The History of The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh in Disneyland

Disney Parks History

The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh is one of the classic dark rides in Disneyland. Added in 2003 to the Critter Country section that also includes Splash Mountain, it is one of the most recent dark ride additions to the park.

But yet this ride fell short of expectations and has never achieved the level of success that every other ride based on the Winnie The Pooh has reached. So why did this happen? To find out we need to look back at how this ride came to be.

The location of The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh used to be home to the Disneyland version of the Country Bear Jamboree. This had been the first attraction from Walt Disney World to be cloned to Disneyland, and due to its popularity at the Magic Kingdom, it opened with two theaters showing the original version of the show.

This left the park with a massive building housing the Country Bear Jamboree, and as the popularity gradually decreased over the years, it was not worth the amount of space that it took up in the landlocked park that was running out of expansion space.

It wasn't that the bears were unpopular, it was that the show took up too much space, making it easy to replace it with a popular and longlasting IP like Pooh.

The Country Bear Jamboree would close in 2001, and despite an attempt to save the bears by adapting the characters into a racing dark ride, they would not remain a part of the park in any significant way anymore.

The building however would remain. They would strip it down to its bones and build a new dark ride inside.

This dark ride would reuse much of what came before, including the queue line and some mechanisms in the ride, notably the mechanic system that was used to lower Teddi Berra from the stage being reused as a hot air balloon effect featuring Pooh.

The high ceilings of this ride allowed the ride to feature some incredibly detailed scenery on a scale not seen in other versions of the ride, but it also featured a disjointed and out of order storyline.

The ride from day one was never as popular as other versions of the ride. The reasons for this are not obvious, but likely a combination of the ride having a higher capacity than other versions, making it appear to have a shorter line, and being located in the back of the park.

For most of the ride's history, it was in a dead-end corner of the park with only one other ride. People will venture this far for a major ride like Splash Mountain, but it is not likely as many will travel to the back of the park for one single dark ride.

This remains, even after a redevelopment of the area, the least popular Winnie The Pooh ride in the world.