In the 1990s, a trend started up at Disney - taking their old animatronic shows and "updating" them for today's audience. It began with Kitchen Kabaret becoming Food Rocks, swapping out the animatronic characters for caricatures of famous musicians and a focus on rock and rap music. Tropical Serenade was next, being turned into The Enchanted Tiki Room - Under New Management!, which featured characters from Disney's ever-popular Aladdin and The Lion King shoehorned in, a more cynical tone, and (again) at least one rap song. Despite generally harsh reactions towards the new, revamped shows from fans, Michael Eisner insisted that the Imagineers do the same to Forecast Follies - make it more "relevant", "update" it, "modernize" it, "do something to it that will draw in today's youth".

Almost none of the Imagineers assigned to the project wanted to change Forecast Follies. It was bad enough that they were forced to close Horizons and change Journey Into Imagination - couldn't they have at least left ONE original EPCOT Center attraction alone? On top of that, as they were designing the new, more "relevant" version of Forecast Follies, the Imagineers were hounded by Eisner and his executives, who were quickly coming up with bad idea after bad idea for the show. One Imagineer is quoted as saying, "It was just a miserable experience, overall." On top of that, the Imagineers were given an incredibly small budget.

Forecast Follies 2.0 opened to the public in 2000. Fans of the original show flocked to the pavilion, unaware that this version of the attraction was a far cry from the one that they'd fallen in love with. The queue was for the most part unchanged, but once they'd had a seat in the theater and the show began, they got their first sign that they weren't in for a good time - a TMZ-esque announcer shouting, "WASSUP, EPCOT?! GIVE IT UP FOR FORECAST FOLLIES!"

Cast

• Carl: Your typical 1990s teenager, a reskinned Professor Sunny Showers (according to the already-quoted Imagineer, the budget didn't allow for a new animatronic). He wore a backwards baseball cap, rode a surfboard, and was unbelievably lazy. He said things like "Booyah!" and "Oh snap!". His voice was provided by some random teenager Disney grabbed off the street.

• Da Sun: The "updated" version of Mr. Sun retained his sunglasses, but was otherwise reinvented as a Jamaican stereotype. He sang a reggae song, "Is It Getting Hot in Here?". His voice was provided by Bob Marley.

• The Raindrops: Rain was replaced by these six wisecracking droplets of water that were caricatures of, and voiced by, famous comedians: Gilbert Gottfried, Whoopi Goldberg, Dana Carvey, Tim Allen, Mike Myers, and Wanda Sykes. They didn't sing a song... their segment was just the six of them bickering. The comedians ad-libbed a good chunk of their dialogue, but were bogged down by the painfully unfunny script. Rumor has it that Mike Myers dubbed lending his voice to the attraction "the dumbest decision that [he'd] ever made."

• Snow: Snow became a male simply because Michael Eisner thought it would be clever having Vanilla Ice provide his voice (you know, since his name is Vanilla ICE). He even had Vanilla Ice's face disturbingly superimposed onto a plywood cutout of a snowflake. He performed (of course) a rap song, "Below Freezing". At one point, Carl told him to "take a chill pill".

• Cloudy: Cloudy was turned into a caricature of Sinbad. That was his entire schtick, he was Sinbad but as a cloud. He could still shapeshift, but only into things that reference 1990s pop culture (Buzz Lightyear, a Beanie Baby, Michael Jordan, etc.). He was basically a poor man's version of the Genie from Aladdin. He sang the loud and bombastic "Bein' a Cloud".

• Wind: Wind was now a tornado all the time (which prompted Carl to quip, "I loved you in Twister!"). Every single line out of her mouth was a yell. She was voiced by Rosie O'Donnell and sang an obnoxious rock version of "Blow You Away".

Plot

The plot? Carl was assigned a homework assignment about meteorology, but he didn't know anything or care about meteorology. The weather barged into his bedroom, one by one, to help him, and of course by the end of the show he was meteorology's biggest fan. "Weather is all that and a bag of chips!" he shouted before he and the weather launched into the Backstreet Boys-inspired "Meteorology Rocks".

Reception

Reception towards the new version of Forecast Follies was almost entirely negative. Park-goers were baffled by just how cringe-worthy it was. The rebranding of the friendly cast of characters, the awful script, and the removal of the signature song "Wonderful, Wonderful Weather" added up to a terrible experience. One audience member, after leaving the theater, said that it was even worse than Sounds Dangerous. Reviews of the attraction on allears.net and WDWMagic.com tore the attraction apart. "Don't go see it. Trust me," one warned. "It's yet another one of Disney's desperate attempts at being 'hip'... and failing miserably," another complained. "They ruined it. I'm not surprised, but it still hurt to watch," a third admitted. "Finally, Walt Disney World has its own Superstar Limo. I was wondering when it would get one," a fourth announced. Despite this, Forecast Follies 2.0 limped along for a few years, despite park-goers and Imagineers alike hoping that it would revert back to its original form.

Eventually, 2007 saw the closure of Forecast Follies. Reportedly, Imagineers were so happy to get rid of the attraction that they held a bonfire of the animatronics. Only one animatronic escaped being burned - that of Carl, which was scrapped for parts. Much like many other parts of Epcot, Forecast Follies was left abandoned used as storage space for merchandise and office supplies.

After Forecast Follies 2.0 closed, an instrumental version of Wonderful, Wonderful Weather was added to The World Above pavilion's area music as a tribute to the original version of the attraction.