The main thing that is better about Pooh-san's honey hunt over wdw's pooh is the free-motion ride vehicles, imho. It's more than just a nifty "wow" factor that they aren't on tracks. I don't know if I have the writing ability to explain it, but the free moving cars are just amazingly better because they allow for more fun and interesting movements. For example, say that there are three cars about to go up to the scene of Tigger bouncing. The cars can move around each other so that the last car goes to the front, the front car to the middle, the middle to the back. I'm not explaining that very well, but it really is a great improvement. And in the huffalumps and woozles scene it is really great, because the cars can spin around and zoom around each other - I'm not explaining this very well, but it is a real improvement. It is like aquatopia, only indoors, the cars move as freely, up to scenes, back out, spin around, etc. like the aquatopia cars do.
That's really the big improvement over wdw, imho. THere are a couple of minor improvements - when pooh falls asleep and the dream pooh flies out, the whole scene turns into a star field with an effet that feels like the one in tower of terror. The animatronics may have a more full range of motion, I'm not really sure though, but sometimes they seemed a little more interesting.
The cue is also better at tokyo, in some ways, but it is maddening, too, because there is so much cue. There is about 15-20 minutes worth of cue beyond the fast pass entry. The first part is much better than wdw, with a walk outside Pooh's house and around Pooh-san's garden, which is cute. Who knew that Pooh kept a Japanese garden? You go in to the house through a gardening workshop, and that is cute. But then there are pages and pages of walking through giant ply-wood type book pages that form cues. Kind of like the pages outside WDW's version. That part is a drag, if you ask me. All in all, though, Tokyo's cue is better than WDW's, which suffers from the same problem as all of wdw's fantasyland.
What the wdw version has that is better than Tokyo is the "when the rain, rain, rain, came down, down, down" scene. That just isn't there in Tokyo, and that is one of my favorite parts. No flood in Tokyo, no swaying car, no flood scene at all. The Tokyo version is basically just Tigger bouncing, pooh's dream - huffalumps & woozles, and the end party, iirc. I may be missing something, but it seems shorter than wdw without that portion. I think that the huffalumps and wozzles section is probably longer in Tokyo, or at least you spend more time in there with your ride vehicle zooming in and around.
Both WDW and Tokyo have a scene were Tigger pops up and invites you to bounce with him. The disneyland ride doesn't bounce at all. Apparently, it constantly sways back and forth, although only mildly, like you would expect to cut in during the flood scene. The comments that I have seen about disneyland's are that the animatronics are especially poor, like
disney store window type displays.
We're going to disneyland in the fall and I look forward to riding it there, and thereby becoming the all knowing rider of all pooh rides in the world
As it is right now, I would rate Tokyo's version higher than WDW's, but not the quantum leap of difference that you might expect - the ride vehicles are a quantum leap forward, but the overall ride, without the flood scene, seems shorter and missing something. So that's my opinion - Tokyo's is certainly superior, but not by an amazing amount, to me. I don't know if wtg2000 will agree with me though!!! The whole dream scene, from pooh falling asleep through the huffalumps and woozles in Tokyo is absolutely awesome though! Absolutely. The Tokyo version is on par with Pirates, HM, and Splash; the wdw version is more on par with peter pan or Buzz.
That said, I agree with wtg200 about some of the reasoning behind the different ride vehicles - there are aiming at a l different group, with more families riding it at wdw and more mature audience and office ladies in Tokyo. I guess they figured it wasn't worth the bucks in Calilfornia for the ride vehicles, which is a shame really. It seems to me that most of the cost in retro-fitting bear hall would be installing the ride vehicles. Intead of laying that track they could have used the trackless ones. It wasn't like in Toad hall where there was track already. I'm sure it would have cost more, but the development costs have already been paid by OLC so why not benefit from that?? Plus, it doesn't seem to me like the animatronics could have cost that much more. It seems a shame to loose the bear animatronics for very simple ones. If it is worth doing, it should be worth doing right the first time.
I wonder what happened to the bears.
DR