You don’t have to be a kid to love you some Buzz Lightyear! Ever since the very first “Toy Story”, we have all been fans of his here in my family! When Magic Kingdom opened “Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin” my family and I could NOT wait to ride it. Years later, it is still a favorite.
With it’s cartoonish looking queue area, you wander through the maze of a line until you finally see Buzz…in all his Space Ranger glory…telling you about your “mission”. I’ve seen this dozens of times and yet I get a picture of him every time and am still amazed to see him talk. Go figure…
The ride vehicles fit three people but then the middle person misses out on all of the shooting, so ideally, you want two people in your ride vehicle. You load on one of those moving sidewalks (like in the Haunted Mansion) and board your XP-38 Space Cruiser. There is a joystick that makes the vehicle go left and right and all around so that you can shoot at all of those little “Z” targets that Buzz tells you about. You have got to help destroy the Evil Emperor Zurg and so while you are shooting, you have a digital display by your gun that shows you how many points you’ve accumulated.
You spin through around ten interactive scenes in the 4 1/2 minutes of your mission. This is not a long ride by any stretch of the imagination but it is interactive and just plain fun! Now that the kids are older, they ride in one vehicle while my husband and I ride behind them. We compete to see who can get the most points and to be honest, it’s not pretty. It’s amazing how crazed we all become over hitting our targets with our lasers so that we can get points!
At the end of the ride, there is a scoring chart that tells you your Star Command Space Ranger rank – it’s always good for a laugh – and then usually followed by cries of “My gun wasn’t working right!” The ranks range from “Space Cadet” to “Galactic Hero”. Can you guess which one the boys all want?
If you have a fan of video games in your group, this ride is going to be a sure-fire hit. It’s colorful, it’s noisy and you can spin and shoot at targets! What kid (and those who are still a kid at heart!) will love this ride. When we do a five-day trip to Disney, we spend one day in each park and our fifth day is spent park hopping to hit all of our favorites one more time. On a typical trip, Buzz Lightyear will see our family an average of four times and we laugh our way through it each and every time!
This is another ride that is known to have a long wait so grab a fastpass as soon as you can. This is right next door to the Laugh Factory in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom. There are plenty of ways to kill time while waiting: ride the Tomorrowland Transit Authority or visit the Laugh Factory or grab lunch at Cosmic Rays – just don’t miss out on this fun ride!
