Pirates Get an Overhaul

The Pirate ride was unavailable for the first E-ticket event because a lengthy overhaul had yet to be completed. But this should be the last week that the slow boat ride, which starts in a backwater bayou before plunging down into loot-filled caverns, is down for rehab. And Disney officials are yo-ho-hoing about the way the refurbished ride looks.

“We have literally tweaked every effect in the ride,” said Tony Baxter, Walt Disney Imagineering’s overlord for Disneyland and similar Disney parks in France and Japan. Baxter said the refurbishment reactivated some effects that hadn’t worked for 20 years, such as multiple ricochets in a scene near the end where drunken pirates are shooting at one another.

And some all-new effects have been added, including two audio-animatronic characters in the “big room” where a pirate ship on the left fires its cannons at the ramparts of a fort. The new characters will pop up above the wall to the right, shouting.

Baxter said the shouts had always been part of the dialogue track, “but there was never any figure there to go with the sound” before.