The first reference to the Hollywood Tower Hotel was in Oswald's Filling Station. The radio inside this gas station-themed gift shop has its own unique audio loop of "radio broadcasts". One of the broadcasts was a performance of Anthony Fremont's orchestra playing at the hotel. At this time, no complete version of the radio loop is online, but thankfully there is a clip of the relevant Tower-themed section:
This reference was still in place as of October 2017, but I haven't been able to confirm it further (albeit mostly because I didn't feel like hanging around in a relatively small gift shop for so long just to listen through the whole loop). However, it definitely survived at least several months past the opening of Mission Breakout.
The next reference was one of the most detailed, and was at Mortimer's fruit stand.
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| In the box, February 2018 |
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| Front page image of the Tower sign being "installed", featuring a questionable-quality photoshop rendering of what the pre-disaster hotel looked like. |
On one of the prop-filled shelves above the actual merchandise stands was a box filled with Buena Vista Bugle newspapers. Generally, all except the paper title and maybe the headline was out of view of most guests... but the front of the paper actually had custom story-relevant text, which appeared as follows:
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| The headline article. Note that the papers were stuck together with glue. |
The Buena Vista Bugle
Wednesday, May 4, 1927
Hollywood Tower Hotel to open next year!
Promises to be a star in its own right!
Locals of the Hollywood Hills have all been watching as construction has been underway on the new hot spot coming to the area. The Hollywood Tower Hotel says it will become a beacon for the show business elite. The hotel manager, Pete Corrigan, assures our readers that once the Hollywood Tower Hotel opens, it will be unlike any other lodging in the surrounding areas.
"We're very excited to open with a party for the ages," says Corrigan. "We are proud to announce that our house band, led by Anthony Fremont, will be performing in the Tip Top Club into the wee hours of the morning."
The Tip Top Club also offers a full menu of both food and drinks for your enjoyment. The hotel also features several presidential suites on the higher floors, fantastic views of Hollywood, and state-of-the-art elevators that will deliver you to your accommodations in style. "We are very proud of our new fleet of elevators and are quite positive our guests have never traveled in ones so smooth," says Corrigan. "Guests at our hotel will not only enjoy all of our amenities, but get the chance to rub elbows with some of Hollywood's finest talents," Corrigan raves. "This is something we're very proud of. Many guests come to Hollywood expecting to see the likes of their favorite stars. Well at the Hollywood Tower Hotel, there's a good chance you can enjoy a game of mahjong in our lobby with your favorite personality of stage or screen." The hotel property is also proud to offer an exclusive Red Car stop in front of their main lobby, as well as a discounted rate for those staying in town for one of the many premieres at the beautiful Carthay Circle Theater. The Hollywood Tower Hotel is sure to be a treasured place of Hollywood for both the city and its citizens.
Note that I've corrected some typos and apparent minor grammatical errors from the actual prop.
There's... a lot to unpack about this article. Most obviously, someone put a lot of work into a prop that's placed where nobody can easily read it. I only got to see the text because a cast member was kind enough to take the prop off the shelf for me to see (that's their hands in the photo). Why put so much work into something people won't notice unless they specifically look for it? Why write custom story-relevant text when stock text could have filled the same purpose? However, there's also a lot to explore in the text itself.
First of all, it seems to get the hotel's opening date wrong. The paper is dated 1927 with the hotel stated to open "next year", making the opening in 1928. However, the plaque on the building itself gives the opening date as 1929, the same year that the real Hollywood Tower opened. It seems bizarre that such a basic piece of lore would be wrong, given that the lore in question is printed obviously on the attraction itself. Interestingly, this isn't the only Tower-related Easter Egg that changes the date; apparently some hidden lore at Shanghai Disneyland also gives yet another opening date for the Hollywood Tower, and seemingly confirms that both the Twilight Zone (DCA, Florida, Paris) and Hotel Hightower (Tokyo) versions of the Tower of Terror are "canon" to the increasingly interconnected Disney Parks lore.
Interconnected lore brings me to the second point: Pete Corrigan. It's odd to give the manager a name and appearance here, almost as if Disney had more plans for him. I highly suspect that Corrigan was intended as a possible connection to the ongoing "SEA" storyline that Disney has increasingly worked into its parks. SEA is the Society of Explorers and Adventurers, a collection of various wacky characters that tie together the backstories of Disney's parks and attractions. Members include (or included; the lore changes occasionally) Indiana Jones' pilot, the owner of the Big Thunder Mountain mine, and Harrison Hightower of the Tokyo Disney Tower of Terror. Had DCA's Tower not unexpectedly closed (and indeed, the amount of Tower connections put into Buena Vista Street seems to indicate that the designers didn't suspect the attraction would close a mere 5 years after BVS debuted), I believe that Pete Corrigan, manager of the Hollywood Tower Hotel, would have been revealed as a member of SEA or connected to them in some capacity.
Third, the article mentions a mahjong game in the lobby. Florida's Tower is the one with a mahjong game in the lobby; DCA had a card game instead (although DCA did have mahjong sets in the libraries). It seems strange for the company that made the attractions to mix up a Florida vs DCA difference, but admittedly it is a minor point. Perhaps it was even intentional; references to the Twilight Zone Tower in places such as Shanghai's Easter Egg seem purposely coy over whether the Floridian Gothic or DCA/Parisian Art Deco versions of the hotel are "canon". However, since this article clearly is meant to be about DCA, it would not make sense to bring intentional ambiguity.
Fourth, the "timeline" of this newspaper's placement seems to be a discontinuity. Why is Mortimer's stocking a paper announcing the hotel's future opening celebration, when Oswald's across the street already has radio broadcasts playing from the hotel? I've heard some fans insist that Buena Vista Street itself represents an ongoing story/changing timeline, with the earliest events being at the gate and the latest events ending at the Hollywood Tower (hence why the hotel "will open next year" at Mortimer's but has already opened, operated, and closed by the time guests reach the attraction). However, even if that were the case, Oswald's is right before Mortimer's.
Finally, that mention of the red car stop... I'll get to that later in this post.
The next significant connection to the Tower came in the form of the Silver Lakes Sisters, fictional owners of the Fiddler, Fifer, and Practical cafe near the Carthay Circle Theater. I covered most of the information about them and their connection to the Tower of Terror in my post about Halloween at the Hollywood Tower.
One thing I did not include in that post, however, was the sad replacement posters put in the cafe after Mission Breakout opened.
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| Overall view of both posters |
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| The right side poster |
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| The left side poster |
As you can see, they're the same images as before... but with "Hollywood Tower Hotel"hastily replaced with "Carthay Circle Theater". They even left in the building shape and a reference to the Tip Top Club! I have no idea why the original posters couldn't have stayed as an Easter Egg, especially when Mortimer's and Oswald's got to keep their (admittedly much more hidden) references. Even with the Tower gone, it isn't out of character for Disney to leave in nods to past attractions for fans to notice, which makes their attempted erasure of Tower here especially strange.
Now, back to that red car...
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| The stop was specifically named for the hotel. Photo by Mrbellcaptain |
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| Stop names listed on the front of the trolley. Photo by Mrbellcaptain |
In addition to having a specific Hollywood Tower stop, the red car also featured an advertisement for the hotel.
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| photo by Mrbellcaptain |
As you can see, the ad rather awkwardly depicted the Hollywood Tower Hotel... as not having a tower. Admittedly, the dimensions of the ad space meant the tower part would have to be cropped out anyways, but the artwork still makes the odd decision to depict the building as just the front part without the main hotel building behind it. It isn't like the tower is cropped out either; that's clearly the sky above the disembodied lobby!
At this time I don't know if the Tower ad is still in the red car. I've heard some people insist it was taken out around the same time the Fiddler, Fifer, and Practical posters got changed, but haven't ridden the red car myself to investigate.
On a tangent, apparently some developments at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida saw the addition of a new Red Car Trolley mural based on DCA's, but with their Tower design dropped in. As noted in one of my Florida Tower posts, their trolley is not an actual ride but instead part of a forensic story emphasizing how the hotel was once bustling enough to have its own trolley line but became abandoned after the disaster. The fact that DCA had an operating trolley with a stop at the Tower, which was explicitly emphasized in the newspaper, seems to show an interesting loop of ideas between the Californian and Floridian versions and their executions of the same story.
Overall, I feel like the Buena Vista Street connections emphasize exactly how much was lost with the conversion to Mission Breakout. Disney California Adventure didn't just lose one stellar attraction; it lost carefully crafted worldbuilding and attention to detail that is quickly giving way to a random mishmash of quick overlays.
