Countdown to Halloween: Cars Land "Haul-O-Ween" at Disney California Adventure

Making time to enjoy the Halloween festivities at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure has proven to be a little rough this year. Between my latest stupid, ongoing illness (a hard cough that won't go away, lasting well over a month), a short vacation away to La Jolla for a few days (way too short), and the generally busy activities in the household, we find spare moments to attend the parks when we can. The problem is exacerbated by Disney having added more dates for Halloween parties than ever before, and then cross that with even more dates being blocked out for cast members around those parties. To top it off, we have friends coming down in another week, and though they were able to score Halloween party tix, we were not alas, as they were completely sold out by the time we tried to grab some.

The spooky smile greeting you when you enter Cars Land this Halloween...

But, not to worry... we will still get into the park to have some Halloween fun. We just have to make a conscious effort to pick the right dates to go. Jen and I had managed to get to Disneyland mid-September to ride the reopened train, see the Main Street Halloween decorations and take a ride on the Haunted Mansion Jack Skellington-style. In keeping with our usual Halloween tradition, we would have liked a chance to ride all of what we call the "Skeleton Rides" (i.e. an attraction, with a ride component, that has a skull, bones, or skeleton built into its design; namely, the Jungle Cruise, Indiana Jones, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Haunted Mansion.) The Skeleton Rides is our own name for the collective group of attractions... Copyright Jen & Rik 2005-2017... that we quite often like to ride one after the other, especially on a Halloween trip. [Note: See more about the Skeleton Rides at the bottom of this post.] Unfortunately, we were in a time crunch and only managed to fit the little we could into the span.

Two of the attraction titles changed for "Haul-O-Ween": Mater's Junkyard Jamboree
is temporarily Mater's Graveyard Jamboree instead.

Not to worry though; our friends will soon be here and we have secured a hotel room for one night so we can stay up late and enjoy the Halloween atmosphere in the park about a week before the actual holiday. But until then, I just had to find a little time between the gaps. I had both a doctor and a dentist appointment last Thursday just down the road in Orange, so Jen's mom Sande and I found ourselves with the second half of the afternoon open. That gave us a couple or three hours of time to spend hanging out in Disney California Adventure waiting for Jen to get off work so we could go use a special employee discount coupon at Napa Rose for our dinner reservation that night. (The food? C'est magnifique!)

Weird spider thingy dangling above the street. All of the creature constructs are made out of car parts.

Because I was not feeling up to too much craziness given my cough, Sande and I decided that just casually strolling around and taking in the Halloween decorations was a solid plan. (We did sneak in a sit-down in the old Muppet Theatre to watch an extended trailer preview for Thor: Ragnarok. I won't say anything more except: Goldblum is hilarious as the Grandmaster.) Naturally, the decorations on Buena Vista Street hit us first – including my first glimpse of the new Headless Horseman statue – but I will touch on those later in the month. [I have posted a photo of the Horseman on my Facebook page. Check it out there if you missed it.] The focus this time is on Cars Land, which has gotten some heavy promotion for its holiday celebration lately, which they have titled "Haul-O-Ween".

More weird spider thingies on the side of Sarge's Surplus Hut; note the patch of Jack-Oil-Lanterns to the right.

From the outset, I have not been a fan of the Cars movies produced by Pixar and Disney. (And I have only seen the first two so far.) This is not to say that I don't like them. I just haven't been gaga over them like I have so much of the rest of Pixar's output. Part of the problem is that Pixar set such a crazily high bar for themselves from the beginning, that anything that doesn't quite hit that mark for me just looks OK. Just one element can be off the slightest bit in a Pixar film and that becomes the difference between genre-shaking, ground-breaking, top tier entertainment and a movie that is merely "good". The first six Pixar films, in my opinion, fell into that first definition (as did releases 8 through 11); Cars, their 7th release and Cars 2, their 12th, fell into the merely "good" category. For me, that is. Maybe you don't see it the same way and that is fine. I have said from the beginning that this is how the Cars films appear... FOR ME.

A quartet of pretty terrific fake horror movie posters are plastered along the side of a garage, my favorite being Escape to Hitch Mountain...

The level of quality in the Cars films is not being judged here; the craftsmanship, attention to detail and design, and sheer love of the animated form that seems to have gone into the other Pixar films is here in equal abundance in the Cars series. By every measure, these are entertaining films that please their audiences across the board. I was even entertained by them. But FOR ME, there is something out of place in the Cars films. At first I couldn't define it, but I finally figured out that the missing element was... me. My involvement. That is, a human touch. I have a hard time identifying with the world of Cars because it seems to be a place where mechanical constructs have come into being without the interference of humanity. If indeed humans were once a factor in their coming to life, it seems like they have replaced us. We may be dead as a species, and the entire series is a post-apocalyptic landscape where cars have somehow become sentient beings who have taken over the world.

First entrance to the Cozy Cone Motel section of Cars Land.
Note the Jack O'Lantern faces on each cone.

That is a little too chilling a premise for a series largely pointed at kids, so there has to be a different solution. I have two theories, but neither one of them allows me to warm up to the series any more than I am able to do. Theory #1) We are invisible to the cars. We exist, we work, we build them, and the cars achieve some form of sentience that is known only to them. Cars and humans are unable to talk to each other; humans see cars only as objects to be owned and used; cars, with a reduced form of intelligence and sensory apparatus, are unable to actually detect us. We are like ghosts to them – ghost riders in essence – and while we are actually the ones controlling and driving them, they believe that they are controlling themselves in the process. 

My personal favorite of the cones at the Cozy Cone Motel: the Popcone booth.
I usually grab dill pickle-flavored popcorn and a wild grape tonic here (THE perfect combo),
 but not this trip. The coolest new thing was that you can get "add-ins" for your
popcorn, i.e. various candies like M&Ms, etc. This will happen when I am
there next week.

Still, that is a bit too much for a kids film (and perhaps too trippy), and so my second theory involves kids in the solution. Theory #2) The world of Cars only exists in the minds of children. As a kid, my brothers and I would build elaborate worlds in our basement combining all of our toys into one huge conglomeration of playtime imagination. Our Fisher-Price Little People buildings and blocks and Lego sets would form a city, combine with Hot Wheel tracks for roadways, and all our army men, space aliens, monsters, stuffed animals, and whatever else would populate it. We each had collections of Hot Wheel and Matchbox cars, and they all had names and even voices, because we had them talk to the Little People, soldiers, aliens, etc. like everyone else. It could be that the world of Cars is part of some child's playtime, only – in a marked difference from the Toy Story series – the car toys have no recognition of their child controllers. They don't pretend to be asleep when their child enters the room or walks up to play with them. They just continue their storyline unaware and uninterrupted by concern for their controllers.

Of course, I have not tested these theories against more recent viewings of the films to see if either theory holds up, or to see if there is maybe an element that I am missing somewhere. As it goes for the moment, the Cars films stand – once again, FOR ME – as lesser entries in a series of films defined by consistent excellence in every department, and yet far better than the bulk of so-called "entertainment" which lies far below it. (For comparison, I place Monsters University and The Good Dinosaur, two more recent Pixar projects, in the same place as the first two Cars films. All are entertaining films, but just miss that high water mark Pixar has, perhaps unreasonably, set for itself. Or did we set it for them?)

Radiator Springs Curios had a huge amount of holiday-themed changes, which surprised
me because I tend to pass up the shops most of the time when I visit Cars Land.

And so, with what some would term my "Cars hatred" intact (just because I liked them a little less than something else better), one might assume that a section of a Disney theme park entirely geared toward the Cars franchise would be out of bounds for me. Why would I like something called Cars Land if I couldn't buy into the fantasy in the films which inspired its creation?

This is perhaps my favorite addition in the entire "Haul-O-Ween" makeover: a monstrous, screaming wreck
of an old beater with a tree growing right up through its chassis. The undead are alive and loose in DCA!

As I had noted, the missing element in the Cars films was my being able to feel a part of that universe as a human. From the moment that Jen and I got our first taste of the new Cars Land back in 2012 – when we got to attend an exclusive cast member preview – I was completely blown away by how completely immersed you become in the world of Cars... precisely what I needed to finally belong to it. As we walked through a doorway in a temporary construction wall and saw the Route 66 desert mountain vista for the very first time, where the Radiator Springs Racers zoom around a track designed to look like the open road, I was instantly won over by Cars Land.

Gas pumps in front of the curio shop, done up in Haul-O-Ween flair...

The retro feel of Cars Land was also a big plus, playing that nostalgia card for all its worth, and as a child of the '60s and '70s, it squared right in on my weak spot. Especially for the odd details of the period and the trivia that I love so much: parodic knockoffs of Burma Shave signs; giant traffic cones turned into a roadside motel (but actually serving as snack stands featuring a variety of goodies); a diner disguised as a gas station that serves classic diner fare; and the constantly spinning array of songs featuring lyrics about cars and assorted hot rods. In five years of regular visits to the area, I haven't gotten tired of looking about the place yet.

The leaning tower of tires in front of Luigi's Rollicking Roadsters – or Luigi's Honkin'
Haul-O-Ween for the moment – gets a more seasonal sort of tread...

The changes for "Haul-O-Ween", some of which I have noted in the captions, include the renaming of at least two of the land's trio of ride attractions. Luigi's Rollicking Roadsters is temporarily Luigi's Honkin' Haul-O-Ween instead, though from the brief glimpse I got in passing was that the ride itself remained the same. Sande thought maybe they might have spookier music on it, but it seemed we heard the same "Italian folk tunes" from before. However, promotion for the celebration calls our some new tunes on the ride that have Halloween themes, so perhaps I wasn't listening closely enough. As we passed the windows of Luigi's, there were a set of "pumpkins" designed to look like they were made out of tires, but the picture I took was not what I wanted. Perhaps if I ride it next week I can get a snap of the tire pumpkins window from inside, while I wait to ride it and hear the new Halloween music playing on it.

The Tow Mater Junkyard Jamboree attraction that sits at the very front of Cars Land's main entrance is briefly called the Graveyard Jamboree instead. Once more, I did not get a chance to ride it this time, so I didn't see inside to see if they added fangs to the cars or did some weird decorative changes. I took a quick look at the front of Radiator Springs Racers at the back part of town and, unlike the other two rides, saw no substantive changes to the signage or the attraction's name (apart from the usual Halloween decor). I suspect that riding one of the racers into the mountains and through the town inside will reveal some special "Haul-O-Ween" decorations, but once more, that is on hold until later.

Here's the Horn-O-Plenty that appears outside the area for the Luigi ride, Note, even more
"Jack-Oil-Lanterns" situated about the horn and sign.

As to the regular cars that roll through Cars Land and engage with the human visitors to the area, we saw Lightning McQueen at the Cozy Cone Motel. He was done up like a superhero, with a long cape-like appendage sticking off his normal spoiler. We also saw Cruz Ramirez, a new vehicular character from Cars 3, dressed up like a pirate. I did not get a picture of her because too many people were in line getting photos with her; plus, I had no idea who she was at the moment, not having done much research in the way of Cars 3 until now. As to the other area car characters, I did not see Red the Fire Engine or DJ (the one that shows up with the party music in midtown) in our walkthrough this time. The vehicle that I was most hoping to see, Tow Mater, was also a no-show, and I was pretty disappointed by this because he dresses up pretty goofily like a vampire. Who knew that one day I would saddened over a character voiced by Larry the Cable Guy not being around when I wished?

C'mon... c'mon... eat the baby... eat the baby... you know it will be both tasty and crunchy...

There is definitely a lot more for me to see in Cars Land for Haul-O-Ween. I did not get a good shot of the billboard sign at the front of the land (because a whole family darted right in front of me... stupid families; they should be banned from the park...), and I wanted to take more time at the actual attractions. I also did not get to check out the really cool spider car that has left webbing high up over Flo's V-8 Cafe, nor did I walk in the direction of the vista area for the Racers attraction. So, don't be surprised if I throw up another pack of Cars Land "Haul-O-Ween" pics closer to Halloween.

Until then, I'm up all night to get spooky,

RTJ

[More notes on the "Skeleton Rides": Jen and I also don't count Tom Sawyer Island, which has plenty of skeleton action, because it is all walkthrough for those portions. Technically, the Disneyland Limited, too, could be a skeleton ride because there are dinosaur skeletons during the Primeval World portion of the round trip, but we don't always find a good opportunity to ride it all the way around, so we don't count it as part of our regular "Skeleton Ride" rotation.]