Mickey Mouse turns 95 years old in 2023 and Disneyland has been around for nearly 70 years. Considering how iconic both Mickey and the Disney theme parks are, it’s hard to believe that Mickey Mouse didn’t get a dedicated theme park attraction until Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway opened at Disney’s Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World in 2020.
Rather than use a classic version of Mickey Mouse for the character’s first ride, Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway is done in the style of the modern cartoon shorts The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse. I recently had a chance to speak with series producer Paul Rudish about the experience of helping to design the attraction and he explained that Walt Disney Imagineering was specifically inspired by the modern shorts because of their high energy, fast-paced nature that they thought would be for a fun ride. He said…
They definitely wanted to leverage our cartoon style. And they mentioned that, it was inspirational, because our cartoons were so fast-paced, and they were a wild ride. And if we can capture that energy in these cartoons in an actual physical ride, that would be a really fun experiment.
Mickey Mouse cartoons have always been fun and silly, but I’m not sure you could honestly classify most of them as a “wild ride.” By contrast, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse crams a lot of zaniness in somewhere between four and nine minutes. The shorts are usually an endless stream of physical gags, and Imagineering saw that as a great way to build a ride.
And if it’s possible to capture the energy of a modern Mickey Mouse cartoon, Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway very much does that. It takes you through numerous different environments in quick succession, with Mickey going through some sort of significant (cartoon) physical abuse with each one. Even the ride vehicles get lost in the madness, as the trackless dark ride system means you're never quite sure where you're going.
Runaway Railway isn’t a massive roller coaster or some other kind of thrill ride, it’s a dark ride, where guests ride vehicles that take them through the story of Mickey and Minnie’s adventure of a picnic gone terribly wrong, but it's still one of the best Disneyland rides and it’s no less a cutting edge attraction as it uses state of the art projection mapping, animatronics, and more, to bring the two dimensional Mickey to life in 3D. Even Paul Rudish was blown away when he first went on the ride, despite the fact that he technically knew everything that was going to happen, because he’d helped make it. Rusdish continued…
It's fantastic. I mean, It's an E-ticket ride. And my first time riding, it was amazing in that I've been involved in all of the development of it. And so I knew all the secrets, and I knew all this stuff, and I knew what was going to be around the next corner. And I knew all the seeds that were planted and the technology that had gone into it, you know, saw how the cake was baked. But once I got on the ride for the first time, and then I got to experience the whole cake. I was blown away as if I had known nothing. I was seeing all the elements come together in amazing synchronicity, and just being inside that space.
The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse is reportedly coming to an end, as Steamboat Silly, the animated short hitting DIsney+ on July 28 is apparently going to be the last in this particular series. But thanks to Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, which now exists at Disneyland as well, the work of these great animators will continue to be in front of millions of guests every year which will certainly drive more people to DIsney+ to seek out the hilarious cartoons that inspired it.
