Adventurers Club

absolutely and i love in the in the ford which bob ger wrote happy birthday it was his 95th over the weekend he mentioned that that was his favorite so yeah i i love that you know it's so rare to have someone that actually was there to try it so

And of course, when asked what your favorite lost experience is, you mentioned one of mine, which is the Adventurers Club at Pleasure Island.

And thank you so much for having a recipe in there for the Kungaloosh.

Yes.

Or probably the entire reason I wanted to do this book.

Yeah.

And honestly, if it hadn't been for the Adventurers Club, we probably would never have had Trader Sam's Grotto or the Haunted Mansion parlors on the ships.

You know, the whole concept of a themed cocktail bar.

It reminds me...

I'm reading Joe Rohde's Floating Mountains book and how they started the Adventurers Club was like that.

An interactive adult area for them and how the interaction they had was... was what they were going for was the surprise element.

Do you guys start off with like a story in mind and find the clues or is it just you're inspired by what's around you?

Right.

But it just, it annoys me that they bring these folks back for like special events, just like when they bring back the Adventurers Club members for the Run Disney events and they have them backstage.

Like they, it not only teases the guests, but if you're one of the actors that is a citizen of Hollywood and you get called in like once a year or twice a year to do this and it is a gig that you used to do like every day for 20 years, it's got to be annoying.

Oh, you think they don't want to get called in?

So if you ask for it, that's why you're going to get it.

All right.

Then when I hit Powerball, we're going to buy out Hollywood Studios for one night and we're going to have the Adventurers Club characters back in the park for one night.

They were never in the park.

You had things like Disney Quest.

You had the Adventurers Club.

You had Pleasure Island as a whole, right? You had those kind of concepts.

There were a whole lot of things.

Cause sometimes we forget that when we're going on our 15th trip, but besides that though, for us that have been around for ever, you know, that are kind of gray beards at this point, I do wonder about those things like pleasure Island, like, you know, cause Disney Springs is so nice now.

Like, but what would pleasure Island be like in 2026, 2027, if it were around, you know, because it was, it was neat.

Like it was so cool to have something like that to go to and, you know, go from eight tracks to, um, adventurers club to the comedy club and you just bounced around and oh my gosh it's 11 45 let's hop out into the street and it's new year's eve even though it's july 3rd you know it was it was so weird and then disney quest you could hop in there and go up and down that elevator with robin williams being the genie and like you know play video games and they had like a little ride you could go on shoot the playground balls at each other and it was it was wild but i don't know i mean what do you do you ever think about those things like would they work today yeah

I know.

That would be interesting.

Like the Adventurers Club.

I think that is the antithesis of the Club 33 idea.

Right.

You almost gotta know somebody just to get on the waiting list at this point.

Yeah.

I actually can't believe I went with Imagination Pavilion on that reference and not Adventurers Club.

And not Adventurers Club?

where you're going.

I'm going to the Adventurers Club.

Oh.

Nice.

Anyway, "Learn the stories behind long-gone restaurants and the dishes they served, and relive your own delicious memories of recently closed restaurants like Steakhouse 55," oh my gosh, I can't believe that's a closed restaurant, "in the Disneyland Hotel, or Mama Melrose's Ristorante Italiano in the Muppets Courtyard.

With this book, you can cook your way through Star Cruiser's most iconic dish, make the old carrot cake cookie, and even get a little taste of Adventurers Club.

It's all in here, and you gotta read it to believe it." But what's really interesting is how my colleagues even got to this point.

Again, how do you recreate decades of Disney favorites, nostalgic fixations people remember so clearly in their mind, with nothing to compare it to? That journey from idea to book and everything in between, including some tough questions I lobbed at these fellow Disney pros, is what we are getting into this week, and you are bound to love it.

But it was, you know, we always had the Walt Disney World annual passes, and so much of like my family just means so much here.

And so I think that place would be Pleasure Island because, number one, it's one of the most missed places here at Walt Disney World, and it's a place that I just have so many personal memories going with my parents.

I think it's why I love theater so much because the Adventurers Club was like being in immersive theater, but you're in a bar.

And so for me, that was one of the first places I was like, "We have to include Pleasure Island." So we did.

It has more of an international parks presence.

I think of Mystic Manor in Hong Kong when I start to think about where is the main story from S.E.A. coming from, uh, or S.E.A. And I am very excited about the prospect that we could be doing more with that in the domestic parks, in part because that is the type of story that really lends itself to this old-school feeling of the Adventurers Club.

Uh, and if you're an old-school Disney fan who remembers the original version of Pleasure Island in Downtown Disney over at Disney World, uh, that was one of the most popular spots there.

People miss the Adventurers Club.

It really evokes this just, I guess, feeling of unchartedness and a, a world of exploration out there and a bit of like, uh...

There, there is a very real Society of Explorers and Adventurers, and I forget exactly what it's called, but you can look it up.