The Toy Story Midway Mania attraction itself was very entertaining — simultaneously playful, enchanting, and horribly violent. At one time or another you throw darts at mutant sheep, knock over barnyard animals, participate in military maneuvers, and try to hurriedly score points before a bundle of dynamite goes off, ending the game (presumably because everyone was killed). Ride vehicles are robotically controlled omnifacing military battle transports, armed with a quartet of manually operated ballistic cannons and seemingly endless ammunition, delightfully themed with characters from the Toy Story films.
Gameplay involves speeding from one target-rich environment to another, earning points every time you whack a chicken with its own egg, trap a harmless alien in an escape-proof ring of power, hit a bar to release the alcohol, or break some of your mother’s good china.
Although the attraction was worth riding a second time, there were a few areas in which Imagineering frankly could have done a much better job. For example, all of the characters depicted in the attraction seemed to be from Toy Story — I didn’t spot a single character from the other movie mentioned in the attraction’s name, Midway. That may have just been a marketing decision, so it might be overlooked.
Not so easy to overlook is the fact that the computer-generated content for this attraction is neither crisp not clear. In fact, the images are so bad that riders are supplied with corrective glasses so that they can have a satisfactory ride experience. Wouldn’t it have been better to spend a little extra money getting everything in focus and doing away with the glasses entirely?
