Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor
| Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor | |
|---|---|
| Park | Magic Kingdom |
| Land / area | Tomorrowland |
| Type | Interactive comedy show |
| Opened | April 2, 2007 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering
|
| Status | Operating |
Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor is an interactive comedy show in Tomorrowland at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, Florida. It opened on April 2, 2007, based on Pixar's 2001 film Monsters, Inc., and places guests in a comedy club in the monster city of Monstropolis, where animated monsters perform stand-up routines and converse with the audience in real time. No two performances are the same: the monsters are voiced live by performers working behind the screen, using digital puppetry technology similar to that developed for Turtle Talk with Crush at EPCOT.
History
The Laugh Floor occupies a Tomorrowland theatre that previously housed a succession of Circle-Vision 360 films, most recently The Timekeeper, which closed in 2006. Disney announced that year that a Monsters, Inc. attraction would take its place.
The show was developed under the working title Laugh Floor Comedy Club, which was expanded to Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor Comedy Club before the name was shortened to its final form shortly before opening on April 2, 2007. The premise follows on from the end of the film: having discovered that children's laughter produces far more energy than screams, the monsters have converted their power company to collect laughs, and the club exists to fill a giant canister with laugh power generated by the human audience.
The show was adjusted in 2013 to acknowledge the prequel film Monsters University. Like other live-voiced attractions, it was slow to return after the park closures of 2020; performances resumed on August 8, 2021, following a soft reopening three days earlier.
Experience
Guests enter through a door presented as a passage between Tomorrowland and Monstropolis, and wait in a holding area where they are invited to submit jokes, originally by text message, for possible use in the show. The main theatre seats about 400 people facing a large screen, flanked by the laugh canister whose level rises as the performance proceeds.
Mike Wazowski, the one-eyed monster from the film, acts as master of ceremonies — billed in the fiction as the "Monster of Ceremonies". A rotating cast of monster comedians performs short sets, and Roz, the slug-like paperwork administrator from the film, appears to close the show. Mike and Roz are the only characters carried over from the film itself; the other comics were created for the attraction.
The interactivity is the substance of the show. Cameras in the theatre let the hidden performers pick out individual guests, who appear on screen with humorous captions and are drawn into conversations, running gags and a recurring "that guy" role assigned to one audience member through the performance. Submitted jokes are read out between acts. Because the dialogue is improvised around a framework of prepared segments, the running order, guests chosen and jokes used differ at every performance. A show lasts roughly fifteen minutes.