Wandering Oaken's Sliding Sleighs
| Wandering Oaken's Sliding Sleighs | |
|---|---|
| Park | Hong Kong Disneyland |
| Land / area | Arendelle: World of Frozen |
| Type | Steel junior coaster |
| Opened | November 20, 2023 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | None |
| Status | Operating |
Wandering Oaken's Sliding Sleighs is a family roller coaster in Arendelle: World of Frozen at Hong Kong Disneyland. Themed to Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna from Disney's Frozen (2013), it is a custom junior coaster built by Vekoma, sending sleigh-shaped trains through the forest and rockwork behind Oaken's shop. It opened on November 20, 2023, with the rest of World of Frozen, and was promoted as the first Frozen-themed roller coaster at any Disney park.[1]
History
The coaster was announced at the D23 Expo in August 2019 as part of Hong Kong's Frozen land, with Dutch Imagineer Michel den Dulk leading the land's design. The first track sections arrived on site in June 2020. An opening in 2021 was originally envisaged, but the pandemic pushed the whole land back, and World of Frozen eventually opened in November 2023.
The attraction was not always a coaster. During development, the Oaken slot in the land was at one stage planned as Wandering Oaken's Dancing Sleighs, a dancing-cars ride in the family of Luigi's Rollickin' Roadsters; the concept was changed during design into a small coaster instead, giving the land a kinetic outdoor ride to balance the indoor boat ride next door.[2] Sources describe the finished ride as a custom Vekoma Junior Coaster installation — designed for this site and threaded through its artificial mountain — rather than a retheme or clone of an existing Disney coaster.
Experience
The queue is a large part of the attraction, and begins inside Wandering Oaken's Trading Post, stocked for a Summer Snow Day sale with winter gear, carved wooden animals, pots, pans and the sun balm and cold remedies familiar from Oaken's brief film appearance. Oaken himself is absent from the counter, having popped off to the sauna — which is where the queue finds him. In the sauna sequence, Oaken appears in the steamed window by screen, talking, humming and drawing shapes, including snowflakes, in the condensation, a gag that directly echoes his sauna scene in the film and which reviewers singled out as the queue's highlight.[3] Beyond the sauna, guests pass Oaken's workbench, covered with his successive sleigh designs — barrel and crate prototypes among them — and the final plan: Sven the reindeer on a treadmill, with Olaf on his back dangling a carrot, providing the power.
The ride delivers on that drawing. Boarding a train of linked wooden sleighs, guests turn out of the station to find Olaf riding Sven, the pair rendered as simple animated figures, who haul the train up the lift hill. What follows is about a minute of swooping, banked turns through tunnels, caves and over the forest, with views opening out across the bay to Arendelle village and the castle beyond. The track is 298 metres (978 feet) long and is built almost entirely into and around its artificial mountain, so the layout hides and reveals itself as it goes. Trains carry 16 riders, two across in each of eight sleigh cars, and the minimum height is 95 centimetres.
In feel, opening reviews compared the ride to a shorter, gentler cousin of Seven Dwarfs Mine Train — a heavily themed family coaster whose scenery and story do most of the work — but the two rides share no layout: Sliding Sleighs is shorter, has a single lift, and was laid out specifically for the Hong Kong mountain it inhabits. Its brevity is the common criticism; its queue, setting and views are the common defence.