Planning a “Maximized” Day for First-Timers

[Charlie The Chatbox Ghost]

My brother and I are heading down to WDW for a short trip in June to celebrate the end of MuppetVision (the company I work for is hosting an event with Imagineers and Jim Henson Co. people who worked on the attraction), and two friends of mine who have never visited any Disney parks before will be joining us. We’ll be doing two parks- Hollywood Studios on June 7th and Magic Kingdom on June 8th.

Since this is their first ever visit to Disney ever, I want to make it as perfect as possible. We’re not staying at a WDW Hotel so if there are extra magic hours these days we won’t be using them, so we’re limited to normal park hours. With four people, how can we maximize our time at both parks? DHS has less to do so I’m less worried. Magic Kingdom seems a bit daunting to get all the essentials done, especially with BTM down, reducing capacity. We’re all late 20s so we’ll be skipping attractions that are specifically for kids and families, like Slinky Dog Dash, but we’re definitely going to do the iconic stuff like Dumbo. We likely won’t be doing any meet and greets either. My brother is autistic, so we always had the DAS equivalent growing up, but with the changes idk if he’d qualify anymore since he’s high functioning (though he still dislikes spending a long time in lines/crowds).

Is there an optimal strategy these days for completing the park in one go, either with or without Lightning Lane/DAS? I remember the strategy used to be “start in Tomorrowland and work your way west” but that might not be a thing anymore.

 

[Charlie The Chatbox Ghost]

Completely missed the park about the Jim Henson people that worked on the attraction. I've always been a huge Jim Henson fan!!!! In Atlanta, it's very neat, they have the Center For Puppetry Arts there where Jim Henson collaborated on and they have a museum with many of the puppets and host puppet shows for the children from time to time there. I took my nephew there for a Rudolph the Reindeer puppet show and we also made puppets there also at the event. I thought that the music was from a recording but it was live and sounded exactly like the cartoon. Pretty fun!

Oh wow, I'd love to visit that! The Museum of the Moving Image in NYC has a permanent Jim Henson exhibit too, I've heard it's really great. I used to live in NYC for college but missed out on being able to see it, it opened after I left because of Covid!