Disney: Day 5 Hollywood Studios

I'll be honest, Hollywood Studios was probably our least favorite of all the parks.  Most of the attractions are shows, which we like, but since they took 15-20 minutes for each show, there was always a huge wait in order to see one.  Kendra and I are not waiting people.  If a ride/attraction had more than 20 minutes in queue, we didn't wait. 

So the big deal ride/attraction at HS is the Toy Story Mania ride.  We followed the crowd to the line for the ride, and at opening there was already a 30 minute wait for the standby line.  Then we saw the line for Fastpasses, and it was just as long!  So, being who we are, we decided to check out some other stuff first.  We toured the shrine to the Walt man himself, which was interesting, and saw the Narnia exhibit (not very good), and when we finished those, lo and behold there was no line for the Toy Story fastpasses.  So we hopped over and got our passes for 1:00.  Perfect! 

Another reason we didn't really like HS is that several of the attractions and rides were not working that day.  We wanted to do the Star Wars and Muppets things, but both were on the fritz.  Bummer.

We did head over to Honey I Shrunk the Kids playland for a short time---it was already blisteringly hot.

Tiny Kendra in a giant roll of film

Even though we didn't ride the Star Wars ride, Kendra got to be a Stormtrooper for a moment:

Hey, where is your helmet?

One of the good shows was the Beauty & the Beast show...

And then we got to do the coveted Toy Story ride:

It is a 4D ride, really fun!

A huge thunderstorm rolled through, so we waited in a line to see the Ariel show for an hour.  Our other option was to get soaked and/or struck by lightning, so we chose the long wait. 

Each park has a big landmark (Cindy's castle at MK, the giant ball at Epcot) and HS has Mickey's sorcerer's hat.

HS also has this attraction called The American Idol Experience.  Any park-goer can go try out to be in the seven daily competitions (no, we didn't try out).  Then they have audience voting in those seven competitions and end the day with the seven winners competing for the big deal--a golden ticket to the front  of the line for the REAL American Idol auditions anywhere in the U.S.  I had no interest in going to see the competitions, but Kendra did so we went.  Turns out it was pretty fun!  The three people who performed at our session were quite talented!  Here's MY American Idol:

The VERY best thing that HS has to offer is their night performance show called Fantasmic.  Totally worth going in an hour before showtime to see.  It includes fireworks, music, all the characters, and really cool water fountains projecting video images.  Very, very cool.  Our favorite thing at this park, hands down.  Since it was a night event, I didn't get any pics, but we had a great time, and even made friends with some fun people who were visiting from England while we waited.