Frozen Ever After

Image: Disney“Disney World’s New Ride Has an Old Problem.” – The Motley Fool

That was a headline on a major business website only five days after the debut of Frozen Ever After. While audiences quickly agreed that the Maelstrom attraction at the Norway Pavilion was worthy of its pre-opening hype, the opening week was kind of a debacle. Disney tried to control the heavily anticipated debut with a poor park strategy, and then the technology failed them, too.

One problem was temporary. Disney prioritized FastPass holders on opening day. Due to ride outages, many of the people standing in the regular line never got the opportunity to try Frozen Ever After. One little girl near and dear to my heart stood in line virtually the entire day, only to be turned away before getting to ride it. That’s a rare black eye for Disney customer service.

Image: DisneyThe technical glitches were a much larger long-term problem, one that the Motley Fool accurately summarized. The audio-animatronic advances in Frozen Ever After are significant, but they also come with more pieces that can break. Similarly, the changes to the path of the boat ride from Maelstrom to Frozen Ever After led to a larger number of potential breaking points, spots that would trigger 101 codes that immediately shut down the attraction. Combined with the dramatic traffic demands for Frozen Ever After, it was the most likely Walt Disney World to break down for a period of almost two years. Disney has since alleviated a lot of the issues, but Frozen Ever After started poorly and struggled to right the ship for an extended period.

Kali River Rapids

Image: DisneyOn paper, this is one of the simplest rides Disney ever attempted to build. After early plans for an ambitious attraction fell by the wayside, park planners dumped the concept of an aquatic safari for a basic rafting ride. By Disney standards, it wasn’t just a compromise. It was a shortchanging of the company brand. Imagineers don’t make ordinary attractions as a rule. They reinvent and repurpose ideas to perfect the core concepts.

With Kali River Rapids, the shame of an ordinary rafting attraction wasn’t the deepest humiliation. The original version of this ride featured mist, smoke, fire, and fog. How many of those elements did you witness during your last journey down the Kali River? The answer depends on when that ride took place and how fortunate you were.

The elements have torn so frequently over the years that Disney leaves them offline as often as not. Sometimes, the rafts get stuck, too. I happened to have a FastPass when that happened. Nothing ruins your Disney day like seeing firefighters helping guests off a ride. Kali River Rapids is a failure of imagination AND implementation.