Post #75054 by BaronV on Sun, Feb 8, 2004 1:36 AM

Al Lutz @ Mice Age (www.miceage.com) has more info about the upcoming ETR refurb (http://miceage.com/allutz/al020304b.htm) -

"And for all of those Tiki Room fans who are so worried that the tacky "New Management" show from Walt Disney World (WDW) might show up in Anaheim, relax. We told you in the last update that the Tiki Room rehab this Fall will just be a freshening of the existing show, and that is still the case. It seems the structure itself is infested with termites, and there is a lot of wood damage that needs to be fixed. And in the process, Matt Ouimet and Marty Sklar cooked up an extra-cost plan to give the entire show the TLC it so deserves. If things stay on track, as Ouimet just recently promised, the Tiki Room will reopen by Christmas looking crisper and cleaner than it has in over a decade.

And if Marty has his way with the sharp pencil boys, the animatronic "Barker Bird" will return to the entrance of Adventureland to entice people into the Tiki show. That infamous bird calling out to passing tourists below had to be removed in the mid 1960's because animatronics were still so new and bewildering to Americans then that the simple sight of a robotic bird would cause traffic jams on the Adventureland bridge. But now that a simple animatronic bird isn't the space-age exotica it once was, Marty would like to return that feature to the attraction's entrance. Besides, with how bad the overcrowding and traffic flow can become in the Fastpass era, a hopelessly gridlocked walkway wouldn't bother a Disneyland manager now like it would have in 1964.

Now if they can only get those kids working at the Tiki Room out of those bland khaki uniforms and back into the wonderfully kitschy Hawaiian shirts and dresses they wore for the show's first 35 years, they'd really have something!"