Disney Cruise Line’s eighth ship is larger than both the Disney Treasure and Disney Destiny. The new Disney Adventure has several firsts: its home port is Singapore, a first for Disney Cruise Line, and the ship stretches 1,122 feet (342 meters) long across 19 decks — it’s the biggest vessel.
It’s also a ship Disney acquired half-built, meaning the Imagineering team — which designed the rest of the fleet — had to rethink and transform it into a true Disney vessel.
Take the Imagination Garden space, essentially a “Main Street” at sea, themed around characters from the Once Upon a Studio short celebrating 100 years of Walt Disney Animation. It’s also the heart of the ship, featuring the first “castle at sea” and an ambitious stage that would be a technical feat even on land.
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The screen stretches nearly 30 feet tall and wraps around roughly 50 feet, making it the largest display ever installed on a Disney Cruise Line ship. It turns the middle of the Disney Adventure into a stage for everything from daytime character moments to large-scale performances. Think punchy, vibrant graphics during a sail away party — ‘Let’s Set Sail’ — or more dramatic environments during a variety of shows.
“This kind of venue is really going to give us an opportunity to expand the kind of storytelling and the immersion we’re going to create for our guests,” explained Will Hastings, Show Lighting Executive at Walt Disney Imagineering.
Shows here will include productions like “Avengers Assemble!”, which will see Marvel superheroes take to the stage — and sometimes the sky — along with other performances designed specifically for the Imagination Garden space.
Normally, on any other Disney Cruise ship, the primary stage is on the top deck in front of the main funnel, but that’s not the case here. Maybe intentional or maybe since Disney got the ship half-built, but the solution was the Imagination Garden with the mainstage inside an open space in the middle of the ship, surrounded by guests’ balconies and staterooms.
To keep the experience immersive and avoid annoying overlooking cabins with excessive sound, Disney actually hid an audio system in the LED screen rather than rigging speakers throughout the garden.
“Most stages the speakers are on the outside, but we wanted to do something completely different here,” said Joey Licklider, Senior Audio Systems Designer at Disney Live Entertainment.
The setup includes 27 modules across 81 arrays and roughly 2,400 speakers, all concealed behind the massive display. The screen itself uses what Disney calls a mesh LED, a transparent design where rows of pixels are removed to allow sound to pass through the display.
But the stage isn’t just about the screen — it’s also designed for moments where characters and superheroes can literally fly.
“This technology was developed to fly a performer anywhere in the garden stage area,” said Andrew Cooke, Technical Director at Disney Live Entertainment.
Previous Disney Cruise Line stages typically allowed performers to move along a more limited air path. “Our other ships could just do the 2D flight, right, X, Y axis, that’s it,” said Patrick Trzeciak, Senior Technical Director at Disney Live Entertainment.
The system relies on large winches hidden within the ship’s structure to control performers as they fly across the venue.
“The winches themselves are huge. It doesn’t fit through any door,” noted Cooke. “So something we had to do was kind of peel off the ceiling, kind of like a tin can of tuna, and drop the winch in there and then seal it back up.”
The layout of the Imagination Garden makes those flying moments even more unique, as Spider-Man or Scarlet Witch will literally fly right next to a balcony of a stateroom.
Designing a space this large also introduced a challenge Imagineers don’t usually face on land: weight.
Cruise ships operate under strict weight budgets, and while designing this space, Imagineers realized their original plans far exceeded what the ship could support.
Through a series of design changes and material swaps, the team ultimately cut roughly 70 tons of steel from the project, making the ambitious stage possible without weighing the ship down, as shown in the episode.
You can watch episode 8 of We Call It Imagineering on YouTube now, and it’ll be streaming on Disney+ — one of the best streaming services — soon.
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jacob.krol@futurenet.com (Jacob Krol)
