The Expedition Everest Yeti Is Finally Being Fixed

Expedition Everest opened at Animal Kingdom on 7 April 2006 with the most ambitious Audio-Animatronic Disney had ever built: a Yeti, nearly five metres tall, lunging at riders in the dark.

It worked for a matter of months. At D23 2026, almost twenty years later, Disney confirmed it is being brought back to life.

What went wrong

The Yeti moved on a hydraulic frame powerful enough to throw its own weight around. The problem was that the frame was anchored into the mountain structure, and running the figure at full motion put structural stress on the building itself.

Rather than risk the mountain, Disney switched the Yeti into what it calls B-mode. The figure stops moving. A strobe light flickers over it instead, so that in a dark scene passed at speed, your eye reads motion that is not there.

Fans named it the Disco Yeti, and the name stuck for two decades.

Why it became such a story

Because it was never hidden. The ride kept running, the Yeti kept standing there under its strobe, and every rider who knew the story could see exactly what had been lost.

It became shorthand in the Disney community for a broader complaint: that things break and stay broken. Fixing it carries weight beyond one animatronic.

What Disney has confirmed

Thomas Mazloum, Chairman of Disney Experiences, announced the repair on stage on 15 August 2026.

Disney marked the moment by bringing out Gloria Gaynor to sing “I Will Survive” as a send-off to the strobe-lit version. Which is a fairly pointed way of admitting how long this has gone on.

What has not been confirmed

• No timeline. No repair date, no completion window.
• No closure date for the ride, and a fix of this kind almost certainly needs one.
• No technical detail on how the structural problem is being solved.

That last point is the interesting one. The original issue was the mountain, not the figure, so the fix is an engineering problem rather than a maintenance one.

What it means for a trip now

Nothing yet. The ride is running normally and the Yeti is still in B-mode.

The thing worth planning around is that Expedition Everest will very likely close for an extended period at some point. If riding it matters to you, the sensible read is that the current version is available now and the timing of the closure is unknown.

Animal Kingdom is also getting Tropical Americas where DinoLand used to be, so the park has a lot changing.

See our Animal Kingdom guide and the full D23 2026 round-up.

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