Since debuting in April of 2018, “UP! A Great Bird Adventure” at Disney’s Animal Kingdom has been met with groans from park guests. The original version of the show in Asia lasted only 5 months before being completely rewritten in September of 2018 to be more comedic. Needless to say, it didn’t improve guest feedback much. Fast forward one year, and the show has been heavily altered once again during a recent short hiatus.
In the latest update, the show has been “dumbed-down” a bit, with the cultured Anandapur resident acting as host now replaced with a bumbling, comedic Wilderness Explorers Troop Leader. Dug and Russell from Disney-PIXAR’s UP are still prominently featured in the show.
The show still features the expert bird trainers of Disney’s Animal Kingdom (and the beloved avian cast), but is probably now more tonally similar to the original Flights of Wonder. You can watch the new show in full from today’s preview performance below:
So, what do you think of the NEW, NEW version of “UP! A Great Bird Adventure”?
Ugh. Liked the one before UP. We saw the first new UP one and it was more annoying. This sounds down right irritating. My family wants to watch an awesome bird show that is amazing and informative, not a dumbed down comedy show. I use the word comedy loosely.
This seems to be a vast improvement over the last version of the show that I saw last year, but it’s still not a patch on the original Flights of Wonder show.
I made it about 3 minutes into the video before I remembered why I’ve never been to the Up! A Great Bird Adventure version. How about if they just bring back Flights of Wonder where the focus was on the amazing birds instead of silliness? In that 3 minutes only one real animal but a bunch of mindless banter about Russell.
It gets better, with more birds. Still has the banter about and with Russell and Dug, but then they chase chickens backstage for a little while.
It’s cute and at least somewhat funny again. What would improve it, in my opinion, is having Kevin the bird pop out of a window or something at the end, like she did at the old show they used to have at California Adventure in the Redwood Creek Challenge area. Then the troop leader could believe Russell more about his “made up” bird. Dug doesn’t get enough respect from the leader either, but at least she is nice to him at the end of the show.
Or just bring back the original.. I walked out of this when I went in August and don’t plan on going again