The Sorcerer's Guide

Characters keep sneaking more and more into Epcot. This park started out as a permanent World’s Fair, but it doesn’t come across that way anymore. Nemo has taken the Sea, Lion King has been to the Land, Ratatouille and Beauty and the Beast are in France, and Frozen is in Norway. To celebrate Epcot’s 40th anniversary, let’s take a look at the Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Cabelleros, the first attraction at World Show Case to be transformed to a character ride. Rio del Tiempo Rio del Tiempo was conceived as an attraction to celebrate the history and culture of Mexico. Like the other original attractions at World Showcase, you can see a country’s influence on the pavilion. The Aztec temple facade drew people for shopping, dining, and the ride entrance. Once you boarded this gentle boat ride, you’d float by a volcano and another Aztec temple. After that, you’d take a trip through time that would show you snippets of Mexico’s ancient, recent, and modern history. The physical componen...

Now that Genie+ and Lightning Lane have been up and running for the better part of a year, Disney has started to tweak the experience at Walt Disney World. Starting June 8th, guests will not be able to purchase Genie+ until the day of their visit. Disney has also stated that the number of Genie+ purchases available may be limited on a given day. Recently, they also updated the product description, which now states that guests should expect to get 2 or 3 Lightning Lanes in a day. This tells us that Disney is starting to recognize a need for change in the way Genie+ runs. This raised the question of whether you need Genie+ to be able to see the park in a day. To test it out, I set out to see all of Epcot without Genie+ in a single day. (Spoiler alert: I saw most of the park without it!) Summary To see how well I did, we’ll be comparing what I did to the list of  65 things to do at Epcot  from Disney World’s Attractions page. Let’s look at some numbers to summarize my day, and th...

Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind opened at Epcot on May 27. A new major attraction will definitely draw crowds, but it will also add ride capacity to the park. So did Cosmic Rewind make Epcot wait times worse? We’ll look at wait times before and after the ride opened. For current wait times at Epcot, check out our RideRouter . In this graph, each point represents a single attraction. The horizontal position represents the average standby wait time for that ride in the 10 days leading up to Cosmic Rewind’s opening (May 17-May 26), and the vertical line represents the wait time in the 10 days after Cosmic Rewind opened (May 27 – June 5). So being in the bottom right means that the line was long before Cosmic Rewind and short after, while the top right means that the line was long before and after the new ride opening. The red dots are the attractions at Epcot. Other colors represent other parks at Walt Disney World, which are included to show how lines are changing as we head into ...