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----    THE LATEST BUZZ    ----
 
    (1/17/2025) Disneyland To Finally Open Haunted Mansion in Original Attraction Mode This Weekend
    (12/16/2024) Disneyland Shuts Down Virtual Queue System for Tiana's Bayou Adventure In Record Time
    (12/6/2024) Walt Disney Animatronic Set To Appear In May
    (11/27/2024) Disneyland Finally Opens Revamped Haunted Mansion Queue
    (11/3/2024) Tiana's Bayou Adventure Opens ... and Very Wet
    (10/13/2024) Disneyland Teases The Return of Paint the Night Parade

Ride Rehabs - These dates are subject to change:
 
Great Moments w/ Mr. Lincoln - NOW CLOSED through TBD
Haunted Mansion - NOW CLOSED through Jan. 17
Monorail - NOW CLOSED through TBD
DL Railroad - NOW CLOSED through Spring 2025
It’s a Small World - Jan. 21 through TBD

General Park News - (10/12/2024) To OC Registers confirmed that the reason the Disneyland Railroad has been closed for the past several weeks is to allow for crews to remove and replace the tracks in the north-east corner of the park. This includes replacing the section of switch-track that sends the trains to the roundhouse backstage.
    Right now there is no official opening day for the 2-month long project, but the article says it will be closed at least through to Nov. 21st, depending on how the project goes. In the meantime crews are also working to refurbish the Main Street Station and some of the passenger cars ahead of the park’s 70th anniversary season.
 
    (7/11/2024) Disneyland fans should start preparing themselves because the early word from insiders is that the original Disney park is planning to put in a big 70th Anniversary celebration in 2025. While there really isn’t time to build a new ride of course, this has never stopped Disneyland from trying to pull out of the stops with a large entertainment line-up features new shows, parades and nighttime spectaculars.
    According to insiders, Cast Members will partake in a “Road to the 70th” special backstage event on July 17th as part of Disneyland’s 69th Birthday where more will be revealed about what they are planning.

Late 2024 - Haunted Mansion Gift Shop - (1/17/2025) At long last the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland will reopen in its original Haunted Mansion format. Just before it closed in at the start of 2024 it had been running with the seasonal “Nightmare Before Christmas” themed overlay, and once again, as soon as it reopened this past fall, it reopened again in the “Nightmare” mode, which means that it had not operated in normal mode since the Summer of 2023.
    That all changes this weekend as the classic Haunted Mansion will not only return to service, but it will return with a few new surprises and upgrades. According to the LA Times, the attic scene has been upgraded with the introduction of an all new floating “Bride” figure. Using the latest technology, this new Bride fills the scene with more of a feeling of loss and sadness over the loss of her many husbands, which is sort of in direct contract with the last version of the bride, often nicknamed as the Black Widow Bride, who seemed to have a little bit of a blood-lust for beheading her previous mates.
    Make the jump and they have a video preview which shows off a bit about the new Bride as well as a look at the newly expanded outdoor queue that runs through expanded garden scenes and even a greenhouse before entering the mansion.
 
    (11/27/2024)  Good news for Disneyland guests, as the revamped themed queue of the Haunted Mansion has FINALLY reopened after being closed for a remodel since January. You can get a quick look at the revised queue as well as this year’s Nightmare Before Christmas makeover of the Haunted Mansion ride in the video below from UndercoverTourist.
    One of key points to the entire rebuild of the outside of the Mansion itself was to add a creepy gift shop experience to the exit the ride, and unfortunately that isn’t done yet. Apparently they’re in a race to try and finish sometime later this Winter, but Disney did reveal that the shop will be named “Madame Leota’s Somewhere Beyond”.

 
    (9/2/2024) For those wondering how the construction outside the Haunted Mansion is going, DisneyGeek has posted a new construction update this weekend. Lots of walls everywhere, so really hard to make things out, but hopefully they’ll have the queue finished before too long. As for that new shop at the end, it only appears that the basic building frame-work has been put into place, so that part is going to take awhile.
    Meanwhile we can also follow along to see how things are going in the other direction as Critter Country is being transformed into Bayou Country. 

Late 2024 - Tiana’s Bayou Adventure - (12/16/2024) Well that didn’t last long. Disneyland announced last week that they were stopping the use of their Virtual Queue system that was in place as the only free way for guests to ride the new Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. Instead all guests are now allowed to join the good old regular ‘Stand-By’ queue, though Lightning Lane passes are also for sale if you want to cut the line.
    In case you are wondering, the Walt Disney World version of the attraction that opened in the Summer is still using the Virtual Queue system, and has not announced any plans to drop it anytime soon. Of course Walt Disney World is still using it on the popular Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind roller coaster at Epcot which opened way back in May 2022, even though most feel that they should have dropped it a long time ago.
 
    (11/3/2024) It seems that the Disneyland version of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure has now opened opened for preview rides and you can catch a POV run through of the experience in the video below that  I queued up to the ride itself. (Rewind to the start if you want to see the queue).
    As you might expect, the ride experience in Disneyland is essentially the same experience that opened first in Florida at The Magic Kingdom park, with the primary difference being the ride hardware used in California is still the original Splash Mountain style logs that feature single-rider in a row seating as opposed to the more comfy double-wide logs that came with the later iterations in Florida and Japan. Still, the overall layout is nearly the same, with some minor tweaks in the west coast version to allow the storyline to still fit where the physical spaces may have differed between the two ride systems.
    One interesting item of note however has been the word on social media that your experience on Tiana in California seems to offer a much WETTER experience than you will find in Florida. In fact, based on a couple of video clips, the experience in California is wetter than it ever was when it ran as Splash Mountain with some logs appearing to just absolutely flood with water after the big splash down to the point that your shoes might be totally submerged for a time. Now, to be fair, the Disneyland version of the ride system has been a little inconsistent in terms of wetness over the years due to changes in the logs. As I recall the original logs were more like your traditional log-flume with a bench like seat that ran down the middle and a couple of seat dividers in place for groups, but I believe the logs held 8 or 9 riders at a time. Years later the logs were modified to have individual seat-backs for each rider, but this also reduced the capacity of each log to about 6 riders, with a much larger bench seat in the back row. The word is that the speed of the water flow was adjusted as well around this time, to speed up the logs journey through the attraction in an attempt to make up for the lost physical capacity of each log, which had also had the side effect of increasing the amount of ‘splash’ as the more speedy logs crashed through the course.
    Anyway… as the cooler winter season is now arriving in California just as they open their Tiana flume, I’m not sure if some further adjustments could be made to reduce the splash problem if log flooding continues to be a problem.

 

2025 - Walt Disney - A Magical Life - (12/6/2024) The new “Walt Disney - A Magical Life” performance featuring an animatronic version of Walt Disney is now set to open in Disneyland’s Main Street Theater on May 16, 2025. While many of the descendants of Disney are excited about this project, that sentiment is not shared by all. Joanna Miller, the granddaughter of Walt Disney, in particular has been opposed to the project, claiming that the creation of “a Robotic Grampa” would be an act of “dehumanizing him”. She also claims that Walt once told one of his Imagineers, Sam McKim, “that he never wanted to be an animatronic.”
 
    (8/11/2024) The Main Street Opera House will soon be home to a new attraction. While Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln will return in the future, the attraction will make way for a new one of special significance in 2025 called “Walt Disney - A Magical Life”, which will feature the first ever animatronic figure of Walt Disney himself.
    Great care is being taken to bring the founder of all things “Disney” to the stage in an all new presentation experience, that will show off what it might have been like to stop by Walt Disney’s office back in the day to see what he was dreaming up.
    The concept is kind of fitting, as Disney himself dreamed up the idea of creating audio-animatronic figures as a way to bring great icons from history’s past to life on a stage. Now, just as Disney park guests would witness Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln or the Hall of Presidents, today’s guests will get a chance to witness a recreation of Walt Disney himself.
    As I said, Mr. Lincoln will also return in the future, as Disney has already announced that once the initial ‘new’ run of the Walt Disney presentation is over, the plan is to operate the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction in rotation with the new Walt Disney - A Magical Life presentation.

2025 - Paint The Night - (10/13/2024) It’s been a long time coming, but Disneyland is now teasing the return of the park’s popular Paint the Night evening parade. The light up parade was created in an effort to create something to replace the former Main Street Electrical Parade that was retired for good and then would periodically be brought out of retirement for a season every so often as a special treat. Paint the Night was well loved by guests but for some reason vanished fairly quickly after it premiered in 2015 for Disneyland’s 60th Anniversary before shutting down after a year in September 2016 for yet another limited-run return of the Main Street Electrical Parade in 2017. Paint the Night would return in a modified form across the entry plaza in Disney California Adventure for a very limited run from April to November 2018 before benign retired once again, possibly for good.
    So with the latest tease now in place from Disneyland along with song lyrics singing, “When Can We Do This Again?”, it seems almost assuredly that “Paint the Night” will return for the park’s 70th anniversary in 2025.

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2026 - Smugglers Run - Mando & Grogu -  (8/11/2024) Ever since I saw Millennium Falcon: Smuggler Run I’ve felt that the video-game style experience really needed to expand and add other ‘missions’ you could experience. At last, Disney agrees, and in 2026, just in time for the launch of The Mandalorian and Grogu movie hitting theatrers, a new new story/attraction featuring Mando and Grogu will also drop into the Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run attraction at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

By 2026 - Electric Autopia - Confirmed - (4/21/2024) Disneyland has now confirmed earlier comments that indicated a plan to convert the Autopia to feature an all electric vehicle fleet. The park has confirmed that these will be all electric vehicles and not hybrids, and you can expect it to be converted within the next 30 months (Fall 2026).
    It isn’t known if the attraction will close entirely to convert over to a new electric fleet all at once, or if this will be something of a phased conversion where cars are just replaced at few at a time as they arrive. Of course a full closure would represent a more lengthy process that could also indicate some possible thematic changes within the attraction itself, which might also be welcomed as very little has changed with the Autopia over the years, other than the sponsorship era from Chevron that started in 1998 that saw the Fantasyland station closed and the Tomorrowland side reformatted to serve as the solitary load-unload point for all four tracks.
    Yes, I’m showing my age, for those not aware, in the old days there were two Autopia attraction stations. Two of the roads would load in Tomorrowland and the other two would load in a second station located in ‘Fantasyland’ right across from the Matterhorn. On slow days, back when there was such a thing, the Fantasyland side would often remain closed, leaving just the Tomorrowland tracks open.

    (4/4/2024) The Autopia at Disneyland is now set to receive a makeover, as all the cars on the attraction will soon be replaced by a new fleet of electric cars, replacing the old gas engine vehicles for good. The details are very light at this time, as there is no timeline for the project to be completed, nor a confirmation if the new vehicles will be all electric or some kind of hybrid power system.