E ticket
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For electronic tickets (e-tickets) as used by airlines, see electronic ticket.
- For the Disneyland fanzine with a similar name, see The "E" Ticket.
Since the 1950s, E Ticket (or E ticket ride) has referred to an unusually thrilling, interesting, most-interesting, or most-expensive situation. It derives from the tickets used at Disneyland and Walt Disney World theme parks until 1982. Park-goers bought tickets in different denominations, from A through E, with E tickets being the most expensive and reserved for the newest, most expensive or popular rides and attractions.
Tickets could be purchased individually or in booklets, with the purchased booklets including tickets of each category. A book may contain, for example, a park admission ticket, one A ticket, one B ticket, two C tickets, three D tickets, and three E tickets. Booklets tended to have more high-level (D and E) tickets than lower-level tickets like A and B. People tended to leave the park with A and B tickets not because they had received large numbers of them, but because the A and B rides were less common and less popular.
Formally, Disney called them coupons, but guests generally referred to them as tickets, as they were purchased in a ticket book (with admission).
The parks no longer use this method of selling tickets. All rides are included with admission. However, the phrase continues to be used, originally made popular by residents of Los Angeles. Astronaut Sally Ride commented on riding in the Space Shuttle: "This is definitely an E ticket!"
From 1997 to 2004 [1], Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom had hard ticket events called E-Ride Nights, where a limited number of resort guests (usually 5000) would be allowed to purchase special tickets that allowed them to stay in the park and ride some of the rides (typically those which had been, or would have been, E-ticket rides) for an extra three hours after the park closed to other guests. E-Ride Nights have now been replaced with evening Extra Magic Hours, which are free for all resort guests.
The Fastpass system is currently used to give out timed tickets that allow users quicker entry to popular rides that, historically, would usually have taken an E ticket.
In 2007, Disneyland brought back the term "Disney's eTicket" for marketing its new Print at Home ticket option, where customers buy their ParkHoppers and other types of admission online and print a bar code on their home printer, and then take that printed page directly to the park entrance turnstiles, where it is scanned and a standard ticket/ParkHopper is printed at the turnstile and handed to the customer.
[edit] Cultural References
- There is a fan-published magazine called The "E" Ticket, which examines the history of Disney theme park attractions.
- The employee cafeteria next to the administration building at Disneyland is called the Eat Ticket, a reference to the E ticket.
- Julie Brown's song "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun", describes the homecoming dance as, "definitely an E-ticket."
- "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Jurassic Park" states: "Well, this sure ain't no E-ticket / Think I'll tell them where to stick it..."
- In the Monkey Island series of games, the player may find an E-ticket as buried treasure.
- In Gwen Stefani's song Orange County Girl, she sings: "I know I'm living the E-ticket dream/For a girl from O.C. it's almost unheard of."
- In the movie Night of the Comet, the character Willy is tormenting the main characters by pointing a gun at their heads and playing Russian Roulette. Each time he clicks the gun and it does not fire, he makes a sadistic quip. One of these is "Ooooh! An E-Ticket attraction! Let's try again!"
- The Vandals's song "Pirate's Life" mentions that "You get something really wicked / when you spend an E ticket," referring to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.
