News Cars-Themed Attractions at Magic Kingdom

[TrainsOfDisney]

but to me the tea leaves suggest because they wanted to remove RoA and TSI because they were viewed as “problematic”.

Well the River is just a River - it’s not problematic. The island with 2 mills and a cabin isn’t problematic. Coke corner / Casey’s corner - it’s just a name. Drop Tom Sawyer that’s fine. That doesn’t explain this.

The key thing is they decided to remove RoA/TSI first and use that location, then decided on an IP.

Did they?

Also not trying to argue with you at all - sounds like you’re on to something I’m just crazy confused by this.

If this was so expensive and they weren’t sure what to do with beyond - why not move forward with Moana while they decide?

 

[eddie104]

How can anyone continue to post on here and say that Cars Land is not increased capacity???? The attractions there will see more guests in one month than Tom Sawyer Island does in a year. This is insane.

Haha…a lot of posters on here are refusing to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

If you support or defend this project it’s blasphemy.

 

[doctornick]

I’m sure there was a concept sketch that included keeping the riverboat and this attraction - big thunder in Paris anyone?

There definitely was a way to make this more of a win-win.

It isn’t a “win-win” for the people approving if their goal is to get rid of the riverboat and TSI.

 

[Brian]

Sorry if this was already posted. I'm about 25 pages behind and am not going to be able to catch up.

Not exactly "breaking news", just an interesting catch.

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

It isn’t a “win-win” for the people approving if their goal is to get rid of the riverboat and TSI.

Why would it be someone’s goal to get rid of the riverboat? Haha.

 

[doctornick]

Well the River is just a River - it’s not problematic. The island with 2 mills and a cabin isn’t problematic. Coke corner / Casey’s corner - it’s just a name. Drop Tom Sawyer that’s fine. That doesn’t explain this.


Did they?

Also not trying to argue with you at all - sounds like you’re on to something I’m just crazy confused by this.

If this was so expensive and they weren’t sure what to do with beyond - why not move forward with Moana while they decide?

I’m just going with what @PREMiERdrum has said and others have hinted at.

I agree that I can’t explain it. The entire decision making process seems completely illogical - but sadly that’s not new at WDW (eg MMRR replacing GMR instead of a new build)

 

[el_super]

And also important, it yet again is Disney spending craploads of money to replace rather than expand at WDW. Over and over and over again, we see billions of dollars spent with marginal gains (if any!) in capacity. There is a ton of unused land available at MK - build on that instead of replacing. Actually make additions.

People are only going to visit 10 or 15 attractions in a day at a park, tops.

If you keep adding attractions at the top of the list, some attractions are just going to fall to the bottom of the demand list.

Eventually they will pass the point of it being worth the dollars spent to keep them running and maintained.

If you kept things opened, and ran the place like a museum, you would reach a point where people were paying 3x or 4x the current admission cost, on attractions they have no intention of seeing or spending time on.

 

[lazyboy97o]

The difference is likely negligbile. Very few guests ever venture out onto to TSI. The Riverboat is another story.

This Cars expansion of Frontierland will add 2 attractions that guests will actually want to experience, and I would assume at least one QSR/TSR option and a snack stand or two, and probably a merchandise location. VS a nearly vacant island & the Riverboat.

I will miss the Liberty Belle, I think it does provide some great kinetic energy and hope that it can be somewhat replicated with this.

Also this seems to make it easier to open up the connection to Villains Land and future expansion.

The difference in cost is not negligible. A big part of the reason that all four Walt Disney World are severely lacking in capacity is because of Disney’s poor use of money. It’s a whole vicious cycle that they refuse to break. Getting less bang for your buck is not a good thing. It’s a root cause of all of the pressure to not spend on the parks, to cut back on operational costs and remove services and experiences. A premium is again being paid for less.

 

[lentesta]

Sorry for the crude graphic.

Here's a chart showing the average ratings and 95% confidence interval, by age group, for the attractions we're discussing, from the Unofficial Guide/TouringPlans.com reader surveys.

These are the age groups we survey:

• Pre-school children (up to age 5)
• Grade school children (ages 6-12)
• Teens (ages 13-19)
• Young Adults (ages 20-30)
• Over 30's (ages 30-64)
• Seniors (ages 65+)

The horizontal line is the average rating for that attraction for that age group.
The vertical line is the 95% confidence interval for that age group.

A decent rule of thumb is that if the confidence intervals don't overlap, the result you're seeing is probably due to some underlying truth, and not (for example) random chance/noise in the sample/etc.

It's a 5-point scale, with 1 bad and 5 excellent. (Take that, DEFCON.)

Radiator Springs Racers is on the left in mint green.
Tom Sawyer Island is next in salmon pink.
The Liberty Square Riverboat is in baby blue.
Hall of Presidents is in lemonade yellow on the right.

Every age group except pre-schoolers rates Radiator Springs Racers substantially higher than any of the other attractions.

It's not close.

Teens prefer Radiator Springs by almost 1.4 points over the next-closest attraction in a 5-point scale.
Young Adults prefer Radiator Springs by almost 1.2 points.
Over 30's prefer Radiator Springs by almost a full point.
Seniors prefer Radiator Springs by almost half a point.

If you want the parks to make people happy, Cars is likely to do that way more than anything that's there now.

 

[Pi on my Cake]

Reading through this forum and Twitter is making me way more angry and sad than I really need to be.

This forum (and the internet in general honestly) can start to doom spiral and catastrophise pretty quickly. I hate that people use "touch grass" as an insult because it really is such a healthy thing to do. Log off, talk to people irl, interact outside of your usual group. Heck, even just hopping to a different sub-forum (we got fun games on the imagineering side) can sometimes be enough. Or even just simply stepping away from the internet and doing something different. It's incredibly easy to get caught in a spiral of anger over things and then find a space online with other angry people so you can all make each other angrier.

Maybe it will look terrible, maybe it will look great. Maybe there was a better option, maybe this was the only practical way to accommodate the major expansion the park needs.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Why would it be someone’s goal to get rid of the riverboat? Haha.

For the same reason that it became a goal to rip out a chunk of the center of Future World. It’s a radical change that be pointed to as a radical change.

 

[Carnotaurus Understudy]

Though with Huckleberry Finn's novel, there is no uniform consensus. BIG RIVER is getting a movie musical adaptation, the novel JAMES has been met with acclaim, and even African American literary scholars widely disagree. It's not my place to comment on that as a Non Black person, but I think it's worth noting that it's just not that simple or easy. It's where nuance and empathy is so important.

The only thing people remember about Tom Sawyer is the white washed fence and them running away to an island to be pirates. Without doxxing myself, I say this as someone who spent a childhood with other children mocking me asking if my biological father was "Injun Joe." (Aren't kids GREAT?! ROFL).

I think dialogue is great. I think nuance and empathy are great.

I also know that none of this is being done for my benefit. It's not done with guests like me in mind. It's done to sell Cars merch.

Very well-said, thank you. In my opinion, Frontierland is such an interesting, complex, and valuable piece of Americana because it reflects the tension between romantic Western fantasies and the not-so-pleasant reality. It is fascinating to read how, for example, the narration on Disneyland's Mark Twain riverboat has evolved over the years (I am not sure about script changes to the Liberty Belle, and Google isn't helping...).

I do not believe that modern Disney is interested in continuing to engage with the art they have created, though.

 

[MrPromey]

Let me introduce to a little thing called call of duty.

Or Fortnite.

Rumor has it, Disney's heard of Fortnite.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Sorry for the crude graphic.

Here's a chart showing the average ratings and 95% confidence interval, by age group, for the attractions we're discussing, from the Unofficial Guide/TouringPlans.com reader surveys.

View attachment 808942

These are the age groups we survey:

• Pre-school children (up to age 5)
• Grade school children (ages 6-12)
• Teens (ages 13-19)
• Young Adults (ages 20-30)
• Over 30's (ages 30-64)
• Seniors (ages 65+)

The horizontal line is the average rating for that attraction for that age group.
The vertical line is the 95% confidence interval for that age group.

A decent rule of thumb is that if the confidence intervals don't overlap, the result you're seeing is probably due to some underlying truth, and not (for example) random chance/noise in the sample/etc.

It's a 5-point scale, with 1 bad and 5 excellent. (Take that, DEFCON.)

Radiator Springs Racers is on the left in mint green.
Tom Sawyer Island is next in salmon pink.
The Liberty Square Riverboat is in baby blue.
Hall of Presidents is in lemonade yellow on the right.

Every age group except pre-schoolers rates Radiator Springs Racers substantially higher than any of the other attractions.

It's not close.

Teens prefer Radiator Springs by almost 1.4 points over the next-closest attraction in a 5-point scale.
Young Adults prefer Radiator Springs by almost 1.2 points.
Over 30's prefer Radiator Springs by almost a full point.
Seniors prefer Radiator Springs by almost half a point.

If you want the parks to make people happy, Cars is likely to do that way more than anything that's there now.

You keep trying to silo this and I don’t understand why. A new Cars attraction isn’t going to be rated worse if the Riverboat or Hall of Presidents still exists.

People’s overall assessment of the day may be worse though as a result of poor design.

 

[Pi on my Cake]

I don’t think we know for sure, but to me the tea leaves suggest because they wanted to remove RoA and TSI because they were viewed as “problematic”.

The key thing is they decided to remove RoA/TSI first and use that location, then decided on an IP. And they didn’t choose it because it was cost effective

The only real problematic thing about TSI is how inaccessible it was and how far behind modern safety standards it was

Honestly I think the Island has been doomed for a while purely because of how inaccessible the paths are. I don't think there's a single square foot of sidewalk on that island that is up to ADA standards or capable if handling more than the couple dozen guests the island gets in a day. And generally if one part of something gets updates beyond basic maintenence, then the whole thing needs to be re-inspected and brought up to modern codes for accessibility and for safety.

If I'm right (which admittedly I could be off) then Disney was likely faced with the choice of either entirely redo the island, let it rot taking up half that side of the park and remaining a lawsuit waiting to happen (I've literally found a rusty hatchet in the fort before sitting on a bench), or tear it out and give us an entire new land plus easy access to 2-3 HUGE land sized expansion pads. Tom Sawyer was never long for the world in its current form

I'm just happy the Cars area, despite being Cars, seems focused on exploring a peaceful natural environment full of rock work and water features.

 

[splah]

the other thing that grinds my gears (pun intended this time) is just the scale of things these days. this new ride is going to massive. everything is huge and spread out. i would love it if disney gave us a classic darkride scale. you can get the illusion of speed by having things closer to you.

would we be losing our marbles if cars was brought in at a physically smaller scale?

also, also enough with the mini lands. i'm over them

 

[Disgruntled Walt]

also, also enough with the mini lands. i'm over them

I actually think part of my problem with this is that it's NOT a mini land. It's basically redefining the whole LAND.

 

[JustInTime]

Ha! Not my intent. But what's left in Liberty Square after Cars and Haunted Mansion becoming the entrance to Villains? Just HOP.

It looks like Liberty Tree (and the buildings around it) is removed in the concept art. Have you heard anything about this? Watch everything from Harbor House over become Haunted Mansion themed…

 

[Trauma]

Didnt walt say somethink like "the park shouldn't me a museum and should continue to evolve"?

I’m so tired of hearing this quote to excuse the destruction of what makes the parks great.

Latest example is Splash “evolving” into a non functional dumpster fire.

 

[Dear Prudence]

Very well-said, thank you. In my opinion, Frontierland is such an interesting, complex, and valuable piece of Americana because it reflects the tension between romantic Western fantasies and the not-so-pleasant reality. It is fascinating to read how, for example, the narration on Disneyland's Mark Twain riverboat has evolved over the years (I am not sure about script changes to the Liberty Belle, and Google isn't helping...).

I do not believe that modern Disney is interested in continuing to engage with the art they have created, though.

Thank you. And you are absolutely right, modern Disney would NEVER.

Exactly! The Mark Twain dialog changed and evolved. It's okay. And even even good for stuff TO change.

Walt hired Native people for Disneyland regularly. He invited the Nations of the Grand Canyon and their spiritual leaders to bless the Grand Canyon diorama. If it's inaccurate, fix that. He wasn't perfect and a lot of the media during his lifetime was problematic, but he still always showed respect for actual people. They hire cultural ambassadors for Epcot. Native Nations are sovereign domestic dependent nations, they could hire them the same way.