How many people actually prefer Winnie the Pooh over Mr. Toad's Wild Ride?

Mr Toad vs. Winnie the Pooh

  • Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

    Votes: 124 62.9%
  • Winnie the Pooh

    Votes: 73 37.1%

  • Total voters
    197

Chef Mickey

Well-Known Member
OK, fess up... some of you folks figured out a way to vote more then once. How can you all like something that was just half a step up from a roadside carnival fun house. A ride where you die at the end and go to hell after looking at a large selection of day glow painted plywood. I went to it once and never went back again. Pooh isn't the best dark ride ever build but at least it had a happy story line and a character the most people could relate too.
I honestly think I can relate more to the life struggle of Mr. Toad than a talking bear that only wants to eat honey.
 

Goofyernmost

Well-Known Member
I honestly think I can relate more to the life struggle of Mr. Toad than a talking bear that only wants to eat honey.
I wasn't referring to life experience. If I was the hell scene is absolutely on target. I was referring to the recognition of the character itself.
 

Fox&Hound

Well-Known Member
Yeah, I picked Toad too, and I started this thread! People are right, it had a charm to it. I like Pooh as well, it had a place but for some reason with the upcoming Animal Kingdom at the time and two rides that have animals in them they didn't find room for either in 1998, but instead had to remove one. The whole "it was just a carnival ride" is overplayed I think. I have never been to a carnival ride that was as good as that. The whole train thing was a little scary to a 10 year old riding it (I mean me).

Lastly, does anyone remember why the train and hell scene were added? So basically in 1955 when this ride was built it would have been in there as well at Disneyland? I am just wondering what the angle was with that. Disney has some dark moments in their rides, Pinocchio comes to mind, but that was pretty dark and maybe even controversial. I mean, why did Mr. Toad die? Or go to hell? Always wondered how that came about.

Neither would really fit AK. Just because they feature animals does not necessarily mean they belong in AK. I wouldn't lose sleep over it but it seems like Disney runs AK with more of a "real animal vibe" rather than animals who wear clothes, drive cars, and in general, act like humans...
 

Musical Mermaid

Well-Known Member
I was a child when Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was still at MK and had never watched Disney’s Mr. Toad, but then again, I’d never seen Song of the South either and that didn’t prevent me from enjoying both attractions. Not only do I prefer Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride to Pooh, but when I was young, I also preferred it to Snow White’s Scary Adventures and Peter Pan. Those rides were ok, but they were just retelling the story and they weren’t as fun as steering a car and getting into trouble. In my young mind, Peter Pan and Snow White felt like kiddie rides, whereas Mr. Toad felt more like a big kid ride. When I heard it was being replaced by Pooh, something I also associated with babies and toddlers, Fantasyland was much more of a disappointment (losing the Skyway didn’t help either). It didn’t matter that Toad had wooden cutouts. It had 2 different tracks, it provided a different story than watching the film, and it was a lot of fun.
 

Brer Panther

Well-Known Member
Pooh is overhated. I'm sure that Mr. Toad was a great ride and all, but on my most recent trip to Disney I've went on Pooh twice and I personally believe that it is a great ride. Yeah, it's obvious that the budget for it wasn't as high as the budget for Tokyo's, but I think they made the best of it. If Pooh had taken the place of some ride that wasn't Mr. Toad, everyone who's talked smack about it in this thread likely wouldn't mind it. There's obviously a bias here.

By the way, I find it kind of funny that people use Tokyo's Pooh as a reason why our Pooh sucks due to its clearly higher budget... and yet they all praise Mr. Toad, which was no more technologically-advanced than Pooh. A ride full of plywood cutouts was closed to make room for a ride that ALSO had lots of plywood cutouts. Again, there's an elephant in the room and its name is BEING BIASED.
 

PiratesMansion

Well-Known Member
In fairness to MK's Pooh, it came into the world BEFORE Tokyo's version, the only one to do so. SO I don't know that "It's not Tokyo's" is as much of a legitimate complaint as it would be at the other parks.

BUT Toad was an unexpected highlight of my first WDW trip, to the point that on our last day we went back to MK to ride it (and HM and a few other rides, but point is we specifically sought out a reride). It had real personality and character in a way that Pooh does not. Pooh is the ultimate committee-approved ride, taking something interesting and memorable but "(fill in this space with any 90s-style parent objection you can think of)" and replacing it with a vanilla ride that is perfectly pleasant and inoffensive and not much more. Even my mother, who considers Pooh her favorite character, came off it feeling very meh about the whole thing (She LOVED Tokyo's!) It's the type of ride that people like who go to the parks because they like the characters and TEH DIZNEY while not actually caring about the parks or what really makes them tick.

In hindsight we were very lucky that we went in Summer 98: we got to hit the original Imagination ride and Toad just before they closed.
 

Professor_Jason

Active Member
Pooh bad, Toad good :p
All kidding aside Pooh is a fun and cute ride but it's something we tend to skip and not even notice we didn't do until we get home. I'm sure as my niece and nephew start to get a little bit older and start to go with us it's something we'll be doing A LOT more of. That said I'd still prefer to have Mr. Toad, it was wacky fun, we always came off laughing and had to ride it at least twice so we could get both sides
 
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Walt Disney1955

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Neither would really fit AK. Just because they feature animals does not necessarily mean they belong in AK. I wouldn't lose sleep over it but it seems like Disney runs AK with more of a "real animal vibe" rather than animals who wear clothes, drive cars, and in general, act like humans...

A Bug's Life, Lion King, etc., I mean there is a precedent for Disney cartoons. I just figure it would have softened the blow a bit more if they moved a classic ride like Toad to Animal Kingdom rather than getting rid of it completely.

From what I understand of all the Disney parks Toad only remains in Disneyland, correct? It seems to me the locals have a lot more say about whether or not classic rides remain.
 

PiratesMansion

Well-Known Member
From what I understand of all the Disney parks Toad only remains in Disneyland, correct?

Correct. Toad never made it to any of the international parks. They instead decided to export (sigh) Pinocchio instead.

I don't know if the local's park aspect will save Toad so much as the space that is way too tiny for modern Disney to know what to do with.
 

Walt Disney1955

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Correct. Toad never made it to any of the international parks. They instead decided to export (sigh) Pinocchio instead.

I don't know if the local's park aspect will save Toad so much as the space that is way too tiny for modern Disney to know what to do with.

The local contingent seems to have a larger voice in California than Florida. Obviously because of the volume of people I would assume. I don't see it going anytime soon.
 

TrainsOfDisney

Well-Known Member
As a kid I enjoyed riding Mr. Toad but I really like the WDW version of Winnie the Pooh. Wish they’d make the heffalump room better, but overall I think it’s a more enjoyable attraction. I still love riding mr toad at Disneyland though and in a perfect world Pooh would have gotten his own attraction in Florida that was a bit more of an e ticket.
 

bubbles1812

Well-Known Member
This one is tough! I loved Mr. Toad as a kid and miss it still to this day. Objectively, I think it was the better ride, at least in terms of fun. My brothers and I loved to get "hit" by the train and bounce up and down in the cart. And that ending in Hell was... wild [pun intended].

That being said, Pooh has come to mean a lot to my mom and I. She's the primary person in my family who goes to WDW with me and for whatever reason, we always end up on the ride at least 6-8x in a trip as FP are always available for it. It's become a running joke to see how many times we end up going on it without really actively trying to go on it. We always yell Hooray! at the end with the characters and then collapse into laughter. So Pooh got my vote here even though, as I said, I think Mr. Toad was the actual better ride.
 
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