The best original attraction in Walt Disney World, an interactive theater that combined live actors, live-puppeteered animatronic elements, gag bar-stools, and booze, is finally being razed.
The Adventurer's Club was the shining star of the otherwise humdrum Pleasure Island complex, a collection of nightclubs intended to entice tweens and young adults to spend their evenings on the Disney World property. Disney's squeaky-clean ethos never sat comfortably alongside the idea of dance-clubs (despite the company's 1950s/60s success with dance parties in Disneyland), and all the clubs shut down in 2008.
Adventurer's Club stole the best stuff from LA's Magic Castle, mixed it up with some proto-steampunk LARPing, added in improv theater that mixed human, "on-stage" actors with remote-controlled, camera/mic-equipped animatronic trophies and masks, to create an experience without parallel. It was a castmember favorite, and if you chanced on it on one of the employee-discount nights (Thursdays, if I recall correctly), it was especially raucous and filled with in-joke innuendo.
Dave Cobb tweeted the depressing demolition shot above yesterday. Goodbye, Adventurer's Club. You were truly the best. Kongaloosh!
