Hello & welcome back to A Look at Disney as we continue our investigation. And today, we are doing something a bit different as we look at The Midship Detective Agency. Midship Detective Agency is a interactive game that debuted for the Disney Cruise Line in 2012 on both on the Disney Dream and Disney Fantasy. Now, I've not tried this out in person but thankfully, there are videos online for each of the three cases and I decided to check them out on YouTube. Now, I've decided to look at this for two reasons, one this is one of the few things that I could find that would allow me to look at something starring Mickey Mouse. And I wanted to look at something good featuring The Muppets. With that out of the way, let's begin.
Guests start out this game (as that is what this is) by picking up a game and notebook and choosing a case. They have three options in terms of cases, The Case of The Plundered Paintings, and The Case of The Stolen Show. Each case comes with a different guide, if you choose Plundered Paintings, you are teamed up with Mickey, Donald, & Goofy. If you choose Stolen Show, apparently, Mickey is out on his lunch break and left Pepe The King Prawn in charge and there you are teamed up with Pepe and Kermit and if you choose Stolen Puppies, you are teamed up with Mickey and Roger from 101 Dalmatians. I watched all 3 of these on YouTube and have to say that it really seems like Stolen Show had the most effort put into it as you had all of these brand new shots filmed with The Muppets and perhaps because The Muppets are characters that can interact with the real world whereas Mickey and the gang are animated characters, that is perhaps one of the reasons why, I felt myself connecting to it more.
If I do have complaint regarding The Muppets' mystery here, it's that I don't like making the Muppets, the culprits.
Now, on the one hand I do get this as The Muppets don't exactly have the most memorable villains and compared the other two mysteries, it doesn't take itself as seriously as there is a lot of the Muppet humor intact such as Gonzo putting a shark in the pool. Still, on the same token, it would've been fun to see The Muppets interact with Disney villains. Then again, Mickey and the gang barely did that.
Plundered Paintings was interesting because watching it with a keen eye, you could see that they mixed in classic animated scenes with new ones and had some of the new voice actors dub over the classic scenes. Now, this one doesn't have the same humor as the Stolen Show but it was still fun but it was definitely skewed towards the younger crowd. Now, the culprit list for this one is the Disney Villains.
But the problem here is that while the mystery portion of trying to discover who the culprit is, it's hampered by the climax as from what I saw, it's just putting a cage over the bad guy and at least in what I saw, the bad guys don't get any lines. The case is pretty self-explanatory as a villain had gone around the ship stealing paintings and after searching through the stateroom of the villain that you think did it, you trap underneath the theater.
And from what I saw Plundered Puppies was rinse and repeat but with less effort put into it because while it had voice over from Mickey & Roger, there was no animation to this one at all as it was just static images. And that made it feel really cheap and as though it was just included as another option.
All in all, this is a cool idea and something that I would love to try and I'd probably go with The Muppets as that one seemed like the most fun. Join me next time as we look at the Music of Roger Rabbit.
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