Mermaids in Pirates of the Caribbean (pics)

Pirates had a one-day refurb this week, during which new red lights were added to the queue, and a new mermaid skeleton was added to the beach. There are also bubbles and projections of underwater mermaids just before the beach, but those are hard to capture by photo.

Aren't those lanterns at the loading gates new?

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Kevin Yee is the author of numerous independent Disney books, including the popular Walt Disney World Earbook series and Walt Disney World Hidden History.

Queue modifications to Pirates of the Caribbean

The past few months have seen smaller construction walls in the queue for Pirates of the Caribbean. We didn't see if all the walls were down (on the right-side queue), but the end of the queue certainly is new. 

Gone is the boat in drydock, and now the two sides of the queue meet on a new walkway. There's a wooden divider so there are two sides, but there's also enough space to let people get by, so this is pretty clearly a "merge point" for the coming FASTPASS Plus. My guess is that the FPP users will enter the left side queue (it had no modifications) and breeze up to the merge point, then be directed either to keep going on this left side, or to join the right side. The standby users will be stuck in slow motion until this point, and the two loading zones will be post-merge.

I like the cannon balls embedded in the walls here; that's new. The whole crumbling look part is new, actually.

I've not heard if the right-side queue will be interactive at all, or just have new decorations to look at for the Standby users.

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Kevin Yee is the author of numerous independent Disney books, including the popular Walt Disney World Earbook series and Walt Disney World Hidden History.

Pirates of the Caribbean - queue construction

When a rumor surfaced recently that there may be a second interactive game in the Magic Kingdom beyond Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom (the new one is said to be Adventureland-specific and called "Pirates Adventure - Jewels of the Seven Seas), we had to look. What was new?

On our visit to find out, we saw that the queue has had several changes. Some show scenes are blocked off, and others are missing (though the chess-playing skeletons appear untouched). Maybe this is related?

It's possible, even likely, that the queue construction here has to do with FastPass Plus, the ride-reservations from home. Once that system goes into wide use, they will need FastPass (or the electric-only variation) on all the major attractions. Pirates won't get a "regular" FP system, I assume, and will instead be like Mansion, which has no paper FP but does have the electronic versions. If so, then the right-hand queue will become the Standby (interactive) queue, and the left side one will be for FastPass.

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Kevin Yee is the author of numerous independent Disney books, including the popular Walt Disney World Earbook series and Walt Disney World Hidden History.