The entrance to Disneyland is shut to visitors in Anaheim, in response to the Covid 19 Pandemic. Photo / Supplied
The entrance to Disneyland is shut to visitors in Anaheim, in response to the Covid 19 Pandemic. Photo / Supplied
For anyone planning a family holiday to Disneyland, the past few months have been an emotional roller-coaster.
Walt Disney's parks were some of the first attractions to close their doors in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
On March 12, the day after the WHO announcement, the two US theme parks, and their international counterparts declared they would shut to visitors for the foreseeable future.
While the park has been offering rebookings for cancelled holidays as soon as June 1 and pledged to pay suspended park workers until April 18, as of last Friday the park has admitted that "an opening date has not been identified."
From daily visitor numbers, Disney World in Florida alone has missed out on over a million visits since lockdown began. That's 224,000 family holidays cancelled.
But if you've had your heart broken by the promise of a trip to Disneyland, there might just be a way to go. And it doesn't require you "wish upon a star" either.
Since 2016, an unofficial YouTube channel which calls itself "Virtual Disney World" has been broadcasting 360-degree VR videos from the seats of the theme parks' favourite rides. Using a smartphone or a virtual reality headset you can get an experience that is the next best thing to a seat on Thunder Mountain.
Among the attractions available virtually is the blockbuster Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, which had opened just a month before the parks were closed to visitors. The US$1billion ride for the popular sci-fi franchise was plagued by glitches in its electronic ticketing system and had been notoriously difficult to get a place in the line.
In the past month the Virtual Disney World channel has seen a boom of 1,032,292 video views and 15000 subscribers. Most are likely to be pent-up Disney fans looking for their roller-coaster fix.
Gary Hall, the man behind the virtual theme park, he started the channel in 2016 as a " way for those to relive attractions in a totally immersive setting."
Riding the roller coasters with a small camera called the "Ricoh Theta", he told the Herald that his set up is high-tech but low-profile. "It's basically a stick with one wide-angle lens on each side," he explains.
"I think Expedition Everest may have come out the best of all the videos on the channel," he says. Being seated with passengers from the "single rider" queue, other riders can have mixed reactions to the camera, but their enthusiasm can help make the videos.
While he's sad to see Disney Parks close around the world, isolating Disney fans have given a huge boost to his channel. "The viewership as skyrocketed immensely over the last week. The amount of views and new subscriptions has more than tripled the lifetime of the channel in just a few days."
Gary says he is "very humbled" to have received so many thanks from virtual "riders" of the attraction and hopes his channel can help them experience the rides built by Walt Disney Imagineering during the parks' hiatus.
All in all, there are 117 rides on the webpage from Disney's California and Florida resorts. As an unofficial fan page, there are even a couple of rides from the neighbouring Universal Studios.
Visitors can even scroll through a playlist of "Extinct Attractions" across the parks which have since been demolished to make way for new rides. It's the only place where you can re-live Disney's The Great Movie Ride! in Hollywood since it was closed in 2017.
While all of Disneyland's rides and attractions are currently out of action for the foreseeable future, the virtual theme park may be the best way to visit and remember what a trip to the resorts was like.
