News / Merchandise & Boutiques

To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of “it’s a small world”, around 50 new artworks by Mary Blair are now available to purchase from The Art of Disney on Demand, at The Disney Gallery boutique in Disney Village. Read More…

While much of the Ratatouille attraction and restaurant exterior has been constructed and finished in full view of passing guests, one developing façade of La Place de Rémy in Walt Disney Studios Park has appeared noticeably shyer: the boutique, Chez Marianne Souvenirs de Paris.

Yet no longer, as white sheets covering the scaffolding along this side of the park’s Parisian street were gradually removed bit by bit yesterday, revealing the first glimpse at the remarkably complete façade of this future Ratatouille shop.

Later in the day, @1929Mickey on Twitter captured these photos of the unveiled finish, which seeks to cover up the corner of the “ImagiNations” Cast Member building as much as provide an exterior for the boutique.

The result matches well with plans published online last year, revealing the full extent of how this “Rue de Paris” leading towards Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy will look.

Chez Marianne Souvenirs de Paris will be located actually inside this corner of the Cast Member building, in former backstage space, with a square corner frontage that will have entrance doors both onto the street, above, and facing out towards the attraction itself (to the left).

The colonnaded exterior seen on the plans matches the cream section still partially covered yesterday, with many finishing touches still to be done.

It’s odd to notice that the modern pitched section on the right of the existing building has been somewhat incorporated into the façade, but beyond this point the rest of the building remains uncovered, leaving an unthemed corner facing toward the Toy Story Playland entrance.

Luckily conifer trees have grown up to mostly cover it from view, but the area between here and Hollywood Boulevard, behind Art of Disney Animation, remains a real let-down (and a perfect spot to give us our own mini Pixar Place, surely).

To put the location into context, and to show just what a transformation this development presents, let’s go back to 2010…

The corner above is where the colonnaded façade is now taking shape, with doors on both sides leading into the boutique slotted into the building’s ground floor.

The boutique itself remains scheduled to open a little later than the attraction and restaurant, in “Autumn 2014”. This does indeed seem absurd, especially for a merchandise might like Disney, but construction did begin later and fitting a new boutique into the corner of an existing building is probably not as easy as building from scratch. And still, you never know, a store on Disneyland Paris property could open ahead of schedule for once.

Though Marianne, of the boutique’s name, is of course a national emblem of the French Republic, it’s been suggested that it could also be an in-joke referring to the (now apparently former) Disneyland Paris Director of Merchandise, Marianne Sharpe, who spearheaded many welcome improvements to the resort’s merchandise offer in recent years.

Inside, we no doubt expect to find the resort’s recently revamped range of “Paris” merchandise, along with items relating to the film and perhaps even culinary homewares or foodstuffs. Alongside Tower Hotel Gifts, it’ll be only the second adequately-sized boutique outside of the Studios’ Front Lot entrance area and the first in the character-filled Toon Studio, ignoring the miniscule Disney Animation Gallery and disappointing Barrel of Monkeys.

Add to this the very welcome toilets just next door, the desperately needed restaurant across the courtyard, and you see why Ratatouille will be the best step yet to make Walt Disney Studios both feel and work like a real Disney park, in this corner at least.

LATEST PHOTOS @1929Mickey (Twitter)

This month’s Pin Trading releases include two more Disney Dreams! pins, two Eiffel Tower pins and another art nouveau Paris pin. Meanwhile in March 2014, Scrooge McDuck finds a pot of gold at the end of the St Patrick’s Day rainbow, Rapunzel represents Printemps (Spring) 2014 and Minnie Mouse gets a touch of Parisian avant-garde with a new “Oh La La” set.

Which ones would you like to add to your collection?

ORIGINAL PDF Disneyland Paris Pin Trading March 2014

After a long wait, it was with just two days’ notice that fans learned the LEGO Store would finally be opening today, 28th February 2014, at 9am — and open it really did.

Joined by the Disneyland Paris Ambassadors, the Vice President of LEGO Europe and a special walkaround “LEGO mascot” named Tom, the new boutique’s team of brick-building enthusiasts cut the ribbon and invited the first shoppers inside the store.

Using the same modern design scheme of other European shopping mall LEGO Stores, this flagship location can boast being the largest on the continent. That said, it’s not massively bigger — at almost 600m² only roughly the size of Hollywood Pictures that was there before — but with walls piled high with LEGO sets and a minimalist aesthetic it does look like a bigger, much more exciting retail space. And certainly a vast improvement on the tired Hollywood Pictures.

Disneyland Paris Ambassadors, Antonella and Jonathan met “Tom” the store’s mascot and Ward Van Duffel, Vice President and General Manager of LEGO Europe at the store’s opening this morning and shared a series of photos from inside the new shop.

LEGO’s all-glass shopfront is immediately the most modern in Disney Village, offering a full view inside the colourful store to passing customers. Brick murals of Sleeping Beauty Castle, Disneyland Hotel and Mad Hatter’s Tea Cups are featured centrally on the bright yellow podium along with a textured, LEGO brick logo.

Where most other LEGO Stores have just a single yellow brick ceiling feature in the middle of the store, this flagship has several, of different sizes, creating more unique areas within the store.

All the LEGO Store favourites are present and correct: the free building table, the build-your-own Minifigure display, and the clever augmented reality scanner that lets you hold a LEGO set up and see the finished creation on screen in 3D.

Here, the popular trademark “Pick-a-Brick wall”, which lets you fill cartons with your choice of loose bricks, isn’t on the back wall of the store as standard, but a larger free-standing wall, with even more LEGO sets behind.

Despite not being as grand as the longstanding LEGO Imagination Center in Orlando or self-contained LEGO Store Anaheim, this new Disneyland Paris example does feature the same special models and customisations.

A huge, stunning brick mural of Prince Phillip fighting dragon Maleficent sits just inside the door, with murals of The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Star Wars line the walls, which are also criss-crossed by a long green monster.

Other full-scale models featured are Sorcerer Mickey, Woody and Buzz Lightyear, and R2D2.

LEGO Store Disney Village opens 9am to midnight, daily.

PHOTOS Ambassadeurs Disneyland Paris (Facebook)

EXCLUSIVE — Marianne Sharpe and David Sultan of the Disneyland Paris merchandising team preview the new Disney Light’Ears at an informal panel discussion just for fansites. Learn about the design, development and production of the ears, how they work and what we can expect when they launch this July at Disneyland Paris.

• Watch, like and share on YouTube here!

Ah, the Disney Store. Not the one in your nearby shopping mall, but the generically titled store that used to be the largest in Disney Village. Now effectively replaced and superseded in both size, style and location by World of Disney, you might well think this rather tired location will be at a loss to find a raison d’être. But, reopening after a short closure on 14th July, it now sees a renewed focus to character groups and a new dedicated Christmas section — the first outside the parks.

Little else has been renewed, however. All the old 1990s props and decoration — including the large spaceship mobile hanging in the centre of the store — remain intact. The ugly dayglo-coloured flat signage outside is still in place, still carrying the generic “Disney Store” name.

Some effort has been made to tie the interior together better, with a smart new mural or “fresque” installed above the displays around the edge of the store, signifying areas for franchises such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars and Cars or even individual characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse. This is slightly different at least to the displays at World of Disney, which largely group items by categories such as homewares and favour resort merchandise over franchise ranges.

Meanwhile the small lower area of Disney Store, historically the original La Poste postal office, is now a dedicated Christmas space. Since the 15th Anniversary it has featured the current season’s merchandise, most recently changing to 20th Anniversary displays for a few months before this recent change. The modest decoration of lights, tinsel, trimmings and props isn’t bad at all, but only stuck-on snow in the window announces this as a Christmas shop from outside.

Presumably all of these changes are merely a stop-gap measure before it’s decided what to do with this space in the longer term. Perhaps split it into several smaller, well-branded boutiques? Or a large (and much-needed) new restaurant? Or why not demolish this whole oppressive, monolithic block and start again, using some of the empty backstage space to create more space out front? We can dream.

In the short term, the restricted opening hours, nondescript name (still curiously overlapping with the actual Disney Store brand) and dated interior almost give the feel of a cut-price outlet store. The store now only opens from 4pm onwards each day, an obvious sign that it’s living on borrowed time.

With rumours of a LEGO store to replace the similarly-inflicted Hollywood Pictures shop further along, let’s hope Disney Village’s true retail revolution is still to come.

PHOTOS Maarten for DLRP Today.com

It can be a beautiful piece of Disney architecture and filled with fun facts and details, but a shop is ultimately only as good as the merchandise its sells. How does World of Disney compare? DLRP Today.com reader Maarten has kindly captured a lengthy photo tour of the new store, showing us what’s on the shelves of this new flagship location for Disneyland Paris merchandise.

Though the store largely presents a kind of “best of” collection of merchandise available at an array of stores across the resort, organised largely by product type through hats, mugs, towels, and so on, it does also introduce a few of its own exclusive ranges. These displays, signified by special “World of Disney – Produits Exclusifs” placards, include items from the colourful Disney by Britto range, designed by pop artist Romero Britto.

One of the main benefits of World of Disney, besides perhaps not having to visit several stores to buy the merchandise that’s taken your eye, is that the aisles between the actual shelves are much wider and more spacious than in any other store at the resort.

Continues with 46 more photos… Read More…

World of Disney is now already a familiar, unique icon for Disneyland Paris. But what went into designing and building this new landmark boutique? Via the Disneyland Paris Generations website, an official video allows some of the creators to speak for themselves, as well as giving us a glimpse at the always fun time-lapse video Disney sets up for most of its major projects.

As it happened, after over 10 years of planning and waiting, this new store rose from the concrete roof of the TGV platforms in just over 18 months. Here it rises in about six seconds.

Video follows… Read More…