Fascinating Walt Disney World Trivia
Sure, you love to visit the Most Magical Place on Earth. How much do you know about it, though? Literally thousands of fascinating details about Walt Disney World would cause a lot of people to say, “I did not know that.” In this article, I’m going to share a few of them with you. Here are some Walt Disney World trivia tidbits you can use to impress your friends.
The Smallest Park
Magic Kingdom isn’t just the most visited theme park at Walt Disney World. It’s also the most popular one in the world! In 2017 alone, more than 20 million people entered the Magic Kingdom. They also felt a bit crowded, even if they didn’t realize it.
Out of the four Disney theme parks in Orlando, Magic Kingdom is easily the smallest at 107 acres. While that’s larger than Disneyland, which comprises 85 acres, it’s far short of Epcot (300 acres) and especially Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The zoo-park is an almost incomprehensible 580 acres, more than five times as large as Magic Kingdom!
What’s interesting about Magic Kingdom is how small its footprint actually is. The Walt Disney World campus takes up roughly 47 square miles of space in Central Florida. That’s about 30,000 acres. Magic Kingdom comprises less than 0.4 percent of this space.
When Walt Disney dreamt of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), he planned the theme park as only a tiny part of the overall plan. This vacation area would pay for some of the other services at EPCOT, but Uncle Walt bristled at the idea of a Disneyland East, a cheap copy of the original. Since he bought the land in Central Florida, he had plans drawn up for the full Walt Disney World campus. After his death, Imagineers generally honored his wishes in constructing Magic Kingdom, which explains its tiny size.
Do You Like Selfies?
Many people have a social media presence these days. For most of them, a trio of image-friendly sites is the place to post those unforgettable photographs. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the predominant places for selfies, and statistics reveal that Walt Disney World is one of the most beloved places for shutterbugs.
Instagram data shows that Walt Disney World is the number three location for Instagram posts out of everywhere on the planet! Only two other places, both of which are beloved tourist spots, exceed Walt Disney World in picture popularity. Those are the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, and…Disneyland.
The Happiest Place on Earth is everyone’s top choice for Instagram hashtags. Disneyland had 14.6 million posts through the site and app. The Eiffel Tower trailed well behind it at 7.3 million posts, with Walt Disney World third at 5.5 million. If you’re curious, the other two spots in the top five are South Beach, also in Florida, and the Berlin Wall in Germany.
Remember that while selfies are heartily encouraged at Walt Disney World, selfie sticks are (thankfully) banned, though!
Where Did I Put My…
Have you ever lost something at Walt Disney World? Well, I have some good news. Disney recently improved the Lost & Found system, giving you a better chance of retrieving your misplaced personal belongings. It was a much needed step, too.
The statistics on lost items at Walt Disney World are staggering. The company estimates that guests lose more than 200 pairs of sunglasses EVERY day! Since I spent a lot of money on a new pair the last time I was at Adventureland, I retroactively wince at the thought of this.
The numbers are even more jaw-dropping in totality. Since its opening in 1971, Disney believes that it’s recovered 1.65 million pairs of sunglasses. And those are just the ones that cast members found! There are likely hundreds of thousands more that they never discovered.
Here are some other lost item facts that might astound you. They find between 15 to 20 cellphones daily! Every year, they also retrieve thousands of hats, autograph books, and digital cameras. Prior to your next day at a theme park, you should do a head count of the important items that you take with you. Then, do a quick verification that you have them all before you leave the park. You don’t want to be a part of these unpleasant statistics, do you?
The Disney Costume Outlet
A popular misconception about cast members is that they take their costumes home at night. That’s not even a little bit true. Disney maintains ownership of their property to prevent its loss. The process that they’ve set up to dispense outfits is extremely impressive.
To visualize costume distribution, you should first think about the various parks. Every themed land, restaurant, and attraction has its own unique outfits. A cast member wears something different at Be Our Guest than they would at Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, even though they’re located in the same general vicinity at Magic Kingdom. And that’s not even accounting for the roaming cast members like those in character outfits.
How does Disney make sure that cast members wear the right clothes each day? They have a clothes warehouse, a place where the overwhelming majority of in-park employees visit at some point during the Disney careers. Many head to the warehouse every day. When they arrive, they enter a building that has literally tens of thousands of different costumes, each of which has a specific purpose and place at the park.
The “checkout” process is quite efficient. The cast member shops for their work clothes for that day, hunting for the appropriate section of the warehouse. Once they find the right row for their outfit, they pick the appropriate clothing size and head to the front of the building. It’s here that another cast member has the job of scanning in outfit barcodes, thereby assigning clothes to an employee for that day.
Disney does this to guarantee that, for example, a Mickey Mouse costume doesn’t go missing. These items would be in high demand. By linking a bar code to a specific cast member, that employee becomes responsible for their gear. Should it disappear, the worker must explain what went wrong.
Nightly disposal of the costumes is much easier. Cast members simply throw them in a chute at the warehouse. Inside the building, a different employee scans it in and unlinks the ownership responsibility from the day’s wearer. The outfit is then passed along for cleaning so that the cycle can begin once more.
Disney’s Transportation Is Incredible
Pop quiz, hotshot! Which organization has a larger bus fleet, the city of Los Angeles or the Walt Disney World campus? Since you’re reading a Disney trivia site, you should have guessed the answer, but it’s a huge surprise, right?
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation has 359 vehicles in its fleet, along with another 25 zero-emission busescommissioned for operation in 2019. Disney has roughly 400 buses in its fleet right now. This is a good time to point out that Los Angeles County has an estimated population of 10.2 million. The entirety of Walt Disney World averages attendance of less than 143,000 each day. In other words, Disney’s running a more efficient logistics system than a much larger and better funded major metropolitan area.
The monorail has its own cool stat, too. Disney Imagineers always loved space travel, going back to the planning phase of Disneyland. They’ve kept up with monorail travel using an odd metric. At Walt Disney World, the monorail fleet travels across a 14-mile path. While that may not seem like much, the system has operated daily since 1971. Over the years, those 14 miles have really added up. To wit, according to Disney, the monorails have driven that path enough to travel to the moon (!) and back more than 30 times. It really is the railway of the future!