This Week in Theme Park News: Mickey’s Toontown Gets Reimagined, Sesame Street Comes to San Diego, and More
Mickey's Toontown concept art courtesy of Disney; Sesame Street Place concept art courtesy of Sesame Street Place
Let’s start with news that broke earlier today. Disneyland’s about to say goodbye to the current version of Mickey’s Toontown. A real-life cartoon world that opened in Jan. 1993, Mickey’s Toontown is being reimagined for early 2023. Disney Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro announced the news today at the annual International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Expo in Orlando. We’ve known for a while that a West Coast version of Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway was coming to Toontown, and that it would bring some changes to the land, but this is the first Disney has revealed about a larger reimagining. The whole land will be closing in March 2022, and when it reopens in early 2023 it’ll feature not just the new ride but play experiences for families and green space for guests to relax on.
Some of the planned changes are detailed in a post on the Disney Parks blog. The first thing you’ll encounter when you enter the new Toontown will be CenTOONial Park, a greenspace with a large interactive water fountain and a sculpted “dreaming” tree that children can explore. It’ll also still be the home of Mickey, Minnie, and their pals, including Donald Duck and Goofy. I’d imagine the land’s outlandish cartoon-style aesthetic might be going away, though, as it always resembled Disney competitors like the Fleischer brothers and Looney Tunes and the fictional cartoons from the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit more than Disney’s own cartoons from the ‘30s and ‘40s.
We don’t know what this reimagining holds for the only ride currently located in Toontown. Back in September Disney revealed that Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin, a modernized take on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride that opened in 1994, would be getting an update that will turn Jessica Rabbit from a damsel in distress into a more active participant in the story. Disney didn’t really touch on the future of Roger Rabbit today, but hopefully it can remain an anchor for the revised Toontown alongside the new Mickey and Minnie ride. We’ll no doubt hear more about the changes to Mickey’s Toontown in the months to come.
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