Disney is finally fixing Expedition Everest's "Disco Yeti" after 20 years!
Disney announced at D23 that the Yeti animatronic inside Expedition Everest is coming back to life, ending a two-decade run in “B-mode” as the strobe-lit “Disco Yeti.” Gloria Gaynor sang “I Will Survive” to mark the occasion. No timeline was announced.
The most famous broken robot in theme park history is getting fixed.
At the Horizons: A Carousel of Progress showcase at D23 on August 15, host Neil Patrick Harris was interrupted mid-segment by Thomas Mazloum, chairman of Disney Experiences, with an announcement that shook the Honda Center.
“We’re bringing the Yeti back to life inside Expedition Everest at Disney’s Animal Kingdom,” Mazloum said.
For anyone who’s ridden that coaster since roughly 2007, that sentence is worth the price of a D23 badge.
Disney sent the Disco Yeti off with Gloria Gaynor
Then Disney did something genuinely funny, which is not a phrase you often type about a corporate presentation.
To mark the end of an era, Gloria Gaynor took the stage and performed her 1978 hit “I Will Survive” as a send-off to the version of the Yeti fans have been living with.
That’s Disney openly acknowledging the joke. The Yeti has spent twenty years frozen in place under a flashing strobe light, which is why fans christened it the “Disco Yeti.” Hiring a disco legend to sing it out is the company admitting the bit landed, on itself, for two decades.
What actually happened to the Expedition Everest Yeti
Here’s the history Disney’s announcement politely skipped.
Expedition Everest opened on April 7, 2006, and its Yeti was the largest and most complex Audio-Animatronic Walt Disney Imagineering had ever built. Twenty-five feet tall, driven by 19 actuators, mounted atop a 46-foot steel tower built into the mountain itself. It lunged at passing trains. Disney promoted it hard, including Discovery Channel documentaries and a Times Square takeover.
Within months, the framing split.
The force of the Yeti’s own movement was stressing the structure it was mounted to. The attraction is essentially three interwoven structures: the mountain shell, the coaster track, and the Yeti’s tower. Keep running the figure at full motion, and you risk damaging the whole assembly.
So Disney switched it to “B-mode.” The Yeti stays still, a strobe light flashes, and at forty miles an hour in the dark your brain fills in the rest.
Why nobody fixed it for two decades
The short answer is that the Yeti is buried inside a finished mountain.
Joe Rohde, the Imagineer who led Animal Kingdom and the attraction, addressed it publicly at the 2013 D23 Expo. “You have to understand, it’s a giant complicated machine sitting on top of, like, a 46-foot tall tower in the middle of a finished building,” he said.
That’s the whole problem in one sentence. Reaching the Yeti means going through the mountain. Reported estimates for a full structural repair have run to closing the ride for six months to a year, on what has been one of Animal Kingdom’s headline attractions.
The situation got embarrassing enough that Universal Orlando trolled Disney over it. Its 2025 Mardi Gras tribute store included a spinning yeti under disco lights, with a Post-it note nearby reading “Call Joe About Parts.”
What Disney didn’t say
Now the caveat, because the announcement was long on triumph and short on specifics.
Disney gave no timeline. No start date, no completion window, no word on whether Expedition Everest closes during the work or for how long. Nothing about whether the fix restores the original A-mode motion or replaces the figure with something new.
The Parks Blog post says to stay tuned, which is Disney for “we’ll tell you later.”
Given the structural realities, a fix of any real ambition means significant downtime on a major attraction. Anyone planning an Animal Kingdom trip in the next couple of years should keep half an eye on the refurbishment calendar.
Still. Twenty years of “when are they going to fix the Yeti” just got an answer, and Disney cared enough to hire Gloria Gaynor to close the chapter. The Disco Yeti survived, right up until it didn’t have to anymore.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Disney Parks Blog (August 15, 2026), the official announcement from the Horizons stage, the Mazloum quote, and the Gloria Gaynor performance
AllEars.Net (December 2023 and January 2025), the three-structure explanation of the attraction’s design and the B-mode history
Boing Boing citing WDW News Today (June 2023), Joe Rohde’s 2013 D23 Expo comments on why the repair is so difficult
WDW Magazine (April 2024), the April 7, 2006 opening date, the 19 actuators, and the framing split shortly after opening
Disney Dining (February 2025), Universal Orlando’s Mardi Gras tribute store parody of the Disco Yeti