Disney’s Hollywood Studios is a Hollywood and show business themed park located at Walt Disney World in Florida, initially designed with the concept that it would not only offer attractions but also function as a production studio with actual backlots and production faculties similar to the theme park Universal Studios Hollywood. One of Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s earliest ideas after taking over the company in 1984, the park was originally called Disney-MGM Studios, after Disney entered into a licensing agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to increase the park’s film representation. Although the park’s name eventually changed to Disney’s Hollywood Studios in 2008 and around that time they also began drifting away from the backlot theme, and production faculties and sound stages were replaced with more Hollywood-themed attractions with more emphasis on the theme park aspect. Although Eisner’s intention for the park has stayed consistent. He wanted to create an idealized version of Hollywood, in his words “a place where illusion and reality are fused by technological magic” and “a Hollywood that never was and always will be.”

The origin of the theme park actually began when Imagineers Marty Skylar and Randy Bright came up with the idea for the park’s opening day attraction The Great Movie Ride, which they initially intended to be part of a show business themed pavilion at Epcot called “Great Moments at the Movies,” but Eisner and company thought the idea was strong enough to be the basis for an entirely new park. In fact when Disney-MGM Studios first opened on May 1st in 1989, the only two attractions were The Great Movie Ride and the Studio Backlot Tour. As the Disney park cycle goes, those two attractions are no longer around. But over the course of four parts, I will discuss the attractions at this park both former and current.

The main entrance to Disney’s Hollywood Studios is Hollywood Boulevard, which is basically a city version of Main Street U.S.A. with venues and parades galore but with a Hollywood flavor. A few months after the park opened back in the spring of 1989 an improv troupe of live street performers known as Streetmosphere (later known as Citizens of Hollywood) would begin showing up regularly. Including traditional Hollywood figures like movie stars, talent agents, movie critics, etc., who would perform in front of guests and play games that were usually comedic in nature and often involved audience participation. These shows lasted until 2020 but the Citizens of Hollywood are set to make a comeback in 2024.

A replica of the Grauman Chinese Theater from the real Hollywood Boulevard stands at the far end of this area. Like the real Grauman’s, this theater is also the location of many celebrity hand and foot prints, including a few Disney characters.

Inside this theater was the park’s star attraction The Great Movie Ride. This was a dark ride that took guests through motion picture history as you visited scenes from famous Hollywood films. The queue area for the attraction featured actual costumes and props from famous films such as a pair of Ruby Slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, Sam’s piano from Casablanca, Mary Poppins’ carousel horse, the Dejarik Board from Star Wars (“Let the Wookiee win”), the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark and the dress worn by Kate Winslet in Titanic among others. The queue led to a 1930s-era soundstage where guests loaded onto a tram and waited for the ride to begin.

The ride featured replicas of film sets as well as animatronic versions of film characters, with the ride’s sections being divided by movie genres, beginning with musicals and including gangster films, Westerns, sci-fi and horror.

This ride ran at the park for many years but eventually closed in 2017. The reason for this was likely due to audiences and their changing tastes and shifting desire for rides that are more interactive and state-of-the-art than The Great Movie Ride was. The ride was finally replaced in 2020 by another dark ride known as Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, which was actually the first Mickey Mouse-themed dark ride in Disney park history, despite concepts for Mickey Mouse rides existing as early as the seventies.

Runaway Railway is based on Disney Television Animation’s Mickey Mouse developed by Paul Rudish, and the team from that series collaborated with the Imagineers to bring this attraction to life.

After going through the queue area, which like the queue area for The Great Movie Ride features costumes and props but from the toon world, the ride begins as a theater experience where the park guests enter the Chinese Theater and sit down to watch a new Mickey Mouse short called Perfect Picnic, but soon you enter the screen and are invited to ride a train into the cartoon where you are immersed in Mickey’s world while seeing characters like Donald, Daisy, Goofy and Pete along the way. Based on the positive reception of this immersive, detailed and often hilarious attraction, Disney apparently made a smart choice replacing The Great Movie Ride, and besides who doesn’t love Mickey Mouse?

In the next part of my series of articles, we’ll be playing the music and lighting the lights as we meet the Muppets at Grand Avenue.