition of another attraction affect toy sales?" or "how is sales affected by rides that exit into gift shops compared to rides that exit adjacent to gift shops?". Of course, all this is assuming I even fully understand what kind of work they do, which is a pretty massive assumption. As in most fields, there tends to be a lot of variety when you get into specifics, so I might be projecting my experiences (mostly working with simulations) against somebody who may well be doing completely different work.
@@Supermoneygang12 To give the guy a break, he probably wasn't a data analyst specifically for queuing or wait times. Id imagine there is a ton of different things disney would want data collected and collated for and he probably just wasnt on this field
Growing up at Disney parks I’ve always been in the “It’s your own fault for not educating yourself before coming…” camp, until Ratatouille opened at EPCOT and I watched family after family of international guests be turned away because there was no standby line AT ALL at first; there was ONLY a virtual queue. And by the time they found that out, there were no more available times for the day. That was awful; and I felt so incredibly bad for all of them. It really made me rethink my standpoint.
Consider this: Having to educate yourself on how to game the system on a vacation seems unintuitive as fuck That's like telling someone that they should've done their research on the best food to grab for value at a buffet before going, or telling someone that they should've done their research on which seats are the best in a stadium before buying tickets to a game. The idea that the average person should be min-maxxing their leisure time is fucking retarded, they might as well just take a stroll in an actual park for free by then.
I'm still in that camp to a degree. As much as the virtual queues system seems to not be fair, it also gives Disney a way to keep the queues for their newest and most popular rides manageable. Not every guest is going to have time to ride every single ride anyway, and while those families would've been able to ride it without a virtual queue, they also would've spent waaaaaaay more time in the queue. Before virtual queues, the waits for new attractions were into the 5-7 hour wait times. Even Disney, with their questionable decisions, isn't cruel enough to want their guests in a queue that long, especially when that means those guests are all jumbled out in regular park space. I think the virtual queue system has helped in a lot of ways and I also still believe that anyone planning a visit should know what to expect before they arrive. My second trip to WDW was completely different and so much better than my first trip because I chose to learn more about the things I failed to learn for my first trip. I fully regret not learning more about the parks and how to maximize for my first trip because I missed out on some great experiences and it was nobody's fault but mine. Disney is not hiding any info on how to have better experiences in their parks, so I honestly can't feel bad for people who don't do their research. Disney isn't cheap yet so many people could get more for what they're spending if they would simply do their research. With today's technology that creates the ability to have information so easily, there's no excuse for not knowing how to manage Disney's system.
The fact that things were so complicated that people needed to make strategy guides for just how to get into lines for family theme park rides means there's a BIG problem.
In the end it turns out, Disney's over complicated digital fast pass scheme did eventually cut down on wait times, by drastically reducing attendance to their parks.
honestly it is. i went to WDW in june of this year and it was stressful having to plan our whole day. My sister had some experience with it so she had to wake up super early to reserve for rides in the genie. We were park hoping and we couldn’t ride some of the rides cuz they broke down and our reservation times were pushed hours later when we would be at a different park. I get the appeal if ur going for multiple days or staying at the resorts but for me it was just stressful.
32:22 Hearing the xPass philosophy of "guaranteeing that guests will be able to eat at their favorite restaurants and ride their favorite attractions" is like foreshadowing. You can already see how the system they're trying to invent will be favoring those visiting the parks often, because the once in a lifetime vacationers don't *have* favorites, because they've never been there before
Exactly. One of my friends told me he went to Disneyland with his kids and said they did everything. Paid for genie+ and lightning lane and everything. Like, of course they did. They don’t go to the park every week/month. They’re once in a life time vacationers.
@@SMA2343 that’s actually set up correctly at Disneyland, where you can’t start claiming lightning lanes until you’re in the park. At Disney World you can claim your first few at 7am. Just went to Disneyland. I actually like it better than WDW, never thought I’d feel that way about it either.
@@williamfryman4360 It also helps that many rides at Disneyland do not offer Lightning Lane, so Standby always moves (Jungle Cruise and Pirate alone show the difference between Disneyland and WDW with how adding LL to a ride that really does not need it, makes the wait increase absurdly) and yes, Genie+ is better implemented on Disneyland.
Also, this video contains one of my favorite cinematic twists of the last five years: "It'd take an industrial engineer to run an accurate simulation of the effects FastPass had on Disney parks." "Oh, by the way, I hired an industrial engineer to run an accurate simulation of the effects FastPass had on Disney parks."
"And someone figured out how to do 39 rides in one day." Flashbacks to when my cousin and I went to Great America and rode the Drop Tower Zone 36 times in a row. By the time we went home, I was just experiencing a continuous, faint falling sensation.
@@SenhorKoringasix flags is a wasteland and dying lol. I wouldn’t wanna go to Disney but lucky that kings island is closer ish to me (haven’t been in a decade lol)
That reminds me of the time I went to Busch Gardens and rode the park train for like 20 laps in a row because I thought it was cool. So I'm probably that guy that rode the octagon.
This topic is so interesting for one reason; it is inherently anti-consumer to not have an earmark for value (E tickets, wait times, fast passes, etc.), yet in the actual reality of SPECIFICALLY amusement/theme park ride wait times, the less the customer knows what is worth the wait, the shorter the wait is for EVERYONE in the park, and the greater the hourly capacity of the most sought after experiences, therefore an overall better (and by some definitions more pro-consumer) experience. Fascinating
Anti-Consumer is the Late-Stage Capitalist endgoal. It's unlimited profits from being the most classist and discriminatory you can be with your service. The whales spend uncritically while the peasants are left to miss out or scrimp and save what little they get for a single experience where they get nickel & dimed at every turn
I think this happens because information simply being available doesn't actually resolve the disparity between the access different groups have to said information. The hurdles of computer literacy and cultural barriers across continents still exist even if you have a page that publishes all the info - and that alone creates enough of a barrier to ruin someone's vacation before it begins. And to an extent, FastPass+ seems to have been reliant on this disparity. It separates guests in a way that feels equitable to the in-group because they assume they are there purely due to their individual skill - and that lack of awareness of one's own privilege seems like a sadly familiar refrain to me.
Not to that extent, but I have family that are those types of people and it really ruins the whole experience. It’s no longer fun, it becomes a task. I remember going to a theme park meant you wake up at 6 am, get breakfast and you’re at the park in line as it opens. Then you can’t leave until it’s closing time and they’re forcing people out of the park.
@rickyrobby8133 Another way of looking at a high ride count: My brother and I loved the Dumbo ride at Disney World when we were very little and rode on it, like, 5 times. There wasn't a line so just continually getting to be on a ride was my strongest Disney park memory. I don't think we could've done it over 20 times though. 😅
@@snes90i had this experience going on splash mountain two or three times in a row and running through the empty queue area for the second two rides. It was minutes from closing
This video has given me a much greater appreciation and respect for my grandma, who under the convoluted genie+ system woke up every single day to get us on ALL the most sought out rides, even getting us on guardians of the galaxy twice. I knew it was kinda complicated, but now I know just how crazy of a feat that really was.
Definitely all guests, employees, and management here are ideal candidates for the 'McDonalds experiment'. Somebody needs to work on that! I expect the conclusion can be found before the experiment takes place... much like the one demonstrated in this video. I'd never think to subject any member of my family to this brutal, hell-bound nonsense. I pity humans.
It was a pretty big move, then again this channel tends to make one video every 6 months or so. Also you could probably hire some college kid to do it for pretty cheap. It is still by far more time and effort put into a video than nearly any other channel would do.
when he said they would need to hire an engineer to create the computer system i was like “yeah it kind of sucks that probably wont happen…” and then my jaw dropped
@@JustaGuy_Gaming idk man, im an undergrad student of IE and our queueing theory syllabus contains some basic equation and windows xp software(we literally have to emulate the xp). Or maybe my college just sucks
"The fact that they... (are) only allowing guests to book passes the day of, seems to be a deliberate attempt to reduce the negative side effects caused by FastPass+." Disney: returns to the reservation system, including the early reservations for those staying at Disney hotels, on July 24, 2024. It seems to me that they preferred the monster when it was eating people.
Alledgedly, Disney is reimplementing the early reservations system *because guests complained* about not being able to hyper-plan their itinerary 2 million years before stepping foot on Florida soil. So basically, the monster fuckers won.
I first learned how to properly look down on the poor when my family and I got paper fastpasses and a decent cardio workout at the break of dawn on disney day seeing the data back this up gave me perverse satisfaction
@@asparagusoffice It does take a good amount of time & practice in order to properly look down on the poor. This is why old money families have disdain for new money and the "nouveau riche": an improper amount of expertise in looking down on poors.
Everybody’s talking about how well scripted this documentary is but can we talk about the score? It honestly made the video for me, after the content itself obviously
54:59 I visited Disney in 2016 with a high school group, and this was the absolute worst part of my experience. I was in a group of 6-8 people, all with different ride desires and preferences, but all required to stick together. Because we were high schoolers, none of us had done any real planning beforehand. So to get the fast passes we wanted, we would have to spend so much time refreshing the app in hopes that enough slots would open up and that we could snag them in time. Nothing says the most magical place on earth like staring at your phone screen in the middle of a hot Florida swamp, repeatedly refreshing an app like a lab rat in a psychological experiment in hopes of maybe getting a fast pass for the group
we went in this too but i usually did my best to sneak by the disney band pillar. the one time i didn't want to (safari in animal kingdom) i got absolutely reamed by the chaperones because i waited for the group at the end of the ride. it was so unnecessarily stressful.
I visited Disneyland in 2022 on a band trip and I have to say things worked out pretty well with Genie+. I just got everybody in my group on my account (each paid me the $20) and we got on pretty much all the big attractions at both parks in one day
I had the high school band/choir trips experiences too-- but from 1996-2000. There would always be these huge discussions over waiting in line for 2+ hours for Splash Mountain, because especially back then if we had only one day at the Park, that long of a wait took a gigantic chunk out of our day and I was always part of the group that voted against that long of a wait time. But we were required to stay in groups, so there were several times I had to stay standing in those 2-3 hour lines with my group even though I'd much rather search for Hidden Mickeys or explore around the Park 😅 We would snack in line, read, study our maps, play trivia, take a couple photos (but not TOO many or else we would risk using up all our film-- can't pay for expensive film at the Park!!), or talk about Hidden Mickeys (no cell phones yet, only a few kids had pagers). By Senior year though, I had a couple friends who actually also preferred not staying in those long lines, and we had a blast together instead of waiting in the long lines ❤😊 We would look for Hidden Mickeys, check out the shops, live shows, bands, find special snacks, go to Tom Sawyer's Island, look for Characters, get pressed pennies and the Pieces of Eight coins, and chat with Cast Members about cool Disney trivia 😀
@@anovemberstar Oh cool, I’m enlightened. So next time I’m with a large group that goes to Disney I’ll just decide not to participate because it’s not worth it
Took my mom and brother to disneyland and at around 6pm we decided to go on Smuggler's Run standby as it was only a 30 minute wait. We said, shoot why not, it's got AC in there and we wanna go on it. 45 minutes later and we hadnt moved from a spot we have stood for 30 minutes, and i knew the queue had another 30 minutes ahead of us. They literally implemented the 100:1 on us when there was no reason whatsoever to do so. they would just keep letting any random fastpass user in and were waiting for them to show up so to not let us standby users on. It was quite honestly the most disgusting display of Disney mismanagement.
If you have to plan literally a month in advance to be able to ride a ride in a park, then perhaps the problem is not with the wait times, but rather the park itself letting in way too many people out of greed.
Thank You! Selling too many Annual Passes! Selling too many Admission Tickets! And raising the price of 1 Day Admission to the equivalent (or more than the) cost of a Knott's Berry Farm / Cedar Fair Pass!
I was a once in a lifetime guest in 2013. I was in marching band and our school was invited to perform in a band contest. I developed a strategy that worked better than fast pass or genie or anything else ever could. I call it the “Wait For The Big Fireworks Show To Start, Then Break The Buddy System Rule and Ride Pirates, Haunted Mansion, and Thunder Mountain All By Yourself When There’s Nobody There” strategy. Worked like a charm.
This is a great strategy even as of last week when I myself was there! Granted used to be people would leave after said big fireworks show…now the power of Mickey’s imagination drags like 20k people to Main Street only to send them right back in when it’s all over! At 10:00 it’s time to go home because the rides get long again. 😅
This is a such a great video for UX designers. Talks about testing, research, and the evolution and constraints each team had to face. But it's also great because shows the disconnect between executives and actual people trying to implement it.
I love how the video gets more and more frantic and flabbergasted as the absolutely lovecraftian horror of Fastpass+ gets bigger and bigger and swallows everything in its path. I was actually on the edge of my seat watching a documentary about a goddamn line skipping system at a theme park whose mascot is a talking rat
Same! The vid whipped me through its twists and turns harder than the rides it simulated the wait for! Of note the shapeland and covid twists got me bad
@@christianfaux736 I don't know -- there have been times I've felt the cold, cruel, unfathomable cosmos, indifferent to the plight of men, in those standby lines.
As someone who’s only ever really attended, smaller, local-ish theme parks in my life, these multi-hour wait times are blowing my mind. The most I’ve had to wait for a ride was probably about 30 minutes. Fucking 4 hours for an avatar themed ride? How could that in any way be worth it?
As the video sorta highlights, there's definitely a psychological difference in a person's perception of lining up in a switchback queue for a roller coaster at a regional park vs. lining up for an indoor attraction at Disney or Universal. When the queue's outside and completely visible to those outside the attraction, like most queues are at smaller theme parks, anyone entering a long queue is fully aware that they're probably going to be stuck standing in the sun and staring at their phones because there's nothing interesting to look at. Meanwhile, Disney obscures and themes their queues to give guests the idea that the queue is part of an "experience" that extends beyond the ride itself, so guests feel willing to devote more time and effort
The difference is most people don't/can't go to Disney for just a weekend or something, so if there is something they don't do, there's a high chance they will never get to do said thing if they don't do it then. You also have to book a hotel, airfare, park entry, food, transportation to the park, so is quite expensive if you don't live nearby. Also, even a week is barely enough to time to do most things, as there are 4-5 different parks, all of which take a day to do majority of the attractions. Whereas with smaller theme parks such as like a Six Flags, its much cheaper for the most part, and people aren't traveling from all over the world to go to it, so there are just less people there in general and people can afford to go back some other weekend if they really want to.
As for someone who sets time aside in advance I would not set more than 2 hours for theme park. Sorry but as much as theme parks are fun I want to do other things in my day too. For 2 hours a day theme park is nice addition to other things but anything more it becomes way less fun. It's just like chocolate. First few pieces are most delicious and enjoyable..but as you are getting full it gets less and less fun from each bite. You don't enjoy it as much as you did on first bite. So yeaa you gotta find other activity instead of keep eating chocolate. Same is with theme park. Take a taste, spend rest of the day on other activities. If you can't do 3 activities within 2 hours in theme park you're not really living your life. It blows my mind ppl would wait for 4 hours for one attraction. Nuts. I would not wait 4 hours for anything no matter how much I love. I have enough self respect for that.
Honestly props to the one dot who managed to do 39 rides in a day Also the plot twist of Shapeland actually being Animal Kingdom may be history's greatest plot twist
I won't lie, I've probably watched this video over 25 times. Possibly more. I know part of it is because Kevin is great at narrating, but I cannot explain what about this video is so captivating to me that makes it an absolute dopamine factory for my ADHD. I've had lots of hours of productive knitting while listening to this, so thank you!
It's a testament to Kevin's skill as a content creator that he somehow made an hour and 40 minute long video about the science of waiting in line... not just interesting, but _really_ interesting. Good stuff, Kevin.
alot of his content is very neich but super interesting if you like sociel pyscology. theme parks are kind of the opposite of psychological warfare or rather its pysc warfare used to make people HAPPYER. but still the same tactics.
Four biggest takeaways: 1. Disney created Covid-19 2. Disney took away UA-cam dislike button 3. Shapeland is Animal Kingdom 4. Bathrooms may require FastPass in the future
I am a queueing theory researcher, and I absolutely love this video. It's a great introduction to so many interesting aspects of the topic! Queueing is one of those behind the scenes quests of a big operation, and it's so rare to see it explains and popularized. Thank you and well done!
TBH I love this sort of high-quality niche-subject long form content. But The Algorithm keeps pushing "#short"s at me. (If I wanted tik-tok I'd be using tik-tok.)
TBH, if I hadn't gone to read the comments to see other people's opinions on this, and seen your comment, I might not have noticed until at least 20 minutes when my brain would begin to wonder "Hey, isn't one of the videos I normally watch usually done by now?". I hypothesize that the quality would've kept me from noticing the time flying past, if it weren't for my own self-imposed interruption.
Can we just appreciate the soundtrack within this video that Kevin has made himself, like he not only creates this 2-hour masterpiece, but he also forges a soundtrack that doesn't really impede on the overall viewer experience while enhancing the experience at the same time
@@cm01 Not really true, a dissertation is typically expected to contribute something new, whereas a thesis for example can just be a compilation of existing information.
When I went to Disneyland in 2005, for some reason the return window wait time for Thunder Mountain was INCREDIBLY short. So we were basically getting a fastpass, riding the ride, and then immediately getting another fastpass which said we could go back on ride within 5-10 minutes. It was the greatest. Ended up riding it like 7 times.
TBH, I went to disneyland in 2000 or so and we stayed at the Disneyland Hotel, and my sister and I got up as early as possible and rode the monorail over and then rode Space Mountain like ten times in a row and there was no one there. XD
I think maybe because thunder mountain is so fast? Because I noticed that too last time I went. My memory is a little hazy because it was 2007 and I was pretty young, but I remember dragging my parents back and forth between thunder mountain and splash mountain maybe 8 times during extra magic hours
This is the best Disney movie I've seen this year. There's a perplexing backstory, great action, extreme conflict, thrilling suspense AND a shocking twist! A must see for anyone!
Mousekers at Walt Disney world and Disneyland before New 1977 new 70s part of the same time years before New Disney classic New Disneyland Disney classic Disney plus on multiple different ways Disneyland before making maze bank tower of power outage map and pay pal made into store story 70s 80s before
I'm such a python data nerd. The instant he started talking about the simulation, I was thinking about how it would be a simple, but monotonous python notebook. I got a little more excited than I probably should have when he started showing off the notebook, lol. Also, the reveal of shapeland being a real park was a nice touch.
okay but the opening sentence, "how much do you know abt lines?" followed by those fun little sounds still just gets me so excited and ive watched this video multiple times.
Disney's actual problem, it seems, is that their attendance is far in excess of their ability to handle. Optimize it how you will, there's only two real solutions: increase ride capacity, or reduce attendance.
Right? Like, after you've optimized out the negative wait times, every additional person -- by necessity -- has to increase wait times overall. You can't cheat that anymore than you can cheat physics.
My husband's best friend used to work at Disney and my husband drove him to work everyday. This was during the '08 recession, so hubby was unemployed and decided to spend his days wandering Disneyland thanks to free tickets from said friend. In the 3 months he was looking for work, my husband rode every ride, did every activity and mapped every stall, alley, and cast member closet. So when we started dating and I told him that I had never been to Disneyland, I got the most detailed, crafted ride experience from what might has well have been Walt Disney himself. Cast members recognized him and greeted him by name. He knew the standard detour routes around construction. No joke-- we got separated, I texted him "I don't know where I am. Everything is brown" and he found me 2 minutes later. When we went to Orlando, his experience was still relevant enough that we only missed one thing we wanted because it happened to have closed early that day. This is ALL to say, I had a great time with the system, but Disney basically gave me a personalized tour guide with enough experience to know the best route to avoid the sun in California Adventure because he once spent a day following around the maintenance crew. Probably not worth the investment.
I love it when people not only have incredibly extensive and detailed knowledge on one niche thing, but get to use that knowledge for harmless pleasant things. :>
@@MillyLou that’s what the Disney tour guide is. It’s a human, Disney employee shaped super fastpass as well as an incredible tour. It costs quite a bit of money.
I just had my first visit to disney and this happened to me all of one time and it was during the rise of the resistance which i wanna say was 90 minute wait
this video took me from "damn, i wish amusement parks in finland had fastpass" to "damn, i'm so happy amusement parks in finland don't have fastpass" very fast
Back before Fastpass was implemented, I visited Disneyworld with my great grandmother. She was going to wait for me at the exit to the Tower of Terror, and I didn’t see her when I got off the ride, so I figured I’d ride again (I was like 10 or 11). After about a dozen rides or so, I see park security waiting at the exit, and they pull me aside and take me to a security office where my grandmother was waiting. She was stressed as hell, but I got to ride Tower of Terror like a dozen times in a row, lol. From what I remember, the wait wasn’t any longer than the actual ride was, so I basically kept circling back through and jumping back on. After a few rides the attendants started recognizing me and welcoming me back to the “hotel”, lol.
I did this at the monsters inc ride at California adventure, Christmas day 2010(?) It was empty at 10 am and no one was going on it, my 4 year old sister liked it enough so my mom put up with us going on it god knows how many times before the crowds came in.
"Laval felt that the system should be free and available to all visitors so as not to create different classes of park guests." This summarizes in one sentence why I feel the Genie+ system is problematic and insulting. Really interesting video!
And yet, when Disney launched MyMagic+, the Magic Band and FastPass+, that’s EXACTLY what they ended up doing! Even though FP+ didn’t cost money, the fact that the system favored people who had hotel reservations ended up creating the different classes of park guests Laval wanted to prevent back the late 90’s!
At the end of the day, Genie+ is a better system than what FP+ tried to be, but not as good as the original FP was. My 2017 trip to WDW was an absolute nightmare (specially at Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom due to that preferred 60 day window), meanwhile my latest trip (first one to Disneyland) was smoother with Genie+ and only waited 1 hour max at both Rise and Runaway Railway in standby.
I don't think my brain can comprehend that amount of effort that went into this video, my god. It's beautiful. The structure, the scripting, the animation, the DATA SCIENCE, it's all so so so well done. Incredible, truly. It's basically a master's level thesis on the subject.
The dot-themed visuals create a better intro than 99.9% of major movies and series, with still a feature-length film ahead. Something tells me this will be an enjoyable ride.
Wow everyone. The response to video has been overwhelming. I appreciate everyone watching it and hope you enjoyed it. It was a labor of love. Due to popular demand, we have added two new shirts to our store. If you want to support our documentary efforts and also get some Shapeland merch, go to our store here to preorder: defunctland.myshopify.com/
I'd love to see a t-shirt with "How much do you know about lines?" printed on the back of it. Imagine wearing that in the parks and the conversations it might spark. Hell maybe even QR code the video below it so that they can learn about it too while they wait.
"...but didney's focus was on improving the guest experience and hoping that the money would come as a result." i came here after watching jenny nicholson's star wars hotel video cos she mentioned the fastpass and wowee didney did a 180
I am literally blown away by how creators like you managed to produce such informative and entertaining content that rivals even the best documentary makers.
35:36 absolutely baffled by the fact that a bunch of trained engineers and designers made a system that literally didnt work and instead of changing the system to work better, they changed the entire park to accommodate it.
It was clearly a divide between the engineer and corporate wing. They refused to scrap it or delay it when it didn't work, so they had to salvage any way they could to save their careers
i complimented a guy with a shapeland shirt at disney a few days ago, and he excitedly exclaimed “finally! someone got it!”
wait was that limited edition merch or something??
@@Spax_ There are a couple of shapeland t-shirts listed on the defunctland shopify (I found them by searching "shapeland shirt"), but both are sold out, so I don't know if they were limited or not.
@@Spax_ Apparently yes, if you type "defunctland shapeland shirt" on Google there's a shopify page for two shirts, "Shapeland: Acute place to shape memories in" and "I survived the Triangle at Shapeland". Both are sold out 😔
this is delightful
I see quite a bunch of those shirts while working at Animal Kingdom. I like to ask if they're enjoying their day at Shapeland as a result. One person stated that they rode the Triangle twice; that's impressive!
I'm CRYING about that dude that got fastpass for the Triangle and rode the Octagon 39 times while waiting. Absolute legend.
Knows what he likes lol.
chadot is our king
That would have been me waiting for space mountain and riding Mr. toad’s wild ride.
Kings only
@@ZoraTheberge mr. toad is the better ride, actually.
Honestly the logistics involved in trying to figure out a "vacation" like this made me think of Jim Gaffigan's Disney bit: "You ever go on a vacation as a kid and wonder 'Why is dad always in a bad mood?', Well now I understand."
I’m usually the one behind the logistics on family vacations everybody wants something but no one is entirely aware of the time and what to do if you want to do everything, so I’m usually the “not relaxed one” some years ago I have to stay behind for 2 days while my family was at the Disney’s Orlando resort, I know those parks incredible well, I gave them instructions on when to arrive. Where to go and when... did they listen NOOOO, when I arrived everybody was angry they did almost nothing, they didn’t eat well, etc. Next day when I convinced them to follow my lead every thing went smoothly every one was happy (tired but happy) and since then nobody questions the itinerary XD . This kind of vacations need another vacation just to relax from the previous one.
Just go to somewhere warm with sandy beaches. That way everybody can stop thinking after they arrive.
He was right!
My personal favorite line from that bit: "If you've never been to Disney, imagine you're standing in line at the DMV.................and that's it"
@@beardlessdragon thats exactly it. Even when we went in the early 2000's. My dad kept saying this is worse then waiting at the DMV.
“My favorite ride was the air conditioned bus ride back to the airport”
Between this and the Jenny Nicholson video about the Star Wars hotel, I’m realizing that my favorite video genre is throwing shade at Disney for making dumb, greedy decisions
You need a fastpass to get stuck behind the pole
Ironically, that video is in my Watch List queue.
Never liked the Jenny video honestly.
@@jonathancharron7360 curious why you didn't like it?
@@TheRealPat316 way too long
I CANNOT get over the phrase "Things like this don't happen to the Dillons" something about it just paints such a vivid picture of the life this man has lived. I'm glad they got their golden fast pass.
I wonder if they can still use it...
They deserve Disney shares with that reaction damn
Plot twist: it was all a coma dream.
Dude, I low-key now kinda wanna know that history, ngl...
the transition into part 4, I had to stop the entire video. I have a huge ridiculous grin on my face
Oh, dear God. The descent from 'streamlined theme park experience' to 'grim Classist dystopia' was a wild ride.
It’s a slippery slope
HEY! did you use your fastpass for that wild ride?
Honestly they're only reintroducing what they had in the beginning with the booklet of tickets they sold in the early years of the park.
@@lucaswenzel1765 but it was free…
@@npcimknot958 Disney hotels were never free
That 'if you like it then you should've got a fastpass' song is the single most agressively 2009 thing I have ever seen. Incredible.
This video gave me a heightened appreciation for not being a disney addict
I'm convinced Disney addicts are suffering some kind of stockholm syndrome. Disney is holding them emotionally hostage with their childhood memories and in return for draining your bank account and life they give you a 4 minute fun ride twice a day. Juuuussstt enough to keep you on addicted. The same mental tricks mobile games use with cooldown timers.
@@partypete2542 They probably hire psychologist, neurologist or similar profession that make it so people gets addicted to the company product. Some big game companies already did it, so it wouldn't surprise me if Disney also have a team dedicated on making people addicted.
Same. I like Disney's best movies like Roger Rabbit well enough, but I never considered myself a Disney adult/kid, and I was poor growing up anyhow, so I never had any dreams of going to disneyland/world. On that note, this excellent doc makes me very grateful for that as this fast pass BS seems like a nightmare.
My favourite thing about UA-cam is some guy can make a nearly 2 hour documentary on queuing and it doesn't have to get approved to be shown or anything. Like, mad long videoes on random stuff can be made and it turns out that it's all absolutely fascinating.
*videos
And then that video gets 12 million views lol love it
I didn't even realise this video was 2 hours long
This has nothing to do with UA-cam... if anything, UA-cam tries to inhibit it these days.
Yeah, @UA-cam was not always a total dumpster fire of blatant greed and you could easily find quality content just like this all the time.... but that was before the over paid business people in charge decided they knew what we wanted to see, because they had a useless and broken from the beginning algorithm.
I love how @youtube suggests I watch the same 20 videos over and over again when there are millions of videos on this shxt platform.
I am personally waiting for a new and better service to happen.
I've put off watching so many great movies because I don't have time, but I watched this and was fascinated the whole way through lol
When you find yourself watching the same thing as Andrew
Didn't think I'd see you here
I mean I watch every video at 2x so never feels long lol you should start doing that 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Oh hey ibx, glad UA-cam has come together to watch this lol
Same lol
If you are feeling like doing something really passive agressive, you could watch this whole video while waiting in line for a Disney ride without the FastPass
Heck you could probably binge this many times
If I ever go to Disneyland I'm totally doing this
This is genius
I did this while waiting in the space mountain standby line
We got lucky when we went, about 6 years ago. It was all magic bands and fast pass for a lot of things but somehow we hit a great time and never saw a single line over 1 hour. Fast pass was cool as hell though as you could sign up online the night before. Once everyone had a smart phone in their pocket this hit the big time.
you would probably finish this video before it's your turn
As a kid, I used to collect the paper fast passes. If you stuck your park ticket in when you already had a fast pass, the machine would spit out an invalid fast pass. I made my dad do this at every kiosk. It was so cool because each ride had it's own unique design and they changed over the years. Sometimes we would even ask cast members if we could keep our spent fast passes. Some said we couldn't, but many were really nice, especially when I pulled out my collection to show them why I wanted it. I threw out at the collection a few years ago because I kind of went through an anti disney, "I'm too cool for my past interests phase" and I really regret that.
Thanks for sharing. Glad you still have the memories:) cherish those. Take care
Same!!!! I also got rid of mine, but i still have a couple randomly dotted around my house, dlp ones tho im from Europe!
:(
Dang those "I'm too cool for kids stuff" phases. That could have been really cool archival stuff today
@@kathyhenry9512I never want to go through that, like, ever
(I’m 19 btw so I definitely have time)
“Things like this don’t happen to the dillons”
PART 4: THE DILLONS
Was comedy gold
We need an April 1st episode on the Dillons.
PART 7: *CLASS WARFARE*
There's so much informed historical tragedy in that one line. Jacob Dillon could write his family memories and win a Pulitzer.
Fr lmao
Honestly I was waiting to find out that some tragedy happened to the Dillons that caused them to change how their parts worked...
Holy flip, a feature length documentary on queuing, YES
Why did I fully expected to Jon to just be here, I mean there were Spreadsheets involved so hmm🤔
Hey, you stole my comment. I made this same comment an hour before you...
This is the engaging content I come for!
@@fartknocker5708 Nah. You wrote: "Holy crap. A feature length documentary on queues and FastPass? Let me clear my schedule."
You think those are the same?
Pff, the fact that I just finished this and now I end up seeing a video from one of the youtubers I’ve been actively getting back into over the last two weeks is funny to me
Planning 70 days in advance for a 5 minute rollercoaster ride is fucking insane. I used to get pissed I sat in line for an hour for a 5 minute ride. Cant imagine waiting 2 months
Lolol and the Corporations take cold cash you worked your butt off for months and its gone in FIVE MINUTES!!!!
That's the most batshit insane part of these Disney "adults" it's a corporation designed to suck them dry of every dime and they genuinely believe it's some magical place that's different from everywhere else... Literally gut churningly upsetting watching those clips of the planning videos where people are sitting with mouse ears 70 days in advance to speak to a guy in a Donald duck suit
@@analyticalhabitrails9857well that’s pretty much how everything we enjoy works. A lucky family saves up all year to go on a week long vacation.
5 minutes is pretty long for a roller coaster to be fair, most are like less than 3 minutes long.
When your spending thousands of dollars to visit a Disney park, you better bet they will work hard to get the most money out of it. When I had an AP, I would not bother planning. Just go, and if it was crowded, just enjoy life. Sadly I no longer live near a Disney park, so its a big event, and I will optimize the hell out of those days. Both styles are enjoyable ways to enjoy the park. At least now you have the option. Do work and research for a better experience, or just go and have a chill time. But dont be the latter, expecting the same experience as the former. You get what you put in.
As a scientist, I'm envious of your ability to present so much and such complex data in a coherent and engaging way. It really is such a difficult thing to do. And it goes without saying that your documentarian skills are absolutely top-notch. A documentary that's this well researched and information-dense and fun to watch, yet doesn't speak down to its audience or use the typical condescending tropes is such a breath of fresh air. I've watched this feature-length video about queuing half a dozen times now, while most TV shows bore me so much I'd rather chew my own arm off than waste half an hour on them. That's the power of passion, when you actually care about a subject and about making other people informed and interested in it, as well, rather than simply churning out content to make a buck. I deeply appreciate you and others on this platform who use your passions (and time and energy and resources) to provide free education and entertainment. It really makes me feel more positive about our society and future.
Ok, first off I never knew I needed an entire documentary on Fastpass, but here we are.
Second, as a Cast Member who worked during all three eras of Fastpass (Paper, FP+ and now Genie+), everything you said was very accurate in regards to the CM experience with all three. I distinctly remember how rough the My Magic+ launch was back in 2014. One minor correction though. We did in fact have guest celebrations implemented into MM+. We could congratulate guests who were celebrating a birthday, wedding, anniversary, first visit or family reunion as they came through FP.
Third, I am not only honored that you wanted to use my song I performed along with my current roommate and CP roommate (especially our bad 2010 music video version before I had any editing skills) but to call it the best Fastpass related parody song… better than ones Disney made? Highlight of my year.
We actually did a 10 Year anniversary version last year during quarantine on my channel if you haven’t seen it…
Outstanding work as always Kevin. I’ve loved watching your channel since the early days and the passion you have for preserving some of history’s theme park moments, both good and bad.
I’m honored you wanted to use our song in such an awesome video.
How is this not the top comment. If this is real you're a genuine myth
You absolute legend
@@Jaded515 I appreciate the love from y’all so much.
My current roommate, my CP roommate and I wrote and performed this parody song back in 2010 for the Disney College Program Talent Show, Night of Stars. It did go viral somewhat back then. We’ve always been proud of it ever since.
It’s funny because I always thought it needed a follow up parody song and the right one never came to me… The renewed interest in the song kinda encouraged me to work on one. Yes, it does involve the new Fastpass replacement and yes, it is a parody of a popular song from 2015, but I’m thinking we might have something here…
Anyways, thanks again to Kevin and Defunctland for letting this song be a part of such an amazing documentary.
@@missybarbour6885 Why thank you!
@@TheOtherBlue Thanks for the reassurance!
Defunctland did an analysis on Disney that a consulting firm would charge at least 1mm+ for and posted it for free on UA-cam. This is insane
This is soooo true
IKR, I said more than once while watching this, Disney should be paying this dude!
@@ladyalfhildrforestofvioletmist im sure Disney knows all of this already, he just puts it in a condensed video form to show to the public. Disney could care less about PAYING him to do this.
@@GregInTechnicolor Exactly. Although the documentary was very well done, no one would be paying a million dollars to commission it. Several thousand dollars I could see but 1 mil...🤣
@@GregInTechnicolor
I mean, that's the point
Disney already pay people some BIG cash to get this kind of data
As someone who's never been to any Disney park, this just sounds like a dystopian hellscape
But they have Mickey shaped soft pretzels!!
But r2d2
Universal is by far better, in my opinion.
I think it's less dystopian and more a reflection of how important wonky things like logistics really can be. FP+ didn't turn the parks into horrific experiences for unprepared guests, but it did make the most anticipated days of some people's lives considerably less happy. That's not dystopian, but it is a very real impact on people's lives.
The executive who pushed FP+ has his heart in the right place. He understood that logistics played an easily-underestimated role in people's happiness. But his only strategy was to throw money at the problem. His predecessor, someone with a degree and experience in logistics, created the original FP, which really was very successful.
So I think that while talking about logistics in dry, mathematical terms, treating people like little machines on a conveyor belt instead of getting swept up in the sentimentality of it, isn't actually a dystopian way of thinking about things. Instead, it is the level of professionalism and commitment to science and math that really does work that results in systems that take stress out of people's lives.
Same never been, not realy interested in ever going.
i heard the rant on statistics and my first reaction was "i'm gonna make that simulation." only to be delighted when it was revealed that it was already made. what a beautiful world.
You did it. You got people to watch a feature length film about lines 21 million times. I’ve never been so proud
UA-cam autoplay keeps starting up this video at least once a day for some reason.
@@baronvonlimbourgh1716 with how views work on youtube you have to watch a few minutes of a video for a view to count.
@@wolfcub0545 There's videos under 1 minute and under 30 seconds on UA-cam..
@@stroberies Yep. Those videos have different rules. Usually it's about half of the watchtime of those shorter videos. UA-cam shorts probably count after a few seconds, but im not sure.
I once watched a 4 hour long video of a fractal without looking away from the screen. Acid is wild man.
"I know that some might disagree with this conclusion- there you are-" and then highlighting the very low part of the "Percentage of Guests" graph was very funny and underappreciated
It was so shady 😂
😅😅😅😅😅😅😮😅😅
As a former attractions cast member I will always miss the paper fastpasses, purely because I used to steal whole stacks of them and discreetly give them to families in standby when I visited the parks on my days off lol. I also used to give them to kids who were scared to ride the bigger attractions as a reward for being brave, or to any guest I saw being really courteous and kind. When mymagic+ rolled around guests honestly started getting really mean and impatient about the whole thing.
I had time for my leaders would just hand me a stack of fast passes and told me to go out and make magic. I really Hate that CM can’t do that anymore
Tbh Disney seemed so much more laid back and spontaneous overall back in the 2000's during the era of paper fast pass, now everything is structured like you're practically planning an invasion when you just wanna enjoy a day at the park. It feels like a competition just to get on the rides you want to, while it is a good system for people who really like to plan ahead, if you're a local that just wants to go there on the weekend or like after work, then not so much
@@fireisfire95 you are not kidding, this made me never want to go to Disney so i don't have to deal with such BS.
@@fireisfire95 local? Why do I have to fully structure a vacation though? Like, that honestly takes a LOT of work (hence the entire industry of planners and bloggers, etc.) but man… I can’t stand it. I’m in VA, near Busch gardens and not far from Kings Dominion (where I used to work!) and while those parks have a completely different vibe and no fast passes, it still completely boggles my mind that Disney, as excellent as it is, is still just a theme park. And people should be able to enjoy it as such.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go watch 1961’s 101 Dalmatians…
You truly are the same kind of god-tier person as the McDonald's employees who sneak extra nuggets into the boxes.
Just finished the new Jenny Nicholson video and it gave me a craving to rewatch this one. Modern Disney is literally cannibalizing itself and its a shame but damn if it doesn't make for good web documentaries
Yeah watching an shit show is always better than glowing reviews
It's fascinating watching how capitalism's requirement to not just to succeed, but to *grow* in profits every quarter (because stock value is the primary issue) causes an endless squeezing of the end customer until they've finally had enough.
Disney has built up so much Goodwill about providing incredible experiences that they have had a very far to fall to get to the point where customers will reject them. And people will do most anything for their kids.
Yet the endless squeeze has made the consumer experience worse and worse while constantly making it more expensive and less appealing. I can't imagine saving so much for an experience and having so many issues with it.
Literally an IRL Global Tetrahedron
@@davii2663 That's totally not a toxic, mentally draining mindset.
Disney’s evolution of its fastpass system feels like someone trying to quench their thirst with sea water
Or an urban planner attempting to solve the traffic problems of their city by endlessly adding more lanes to a freeway.
Or a nation trying to solve its poverty problem by printing alot of money.
@@drakep.5857 They aren't printing money to solve the poverty problem. It's a means to prop up the system that funnels money to the ruling class
@@inefffable oh yeah I agree, I'm a socialist and yeah that's true, just thought it was a funny example
@@drakep.5857 What kind of Socialist?
Ah, I see you decided to recreate Rollercoaster Tycoon to solve your issue. Good choice.
Ayyyyy huggbees
Huggbees has appeared
When do we get to see your voiceover version of this video? ;-p
Kind of surprised to see so many familiar faces were also interested in queues...
Are you ready to do a 100 Minute "An Actual Complicated History"?
Someone in a Disney world line could watch this whole video and not be on the ride yet
that's what i did lmao
@@swirlingsun was flight of passage fun at least Buddy
Did you enjoy Rise of Resistance
@@swirlingsun hope you get to ride Hagrid's Motorbike Adventure soon
not disappointed in this reply section
I've watched this video as background noise maybe four times and every single time the shapeland reveal makes me say "god that's such a cool reveal"
Are you me?!?
Saaaame
It really is darkly ironic that one of the best-known roles of Robin Williams, a man who sued Disney for using his image without his consent for marketing, is now the face of an exploitative app which charges $15 a pop to skip lines, after a free system which did basically the same thing for everyone was replaced by inherently the same system - but worse enough to 'necessitate' this new app to some people in the first place.
Seconding your sentiments of disdain for the misuse of Robin Williams' image, I suspect that he'd be rolling in his grave enough to power all the Disneylands combined if he was even made aware of any of this.
I was about to comment the same thing. He'd be rolling over in his grave.
That's exploitative capitalism for you. Putting profit over everyone
Well, that marketing was for the movie specifically as I understand it. He didn’t want him/Genie to be the main marketing of the movie. But I get the sentiment of the post regardless.
They could have named the app after any helpful Disney sidekick too. So preverse
This guy just talked about waiting lines for 1 hour and 40 minutes and I listen to him from stat to finish, mad respect
Bruh somebody could watch this whole video in a disney world line and still be in said line after the end of the video.
@@gilbert3672 And needing a piss.
Pshh once in a lifetime watcher? Shoulda utilized youtube's 1.75 FastPass
Pretty much yeah
Use fast forward like fast pass 🤷🏽♀️
Was at Disneyland earlier this month. The queue for Radiator Springs Racers was 75 minutes. The genie pass system wasn't availiable because the ride had temporarily closed earlier in the day. So our group decided 75 minutes would probably be worth it. At the same time, Disney offered a $21 fast pass to cut the wait time down to 30 minutes. Because of the influx of people buying the fast pass, the actual time we waited in line was 2 hours and 20 minutes. This led to many moments of exitential crisis. Do we leave the line? No, we are already too committed. Should we have just paid more money to ride one ride? Where are the mid-queue wait time clocks? How big of suckers are we?
It wasn't pleasent. The ride was fun when we got on it, but it was NOT worth the wait and mental strain.
lol, this is a great story. if you went to the parks before 2010, there truly was a sense of magic in the air. Kids thought they were in a Disney movie and parents got to experience is vicariously through their child. The focus of Disney on, not JUST making money, but making AS MUCH money as possible has truly decreased the magic of the parks. Imagine telling Walt this story. he would have a heart attack!
@@ConnorEverything1997 I would love to see a system in place that, more or less, garuntees your wait time if you choose the standby line. We definitely felt cheated for time when it was an additional hour and 5 minutes wait. We could have enjoyed ourselves elsewhere in the park had we not been inadvertently duped.
I love the parks, but I'll be thinking a little harder on my decision to go back anytime soon.
🤙Take it easy
We went to epcot and waited in the line for ratatouillee for 2 HOURS. We went to universal studios island of adventure and was on a roller coaster 5 minutes after we arrived, with no fast pass.
That sounds exactly like the last time me and my family went to Disneyland tho the reason why the standby line was so slow was they were letting 20 lightning people to 1-4 standby.
@@seeaddy001i remember getting to universal when they opened, and rode the hull ride 4 times in a row before there was even a wait by the time i circled around
The reveal at 1:15:27 was a more impactful twist than any movie I've watched in the past decade. I don't even care about the content of that reveal that much, but the delivery and the music made my jaw drop. AMAZING execution
Every Rollercoaster Tycoon player knows that all it takes to solve long queues is to have TVs lining every square meter of the wait area and a cast member in a panda costume stumbling around. That will magically make guests willing to wait for literal eons.
Disney will never learn 😢 I liked the Tiger personally 🐯
Oh boy you make me laugh out loud
I mean that's probably not a bad idea for alot of people these days, just have screens scrolling endlessly through tiktok 😂
Thank you for that core memory, lol
@@Ekrooool I'd rather die, tysm. 😊
I think the most important thing he says is when he points out that the original system was designed by operations, people who are trying to make the park work better, while Fastpass+ was designed by marketing, people who are trying to ring the most money possible out of the people who go to the park with no regard for what it will do to the whole experience. Truly a masterpiece video essay, with one of the most solid conclusions I've ever seen.
I wholeheartedly agree!
Sometimes a pair of fresh eyes helps with things. 🤷♀️ The first way was designed to deceit people because it was to "hide the line from sight" so idk why you're trying to make it seem like marketing is such an evil department lol I was in operations at first at my company and any department in the corporate would can have bad characteristics.
@@secretlyamazing ya but marketing is always evil and also a very much waste of money
@@secretlyamazing Chris' comment was pretty neutral regarding operations. It's pretty common knowledge that marketing tends to not understand what the fuck is going on in the thick of it - they're literally there to ONLY make money. Operations understands what's going on and while, yes, is trying to make money... they're doing it efficiently lol.
What gets me is the blatant lying. Makes you wonder what else Disney has lied about to make it seem like Captain Marvel box office numbers things are going as planned and everyone is happy
The cut at 57:53 may be the greatest edit in any Defunctland video. Can you please sell merch that just says: "Everybody wants to ride The Triangle." With a picture of The Triangle.
I knew it was coming the moment he said someone would have to pay an industrial engineer, but it didn't lessen the excitement at all when the cut happened
i will buy that shirt
How about "I paid an industrial engineer to create a complex computer simulation of a theme park populated with agents, all with unique preferences, riding attractions of varying capacities in order to compare and contrast wait times, number of rides ridden, and other factors with and without a virtual queue system and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."
I would absolutely buy that shirt
I want to ride the octagon 39 times!!!!
"Hide-the-queue" is definitely the most insidious strategy lmao, especially if you haven't ridden the ride before. I remember waiting for the Spiderman ride at Universal Studios. The que started snaking outside. You think "oh it must not be that long of a wait" even with it only going a little bit outside. Then you're inside. Must not be long now then, only you enter another room. Then you keep waiting and finally enter...another room. Every room had snaking queues. Repeat like 4 times.
The Shape Land plot twist blew my mind. An extremely well made documentary!
Same! I was like, "Holy s**t!" and started clapping lol
Is that you Eddie "Eddache" Boley?
UA-cam needs a way to mark spoilers. lol.
I don't understand half the data blabbering and even I was like "No way...!!"
"You want the truth?! THERE IS NO FRIDGE!"
I was a data analyst for Disney during the fastpass+ era and into the pandemic. All I can say is this video blew me away and made sense of so many different experiences I had while there. Incredible work!
If you're open to sharing, what kind of data were you analyzing?
Wait, so you were a data analyst and you didn’t ALREADY understand all this?? What the fuck were you even doing?
@@Supermoneygang12 Because Disney only has one data analyst at all times that has to analyze and understand all data one of the largest companies in the world collects.
@@Supermoneygang12 As someone who is not that guy but is in an adjacent field (operations analysis), there's a shit ton of data in the modern world. Studies these days tend to be fairly narrowly focused. I doubt they'd be interested in re-litigating the effects of fastpass+ after they already implemented it, since they're not going to care unless they're considering removing it, which wouldn't be on the table considering how expensive and ingrained the system has become. Should they know if their system sucks and is making everyone's experience worse? Yes. Will they actually be willing to pay someone who might tell them that their system sucks? No.
Especially in a company as cutthroat as Disney, no director is going to greenlight a study that might prove they wasted a billion dollars. The sunk cost is too great to consider removing it, and even if the study never sees the light of day the risk of that information leaking to investors or executives is too much. They're more likely to care about things like "how would the addition of another attraction affect toy sales?" or "how is sales affected by rides that exit into gift shops compared to rides that exit adjacent to gift shops?".
Of course, all this is assuming I even fully understand what kind of work they do, which is a pretty massive assumption. As in most fields, there tends to be a lot of variety when you get into specifics, so I might be projecting my experiences (mostly working with simulations) against somebody who may well be doing completely different work.
@@Supermoneygang12 To give the guy a break, he probably wasn't a data analyst specifically for queuing or wait times. Id imagine there is a ton of different things disney would want data collected and collated for and he probably just wasnt on this field
Growing up at Disney parks I’ve always been in the “It’s your own fault for not educating yourself before coming…” camp, until Ratatouille opened at EPCOT and I watched family after family of international guests be turned away because there was no standby line AT ALL at first; there was ONLY a virtual queue. And by the time they found that out, there were no more available times for the day. That was awful; and I felt so incredibly bad for all of them. It really made me rethink my standpoint.
Consider this: Having to educate yourself on how to game the system on a vacation seems unintuitive as fuck
That's like telling someone that they should've done their research on the best food to grab for value at a buffet before going, or telling someone that they should've done their research on which seats are the best in a stadium before buying tickets to a game. The idea that the average person should be min-maxxing their leisure time is fucking retarded, they might as well just take a stroll in an actual park for free by then.
I'm still in that camp to a degree. As much as the virtual queues system seems to not be fair, it also gives Disney a way to keep the queues for their newest and most popular rides manageable. Not every guest is going to have time to ride every single ride anyway, and while those families would've been able to ride it without a virtual queue, they also would've spent waaaaaaay more time in the queue. Before virtual queues, the waits for new attractions were into the 5-7 hour wait times. Even Disney, with their questionable decisions, isn't cruel enough to want their guests in a queue that long, especially when that means those guests are all jumbled out in regular park space. I think the virtual queue system has helped in a lot of ways and I also still believe that anyone planning a visit should know what to expect before they arrive. My second trip to WDW was completely different and so much better than my first trip because I chose to learn more about the things I failed to learn for my first trip. I fully regret not learning more about the parks and how to maximize for my first trip because I missed out on some great experiences and it was nobody's fault but mine. Disney is not hiding any info on how to have better experiences in their parks, so I honestly can't feel bad for people who don't do their research. Disney isn't cheap yet so many people could get more for what they're spending if they would simply do their research. With today's technology that creates the ability to have information so easily, there's no excuse for not knowing how to manage Disney's system.
@@basicleighdisney5643 It was the same for our two trips. Our second trip was 100% better because of what we learned (the hard way) on our first.
"It's always somebody's first visit" is usually the first thing park designers forget.
The fact that things were so complicated that people needed to make strategy guides for just how to get into lines for family theme park rides means there's a BIG problem.
"I loved the Kaiju subplot of the Defunctland Fastpass video."
I absolutely love 57:00 where it’s “You would need to pay an industrial engineer to create this complex simulation”
…..
“and I did just that”
I did the thing where you read a comment just as it is mentioned in the video
came down here in the comments to remark on just that - so funny & satisfying
Same here
I love how they went from “more fast pass is a bad idea” to “fuck it, fast pass on bathrooms” in record time
@@emperorgeorgethefirst674 You want to go to Universal?
@@MovieFan1912 if it means not having to deal with Disney’s nickel and diming, I think I can suffer through JK Rowling’s TERF-o-verse at universal
Almost like they took the fastpass on that line of logic
@@harrylane4 This is the best way somebody has ever described Harry Potter land.
Fr
Your ability to keep me engaged for hours about subjects I don’t care about at all is truly amazing.
You could say it’s a fastpass to knowledge
Nah fr wtf
the way I GASPED when he revealed it was actually simulated off of Animal Kingdom
Erm ackshully it's only 1 hour and 42 minutes
I was just thinking the same thing!
Shout out to the mad lad that road the octagon 39 times in a row lmao
In the end it turns out, Disney's over complicated digital fast pass scheme did eventually cut down on wait times, by drastically reducing attendance to their parks.
And over charging on everything, pricing out the poor.
@@Enchie And the governor of the state scaring people away by being a creepy sociopath.
@@Enchieon the plus side, hooking Walt's rapidly spinning corpse up to a generator has saved them millions on power bills~
Thats why my family wont go and sadly once I have a family of my own I wont either if they keep it up
So if attendance is down... There's no real benefit in buying in!
The amount of time and energy to create this video is mind-boggling
Imagine all the rides he could have gone on in that time!
@@williamdrake65 1!
The amount of time and energy dedicated to "amusement parks" is mind boogling.
there are a lot of videos like this my friend
you may want to do some digging
@@UA-camPizzer But he paid someone to create an entire simulation
This does not make Disney sound like a vacation. It makes it seem like a stressful planning trip.
Seriously. I never went to Disneyland as a kid, and as an adult, it seems too expensive and overwhelming to consider
honestly it is. i went to WDW in june of this year and it was stressful having to plan our whole day. My sister had some experience with it so she had to wake up super early to reserve for rides in the genie. We were park hoping and we couldn’t ride some of the rides cuz they broke down and our reservation times were pushed hours later when we would be at a different park. I get the appeal if ur going for multiple days or staying at the resorts but for me it was just stressful.
32:22 Hearing the xPass philosophy of "guaranteeing that guests will be able to eat at their favorite restaurants and ride their favorite attractions" is like foreshadowing. You can already see how the system they're trying to invent will be favoring those visiting the parks often, because the once in a lifetime vacationers don't *have* favorites, because they've never been there before
Exactly. One of my friends told me he went to Disneyland with his kids and said they did everything. Paid for genie+ and lightning lane and everything. Like, of course they did. They don’t go to the park every week/month. They’re once in a life time vacationers.
ua-cam.com/video/0twDETh6QaI/v-deo.html
I'm glad i decided to watch this again because the ending was like an m night syhamalan twist.
@@SMA2343 that’s actually set up correctly at Disneyland, where you can’t start claiming lightning lanes until you’re in the park. At Disney World you can claim your first few at 7am. Just went to Disneyland. I actually like it better than WDW, never thought I’d feel that way about it either.
@@williamfryman4360 It also helps that many rides at Disneyland do not offer Lightning Lane, so Standby always moves (Jungle Cruise and Pirate alone show the difference between Disneyland and WDW with how adding LL to a ride that really does not need it, makes the wait increase absurdly) and yes, Genie+ is better implemented on Disneyland.
Also, this video contains one of my favorite cinematic twists of the last five years:
"It'd take an industrial engineer to run an accurate simulation of the effects FastPass had on Disney parks."
"Oh, by the way, I hired an industrial engineer to run an accurate simulation of the effects FastPass had on Disney parks."
"Because shapeland is actually Animal Kingdom"
second to him revealing that shapeland is actually animal kingdom
@@cononodapotato6920 Exactly
As he was explaining it I was laughing so hard because I KNEW it’d end up with that twist.
@@lucasgarcia9330 this gave me chills lol
"And someone figured out how to do 39 rides in one day." Flashbacks to when my cousin and I went to Great America and rode the Drop Tower Zone 36 times in a row. By the time we went home, I was just experiencing a continuous, faint falling sensation.
Six flags is honestly way more enjoyable
-more teen & adult oriented rides
-cheaper
-less stressful
-more stuff to do
@@SenhorKoringasix flags is a wasteland and dying lol. I wouldn’t wanna go to Disney but lucky that kings island is closer ish to me (haven’t been in a decade lol)
what do you mean drop tower zone its just drop tower?
@@zanderandrus7074 It used to be called the Drop Zone and has been renamed some variation of Drop Tower/Zone/etc over the years.
That reminds me of the time I went to Busch Gardens and rode the park train for like 20 laps in a row because I thought it was cool. So I'm probably that guy that rode the octagon.
This topic is so interesting for one reason; it is inherently anti-consumer to not have an earmark for value (E tickets, wait times, fast passes, etc.), yet in the actual reality of SPECIFICALLY amusement/theme park ride wait times, the less the customer knows what is worth the wait, the shorter the wait is for EVERYONE in the park, and the greater the hourly capacity of the most sought after experiences, therefore an overall better (and by some definitions more pro-consumer) experience. Fascinating
Anti-Consumer is the Late-Stage Capitalist endgoal. It's unlimited profits from being the most classist and discriminatory you can be with your service. The whales spend uncritically while the peasants are left to miss out or scrimp and save what little they get for a single experience where they get nickel & dimed at every turn
I think this happens because information simply being available doesn't actually resolve the disparity between the access different groups have to said information. The hurdles of computer literacy and cultural barriers across continents still exist even if you have a page that publishes all the info - and that alone creates enough of a barrier to ruin someone's vacation before it begins. And to an extent, FastPass+ seems to have been reliant on this disparity. It separates guests in a way that feels equitable to the in-group because they assume they are there purely due to their individual skill - and that lack of awareness of one's own privilege seems like a sadly familiar refrain to me.
Gods speed to that man who figured out how to ride 39 rides in one day
Not to that extent, but I have family that are those types of people and it really ruins the whole experience. It’s no longer fun, it becomes a task.
I remember going to a theme park meant you wake up at 6 am, get breakfast and you’re at the park in line as it opens. Then you can’t leave until it’s closing time and they’re forcing people out of the park.
@@rickyrobby8133 Yeah, I don't really see the point of speedrunning what's supposed to be vacation time.
@rickyrobby8133 Another way of looking at a high ride count: My brother and I loved the Dumbo ride at Disney World when we were very little and rode on it, like, 5 times. There wasn't a line so just continually getting to be on a ride was my strongest Disney park memory.
I don't think we could've done it over 20 times though. 😅
It was probably Triceratop Spin 39 times
@@snes90i had this experience going on splash mountain two or three times in a row and running through the empty queue area for the second two rides. It was minutes from closing
This video has given me a much greater appreciation and respect for my grandma, who under the convoluted genie+ system woke up every single day to get us on ALL the most sought out rides, even getting us on guardians of the galaxy twice. I knew it was kinda complicated, but now I know just how crazy of a feat that really was.
Now THAT'S a dedicated grandma.
!! absolutely dedicated !!
your granny is Amy from B99
Wow! Hats off to her.
Definitely all guests, employees, and management here are ideal candidates for the 'McDonalds experiment'. Somebody needs to work on that!
I expect the conclusion can be found before the experiment takes place... much like the one demonstrated in this video.
I'd never think to subject any member of my family to this brutal, hell-bound nonsense. I pity humans.
are we not gonna gasp in awe and clap that this guy literally paid an industrial engineer to simulate this
I mean I did (admittedly after laughing because I wasn't expecting it)
It was a pretty big move, then again this channel tends to make one video every 6 months or so. Also you could probably hire some college kid to do it for pretty cheap. It is still by far more time and effort put into a video than nearly any other channel would do.
No
when he said they would need to hire an engineer to create the computer system i was like “yeah it kind of sucks that probably wont happen…” and then my jaw dropped
@@JustaGuy_Gaming idk man, im an undergrad student of IE and our queueing theory syllabus contains some basic equation and windows xp software(we literally have to emulate the xp). Or maybe my college just sucks
"The fact that they... (are) only allowing guests to book passes the day of, seems to be a deliberate attempt to reduce the negative side effects caused by FastPass+."
Disney: returns to the reservation system, including the early reservations for those staying at Disney hotels, on July 24, 2024.
It seems to me that they preferred the monster when it was eating people.
Alledgedly, Disney is reimplementing the early reservations system *because guests complained* about not being able to hyper-plan their itinerary 2 million years before stepping foot on Florida soil.
So basically, the monster fuckers won.
“Some of you might disagree with this conclusion. There you are.” The single greatest play to have ever occurred in Disney discourse
I first learned how to properly look down on the poor when my family and I got paper fastpasses and a decent cardio workout at the break of dawn on disney day
seeing the data back this up gave me perverse satisfaction
@@asparagusoffice It does take a good amount of time & practice in order to properly look down on the poor. This is why old money families have disdain for new money and the "nouveau riche": an improper amount of expertise in looking down on poors.
Everybody’s talking about how well scripted this documentary is but can we talk about the score? It honestly made the video for me, after the content itself obviously
I had the same thought! And then I saw it's the same guy as the animations 👌🏼 👌🏼 👌🏼
What's score
@@CamohFN the music that plays over the video
Totally Agree with you, Man :)
especially when he revealed that shapeland was actually animal kingdom
54:59 I visited Disney in 2016 with a high school group, and this was the absolute worst part of my experience. I was in a group of 6-8 people, all with different ride desires and preferences, but all required to stick together. Because we were high schoolers, none of us had done any real planning beforehand. So to get the fast passes we wanted, we would have to spend so much time refreshing the app in hopes that enough slots would open up and that we could snag them in time.
Nothing says the most magical place on earth like staring at your phone screen in the middle of a hot Florida swamp, repeatedly refreshing an app like a lab rat in a psychological experiment in hopes of maybe getting a fast pass for the group
we went in this too but i usually did my best to sneak by the disney band pillar. the one time i didn't want to (safari in animal kingdom) i got absolutely reamed by the chaperones because i waited for the group at the end of the ride. it was so unnecessarily stressful.
I visited Disneyland in 2022 on a band trip and I have to say things worked out pretty well with Genie+. I just got everybody in my group on my account (each paid me the $20) and we got on pretty much all the big attractions at both parks in one day
I had the high school band/choir trips experiences too-- but from 1996-2000. There would always be these huge discussions over waiting in line for 2+ hours for Splash Mountain, because especially back then if we had only one day at the Park, that long of a wait took a gigantic chunk out of our day and I was always part of the group that voted against that long of a wait time.
But we were required to stay in groups, so there were several times I had to stay standing in those 2-3 hour lines with my group even though I'd much rather search for Hidden Mickeys or explore around the Park 😅 We would snack in line, read, study our maps, play trivia, take a couple photos (but not TOO many or else we would risk using up all our film-- can't pay for expensive film at the Park!!), or talk about Hidden Mickeys (no cell phones yet, only a few kids had pagers).
By Senior year though, I had a couple friends who actually also preferred not staying in those long lines, and we had a blast together instead of waiting in the long lines ❤😊 We would look for Hidden Mickeys, check out the shops, live shows, bands, find special snacks, go to Tom Sawyer's Island, look for Characters, get pressed pennies and the Pieces of Eight coins, and chat with Cast Members about cool Disney trivia 😀
surely you knew before you went you would spend the majority of your day waiting in queues? i dont see the appeal in the first place, honestly
@@anovemberstar Oh cool, I’m enlightened. So next time I’m with a large group that goes to Disney I’ll just decide not to participate because it’s not worth it
Took my mom and brother to disneyland and at around 6pm we decided to go on Smuggler's Run standby as it was only a 30 minute wait. We said, shoot why not, it's got AC in there and we wanna go on it.
45 minutes later and we hadnt moved from a spot we have stood for 30 minutes, and i knew the queue had another 30 minutes ahead of us. They literally implemented the 100:1 on us when there was no reason whatsoever to do so. they would just keep letting any random fastpass user in and were waiting for them to show up so to not let us standby users on.
It was quite honestly the most disgusting display of Disney mismanagement.
If you have to plan literally a month in advance to be able to ride a ride in a park, then perhaps the problem is not with the wait times, but rather the park itself letting in way too many people out of greed.
Agreed. But at this point, fuck Disney and their greed machine it’s become.
Thank You!
Selling too many Annual Passes!
Selling too many Admission Tickets!
And raising the price of 1 Day Admission to the equivalent (or more than the) cost of a Knott's Berry Farm / Cedar Fair Pass!
The thing is people would then complain they can’t get in when they are taking their vacation
The only way to reduce demand to enter the park is to raise prices.
Did you even watch the video?
@@bobguy6542 You could always ignore demand altogether though.
This video was worth the wait!
Man, all my favorite youtubers watch this channel.
Rt fancy seeing u here
Why is there a bunch of you tubers commenting on this video
Didn’t expect you here
Crossover of the century
I was a once in a lifetime guest in 2013. I was in marching band and our school was invited to perform in a band contest. I developed a strategy that worked better than fast pass or genie or anything else ever could. I call it the “Wait For The Big Fireworks Show To Start, Then Break The Buddy System Rule and Ride Pirates, Haunted Mansion, and Thunder Mountain All By Yourself When There’s Nobody There” strategy. Worked like a charm.
Now that you've talked about it, Mousecorp is probably going to find a way to break that.
@@andyjay729fireworks are only viewable with paid access
@@andyjay729I don’t think they can direct people not to go to the epic fireworks haha xD
Haha we do it too
This is a great strategy even as of last week when I myself was there! Granted used to be people would leave after said big fireworks show…now the power of Mickey’s imagination drags like 20k people to Main Street only to send them right back in when it’s all over! At 10:00 it’s time to go home because the rides get long again. 😅
This is a such a great video for UX designers. Talks about testing, research, and the evolution and constraints each team had to face. But it's also great because shows the disconnect between executives and actual people trying to implement it.
I love how the video gets more and more frantic and flabbergasted as the absolutely lovecraftian horror of Fastpass+ gets bigger and bigger and swallows everything in its path. I was actually on the edge of my seat watching a documentary about a goddamn line skipping system at a theme park whose mascot is a talking rat
Same! The vid whipped me through its twists and turns harder than the rides it simulated the wait for! Of note the shapeland and covid twists got me bad
Sure, blame everything on Ricky Rat.
I dont think you know what the word "lovecraftian" means
@@christianfaux736 I don't know -- there have been times I've felt the cold, cruel, unfathomable cosmos, indifferent to the plight of men, in those standby lines.
he isnt a rat hes a mouse
As someone who’s only ever really attended, smaller, local-ish theme parks in my life, these multi-hour wait times are blowing my mind. The most I’ve had to wait for a ride was probably about 30 minutes. Fucking 4 hours for an avatar themed ride? How could that in any way be worth it?
And all the over planning. No just seeing a fun looking ride and wanting to try it, no you need your whole trip planned a month in advance.
As the video sorta highlights, there's definitely a psychological difference in a person's perception of lining up in a switchback queue for a roller coaster at a regional park vs. lining up for an indoor attraction at Disney or Universal. When the queue's outside and completely visible to those outside the attraction, like most queues are at smaller theme parks, anyone entering a long queue is fully aware that they're probably going to be stuck standing in the sun and staring at their phones because there's nothing interesting to look at. Meanwhile, Disney obscures and themes their queues to give guests the idea that the queue is part of an "experience" that extends beyond the ride itself, so guests feel willing to devote more time and effort
The difference is most people don't/can't go to Disney for just a weekend or something, so if there is something they don't do, there's a high chance they will never get to do said thing if they don't do it then. You also have to book a hotel, airfare, park entry, food, transportation to the park, so is quite expensive if you don't live nearby. Also, even a week is barely enough to time to do most things, as there are 4-5 different parks, all of which take a day to do majority of the attractions.
Whereas with smaller theme parks such as like a Six Flags, its much cheaper for the most part, and people aren't traveling from all over the world to go to it, so there are just less people there in general and people can afford to go back some other weekend if they really want to.
That’s the neat thing: It’s not worth it. At all.
As for someone who sets time aside in advance I would not set more than 2 hours for theme park. Sorry but as much as theme parks are fun I want to do other things in my day too. For 2 hours a day theme park is nice addition to other things but anything more it becomes way less fun.
It's just like chocolate. First few pieces are most delicious and enjoyable..but as you are getting full it gets less and less fun from each bite. You don't enjoy it as much as you did on first bite. So yeaa you gotta find other activity instead of keep eating chocolate.
Same is with theme park. Take a taste, spend rest of the day on other activities. If you can't do 3 activities within 2 hours in theme park you're not really living your life. It blows my mind ppl would wait for 4 hours for one attraction. Nuts. I would not wait 4 hours for anything no matter how much I love. I have enough self respect for that.
Honestly props to the one dot who managed to do 39 rides in a day
Also the plot twist of Shapeland actually being Animal Kingdom may be history's greatest plot twist
With the OG FP , grab a fast pass then get in the standby and then use the fast pass to get a shorter line for the second ride.
Maybe that was a make-a-wish kid or something
Dammit edit the comment so it doesn't spoil it for people
that one dot be like
ua-cam.com/video/uizzVAltUWw/v-deo.html
@@bread_dawg imagine getting spoiled in the comments, looks like we don’t have to
I won't lie, I've probably watched this video over 25 times. Possibly more. I know part of it is because Kevin is great at narrating, but I cannot explain what about this video is so captivating to me that makes it an absolute dopamine factory for my ADHD. I've had lots of hours of productive knitting while listening to this, so thank you!
"It was like a MAGIC WRISTBAND! So naturally they called it
Experience Band."
I laughed way too hard.
1.5k likes but no comments. Weird
It's a testament to Kevin's skill as a content creator that he somehow made an hour and 40 minute long video about the science of waiting in line... not just interesting, but _really_ interesting.
Good stuff, Kevin.
It was definitely much more interesting than waiting in line at Splash Mountain for the 3rd time, that's for sure 😂
alot of his content is very neich but super interesting if you like sociel pyscology. theme parks are kind of the opposite of psychological warfare or rather its pysc warfare used to make people HAPPYER. but still the same tactics.
Most of which isn't even true. There's a lot more to this story than "fast pass".
its not about waiting in line, it's about Disney fast pass which is already an interesting topic.
I wonder if this comment calling Kevin a "content creator" was one he was thinking about while writing his new video.
Four biggest takeaways:
1. Disney created Covid-19
2. Disney took away UA-cam dislike button
3. Shapeland is Animal Kingdom
4. Bathrooms may require FastPass in the future
The Dillons live simple and common lives, and it was rewarded
Rise up and seize the means of Triangle brothers!
I just left Disney a couple weeks ago. So much Covid.
Disney keeps a monster in a cage somewhere in the park
Bingo
I am a queueing theory researcher, and I absolutely love this video. It's a great introduction to so many interesting aspects of the topic! Queueing is one of those behind the scenes quests of a big operation, and it's so rare to see it explains and popularized.
Thank you and well done!
Did I think I would be watching a movie length video on amusement park wait times today? Nope. Yet here I am, enjoying every minute of it.
You could watch this in queue and still finish this video first.
TBH I love this sort of high-quality niche-subject long form content. But The Algorithm keeps pushing "#short"s at me. (If I wanted tik-tok I'd be using tik-tok.)
My fav UA-cam video right now no lie ua-cam.com/video/cc05a_tdrsU/v-deo.html
Oh shit didn't realise it was almost 2 hours
TBH, if I hadn't gone to read the comments to see other people's opinions on this, and seen your comment, I might not have noticed until at least 20 minutes when my brain would begin to wonder "Hey, isn't one of the videos I normally watch usually done by now?". I hypothesize that the quality would've kept me from noticing the time flying past, if it weren't for my own self-imposed interruption.
Can we just appreciate the soundtrack within this video that Kevin has made himself, like he not only creates this 2-hour masterpiece, but he also forges a soundtrack that doesn't really impede on the overall viewer experience while enhancing the experience at the same time
i know right?!
At 39:30 he played a banger of a song, If Only I Was A Poet by Staffan Carlen!
I'm still recovering from the Vaporwave Twilight Zone Mic Drop actually
This surpasses "video essay" and crosses into "PhD-level video dissertation". Well done!
There's no fundamental difference between researching and presenting for a PhD and researching and presenting without concern for a PhD.
@@cm01 Not really true, a dissertation is typically expected to contribute something new, whereas a thesis for example can just be a compilation of existing information.
@@okaydetar821 there's nothing about not perusing a PhD that disqualifies someone from offering new information
@@cm01 But there is something about pursuing a phD that requires it, meaning this wouldn't qualify as a dissertation for a PhD
These documentaries are so good and informative, that when Kevin hits you with a joke or comedic remark out of nowhere, it HITS.
This was more fun and informative than some semester long classes I took in college. Superbly made.
I didn't expect a random RogersBase comment while scrolling through here lol but you do like Disney
Obviously a video would be more fun than a semester long class
@@ArroganceClause Yup. I would absolutely hate this topic stretched over an entire semester class.
I was this man’s suitemate freshmen year in college. Always grinding always improving. Nothing but respect-congrats on 1mil!
oh really? This was better than college writing? Who would have guessed
When I went to Disneyland in 2005, for some reason the return window wait time for Thunder Mountain was INCREDIBLY short. So we were basically getting a fastpass, riding the ride, and then immediately getting another fastpass which said we could go back on ride within 5-10 minutes. It was the greatest. Ended up riding it like 7 times.
when i went to DCA for gradnite in 2018, my group did the same thing for Grizzly River Run. Rode it several times and I still have the fastpass cards
TBH, I went to disneyland in 2000 or so and we stayed at the Disneyland Hotel, and my sister and I got up as early as possible and rode the monorail over and then rode Space Mountain like ten times in a row and there was no one there. XD
I think maybe because thunder mountain is so fast? Because I noticed that too last time I went. My memory is a little hazy because it was 2007 and I was pretty young, but I remember dragging my parents back and forth between thunder mountain and splash mountain maybe 8 times during extra magic hours
I did that at WDW with Space Mountain. God bless the era when the Not so scary Halloween party was sort of a secret that was affordable.
@@NanaShaCrash damn your account is old
This is the best Disney movie I've seen this year. There's a perplexing backstory, great action, extreme conflict, thrilling suspense AND a shocking twist! A must see for anyone!
I know that you're joking but
You're also very right haha
This isn't even a joke. It's just true.
Mousekers at Walt Disney world and Disneyland before New 1977 new 70s part of the same time years before New Disney classic New Disneyland Disney classic Disney plus on multiple different ways Disneyland before making maze bank tower of power outage map and pay pal made into store story 70s 80s before
idk the corona twist was too convenient for the plot tbh
Yes.
I'm such a python data nerd. The instant he started talking about the simulation, I was thinking about how it would be a simple, but monotonous python notebook. I got a little more excited than I probably should have when he started showing off the notebook, lol.
Also, the reveal of shapeland being a real park was a nice touch.
“A powerful rat named Charles Entertainment Cheese” walked so “because Shapeland is actually Animal Kingdom” could run.
plot twist of the fucking century man i was downright flabbergasted
A powerful rat... named...
Meisner.
"I love you"
SPOILERS
Immediately o
I was shocked!!!
Dude I was so excited to hear the story of the Dillons.
same 💀
I demand a video about the Dillons! Defunctland? No, this is now Dillonland!
I was getting ready for a story about how the Dillons were some secret, influential family, and stuff like this happened all the time.
Oh shit MAX! You're back!?
Genuinely thought there some dark secret behind them or what happened afterwards
okay but the opening sentence, "how much do you know abt lines?" followed by those fun little sounds still just gets me so excited and ive watched this video multiple times.
I like to say that phrase right before showing someone this video, as though it's a direct threat of education and existential horror
Fr. This is my favorite opening to any video ever. Sometimes I come back just to listen to that.
SAME I think about it so often
SO TRUE I LOVE THE INTRO
I heard something that reminded me of those fun little sounds, and after 2 days of listening to just the intro here I watched the full video again
Disney's actual problem, it seems, is that their attendance is far in excess of their ability to handle. Optimize it how you will, there's only two real solutions: increase ride capacity, or reduce attendance.
Right? Like, after you've optimized out the negative wait times, every additional person -- by necessity -- has to increase wait times overall. You can't cheat that anymore than you can cheat physics.
Very true. Lots of people have too much disposable income for their own good.
My husband's best friend used to work at Disney and my husband drove him to work everyday. This was during the '08 recession, so hubby was unemployed and decided to spend his days wandering Disneyland thanks to free tickets from said friend.
In the 3 months he was looking for work, my husband rode every ride, did every activity and mapped every stall, alley, and cast member closet. So when we started dating and I told him that I had never been to Disneyland, I got the most detailed, crafted ride experience from what might has well have been Walt Disney himself.
Cast members recognized him and greeted him by name. He knew the standard detour routes around construction. No joke-- we got separated, I texted him "I don't know where I am. Everything is brown" and he found me 2 minutes later.
When we went to Orlando, his experience was still relevant enough that we only missed one thing we wanted because it happened to have closed early that day.
This is ALL to say, I had a great time with the system, but Disney basically gave me a personalized tour guide with enough experience to know the best route to avoid the sun in California Adventure because he once spent a day following around the maintenance crew. Probably not worth the investment.
I love it when people not only have incredibly extensive and detailed knowledge on one niche thing, but get to use that knowledge for harmless pleasant things. :>
NGL, rich people would probably pay your husband a lot of money to tour them around the park for the day.
@@MillyLou yup hundred percent profitable.
Cool. I was actually at Walt Disney World at the time. Loved Fast Pass
@@MillyLou that’s what the Disney tour guide is. It’s a human, Disney employee shaped super fastpass as well as an incredible tour.
It costs quite a bit of money.
I couldn't imagine I would be watching a 1h40 long documentary on Queing, it was a great journey.
Amazing video
Queue is just one letter with a bunch of others waiting behind it.
@@EDDIELANE damn
Shadoune que haces acá
@@ariehamm241 damn, indeed
@@EDDIELANE Mind = blown
“Allowing people to interact with strangers, back when people were into that kinda thing”
Great line
8:12
Heh, "Great Line" I see what you did there
I just had my first visit to disney and this happened to me all of one time and it was during the rise of the resistance which i wanna say was 90 minute wait
@@Whistlingduckpro what did he do ? 😀
Still don't like lines.
this video took me from "damn, i wish amusement parks in finland had fastpass" to "damn, i'm so happy amusement parks in finland don't have fastpass" very fast
Back before Fastpass was implemented, I visited Disneyworld with my great grandmother. She was going to wait for me at the exit to the Tower of Terror, and I didn’t see her when I got off the ride, so I figured I’d ride again (I was like 10 or 11). After about a dozen rides or so, I see park security waiting at the exit, and they pull me aside and take me to a security office where my grandmother was waiting.
She was stressed as hell, but I got to ride Tower of Terror like a dozen times in a row, lol. From what I remember, the wait wasn’t any longer than the actual ride was, so I basically kept circling back through and jumping back on. After a few rides the attendants started recognizing me and welcoming me back to the “hotel”, lol.
"holy shit this kid *really* likes Tower of Terror"
Now that's good hotel services 😂
ayyy we found the octagon guy
I did this at the monsters inc ride at California adventure, Christmas day 2010(?) It was empty at 10 am and no one was going on it, my 4 year old sister liked it enough so my mom put up with us going on it god knows how many times before the crowds came in.
As someone who has been on that ride, i have no idea why anyone would go on it more tha once IN THEIR WHOLE LIFE but hey, at least ya had fun
Best video of the year! Absolutely worth the wait.
I agree! Can't believe fast pass is now defunct, such a meaty video to dig into.
Wait, is that the magical Toaster man who buys two of everything?!
The streams of my subscriptions are crossing 😧
As an eastern european man who has to work hard the idea of wasting time in DisneyLand still disgusts me. Do Americans really?
Nice to see you, Mr. Epcot Mug Man.
"Laval felt that the system should be free and available to all visitors so as not to create different classes of park guests."
This summarizes in one sentence why I feel the Genie+ system is problematic and insulting.
Really interesting video!
Hahahahahah so true
Shows the evolution of the corperate culture very well.
And yet, when Disney launched MyMagic+, the Magic Band and FastPass+, that’s EXACTLY what they ended up doing! Even though FP+ didn’t cost money, the fact that the system favored people who had hotel reservations ended up creating the different classes of park guests Laval wanted to prevent back the late 90’s!
At the end of the day, Genie+ is a better system than what FP+ tried to be, but not as good as the original FP was. My 2017 trip to WDW was an absolute nightmare (specially at Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom due to that preferred 60 day window), meanwhile my latest trip (first one to Disneyland) was smoother with Genie+ and only waited 1 hour max at both Rise and Runaway Railway in standby.
you are the problem, using words like that. how dare you.
Kevin: "How much do you know about lines?"
*me, having watched this video many times now*: "i like to think pretty well..."
I don't think my brain can comprehend that amount of effort that went into this video, my god. It's beautiful. The structure, the scripting, the animation, the DATA SCIENCE, it's all so so so well done. Incredible, truly. It's basically a master's level thesis on the subject.
Yup. I’m a Data Analyst (not a Data Scientist), but the analytical side of this was so intriguing!
Hey some guy here I too like numbers THE NUBERS
The dot-themed visuals create a better intro than 99.9% of major movies and series, with still a feature-length film ahead. Something tells me this will be an enjoyable ride.
Agreed. That combined with the music is such a clean, simple intro that's very compelling.
the dude with 39 attractions in a day had an enjoyable ride
The shapeland twist was absolutely phenomenal. Never expected it coming.
your pfp fits your comment perfectly. I loved the reveal too.
I was your profile pic too when I saw it.
I especially loved the dramatic change in the music as they drop the other shoe.
I felt so betrayed when he revealed it.
Do they give awards for scoring UA-cam videos?
Wow everyone. The response to video has been overwhelming. I appreciate everyone watching it and hope you enjoyed it. It was a labor of love. Due to popular demand, we have added two new shirts to our store. If you want to support our documentary efforts and also get some Shapeland merch, go to our store here to preorder: defunctland.myshopify.com/
The shapeland shirt looks great but I will not rest until I can buy a _Homosexual fast dancing_ one.
It shows it was a labor of love.
Many thanks for producing!
I'd love to see a t-shirt with "How much do you know about lines?" printed on the back of it. Imagine wearing that in the parks and the conversations it might spark. Hell maybe even QR code the video below it so that they can learn about it too while they wait.
@@GilesWells
Gotta be a big attraction for the whole video.
thank you for high quality content!
"...but didney's focus was on improving the guest experience and hoping that the money would come as a result."
i came here after watching jenny nicholson's star wars hotel video cos she mentioned the fastpass and wowee didney did a 180
I am literally blown away by how creators like you managed to produce such informative and entertaining content that rivals even the best documentary makers.
Probably comes down to passion if I have to guess.
Even better than some docs!
Never underestimate the obsession of a disney adult....or worse, a disgruntled disney adult.
35:36 absolutely baffled by the fact that a bunch of trained engineers and designers made a system that literally didnt work and instead of changing the system to work better, they changed the entire park to accommodate it.
It was clearly a divide between the engineer and corporate wing. They refused to scrap it or delay it when it didn't work, so they had to salvage any way they could to save their careers
thats because that was easier then explaining they just wasted 1 billion dollars
that sound like hella dedication though
very stupid, yet very dedicated idk
It was probably the corporate side that forced them to go in that direction
it's a very cis male thing for them to do
I wish I could express the un-ironic shock I felt when you said “shapeland is animal kingdom”. My jaw actually dropped and I audibly gasped
Exactly! I was like holy shit this is insane!
Yep same!
Spoilers...
I was working on Thanksgiving dinner and ended up with a mess on the floor from a dropped pot. I’m not easily surprised. That did it.
omg I was like WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!??
I love how every solution is basically: “Lie to your guests”