🎉 D23 Delivers the Biggest Weekend of the Year

D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event took over Anaheim August 14–16, and Walt Disney World fans walked away with more concrete news than any single event in years. Here's what matters most for us:

Journey Into Imagination is finally getting reimagined. The night's biggest surprise (and the one host Neil Patrick Harris specifically asked for): Dreamfinder and Figment are returning to EPCOT in an all-new attraction. Disney Experiences Chairman Thomas Mazloum called it "one more way we're putting you in the center of everything we do" — a clear nod to how loudly fans have been asking for this.

Villains Land has a name and two attractions. Magic Kingdom's next big expansion centers on a wishing well corrupted by dark magic, drawing villains from across Disney lore to build their lairs around it. The Maleficent Coaster sends guests racing through her enchanted briar forest with ride elements Imagineers say haven't been attempted before (translation: hold onto your ears). The Mirror Realm Dark Ride, hosted by the Evil Queen's Magic Mirror, blends physical sets and effects to pull guests into a world of Disney villains.

Piston Peak's attractions are named too. The Cars-themed expansion — the largest in Magic Kingdom history — will anchor Frontierland's new "Parkitecture" district. Cars Ridge Run Rally is an off-road racer with vehicles that physically react to the terrain, climbing to a snow-capped peak and sprinting past Lightning McQueen and Mater. Miss Fritter's Daredevil Spin-Along puts an Audio-Animatronic school bus in charge of a demolition derby, which honestly tracks for a character named Fritter

Carousel of Progress has a firmer return date and new voices. The classic attraction, closed since July, is now targeting a late spring 2027 reopening. Jamie Lee Curtis and Bryan Cranston are voicing Mom and Dad, and a new Audio-Animatronic Walt Disney will be opening the show.

Animal Kingdom's Tropical Americas expansion got major new details, including the full name of its Indiana Jones attraction — Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent — which will feature Harrison Ford's likeness on an Audio-Animatronic, a first for any Disney attraction. Over in Anandapur, Expedition Everest's original Yeti Audio-Animatronic is officially coming back to life (sorry disco yeti fans).

🏨 Kidani Village Lobby (Animal Kingdom Lodge) — Status: Phased refurbishment, Aug 17–Nov 6
The main lobby and entrance close August 17 through October 9, with check-in temporarily relocating to the Palace Library. Johari Treasures merchandise shop closes August 17–28, the north lobby corridor closes September 28–October 9 (along with the second-floor elevators and outdoor terrace), and the south lobby corridor follows October 26–November 6. Guests should expect rerouted paths and construction noise throughout.

⛴️ Yacht & Beach Club FriendShip Boat Dock — Status: Closed Aug 17–21
The FriendShip Boat dock closes for maintenance this week, with direct buses to Hollywood Studios and walking access to EPCOT via International Gateway serving as alternate routes.

🏰 Contemporary Resort Porte Cochere — Status: Phased maintenance, Aug 10–late Oct
The resort's iconic covered entrance and adjacent walkway begin planned maintenance this month, with some overnight work to limit daytime disruption. This is part of the broader multi-phase Contemporary refurbishment that's expected to run through 2027.

🍸 Turf Club (Saratoga Springs) — Status: Rolling closures through mid-Sept
The Turf Club Bar & Grill closes mid-August through mid-September for refurbishment, while the Turf Club Lounge — closed earlier this year — reopens during that same window. The patio closed briefly in early-to-mid August as well. If you're keeping score, virtually every part of this space has been closed at some point this year, just never all at once.

🌴 Tropical Americas (Animal Kingdom) — Status: Ongoing, targeting 2027
Construction walls remain up around the former Dino-Rama section as work continues on the Indiana Jones and Encanto attractions announced in more detail at D23 (see above). No firm opening date yet beyond the 2027 target.

A Swimmin' Hole Built by Imagineers

In development, it went by the working title "Pop's Willow Grove." By the time it opened on June 20, 1976, Disney had settled on River Country and a concept unlike anything else in the theme park world: an "Ol' Fashioned Swimmin' Hole," styled after a Mark Twain novel. It featured sand-bottom pools, rope swings, and man-made boulders mirroring a rustic Ozark creek. It was one of the first fully-themed water parks ever built, arriving five years after Magic Kingdom itself and instantly becoming a signature piece of Walt Disney World's "Bicentennial Summer."

The opening ceremony was a genuine event — more than 700 reporters and their families attended, and 18-year-old Susan Ford, daughter of President Gerald Ford, took the ceremonial first ride down the park's signature slide, Whoop 'n' Holler Hollow, to officially christen it.

The engineering behind River Country was as clever as its theming. Rather than use standard chlorinated pool water, Imagineers built a system that pulled water directly from adjacent Bay Lake, filtering out fish, bugs, and debris at a rate of 8,500 gallons per minute. A large inflatable rubber "bladder" separated the park from the open lake, keeping River Country's water level about six inches higher so gravity would carry the flow back out rather than letting untreated lake water in. It was inventive, sustainable by 1970s standards, and completely unlike anything a guest would swim in today.

What Was There?

The park was compact but packed: Whoop 'n' Holler Hollow sent guests down twin slides (260 and 160 feet) into Bay Cove, a half-acre sand-bottom lagoon rigged with a tire swing, boom swing, rope climb, and T-bar drops. White Water Rapids was a 330-foot inner-tube river notably rougher than anything Typhoon Lagoon or Blizzard Beach would later offer. Slippery Slide Falls dropped riders into Upstream Plunge, a 330,000-gallon clear-water pool for guests who wanted a break from lake water. Younger kids had their own zones in Indian Springs and Kiddie Cove, and the whole park was laced together by the Cypress Point Nature Trail and a wobbly, barrel-lined Barrel Bridge styled after the one on Tom Sawyer Island. In its first year, the park averaged roughly 4,700 guests a day.

The Tragedies

River Country's darkest chapter came in August 1980, when an 11-year-old boy died after contracting amoebic meningoencephalitis, a rare, near-always-fatal brain infection. It's naturally present in warm Florida freshwater generally, not unique to River Country, and Florida recorded multiple similar deaths in lakes that same summer. Two separate drowning incidents in Bay Cove followed later in the decade, worsened by the fact that lake-filtered water was never fully clear, making it hard for lifeguards to spot swimmers in distress.

Believe it or not, none of this is actually why River Country closed. That happened two decades later, in 2001, for business reasons. Typhoon Lagoon (1989) and Blizzard Beach (1995) had both dramatically outgrown it. Typhoon Lagoon alone was roughly nine times River Country's size, and guest attendance at River Country had been sliding for years. The final push came from tightening Florida water-safety regulations that would have required River Country to abandon its natural lake-filtration system entirely and rebuild around fully chlorinated water — an expensive overhaul for a park that was already losing the numbers game.

River Country closed for its routine seasonal refurbishment on November 2, 2001, with guests expecting it to reopen the following spring… It never did.

Eighteen Years of Nothing

What makes River Country such an oddity is that Disney walked away and left it standing. The company didn't confirm the closure was permanent until 2005, and even then, didn't send in a demolition crew. Instead, River Country sat behind a green fence for the better part of two decades. Slides cracking, pools turning green, vegetation swallowing the boardwalks. Disney didn’t even cut the power. The park's closing theme music reportedly kept looping on a timer, and its lights clicked on and off automatically each night for years… illuminating an audience of no one. It became one of the most-photographed abandoned sites in Florida, urban explorers scaling the fences to document its decay, ironically making River Country far more famous in ruin than it ever was in operation.

The Long, Strange Path to Redevelopment

Disney finally confirmed redevelopment plans in May 2018: a new nature-themed deluxe resort called Reflections – A Disney Lakeside Lodge, with 900 rooms themed around films like Bambi, Brother Bear, and Pocahontas, plus a Princess and the Frog-inspired lakeside restaurant. Demolition finally hit River Country in April 2019, clearing away the last physical trace of the original park, including the remains of Upstream Plunge. Reflections was set to open in 2022.

Then COVID hit. Disney paused nearly all major construction across Walt Disney World, Reflections among the casualties. By 2020, all mention of the resort had quietly vanished from Disney's own websites — no formal cancellation announcement, just an absence. It wasn't until March 2022 that Disney confirmed, somewhat anticlimactically, that Reflections was dead and the site would instead host new Disney Vacation Club villas.

The site sat dormant again until November 2024, when Disney announced its actual successor: Disney Lakeshore Lodge, reusing much of Reflections' original footprint and site plan, now targeting a 2027 opening with a mix of A-frame cabins and elevated treehouses. As of this year, construction is visibly underway, with the A-frame units taking shape first. And in a small, easy-to-miss nod earlier this year, Disney quietly added a barrel-themed display referencing River Country at the nearby Meadow Swimmin' Pool at Fort Wilderness — not a revival, not a reopening, just a quiet acknowledgment that the ol' swimmin' hole is still part of the story.

If you've ever had a giant chipmunk visit your dinner table, it might surprise you to learn this entire beloved category of Disney magic started as a modest, one-day-a-week experiment nobody expected to become an institution. Here's how a quiet Sunday brunch grew into one of the most cherished parts of a Walt Disney World vacation.

The Very First Character Meal

When Walt Disney World opened its doors in October 1971, it already had, without quite realizing it, the bones of what would become character dining. Tucked inside the newly built Cinderella Castle was a restaurant called King Stefan's Banquet Hall — an oddly-named spot, since King Stefan is actually Sleeping Beauty's father, not Cinderella's. As the story goes, Imagineers wanted the restaurant to feel appropriately regal, but since Cinderella's own father was never named in the film, they simply borrowed a king from a different fairy tale altogether. It's a small, charming bit of Disney logic that lasted 26 years before anyone officially corrected it. In its earliest days, diners were greeted not by cartoon characters but by real madrigal singers in 13th-century costume, wandering the hall in tunics and gowns — a lovely, very different, kind of "character" experience.

But the true birth of character dining as we know it today happened a few years later, and almost by accident. In December 1977, the Walt Disney World Village ran a small holiday promotion called "Have Breakfast with Santa," hosted aboard the Empress Lilly riverboat restaurant — a boat that, at that hour, wasn't even supposed to be serving breakfast at all. Kids and parents came aboard for eggs, bacon, and pancakes while Santa made his unhurried way around the Promenade Deck, stopping to visit every single table. It wasn't dreamed up as a grand innovation — it was borrowed from a format shopping malls had already been using for years. But it charmed everyone who tried it, and it planted the idea Disney would spend the next two decades quietly perfecting: a meal built entirely around personal, table-by-table character time.

That same year, over at Disney's Contemporary Resort, Coconino Cove began offering the first true character brunch — Sunday mornings only, no reservations needed, because in 1977, nobody needed to plan that far ahead for breakfast with a mouse.

Through the '80s

For much of the following decade, character dining stayed refreshingly rare. By 1984, there were only three character breakfast spots in all of Walt Disney World: Minnie's Menehune at the Polynesian Village, the Terrace Café at the Contemporary, and the Village Restaurant. In 1981, the Contemporary's Golf Resort introduced Dining à la Disney, where characters wandered in each evening at 5 p.m. to greet guests and hand a small gift to every child — one of the first documented daily character experiences on record, rather than a once-a-week special occasion.

Elsewhere, The Melvin the Moose Breakfast Show leaned more toward theater and performing rather than meet-and-greet, pairing the meal with an actual performance. It later gave way to a livelier Chip 'n' Dale version — rebranded the Chip 'n' Dale Jamboree — which delighted guests until 1991.

Meanwhile, over at Epcot's brand-new Land pavilion, a rotating restaurant quietly began its own charming identity crisis. First called The Good Turn Restaurant, it was later renamed The Land Grille Room in 1986, before finally settling into its now-familiar name, Garden Grill, in the early '90s. Only then did Disney add characters to the mix, eventually landing on today's beloved Chip 'n' Dale's Harvest Feast, complete with Farmer Mickey and Pluto making their way around the room as it makes one slow, gentle rotation past scenes from Living with the Land.

Chef Mickey's Changes Everything

The real turning point for the entire category came around 1989–1990. The old Village Restaurant space was reborn as Chef Mickey's, with Mickey himself in a chef's hat, working the room table by table in a way no restaurant had quite done before. It was, in every meaningful sense, the first restaurant to look and feel like character dining does today — and it was an instant, beloved hit. In 1996, Chef Mickey's moved to its now-iconic home at Disney's Contemporary Resort, where it remains one of the hardest reservations to snag anywhere on property.

The Castle Finally Gets Its Princess

Back at King Stefan's Banquet Hall, change was coming too. In 1996, the restaurant introduced its first character breakfast, letting guests meet Disney princesses over pancakes for the first time. A year later, on April 28, 1997, Disney finally gave the restaurant the name it should have had all along: Cinderella's Royal Table. The "Once Upon a Time" character breakfast became one of the most sought-after meals in the entire resort, eventually expanding to lunch in 2005 and a fixed-price dinner (complete with a Fairy Godmother appearance) in 2006 — transforming what had once been a quietly underappreciated castle restaurant into one of the most magical, hardest-to-book tables in the world.

A Beloved Tradition

What began in 1977 as a single weekly brunch has since blossomed into more than 35 character dining experiences across Walt Disney World — spanning breakfast, lunch, dinner, and specialty meals, from Cinderella's castle to the rotating Garden Grill to Ohana's Hawaiian-inspired feasts. The tradition keeps growing: Disney's newest international park, Disney Adventure World, recently welcomed its very first character dining restaurant, a gathering spot for princesses from across Adventure Bay — proof that a small, hopeful Santa breakfast on a riverboat in 1977 sparked something that's still spreading joy, nearly fifty years later.