The WDW News Today Podcast - without News Today · Tom Corless & Eric Morton

What We Want at Disney Parks in 2026 - The WDW News Today Podcast: Episode 91

·1 hr 14 min·5 clips

Tom argues that Horizons is unlikely to return, but Spaceship Earth could become its spiritual successor.

The show starts with New Year banter and the familiar promise that it will not waste time, followed by a little time-wasting anyway. It jokes about the 100th episode, odd food, and what might happen when that milestone finally arrives. The mood stays loose and familiar. Then the conversation turns to viewer mail and stays there long enough to count, which is more or less how this show works when it is paying attention. One thread gets into the practical mess of removing Mission: SPACE and what Space 220 does to the shape of any future replacement. The hosts treat that as an operations problem as much as a nostalgia problem. They talk through the facade, the restaurant, and the fact that some walls are harder to erase than fans like to think. The answer is basically no, Horizons is not coming back. That leads into a broader reflection on what happens when people love the history of a place even as the building itself becomes harder to replace. Another email comes from a viewer who met the hosts on the final day of Muppet Vision 3D and grew up learning theme-park history through creators who cover both what was built and what never made it past planning. The question is about a shift in how general audiences see theme parks. The viewer prefers highly themed attractions and feels odd for caring more about atmosphere and storytelling than raw coaster scale. The discussion lands on that tension right away. The hosts talk about how some guests go to theme parks for things only those parks can offer, while others respond more to size, speed, or familiar branding. The conversation does not romanticize the old days. It stays grounded in what people actually notice when they walk into a park, queue for a ride, and compare one experience to another. There is a steady sense that imagineering work is easy to overlook when the loudest thing in the room is something bigger or tied to a name people already know. The episode keeps its usual loose structure, moving from memory to correction to argument without trying to sand off the edges. That is part of the appeal. It sounds like people who know the parks well enough to be impatient with lazy takes, but not so formal that they stop joking around. The New Year framing gives the episode a slight forward look, even when the topics stay rooted in old debates. By the end, the show has turned a couple of viewer prompts into a decent map of where Disney parks fandom sits right now: part nostalgia, part engineering, part argument, and still not especially tidy.

As heard by us

A loose parks conversation that turns Mission: SPACE into a practical design problem.

The episode opens in a loose register, with New Year banter and 100th-episode jokes, then settles into a listener question about Mission: SPACE, what might replace it, and why Horizons probably will not return.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want Disney parks talk that starts messy and lands on real design questions.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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