Review: The Color Companion to Walt Disney World

OVERVIEW: THE COLOR COMPANION TO WALT DISNEY WORLD

The crew behind the Unofficial Guide—authors, among other things, of TouringPlans.com and The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2011, have released a new work, and it’s terrific!

The new book’s full title is The Unofficial Guide: The Color Companion to Walt Disney World, and Bob Sehlinger and Len Testa share author credits.

However, as has been the case in the rest of the Unofficial Guide series about Disney World and Orlando (the magna carta known in the community as TUG, with kids, without kids, beyond Disney—soon they’ll need an Unofficial Guide to the Unofficial Guides), a whole crew of data collectors, hotel inspectors, photographers and such were involved in its creation.

Yes, photographers. That’s the new thing about The Color Companion to Walt Disney World: more than 560 often excellent photographs.

The photographs really make this a new thing. They help illuminate some of the choices a visitor faces, show the future reward of current planning work, and also serve as great mementos of the trip itself.

MORE DETAIL ON THE COLOR COMPANION TO WALT DISNEY WORLD

For example, there’s no text that can really illuminate the difference between Disney’s Beach Club and Yacht Club resorts, other than to note that one is blue and one is gray.

Photographs, on the other hand, both capture the grace of their architecture, and also make it clear that there isn’t much difference between them other than that one is blue and one is gray.

Its marketing matter positions the Color Companion to Walt Disney World both as a companion to The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World and as a guidebook valuable all on its own.

Both points are true.

Visitors can have a great Walt Disney World experience based solely on the material in the Color Companion:

• The photographs are tremendously valuable
• The material has been largely re-written for brevity and punch—I love the new handling of Stitch’s Great Escape, and even more that in this book I don’t have to read these guys complaining about Alien Encounter anymore
• Everything that is central to a standard Walt Disney World vacation—one where you stay on site, and visit only Disney theme parks—has been retained
• The TUG team tone and sense of humor remains, usually welcome, sometimes to be feared…

Running at about 384 pages, including the front matter, the work is less than half as long as The Unofficial Guide. Even with a new teeny (but readable) font size, the 560 photographs take up so much of the layout that a lot had to be cut, and I am guessing that the work has fewer than a third of the words that TUG has.

Not included, for example, is material on Universal Orlando and SeaWorld, the Disney Cruise Line, or about off-site or Downtown Disney Resort Area hotels.

I can’t quibble with these choices—for the exact same reasons you will not find much about them on this site either.  They just aren’t as central to the purpose.

But because material like this—and thousands of other details—is missing compared to TUG, it is fair to label this book as a companion to the Unofficial Guide.

It is also fair to label this book as the latest competitor in a new genre of Walt Disney World guidebooks—pictorially based guides that also cram a whole lot of teeny-font text in.

Julie and Mike Neal founded this genre, with what is now The Complete Walt Disney World 2010, and it’s good to see that the Unofficial Guide crew has a work in this genre out as well.

Between the two, the Neal’s The Complete Walt Disney World has done a much better job of printing its photos, and Sehlinger and Testa’s The Unofficial Guide: The Color Companion to Walt Disney World has much more consistently useful and relevant detail.

This, combined with the fact that any topic in the Color Companion can be supplemented with the editorially consistent TUG, makes the Color Companion the preferred choice of the two.

There are errors here and there—none really material.

Some have carried over from TUG.

• The capacity of It’s a Small World is much higher than 545 people per hour, which is what the books’ asserted figure of 11 minutes of waiting per 100 people in line ahead of you implies.  (Small World dispatches two boats that can hold between them as many as 50 people, as quickly as once a minute, and around every two minutes on average.)
• Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort is much closer to Epcot than the book’s maps imply
• Etc…

Others errors are new.  For example, the Color Companion includes new material by Sam Gennaway on the design of the parks, particularly their staging.

This material is generally interesting, but too often is forced. For example, many of these items are about luminal moments—entrances and transitions—and Gennaway, while making a valid general point, will force the tone a bit.

• Not all guests entering Epcot do so past Spaceship Earth
• There are half a dozen, not one, entrances to Fantasyland
• The Crystal Palace is based more on the one that housed the Great Exhibition in London than one in New York
• Etc.

But these are quibbles.

Overall, The Color Companion to Walt Disney World is a welcome, significant, much-needed work, and a great resource for visitors who wish to use a guidebook, either on its own, or as a companion to The Unofficial Guide.

It’s also nice to see that Len lost the “with” and gained an “&.”

You can find it here at Amazon.com.

(On a more personal note, The Unofficial Guide and the other works of its authors have been an ongoing inspiration to this site.

• On the positive side, TUG illuminated how fact-based analysis could be part of the basis for travel recommendations
• On the negative side, it illuminated how many pages of reading could be required to construct a trip to Walt Disney World!

The goal of this site was, for first time family visitors unsure if they would ever return, to provide just one page of advice. At McKinsey, we always said that the best conversations with our clients came from a discussion around just one sheet of paper that synthesized and summarized all of the work done to solve the problem at hand.

That was the goal pursued on this site.

Visitors who could follow all of the instructions on this site’s one page Summary of Instructions would have a great trip.

Visitors who could not follow an instruction would find their next best options, ranked in order, one level down in the site’s information architecture.  Those for whom even these did not work could find at further levels the analysis, facts and opinions from which they could design their own trips.

All of this was inspired by TUG’s application of analysis to travel, …and by its length!  The much shorter Color Companion to Walt Disney World thus will be a real help to those preferring to plan their travels from a book.)