Despite the debacle last weekend and the lines down Mainstreet the past two days, I ventured to Disneyland with the express purpose of riding the revamped Pirates of the Caribbean. For those of you that don’t want to know anything about the ride before you get a chance to see it for yourself, please stop reading now.

Even though the lines have been very long the past two days, the lines this evening were short, just 20 minutes. They were short enough that after riding it once I turned around and hopped back in line. I have no doubt that in my two rides I missed a number of additions and changes, but here is the most notable items that I noticed:

• The voices of all of the characters in the ride were much more clear and understandable
• The music throughout the ride has changed, they have removed the singing just after the drops, so you no longer hear, “We pillage, we plunder, we rifle, and loot,” although the music is still playing.
• Davy Jones (from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest) is projected onto a screen made of fog that the boats go through in one of the tunnels.
• Captain Jack Sparrow shows up in three places in the ride: near the Mayor as he gets dunked in the well, in a barrel just after the scene where brides are being sold, and at the very end (this is what the picture is of.) He is also painted on the wall just inside the door next to the line off to the left.
• There is also a new voice as you climb up at the end of the ride that just doesn’t fit.

Overall, the additions weren’t extreme and fit in quite well. In no way did Disney destroy the ride as they could have with these additions. However, there are a few things that should have been changed but weren’t:

• The food needs to be removed in the area where the women are being chased by Pirates. This is a ridiculous move that Disney did when they tried to make the ride more politically correct, and needs to be undone.
• The hidden Mickey that use to show up in the shadow of the ship’s captain in the fort scene needs to be returned. This was one of the few hidden Mickeys that a lot of people knew about and made them feel like part of the ‘in’ crowd.
• Many of the boats that take guests through the ride need to be removed, there are just too many of them. There is constantly a backlog of boats stacked up all the way back to the jail scene. Every time another boat comes they run into the boat in front of them and jerk everybody around a bit. It’s like having somebody start hitting you in the back of the head in the third act of a movie and not stopping until the credits start to roll. It was my biggest complaint about the ride before and it would be easy for Disneyland to fix it, they just refuse to.

While I thought these additions were alright, there are rumors that there will be more changes made to the ride, with the addition of both Kira Knightly’s and Orlando Bloom’s characters to the ride. Hopefully this won’t be a precedent for Disneyland, changing classic rides to fit their recent movies spawned from the ride. Disney is currently working on a Jungle Cruise movie based on the ride, and I would hate to see them change the ride to reflect the movie.