Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway Brings a Jolt of Irreverent Energy to Disney World
All images courtesy of Disney
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Disneyland turns 65 in July. Disney World is just a year away from hitting 50. And yet during all those decades no Disney theme park ever featured a ride starring Mickey Mouse. That officially changes this week, with the opening of Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Disney World. This all-ages charmer uses a hodgepodge of newfangled theme park tech to turn the Chinese Theater at the heart of Hollywood Studios into a glorious cartoon world, with Mickey, Minnie and their friends as your companions throughout. It’s a breezy, beautiful new addition to Disney World, and the final grace note for the transformation of Hollywood Studios.
Okay, I’m about to get into it. If you aren’t that well-versed in theme park jargon, I’ll try to explain it as I go. And if you hope to avoid spoilers on new rides, here’s your warning: I’ll be getting into some specifics that might ruin a surprise or two. I don’t want to bum you out, so be warned, okay? Also, just to get the old-time Disney nostalgia beef out of the way from the jump, yes, I was a fan of the Great Movie Ride; yes, I’m sad it’s no longer around; yes, as a fan, I would’ve liked to see Disney update that ride and build this new one at another spot in the park; but also, yes, I’m still glad Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway exists, I still enjoy it tremendously, and I do think it’ll be considerably more popular with your average park-goers than the old ride was. It’s not a grand centerpiece or statement-of-purpose ride like the Great Movie Ride was, and it lacks pretty much everything that made that ride such an epic, but this Railway is still an undeniable blast of Disney fun that doesn’t look or feel like any other ride in the parks today.
Here’s what you can expect when you finally make it back into the Chinese Theater and hop on this runaway train for the first time.
Let’s start with the jargon. Runaway Railway is a dark ride. That doesn’t mean it’s goth or going through a rough time, or anything; it just means it’s set indoors, in a space that uses various lighting and special effects to create a heightened form of reality. Almost every classic Disney ride that isn’t a spinner (like the Dumbo ride), a motion simulator (like Star Tours) or a roller coaster (like Big Thunder) is at least partially a dark ride, from Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion, to all the parts of Splash Mountain that aren’t about plummeting 50 feet into the watery spray below. Almost every classic Fantasyland ride, for instance, is a dark ride, including a cult favorite that still exists in Disneyland but was removed from Disney World in 1998: Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. I bring up that 1950s chestnut for a reason: in many ways Runaway Railway can be seen as its spiritual successor, only with cartoon characters that are exponentially more popular than Mr. Toad and Winky the villainous bartender.
If the similarities in the names “Runaway Railway” and “Wild Ride” aren’t self-explanatory enough, both rides are about everyday modes of travel going completely haywire under the control of an incompetent driver. Here the blame is squarely placed on Goofy, who, despite apparently being the “engineer of the month,” struggles mightily to keep his train on its tracks when a pie clogs its chimney. This is all introduced during a pre-show cartoon at the end of the queue; like the rest of the ride, it’s animated in the style of the recent Mickey Mouse shorts. This cartoon introduces both the basic plot—Mickey and Minnie are on their way to a picnic in the park on a beautiful day, and Goofy, the engineer of a train that goes to the park, is bringing all the rest of us along—and the earworm of a theme song, “Nothing Can Stop Us Now,” which your children WILL be singing nonstop for weeks after first hearing it. The short ends with that pie mucking up Goofy’s works, and then an amazing special effect turns a movie screen into the entrance to the train station, where you’ll hop on board for the ride itself.
