Many theme park fans love character dining. It offers one of those welcomed "kill two birds" opportunities, where you can get in a meet-and-greet with favorite characters during a meal time, saving you the often-long wait to meet those characters elsewhere in the park. That's why fans often snap up reservations for character dining times as soon as they're available, and parks often command a premium over typical meal prices for restaurants that offer character dining.
Disney's "Big Five" (Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Pluto, Donald) used to dominate character dining opportunities at the Walt Disney World Resort, but Disney now also offers wildly popular character dining meals with its line-up of Disney princesses. Disney has many more collections of characters it could send out at meal times, as well. The Star Wars characters are just one of the many IP [intellectual properties] that Disney owns. How about Toy Story and the other Pixar characters? Or Marvel?
Yes, Universal Orlando owns the Florida theme park rights for the Marvel characters. But would that keep an Avengers breakfast out of one of the Disney World hotels? Marvel characters are the only things bringing any visitors into Disneyland's Innoventions building. What if Disney just converted that space into a massive Marvel character dining facility? How many more bank vaults would Scrooge McDuck have to buy to hold all that extra cash?
Here's your chance to tell Disney what you want — how you want to spend your money on character dining. We're limiting this question to Disney's IP, though the Universal and SeaWorld parks also offer their own character dining opportunities. But they don't offer it on anywhere near the scale that Disney, and especially Walt Disney World, does.
Please tell us in the comments about your favorite, and your dream, character dining meals.
But when we eat, like Tim, we just want good food and good service. No characters, please.
His mother, on the other hand, would rather spend the dinner hour checking out Gaston or Kronk (I like 'em big and stupid)!
It'd be great to have Jack Sparrow as a dining character. He come in stumbling from the bar and pull up a chair next to the female guests.
My boys have asked me for years why they can't dine with pirates, or Star Wars, and now more than anything they wish they could dine with Marvel chracters. My vote is definitely geared towards some boy experiences, which I hope this test during Star Wars weekends proves that it will be an excellent money maker. My boys will most likely require the proper attire (one more money maker) to look like their favorite characters. If there were Marvel dining at the resorts, you can bet that my boys would want to be dressed like Captain America, Iron Man, Wolverine, even Deadpool, etc. More money would be made off of my family if these experiences were offered on a regular basis. There are only so many times you can eat with Mickey and the fab 5 before it feels redundant. We need these boy experiences for the boys who are too old for Winnie the Pooh, yet too young for fine signature dining.
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