Walt Disney World just wrapped up a quiet summer, opening a couple quality stage shows and new nighttime parade, but no new attractions or any “answer” to Epic Universe. The surprise sleeper of the season was Cool Kid Summer, which brought new family-focused experiences to Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom. This explains the lessons learned from this surprise success that punched above its weight and made some magical memories.
In case you missed it, Cool Kid Summer featured dance parties, extra character appearances, hands-on activities, and a lot of interactivity. Highlights included the Goofy takeover of CommuniCore Hall at EPCOT, otherwise known as GoofyCore Hall. Instead of being a festival center, GoofyCore Hall was a Goofy-led immersive experience, with games with silly twists, like Loopy Limbo and Parachutes ‘n’ Pipsqueaks all in glorious air conditioning.
Over at Animation Courtyard at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, there were games and crafts, magicians and jump rope performers, surprise character appearances, and a lively indoor DJ dance party where little ones can become further indoctrinated into the Cult of the Hot Dog Song. It was a similar story in Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom, where there were dance parties, sing-alongs, and other such silliness.
In addition to this, characters were also out in the parks earlier than normal for Walt Disney World resort hotel guests during the daily Early Entry period. How this happened was never really explained in official Walt Disney World communications, but my observation was that it typically occurred as a pop-up, free roaming ‘street party’ kinda deal, with special music cutting into the normal background loops and signaling the arrival of characters.
Similarly, guests staying at Art of Animation, Pop Century, Caribbean Beach and Wilderness Lodge were all able to enjoy more Disney-themed activities designed for families with kids. This included character visits with set appearance times to help you plan your day and an expanded itinerary of things to do with your family throughout your stay at these four resorts. So basically, the Character Caravan but with a published schedule.
Anecdotally, I also noticed more surprise & delight “Character Paloozas” during my most recent visit to Walt Disney World.
For those who are unfamiliar with them, Character Paloozas are spontaneous meet & greets with a large number of rare characters in out of the way locations. They usually happen pretty close to backstage access points, for quick entry and exits.
The true purpose of Character Paloozas is giving Cast Members on the job training in lower stakes environments. This is also why the characters featured are rare or rare-ish, as the “character integrity” bar is lower. Big Al or Wendell performers have much more, ahem, autonomy for interactions than Mickey Mouse, who must stay on-brand.
I’ve always thought that Character Paloozas are one of the best things Walt Disney World does with meet & greets, even though the purpose is mostly about training in a lower pressure environment. We have fond memories from the Toontown Teardrop way back in the day, and still enjoy stumbling upon a Character Palooza from time to time. It’s the stuff of unexpected magical memories.
The sheer volume of Character Paloozas I observed in the lead-up to Labor Day could’ve been due to a few huge waves of College Program arrivals. It probably had more to do with that than being a surprise Cool Kid Summer offering or paradigm shift in character encounters.
I’m nevertheless including Character Paloozas as something Walt Disney World should do more, purposefully, outside of Cast Member training. They’re win-win, and an example of Walt Disney World getting something right, maybe without realizing how impactful it is to the guest experience.
As for Cool Kid Summer, it was nothing special this year on paper. The original announcement struck me as an “event” that was thrown together very quickly as Walt Disney World tried to market to families and combat mainstream media reports that Walt Disney World was “turning its back” on middle class families with children. (See Disney’s Response to Rising Costs Criticism.)
In practice, Cool Kid Summer was the scrappy little event that brightened up days and brought a bit of magic to blighted corners of the parks. Animation Courtyard felt like a dead mall that was somewhat-alive for the first time in years. Just in observing kids fishing with ‘Vacation’ Goofy, coloring with Clarabelle or engaging in antics with Donald, my strong suspicion is that guest satisfaction was higher among those who visited Animation Courtyard than those who did not. I highly doubt that was true before this summer!
Animation Courtyard was the most pronounced example, but Cool Kid Summer injected a lot of excitement around various hotspots of the parks. I would likewise hazard a guess that the families who stopped for special moments with the characters behind Cinderella Castle had better qualitative experiences than those who raced on to Peter Pan’s Flight. Same goes for those who took the time to slow down in Storybook Circus, Discovery Island or in GoofyCore Hall.
No one is going to accuse Walt Disney World of dreaming too big with Cool Kid Summer. As seasonal events go, it was a minor one. There wasn’t much of a decor package to speak of, and it was thrown into several underutilized venues around Walt Disney World. So just to be abundantly clear, we’re not saying it was actually great or imploring you to plan a trip around Cool Kid Summer in 2026.
It also had a blink and you’ll miss it quality. I wouldn’t be surprised if over half of guests visiting this summer had no clue Cool Kid Summer happened. Not just that they couldn’t identify it by name (that number is probably even higher), but that they also didn’t experience anything I’ve just described.
Cool Kid Summer was easy to overlook. If you weren’t eligible for Early Entry or didn’t stay at on of the handful of hotels with extra offerings, you wouldn’t have experienced that. If you didn’t venture into some out of the way locations where it was held (they’re underutilized for a reason!), you also wouldn’t have seen any of that.
What we are saying is that there’s room for refining and improving on the concept with a full year of lead-time to plan the 2026 Cool Kid Summer. That the event has potential and its good ideas could (and should!) be implemented full-time, beyond summer.
Most importantly, Cool Kid Summer demonstrated Walt Disney World finally “gets” the appeal of Disneyland-style free roaming characters. This is something we’ve been discussing here for a while, especially back with the debut of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in 2019.
One of the biggest questions at that time was whether free-roaming characters would translate to Walt Disney World given guest demographics. The concern was that once-in-a-lifetime guests wanted posed photos with characters, not to “play” with them.
This is despite free-roaming characters being a staple of the Disneyland experience for years. So many of Disneyland’s best moments with characters unfold in an organic and spontaneous manner as characters like Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, or the Evil Queen wander the park.
(It also helped that Cool Kid Summer didn’t totally eschew traditional meet & greets in favor of character ‘play’ experiences; Animation Courtyard added a lot of both. We’re cognizant that many first-timers want the photo of their kids posing with characters, getting an autograph, etc. This isn’t an either/or proposition. And as a whole, DHS has quietly become a great park for meeting characters.)
Based on my observations, Cool Kid Summer definitively demonstrated that spontaneous character experiences not only work at Walt Disney World, but are a huge hit with guests. Animation Courtyard was the best evidence of this, and I hope what was offered there this summer was proof of concept for the type of ‘play’ that’ll be featured in the reimagined Walt Disney Studios Lot.
There’s something special about these spontaneous encounters, getting a chance to briefly play with characters as opposed to posing for a photo, assembly-line style. This is the stuff that ‘core memories’ are made of. Even though Cool Kid Summer obviously didn’t come anywhere near being an “answer” to Epic Universe, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if some of the character encounters at Walt Disney World left equally powerful lasting impressions.
Hyperbolic as it might seem, this is formative stuff. We’ve often stressed that it’s the “little things” that form the foundation of nostalgia and sentimentality, and forge new Walt Disney World fans in the process. Obviously blockbuster new attractions and lands are important, but getting these little things right is the ‘secret sauce’ for Walt Disney World.
Although Cool Kid Summer was nothing noteworthy on paper, and definitely not the type of thing anyone planned trips around (except for Walt Disney World’s unprecedented summer discounts that essentially offered 2019 pricing), it did manage to punch above its weight and offer something special to many of the guests who got to experience it.
The seasonal event also suggested that Walt Disney World is finally starting to get the appeal of playing with characters or having spontaneous and memorably interactions, and might use Cool Kid Summer as a template for future character encounters. That alone would be a huge win, and honestly, it’s kind of wild that they didn’t learn this lesson from Disneyland a decade or more ago.
As for the seasonal event itself, I’m cautiously optimistic about Cool Kid Summer getting a sophomore season in 2026. Hopefully the inaugural year was a learning experience, and it returns bigger and better next year with (presumably) more lead-time for planning it. Although this is about the character component, I hope more emphasis is placed on the cool aspect of Cool Kid Summer, as there are so many creative ways for Walt Disney World to help guests beat the summer heat.
When it comes to characters, the big thing on my wish list for a while has been 90s nostalgia. The recent Destination D23 did this really well both with its panels and the exceptional Kuzcotopia Night at Typhoon Lagoon. Hopefully that was proof-of-concept for in-park offerings, and maybe even a hard ticket event.
Doing more with Disney Afternoon, Disney Channel, and cult classics animated films from the late 1990s would be awesome. People my age adore those animated films from the second half of the 1990s, along with Rescue Rangers, Darkwing Duck, TaleSpin, and DuckTales. We are also now the target audience of the parks, whether we’re Childless Disney Millennials or parents who want to share our own childhood nostalgia with our kids.
As covered previously in our Top 10 Rare Characters We Wish Walt Disney World Would Bring Back, we can’t be the only millennials who would overpay for a 90s nite at Magic Kingdom or Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Maybe Walt Disney World could weave that together with Cool Kid Summer, and pull deeper from the 2000s playbook by offering a “Pirates, Princesses & Pals Party.”
Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with the event in 2026, and hopefully we don’t have to wait almost a year to see Walt Disney World apply lessons learned from this summer to spontaneous character encounters around the parks. There’s tremendous unrealized potential for Disney to leverage its beloved characters in playful ways, and the opportunity to make new lifetime fans of the parks via those little moments of magic.
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YOUR THOUGHTS
Did you experience any of the character encounters during Cool Kid Summer? What did you think of these spontaneous experiences? Any special lasting memories from ‘playing’ with the characters? Do you hope Walt Disney World learns lessons from this special event and applies them year-round? Will you be visiting for Cool Kid Summer 2.0 if the event is expanded upon and improved in 2026? Thoughts on the new character experiences/encounters at the parks & resorts this summer? Any questions? Hearing your feedback about your experiences is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts or questions below in the comments!
