Hi all,

The Disney Parks Blog the other day made a post about the opening of the new Mickey meet ‘n’ greet in Town Square. In the post they mentioned magician Mickey, to which I, and the rest of the Disney community took as meaning he will have an actual magician’s outfit. But it has now come to light that this is not the case, and it will be just regular Mickey. The “magician” part simply implied, well, that Mickey can do magic I suppose. The post doesn’t make it too clear and caused quite a lot of confusion, but sadly regular Mickey will be greeting Guests. We will be there in just over two weeks to check this out for ourselves. The new area does look neat, and today Stitch Kingdom shared two (albeit blurry) images taken by someone on the inside!

What is interesting about that Stitch Kingdom article is that it also addresses the Princesses moving in, but says that the Fairies will be making appearances there too after they leave EPCOT in the summer. The apparent reason for this is that John Lasseter wants to keep the Fairies in the Magic Kingdom, which is a fair point, but why they have to share an already overstretched space with the princesses is a little strange. There is a lot of redundant space in the Magic Kingdom ,as many fans often point out, and yet they are lumping two different character brands together. How this will work nobody knows yet. Will they alternate sets? Will they be all mixed up? What ever happened to the whole “you can only meet the Fairies in Pixie Hollow itself?” I guess for now all we can do is wait, but I shall be interested to see how this plays out – and what happens to the space once all the Princesses and Fairies move out. There is obviously a separate line for those as to Mickey, and has to have separate theming, so which characters will go in there after?

Jon posted on our forum a rumour that I heard from a contact regarding the new hub show in Disneyland Paris. Be sure to check it out! (scroll down past the original post)

User cyberbb on our forums posted a mini-report on a new event at Hong Kong Disneyland that began recently. Be sure to see which rare characters he saw when he went!

Disney Central Plaza has been at special Disney Channel event in Paris this evening. If you follow them on Facebook, they have some pictures, including one of Handy Manny making an appearance! I don’t know which other characters were there, but if I find out more, I will let you know.

Moving to NYC now, and I know this is not a lot of use right now, but a blog posted that there is to be some special Princess event in New York soon, complete with characters, but the problem is I can’t remember where I read that! LOL! Again, as always, I shall let you know more when I hear it. (I thought I’d mention this anyway so that anyone who is interested can keep a look out on the internet for more information)

Finally, again in some “non-news”, some of my Disney friends have been in Dubai this week for a special Disney event, but I don’t know why, though one person did post this video to YouTube showing a segment from the Little Mermaid being performed in a mall. The name in the background in the video is "Mickey's Amazing Adventure". My guess would be that this is some sort of promotional event organised by Disney to bring the magic of Disney to other countries. A mall seems a strange place for this, but nonetheless there it is.

Ok that’s all for now. Apologies for some of the uncertainty around some of this news today, but I can only post what I hear – and what I remember LOL!

Dan.