Vacation Fun
Vacation Fun is an original animated short film shown exclusively at the Mickey Shorts Theater at Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World. Starring Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, it celebrates the couple's favourite vacation memories by combining new animation with clips from the modern Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts. The theatre, in Echo Lake, opened on March 4, 2020 — the same day as Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway — and the roughly ten-minute film is followed by themed photo opportunities inside the theatre.
History
The Mickey Shorts Theater was announced on September 25, 2019, as a companion piece to Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway, the first ride-through Mickey Mouse attraction, then under construction inside the Chinese Theatre. Both projects drew on the same source: the Mickey Mouse shorts that began on television in 2013 under Paul Rudish, whose flat, fast, gag-driven style deliberately harked back to Mickey's earliest cartoons while pushing the characters into far more frantic situations.
The theatre took over a building with a long screening history in Echo Lake. Most recently it had shown Star Wars: Path of the Jedi, a compilation film recapping the Star Wars saga, made redundant once Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge opened in the park in 2019. Reimagined inside and out with Mickey and Minnie theming — colourful marquee styling, cartoon posters and props throughout — it was a venue in search of a film that only it would ever show.
Disney announced that film on February 24, 2020. "Vacation Fun" was made for the theatre rather than adapted from television: a new short built around holiday memories, using fresh animation to link excerpts from existing shorts. The theatre opened on March 4, 2020, alongside Runaway Railway, as the finishing touch of the park's multi-year transformation. Both attractions had been open barely a week when Walt Disney World closed for the COVID-19 pandemic; the theatre reopened with the park that summer and has screened the same film ever since.
The film and theatre
"Vacation Fun" runs about ten minutes and is structured as a scrapbook. Mickey and Minnie look back over their vacations, and each memory becomes an excerpt from a modern Mickey Mouse short. The clips Disney named at opening were "Panda-monium", "Couples Sweaters", "Potatoland", "Croissant de Triomphe", "Entombed", "Dumb Luck", "Al Rojo Vivo", "Yodelburg" and "Outback at Ya!" — a selection that takes in a runaway panda, a trip to a theme park devoted to potatoes, a Parisian bakery and the Australian outback, among other holidays that went cheerfully wrong.
The new linking animation keeps the same art style and voice cast feel as the television shorts, so the joins between old and new material are part of the joke rather than a distraction from it. The film is exclusive to Disney's Hollywood Studios: it was not made for television or streaming, and the Mickey Shorts Theater is the only place it is screened.
The experience does not end with the credits. Guests leave the auditorium through a photo area filled with oversized, cartoon-styled set pieces drawn from the world of the shorts, designed for posed photographs — a couple re-creating a Mickey and Minnie vacation moment is the intended picture. The theatre's lobby and exterior carry the same joke, with Mickey and Minnie artwork, playful posters and hidden details in the design, making the building read as a small cartoon cinema dedicated entirely to its two stars.
Set in Echo Lake near Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway, Vacation Fun serves a practical purpose in the park as well as an artistic one: it is a short, seated, air-conditioned show with no height requirement and frequent performances, and it gives the Mickey of the modern shorts — the same Mickey guests meet inside the Chinese Theatre ride — a second home in the park.
See also
- Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway
- Disney's Hollywood Studios
- Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge
- Star Tours – The Adventures Continue