TechStuff Classic: How the Disney Magic Works

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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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,

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 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. 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 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

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,

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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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,

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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

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. 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, 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

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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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

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,

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 search field and click on that little microphone icon that can let you leave a thirty second voice message for me let me know what you would like to hear in the future, or if you prefer, you can leave 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

podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.