Official site updated

Walt Disney World has updated it's official site, including its page for The Jungle Cruise. Notable updates from the previous version include more recent photos that include the currently-in-use boats rather than the classic striped-canopied originals that were still used in photos on the site up until last week, and a nifty sepia-toned newsreel style video promoting the attraction. Much as I prefer the original boats, it make more sense for the site to match what's currently on the attraction.

I think that the Disneyland version has stayed mostly the same, but I thought it used to rotate through a few photos, rather than just the static image of the sign. My memory might be foggy on that, though.

Merry Christmas from worldfamousjunglecruise.com

(Click to enlarge)

Merry Christmas from worldfamousjunglecruise.com and thanks for reading the site! We'll be back in 2009 with plenty of new fun and interesting updates. In the meantime, I hope your holidays are more fun than a campsite full of monkeys.

Tiny Jungle Cruise clip on WALL-E DVD

I was watching the extras on the three-disk edition of Wall-E the other day and was excited to see the entire documentary href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059955/">The Pixar Story included as an extra. I would've bought a DVD just of that! I feel OK saying that since it's too late now to take it away from me and make me buy a different edition.

Anyway, right near the end of the documentary, there is a very, very brief clip of John Lasseter performing on the Jungle Cruise when he returned to his old job for a day during Disneyland's 50th anniversary (more on Lasseter's Jungle Cruise background here). The clip is so quick that I don't think it's quite worth ripping and putting up on the site, but I'm glad to see the footage exitsts. Oh, how I'd love to get my mitts on it.

Anyway, here are a few screengrabs:

Now it can be told: Skipper Brodie's surprise sequel

The Year of a Million Dreams is finally coming to a close. I know lots of people are happy to see this particular marketing campaign ending, but I'm not one of them. From the imagination-capturing title to the ever-present possibility of winning a prize, I've found the whole idea a pretty fun gimmick. Sure, I never actually won one of the random prizes myself, but I've enjoyed seeing other people win their dream ears or riding the carousel with Mary Poppins.

Of course, it would also be hard to be bitter about not winning one of the random prizes after being named one of the winners of the Disney Dream Jobs, a tie-in competition within the Year of a Million Dreams campaign.

But that wasn't the only time The Year of a Million Dreams granted me a nice surprise. If it weren't for that campaign, there wouldn't have been a group of cast members called The Dream Squad tasked to dispense all those million dreams.

And if there hadn't been a Dream Squad, I might not have found myself - half a year away from the Dream Job event and on the opposite side of the country,surprised with a Dream Job sequel of sorts. It's a story I've been meaning to get around to for a while, but haven't shared with worldfamousjunglecruise.com's readers until now: Skipper Brodie's Christmas Sequel Surprise.

Taste the Adventure!

Your humble webskipper recently celebrated the anniversary of his birth. How old am I? Let's just say I'm 17 younger than The Jungle Cruise (also there's a non-too-subtle clue in the following piture). I'm not bringing it up so you send me presents, though. I just wanted to share this picture of the amazing Jungle Cruise cake my parents crafted for my family party:



Impossibly, it tasted as good as it looked.

Jungle Cruise movie docked?

A couple of months ago, Disney announced a bunch of their upcoming, high-profile movie projects. About the long-in-development Jungle Cruise movie? Not a peep.

But wait! Here's fresh word that Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the writers last specifically mentioned to be working on the JC movie, are now hard at work on... a Robotech movie.

So no one is coming right out and saying The Jungle Cruise movie is no longer happening, but it's starting to look that way. If not, it's almost certainly been put on the back burner.

What's YOUR favorite Jungle Cruise animal?

Disney has a special YouTube Channel for their theme parks and have just added this video in which they ask several Walt Disney World guests what animal on the Jungle Cruise is their favorite (they also ask everyone to imitate the animals they like... I don't think I've ever heard the hippos make the sound the first kid describes):



It's a little silly, but that's appropriate, right? Nice to see our favorite adventure getting a little attention, and nice to see so many smiling faces fresh off of The Jungle Cruise.

So what about you? What's YOUR favorite animal on the Jungle Cruise (I won't make you imitate it too)?