The Familiar Ride of Big Thunder

So after a brief hiatus for refurbishment, the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad has re-opened for the public. Seeing that it’s my favorite ride in Magic Kingdom to a point that I even wrote a movie script based on it (which sucked, so it’s totally gone and I have to start from scratch) I decided to see what changes (if any) were made to the queue and eventually the ride itself. Seeing that Big Thunder hasn’t had anything new in quite some time and has had many parts fail on them (especially the rock sequence) I wanted to see if the Imagineers were going to get creative and throw in some new surprises.

So on a hot Saturday afternoon I decided to drive over there to observe any potential additions. The entire area got a nice fresh new coat of paint, but the queue line didn’t get much of an upgrade just a different way of maneuvering through that maze. Unlike Haunted Mansion, Soarin, and Space Mountain, they didn’t have any random activities to do while waiting in line. You still get to see the ride in the distance—which cleaned up the water and the geysers involved. I finally make it to the ride and experienced it.


In case you are wondering why you got an old video of Big Thunder right above you, its mainly because the ride was practically the same. Its smoother, but nothing more. The darn fake-looking bats can still be seen, the same animals can be seen in the small lagoon sequence, the rocks still aren’t moving, although the ride is still the wildest in the wilderness.

Now, one can moan that five months isn’t enough time to fix and enhance a ride, the issue isn’t the time, but it’s the total lack of effort. In five months all this (mostly low-budget ideas) could have been accomplished:

~Have puffs of air breeze by you, in the beginning of the ride creating the effect of bats actually flying past you

~You could have eliminated the bats that can clearly be seen on wires. Or at least reuse the effect done in Haunted Mansion to improve the bats’ realism

~You could have added more animals in the lagoon sequence. We still don’t have our goat chewing on dynamite like the one in Disneyland

~You could, you know---make the rocks actually move

~You could have done what I discussed a while back—add gunshot effects whenever kids are firing the rifles across the lake at Tom Sawyer Island

~You could have added wanted signs on the queue line, something, anything I don’t know, they are the Imagineers, they are getting paid to come up with the ideas, must I come up with everything?

I know a good portion of this is very nitpicky but the issue we have here is: Disney’s competitive spirit just isn’t there. Your goal for running the most popular and successful theme park in the history of the planet is to try to improve it whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Disney had months, and didn’t pull the trigger.

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad deserves better.

To this day, the rocks still don't move.