Disneyland will never be finished. Walt Disney always said that as long as there was imagination in the world, his theme park would always change, adapt and evolve. And it certainly has done just that. For more than 65 years Disneyland has never remained still. There's always something new being added, which sometimes requires something old to be removed, but normally guests don't actually see this happen. Yesterday visitors to Disneyland, and more specifically those inside Mickey's Toontown, got to watch construction equipment actually tear down part of the theme park.
Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway is currently under construction at Disneyland and while, for the most part that just means that a massive new show building is being added to the park, some of the existing Toontown is also being taken out, and that construction, or more to the point, destruction, was taking place in the middle of the day in a way that guests could see and hear some of it. Check it out.
User thecalibae on Instagram was just one of several people who caught buildings coming down on video. Construction walls are certainly nothing new to Disney parks. Rarely do you find yourself in any theme park where there isn't something being worked on somewhere. But we rarely see this sort of work taking place in the middle of the day. Work that requires big construction equipment is generally too distracting and so we often see that sort of work done overnight. You leave the park one day and come back in the morning to discover that a wall has been knocked down.
The decision to do this yesterday may have simply been because, in the grand scheme of things, there isn't a massive amount of external demolition that needs to be done for Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway. The Gag Factory and Five And Dime gift shops are the only parts of the existing Mickey's Toontown façade that are being impacted. They will be replaced with the entrance to the attraction. The ride itself is inside a massive building that was constructed while Disneyland was closed.
It's sort of cool to see a part of Disneyland get torn down, just for the novelty of it. Unless of course you're a serious fan of Mickey's Toontown, in which case seeing part of it literally ripped apart might be slightly traumatizing. Actually, now that I think about it, a lot of the people who love Tooontown are probably kids, so they might have been really weirded out by seeing this. Unless they're kids who like big construction equipment, in which case it was probably all really cool.
It's all for a good cause, however, as Mickey and Minnie's Runaway railway is a pretty impressive attraction. It already exists at Disney's Hollywood Studios but now people who haven't been able to make the trip to the east coast will be able to check it out. The attraction is scheduled to open at Disneyland in 2023.
