Enchanted Tiki Room - Attraction

Attraction

The presentation features a "cast" of over 150 talking, singing and dancing birds, flowers, the aforementioned magic fountain, tiki drummers and tiki totem poles that perform the attraction's signature tunes, "The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room" by the Sherman Brothers and "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing". The finale has every Audio-Animatronic figure performing a rousing version of "Hawaiian War Chant". The choice of exit music is somewhat unusual, namely an arrangement of "Heigh-Ho" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with lyrics thanking guests for watching the show and hurrying them to the exit.

So innovative was the technology by 1963 standards that an Audio-Animatronic talking "barker" bird (Juan, cousin of José) once located near the walkway to beckon visitors inside, caused enormous traffic jams of visitors trying to catch a glimpse of it. While waiting outside in a lanai area for the show to start, visitors are serenaded by Hawaiian music which at one time included that of Martin Denny and Bud Tutmarc. Hawaiian gods are represented as well around the perimeter of the lanai and each has a rhyming legend to tell via Audio-Animatronics.

Some include Hina Kuluua, goddess of rain; Rongo, god of agriculture; Maui, who roped the playful sun; and Tangaroa, father of all gods and goddesses. A brief documentary of the history of the pineapple is presented as well. The story, filmed in the early 1960s and updated at the end with a Macromedia Flash presentation of a parade of Dole products, is shown on a screen on the rear of the roof of the Dole snack bar at the entrance to the lanai. Other than the removal of a minor musical number set to the "Barcarolle" from Jacques Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffmann and the final verse of "The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room", the show has remained otherwise unchanged since its 1963 inception due to a stipulation in the sponsorship contract with Dole that the attraction remain unchanged.

One chorus of "Let's All Sing Like The Birdies Sing" has José crooning like Bing Crosby, Fritz scat-singing in a gravelly voice like that of Louis Armstrong and Pierre singing like Maurice Chevalier. The show reopened in March 2005, after a seven-month refurbishment, commissioned by new Disneyland management in a bid to restore the park to its former glory for its 50th birthday. Feathers were regularly falling out of the Audio-Animatronics, the thatched roof of the building was breaking away in broad daylight, and the movements of the Audio-Animatronics were noisy and slow.

After the renovation, the original show and storyline remained but with a digitally remastered audio (remastered by Randy Thornton, who produced A Musical History of Disneyland (2005)), a new sound system both indoors and out, and completely new Audio-Animatronics. These look the same as the previous ones, but have a completely different infrastructure. Updates in technology allowed Walt Disney Imagineering, the descendants of WED Enterprises, to create a show to satisfy 21st century expectations while retaining its classic look and feel.

The original Tiki Room was controlled by a large room full of floor-to-ceiling computers that operated the birds with data on magnetic tapes, which was located underneath the floor of the main show room. Footage of the original control room is available on the 10th anniversary special made in 1965 featuring Walt Disney and "Miss Disneyland 1965" called "The Tencennial Special."