Every attraction at Disney California Adventure

The Red Car Trolley opened with the 2012 Buena Vista Street overhaul, and it exists mostly to make a short walk feel like a period piece. The cars are modern reproductions of the Pacific Electric Railway streetcars that once ran across Los Angeles, complete with wooden bench seats, brass fittings, and a live operator who works the controls by hand.

Five & Dime is the resident street act on Buena Vista Street: a small brass-and-rhythm ensemble fronted by a vocalist, delivered from the back of a period delivery truck that parks itself near Carthay Circle. The conceit is that they are a struggling group of musicians who have driven cross-country to break into pictures in 1920s Los Angeles.

Disney California Adventure's entrance street is where the classic characters appear, and they appear here in clothes you will not see anywhere else at the resort — period Los Angeles daywear rather than the standard costumes. Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, Donald Duck, Daisy Duck and Pluto all rotate through the area near Carthay Circle and the Buena Vista Street plaza.

Animation Academy is a live class inside the Disney Animation building, and it is the most underrated hour in the park. A real instructor stands at a lit drawing desk projected onto a screen and takes the room through constructing a single character step by step, from basic shapes to final line. You get paper, a pencil, and a hard surface. You keep the drawing.

Character Close-Up is the greeting space off the main hall of the Disney Animation building. The lineup rotates and is posted on the app; over the years it has hosted characters from Frozen, Moana, Encanto and other animated features, generally two at a time in separate rooms.

The Disney Theater in Hollywood Land has held some version of a Disney Junior show since the park's early years, and the current production is Disney Junior Dream Factory. The framing is a workshop where a host and a rotating cast of Disney Junior characters build things — songs, dances, a party — with the audience doing the work alongside them.

PhilharMagic is a 12-minute 3D feature built around Donald Duck being catastrophically bad at his job. He commandeers a conductor's hat, sets off a chain of events, and is flung through set pieces built on Disney animated musical sequences before being deposited, humiliated, back where he started.

The Hyperion is a real theater — a full fly tower, an orchestra pit, a balcony, and around two thousand seats. It has housed a series of large-scale productions since the park opened in 2001, each running for a period of years before being retired and replaced.

Mission: BREAKOUT! took over the drop tower that had operated as The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror since 2004 and reopened in May 2017 with a completely new exterior, queue, story and ride profile. The premise: the Collector has the Guardians of the Galaxy locked in his private museum, and Rocket wants your help springing them.

WEB SLINGERS opened with Avengers Campus in June 2021 and is the only ride at the Disneyland Resort where the control input is your own body. There is no blaster. A gesture-tracking system reads your arm motion, and a flick forward launches a web on screen. Spider-Man has lost control of an army of spider-bots and you are recruited to sling them back into containment.

The Ancient Sanctum sits at the back corner of Avengers Campus, and several times a day it becomes a classroom. Doctor Strange appears and runs a short lesson in the mystic arts, drawing on volunteers from the audience and demonstrating spellwork with a combination of practical illusion, projection mapping, fog and lighting.

Avengers Campus was designed around the idea that the heroes are staff, not attractions, so they arrive and depart from the land's buildings rather than standing at a marked photo spot with a rope line. Some do form a proper queue — Spider-Man and Black Panther usually do — while others simply appear, do something, and go.

The spider-bots sold at WEB Suppliers are not just toys with a Marvel logo on them. Each is a small remote-controlled robot with an attack mode, and Avengers Campus has arenas where two owners can face off. Cast members referee, other guests gather to watch, and the whole thing takes about five minutes per bout.

Radiator Springs Racers opened with Cars Land in June 2012 and remains the most expensive and most technically accomplished attraction the Disneyland Resort has ever built. It runs on the same enhanced motion vehicle system as Test Track at EPCOT, but where that ride is a proving ground, this one is a narrative dark ride that happens to end with a race.

Mater's Junkyard Jamboree is a Disney reworking of a classic carnival whip. Twenty-two small trailers are towed by baby tractors around a set of interlocking turntables, and every time the tractor changes turntables the trailer behind it slings out to the side. The result is a sequence of snapping lateral swings, one after another, for ninety seconds.

Luigi's Rollickin' Roadsters replaced Luigi's Flying Tires in 2016, and the swap was a straight upgrade. The original was an air-hockey-style ride that broke down constantly and moved slower than most people could walk. The replacement uses trackless vehicle technology to send cars gliding across an open plaza in a choreographed dance, pairing up, circling and reversing in patterns.

Incredicoaster is the 2018 retheme of California Screamin', the coaster that opened with the park in 2001 and defined its skyline for seventeen years. The track layout is unchanged — same launch, same loop, same 6,000-foot circuit around Paradise Bay — but the theming, the tunnels, the audio and the on-ride show scenes are all new, built around the Parr family chasing Jack-Jack.

Toy Story Midway Mania! opened at this park in June 2008 in the pier's old shooting-gallery building, and it has been near-permanently busy ever since. You ride a tracked vehicle that rotates to face a series of screens, each running a different carnival midway game, and fire a spring-loaded cannon at 3D targets.

The wheel has been on the pier since the park opened in 2001, originally as the Sun Wheel, rebranded as Mickey's Fun Wheel in 2009, and rethemed again in 2018 as Pixar Pal-A-Round. Through all of it the machine has been the same: a 150-foot eccentric wheel with 24 gondolas, sixteen of which slide along curved interior rails as the wheel rotates and eight of which are fixed in place.

Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind opened in 2019 as the replacement for Flik's Flyers, which had been moved from a bug's land. It is a standard amusement-park scrambler variant: gondolas on arms extending from a rotating central hub, which lift and swing outward as the ride spins up.

Jessie's Critter Carousel opened in 2019 on the site of King Triton's Carousel, which had been on the pier since 2001. The mounts are the woodland animals from the Woody's Roundup segments of Toy Story 2 — a turtle, a skunk, a bat, an armadillo, a snake and more — each rendered with the wide-eyed expression the film used as a joke.

Games of the Boardwalk are the only pay-to-play carnival games at either Disneyland Resort park. Four booths sit along the Pixar Pier walkway, each themed to a different Pixar property — a ring toss, a ball toss, a bottle knockdown and a target game — with a cast member running each one and prizes hanging overhead.

Pixar Pier hosts the resort's densest concentration of Pixar character greetings, spread along the walkway between Incredicoaster and the wheel. The rotation has included Woody, Jessie, Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Incredible, Frozone, Edna Mode, Joy, Sadness and Bing Bong, generally two or three out at a time.

Ariel's Undersea Adventure opened in 2011 in a building fronted by a giant clamshell facade on Paradise Gardens Park. It is a continuous-loading omnimover — the same vehicle system as the Haunted Mansion — running through the story of the 1989 film in a series of tableau scenes.

Goofy's Sky School opened in 2011 as a retheme of Mulholland Madness, which had been on the pier since the park's 2001 opening. The layout is a classic Mavericks-style wild mouse: a lift hill, a series of flat 180-degree hairpin turns at the top, then a run of short dipping drops back to the station.

Silly Symphony Swings opened in 2010 as a retheme of the Orange Stinger, which had been on the pier since 2001 and enclosed the same swings inside a giant orange. Removing the shell was the best decision anyone made in the park's first decade — the ride went from a claustrophobic spin inside a fruit to an open-air swing over the water.

Golden Zephyr is a reproduction of a 1920s amusement pier ride, the kind built when rocket travel was a magazine-cover fantasy rather than a thing anyone had done. Six burnished silver rockets hang from cables off a central tower, and when the tower rotates they swing outward over the edge of Paradise Bay.

Jumpin' Jellyfish has been on the pier since 2001 and is one of only two original Paradise Pier flat rides still operating unchanged. Two towers, each with a set of open seats suspended beneath a translucent jellyfish canopy, lift riders up and then release them into a slow, cushioned descent with a few soft bounces at the bottom.

World of Color debuted in 2010 and remains the largest piece of nighttime entertainment at the Disneyland Resort. It is built on roughly 1,200 programmable fountains in Paradise Bay, which project water screens that film is then mapped onto, combined with lasers, flame effects, lighting on the surrounding structures, and a full orchestral soundtrack.

The Paradise Garden Bandstand sits in the planted area between the walkway and the water, and it hosts live music on a rotating schedule — mariachi ensembles, steel drum groups, jazz combos and similar acts depending on the day and the season. The programming is not fixed and is posted on the entertainment times board.

San Fransokyo Square replaced Pacific Wharf in 2023, rethemed to the hybrid city from Big Hero 6, and its one non-food offering is a greeting with Baymax near the center of the district. He appears on a posted rotation with breaks, so check the app rather than wandering over hopefully.

Soarin' opened with the park in 2001 as Soarin' Over California, flying a single-state route that is still the version many locals prefer. In 2016 it was replaced with Soarin' Around the World, a globe-spanning film shot in higher resolution that visits sites across five continents.

Grizzly River Run opened with the park in 2001 and runs around the base of Grizzly Peak, the bear-shaped mountain that is the park's original visual anchor. Eight-passenger circular rafts float a course of rapids, past geysers and under waterfalls, with two drops — the second of which is taken while the raft spins.

Redwood Creek Challenge Trail opened with the park in 2001 and is the single most underused piece of real estate at the Disneyland Resort. It is a genuine adventure playground: rope bridges, a climbing net, cargo nets, log slides, a rock wall, a cave to crawl through, and two short zip lines, all laid out along a wooded trail on the slope of Grizzly Peak.