WDW Radio: Your Guide to Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise and More Disney Magic!

881 · The Magic of Disney Animation: An E-Ticket Without a Ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios
The Magic of Disney Animation gives Disney’s Hollywood Studios a new way to explore how the movies we love are made. But I kept coming back to a bigger question: what makes a place feel like a studio when the movies are no longer being made there?
This week, join me as we discover what’s inside, which details deserve a closer look, and why different people in your family might love completely different parts of the same experience. We’ll connect it to the original animation tour and explore why I think this is an E-ticket experience without needing to be an E-ticket ride.
A studio open house: How Once Upon a Studio connects the experience, with characters taking over and artwork coming to life.
Hidden details worth finding: A Lost and Found with references to Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet, plus a chandelier whose paintbrushes were individually named by Disney artists.
Inside the Animator’s Office: Personal objects, familiar tools, and unexpected references that bring you closer to the people behind the films.
Characters with a purpose: Why Mulan is in Story, Rapunzel is in Layout, and Goofy has somehow been entrusted with Lighting at Off the Page!
An unexpected Mulan moment: The conversation that brought back a memory of my son and changed how I think about character encounters.
Olaf Draws! and Eric Goldberg: The thread connecting Robin Williams in Back to Neverland to drawing Genie, and why my own attempt came with a written apology.
Room to play and discover: Mary Blair’s influence on Drawn to Wonderland, and why I’d leave yourself time to wander.

There’s history, humor, practical advice, and a drawing that probably raises more questions than it answers. What part of The Magic of Disney Animation would you most want to spend time exploring, and why?
📣 Comment in the WDW Radio Clubhouse or 📞 Call the Voicemail: 407-900-9391
✈️ Looking to visit a Disney Park, Disney Cruise Line, or any vacation destination around the world? Let our friends at Mouse Fan Travel help you with expert planning at no cost to you! - visit MouseFanTravel.com
📬 Stay Connected:
- Subscribe for email updates + get my FREE Disney book!
- Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube
🎧 Explore More:
WDWRadio.com - Blog, archives, podcasts, and more
WDW Radio Nation - Support the show and unlock rewards
WDWRadioLIVE.com - Watch and chat LIVE Wednesday nights
Events & Cruises - Join us for group trips and in-person meetups!

LouMongello.com - Creator or solopreneur? Turn your passion into your profession with coaching, courses, and events, including our Momentum events in Walt Disney World. I am also a keynote speaker who shares how to leverage lessons from Disney on customer service, experience, and leadership.
🙏🏼 Thank you for listening, being part of the WDW Radio family, and helping the show be recognized as the Best Travel Podcast for nine consecutive years - and for the incredible honor of being inducted into the ⭐️ Podcast Hall of Fame.
Please subscribe, tell a friend, and join me again next week... and as always, sit back, relax, and enjoy this week's episode of the WDW Radio Show!

880 · Tasting Disney History: The Unofficial Disney Parks Retro Cookbook
What if you could taste your way through Disney Parks history?
This week, I’m joined by theme park and travel journalist Carly Caramanna, co-author with Julie Tremaine of The Unofficial Disney Parks Retro Cookbook: 60+ Nostalgic Recipes and Stories of Yesteryear. And while “cookbook” is in the title, this conversation becomes something much bigger: a journey through Disneyland and Walt Disney World history using food as our time machine.
Carly shares how discovering a 1981 Walt Disney World dining guide eventually led to the book, why the Adventurers Club became one of her first chapters, and how restaurants can tell us what Disney was trying to become during different eras.
We wander through the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant, Casa de Fritos, Top of the World, Aunt Polly’s, Writer’s Stop, Pleasure Island, the Handwich, ABC Soap Opera Bistro, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, and more.
We also explore why Disney fans become nostalgic for places they never experienced, how old recipes were adapted for modern kitchens, why Disney Legend Bob Gurr was the perfect person to write the foreword, and which Disney foods Carly believes we may someday regret taking for granted.
Most of all, we ask whether the food itself is really what we miss, or whether one bite simply brings back the people and versions of ourselves connected to it.
If you could bring back one extinct Disney restaurant or menu item tonight, what would it be, and why?
📣 Comment in the WDW Radio Clubhouse or 📞 Call the Voicemail: 407-900-9391
✈️ Looking to visit a Disney Park, Disney Cruise Line, or any vacation destination around the world? Let our friends at Mouse Fan Travel help you with expert planning at no cost to you! - visit MouseFanTravel.com
📬 Stay Connected:
- Subscribe for email updates + get my FREE Disney book!
- Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube
🎧 Explore More:
WDWRadio.com - Blog, archives, podcasts, and more
WDW Radio Nation - Support the show and unlock rewards
WDWRadioLIVE.com - Watch and chat LIVE Wednesday nights
Events & Cruises - Join us for group trips and in-person meetups!

LouMongello.com - Creator or solopreneur? Turn your passion into your profession with coaching, courses, and events, including our Momentum events in Walt Disney World. I am also a keynote speaker who shares how to leverage lessons from Disney on customer service, experience, and leadership.
🙏🏼 Thank you for listening, being part of the WDW Radio family, and helping the show be recognized as the Best Travel Podcast for nine consecutive years - and for the incredible honor of being inducted into the ⭐️ Podcast Hall of Fame.
Please subscribe, tell a friend, and join me again next week... and as always, sit back, relax, and enjoy this week's episode of the WDW Radio Show!

879 · Return to Progress City: Imagining Walt Disney’s City of Tomorrow
What if the most interesting thing about Walt Disney’s Progress City isn’t that it was never built, but that it was never really finished?
Recorded live at the WDW Radio booth at D23, former Walt Disney Imagineering President Bob Weis and artist, architect, and former Imagineer Eric Robison join me to explore Eric’s extraordinary new book, Return to Progress City.
What begins with Walt’s original vision for EPCOT becomes something much bigger: a conversation about imagination, architecture, storytelling, technology, creativity, and what happens when you give yourself permission to start with a blank page.
Eric shares how a pandemic project to paint another 100 Mickeys ended at number 38 when his imagination pulled him back to the Progress City model that had fascinated him since childhood. Bob also reveals something remarkable from Marty Sklar’s archives: Marty’s original handwritten notes from conversations with Walt about EPCOT and the City of Tomorrow.
We explore the wonderfully strange Progress City story Bob and Eric dreamed up over pastrami and martinis, how Imagineers move from rough “chicken scratch” to places filled with story and emotion, why Eric believes something human can disappear when we jump too quickly to the computer, the role of AI in creativity, and why even the most beautiful visual idea still needs a writer and a story.
And then Bob hands Eric a blank card and asks him to draw the future, right there at the table.
I also share something very personal from D23: the release of my new book, The Disney Interviews: Disney Legends Edition. This new 456-page collection preserves 18 in-depth conversations with Disney Legends including Julie Andrews, Marty Sklar, Richard M. Sherman, Tony Baxter, Alan Menken, Joe Rohde, Bob Gurr, Alice Davis, Don Hahn, Jodi Benson, Paige O’Hara, Dave Smith, and more, along with completely new introductions, stories, context, and artwork, along with completely new introductions, stories, context, and artwork.
It is available now in paperback and Kindle on Amazon.
If Walt handed you that blank page today, what would you add to Progress City?
📣 Comment in the WDW Radio Clubhouse or 📞 Call the Voicemail: 407-900-9391
✈️ Looking to visit a Disney Park, Disney Cruise Line, or any vacation destination around the world? Let our friends at Mouse Fan Travel help you with expert planning at no cost to you! - visit MouseFanTravel.com
📬 Stay Connected:
- Subscribe for email updates + get my FREE Disney book!
- Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube
🎧 Explore More:
WDWRadio.com - Blog, archives, podcasts, and more
WDW Radio Nation - Support the show and unlock rewards
WDWRadioLIVE.com - Watch and chat LIVE Wednesday nights
Events & Cruises - Join us for group trips and in-person meetups!

LouMongello.com - Creator or solopreneur? Turn your passion into your profession with coaching, courses, and events, including our Momentum events in Walt Disney World. I am also a keynote speaker who shares how to leverage lessons from Disney on customer service, experience, and leadership.
🙏🏼 Thank you for listening, being part of the WDW Radio family, and helping the show be recognized as the Best Travel Podcast for nine consecutive years - and for the incredible honor of being inducted into the ⭐️ Podcast Hall of Fame.
Please subscribe, tell a friend, and join me again next week... and as always, sit back, relax, and enjoy this week's episode of the WDW Radio Show!

878 · D23 Disney Parks Announcements: Sightlines Into Yesterday, Tomorrow, and Fantasy
The loudest cheers at D23 weren't necessarily for what Disney was building next. They were for what Disney was willing to bring back, repair, and finally acknowledge.
In a presentation built on a little faith, trust, and pixie dust, Disney asked fans to believe in an ambitious future, but this time it also showed its work. Models, progress, priorities, restorations, and even the things Disney chose to address directly revealed a much bigger story than any single attraction announcement.
In WDW Radio # 878, we look at the D23 2026 Disney Parks announcements through a series of "sightlines" that connect Villains Land, Piston Peak National Park, Dreamfinder, the Expedition Everest Yeti, Spaceship Earth, Tomorrowland, Monstropolis, Tropical Americas, Disney Cruise Line, and much more. And the sightlines stretch well beyond the U.S., from Disneyland Paris and the return of its Jules Verne-inspired Space Mountain to new Tomorrowland, Avengers, and Spider-Man experiences coming to Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
When you step back, it starts to look like a very Disney story of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy. Yesterday is being honored through attractions, characters, and experiences fans refused to let go of. Tomorrow is taking shape through ambitious new lands, technologies, attractions, and global expansion. And fantasy is where Disney is creating entirely new places and stories for us to step inside.
We also explore what changed the perspective on some of these projects, why "no height requirement" may be one of the most important phrases of the night, why the sequence of these projects may matter as much as the projects themselves, and what Disney did not announce... and why.
This isn't simply a recap of D23 2026. It's a closer look at what Disney is building, what it is preserving, what it is asking us to trust, and what all of it may mean for the way we experience the Disney Parks around the world in the years ahead.
📣 Comment in the WDW Radio Clubhouse or 📞 Call the Voicemail: 407-900-9391
✈️ Looking to visit a Disney Park, Disney Cruise Line, or any vacation destination around the world? Let our friends at Mouse Fan Travel help you with expert planning at no cost to you! - visit MouseFanTravel.com
📬 Stay Connected:
- Subscribe for email updates + get my FREE Disney book!
- Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube
🎧 Explore More:
WDWRadio.com - Blog, archives, podcasts, and more
WDW Radio Nation - Support the show and unlock rewards
WDWRadioLIVE.com - Watch and chat LIVE Wednesday nights
Events & Cruises - Join us for group trips and in-person meetups!

LouMongello.com - Creator or solopreneur? Turn your passion into your profession with coaching, courses, and events, including our Momentum events in Walt Disney World. I am also a keynote speaker who shares how to leverage lessons from Disney on customer service, experience, and leadership.
🙏🏼 Thank you for listening, being part of the WDW Radio family, and helping the show be recognized as the Best Travel Podcast for nine consecutive years - and for the incredible honor of being inducted into the ⭐️ Podcast Hall of Fame.
Please subscribe, tell a friend, and join me again next week... and as always, sit back, relax, and enjoy this week's episode of the WDW Radio Show!

877 · Disney Worldbuilders Interview with Leslie Iwerks
Disney Worldbuilders asks a question most of us have never thought to ask... where does a Disney world actually begin?
Not the land. Not the ride. The moment before any of it existed, when it was still just a feeling inside one person's head.
This week I sit down with Leslie Iwerks, director of The Imagineering Story and Disneyland Handcrafted, to talk about her ambitious new documentary. Disney Worldbuilders brings together Bob Iger, Josh D'Amaro, James Cameron, Kevin Feige, Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Pete Docter, Jennifer Lee, and Jared Bush for a series of remarkably candid conversations about how deeply personal ideas become stories, characters, and physical worlds that millions of people can walk into.
I had the privilege of screening the film before its release, and it is even better than I hoped.
In our conversation, Leslie shares:
Why so many of today's most influential creators were Disney fans first, and what that says about the parks
How personal struggles and childhood memories shaped stories like Frozen, Inside Out, and Zootopia
The brutal note Jared Bush received on an early version of Zootopia, and what pulled it back from the edge
Why Kevin Feige's favorite detail in any Disney land is a construction wall
Why story and technology have always worked together at Disney, going back to Walt and Ub
What creative failure, uncertainty, and rejection can teach the rest of us
How great leadership protects storytellers and creative risk
Why honoring Disney's history cannot mean being afraid to evolve it
The moment Leslie filmed that became the emotional heart of the film

Leslie also reflects on her grandfather, Disney Legend Ub Iwerks, and her father, Disney Legend Don Iwerks, and how their legacy of combining storytelling and technology continues through Disney's worldbuilders today. She does not just study world builders. She comes from them.
Disney Worldbuilders premieres at D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event on August 16 and begins streaming on Disney+ on August 20.
Subscribe to WDW Radio so you never miss an episode. Then tell me this: What Disney story, character, attraction, or world first made you believe that something impossible could become real? Share your answer in the WDW Radio Clubhouse at WDWRadio.com/Clubhouse, or leave me a voicemail at 407-900-9391.
📣 Comment in the WDW Radio Clubhouse or 📞 Call the Voicemail: 407-900-9391
✈️ Looking to visit a Disney Park, Disney Cruise Line, or any vacation destination around the world? Let our friends at Mouse Fan Travel help you with expert planning at no cost to you! - visit MouseFanTravel.com
📬 Stay Connected:
- Subscribe for email updates + get my FREE Disney book!
- Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube
🎧 Explore More:
WDWRadio.com - Blog, archives, podcasts, and more
WDW Radio Nation - Support the show and unlock rewards
WDWRadioLIVE.com - Watch and chat LIVE Wednesday nights
Events & Cruises - Join us for group trips and in-person meetups!

LouMongello.com - Creator or solopreneur? Turn your passion into your profession with coaching, courses, and events, including our Momentum events in Walt Disney World. I am also a keynote speaker who shares how to leverage lessons from Disney on customer service, experience, and leadership.
🙏🏼 Thank you for listening, being part of the WDW Radio family, and helping the show be recognized as the Best Travel Podcast for nine consecutive years - and for the incredible honor of being inducted into the ⭐️ Podcast Hall of Fame.
Please subscribe, tell a friend, and join me again next week... and as always, sit back, relax, and enjoy this week's episode of the WDW Radio Show!