TechStuff Classic: How the Disney Magic Works

After my recent (tenth) cruise on the Disney Cruise line, I decided to look into what makes the ship work.How does it steady itself in rough seas? How much is automated?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
are you? It is Friday. It is time for a
classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published on

(00:26):
June twenty second, twenty sixteen. It is titled how the
Disney Magic Works The Disney Magic being a cruise Ship.
I hope you enjoy. Now, before I jump into this show,
I just want to let you all know Disney had
nothing to do with me choosing this episode, apart from
the fact that I'm going on a cruise anyway, this

(00:49):
is not a sponsored show. I'm not getting any perks
for recording it. In fact, Disney's not even aware I'm
doing this. They wouldn't know me from anybody else out there.
And I say this because I am a Disney fanboy.
I'm gonna geek out over Disney stuff as well as
the cruise ship technology stuff. And it's important you know.

(01:11):
I have a completely biased opinion, but it comes to
me honestly. Now that being said, the company, if they
decide they want to sit me on a cruise they
can do that. I'm not gonna turn it down. I
love them. I'm really hoping that I can actually get
a bridge tour this cruise, but they don't tend to

(01:33):
do those, so if it happens, it will only be
because somebody took pity on me. All right, So let's
talk about the history of Disney in the cruise industry.
Before the Disney Company actually commissioned its own cruise ships,
it partnered with an existing company called Premiere Cruise Line.

(01:53):
Back in nineteen eighty five. Premiere became known as the
official cruise line of Walt Disney World, and Disney characters
would appear on Premiere ships. It was one of the
things that set Premiere apart. Premiere was also known as
the big Red Boat because some of their ships were
big and red, big ish. They're not as big as
the ones that you would see today in the industry,

(02:16):
and the nickname of its flagship, Starship Oceanic, was the
Big Red Boat, and it actually became the official name
of two of their other ships. They actually renamed them
because both of those ships were older. With the exception
of one of their ships, the Starship Atlantic, which was
built in nineteen eighty two. The company's fleet consisted of
ships built between nineteen fifty five and nineteen seventy, so

(02:38):
they were a little on the creeky side. The partnership
with Disney ended in nineteen ninety three. Premiere would eventually
go out of business in two thousand and Out of
all the ships in their fleet, only one still exists,
and that is the Atlantic. All the others have either
been sold for scrap or they sank. So Disney had

(03:00):
kind of dipped its toe in the cruise partnership world.
And once that partnership with Premiere ended, you know, it
was an agreement to last a certain amount of time,
essentially a little less than ten years. The Disney Company
started to hold talks with other cruise lines, including Carnival
and Royal Caribbean, but neither of those companies could agree
to Disney's terms, essentially how much money they would have

(03:20):
to pay Disney to allow Disney characters to appear on
those cruise ships. By nineteen ninety four, the rumors were
that Disney the company was looking at creating its own
line of cruise ships. Now the actual Disney Cruise Line
Department was founded in nineteen ninety five, and Disney commissioned
two ships from an Italian shipyard called Fincantieri. The two

(03:45):
ships would become the Disney Magic and the Disney Wonder,
and according to a website called Hidden Mickeys, the Magic
costs three hundred and fifty million dollars to build. I've
also seen that figure go up as high as four
hundred million dollars to build, So between three hundred and
fifty and four hundred million dollars. So a big, big

(04:05):
investment on the part of Disney in an area that
they had not really explored. But they saw an opportunity because,
as Disney representatives will tell you, the issue with the
cruise industry was it was mainly geared toward adults and
a lot of senior citizens as well, but not so
much to families with children. And so they saw it

(04:28):
as an opportunity to do to the cruise industry what
they had done with theme parks and hotels and other
things like that. So they decided to take this plunge. Now,
Michael Eisner was in charge of Disney at the time,
and he wanted the ships to have a classic ocean
liner feel, so something akin to what you would have

(04:48):
seen back in the old days of ocean liners, we're
talking like the early nineteen hundreds, and to take those
lines to kind of update it with modern acts, but
to still have that classic style. So that's exactly what
the engineers did. They started to design this so it
kind of had this sleek look of a classic ocean liner,

(05:11):
complete with two smokestacks, even though those were not both
necessary more on that in a second. And they decided
that the interior decoration was going to be in the
Art Deco style for the Disney Magic the Wonder actually
has an Art Nouveau style. Now, the ship was constructed
in two halves. You had the bow and the stern,

(05:32):
the front and the back. The front half of the
ship was built at the Encona shipyard and the back
half was built at the Margera shipyard. And those two
shipyards are more than one hundred miles apart from each other.
So once they finished building out the four half, the
forward or front half, they had to tow it back

(05:54):
to the other shipyard, and they did this by placing
it on a giant kind of floating barge essentially, and
towed that more than one hundred miles to the other shipyard,
and then they had to fit the two together. Now,
remember that this ship is like a small city. It
has all of these independent systems that make up the ship.

(06:18):
That includes a water system, so lots of water pipes,
and electric grid including electric generators, climate control, and more.
I mean everything that you would expect to have in
a nice hotel has to be on the ship, which
means all those systems have to be self contained. And

(06:39):
that means that all of this stuff laid out had
to fit together perfectly. You could not have any misalignment
or else. The conduits where you would allow electrical wires
to go through, or the air duct systems or the
water pipes they wouldn't match up. So they had to
make it precise and hope that they could fit it
together exactly the way needed to. And this is not

(07:02):
a small challenge. It's actually pretty tough. So once they
got to the point where they were ready to put
the two halves together, each half had to be put
on a giant rail system and this allowed them to
very slowly bring the two halves until they met in
the center, and then they started to weld the ship together,

(07:22):
and that's where you get the full ship the Disney Magic. Now,
this construction project encountered multiple delays throughout the process due
to other construction projects being a little slow at the shipyards,
and it meant that Disney had to keep pushing back
the date of its initial sailing, and it ended up

(07:46):
being almost five months late as a result of this.
The Magic finally set sail across the Atlantic to its
home port in Florida over at Port Canaveral and was
ready for its first cruise several months later than was
originally planned, and I believe it was July of nineteen
ninety eight, so a little bit later than what they

(08:09):
had hoped. At any rate, it does take a long
time to build one of these ships. There's a lot
that goes into it. In the design process, you have
the imagineers, that's the Disney term for the engineers who
bring Disney's flare into whatever projects they're making. So Disney
imagineers are responsible for pretty much anything physical that you

(08:32):
encounter within Disney. So you think about the Disney parks,
the imagineers are the ones who were designed, who had
designed all the theming, all the rides, everything that you encounter.
An imagineer has had a hand in designing. Same thing
is true for the cruise ships, but it meant that
they had to design things and then shipbuilders actually had

(08:52):
to make it happen. So it was an interesting relationship
because this was not something that they had done before.
So imagineers typically use three D rendering software to build
virtual representation of a space that they wanted to create
within the ship. So you had a virtual model, and
then you had to plan out how could you achieve
this physically, and in some cases it might mean that

(09:14):
you had to go back and redesign. That's why you
have to use that three D approach so that at
least it's less complicated than building something out and then
realizing it's not going to work. Now. Part of that
included building out spaces specifically for kids. I mean, this
is Disney we're talking about, and in fact, kids have
a couple of different areas on a couple of different

(09:36):
decks of the various Disney cruise ships that are dedicated
just for them. Adults, apart from the supervising adults are
not allowed in that space. So the worst part is
these are some of the coolest areas of the ship,
and typically you only get to see it maybe when
you first board. Sometimes the Disney allows adults to tour

(09:57):
the spaces before the ship gets underway, because you might
be looking at it in order to decide whether your
kid will go to the Oceaneers Club, for example, and
maybe you don't have a kid, but maybe you do
want to be an Avenger, so you go anyway. I'm
not saying I've done that. I'm just saying I'm not
above doing that at any rate. A lot of really

(10:20):
interesting spaces, and when the imagineers were designing these spaces,
they had to take concertain considerations in mind that you
wouldn't necessarily think of for other spaces. So they actually
built out some rooms that had lower ceilings, which makes
the kids feel taller because they're in a space that
is scaled more to their size. They also created different

(10:42):
stories for different areas, like there's a toy story area,
there's a Pixie area, there's the Avengers area, which is
the one I really want to go through, and then
they're like the Oceaneer's Lab, which is more of a
sciency ocean voyage themed area. And all of this had

(11:03):
to be done on computers first before building out the
actual physical stuff that would fill up these spaces, and
then there had to be the installation phase. So all
of this is very technical. It takes a lot of
work on the front end before you ever get to
a point where a guest actually walks onto the ship. Now,

(11:24):
the ship's tonnage is eighty four thousand tons. That means
the ship has the volume of eighty four thousand tons.
That's typically what tonnage means, and it's a pretty big ship,
though not as big as the Disney Dream or the
Disney Fantasy, which are two of the younger ships in
the Disney cruise line, and of course there are other
cruise lines that have ships much much larger. So the

(11:45):
Magic is nine hundred eighty four feet long and one
hundred and six feet wide at the beam. That means
just the widest part of the ship, and it's one
hundred and seventy one and a half feet tall. The
draft of the Show is twenty five point three feet Now.
The draft refers to the distance from the water line

(12:05):
to the bottom of the hull, also known as the keel.
So you measure that distance and that's how you get
the draft twenty five point three feet. Now, when it launched,
the Magic was one of the largest cruise ships in service.
In fact, I think it was the third largest ship
in service at the time. Now since then it's been
eclipsed big time. There's a Lure of the Seas, which

(12:25):
I believe is the largest cruise ship currently in service
that's run by the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line. That one
is one hundred and eighty one feet long and two
hundred eight feet wide with a tonnage of two hundred
twenty five two hundred and eighty two tons, So enormous, huge,

(12:45):
much bigger than the Disney Magic. But when Disney Magic
was first built, it was considered to be a pretty
big ship. Now, the Disney Magic has five sixteen cylinder
Solzer diesel engines, each of which can has output of
fifteen four hundred forty eight horse power serious horse power.

(13:06):
There the total horsepower for the ship is seventy seven
two hundred and forty three Now that means the Magic's
engines have the power equivalent to one hundred Formula one
race cars running full speed. There are also two nineteen
megawatt general electric propulsion motors that's what actually turns the

(13:27):
provides the power to turn the propellers in the propulsion system,
and the ship has a fuel capacity of twenty thousand
gallons of diesel fuel, so it's running on diesel to
run these engines, which also provide the electricity for the
entire shit. And the ship's hull has a special coating
on it that's designed to actually make it move through

(13:48):
the water with less resistance, which reduces the amount of
work the engines have to do in order to move
the ship. So this was an effort to reduce the
fuel consumption of the disease cruise line ships and also
means that the engines themselves don't have to do as
much work, so they don't need to be replaced or

(14:10):
repaired nearly as frequently, although of course every cruise ship
out there undergoes a period of maintenance. It's called dry dock.
It's when you bring a ship in, you elevate it
above the waterline and you're able to really work on
it and make sure that it's ship shape. Now, there
are three bow thrusters and two stern thrusters, each eighteen

(14:34):
hundred kilowatts, and the arrangement allows the ship to turn
into plate turn in place without moving forward. So, in
other words, you can rotate the ship three hundred and
sixty degrees and not be moving forward at the time,
which is pretty cool. And I've actually seen it done
because that's how well I've seen it done with one
hundred eighty degrees, because that was how the cruise ship

(14:57):
would pull into one of the ports of cal the
Disney's private island. They would actually turn the ship completely
around so that you would back into the space. I
don't think they actually have a rear view camera to
do that, but maybe they do. Actually, they have lots
of cameras all over the place in order to be
able to navigate the ship. Now, like I said, the

(15:19):
ship has two smoke stacks, but one is used for
exhaust and the other is decorative and actually houses some
other stuff in it. So only one of the two
smoke stacks actually is for exhausting smoke from the engines.
But they decided that they wanted to have the two
smoke stacks on the cruise ship to give it that
classic look. The cruising speed that the ship can attain

(15:41):
is twenty one and a half knots. It has a
maximum speed of around twenty four knots, although I've read
that it can go as fast as twenty six knots,
which might be after the Magic has had a couple
of renovations. It's been upgraded both in twenty thirteen and
twenty fifteen. More on that in a little bit. One
of the interesting things about the Disney Magic is that

(16:04):
they have their lifeboats painted a yellow color to match
the color of Mickey Mouse's shoes. This was actually a
big deal. The US Coast Guard has a standard for lifeboats.
They're supposed to be a bright orange, which is considered
to be one of the most visible colors on the
surface of the ocean. So if you are in a lifeboat,

(16:25):
you want to be really visible so that you can
be rescued. And Disney had to prove to the Coast
Guard that the yellow they wanted to use was in
fact just as visible as the orange, or else the
Coast Guard would have said, I'm sorry. I know you
want to have this beautiful color because you want it
to fit the theme of your boat, but people's safety
is more important than theming. But Disney was able to

(16:48):
prove that the yellow was in fact just as visible,
and so they were able they were allowed to paint
their lifeboats yellow, and in fact the cruise ship in
general is designed to have the color palette of Mickey Mouse,
so it's essentially white, black, red, and yellow. It has
eleven passenger decks and three I think crew only decks,

(17:10):
but eleven decks that passengers can go on. The Decks,
of course, are floors, kind of like floors of a building.
And it has the capacity to hold twenty four hundred guests,
although according to some sources I've read the actual limit
is closer to twenty seven hundred, and it has a
crew of about nine hundred and fifty people, so you
have just shy of one thousand people working on this

(17:33):
ship to make everything go, and then another twenty four
hundred who are guests, as a lot of people to
be on one boat. There are eight hundred and seventy
five staterooms, two hundred and sixty two of which are
inside staterooms, which means you don't get a view of
the ocean, which is kind of sad. But you have
six hundred and thirteen that are outside state rooms, and

(17:54):
out of those, three hundred and eighty four have a veranda,
which is really nice. And there are three major thiet restaurants,
Lumier's animator's palette, and what used to be parrot key
and is now Keriokas. Plus you have an adult's only
restaurant called Palo and a buffet restaurant called Cabanas. And
every restaurant has its own galley attached to it, and

(18:17):
a galley is a kitchen, so every single restaurant has
its own kitchen. And on the big ships that's seven
galleys total. Now this was actually a new approach in
cruise ships. A lot of cruise ships have a single
galley that provides all the food for any of the
places where you can get food. And in fact, a
lot of the cruise ships only have one restaurant that

(18:39):
you go to. Disney was different and had all these
different themed restaurants. So by having a galley attached to
each restaurant, it meant that the white staff doesn't have
to travel a ridiculous distance or use escalators or elevators
to get food to where the guests are. So this
was another innovation in the cruise industry. Addition, guests rotate

(19:01):
through the restaurants, I mean not literally, you actually go
to a different restaurant each evening, you get an assignment
when you get to your stateroom that tells you which
restaurants you go to on which evenings, and you travel
one to the next. And if you also get your
weight staff to travel with you. So the people who

(19:21):
are doing your drinks and food service go restaurant to
restaurant as you do, which means they get to know
what you like, what you don't like, any allergies you
might have. This is another big innovation in the cruise industry,
something that you don't see in other cruise lines. So
some of the innovations that Disney came up with aren't
necessarily technological, but they were big changes to the way

(19:43):
things had been traditionally done within the industry. Before we
talk more about the Disney Magic, we need to set
Saale to listen to these messages. Now. Out of the
major restaurants, Animator's Palette is probably the most technically sophisticated

(20:09):
in the original incarnation aboard the Disney Magic. The way
this worked was you walked into Animator's Palette and the
restaurant starts out with just everything in black and white,
the tablecloths, the walls, the columns which were designed to
look like paint brushes. Everything's in black and white. Even
the white staff's outfits were all in black and white.

(20:31):
And as you sat down to dinner and dinner commenced,
you would start to hear music from various Disney movies,
and if you looked around the restaurant, you would see
that there were portraits from Disney movies, all in black
and white all around you, some of which were static portraits.
They were just they were drawn essentially onto the walls,

(20:53):
but they had had a frame set around them. Others
were actually displayed on LED television's score essentially, and if
you listen to the music and you recognize where it
was from, you could actually look for the corresponding images
on the walls and slowly color would seep in. Now,
with the LED screens, that's pretty simple. You just you know,

(21:14):
you have a little animation program that allows us a
black and white sketch to be infused with color. But
for the static portraits, what they used were fiber optic
cables that were behind the walls. So you have a
computer system that is timed with the soundtrack for the dinner,
and as certain songs play, the computer sends the command

(21:37):
to light up certain fiber optic lines, and those portraits
would slowly go from black and white to color. Animator's
palette has changed quite a bit since the renovation that
happened in twenty thirteen, where a lot of these static
displays were removed and new LED screens were put in place.
So I'll talk a little bit more about that when
I get to the renovation side of things. But this

(21:59):
was one of those those experiences that people really felt
had the Disney touch. You walked in, you sat down,
the restaurant transforms around you, even so much that the
weight staff would change into colorful outfits. They would go
backstage essentially and change it to their colorful outfits, come

(22:20):
back out, and this would be the big dessert celebration
part of the dinner. And it was incredible. It's certainly
like you might if you're a grouch, you might roll
your eyes at such a thing. But to see all
the families and kids get really excited when this transformation happens,
It's like going to Disney World for the first time

(22:43):
and having that experience of discovery. Now I've done this,
it'll be ten times by the time you hear this.
So for me. I still enjoy it, but there's not
a whole discovery left for me at this point. That
being said, I still think it's one of those experiences
that really sets the Disney cruise line apart, because it's

(23:04):
pure Disney. There are two theaters aboard the Disney Magic.
One of them is specifically for live performances, although they'll
also show movies in that one, and the other one
is specifically for movies, although they'll also hold live conference
type things in there, like sometimes they'll have special guests
aboard the cruise ship that might give a talk in

(23:26):
the second theater. So the big live action theater is
the Walt Disney Theater and the cinematic theater is the
Buena Vista Theater. So the live action one can set
around nine hundred people and the Buena Vista one are
about two hundred and eighty or so, and they're both

(23:47):
really impressive. In fact, the Walt Disney Theater has a
lot of different interesting technologies behind it. It's got a
stage that's about forty feet wide. It's pretty impressive considering
it's on a boat, and it has an advanced fly
system which doesn't involve zippers necessarily. Anyway, a fly system

(24:07):
in theatrical terms is a term for a rigging system,
and the rigging system is a bunch of ropes and
pulleys and they're meant to do things like move curtains
or lights or scenery and sometimes even people. So if
you've ever seen a show where a person is in
a flight harness and they're flying around, that's because they're

(24:27):
part of the fly system. And of course in Disney
that happens a lot. You've got characters like Peter Pan
who fly around over the stage, so they are part
of this or dependent upon this pretty impressive flight system
or fly system. The stage also has several lifts, so
they have lifts that can elevate or recess below the stage.

(24:52):
There's a storage area below the stage where scenery can
be or actually characters can wait so that they can
dramatically appear on stage the being lifted out from underneath.
And it's really pretty incredible to think about that you're
on a moving platform, you're on a ship, and the

(25:13):
ship is at sea, and you have these theatrical elements
that have to be placed on elevators to go up
or down. So you might think, well, how do they
make sure stuff doesn't slide around if the ship is
rolling a little bit. And there are two things that
they do. One is that the stage itself has tracks
built into it, and the scenery can be placed on

(25:36):
these tracks. They look like almost like if you remember
old slot cars, It looks kind of like the slots
for slot car racing, and you set the scenery into these,
and you can even have it all computerized and automated
so that the scenes can come on and off through
a computer control. But the tracks actually limit where the

(25:58):
scenery can move so that way it doesn't just roll
all over the stage if the seas get a little choppy.
The other thing they can do is they can also
alter the shows, so they can take out stuff that
isn't necessary for the show if the sea is acting
up a bit. So what they'll do is they'll simplify
a sequence so that there's not as many elements on

(26:20):
the stage, or they might remove some of the dance
moves that the performers need to do so that they
aren't endangering themselves while they're trying to perform. And so
it's a combination of changing the performance itself and depending
upon this technology. If you talk to people in theater.
They often will refer to the cruise ship stages being

(26:42):
as advanced as something you would see on a state
of the art stage on Broadway or London's West End.
That's the amount of detail that Disney put into this stuff,
including things like LEDs that are inside the ceiling where
you'll get a starlight effect inside the theater. It creates
this more immersive experience for the audience. They also have

(27:07):
pyrotechnic capabilities, so you'll actually get some fireworks in some
of the shows. And these are all things that you
wouldn't necessarily think to find on a cruise ship or
even just a regular theatrical stage. I've got a chance
to do a behind the scenes tour of the stage
as well. Disney used to do a lot more behind

(27:27):
the scenes stuff, several like more than a decade ago now,
and I took those opportunities to take those tours. It
is really interesting to see how they made as much
use of the space as possible. This theater doesn't have
very much wing space, so everything has to go either
up or back or down from the stage because there's
not really a whole lot of room stage left or

(27:49):
stage right, and It also showed how technical these shows were.
They had to be timed just right for multiple reasons.
They had to be time just right so that the
scenery and the lighting and the effects are all coming
on at the right time. So you have all these
very sophisticated computer systems that keep all of that synchronized properly,

(28:11):
and you also have the time it right because of
the schedule that people have in the evening, you would
either be coming from dinner and seeing a show, or
you'd see the show and then go to dinner, and
you don't want anything to run too long and interfere
with the rest of the schedule. So it was really
cool to see how they had set up these computer

(28:31):
systems that were all specifically designed for each show. And
keep in mind, if it's a long cruise, they do
multiple shows. They do two shows a night for the
two different seatings that they have for dinner. There's an
early seating that kids tend to go to and then
they go see the show afterward, and then there's the
late seating that adults tend to go to. They see

(28:53):
the show earlier in the night, they see it before dinner,
and that means that you have to have a sophisticated
technical system that can handle all of the needs of
each show, do it twice a night and then be
switched over for the following night, and it is really
neat to see this stuff backstage. If you ever get
a chance to check that out, you should. There are

(29:14):
also several documentaries more or less commercials for the Disney
Cruise line that do show you some of the behind
the scenes stuff, and it's cool. Sadly, most of them
are pretty limited in what they show you, so if
you ever get a chance to actually do a behind
the scenes tour, I highly recommend it because it is
really cool to see how they put this stuff together.

(29:37):
And keeping in mind, this is all on a ship
that's moving around. I as a performer, I've done some
stage work. I've done musicals where I have to dance
and sing. I'm not great at it, and to think
about having to do that on a stage that's actually
moving is terrifying. So let's talk about some of the
other technical stuff about this ship, not just the which

(30:00):
obviously I'm a huge fan of, but the actual things
that make the ship itself work. The most technically complicated
area of the ship is undoubtedly the bridge. The bridge
of the ship is where the ship's senior staff, who
are in charge of the systems that keep the ship
running and navigate, navigation, as well as actual steering the ship.

(30:25):
All of that is located on the bridge, and then
you have other departments that are obviously very important where
those officers would be located elsewhere they would not be
on the bridge. That's where your ship's captain is going
to be most of the time. And if you were
to take a look at it, look a lot like
the Star Trek Enterprise set. I mean, you have these

(30:46):
different consoles with computer screens and lots of complicated looking controls,
and they're all very important for the control and safe
operation of the ship. There are stations for communications, navigation,
and other critical systems all on the bridge, and you'll
see lots of screens showing stuff like current sea conditions,

(31:07):
whether any sort of a naval traffic that's going through
the area, ship status, that kind of stuff. They do
have a ship's wheel, so you could stand behind the
wheel and use the wheel to steer the ship, but
they also have an option to route all the ship
controls into a joystick, so you could actually have the thrust,

(31:29):
the steering, all of that in a single joystick, which
is particularly useful if you are maneuvering in or out
of a dock. You can also hand over controls to
a land based system if necessary, but it's really interesting
to see that all of these complex controls like the
thrusters and the steering and all of these other elements

(31:52):
can be boiled down to a single joystick control when necessary.
In normal operations, you wouldn't be using that, but for
something where you're using precise movements and you're trying to
maneuver so that you can dock or something similar, then
it becomes necessary. They also have a semaphore flag station. Yeah,

(32:13):
the cruise ships still uses semaphore flags in case other
communication tools are unavailable or not working, so semaphore you've
probably seen it, the idea of holding flags that have
symbols on them and then you move your arms in
a particular way. It usually looks very robotic, very stiff,
but those are specific ways of communicating messages to other

(32:34):
ships when your communications tools have otherwise died down. It's
all visual based and you can send messages like we're
in distress or you know you know, we've got we
need some help, whatever it might be, And they have
a whole cabinet filled with the various semaphore flags they
would need in order to communicate at any part of

(32:55):
the world, which is pretty cool that they have the
low tech version of long distance communication along with the
more high tech versions as well, because you want to
have some redundancy in those when you're talking about more
than two thousand guests, you've got to have those redundant
systems in place just in case something goes wrong. There's

(33:17):
also apparently a bridge simulator for the kids in ocean Quest,
but that's a kid's only area, so that's one of
those things I've heard about but I've never actually seen,
because despite my sense of humor and my general personality,
I am not a child, so I'm not allowed to
go there. But they apparently have a live camera feed

(33:40):
from the bridge that serves as the vision they see
like the they have windows or actually their displays, but
they look like windows up in front of them, and
that's coming from the live camera feed from the bridge.
And then you have controls that you can use as
a kid that simulate the way it would work if
you actually on the bridge of the ship itself, which

(34:03):
sounds so cool that I wish that all the State
rooms had one of these because I would play with it.
But again, I'm not allowed to go there, so I
haven't been able to experience this myself. Some other interesting
technical details. When Disney Magic anchors when they have to
lower the anchor, they're lowering an anchor that weighs twenty
eight two hundred pounds, So imagine the torque necessary on

(34:26):
the motor to be able to lift twenty eight two
hundred pounds worth of anchor. The ship has seven propellers.
They has two primary propellers and then five thruster propellers.
I mentioned the thrusters earlier. You have two in the
stern and three in the bow. The two primary propellers
weigh eighteen tons each. They are enormous and heavy and

(34:49):
in order to limit the amount of rolling that the
ship does. Rolling is the side to side motion, like
if you're looking four, meaning you're looking forward from the
position you are in on the ship. Rolling would be
the left right mission the import and starboard rising and
lowering as opposed to the fore and aft that's rocking,

(35:11):
So you can rock and roll on one of these ships.
The stabilizers are meant to reduce that rolling. They are
actually two large wings that can retract into the ship
or extend outward if the seas start getting choppy and
it's beneath the water line so you don't see it
as a passenger, but beneath the water line, these two

(35:31):
wings extend outward and create some stabilization, and they look
like plane wings and they're pretty big, so they, according
to Disney, they reduce roll dramatically. They actually sat up
to ninety degrees, which is pretty amazing, and I'm not
entirely sure how that's possible, but at any rate, they

(35:53):
are meant to reduce that rolling so that you don't
get that seasick feeling walking around inside and being rocked
all over the place. I am not prone to sea sickness,
so I haven't really had an issue with it, apart
from I think one cruise where for some reason that
was affecting me. But I do know that even with
the stabilizers, some folks are a little susceptible to that.

(36:16):
So if you ever do go on a cruise, look
into dramamine. That can help you out a lot. Now,
one of the other things you have to think about
is when you're on a ship and you're out at sea,
you are a completely self contained community, and that means
you have to figure out how you deal with other
stuff like garbage and waste, and how do you conserve

(36:37):
water and energy so that you're not being wasteful. So
one of the things I do is they actually have
a way of collecting the condensation from air conditioning. So
as air conditioners work and water condenses, water from the
atmosphere condenses on the equipment, they can actually collect that water.

(36:57):
They harvest it, and they use that water to wash
the decks, and they also use it in the laundry system.
It's perfectly fine. It gets filtered through into everything. It's
just condensed water from the atmosphere. It's actually pretty clean stuff.
But Disney estimates that this approach saves them up to
twenty two point three million gallons of fresh water every year,

(37:18):
so it's a pretty interesting way to get around the
issue of how do you deal with all of these
needs without wasting fresh water. The ship can also distill
two hundred tons of fresh water from seawater every day,
and the total potable water storage capacity aboard the ship

(37:39):
is eighty two thousand gallons. They also recycle used cooking oil,
so they go through about two hundred and sixty four
gallons of cooking oil every week. Now that oil is
taken by a company called the Bahamas Waste Management Company
and they convert it into biodiesel. They also have a
partnership with BMW and there's several BMW vehicles that run

(38:03):
on this biodiesel in the Bahamas. Disney estimates that recycles
nine hundred tons of aluminum, paper, plastic, and other odd
recyclable stuff every year from their cruise line. Now, going
back to the Disney Magic and talking about its original cruises.
It sets sale and it's made in voyage on July thirtieth,

(38:26):
nineteen ninety eight, out of Port Canaveral, Florida, And originally
it only sailed for three or four day cruises. In fact,
the first time I ever went on one, it was
a four day cruise. Then a year later the Disney
Wonder joined the fleet. The Disney Wonder and the Disney
Magic are nearly identical. The theming is different. It's Art
Deco and one Art Nouveaux in another. Some of the

(38:48):
spaces are themed a different way, like the different nightclubs
and stuff that you can go to have different themes.
The main restaurant on the Disney Magic is Loumiere's. The
main one on The Disney Wonder is Tritons. Helmsman Mickey
is in a statue in the lobby and the Magic
and Ariel the Little Mermaid is on the Wonder. But otherwise,

(39:10):
apart from some superficial differences, they're largely the same. So
once the Wonder came online, it started doing the three
and four day cruises, and the Magic began to do
seven day cruises, which meant that Disney had to come
up with all new ways of entertaining guests and feeding
them and making sure they had enough variety on their
menus so that people weren't just tired of eating the

(39:31):
same thing over and over. So it came up with
new challenges. Well, we're getting ready to conclude our episode
about the Disney Magic, but before we returned to port,
let's listen to some more messages. In twenty thirteen, the

(39:55):
Magic went in for a massive facelift. Disney actually called
it a reimagine, which makes perfect sense when their engineers
are called Imagineers. Now this time they took it to
the Navantia Shipyards in Cadiz, Spain, so they weren't at
the same place that they were when the ship was
being constructed, and there was another dry dock period in

(40:16):
twenty fifteen that updated a few more features. The twenty
thirteen dry dock lasted two months and involved taking a
part about eighty percent of the ship for upgrades, including
stripping the ship completely of paint. So you can see
pictures of the Disney Magic and dry dock from twenty
thirteen and it looks pretty pretty banged up because all
the pain has been removed. In twenty fifteen, they upgraded

(40:39):
the engines aboard the Magic to be more efficient and
reduce fuel consumption further along with that special coating on
the hull. And one practical addition to the ship was
the duct tail. And this was not a Donald Duck reference.
The ductail is an industry term. It's essentially a tank
that's placed in the back of the show that adds buoyancy,

(41:01):
and it's distributed so that it provides buoyancy without making
the ship list to either side. This is really important
because during this renovation period They added a lot of
features onto the Disney Magic, which increased the weight of
the ship, and it wasn't built to hold that much weight,
so they had to adjust the design of the ship

(41:22):
in order to account for that. To account for the change,
Disney added a second water slide. There was already one
small water slide, which they actually replaced and made a
slightly larger one, and this new water slide, called the
Aqua dunk is a is a slide that's designed to
do a pretty rapid drop into water. It's actually a

(41:46):
twisty slide. It goes two hundred and twelve feet and
twists that way, and part of that includes a twenty
foot clear section that extends out over the side of
the ship and over the ocean. So for a twenty
foot stretch of that, you're directly over the ocean. You
can look down and see the ocean about one hundred
feet below you. Sliding down takes about five seconds, so

(42:07):
you have to look fast. It's actually a really tough
thing to have water slides on a ship. This is
another engineering challenge. Water slide technology is pretty simple. You
pump water up to the top of the slide. You
let the water go down using gravity as your main
force to the bottom, and then you collect the water,
filter it, pump it back up. Not a whole complicated

(42:30):
technology there, but the engineering when you're talking about a
water slide on a cruise ship is much harder. And
the reason for this is that cruise ships can twist
and torque, they can bend in different ways. They also
can expand and contract because the body of the ship
is made out of metal, and all of these mean

(42:50):
putting extra stresses on what is supposed to be a
water tight tight water slide. So if you want a
watertight slide and you're going to have all of these
different motions to take into account, you have to build
it out a very special material, and you have to
figure out a support system that will move along with
the ship while keeping the integrity of the slide intact.

(43:14):
On top of that, you have engines running at different
levels throughout the cruise, which means you're going to have
vibrations sent through the ship. And yes, if you're quiet
and you're in a quiet spot, you can feel the
vibration from the engines pretty much anywhere on the ship.
Of course, you can feel it better when you're closer
to where the engines are. But if you're very quiet

(43:35):
and you just touch a wall, you can pretty much
feel the vibrations. Well, that slide has to take that
into account too. You are constantly being rattled. So this
was actually a pretty tough challenge for the imagineers to
create a slide that was fun and safe and would
be resilient to these different stresses on it, and I

(43:57):
think that's pretty impressive. One of the other changes they
made was to the ship's horn. Originally, the horn only
played the first few notes of when You Wish upon
a Star, And if you're a Disney nut like me
and you hear it for the first time on your
first cruise, it's a pretty phenomenal experience. You are surprised
and delighted to hear this little Disney touch early on

(44:19):
in your cruise experience. It's also fun to see all
the families and kids kind of light up at it.
These days, when I go on to Disney cruise, I
see a lot of returning cruisers because you can tell
the more cruises you go on, the different lanyard you
will get, like you have a silver level, a Gold level,
a Platinum level, and I just went on my Platinum cruise,

(44:41):
so anyway, I see a lot of returning guests. So
the ship's horn doesn't have quite the same effect that
it used to. But the upgrade allowed them to create
new tunes for the horn to play, and they're all
Disney related or one of the Disney properties are property
owned by Disney. Like Star Wars. There's an Imperial March

(45:03):
horn now as well. Also, this is kind of dorky
but awesome, there is a physical button to sound the
ship's horn. You have to make an announcement first to
let people know, hey, by the way, we're going to
sound the horn, so be prepared for that. But the
button itself is on a console and around the button

(45:23):
is a little frame in the shape of Mickey Mouse ears.
So the button's in the center and you got the
two ears on either side. And I know it's dorky,
but I love Disney, so I think it's awesome and
I want to push that button so badly I wouldn't
be able to resist it. That, of course, is on
the bridge, so it's right there along with all the

(45:44):
other controls. There's a console area where there's the ship's horn,
and you usually sound that whenever you're entering or leaving
a dock area. The parent Key restaurant during this renovation period.
The thirteen to one was changed at that time, so
parrot Key, which you can no longer go to, had

(46:05):
a Caribbean theme. Actually, I don't know. The Disney Wonder
might still have parrot Key, but I haven't been on
the Wonder in years, so I'm not sure. But the
magic the parrot Key is gone. So I had a
Caribbean theme. It was a lot of the cuisine was
Caribbean in inspiration. They have now replaced that with a
restaurant called Karriokas, and Karaokas is named after Jose Karaoka,

(46:30):
a Donald Duck character in the Three Caballeros cartoon. I
don't know why I'm suddenly adopting an accent here, but
the Three Caballeros cartoon is a very fun classic Disney cartoon.
And so the Three Caballeros takes place in South America,
and the cuisine at Kaiokas is largely influenced by the

(46:53):
food of Brazil, so it's a different change, different style
of cuisine, and they did different theming, different lights in
order to give it this much a pretty large change
in identity, and another space that got a major overhaul
was the Oceaneer's Club. That's when they ended up being
able to incorporate stuff like Marvel Avengers and toy story

(47:15):
things that weren't as prominent back in the late nineties
when they were building the ship in the first place.
So when you go to like the or when your
kid essentially goes to the Avengers Academy, they can train
to become a superhero. No word yet. If Captain America
whispers hell Hydra to each recruit, that's a reference to

(47:37):
a storyline that's going on right now in Marvel that
I'm not crazy about. I also wonder if the Captain
America aboard the Disney cruise ships is getting any flack
about being a secret Hydra agent, because they do have
lots of different Disney characters aboard these various ships, including
Marvel characters. Typically it's Captain America. They've also had Star

(48:01):
Wars characters as well. They've done Star Wars themed ship cruises.
I have not gone on one of those, despite the
fact that I also loved Star Wars as well as Disney.
I did not do one of those yet by stress
yet now. One of the other changes they made was
at animator's palette. I mentioned the fiber optics static displays earlier.

(48:22):
The ones that were just black and white sketches of
various Disney characters, they couldn't change because they were built
into the wall. But then the fiber optics would allow
color to come into the picture, and so they would
change from black and white to color, but you couldn't
change what the portrait was of, Right, like a picture

(48:43):
of blue the bear from the Jungle Book is always
going to be blue the bear. It would never change
into anything else. When they did the renovation, they pulled
out some of that and swapped in LED screens, and
now you get a different experience. So instead of it
just being images that go from black and white to
color on the screens, you'll see sketches start to appear

(49:06):
on the various portraits of various Disney characters. And as
the dinner progresses, you get more details, you get color,
you get animation, and they change over time, so you're
not looking at just an evolving sketch of a single character.
It swaps as the dinner goes on, and again it

(49:26):
ends up being kind of a show. It's not just dinner,
it's also a performance, which is kind of cool. At
the end of one of the dinners at Animator's Palette,
if you go twice, if your cruise is such that
you go to Animator's Palette two times, the second time,
they have a special show where all the guests are
invited to draw a character on a piece of paper,

(49:49):
and all of those pieces of paper are taken backstage
and scanned into a system, and then when you watch
the show at the end, these characters are animated and
they appear on screen. So a character you drew will
appear on screen and dance around and move about. The
way they do this is they have special blocks set
aside that you draw in things like legs and arms

(50:12):
and hands and a head and a body and that
kind of stuff. And when they scan it, each of
those blocks is design in such a way that it's
considered to be a joint, right, like the shoulders or
the hips or whatever. And so when it's animated, it
animates each of these blocks in a way so that
the characters can move around when you're looking at them

(50:32):
on the screen. When I did this, I drew a
pirate with a peg leg and a hook and an
eye patch, and his name was Lucky. Other Disney touches.
Of course, you've got the characters, You've got the Disney
movies that are shown in the various theaters. If a
Disney film comes out during your cruise, they show it

(50:54):
that same day on the ship, so it's premiere on
land and sea. And I think I might be seeing
Finding Dory by the time this episode goes live, I
will have seen Finding Dory, assuming that I it premieres
while we're on the ship. I think it will actually,
which is kind of cool the neat idea that you

(51:16):
get this unique Disney experience. Disney actually also does this
big fireworks display out at sea. Typically they do this
with a pirate themed deck party. So if you've heard
the tech Stuff episode on fireworks, you know how technical
that can get. In the Disney shows. They tend to

(51:37):
be three hundred or so shots per fireworks display, which
is modest by Disney standards, but it's at sea, so
that makes it different. These are also controlled by a
system that is highly synchronized with music and other effects,
so that you get a story throughout the fireworks display,

(51:57):
not just stuff. Shooting off into the sky. I am
blowing up, which is also pretty cool, but it's more
effective when it's all synchronized with music and everything else.
They actually hold several patents for their fireworks displays, and
they were the first cruise line to have a fireworks
display out at sea because it involves getting a lot
of permissions from various nautical authorities. The fireworks themselves are

(52:22):
made out of edible material, so when they are done
exploding and they go down into the ocean, they can
actually be eaten safely by sea life, so there's no
pollution there. I thought that was pretty cool, so you
can actually check this out and not feel any guilt
about it. Some of the ships also have interactive portraits

(52:44):
that animate or a part of an augmented reality game
aboard the ship. I got to play with one of
these on the Disney Dream I believe, and that's really
cool too, this idea that you've got these things that
look like they are static portraits from Disney movie, but
if you watch, you see that they start to animate
and sometimes they interact with each other. I remember coming

(53:05):
to one hallway where there were portraits of pirate ships
on either side of the corridor on either side of
a doorway really and they had a battle with each other.
They actually started firing cannon balls at each other, and
I thought that was really a clever thing to do.
And the game aspect, you can play a game where
you have cards that have a low pattern on them,

(53:26):
and when you hold them up to the portraits, the
portraits have an embedded camera that can pick up the
pattern on the card and tell the portrait this person
is playing this particular game. And it's almost like a
scavenger hunt as you go through the ship and you
try to solve a mystery or help out a character,
and it's really an interesting way to explore the ship

(53:49):
as well as engage in a fun interactive form of technology.
A very clever approach to using augmented reality and video
interactive video. So well done there. That was the episode
on How the Disney Magic Works, which published on June
twenty second, twenty sixteen. These days, the Disney Cruise line

(54:10):
has five ships. There's the Magic, the Wonder, the Fantasy,
the Dream, and the Wish. Actually spent my twenty fifth
anniversary on the Wish, which ended up being a longer
cruise than we intended because Hurricane Ian hit Florida while
we were at sea and we could not return to port,

(54:32):
so we had to stay on the ship two extra days,
which you know, there are worse ways to have to
ride out a hurricane, trust me. But it was definitely
a stressful time because you also had to try and
arrange things like travel and stuff like that, things that
you couldn't easily do because you were on a boat

(54:53):
at sea and didn't have very much connectivity. It was
a complicated time, but yeah, it was fun to If
you do that episode, hope you enjoyed it. If you
have suggestions for future topics, you can reach me either
by downloading the iHeartRadio app, which is free to download
and news. Navigate over to tech Stuff using a little
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(55:16):
can let you leave a thirty second voice message for
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me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show
is tech Stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more

(55:40):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts, or
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