We're just three months away from the opening of Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway at Disney's Hollywood Studios. After getting my first ride on the world's best theme park attraction this morning, I completed the best hour of my theme park reporting career (insert Homer Simpson voice, "So far...") with a first-look walkthrough the pre-show of Disney's first-ever Mickey Mouse ride.
Executive Creative Director Kevin Rafferty explained that we're at the Chinese Theater for the premiere of a new Mickey Mouse short, "Perfect Picnic," which Rafferty said is an original cartoon production created by Walt Disney Imagineering.
Though the lobby of the Chinese Theater has been stripped of its Great Movie Ride artifacts, it's still a familiar and welcome sight to long-time Disney World visitors. But Disney has made other changes, including the construction of new pre-show areas. It was into one that we met Creative Producer Charita Carter, who set up the pre-show performance of "Perfect Picnic."
"It really doesn't have a comparable experience," she said, "but it is our version of the Haunted Mansion's stretch room, in that it establishes the experience you are about to have."
And like the stretch room, there's a surprise here — one that challenges your assumptions about what a pre-show should be.
But before that, we see the first moments of "Perfect Picnic" play on screen, featuring its sure-to-become-an-earworm theme song. Dripping with ironic foreshadowing, Mickey sings, "Nothing can stop us now," followed my Minnie's response, "Absolutely nothing will go wrong."
Yeah, right.
And then it does, as it must, even though we're not on the ride yet. That builds up to a wonderful moment similar to the conclusion of the pre-show on Efteling's Symbolica — a "scenic illusion," as Carter called it, that will set the stage for additional illusions on the ride itself as it also clears your path to that ride.
We've got more detail on what you can expect on the ride here. But if you want to skip the spoilers, just get ready to ride on March 4, 2020 at Disney's Hollywood Studios... or in 2022, when the ride comes to Toontown at Disneyland in California.
Update: After our preview, I talked with Kevin Rafferty about the design and creation of the attraction.
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DHS - the E-ticket capital of Orlando!
7 E-ticket attractions - ToT, RnR, TSM, SDD, MF:SR, RotR and soon you be MMRR!
It’s no wonder MK had to shoehorn Tron into Tomorrowland, not enough E-ticket attractions there.
Just the preshow today. No look inside the ride itself.
Russell, it's already been confirmed that the ride vehicles are brand new trackless designs, similar to those used on Rise of the Resistance. They will break apart into different scenes and come back together at different points. Whole ride system is revamped.
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Did you get any looks at Disney's "2.5 D" elements inside the attraction? What about the actual ride vehicles, are they brand new or just re-purposed from GMR?