"I only hope we never lose sight of one thing: that it was all started by a duck."
Some part of me thinks that this was all the work of a very gifted maintenance tech guy who has a deep passion for Epcot. Over the last few month's he's been sneaking away on his breaks to maintain these animatronics and get them looking good and into shape to be installed. Then, when the time is right, he goes in, removes the screen and plops in the animatronics and programs everything to work properly without anyone seeing. Next day the guests notice something different about the ride and the CMs are all confused. The suits have no clue it's been added because they don't leave their comfy chairs and the maintenance guy tries hard to hide his gleaming smile as he hears word of how everyone loves the plus. He starts to plan his next ride that he will secretly plus in the cover of darkness as people come up with a name for his secret identity.... "The Night Doctor" in reference of how he is bringing Epcot back from the dead, one surgery at a time.
It makes for a good story at least.
I don't think that character is nearly as relevant as some here would like to believe. A far more likely plan is to build a ride that is more appropriate for Figment who could and should be very popular.
The two successful-to-the-point-of-surprising-Iger-himself comic book miniseries from Marvel would say otherwise.
As long as they remove Figment's current mischievous and annoying personality seen in the current version.
And they did it in a shade under a decade too... bravo!
FYI, these are recycled from Tokyo. Having said that, I like the look as well.
Agreed. Saw these on Sunday, very cool addition. Audio was a mess from the start as the first scene was barely audible. It appears they split the audio three ways for each character coming from the front of the stage. The problem is you're in a moving boat so you're mostly hearing the speaker facing you, with the other two much quieter. It might have been this way with the screen too, but it's more noticeable now.
To anyone that rides Everest and says a working Yeti doesn't matter, read the posts about how much animatronics improve rides.
