Alien Swirling Saucers Ride in Toy Story Land

Posted by Mike

Apr 11, 2020 2:56 PM

Let’s step into Andy’s backyard and explore Toy Story Land at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. In our Alien Swirling Saucers ride guide, we’ll help you plan your visit to Toy Story Land and help you avoid The Claaaaw.

Opening Date	June 30, 2018
Height Requirement	32″
Type	Spinning, whipping
FastPass+	Yes, Tier 2
Extra Magic Hours	Yes, evening
Ride Length	2 min

Alien Swirling Saucers Ride Location

Alien Swirling Saucers is located on the south end of Toy Story Land, near the pathway to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. There are two ways you can get to Alien Swirling Saucers, one from the Toy Story Land entrance, and one from Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.

Alien Swirling Saucers ride — Alien Swirling Saucers walking path from Toy Story Land entrance

The entrance to Alien Swirling Saucers is quite easy to find as long as you remember that you’re looking for Buzz Lightyear.

Alien Swirling Saucers Queue

The Alien Swirling Saucers queue is about 50% outdoors and 50% indoors. This means that during the summer rains at Walt Disney World, you can expect to be out in the elements. That said, the second half of the queue and the entire ride are under cover, although their is no air conditioning.

The queue contains some oversized elements, as is the running theme in Toy Story Land. Other than that, it’s pretty basic.

FastPass+

Alien Swirling Saucers does have FastPass+. By using FastPass+, you should skip the majority of the outdoor queue and only wait about 5-10 minutes. You don’t miss anything noteworthy or any “must-see” theming in the queue by using FastPass+.

With the FastPass+ tier changes in early 2020, Alien Swirling Saucers moved down to a tier two attraction, along with other attractions such as Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster, Tower of Terror, Toy Story Midway Mania, and more. This change has made it a bit more difficult to secure an Alien Swirling Saucers FastPass+ because it is thrown into the tier two grab bag of attractions.

We typically don’t recommend getting a FastPass+ for Alien Swirling Saucers because it typically has shorter waits than other competing tier two attractions. More on wait times in a bit.

Grouping

Each “saucer” can fit two adults or a combination of three guests if you have little ones. You typically will not be grouped with other guests as each family unit can take up a single saucer. To be grouped, you’ll be asked to stand on a number, but this number doesn’t correspond with a number on the saucer. Once the gates open, you are free to walk to any saucer you’d like.

Alien Swirling Saucers Wait Times

With a ride that is just about 2 minutes in length and two “sides” working to clear guests, we don’t typically see very high wait times for Alien Swirling Saucers. That said, Toy Story Land as a whole remains popular with young families and Alien Swirling Saucers is just as colorful and fun as the other attractions in the land, so it can pull a 45 minute wait during the middle of the day.

The average wait for 2019 was about 40 minutes, with lower waits available in the first and last hour of the day. We don’t recommend jumping in line if there is more than a 20 minute wait because the waits can drop down to 5 or 10 minutes during early or late hours. We recommend visiting during the first hour of your day if you’re rope dropping Toy Story Land or at the end of your day if you’re rope dropping Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge or other attractions that would require you to ride after 11am or so.

Alien Swirling Saucers Ride Review

Alien Swirling Saucers is a fun, “whip”-style spinning ride that combines upbeat music with dance-style lighting that is mostly prevalent at night. It’s because of the lights (and lower waits) that we like to ride Alien Swirling Saucers at night.

Story

As it relates to the larger Toy Story Land theming, Alien Swirling Saucers is a playset that Andy won at Pizza Planet and set up in his backyard for all of us “honorary toys” to enjoy.

Alien saucer pilots are straight out of the Toy Story movies, with their pointy ears, three eyes, short antennae and facial expressions designed to convey surprise or delight. Each extraterrestrial has hitched its flying saucer to one of 22 rocket ships; together, flying saucers and rockets spin through the Pizza Planet galaxy.

With “The Claw” dangling overhead, guests climb aboard their rocket ships and hover in Pizza Planet’s version of “deep-dish space” for an out-of-this-world saucer whirl to the beat of new versions of Toy Story songs and musical themes. During the adventure, the Aliens spin guests around toy icons like Planet Pepperonia and a pizza-inspired space station.

Ride

The ride itself is a whip-style attraction that is the exact same ride system as Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree in Disney California Adventure. While the ride vehicles circle on top of turntables, the portion of the vehicle that you’re sitting in can whip from side-to-side via the arm attachment seen in the photo above. While the spinning isn’t as intense as a teacup-style attraction, the whipping is thrilling for guests of all ages.

If the whipping and spinning is too intense, or some of the “honorary toys” don’t measure up to the 32″ height requirement, you can easily watch your party ride the attraction from the perimeter of the ride areas like you might do at Dumbo or other similar attractions.

For an idea of what you can expect, check out our POV below.