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ORLANDO — Expect the unexpected when Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway opens at Disney’s Hollywood Studios on March 4.
That was the takeaway from lead Imagineers Kevin Rafferty and Charita Carter, the attraction’s creative director and creative producer, respectively. Rafferty and Carter discussed the attraction at a media event Tuesday after announcing its opening date.
“Creating the story was a really fun challenge because Mickey and Minnie, they don’t have any real jobs, per se,” Rafferty said. “They don’t come from any place.”
He used the Cars franchise as an example: The character Mater is a tow truck, and the character Lightning McQueen is a race car. They both have jobs, and they live in the town of Radiator Springs. It’s an automatic springboard for a story line that Mickey and Minnie just don’t have.
“What I can promise you with Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway is that the thing that you can expect is the unexpected,” Rafferty said. “There’s a surprise around every corner.”
The attraction will bring guests into a Mickey Mouse cartoon short. It features a new story and theme song.
According to Carter, the project gave Imagineers a unique challenge: “To take the 2D flat animated world of the Mickey shorts and extrude it into a dimensional environment so that our guests can experience it.”
“We literally went into our toolbox and pulled out every theatrical tool and the latest technology, and integrated it in a unique way to create an environment that hasn’t ever before been seen by our guests,” she added.
Members of the media on Wednesday were given a short peek at the attraction, which is housed in the Chinese Theatre, the former home of the Great Movie Ride.
The pre-show room features a standard movie screen that begins to show a cartoon short of Mickey, Minnie and Pluto going on a picnic. On their drive to the park, they pass by Goofy, who is piloting a train.
A collision occurs, and that’s where the theatrical and technological tricks Carter mentioned come into play: a portion of the screen appears to explode in a burst of fog. When it clears, the jagged screen has opened into a doorway to the remainder of the attraction.
The explosion was unexpected, to say the least, and well executed. Nothing hinted that anything but a normal, video pre-show would occur.
Source: travelweekly.com