This new design solves a few of the flaws in the old version (introduced in June 2008) and allows for the folded paper guide to be a little more “customised” to each park.

Well, look at this:

As you can guess, the Cast Members are now able to place the Disneyland Park side face-up under Main Street Station and the Walt Disney Studios Park side face-up at the entrance of Disney Studio 1. Very smart.

Unlike the old design, which wasted a lot of space on its cover and reverse, each park is given its own little “notice board” to boldly display the times of the main featured events, park opening hours and any attraction closures.

Then, when you open it up, the times for your current park are shown straight away, with the times of the other park upside down, making the divide between the two much clearer (who knows, maybe guests were looking for Minnie’s Party Train in the Studios?).

The sensible change here is that now the events being pushed are on the front cover, this clever grid can fill the whole page — and crucially, include all the events. The previous design didn’t feature the times for say Disney’s Stars ‘n’ Cars in the main grid if it was also in the “featured” column, making the whole idea of having this hour-by-hour grid quite pointless. Problem solved.

Also pleasing is the new typeface used throughout — rounder and more legible in small print. The only downside to the whole re-think is that the resort still provides a PDF download of the Programme as an answer to providing entertainment times on its website, rather than having a fancy calendar like Hong Kong or California.

So, anyone who doesn’t want to print and doesn’t know of the “rotate” function in Adobe Reader… will be getting a bit of a twist in their neck.

The Programme was re-introduced back in 2006. Always looking for shameless promotion, this is a good time to mention that you find various versions of this new-generation Programme — and several fascinating old programmes — on our Memorabilia pages, well worth a look.

Images © Disney.