Slinky Dog Dash
| Slinky Dog Dash | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disney's Hollywood Studios |
| Land / area | Toy Story Land |
| Type | Family launched roller coaster |
| Opened | June 30, 2018 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering / Mack Rides |
| Height req. | 38 in (97 cm) |
| Status | Operating |
Slinky Dog Dash is a family launched roller coaster in Toy Story Land at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World, Florida. Opened on June 30, 2018, the day Toy Story Land itself opened, it is themed as a coaster that Andy, the child in the Toy Story films, has built in his backyard from a construction kit, using his toy Slinky Dog as the train. It was the second roller coaster built at the park, after Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, and remains its principal family coaster.
History
Toy Story Land was announced in 2015 as part of a multi-year rebuilding of Hollywood Studios that also produced Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge. Where the park's earlier Pixar area had a single dark ride, the new land was designed around outdoor attractions at toy scale, with guests treated as toys moving through Andy's backyard among oversized building blocks, board games and playthings. Slinky Dog Dash was built by the German manufacturer Mack Rides — only the second Mack coaster installed at a Disney park, after Goofy's Sky School in California — working to an Imagineering design. It opened alongside the land's other new ride, Alien Swirling Saucers, and quickly became the land's longest-wait attraction.
Experience
The queue is dressed as Andy's drawings and packaging for his Mega Coaster Construction Kit, with instructions and sketches showing how the coaster was supposedly assembled. Riders board a train formed as Slinky Dog himself: his head leads, his spring midsection forms the body of the train over the passenger cars, and his tail brings up the rear.
There is no lift hill. A launch sends the train out of the station and around an opening circuit of banked turns and low, rolling hills that give repeated brief moments of weightlessness, passing under bridges and around the land with views across Toy Story Land and toward Galaxy's Edge. Halfway round, the train slows to a stop in a second launch area styled as a toy playset, where a countdown and sound effects build before it is launched again, over a series of camelback hills and through a set of oversized rings, and into the final brake run. There, an Audio-Animatronic Wheezy, the penguin from Toy Story 2, sings a rendition of "You've Got a Friend in Me" accompanied by a giant Mr. Mike tape recorder. The ride reaches about 40 mph (64 km/h), rises to 50 feet (15 m), lasts about two minutes, and has no inversions. Its height requirement is 38 inches (97 cm).
Design
The double-launch layout lets a family coaster produce a longer, more varied ride than a single lift would allow, and lets the second launch act as a show scene in its own right. The track is carried on supports painted and shaped to resemble the plastic and wooden pieces of a toy construction set, keeping the whole circuit in keeping with the land's conceit that everything in it was assembled by a child.