Hi all,

This week has been quite eventful for new character happenings across the parks, so let’s start with California, which rather unusually has seen a big increase in character offerings!

This weekend was the start of a series of two month long events, all under the umbrella of Family Fun Days. This weekend’s event was the Fiesta Disneyland event over at the Festival Arena in Frontierland.

Our good friend and California correspondent, Loren Javier was there of course, and this is what he had to say:

“It was definitely better than I expected. I got there at opening and it was easy for me to get my pictures with all the characters in their "fiesta" costumes. The entertainment, I thought, was great. The stage program consisted of a "street party" that featured a couple of the characters (the first one I sat through had Mickey and Minnie, the next one Goofy and Pluto), then the Mariachi Divas (who I absolutely love) performed and then a local Ballet Folklórico group. Then it cycled again for guests throughout the day. It's a good solid hour of entertainment which surprised me because that seemed like a long program considering they usually like to keep things short. I personally love Ballet Folklórico with the movement of the colourful dresses, so I was entertained throughout. If you want, I'd be happy to write something for the site. I'm looking forward to the other weekends as its worth it just to see the characters in different costumes.”

Characters there this weekend were Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Pluto, Chip, Dale and Donald. They were all dressed in their Fiesta finest, too.

Loren’s very comprehensive set of photos from this first event can be found on his Flickr stream, here.

Coming up over the next two months, and as Loren mentioned, there are going to be more events, with more cool characters and special costumes; details as follows:

Kickin’ Country Weekend – January 21-23
Character Fan Days – January 28-30
Happy Lunar New Year Festival – February 4-6 and 11-13
Mardi Gras (New Orleans Sq instead of the arena as with all the rest) – February 18-20, 25-27, and March 4-6.

Loren will be keeping us updated with the happenings at those events too, and of course he will have many pictures of all the cool characters to share with us also!

Loren was also in California Adventure for the start of the new happening there, that I mentioned on my last blog entry – the new Pixar Pals featuring The Incredibles: Heroes in Training Squad.

Again, his pictures can be found here.

Moving over to Florida now and today saw the start of another new PIXAR event- the new PIXAR Pals Countdown to Fun, which replaced Block Party Bash.

Stitch Kingdom started to post some “live” images here.

Finally, Jon and I have been working hard to make some new additions and changes to the site. Over the next couple of days you may notice things moved around, or some icons, titles and other small things on the character pages, and elsewhere. We always want to make sure the site is up to date with all the latest information, but also the latest trends and style, and we hope that you continue to support us as we work hard to achieve this.

Check out Mickey, Stitch or Maleficent's pages for a taster of some of the new things that have started to appear on the site. Some pages may differ slightly for the time being but generally include the new rarity scale for each resort, new friends and foes links, brand new tabbed browsing of "where to find", and the click-able Character of the Week "award" icon to show that character has been featured. Just as a tip for the new features - you can hover the new icons and the award scale to see what each thing means. Also, if something doesn't look right please refresh the page as your browser may be using an old file that doesn't have all of the updates in it.  There is a lot more to come, so stay tuned over the coming days!

Ok, that’s all for now,

Dan.