After several very short soft openings during the week, the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train attraction opened for most of the day on Friday/Saturday at the Magic Kingdom during the 24-hour Rock Your Disney Side party. As always, WDWNT was on the scene to bring you all you need to know about the new attraction:

The attraction officially opens on May 28th and FastPass+ is not guaranteed to be available for the ride until then. While the lines moved fast during the soft opening, there was also no FastPass+ in use. Regardless, the attraction loads quickly and your actual wait time shouldn’t exceed 45 minutes to an hour. The only line issues we have seen thus far is that the queue is too small. Often the line would only actually reach a 30 minute wait, but would wrap around the mountain. It’s likely that without FastPass+ offered, guests did not see another option but to wait in the line. I still think the queue space is too small and the existing stroller parking outside of the ride will probably be relocated to accommodate more queue in front of the ride. When the line moves well, the queue is very beautiful and entertaining (and has plenty of fans), so it won’t be such a bad stand-by line to wait in now and then.

The attentions to detail in the queue is amazing. There is moss applied to all of the walls, even within guests’ reach. I assumed that the moss would fall off as people would touch it, but whatever method they have used to apply it to the walls allows it to stay no matter how hard a guest might try to peel it off.

The interactive queue has 3 parts: sorting jewels, a motion activated musical device that pours water, and spinning jewel buckets.

Using large touch screens, guests can first sort jewels.

You can then run your hand under these faucets to play music and release a colored water stream.

Upon entering the interior queue, or the vault, there are then barrels of diamonds for guests to spin:

If you spin the barrels fast enough, a character will appear on the ceiling. Spin all seven fast enough at the same time and something special will happen:

At this point, you go through a few more switchbacks and arrive at the loading platform. The interior queue is pretty small, but it does reside inside the mountain which already has scenes and such that also take place inside of the building.

At times, the ride is a challenge to film, so we’re sharing two videos of the attraction with you today. The ride is very detailed and there’s a lot to see, so you’ll surely notice different things in each video:

The ride consists of 4 parts: an outdoor roller coaster portion, the indoor mine scene, the thrilling drop and ride across the bridge, and the Dwarfs’ cottage.

Let’s start by talking about the roller coaster… it’s definitely more thrilling than the Barnstormer, but not by much. The rocking mine car vehicles do not deliver the action most guests were expecting, but the rocking does get you closer to the ground on banked turns and works better than if the vehicles didn’t rock or sway at all.

The indoor dark-ride-type scene is gorgeous. The audio-animatronics are second-to-none. The projection faces on the characters and the fluid movements makes you truly believe that they are the Seven Dwarfs and not animated robotic figures. The jewels shine brilliantly, the music is infectious, and it builds to the large drop very nicely. I don’t think a more perfectly laid out, planned, and executed scene has ever been built for a Fantasyland attraction.

The finale scene with the cottage is brilliant. Disney Imagineers made sure to build something large enough that it could entertain guests sitting in the sun waiting to pull into the station and unload. Dopey and Snow White actually dance through the entire cottage, moving between rooms and in and out of the view of guests in the front and back of the train. Meanwhile, some of the animated Dwarf figures from Snow White’s Scary Adventures play instruments inside the cottage. If you sit near the very front of the train, you’ll get a nice long look at the Old Hag (in beautiful, audio-animatronic form) waiting to give Snow White the infamous poison apple!

The bottom line is the same with this attraction as the rest of New Fantasyland: it’s fun for the whole family, it is beautiful, and it is a wonderful representation of the film it depicts. Seven Dwarfs Mine Train isn’t a gate buster, but it’s arguably the most well-themed and executed kiddie coaster on the face of the earth. The show scenes are practically unmatched, and while the ride is short and not super-thrilling, we expect it to be a guest favorite for decades to come.

Tom Corless