Adventurers Club

The Adventurers Club was a themed nightclub in Pleasure Island at the Walt Disney World Resort. It was styled after a private club for world travelers and explorers and was set in 1937. The walls of the club were covered with artifacts and photographs from various explorations. The Adventurers Club featured animatronics, puppets, and a cast of adventurers who performed in shows and improvisational comedy while mingling with the club's patrons. Shows and conversation were often laced with innuendo, and the patrons might have been welcomed as guests, given fictitious names and "recognized" as fellow adventurers, or simply referred to as "drunks".

The Adventurers Club opened with the rest of Pleasure Island on May 1, 1989 as part of a fictional legend about the island's previous owner, Merriweather Adam Pleasure, and back-story describing each of the buildings' former uses. Disney's Imagineers led by Head Writer, Show Producer and Show Director, Roger Cox and designer Joe Rohde (who later designed Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park) conceived and created the club.

The Adventurers Club's unlikely hero, Emil Bleehall, is based on a semi-autobiographical character Cox created. He is a little guy from Ohio who wins over the higher authorities and gains their respect and admiration with his seemingly awkward, modest, but ultimately unique crowd-pleasing talents. Cox felt it paralleled his own story at Disney. A docudramatic version of Cox’s journey at Disney by Sandra Tsing Loh, called, "It Happened in Glendale" from her Book, Depth Takes a Holiday was performed on the radio show, This American Life episode "Something for Nothing."

Until December 31, 2005, every night in Pleasure Island was celebrated as New Year's Eve. The clubs show schedule was set to create a break near midnight to allow people to go outside to see the fireworks, and to accommodate the noisy explosions that resulted. One of the launch points for the nightly fireworks was the Adventurers Club's rooftop.

On June 27, 2008 Disney announced the Adventurers Club (along with all other clubs on Pleasure Island) would be closing permanently on September 27, 2008. An online petition to save the club was created at SaveTheAdventurersClub.info by members of the Disney fan community in hopes that Disney would consider moving the club or keeping it open as part of the new Pleasure Island format, and over 2,750 signatures were collected in the first 72 hours. There were also letter writing campaigns to company executives, internet web sites, and blog postings. In February, 2009 Disney announced that Adventurers Club and the dance clubs Motion and Soundstage would reopen for private party rentals at least through September, 2009.

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