Field operative notification

Last week the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure ran its last mission in order to make way for Phineas and Ferb: Agent P’s World Showcase Adventure. As a fan of Phineas and Ferb, seeing an attraction featuring the silent platypus secret agent is terrific, but I have a few reservations.

For starters, I’m fairly certain this is simply an overlay and not a truly new experience. Try thinking of this like it’s a small world in Disneyland, when it puts on its holiday garb it isn’t a new story, just a tweaked one. Instead of a Kimmunicator guest will utilize a Field Operative Notification Equipment (F.O.N.E.), but there are still phones being used as storytelling devices for the attraction. In the place of Professor Dementor we are given Dr. Doofenshmirtz, but it is still a girlish clock figurine chasing the villain around the clock tower in Germany. What feels like a very real possibility here is that Kim, her sidekicks and rogues gallery, have simply been transmogrified into characters from the Organization Without a Cool Acronym (O.W.C.A.).

Since the opening of the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure there have been ample ideas and creative uses offered up as the next steps for this type of attraction, along with the hopes that it would find a home in a variety of Walt Disney World corners. We see the fruits of the investment in interactive attractions in the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom and the success of the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure. The living artwork of Sorcerers and the integration of setting in both Kim Possible and Sorcerers give Agent P’s World Showcase Adventures a strong foundation, but I fear that the lessons learned are not going to be applied here, they are simply going to be copied.

What Kim Possible lacked was new source content or, in other words, the attraction launched too late to take advantage of the success of the Kim Possible cartoon. Thankfully, Phineas and Ferb is still going strong, and the clamoring for the inventive brothers and their secret agent pet is at an all-time high. This gives Agent P’s World Showcase Adventure the possibility of continuing on and having many secret missions in Walt Disney World for many, many years.

I am hopeful that after the initial conversion of the current adventures in World Showcase that Agent P will also be assigned to the pavilions that haven’t been explored yet. While I am afraid that we are just dressing up Kim Possible’s previous missions, I will be the first one to pick up the F.O.N.E. and assist Agent P against the –inators of Dr. Doofenshmirtz!