Disney World Is Getting Rid of One of Its Most Historic Attractions—and Replacing It With Cars

In August, at the biennial Disney fan convention D23, the chairman of Disney Experiences, Josh D’Amaro, announced an ambitious slate of updates to the company’s theme parks. The reveal of a new villains-themed land in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom captured most Disney fans’ attention, along with a Monsters, Inc. area at Hollywood Studios and a Coco ride at Disney California Adventure.

Buried way down on the list of new rides and experiences was a new Cars-themed environment and ride in the Magic Kingdom’s Frontierland. A few days after the convention, Disney confirmed that in order to build the new Cars ride, the company was demolishing one of the oldest attractions in the park, and one with a direct connection to Walt Disney himself: Tom Sawyer Island.

As is the case any time Disney changes basically anything at its theme parks, a certain subset of hidebound Disney adults was immediately enraged. “This will be the worst mistake Disney has ever made,” groused a representative fan. Another subset of loyalists leapt to the company’s defense, pointing out that the island attraction wasn’t particularly popular and would be replaced by a ride attached to a property with plenty of fans.

I’m not that sentimental about Disney parks, and in fact find the kneejerk responses of traditionalists a little stupid. (It was definitely the right move, for example, to change Splash Mountain, based on an ancient, racist Disney movie, to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure—no matter how many fans scooped up “keepsake” water from the old attraction.) But I am sentimental about Tom Sawyer Island, and I do think that closing the attraction and replacing it with a Cars ride is a real shame. Not because it was the best attraction at Disney World, but because it was the most unusual and useful one—and its loss will leave the park without a particular kind of feature that every theme park needs.

The first time we took our kids to the Magic Kingdom, my older daughter was 7, and by midafternoon she was hitting the wall. We’d hit a few of the big-ticket rides, but the crowds were getting overwhelming, the lines were getting daunting, and we didn’t have any FastPasses lined up. We both needed a different kind of experience for a little while. So we hopped on a raft to Tom Sawyer Island. It was the best decision we made all day.

The island is unlike most any other attraction in the park, in that it’s not a ride with a line but a place to explore. You take a charming raft across the river to a dock with a little drink stand and some rocking chairs, and then the island is yours to discover. You can find rickety rope bridges over creeks, an abandoned fort, a network of spooky underground caves. The space is ostensibly themed around Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, but really it’s a manifestation of Walt Disney’s ideas about childhood and imagination. The Disneyland version was personally designed by Uncle Walt: “I put in all the things I wanted to do as a kid,” he said, “and couldn’t.”

Now, Walt Disney had plenty of really bad ideas. (For instance, he thought Song of the South would be his masterpiece.) But Tom Sawyer Island was a good idea, and it’s turned out to be a better and better one as more and more of Disney World has filled with complex, overwhelming, IP-driven attractions. Those attractions are often astonishing, to be sure. But it’s great that the Magic Kingdom has, despite everything, maintained one refuge that’s slower-paced than the rest of the park, as Disney World gets more and more crowded. It’s great that it’s maintained a hideaway that’s cool and shady, with actual subterranean tunnels, as Florida gets hotter and hotter. And it’s great that the park has maintained an area where children can play, as opposed to simply sitting back and having an experience. Disney is great at delivering experiences, to be sure! But sometimes, in the middle of a hectic, experience-filled day, a kid (and a parent) needs something different, an island oasis that’s only a raft ride away. (It is an additional disappointment that Disney is investing in Cars, and the concept of cars, considering that one reason many Americans discover they love Disney World is that it’s often their first experience with a car-free, walkable environment with lots of transit.)

That Disney is eliminating this out-of-the-way attraction in favor of a Cars ride will certainly make Disney more money. In an often terminally overcrowded park, a space that’s filled with guests is way more valuable than a space that’s not. But I also think it will make the Magic Kingdom worse overall, and I think those visitors who were lucky enough to know about Tom Sawyer Island in the past will really miss it, much more than they miss, say, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. That this sole remaining respite from the chaos of the park is being replaced by a Cars feature that—judging from concept artwork—seems likely to be loud, hectic, and hot, is a real bummer. (Look at that concept art! Are those cars really kicking up dust on a 102-degree Orlando day? No thank you.)

Tom Sawyer Island is slated to close in early 2025. When the Cars feature opens, I am sure it will be beloved by many families of young children. But the memory I’ll keep forever from our Disney trip isn’t a ride or a show or even the character breakfast on which we spent a criminal amount of money. It’s following my daughter as she made her way across precarious floating platforms on Tom Sawyer Island, talking about the day we’d had so far, enacting a swordfight with sticks, and giving ourselves an hour of pure play with each other. In a place that encourages you to spend a lot of money and effort in search of enchantment, that’s where we found the most magic.