Toy Story Midway Mania Rider Reviews

[WallyBoag]

As far as I know there hasn't been a thread set up for reviews of the ride, so I'll start one.

I rode the ride last night during the employee previews.


If you have read my posts here before you know that I was skeptical when I saw the youtube video... looked pretty boring. But then people started riding it and saying that it was a lot of fun and the video didn't do it justice, so I became hopeful that maybe it was a really fun ride.


Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I still was not impressed with the ride. The potatohead out front is completely remarkable. Very amazing and a relatively funny script. Too bad you just kind of blow by him in the line, but there are some benches in the area so you can watch him longer if you like. I noticed that the blinders were down on one side of him due to the setting sun shining straight on him and blocking out his TV monitor eyes. Unfortunately this is the side that faces the majority of the ride's queue, so you have nothing to look at while out in the sun but the roller coaster shooting by and the sweaty back of the person in front of you. A portion of the line is indoors. I was looking forward to this because surely it must be air conditioned in there. It wasn't. In fact, the only air conditioned part of the line was the little hole in the wall that has the glasses in it. Why do they air condition the glasses but not the people waiting in line. Of course, the cold glasses fogged up immediately as they were put on people's sweaty heads. Yay for design!


Not long after you get your glasses you board the ride. The station is pretty humdrum. The seats are actually pretty nice for a Disney seat. There is a lot of leg room for once. You round a corner and are in the ride. Well, almost. We rounded a corner and stopped in a dark hallway with some black light paintings and not much else to see and waited for the car in front of us to be done with their game. This took about 15 seconds to happen, which when you are on a ride seems like a lifetime. We rounded another corner and finally could start shooting things. This first game I think was just practice and you were flinging pies at a bull’s-eye held by Woody. OK, this is pretty fun to shoot things at targets that move. The 3D was not very impressive here though as it was just a guy standing holding a bull’s-eye in front of you. Surely the different games would get more exciting. This game was over, hey, time to move on to the next game! Well, not quite, you just kind of sit there waiting for the track switch to turn and the cars in front of you to move so you can pull up to a screen. This means another 15 seconds in a blacklit hallway with a few things on the walls to look at and nothing else. Once everything is sorted out in front of you, you then get to move up to the first game that counts. I think this first game was an egg toss on a farm. Your shooter is magically tossing out eggs at targets. When you knock targets down, sometimes more valuable ones pop up. Again, I really wasn't too impressed with the 3D here. Every now and then there would be something that would fly at you, and that thing would be accompanied by a cheap thrill with a puff of air or a squirt of water, but there was nothing spectacular. The big 3D movies pull off the effects so much better. After a few seconds the characters count down and your game is over, time to move on to the next one! Well, not quite. It's still backed up, we had to wait. This time though at least we could shoot at the screens, which are more interesting than looking at painted flats.


Anyways, the ride repeats itself over and over again. Each screen has a different game, but at heart they are all the same. Pull the string over and over again and hope to hit a target. It got old to me really fast. And waiting between games was getting really ridiculous. Finally you get to the last game which is the most convoluted of them all. You get to move across screens and keep shooting as you move, then it gets really exciting! Pull as fast as you can and hit the really big targets because the point values keep going up! Hurry! You're almost out of time! Hurry up! AND TIME! STOP SHOOTING! LET’S GO TALLY UP YOUR SCORES!


Not so fast! First we have to wait for the cars in front of you to get out of the way. Another 15 seconds of blacklit flats. You pull up to the final screen! Big reveal… it’s your score! Yay! 3D confetti falls on the screen and if you shoot your little cannon more pops out. I recommend you shoot the confetti, because you’re going to be staring at a screen with nothing but your score on it and whatever prize you won. They’re all strange drawings of stuffed animals. I won a ***** and my wife won a beaver. You stare at the score and your prize. And stare some more… maybe shooting some confetti. Then you finally get to leave. HOORAY! THERE’S THE STATION! TIME TO GET OFF! Not quite. Gotta wait for the cars in front of you. This whole ride is waiting for the cars in front of you. Even when you get in you have to wait to be dispatched. Are there too many cars on the circuit? It certainly was not the load and dispatch crews. They had the cars loaded and enabled right quick. Very efficiently. But after enabling, you just have to wait for the car in front of you to move. Constantly. The ride just would be better if it wasn’t a ride. In fact, they already built it as not a ride and it’s a lot more fun. It’s called Pirates of the ffice:smarttags Caribbean and it’s at Disney Quest in Florida. You don’t have to move from screen to screen and there is no downtime in the game action. The 3D was just not as impressive to me as other people seem to be impressed by it. Really it was no different than playing Wii at home on a big screen TV. The games are really all just the same thing over and over again with different colors on the screen.


I know I sound harsh, and honestly, it’s OK fun. But it is not worth waiting in line for. Not even ten minutes. I liked the Monsters Inc. ride a lot better than this one.

[EpcotServo]

The long stopping is because of problems at load & such. From the sounds of it, it sounded alot like our Midway Mania when early previews started, and it's been resolved here. Give them time.

[lillifern]

Riding it Wednesday w the AP preview! Excited to see how I like it!

[KNRG]

I have to concur that it's a diversion but not really great - i have ridden it twice and have zero desire to ride it again. If there's no line or i'm with new people then i might.

[WallyBoag]

Like I said, I was watching the load area and it seemed like the ride ops were waiting for the vehicles to go. People were seated and lap bars down, they'd hit the button, and they were waiting for actual movement.

[SNJ]

I have to concur that it's a diversion but not really great - i have ridden it twice and have zero desire to ride it again. If there's no line or i'm with new people then i might.

Interesting. I thought you had enjoyed it more than that.

[KNRG]

Interesting. I thought you had enjoyed it more than that.

It's not to say that i didn't enjoy myself, but rather it's not a pull of any sort for me. It's like a movie you can watch once, be entertained by, but have no desire to sit through it again.

[k_peek_2000]

I'm riding tomorrow, i'll film it with my digital camera and get a video of it up.

[EpcotServo]

I'm riding tomorrow, i'll film it with my digital camera and get a video of it up.

Not that I support in any way the filming of Midway Mania, if you do film it, try and get footage of the surroundings of inside the ride, not the games themselves.





heh heh.

[k_peek_2000]

Not that I support in any way the filming of Midway Mania, if you do film it, try and get footage of the surroundings of inside the ride, not the games themselves.





heh heh.

That'd prolly be the hardest thing to film sence there is no photography, I was thinking of just filming the ride itself, whippin out my digital camera once it starts goin.