It’s trite but true. It’s been a roller-coaster week for some Walt Disney World fans. They learned of promising expansion plans but later found that the addition of Magic Kingdom attractions translates into the subtraction of sentimental favorites.

Among the stash of worldwide Disney announcements made Saturday was the news that two “Cars” rides were being added to Magic Kingdom’s Frontierland area.

On Monday, Disney confirmed that the new rides will be built on Tom Sawyer Island replacing the longstanding fort and caves. The area also will lose the Liberty Belle boat, which currently rests on the Rivers of America that surround the island. The attractions have operated at Magic Kingdom since the early 1970s.

“So, people are completely forgetting all the good news, and now they’re just mad,” said Michele Atwood, owner of the Main Street Mouse website, who attended Disney’s weekend announcements during the D23 fan club event in Anaheim, California.

There are no rides on Tom Sawyer Island now. It’s a tree-lined rustic playground area. Its theme is based on Mark Twain characters, and visitors only access it via log rafts. Liberty Belle, a triple-decker paddle boat, loops around the island for views of Frontierland attractions and the nearby Haunted Mansion.

“People were saying things like they’ll miss hearing like the whistle of the ferryboat when you’re standing in line for Haunted Mansion and the aesthetic of the area,” Atwood said.

Online some Disney fans lamented the loss of playground space on the merchandise-free island and said they’d miss that “romantic piece of ambiance.” Others objected to cramming “Cars” into the frontier setting.

Another complaint was that the move eliminates a place where kids can run free. But the island usually isn’t densely populated, and many fans posted they had not ventured over in several years.

For the most part, Disney has not revealed timelines for its expansion projects, including the “Cars” attractions. Disney Experiences Chairman Josh D’Amaro indicated folks would be able to see the island in its current form the rest of this year.

John Saccheri, who owns the BigFatPanda.com website that covers Disney World and other attractions, last went to Tom Sawyer Island a year ago. He was underwhelmed.

“I did feel like, ‘Wow, this is really out of place.’ … It ought to be more special, I felt, if it was in the Magic Kingdom, and it just wasn’t,” Saccheri said.

“It is definitely underutilized space,” he said.

The Tom Sawyer area isn’t the nostalgic draw of decades ago, said Simon Veness, a travel writer and guidebook author.

Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was published in 1876, and it has been made into multiple movies and TV productions since 1917.

“It just doesn’t appeal to the majority, and the market has moved on,” he said. “People want what Disney is selling. You know, by and large, they want ‘Cars.’ They want ‘Monsters, Inc.’ They certainly want the villains.”

The Disney expansion announcements also included a land based on its animated-film villains in Magic Kingdom, which is also getting a nighttime parade; a “Monsters, Inc.” land to be built at Disney’s Hollywood Studios; and attractions at Disney’s Animal Kingdom based on “Zootopia” and “Encanto,” Disney films released in 2016 and 2021, respectively.

The villains concept was a crowd-pleaser at the experiences showcase portion of the D23 event, earning an enthusiastic response from the 12,000 attendees at the Honda Center. It was the capper of the evening, presented in “and one more thing” style by D’Amaro. As he spoke, an enormous, and ominous, animated character from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” appeared behind him.

“That place pretty much went in an uproar the second they officially said it, and I think the second you saw the [Magic] Mirror appear behind Josh, you can kind of feel, like, a rumble amongst the crowd,” said Dustin Sparage, who is based in Los Angeles and owns the Theme Park Shark site.

“We don’t even know anything about what’s in villains land. … But the thought of it and the idea of it is cool,” Saccheri said.

Veness agreed. “Disney has produced some of the best villains in movie history. These are genuine, grade-A superstars of animated movies for the best part of the last 100 years,” he said. “They’re far more interesting than the heroes in many cases. We’re sick to death of princesses. Give us something different.”

Disney has said it will spend $60 billion worldwide on theme parks and other experiences over the next decade. And industry watchers have speculated that the company’s moves in Central Florida come partly because Universal Orlando is to open Epic Universe, its third theme park, in 2025.

“Disney wouldn’t have announced this if there wasn’t something big going on just down the street. It also happens to include monsters, right?” Veness said. “So you can be a little bit skeptical, from that point of view, that Disney is being reactive rather than proactive.”

That makes sense, Atwood said.

“Some people say Disney doesn’t care what Universal is doing. I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “In a competitive market, being the parks are 20 minutes from each other, I think they do have to be mindful of what’s going on out there.”

One of Epic’s lands is named Dark Universe, and it features a descendant of Dr. Frankenstein and classic monsters from Universal Studios’ early film history.

Disney fans have hoped for a villains concept for years, although naysayers predicted it was too spooky for Disney parks.

“I feel like it’s going to be, like, tongue-in-cheek darkness. I think it’ll satisfy the fans and not scare the kids,” Saccheri said. “But who knows? They keep using the word ‘fearless’ through this new vision in what a land can be.”

Sparage said he was hyped about the “Monsters, Inc.” land planned for Hollywood Studios. It will include a suspended roller coaster that travels through the film’s Laugh Factory setting.

“The fact that they’re willing to go to that extent with, I think, a ride that has been kind of talked about within the Disney community for probably a decade now. … It’s exciting,” he said.

The first of the new attractions to be seen at Disney World may be “Disney Starlight,” a parade at Magic Kingdom set to start in the summer of 2025. It will be the first regularly scheduled nighttime parade at that theme park since 2016.

“It’s been so quiet there in the evenings,” Atwood said.

The expansion is a big, around-the-world task, Veness said.

“It’s on a scale that’s quite mind-boggling,” he said. “When you really look at what they’re proposing to do … It’s going to have long-term payoffs, and it’s going to have short-term pain.”

Fans want everything, he said, looking for Disney to both keep sentimental attractions and add new ones to its parks.

“People complain, complain and complain and complain, but yet they still go there,” Atwood said. “They still spend the money.”

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