Earlier this week, the Jungle Cruise reopened from a multi-month refurbishment at Magic Kingdom where the attraction was drained, and Imagineers worked to refresh the sets and even resculpt some of the rockwork throughout the ride. During a ride this morning, we even noticed that some of the effects that we hadn’t seen working in a while were working again. Let’s cruise down the river and see what’s new!
Jungle Cruise Reopens from Refurbishment at Magic Kingdom
For this article, we’ll take a more holistic look at the attraction experience than we have before to try and create a post-refurbishment baseline for the ride. The main takeaway is that the attraction looks pretty good following the work. Some portions of the ride received noticeably more work than others, but on the whole, the ride looks better than it has in a while.
The reason that it looks so good is simple – it was closed. When the Jungle Cruise attraction received new scenes and sets a couple of years ago, the ride remained open and it was filled with tarps and scrims as the new scenes were being installed. It didn’t look great, but it kept a classic attraction open for guests to experience. That said, crews weren’t able to really roll their sleeves up to give the ride a proper refurbishment. That changed with this recent refurbishment.
Crews drained the attraction completely, even moving the boats out to the river surrounding the Swiss Family Treehouse. Some of the work that we could see from outside of the attraction during the refurbishment included some work on the hut seen at the load area, including some dock replacement.
One of the things that was obvious when we rode was that the ride either took a significant hit from Hurricane Milton, or the vegetation was removed as part of the refurbishment work. Either way, some big trees and bamboo were removed at multiple spots, creating some sightlines to backstage infrastructure for those who were looking hard. We didn’t get any good photos of that during the early stretch of the river, but we’ll see an example once we get closer to Schweitzer Falls.
Back to our departure from the dock, it’s time to set off on a cruise through the jungles of the world.
As we approach the first set, it doesn’t look like there was too much of a refresh for the Boats & Baits scene. We can still see some noticeable rusting along the beachfront – a sign that there wasn’t a refresh of the ground here. Other props don’t appear to have been cleaned up, but the scene still looks decent.
Moving on to the explosive trash the camp scene, this set also looks to be relatively untouched beyond a possible refresh of prop paint.
Before we get to the African veld proper, we come across an elephant. Unfortunately, this elephant is still solo in this part of the ride, as the other one across the river has been missing for some time. It seems like the plan is still to have the second elephant return because the sound effects are still playing of the trumpeting pachyderm.
The biggest change for the attraction was the resculpting and repainting of a number of rock features along the waterway. With the attraction drained, it was easier for crews to rebuild and refresh the parts of the attraction that make contact with the typical water level. The Walt Disney Imagineering Instagram account gave us a wonderful look into the work that crews did during the refurbishment to refresh the rockwork. Our photos of the work follow the embedded social media post below.
As you can see in our photos below, some of the vegetation has been removed from atop Schweitzer Falls.
As we turn toward the hippo pool, it’s more populated than it has been in recent times. As a matter of fact, minus the missing elephant, the animatronics looked great during our rides this morning. Some that had been static (or even missing) were now moving again. Effects that had been missing for a while were seemingly restored during the refurbishment.
As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!
