Every piece of the old Carousel of Progress has been saved. Walt Disney Imagineering shared the news Sunday, October 4, at D23 Spotlight Series: 55 Magical Years of Storytelling at Disney’s Contemporary Resort. The team also made a promise about one of the show’s strangest props: the pumpkin will return.
The update came from the Imagineers leading the refurbishment, who joined Steven Vagnini of D23 and Becky Cline of the Walt Disney Archives on stage. Some artifacts from the show have already gone to the Archives. The bigger news is that the full show has been saved and is being preserved, down to the small set pieces in every scene. The team said every piece from Carousel of Progress was kept and not one was thrown out. This is the biggest overhaul of the show since 1994. All four scenes are moving to new time periods, so the sets, props and costumes fans have known for more than 30 years all had to come out after the show closed July 6.
A few of those pieces made the trip to the Contemporary. On a table beside the panel sat a stereoscope and its picture cards, Rover’s dog dish, a Niagara Falls souvenir fan, a doll with yellow yarn hair (it may be based on Mary Blair), and the green novelty slippers from the Christmas finale. Sitting above them all was the pumpkin.
Longtime riders know it on sight. It is a glossy orange jack-o’-lantern that fades to green at the base, with arched eyebrows, a single tooth, and a wide-open mouth. In the old show, it sat on top of the General Electric refrigerator in the 1940s Halloween scene. The Imagineers kept their answer on its future short: “The pumpkin will return.” The new second act is set on Halloween night 1985, which gives it a natural home.
The figures themselves are getting work too. Imagineers said they are updating the show controls for all of the Audio-Animatronics, the first update to that system since the 1970s. The show has been at Magic Kingdom since January 15, 1975. For Disney history fans, this is major news. Carousel of Progress is the show Walt Disney created for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and a full overhaul had plenty of people worried that decades of handmade details would be lost. They were not.
Carousel of Progress reopens in late spring 2027.
More news from yesterday’s presentation D23 Spotlight Series: 55 Magical Years of Storytelling:
