A Final Journey Into the Movies

We received some pretty upsetting news in July. During their D23 Convention, Disney announced a new Mickey and Minnie themed ride. Separately, and extremely quietly, they announced the closing of The Great Movie Ride. For those of you who don’t know, Pat and I met while we were working at Disney World. In particular, while we were both working at The Great Movie Ride. We spent several years at the ride together and have countless memories from the friends we made while working there. While reminiscing about our time working at the ride, we decided to look back through some old memories and photos… and, because we clearly want to embarrass ourselves… we’re sharing some of those photos with you!

 

If you have never had the opportunity to journey into the movies; well, I wish you still were able to! Unfortunately, the ride is officially closed now. But the good news is that thousands of tourists have documented their own tour through the movies over the past nearly 3 decades that it has been running. You can view one of those spectacular journeys here. And, if you do some searching on YouTube, who knows.. you may even stumble upon Pat or I!

It is still pretty surreal that The Great Movie Ride is officially closed. It’s the type of place that even though it can be cheesy at times, you really never expect for it to be gone. And now, it is… Thankfully, we had a very unique opportunity to attend the closing of the ride last week. We were able to ride through our ride and even walk on the ride path after hours one last time. It’s bittersweet but we are so thankful to have been able to spend one last night journeying into the movies together with our friends.

 

 

Pat recently announced his new podcast, Every Movie Ever *, and today he and one of our dear friend and fellow Movie Rider, Matt, are taking a trip down memory lane and chatting about their time at The Great Movie Ride. They are also reviewing some movies within the podcast as well as several anecdotes. I promise, these two are astronomically more entertaining and funny than I am. Pat came up with the idea of watching an discussing all of the movies that are in our local video store. Shockingly, some of the movies (okay, most) that are portrayed in the scenes of The Great Movie Ride are not available to be rented at our local store. So, he and Mat took some creative liberties with finding comparable movies to those seen within the ride.