The construction walls came down yesterday around half of the Rivers of Light seating area, and we made it out to take some pictures, but one picture in particular stood out.

Dancing Yeti Rakshi, Distilled in Yeti Country

This might look like just another sticker for the latest beer to hit Anandapur, but it’s a not-so-subtle hint to the legend of the Disco Yeti in Expedition Everest. If you’ve never heard of the Disco Yeti, let me try my best at reciting the legend.

As with all legends, the details are a little bit fuzzy, but it goes something like this. The Yeti on Expedition Everest was a feat of engineering. Standing at almost 25 feet tall and weighing in at 20,000 pounds, the Yeti was a force to be reckoned with. Until one day, the Yeti was too much for the mountain, or at least the foundation that he was standing on, and it cracked.

Enter B-Mode.

The construction of the whole ride is a complex thing. You essentially have three structures. The Yeti and his foundation, the roller coaster, and the mountain. Construction was so complex that fixing this giant animatronic in the middle of a finished mountain, surrounded by a roller coaster, proved to be too difficult or too time consuming to be worth the downtime required to fix it.

The solution to such a complex engineering project? Strobe lights. Seriously, strobe lights.

The next time you ride Expedition Everest and think that you’ve seen the Yeti moving towards you, know that it is still sitting there, motionless, and that you’ve been duped by simple strobe lights. Believe me, once they fix the Yeti they will remove the strobe lights and want to shine a thousand lights on it to show it off.

Once they fix it? Or if they fix it?

Joe Rohde, Imagineering Genius (my title, not official), said this about the Yeti at the 2013 D23 Expo.

You have to understand, it’s a giant complicated machine sitting on top of, like, a 46 foot tall tower in the middle of a finished building. So, it’s really hard to fix, but we are working on it. And we continue to work on it. We have tried several “things”, none of them quite get to the key, turning of the 40 foot tower inside of a finished building, but we are working on it….. I will fix the Yeti someday, I swear.

I have to hope it will eventually be brought back to it’s former glory.

All this brings us back to the sticker seen plastered on the newly unveiled buildings around Rivers of Light.

The Dancing Yeti Rakshi is more than a sticker for a local distillery, it is the Imagineers way of trolling us all with the legend of the Disco Yeti.