Geez- I miss a couple of days and ALL this stuff happening!
Fun fact I saw on twitter. With today's two closures the two rides had 95 animatronic figures, all now going away.
Is it sad that the first thing I thought of when I read this post was "Yeah, but only 38 of the them actually worked." But seriously, GMR had a huge number of animatronics but most of them were EXTREMELY static. Think of Mary Poppins bobbing up and down, Tarzan swinging on his vine, Sigorney Weaver hiding from an Alien, Indiana Jones lifting the ark up and down. Besides the Wicked Witch, the rest of the animatronics in GMR were rather cheap versions of what we think of a good animatronics. Even compared to ancient stuff from Pirates and HM they weren't very impressive. Now the Ellen AAs were nifty as hell.
Also, doesn't it look like the Carthay Circle building to the right of Grauman's?
Before anyone tells me I'm a crazy person, I fully know this, and I'm sure it's just a fun was of writing out Disney's Hollywood Studios.
Just an interesting observation.
A while ago there was rumor they would put a Carthay Circle restaurant into DHS - but I will also point out there already IS a Carthay circle building in DHS. It's down towards the Theater of the Stars. It's a souvenir shop!
Very disappointed that the express transportation is ending.
I was surprised to see this go so fast - what about 6 months of operation, but here's what I think was likely to have happened:
1) Started it up at a low price, saw some success - but was not profitable.
2) Raised the price and business went down - yet still was not profitable.
As others said, it wasn't particularly well advertised, and from the sound of it not frequently very busy. It only makes sense to do it if it's profitable.
I don't really get the "Minnie Vans are replacing it" talk. There are already busses that go from park-to-park. Taking a Minnie Van should show no advantage over the park busses besides not having to wait the 10-20 minutes for the bus, and even that is assuming that they stock Minnie Vans in front of the parks.
We were considering it for our trip in November, but in the end had decided it wasn't worth it, we were thinking that we might use it twice, and to pay $60 to save maybe 40 minutes of time seemed like a really poor use of money. Too bad though - because even if we didn't use it, it was something that people could pay extra to actually GET something extra, while at the same time not affecting those that chose not to use it.