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Hollywood Studios is so you, FarSky. I love it, but right now it's weak. Many of its attractions are closed, and the few headline attractions it has are always lined up something fierce. Still, I love it. It will benefit greatly from the 3 or 4 billion about to be spent upgrading it.
Not to derail your thread, but there's not enough interest from other gladers on the topic, so this is as good a place as any.
The State of Walt Disney World
Walt Disney Company has spent many millions on modernizing their park infrastructure. The FastPass+ system and the magic bands were a great addition, and they were probably necessary, but they merely succeed in helping to balance the crowds, they don't actually increase capacity.
Park Attendance for all four theme parks and both waterparks at WDW go up to new records every year. Demand increases, slow times become less slow, and Disney would be stupid not to keep raising prices, but they risk doing something they're actually opposed to doing -- becoming a place that the middle class can no longer visit. So there are big changes happening to WDW. I'm not planning to go back for several years now, which is actually good, I think. By the time I return, there will be so much more to see and do there.
Disney Springs
Disney's free shopping area (formerly Downtown Disney -- when I was a kid it was "Buena Vista Village") is already benefiting from a major makeover even while construction continues all around. The themed restaurants/bars are spectacular (did you get a chance to visit the Indiana Jones-themed "Jock Lindsey's Hangar Bar"? It's splendid and absolutely jam-packed with Lucasfilm easter eggs.) People just think of the Magic Kingdom when they think of Disney World, but this place is great, and free to visit. And getting better. The AMC Dine-in Theater may be the best place in the world to watch a movie (I wish I had one here - i don't want to waste time watching movies when visiting Disney). Splitsville is beautifully themed like stepping back into the 50's. The shops are a geek's dream. Cirque du Soleil La Nouba is something entirely unique and very entertaining. Unfortunately the last DisneyQuest is closing, to be replaced with something I don't give a **** about (Some NBA themed thing). But there's so much there it doesn't matter, and DisneyQuest is rather dated, anyway.
The Magic Kingdom
Already the beneficiary of a major makeover in Fantasyland, the original Florida Disney Theme Park still has the greatest attraction density (and attendance) of anything there. It's still my favorite, and rumors are it will see further expansion. Apparently Frontierland is receiving a $400 million dollar upgrade in the next few years. Tom Sawyer Island may be replaced with an attraction that actually attracts people. Still, there's so much there that gets overlooked - you could spend 3 or 4 days there and still not do everything. Even the lineups are becoming interesting, as the queues are becoming more and more interactive with every rennovaction. The Magic Kingdom is the reason people go to Walt Disney World. The other parks are the reason they stay for more than a week. If MK has a fault, it's Tomorrowland, where they don't seem to have found a suitable replacement for Walt's visionary look at the future back in the 50's and 60's.
Epcot
Walt's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was never meant to be a theme park. After Walt's death, Disney Company (probably wisely) decided that they lacked Walt's appetite for pushing the envelope on social engineering, but converted the idea into a permanent World's Fair. The World Showcase itself is still extremely charming (especially in the fall when they're doing their food and wine festival.) New Attractions are slow to come to Epcot - a Frozen-themed ride is being added to the Norwegian Pavillion right now, and Soarin' is getting a new film and theater, but those don't begin to address the problems with Epcot's Future World.
To be fair, Future World is suffering from some of the same issues Tomorrowland is - they haven't really hired someone who can look at the future with the same level of imagination that previous imagineers did when building it back in the 80s. This is symbolized horrifically in the travesty that the Journey into Imagination pavillion has become - it used to be my favorite, now it's...kinda plain. Half of it is closed, and the ride is a shadow of what it once was. And not to knock the fantastic ride "Mission: Space" - but Horizons was phenomenal, and needs a replacement. Mission Space isn't it. Ellen's Energy Adventure is more movie than ride. On the plus side, Spaceship Earth is still fabulous - augmented by the charismatic voice of Dame Judi Dench helping us view the history and future of human communication. The Land pavillion and the Seas pavillion are still the highlights of the area. Epcot is also rumored to be getting a half billion to update with - i hope it's spend on Future World.
Disney's Hollywood Studios
This park is currently suffering the most - it has the fewest attractions, and the most congested crowds. It does boast some of the most popular theme park attractions in the world, mind you, and the theming itself is gorgeous. But it needs a LOT of additions. Fortunately, it's getting them.
Yes, they're adding an entire land themed after Toy Story around Midway Mania. It will probably be middling, targeted at younger kids, but it will certainly be popular, and popular areas for young children free up space in the other areas of the park. The real draw, however, is going to be a massive new area, entirely themed after Star Wars. They're spending half as much building this as it cost to build Shanghai Disney World or Tokyo Disney Sea. Hell, they're almost spending as much on it as they spent on buying Lucasfilm and all its intellectual property and subsidiaries. It is rumored to have three headline attractions (as many as DHS has right now in its entirety - effectively doubling the park capacity). Expect it to be extraordinary, and quickly turn Hollywood Studios into the second most popular theme park in the world.
I can't wait.
Disney's Animal Kingdom
This is my second favorite park in Orlando. It's also the largest theme park in Orlando - which makes it ironic that it's the only park that you can currently complete in a single day's visit if the crowd levels are low. Animal Kingdom may be huge, but so are its individual attractions. The Kilimanjaro Safari alone is physically bigger than Magic Kingdom in its entirety (110 acres to 107 acres). The theming here is wonderful, but also results in the park being more humid than anywhere else in Disney World. If temperatures are high, expect to sweat buckets at AK. Also, the park is the only park currently to not be open at night. It closes at 5pm, which is hard for people trying to do a condensed disney trip to work into their schedule.
That's all changing soon. There are currently two absolutely massive upgrades to Animal Kingdom currently being built. THe first is the "Rivers of Light" "nightime spectacular"... wait, "nighttime spectaculars" require the park to be open at night, right? And so it will be, when RoL is done. This is not a fireworks show, it will apparently be entirely unique (much like Fantasmic at DHS is utterly different from a fireworks show.) The architectural design of DAK makes it impossible for them to completely conceal the RoL construction from guests, so you can see the river's edge seating systems being built from places like the Flame Tree Barbecue restaurant. Bigger still, is the new land being built, in cooperation with 20th Century Fox and James Cameron.
Yes, I know, Avatar doesn't really blow me away either, but visually it did. And World of Pandora presents an amazing bit of theme-work for Disney Imagineers to complete. I've read up on it, and I'm really excited to see how it looks when they're done. Again, they're adding two new major headline attractions, which will greatly increase crowd capacity at DAK, as well as many smaller attractions. And it's half done...it's supposed to open in 2017.
Waterparks, fun, and more
Typhoon Lagoon's wave pool may be the most fun one can have in the water. Their Crush n' gusher water coaster is a close second. Blizzard Beach's unmatched assortment of waterslides keeps it in the running, though. These waterparks are the two best i've ever been in, anywhere. But competition is good, and Universal Studios has its own rather spiffy looking themed waterpark going into orlando, as well, so maybe I won't be as glowing about the disney waterparks in a few years.
That's not all that Disney is doing. Despite owning almost 50 square miles of contiguous land in the Orlando area, most of it undeveloped, Disney just acquired more land adjacent to Disney World this year - much of it conservation land for them to manage, in order to get a few hundred more acres to develop into guest attractions over the next decade+. They aren't done yet.
As mentioned earlier, DisneyQuest is closing. I fully expect an actual indoor theme park replacement, but not for at least a decade.
Disney's dining is an area where it excels above all else in theme park design. I could spend hours just talking about restaurants that you really NEED to visit some day. Yes, the food is great, but the food isn't even the point. Their restaurants are as much a part of the visits as the parks themselves are.
I love Walt Disney World, but it's not perfect. There's a lot that needs to be done to improve those parks, but there always will be. Walt himself, speaking of his first project in Anaheim, said "Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world." Without unlimited space, that means some attractions will be removed and replaced, others rennovated, in a constant cycle. Attractions will grow stale before they get replaced, it's inevitable, and unstopping.
It also means I can go back in 5 years to a Disney that, despite in so many ways being the same place that captured the heart of a seven year old girl back in 1980, will be different enough to turn her back into that seven year old girl 40 years later.
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But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
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