>Continuing on with my recent trip to Walt Disney World... "Nothing can stop us now! I'll tell ya how, we're gonna make it happen! Let's take a ride. And spend a day in the countryside!"

Continuing on with my recent trip to Walt Disney World... Over at Disney's Hollywood Studios, they have opened Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway in the old Grauman's Chinese Theater replica. It opened in 2020, replacing the boring The Great Movie Ride (in Disneyland they built a new building in ToonTown)...

The concept of the ride is that you are going to the theater to watch the latest Mickey & Minnie cartoon... Perfect Picnic. There's not much to the queue, but you do occasionally get rotating digital posters for other Mickey & Minnie cartoons...

As you are watching the Perfect Picnic cartoon, an accident in the cartoon causes the screen to explode, allowing you to step inside the cartoon and board the train that Goofy was driving in it. But, uh-oh, the train comes un-hitched from Goofy's engine car, and away you go. From there you go through various scenes as Mickey and Minnie try to get your train car under control so they can continue on to their perfect picnic. Overall, it's a very well-done attraction that's pretty entertaining. So much to look at as you ride through, which makes it good for repeat viewings. A far, far better use of space than The Great Movie Ride it replaced. Let's sum it up, shall we?

The Bad...

• Reliability. The thing is always breaking down. I think it was down every day I was at Walt Disney World. Once it broke down while I was in the queue, for which I received a Lightning Lane good for everything except what you'd want it to be (Slinky Dog Dash and Rise of the Resistance). When I returned, the part of the ride where you watch the start of the cartoon and the screen explodes wasn't operational, and you just walk through the exploded screen (robbing you of the entire premise, which they are announcing over the speaker system).
• Unnecessarily Trackless? The ride cars are trackless, meaning that they can move entirely independently of each other and the ride itself. But there's only two times that this really comes into play. The first is when Goofy's engine car drives off without you. The second is when you somehow end up in Daisy Duck's dance studio and your car starts dancing with her instruction. Everything else feels very much like it could have been on a track. That's a bit of a bummer, and I really wish they had more space to take advantage of it.

The Good...

• The Style. I love, love, love the 2-D style of the new Mickey & Minnie shorts. It fits the characters flawlessly and is so much fun. Plus they're original white again instead of Caucasian, which means they're more relatable to more people. And the other characters look incredible too... Daffy, Pluto, Goofy... it's all amazing. And the way that they turned the 2-D animated characters into 3-D animatronics is darn good too. The whole ride is beautifully appointed 2-D turned into 3-D and I love it.
• The Music. I swear, I have not stopped hearing "Nothing can stop us now! I'll tell ya how, we're gonna make it happen! Let's take a ride. And spend a day in the countryside!" in my head since the first time I rode it. The tune they sing is a total bop, and it's so great that they put some thought into it to make it so memorable.
• The Location. Putting a movie ride in a movie park (and a cartoon ride in a cartoon land for Disneyland) means that the ride actually makes sense for where it sits. This is something obvious that's very quickly disappearing as Disney craps out intellectual property anywhere they can cram it in.