2011 Minnie's Moonlit Madness at Disneyland

On July 8th, our team captain found the following message on the Disney Backlot page.

Minnie Lives
4d696e6e69652773
4d6f6f6e6c6974
4d61646e657373
30392e31332e3131

>:\ EXO DCHE
[end of line]


This worked out to
HEX CODE
4d696e6e69652773 = Minnie's
4d6f6f6e6c6974 = Moonlit
4d61646e657373 = Madness
30392e31332e3131 = 09.13.11

Sweet! Obviously we've got a TRON theme going on this year.

For those who don't know, Minnie's Moonlit Madness is a cast-members (and their friends) only scavenger hunt around Disneyland after the park has closed for regular guests. Registration is limited to only ~350 teams of 4, and a part of the $75 registration fee goes to charity. This year the charity was the Boys and Girls Club of Anaheim.

Another great part of this event is that you can dress up as a team. Our team wasn't quite TRON themed, but we still got a lot of compliments. Can you guess which Disney characters our costumes are based on?

Our captain waited in line with all the other captains and they started handing out race packets at 8pm.

Of course we had to stop at the Bank of Main Street and get a photo in the vault

A few quick photos in front of the castle and we're ready to go!

Everything starts back at the festival arena inside Big Thunder Ranch. Disneyland Cast Members were at all the major bottlenecks checking to make sure everyone had wristbands.

We made it to the festival arena and started going through our package.

A Disneyland map, flashlight, lanyard, scantron sheet, pencils, and a sealed clue envelope.

Then our host for the evening came out. His name was "Clue", not to be confused with "Clu" from TRON. After a few bad jokes, representatives from the Boys and Girls Club of Anaheim came out and were given a giant check for $5500. And because it's Disney, they wanted to give them another big surprise: another check for $10,000!

Then it was time for trivia! We were told to pull out our scanTRON slip... haha.
Trivia was 50 multiple choice questions shown on projection screens. Each question was only shown for ~30 seconds and they never repeated any questions. All the questions can be seen by clicking here.
Here's the first 5.

1. What Disney channel original series features two best friends on a dance show?
a. sonny with a chance
b. the suite life on deck
c. shake it up
d. phineas and ferb
e. Hannah Montana

2. Which of the following Disney produced films has not been made into a production on Broadway
a. The Lion King
b. Beauty and the Beast
c. Finding Nemo
d. Tarzan
e. Mary Poppins.

3. In which California city is the Walt Disney family museum located
a. Burbank
b. San Francisco
c. Emeryville
d. Anaheim
e. Glendale

4. who is not a member of captain eo's crew?
a. major domo
b. commander bogg
c. hooter
d. minor domo
e. fuzzball

5. what abc family original series is based on a series of novels?
a. the secret life of the American teenager
b. melissa and Joey
c. pretty little liars
d. make it or break it
e. Greek

Some of the questions were pretty easy, but a few were just evil.

8. what is the computer operating system displayed on the console in Kevin Flynn’s hidden lab in the film tron legacy?
a. pc dos 1.1
b. solaros 4.0.1
c. Atari 2600
d. apple dos 3.3
e. Mac os 6

Seriously? I went and looked at the movie later. It was on the screen for less than a second and it was covered with dust!

32. the musical duo known as daft punk is comprised of French musicians thomas bangalter and
a. guy-manuel de homern-christo
b. christo-manuel guy de homen
c. manual-christo homen de guy
d. guy-christo manuel de homen
e. christo guy yuno hooman

Really???

After trivia, it was time to star the rest of the hunt. These images started rotating on all the screens and we were told we could open our first envelope.

A quick look at the map, and we were headed to Pirates of the Caribbean. As soon as we left the Festival Arena, we had to be clipped together.

At Pirates, there was a sign with the word Quorra on it. We wrote this on our envelope and made our way to the hub.

The Hub is always a frantic mess. Imagine 350 teams with 4 team-members each all tied together and trying to weave in and out of the same space. And it's a race, so everyone is trying to hurry.

The rest of the hunt was on! You only get 1 clue at a time, so you have to be confident in your answer when you turn it in. Here's a small sample of the questions. You can click here to see all the questions we got, including a new type of clue using a QR code reader and our smartphones.

2 hours passed super quick. My team was able to get through all 10 hard clues and even finish with a few minutes to spare! We turned in our last clue and our rope and grabbed a few more team photos on Main Street.

And then we waited for the results. They were supposed coming out on Thursday. Last year they were available at 10am on Thursday. This year though, there seemed to be a few issues. An update was posted on the Cast Member homepage saying the results would be out on Friday. After no results on Friday, results finally came out Monday afternoon. Obviously something weird was going on with the scoring.

So what were the total possible points? Before the race began, each captain had to choose 10 questions as either Easy or Hard. The 10 could be all Hard, all Easy, or any combination thereof.

Easy Questions = 100 points. Up to 1000 points
Hard Questions = 125 points. Up to 1250 points
Trivia Questions = 3 points each, 150 possible points total
Question #1 (not part of the 10) = 100 points
Turning in your rope before time expires = 100 points

The maximum anyone could get is 1600 points.

Two teams tied for first place! They took all Hard questions and answered 42/50 trivia questions correctly. Very impressive!
And how did we do?

28th out of 350. Not too bad at all, though I do think there might have been an issue with the scoring. According to our score, we missed a 100 point question, which was either the first question (going to Pirates) or turning in the rope on time (which we did). I'm guessing this was the issue they were having with scoring and the reason the results were delayed. It also looked like 3 of the top 10 teams also missed a 100 point question, which is really odd.

Even still, we all had a great time running around Disneyland! We're all definitely looking forward to doing this again next year!