10/14 Duffy the Disney Bear Grand Opening Ceremony, New Merchandise at Epcot

Hi everyone!

This is my first Walt Disney World blog post after returning from a wonderful and busy two week trip to California (if you'd like to see Disneyland at Halloween, I have 500 photos here!)  It's amazing the changes that happened at WDW in that short time.

We were invited to see Duffy the Disney Bear's debut yesterday – it was set for noon, we arrived just a little before that time and I wish we'd arrived an hour earlier – there was a very large crowd excited about Duffy!

Duffy already has a huge fan base from Japan (some who were there to see him), and he was kept quite busy with park guests all day at his new meet and greet location.  I heard several times yesterday that Duffy is even more popular than Mickey Mouse in Japan.  It will be interesting to see how Duffy does in America, but his first day here was spectacular.

We had already seen Duffy at an annual passholder event about a month ago, and took our new Duffy bear around World Showcase to pose at each country. 

Vice President of Epcot, Dan Cockerell and Senior Vice President of Merchandise Development, Liz Boice get ready to speak.  We have video of the full ceremony here!

 

 

Disney Ambassador Vanessa Rosas says a few words:

 

 

Liz Boice:

 

 

 

Welcoming Dan Cockerell to the stage:

 

 

 

Disney Ambassadors Vanessa Rosas and Clay Shoemaker escort Duffy and Mickey to the podium:

 

 

 

We had the choice of either getting video or photos of the ribbon cutting – and we went for the video of the entire ceremony.  I felt fortunate to get photos with Jeff's camera of the ceremony when his Nikon doesn't include a flip-display window and I couldn't see what I was doing over everyone's heads!

 

 

Mickey makes his way through the crowd: