After more than a quarter century, Buzz Lightyear is getting an upgrade.
Disney's original Buzz Lightyear ride will be getting improvements when it closes for refurbishment at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom this August. Leading the changes will be the installation of handheld blasters, just like on the west coast installation of Buzz Lightyear at Disneyland.
Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin opened in 1998 in the old If You Had Wings space in Tomorrowland. The Omnimover ride featured vehicles that riders could spin, with two blasters mounted on its front. The idea was that riders would fight for control of the spinning, to better aim their blaster and get the high score on this video game-inspired ride.
When Disney installed the ride at Disneyland in 2005, it swapped the fixed blasters for handheld ones, making the spinning less important to the gameplay and the targets easier to hit for most riders. Disney also named the Disneyland installation Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters to de-emphasize the spinning element.
With the changes coming in Florida, Disney also will be upgrading the Magic Kingdom installation to have each blaster on the car project a different colored laser beam, to allow for easier targeting. The new blasters also will feature haptic effects. And the vehicles will include new video screens to display your scores.
Imagineers also are promising more dynamic Z targets on the ride, enhanced with new light effects and reactions. The ride also will get a new character, Buddy, a support robot who will help instruct riders how to use their blasters to help defeat Zurg and save Star Command.
Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin will open with its improvements sometime next year.
Disney also has Buzz Lightyear rides at Disneyland Paris and Shanghai Disneyland. The former Buzz ride at Hong Kong Disneyland is now Ant-Man and The Wasp: Nano Battle!, while the Tokyo Disneyland version is being reimagined as a Wreck-It Ralph ride.
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I see this as an absolute win!
The Shanghai Disneyland installation of Buzz is the best version of the ride [the haptic feedback, Z screens, etc]. Even if this is a lite, Nano-Battle-type refurbishment, this will be a much better attraction than what exists now.
Show of hands here who remembers If You Had Wings? The song was equal parts corporate schmaltz and trippy as s**t psychedelia. I wish they’d play that song on top of THIS ride.
I remember If You Had Wings. Featuring the voice of Orson Welles. Sponsored by Eastern Airlines ("The Official Airline of Walt Disney World.") One of the few non-ticketed rides in the park. Fun attraction with cool music.
When my family visited Disneyland in 2023, we were struck by how different and easier the blasters were.
And yes I'm old enough to remember If You had Wings
Fina-freaking-lly!
I see nothing but positive in this upgrade. It's an increasingly uncommon complete win for Walt Disney World.
Next move the hatbox ghost to the attic pretty please.
While I’m thankful for literally ANYTHING we can get from Disney at this point. There is an empty space pretty much across from this ride. Why spend so much to update an attraction when they could put something new into the vacant Stitch space?
Now I can’t get the If You Had Wings refrain out of my head…would like another ride through the video motion tunnel.
Let's not forget Dreamflight, which proceeded Buzz Lightyear
We were at MK last night and the ride is long overdue for a refresh. The joystick for moving the car we rode was out of whack with lack of responsive control. We could’ve gone on again but said no, didn’t want the chance to have a bad car again. The sad thing is a good chunk of popular rides are now needing updates. Thunder mountain closed and now buzz.
I watched the video about the upgrades and thought, "But the ride still consists of cardboard cutouts of scenery and aliens."
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This was a long-needed upgrade for a ride that was stuck in the 1990's for far too long. The targeting was far too complicated with the blasters mounted to the car and requiring guests to spin the vehicle to improve the limited aiming range. There was nothing more frustrating than getting locked in on a target only to have your riding companion pivot the vehicle so they can aim at something else. Even if you and your partner wanted to aim at the same target, there were some (usually closer ones like the robot hands, which are high value) that you both can't hit at the same time because the blasters had about 45 degrees of range horizontally and less than 20 degrees vertically.
The Disneyland version of the attraction has always been superior in my book for the simple reason that you could pull the blaster out and free-aim at anything (or leave it in if a smaller guests could not handle the bulky blaster), which was always surprising to me since we've never visited DL when Buzz has had a longer line than we typically see at MK. Allowing blasters to have different colored targeting lasers is the next natural evolution of the design (that hopefully works better than Justice League that picked colors that are virtually indistinguishable now with their burned-out projectors and washed-out images), which will hopefully also include more animation triggers than currently exist (I think there might be 5 or 6 right now), to make it far more interactive and interesting for guests.
I've always loved shooting gallery dark rides, and it seems that WDW is finally going to give their 2nd best one some love so that it can at least happily state that they're the 4th best ride of its kind in the Orlando market, and not be embarrassed at being the worst (after MIB, TSM, and Ninjago).