Orlando Base: Pop Century Hotel

In the vicinity of the Disney Parks, and the other amusement parks not owned by Disney, there are thousands of hotel and motel options. Disney specifically owns maybe five or six, and they range from top of the line hotel style (the Coronado) to fake Polynesian island archipelago ( the Polynesian Island Resort) to where we stayed, the Pop Century, an enormous ode to the pop cultural icons and moments from the latter decades from the 20th century, the postwar decades of the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s.

The Pop Century has color coded dormitory/motel style buildings, with the doors open to the outdoors, with each color denoting a specific era...green for the '70s, blue for the '80s, etc. They also included the occasional epoch sensitive phrase or font style, as well as larger-than-life sculpture on the grounds. Check out the big-wheel below, and the color coding scheme:

There was also an over-sized fussball table, but it didn't seem as if the players moved:

Around the '70s era buildings were a series of 8-track cassettes, complete with fake album art on one side and jokey song names on the other:

It looks like the '60s buildings had yo-yos.

The 8-tracks and yo-yos were actually to cover up the outside stairwell. In our '80s building we had a giant cockeyed Rubik's Cube, which I never managed to photograph in the daylight.

On the way to our room one could see the Pac-Man motif at work, but now it looks like the '80s buildings were red, and now I'm confused...it seems the time between being there and writing this has blurred the memories:

Our rom had what looked like one bed and a large cabinet connected to a table. It turned out to be a Murphy bed, which became the Boy's bed. It had a cool Pluto picture hidden away, only in view when the bed was down:

We ate breakfast in their cafeteria zone nearly each day; the exception was when we had breakfast reservations at one of the parks.

The hotel was nice, maybe a spruced up Motel 6: AC that freakin' cranked, big televisions that had 20 channels, 14 of which were either owned by Disney or featured "What to do at the Parks" info. There were park specific buses that ran every 8 minutes or so, but don't be mistaken---they may have been the familiar looking coaches you see everywhere in cities, but these were in essence shuttles.

They had all the amenities that you may need desire if you're not interested in the five-star hotelier experience. It was pretty great.