Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway
| Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disney's Hollywood Studios |
| Land / area | Hollywood Boulevard |
| Type | Trackless dark ride |
| Opened | March 4, 2020 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | None |
| Status | Operating |
Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway is a trackless dark ride on Hollywood Boulevard at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World, Florida. Opened on March 4, 2020, inside the park's full-scale replica of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, it was the first ride-through attraction at any Disney park to be built around Mickey Mouse. It replaced The Great Movie Ride, the theatre's original occupant. A second version opened in Mickey's Toontown at Disneyland Park on January 27, 2023.
History
The attraction was announced at the D23 Expo in July 2017, and The Great Movie Ride gave its final performances on August 13 that year. Imagineer Kevin Rafferty, who had worked on several earlier character attractions, led the project. The new ride was based not on the classic theatrical shorts but on the Mickey Mouse television shorts that began in 2013, with their distinctive flat, exaggerated art style; members of that series' creative team worked on the attraction's animation, and composer Christopher Willis, who scored the shorts, wrote its music, including the song "Nothing Can Stop Us Now".
Originally expected in 2019, the ride slipped to the following spring. It opened on March 4, 2020, only days before Walt Disney World closed temporarily for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it reopened with the park that July. Posters in the Hollywood Studios queue pay tribute to earlier Mickey cartoons and include a set of invented film posters, among them a reference to The Great Movie Ride itself.
Experience
Guests enter the theatre for the premiere of a new cartoon, Perfect Picnic, in which Mickey, Minnie and Pluto set out by car for a picnic at Runnamuck Park while, nearby, Goofy prepares to drive a train. In the pre-show the cartoon screen appears to burst open, and guests step through it into the cartoon itself, boarding cars of Goofy's train, the Runnamuck Railroad.
The trackless train cars separate and travel through a series of cartoon scenes: a stampede at a carnival, a tropical island struck by a volcanic eruption and a tornado, a desert canyon and a waterfall, a city street where Daisy Duck runs a dance studio and the cars are drawn into a dance sequence, and a factory where riders are nearly processed along a conveyor before the machinery reverses. Throughout, Mickey and Minnie attempt to reach the park and rescue the runaway train's passengers. The finale returns everyone to Runnamuck Park for the picnic, with a fireworks display overhead and the train reassembled under Goofy's control.
Design
Imagineering described the visual approach as "2½D": flat, cartoon-styled sets and figures are given depth through layered scenery, projection mapping and lighting rather than through fully three-dimensional modelling, so that riders feel surrounded by a drawing rather than by realistic environments. The trackless system lets the four cars of each train split apart, dance in formation and recombine. The ride has no height requirement, which, together with its gentle motion, places it among the park's principal family attractions.