Celebrating 100 Years of Disney at the 2022 D23 Expo!
Disclosure: Pandora Jewelry provided us with two complimentary weekend passes to the D23 Expo. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
I’ve attended almost all of the D23 Expos since its inception back in 2009 and I was so excited that Pandora reached out and hosted me and Kev this year! This is a particularly special D23 Expo because we’re celebrating 100 years of Disney!
DAY 1
Pandora kindly gifted me a pair of earrings, a necklace, two bracelets, and a handful of charms to style and wear the entire weekend! I love how easy it is to customize their pieces and make each of them my own.
We weren’t able to be at the expo all day due to our work schedules, so the first thing I wanted to do while we were there was to stop by the D23 Expo Marketplace and Mickey’s of Glendale Main Store to grab the special merch being released! I made sure to snag some LinaBell and Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway pieces for upcoming Disney trips I have planned.
We then took a quick walk through Walt Disney Imagineering’s Wonderful World of Dreams exhibit, which was one of my favorites from the weekend because we got to see all the cool things that are coming to the Disney Parks! I can’t wait to see how they transform Mickey’s Toontown and reimagine Splash Mountain into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure at Disneyland Resort.
We ended the evening seeing the Marvel booth and our favorite Avengers’ costumes in person!
We snapped a few quick photos outside the Wonderful World of Dreams exhibit and the Pixar booth!
We loved running into my friend Melizza who I was in the Disney Creators Lab with! She is such a ray of sunshine.
We then walked over to see Walt’s plane, and what a pleasant surprise that we got to see our favorite Imagineer, Joe Rohde, and on his birthday, no less! He was so kind and I’m so grateful we got to meet him.
DAY 3
In all the years of D23 Expos, I have never been to a panel, so I was very excited to be at the Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products panel thanks to the Disney Parks team! It was so nice sitting next to our favorite theme park journalist and friend Carlye!
There are so many exciting things coming to the Disney Parks around the world, starting with the announcement that Happily Ever After is coming back to Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World! It took me a minute to process that Jordan Fisher was physically there singing the song and I couldn’t believe it!
We were also treated to a performance of “Almost There” by Anika Noni Rose (the voice of Princess Tiana) with the announcement that Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will be opening at Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World in late 2024!
That was just a little sneak peek into some of the announcements that were made, and I can’t wait to see what else is in store for Disney Parks in the coming years! The panel ended with a few sweet treats from Porto’s Bakery (which is coming to Downtown Disney soon!) as well as a collectible pin and a few prints for us to take home.
We then checked out the 100 Years of Disney exhibit and my favorite of course was the Disney Channel portion! I lived my Disney Channel star dreams filming my very own “Wand ID” commercial, and loved seeing the costumes from my favorite shows and DCOMs growing up.
We then got to meet the cast of one of my favorite Disney Channel shows, The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder and everyone was so sweet! There was so much of my childhood in this one photo alone - I loved Alisa Reyes from All That, Soleil Moon Frye from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and of course, Kyla Pratt from Smart Guy, Sister Sister, and countless other shows from the 90s!
We then did a few photo ops like the Cruel Summer (which was my dream bedroom in the 90s) and Hulk Smash ones!
We ran into Khleo Thomas who you may remember as Zero from the movie Holes and he looked amazing in his Powerline costume!
