This week, Walt Disney World has been hosting an “Awaken Summer” event to promote the new offerings coming to the parks this summer and beyond. Toy Story Land was among the coming attractions presented, and Imagineer Kathy Mangum took the stage to share a few more little snippets of information about the project.
With the closure of Lights Motors Action and the Streets of America at Disney’s Hollywood Studios yesterday, it was no surprise to wake up this morning to find photos of construction walls on Twitter. At first, I was excited to see that the concept art for Toy Story Land was finally posted…
It seems like all the recent Disney Parks construction news has been about Star Wars Land, but for this fangirl, all I really want to know is how Toy Story Land is progressing. And it appears that work is finally about to begin in earnest on the toys’ new home at Disney’s Hollywood Studios! It’s only been seven months since the new addition was announced at the 2015 D23 Expo, but the long wait for actual ground-breaking may soon be over – at last, in the past several weeks, there has been some activity in the backstage areas of the park.
Once again, I’ve fallen behind on blog updates due to a Walt Disney World trip! We just got home from Florida yesterday, so I’m finally catching up on compiling what’s been going on in the world of Toy Story since my previous post.
I started writing about our recent Walt Disney World trip in my previous post, and continuing on with that theme, let’s talk a little about Toy Story Land – or what will eventually be Toy Story Land – at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
I’ve shared before what we know about Toy Story Land to date, and nothing really has been added or changed since then. I had high hopes that there would be some walled-off construction zones when we were at the park this past November, but alas, there was nothing of the sort. Realistically, I knew that the busy holiday season – transitioning into the very popular Marathon Weekend – wasn’t an ideal time to begin a major project, like building an entire new land. Nevertheless, I thought we might see a few tiny signs of progress made since our prior visit in June.
Let me start out by saying that I am not usually a right-place-at-the-right-time sort of girl. More often than not, the events I’d most like to attend take place in California or New York; rarely does something occur in a location that’s convenient for me. So, when I got an exciting Twitter notification while we were on our most recent Walt Disney World vacation, I was completely blown away by our unusual turn of good fortune.
Did Pixar give us Toy Story fans a belated Christmas present? Is this the very first concept art to be released for Toy Story 4? The image – which is consistent with the style of a storyboard sketch – was tweeted by Pixar Story Supervisor Matthew Luhn on Sunday:
It’s been over two weeks since I’ve published anything on this blog, and there’s a good reason for that – I’ve been at Disney World! My family and I are annual passholders, so we head to the parks as often as we can – this time it was to attend Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, and to celebrate Toy Story‘s 20th anniversary with the toys themselves. We had some amazing luck while we were there that led to an unforgettable Pixar experience, which I’ll be writing about soon in a future post. But for now, I thought I’d recap the little snippets of Toy Story related news that came out while I was away.
News from the toy box has been pretty sparse recently, but finally we get a small clue – the latest word is that Patricia Arquette is in talks to voice a new character in Toy Story 4!
The Blu-ray and DVD releases of Toy Story That Time Forgot hit store shelves yesterday, and as promised, I bought my own copy and watched it last night, including all the bonus features. The director’s commentary is always one of my favorites, because I love to learn about the thought processes that went into the creation of the story and its animation. And this time, I might have caught something significant at the very end of the commentary for Toy Story That Time Forgot.
Toy Story Fangirl 