Our Surprise Day at Disney's Hollywood Studios!
When we were planning our itinerary for our summer trip to Orlando, Disney’s Hollywood Studios was not on our radar. By the morning of this particular adventure, we had already checked out of Animal Kingdom Lodge that morning and said goodbye to the Walt Disney World Resort. Everything was going according to plan until we got within two city blocks of the parking lot at Aquatica, the water park accompaniment to Seaworld’s animal and coaster-centric experience across the street. It was at this point that we hit a wall of immovable traffic, and after nearly two hours of sitting without movement in front of the gates, Tim remembered that we still had an unused Hollywood Studios ticket from the 4-day, 4-park ticket package we purchased for this trip. Our intent was to bank that last day for a future visit, but we quickly turned around and headed back to WDW to claim our last park day.
Although Disney’s Hollywood Studios isn’t our favorite of the four Walt Disney World parks, it does have some of our favorite attractions - including MuppetVision 3D, Tower of Terror, Rise of the Resistance and more. In hindsight, we are thankful that we did make it to the Hollywood Studios park…because, as it turned out, this would be our last chance to experience the brilliance of MuppetVision. Only after we had returned home and settled back into our day-to-day lives was it formally announced that the attraction would be closing permanently, so we were glad to have been able to take in the show one last time! Despite a rather late start, we managed to conquer most of the major attractions across the park while still making time for a few shows and character encounters. We also got a chance to test out the single rider queue at Rise of the Resistance, and it was our very last time leveraging the now-defunct Genie+ Lightning Lane system before the broader transition to the new Multi-Pass Lightning Lane system in August of this year. We also got to experience the WDW iteration of “Fantasmic!”, the premiere nighttime spectacular at Hollywood Studios, for the very first time.
After a rather busy day, it was nice to sit for a while before the show started. The humidity was high, but thankfully any threat of rain held off and the show went off without a hitch. Make sure to check out of vlog for our rider cam reactions and fun character encounter highlights. Our spontaneous visit to Hollywood Studios turned a sour situation into a “fantasmic” day and was the perfect bookend to our summer 2024 adventures. This video is the last from our Summer 2024 visit to Orlando and the surrounding areas, and we are so excited to share our final adventure with you all!
