Disney is building robot manta rays and dolphins for its lagoon shows
Bloomberg got a tour of Walt Disney Imagineering's R&D labs, and the standout is aquatic. Imagineering is building a robotic manta ray, roughly six feet long, meant to swim a lagoon show and transform into Gramma Tala from Moana. Behind it is a planned fleet of robotic dolphins that swim together and perform synchronized storytelling on the water.
The engineering is the interesting part. The figures move with hydrofoils and jet-pump propulsion, hold position with GPS and onboard sensors, and run under human supervision rather than fully autonomously. Disney started this line with a radio-controlled underwater "plane" using servo-driven ailerons, then moved the same control approach onto a dolphin body, with the fins doing the work the ailerons used to.
For anyone who builds figures, a free-swimming character is a genuinely hard target: buoyancy, propulsion, waterproofing, and positioning all at once, with none of the fixed anchoring a show-scene animatronic gets. Solving it opens up a class of shows that today lean on projections or performers. The manta ray could also be re-skinned for other franchises, Star Wars among them.
Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress closes for a full rebuild
Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress ran its current version for the last time on July 5 and is now closed for a rebuild that replaces all four show scenes. The through-line stays: the family, the theme song, and the march of progress.
The animatronics headline is a new figure of Walt Disney himself, opening the show in a scene set at the 1964 World's Fair where he first introduced the ride. The updated scenes move the timeline forward to the moon landing, the 1980s, 1999, and a new "distant future" finale. It isn't expected back until 2027.
Jurassic Park River Adventure's dinosaurs are getting rebuilt from the armature up
Jurassic Park River Adventure at Islands of Adventure has been closed since January 5 and isn't due back until November 20, and aerial photos from Bioreconstruct show why the closure runs so long. The Ultrasaur, the tall dinosaur that greets riders at the start, has had its skin pulled and a clean new white armature installed on its neck. Longtime riders have joked for years that the figure looked like it had a broken neck, so a fresh armature points to real articulation work rather than a repaint.
Nearby, the baby Stegosaurus has its face skin off for updates to the head mechanism, and the adult is gone from its usual spot, presumably getting the same work off-site. Universal is only calling it "planned maintenance," but this is teardown-level animatronic work, not the usual annual water-and-paint refurbishment.
The Lost Continent comes down, and the Mystic Fountain's face is saved
Universal is demolishing the Lost Continent at Islands of Adventure in phases. The Eighth Voyage of Sindbad theater is already flattened to its foundation. The interactive Mystic Fountain, the talking face that bantered with and occasionally soaked guests, closed May 16.
The good news for fans of the fountain: its face was removed with care and set aside rather than smashed. Aerial photos show the face intact on the ground while the plumbing behind it gets stripped out. Whether it goes into storage or gets transplanted onto a rebuilt fountain elsewhere is an open question. Either way, an animatronic character a lot of people grew up with looks like it survived the wrecking crew.
SeaWorld Orlando's first suspended dark ride, SEAQuest, is coming this year
SeaWorld Orlando is targeting late summer for SEAQuest: Legends of the Deep, its first suspended dark ride. Riders hang below the track and follow a fictional expedition team through glowing deep-sea environments, sunken shipwrecks, and a finale launch, in vehicles built with Vekoma that swing and rotate a full 360 degrees.
It's worth watching for the ride system as much as the theme. SeaWorld is calling it a "world's first-of-its-kind" suspended vehicle, and the park has been leaning hard into ride tech after Penguin Trek and Expedition Odyssey. How much of the storytelling is physical animatronics versus screens and projection isn't clear yet, which is the detail I'd want pinned down before opening day.