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----    THE LATEST BUZZ    ----
 
    (11/25/2025) Disney Reveals New Details About 2026 Millennium Falcon Smuggler's Run Upgrade
    (11/4/2025) Disneyland’s Big Thunder Mountain Reopens
    (10/8/2025) Disneyland To Make Addition to Storybook Land Canal Boats
    (8/23/2025) Reservations No Longer Required for Oga's Cantina

Ride Rehabs - These dates are subject to change:
 
Mark Twain Riverboat - Jan. 12 through Jan. 15, 2026
Haunted Mansion (Nightmare Removal) - Jan. 12 through Jan. 22
Rise of the Resistance - Jan. 20 through TBD
It’s A Small World - Jan. 26 through TBD
Sailing Ship Columbia - Jan. 26 through Jan. 29
Fantasmic! - Jan. 5-8, Jan 11-15, Jan. 18-22, and Jan. 25-29
 

General Park News - (11/4/2025) Big Thunder Mountain has now reopened at Disneyland after a lengthy refurbishment. You can check out the POV video below showing it off in action. For the most part, this looks to have been a restoration of the ride experience, as I didn’t really notice anything new. What has been noticed however is that the waterfall at the top of the first lift hill is either turned off, or has been replaced by a simple mist effect.
    Hopefully it just wasn’t turned on yet… I’d hate to think they removed the waterfall for that. (UPDATE: The Waterfall has returned...)

 
    (10/8/2025) Disney has confirmed that the closed Storybook Land Canal Boats attraction will be getting a new addition before it reopens. If  you’ve never ridden it the attraction takes guests on a boat ride through a waterway that features scale-model sized versions famous structures from Disney animated films. To this end a mini version of Rapunzel’s Tower from Tangled is being added to the attraction as part of the park’s 70th Anniversary celebration.
    Look for the new addition to be placed between Toad Hall and the Patchwork Quilt when it the attraction reopens this winter
 
    (7/2/2025) I’m going to list this as being a very good thing, but some of you may disagree. According to SFGate, as of July 1st Disneyland has removed the popular Pirates of the Caribbean attraction from their list of Lightning Lane attractions and is now offering just a single “Stand-By” only lane for access to ride.
    Long time readers know Screamscape has never been a huge fan of Disney’s various line-skipping services… not even the free for everyone FastPass system. While it worked out on some attractions, other attractions never needed it, and the addition actually caused attractions that rarely had long lines to suddenly have them all the time.
    In this case, Pirates was last added to the park’s Lightning Lane service at the start of 2024 as two other Lightning Lane attractions were going down for extensive refurbishments… in this case it was Splash Mountain closing to be converted into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure and the Haunted Mansion closing for a refurbishment that would change the outdoor queue as well as add a gift shop to the exit. As the article also confirms, the line of Pirates has since skyrocketed once the single-line was split to include Lightning Lane. By creating an artificial bottleneck the stand-by queue would then spill out into the pathways and make things look more crowded than ever.
    Now that both of those projects have been completed and returned to the Lightning Lane offerings, there really was no need to keep Pirates on the list any longer. Not that Pirates would ever need it, as the same thing happened back during the original FastPass era as well. Pirates is the highest capacity ride in Disneyland after all. While the popular roller coasters like Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain have theoretical capacities of 1,840 and 2,200 riders per hour, Pirates of the Caribbean is capable of handing up to 3,430 riders per hour. So even when Pirates appears to have a long line, that line is constantly moving due to the attraction’s design being quite literally the biggest people eater in the entire California resort. (Fun note: According to online stats, the only attraction with a higher capacity in all of Disney’s North American parks is the Tomorrowland Transit Authority (aka: Peoplemover) at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom which at full capacity is said to be able to handle up to 4,600 riders per hour.

2026 - Smugglers Run - Mando & Grogu - (11/25/2025) Blooloop reveals a few more details about the upgrades coming in 2026 to the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run attraction. As you have guessed from the previous version of the attraction, Millennium Falcon works like a giant video game, which means all the visual action you see through the cockpit windows are rendered in real-time by a video-game software engine.
    And if you missed it, the engine itself was upgraded around August 2025 to use “Unreal Engine 5” from Epic Games (from Version 4) and they’re also in the process of upgrading graphic cards used to render all the graphics you see, which means even more detailed and realistic graphics are coming. It’s also fun to note that “The Volume”, the giant video screen soundstage used in the production of The Mandalorian itself, is also said to be powered by Epic’s Unreal Engine, so this should allow for the same graphic look to apply from the productions to the attraction itself.
    Another big reveal about the new updated version of the attraction is that while your adventure on the Falcon will apparently begin with a visit to Tatooine, your journey through the attraction itself will not be as linear as the previous version. Your choices along the journey will apparently unfold with your adventure ending with a finale sequence on one of three different locations: the Bespin Cloud City, galactic Capital planet of Coruscant, or an encounter at the wreckage of the Death Star. Once at any of these three locations, apparently there will be a few branching points to travel into different sections of each of these levels as well.
    So really the new version of the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run attraction that arrived in 2026 will be something infinitely more fun and replay-able, so you can try to experience something new with each new ride experience.
 
    (3/9/2025) Disney has confirmed that a new adventure mission aboard Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run featuring Mando and Grogu in the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge lands at Disneyland and Disney Hollywood Studios will be available starting on May 22, 2026, the same day that The Mandalorian and Grogu fim will hit the silver screen in theaters.
    While we don’t know exactly what the experience will be line, it will play into the storyline told in the new movie apparently. Based on the concept artwork released, we see the Falcon flying towards the Cloud City at Bespin once again, a shot of a sand crawler, which means a stop by Tattooine, and what appears to be an image of the wreckage of the second Death Star floating in orbit over Endor.
    According to the post, the events you’ll experience in the new Smuggler’s Run mission won’t be a re-telling of the events of the new film, but instead will be “more like participating in something that’s happening just off-camera from what you see in the film.” I do admit, I like that idea, as it is what really makes the events of Universal’s “Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts” a really fun attraction. It places the riders on your own adventure within the Gringotts bank, at the same time that key events from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is taking place elsewhere within Gringotts, allowing your paths to cross at some key scenes along the way.

 
    (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.