Our slow-moving queue curves around a two-story wooden boathouse filled with props from explorations through distant lands. At the front of the line, a Disney cast member dressed in khaki helps us step onto a quaint little boat for a tour around the jungle.
This is Disneyland’s world-famous Jungle Cruise, filled with animatronic animals and painful puns from your skipper, and old-world set pieces depicting scenes straight out of the Amazon, Congo, Mekong and Nile rivers. It’s a ride that Walt Disney himself had a hand in developing, but something new is coming that separates it from its 1950s origins: a 3D-printed prop.
You may have seen small-scale 3D printing being done by hobbyists at home. But that’s child’s play compared to what industrial-scale 3D-printing workshops can do.
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Haddy, a 3D-printing business based in Florida, says it can build worlds. More specifically, Jay Rogers, co-founder and CEO, tells me the company is installing its first boat in a Disney park.
«It’s in the Jungle Cruise ride,» he says during Disney Demo Day at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, last month.
3D printing burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s. These printers take little pellets or strands of polymer or liquid resin and turn them into fully fleshed-out designs, like the purple toy octopus and Prada purse that my 3-year-old daughter got from her Uncle Zach for her recent birthday. Using a digital file, you can send a project to the printer to produce — whether it’s a small octopus or an armchair.
You can buy small 3D printers, priced between $180 and $400, for home projects, while larger operations require enormous machines that churn out items as big as cafe counters and even houses.
And, yes, boats.
Haddy’s Jungle Cruise boat is a prop canoe that will be placed on the ride soon, where it’ll become part of the scenic journey alongside those fake animals on the banks of the Amazon-Congo-Nile-Mekong river.
Walt Disney Imagineering collaborated closely with the Haddy team to adapt the plans for the boat, ensuring it captured the spirit of the existing props while using 3D-printing technology.
Yes, 3D-printed boats can float
Founded in 2022, Haddy creates home decor like planters, and furniture like outdoor benches, chairs and tables. Its gig of working with Disney’s Imagineers came about after it was selected as one of the four startups to receive financing, platforming and mentoring via the 2025 Disney Accelerator Program.
Rogers says Haddy can quickly transform imagination into reality, saving a lot of time (and presumably money — the companies wouldn’t provide specifics). This is in addition to being able to recycle any 3D-printed material for new objects, because once a prop reaches the end of its life, it can be melted down and 3D-printed again into something new.
A 20-foot boat made by a traditional boat-maker can take one thousand human hours, but not so for the Jungle Cruise canoe prop, Rogers says. «It’s not just faster to make, it’s faster to develop.»
He describes the traditional process, which unfolds over weeks and months: designing the boat, creating and securing a master mold, repeating the mold-making process an average of 30 times per boat and then manufacturing the parts that go onto the boat.
By comparison, it would take Haddy 70 robot hours in manufacturing. Both processes use a digital file as a starting point. The difference is that Haddy can simply make tweaks to the file and reprint the boat if there are any problems with the final product — no more mold-making necessary.
Still, how much of the whimsy remains? Can a 3D-printed boat evoke the same feelings of nostalgia and fantasy as the ride’s existing set pieces?
During Disney’s Demo Day, I spot what appears to be a wrought iron fence leaning against a tree, and Rogers says it was 3D-printed. Maybe guests won’t even notice if a boat is made of polymer instead of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, and printed by a robot.
Even the light fixtures in the Main Theatre at Walt Disney Studios, where I had just watched a video showcasing various new technologies being used by startups backed by Disney, were made by Haddy for this event. (I had assumed the intricate, glowing blue lights were a remnant of when Frozen 2 was being workshopped in the theater.)
Perhaps 3D-printed objects have a whimsy of their own? CNET Senior Editor James Bricknell, an expert on 3D printing, says yes. The canoe would not only have all the whimsy that an Imagineer can conjure, but would also be manufactured faster and in a far less expensive way — and would definitely float.
«It’s a brilliant idea,» Bricknell says. «You can make them look any way you like, just like the normal boats, but instead of injection molding, you can make each one individual for much less cost.»
Disney’s Imagineers are continually seeking new technologies to incorporate into the parks and on Disney cruise ships.
Walt Disney Imagineering is «the tip of the spear when it comes to emerging technologies» like AI, robotics and drones, according to Michael Hundgen, portfolio executive creative producer of Walt Disney Imagineering.
With Haddy, Imagineers are exploring the creation of set pieces for attractions in Disney’s theme parks. Beyond the Jungle Cruise, these products could also include closet doors from Monstropolis — for the new Monsters, Inc. ride being constructed at Walt Disney World — and rock work for various lands, such as Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. There might even be the creation of furniture for thousands of hotel rooms across the Orlando property.
«We’re not just creating technology for technology’s sake; we’re doing it to help our creative teams bring the stories from the company to life,» Hundgen says.
So now it’s out with the fiberglass-reinforced plastic and in with the polymer pellets. We’ll have to see whether guests truly can tell the difference between the old props and the new.