The Best Part of Disneyland’s Newest Ride Might Be Waiting in Line

Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway opens today at Disneyland as part of the Disney100 celebration. If you’ve ridden the attraction that opened at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in 2020, you’ll know what to expect from the new West Coast version. It’s an almost identical recreation of the Disney World dark ride, an irreverent, lightly chaotic trip into a Mickey Mouse animated short, with all the zaniness and cartoon logic that entails. It’s essentially a newfangled, high-tech update on the basic concept behind Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and with its vibrant colors and cartoon aesthetic it fits perfectly into Mickey’s Toontown alongside Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin (which is, itself, a modern riff on Mr. Toad.) It’ll no doubt be a major crowd-pleaser for decades to come, and that’s all I’m going to say about the ride.

As cool as the ride is, the new queue is something truly special. The Florida original uses the same Chinese Theater lobby that served as the queue for The Great Movie Ride; it’s functional and fits the ride’s movie premiere theme, but nothing about it relates directly to Mickey Mouse or Disney’s history of animation. The Disneyland version rectifies that with a large helping of charm and humor.

This Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway is also set in a movie theater, only it’s one designed to fit into the cartoon landscape of Toontown. The lengthy queue runs through the theater’s lobby, which is hosting an exhibit on Mickey Mouse’s 95 year career put on by Minnie Mouse and the Toontown Hysterical Society (expect a lot of questionable puns). The exhibit is full of “props” from Mickey’s films—the helm from “Steamboat Willie,” the plane from “Plane Crazy,” the spell book and sorcerer’s apprentice costume from Fantasia—as if these cartoons were actual physical constructs and not the hand-drawn works of art we know them as. It’s a cute, fun idea that fits the theme of Toontown, and Disney carries the idea throughout Mickey’s entire history, with separate rooms focusing on different eras of the character.

I might just be saying this because I grew up in the ‘80s, but for me the highlight of the queue was a display devoted to the Mickey Mouse Disco and Mousercise records that came out in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Lifesize Mickey figures decked out in his finest disco and workout threads stand on a colored dance floor as songs from the records play. It’s a surprising, unexpected reference to something rarely acknowledged in the theme parks today, and a fun tip of the hat to anybody who grew up with that music.