Want To See
On a normal day, there are more than 50 attractions open across the 8 different sections of Disneyland. Most of the rides and shows don't last all that long. If you're trying to jam your day at Disneyland full of activity, the things you do aren't going to run down the clock. It's all the waiting and walking in between.
On the morning of Sunday, February 11th, Jae Kaplan walked from her Anaheim hotel to the Disneyland entrance and waited at the main gates. For her, time was of the essence. At 7:43 a.m., park staff ushered Kaplan and the other early risers through the gate and down Main Street. By 8:07, Kaplan was done with her first ride of the day, Peter Pan's Flight in Fantasyland. She had 50 more attractions to see. She had just under 16 hours to go until the park closed. She had it all planned out.
She had come to speedrun Disneyland.
"You can power walk," Kaplan said. "As long as you're not running into people, you're good."
Speedrunning is a form of competitive video game play. The most common kind of speedrun entails playing a game, start to finish, in as little time as possible. Some are straightforward — the world-record speedrun for the original "Super Mario Bros." is a few seconds shy of five minutes and fun to watch. Other speedruns are heavily dependent on glitches (like tricks for moving a player character faster than normal or through solid walls) and are nearly incomprehensible without some explanatory commentary. At the highest levels of competition in speedrunning communities the difference between a good run and a new world record can be slim: a bit of good luck here, a move that saves a frame's worth of time there. An organization called Games Done Quick puts on twice-yearly speedrunning marathons for charity, and new records for games are constantly being set in front of live audiences on Twitch streams. Speedrunning is popular, but it can be a relatively solitary pastime if a person wants it to be — just a contest between them and the limits of the game.
Disneyland's not built for solitary experiences. While on a break from her visit to Disney's California Adventure on the day after her run attempt, Jae Kaplan spoke with me over Skype and explained how she factored the other park attendees into her plans. A software engineer by trade and a former speedrunner of "Lego Island," Kaplan eagerly discussed how her Disneyland visit was and wasn't like speedrunning a video game. Her itinerary took into account when attractions were likely to be at their busiest, as wasting time in long lines or crowded walkways would risk killing the required pace. "You can power walk," Kaplan said. "As long as you're not running into people, you're good. Practic[ing] ducking and weaving between people is good."
Thanks to careful placement of tall, eye-catching structures (nicknamed "weenies" by park designers), the average visitor's path through Disneyland flows in a predictable manner. Kaplan's did not. "There are a lot of shortcuts," she said. "They're on the map, but they're harder to see. A lot, especially over by the Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland area. You can jet around over there." These pathways sped up Kaplan's trips between individual attractions, but Disneyland's overall hub-and-spoke design lends itself best to tackling each themed area one by one. "You can bounce back and forth as needed," Kaplan said, "but you want to avoid doing as much of that as possible."
If Disneyland were a video game, you could imagine a glitch might expedite the work of criss-crossing the park. Still, just by walking with purpose, Kaplan finished fifteen attractions in her first two hours that Sunday.
At certain points in the speedrun, Kaplan could essentially be in two places at once. Every visitor to Disneyland can use the FastPass ride reservation system to access shorter lines for popular attractions, but Kaplan also had another time-saving tool: the disability access service (DAS). Park visitors who have difficulty standing for long periods of time can apply for a DAS card, which essentially lets a visitor hold a spot in line for a ride. During that time a guest can rest, eat… or go see other attractions. Kaplan broke her ankle in 2017, making her eligible for the service. With careful use of DAS return times and FastPass reservations, she could tackle smaller attractions while effectively "queued up" for busier rides.
Kaplan could have gone for a "rides-only" Disneyland run1, but her choice to include all the available attractions introduced a wrinkle that DAS and FastPass can't address: scheduled live shows. These were fixed in Kaplan's schedule; if a delayed ride made her miss a show, the speedrun would be over instantly.
There were also attraction closing times to contend with. "I got a bit greedy and thought that I could do Pirates of the Caribbean at 4 p.m.," Kaplan told me. "I still had to do Tom Sawyer Island, and the last boat over there was leaving at 4:30. At about 4:20 I'm still on the [Pirates] boat and I'm realizing what a mistake I just made. I end up on the last boat going to Tom Sawyer Island."
Along the way, Kaplan found time to chat with a few of the park's staff about her goal. Some wondered whether it was even possible. "One of the things I had to do was the Princess meet-and-greet at Royal Hall," Kaplan said. "Usually there are two or three princesses there. This time it was Snow White, Ariel and Cinderella. I told Snow White and Ariel what I was doing and they were like, 'Oh, that's neat.' Cinderella thought about it for a second and then she accidentally dropped character a little bit, asking questions like 'How do you even do that?' and 'What's the prep for that like?"
By 6 p.m., Kaplan had 10 attractions left to complete, including a handful of scheduled shows. The required timing was tight. People followed along with her progress via occasional Periscope check-ins and through her hashtag #DLDQ2018 (Disneyland Done Quick) on Twitter. Kaplan's decision to include live shows also meant the earliest her speedrun of the park could end would be with the conclusion of Sunday's early performance of "Fantasmic": 9:27pm.
At 8, Kaplan had 4 attractions — the Astro Orbiter, Main Street Cinema, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln and Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room — left between her and "Fantasmic." If she missed a single one, she'd have to go back and do it after the show. Worse, if she missed the early "Fantasmic," her run's endtime would be pushed back to the later show's ending at 10:57pm. By the time Kaplan left the company of robot Abe Lincoln, all that stood between her and a successful speedrun were a bunch of animatronic birds and tiki gods.
"I had pretty much perfect luck from 7 p.m. onwards," Kaplan told me. Her speedrun clocked in at 13 hours and 27 minutes. Save for the few rides that were closed for refurbishment, Kaplan did all of the attractions at Disneyland.
Speedrunners see simulations for what they are, and work inside of those broadened constraints to find untapped forms of joy.
When I first caught wind of Kaplan's plan on Twitter, I was immediately reminded of Disneyland's prominent use as an example in postmodern theories of reality. Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard categorized the park as "hyperreal" — in Baudrillard's writing, something hyperreal was more truthful, despite lacking "origin or reality." Hyperreality serves to obscure the truth about what masquerades as "the real." The existence of prisons hides that beyond their walls, society itself is carceral. The existence of Disneyland hides that beyond its walls, everything is a manufactured fantasy. The same argument can be extended to virtual reality simulations and video games — their existence obscures that the "real world" is just as insubstantial and divorced from truth.
Video game speedrunning is fascinating because great runs depend on intimate knowledge of a game's true nature. Speedrunners aren't beholden to how a game is "supposed" to work; they engage with the game's raw design, leveraging any and every quirk that can be used to their advantage. To a speedrunner, a useful glitch becomes a feature of game, and its exploitation expresses a deep appreciation for what the game really is, revealing hidden aspects of its function. Speedrunners see simulations for what they are, and work inside of those broadened constraints to find untapped forms of joy.
Jae Kaplan loves Disney parks — before coming around to the speedrun idea, she was just interested in seeing all of the dark rides she'd missed on previous trips to Disneyland. As the plan started to take shape, she consulted maps and historical data about the park, turning a trip to a theme park into an exercise in problem-solving. Some might think that would strip the fun out of Disneyland, but all of the good stuff is already diluted by the trappings of ordinary life: at a theme park there are long lines of people, park regulations and an onslaught of things to buy standing between you and the park's unique joys and experiences.
That Sunday, Jae Kaplan moved through Disneyland according to a set of rules and constraints she had learned and embraced. In the middle of her journey, someone's whose job is pretending be a princess was momentarily amazed by it all. Making Cinderella realize there's magic afoot in Disneyland? That's a day well spent.
