- The Alien Swirling Saucers ride opened June 30, 2018 at Toy Story Land in Disney World's Hollywood Studios.
- INSIDER was there to try out the attraction opening day.
- Guests sit in little spaceships that are pulled around four circular tracks by the "Toy Story" aliens.
- If you like the Mad Tea Cup Ride at Magic Kingdom, this is similar. But you don't get to spin your spaceship around.
- Some gentle whips from side to side add enough of an unexpected jolt to make the ride worth it.
- I waited 80 minutes for this ride. That's the max I would commit for a ride that lasts about two minutes.
The Slinky Dog Dash roller coaster isn't the only new ride at Toy Story Land.
INSIDER waited in the rain on opening day to see if the Alien Swirling Saucers is worth a long wait. The verdict? It's definitely a cute ride, but it's not worth waiting hours to try out.
Here's what you should know before riding.
The waits are really long so bring a drink and maybe a snack into the queue.
I didn't get into the park before noon on opening day. At that point, the wait for the saucer ride was over two hours. It was better than the line for the Slinky Dog Dash coaster, which I heard was three to four hours. Sunday, the official Disney World app has had the wait time for the ride hover between 55 and 80 minutes.
If you have a little one with you be prepared to carry them or have them walk. All strollers need to be parked outside the ride and aren't allowed into the queue.
If you're hoping for a shorter wait, hope for rain.
I'm a bit of a theme park veteran. I've been going to Disney World since I was out of the womb and spent my New Jersey high school and college summers at Six Flags Great Adventure. I know that that when it starts raining, people are going to start ditching a ride — especially if they're getting rained on and the ride stops running.
A big storm came rolling in to Toy Story Land after 1 p.m. on opening day and I took advantage of it.
I was able to jump on the Alien Swirling Saucer queue when the wait was about 80 minutes. It sounds like a terribly long wait, but it felt like a victory after I waited nearly three hours just to get into Toy Story Land.
The only downside of my plan was that I didn't have a poncho on me and I didn't see anywhere nearby to pick one up. Toy Story Land doesn't have a big shop selling themed gear. There are a few standing kiosks and cast members pushing smaller carts around, but there's no indoor location to grab a hoodie or poncho from what I saw. And it's not like you can run right out of Toy Story Land to get one from another part of Hollywood Studios. Once you're inside that part of the park, you don't want to leave or you'll have have to get back in a line to enter the park. I wasn't doing that again.
It was an awful Catch-22, especially since I knew I had a perfectly good poncho waiting back at my hotel.
I sucked it up and got soaking wet. It was not one of my finer moments of theme-parking.
There are no interactive elements while you're waiting.
If you have little ones with you, make sure you have something to keep them occupied. There are fun painted walls and another one featuring buttons that look like you can press, but they're just static wall decorations. I saw many children try and press them to get them to work.
That was a bit of a bummer. One of the reasons I love the Snow White and the Mine Cart ride at Magic Kingdom is because of how many interactive elements the ride queue has for its younger guests. It helps pass the time away from, what is always, a very long wait.
The downside is that it slows down the queue a bit. People get caught up in the interactive elements and forget to move up the line sometimes. It's a give and take.
At least you can spot an easy-to-find Hidden Mickey on the queue's back wall. I saw a lot of riders notice it. Hidden Mickeys can be found throughout all of Disney's theme parks.
A positive: Most of the ride queue protects you from the hot Florida sun
A lot of Toy Story Land doesn't have shade. You'll see a lot of colorful umbrellas around the area to offer some relief from the heat and to offer protection from incoming rain.
While the beginning of the ride has no covering to shield from the sun, the majority of the line is under coverage. It was something my bare arms and legs were thankful for as the rain steadily fell.
Another plus? There are plenty of fans inside and out scattered throughout the ride to keep fans cool on a hot day. Water fountains are in the queue line, too.
The ride feels like another Disney World classic
If you've been on the spinning Mad Tea Party tea cups in Magic Kingdom, this new Toy Story Land ride will feel very familiar to you. Instead of spinning tea cups swirling around a floor I was ready for spinning alien spaceships around a circular floor. I wasn't completely wrong, but there's one big difference that left me a little disappointed.
When I got inside my little spaceship I was ready to start spinning it around. That's not the case here. You have no control over the cart. Your spaceship is connected to an alien in a saucer who guides and spins you around four different large circles.
One other difference is that the attraction is large enough to have two sets of riders moving at once on spaceships so that double the number of guests can get through the ride at once. I entered on the left side of the ride which can accommodate 11 pairs or small groups of people. Each spaceship seats one to three individuals comfortably.
The full ride is only about two minutes long.
After waiting 80 minutes, I was most surprised by how short the ride was. It was around two minutes. When my ride ended, I hung back through a few more run-throughs to make sure it wasn't specific to my time on the attraction and it wasn't. This is probably to keep shuffling as many people as possible through the ride.
If that time seems short, it's actually pretty comparable to the Mad Tea Party ride time as well, which is about a minute and a half. The main difference is that you usually don't wait more than 30 minutes for the Mad Tea Party. With that in mind, I wouldn't invest hours in waiting for the Alien Swirling Saucers either.
There was one feature which made me pleasantly surprised
When I thought I had the swirling saucers figured out, they threw me for a loop. Every so often your alien guide will whip your cart from one side to the other. Since I was riding by myself, it caught me off guard and slid me around in my seat a bit. It was just the right amount of a jolt to keep me smiling. Otherwise, the ride would have been a really tame tea cup replicate.
The Alien Swirling Saucers is definitely a kid ride meant to do with parents. Everyone I saw get on and off the ride looked like they had a good time. But because of the short time you get to spend on the actual attraction, avoiding a longer line by nabbing a FastPass or heading to it first thing in the morning. And if neither of those work, you can always head straight there when it starts raining. Just remember to pack a poncho.
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SEE ALSO: 30 photos of Toy Story Land — the newest area that just opened at Disney World
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