Plenty new to see, do at Florida's theme parks

Toy Story Mania! at Disney: Walt Disney parks on both coasts, Anaheim's Disneyland and Orlando's Disney World, are beefing up their Pixar presence with a new 3-D video shooting gallery themed after the "Toy Story" movies.

Guests enter the world of Andy, the cartoon boy whose come-to-life toys have created their own carnival while he's away. Visitors are made to feel "shrunk" down to toy size by giant dice, checkers and other oversized toys lining the ride queue.

At the front is an interactive Mr. Potato Head carnival barker that Disney calls one of its most ambitious audio animatronics ever. He sings, dances, tells jokes and even removes and replaces an ear.

And he's not even the main attraction.

Down the stairs, guests step right onto a platform in the middle of the ride track. Each car seats four people, and each rider gets a spring-action shooter and an on-board computer to ring up scores. The gun is operated by simply aiming and pulling a string on the back. If you want to be successful, pull it very, very fast.

The track whizzes from booth to booth, where players aim the cannon at animated targets. Because it's in 3-D, you can actually see where the bullets are going. The technology is so sophisticated that even a missed shot will stick to the wall and stay there awhile. The ride is designed so each trip through will be different.

Disney touts the attraction as "4-D," because puffs of air and small mists make objects seem to fly past the rider. The cannons shoot darts, rings and pies, corresponding to the booth the ride car has stopped by. Hidden "Easter eggs" and other goodies will jack up a rider's points.

High scores of the day are kept on monitors at the end of the ride, so you can tell just how good (or bad) you were.

Jungala, Busch Gardens: Welcome to the jungle, right here in Florida. Busch Gardens Tampa Bay — just down the Interstate from Orlando — has opened a four-acre attraction featuring Bengal tigers, orangutans, gibbons, flying foxes and more.

Jungala, in the park's Congo area, is by far its most ambitious undertaking. It simulates a hidden jungle village surrounded by giant trees, waterfalls and stone.

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Rides include a four-story Wild Surge that shoots guests out a mountain crater and above a giant waterfall. Three tiers of zip lines can be ridden at Jungle Flyers, and Tree-Top Trails has tubes, bridges and climbing nets for kids.

You can see tigers swim in windowed underground caves and through aboveground domes, or observe orangutans swinging on lines overhead.

In the Kulu Canopy live the white-cheeked gibbons, flying foxes and gharials — similar to crocodiles, with much skinnier snouts.

To feed your own snout, the park has reinvented the former Vivi Restaurant into the Bengal Bistro and opened the snack booth Orang Cafe.

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