Sometimes, you have to look really hard — or get incredibly lucky — to see an Easter egg Disneyland Imagineers have placed in one of the park’s rides.

But on Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, the new ride that opened Jan. 27, the secrets are right there in plain sight … as long as you know what to look for.

In fact, the ride holds a unique distinction: It has more hidden Mickeys than any other attraction in the entire Disneyland resort. The same goes for the Walt Disney World version, too. How many? “A hysterical number,” Sarah Kibler, an Imagineer who worked on the interior design of the ride building and the ride queue, tells SFGATE. “I can’t answer that question — but there are little kernels of Mickey everywhere through this attraction.”

If that sounds vague, that’s because there’s no actual way to count the number of nods to the mouse inside Mickey’s first dedicated ride at the park. It takes riders into the El Capitoon Theatre to see a Mickey and Minnie movie and then brings them through the screen and into the movie itself … until Goofy gets involved and things go off the rails, literally. Hidden Mickeys are veritably everywhere you look: windows on the theater doors, reels of film on the wall, air bubbles in the underwater scene and fireworks over Mickey and Minnie’s picnic all depict the mouse. The popped popcorn kernels in the ride queue’s concession stand are all shaped like Mickey, Minnie and Donald. (There’s a lot more to unpack about the concessions, but we’ll get to that in a minute.)

Even the wooden beams above the boarding area have hidden Mickeys in them — albeit a different kind. Once you’re in your ride car, before the ride starts moving, look up: you’ll see the words “Mickey” and “Minnie” painted into the wood grain of the beams above you.

Beyond hidden Mickeys, there are extensive nods to Disney history throughout the attraction.

If you keep looking up in the first ride scene, you’ll spot “Yensid Way” and a year inscribed above the entrance to the tunnel: 1928. If you’re a Disney historian, you might recognize that as the year Mickey Mouse first appeared in a Disney cartoon, “Steamboat Willie.” Another unseen — but heard — nod to that cartoon pertains to Goofy’s train: Imagineers used the original whistle from “Steamboat Willie” to create the sound of the train whistle, according to Disney fan club D23.

“Oswald the Lucky Rabbit gets a shout-out on a newspaper with the headline ‘Oswald Wins!,’ a reference to the character created by Walt Disney that pre-dates Mickey Mouse,” Beth Deitchman wrote on the D23 blog. “The Iwerks and Uwerks Waterworks water treatment plant pays tribute to Disney Legend Ub Iwerks, who is credited with sketching Mickey for the very first time. The 1401 Flower Shop takes inspiration from Walt Disney Imagineering’s Glendale, California, headquarters.”

There are also other numbers that pop throughout: 11/18, for Mickey’s birthday, and 1901, for Walt’s birth year.

The ride opened at Walt Disney World in 2020; the main difference between that ride and this one is the ride queue. Whereas the Florida version replaced an existing ride and had to work within that building, the Anaheim version had an entirely new building to utilize, and built an indoor queue that looks like a movie theater lobby and holds an exhibit curated by the “Toontown Hysterical Society” of props and costumes used by Mickey in his movies. (In the queue, the conceit is that he’s a real-life person and that cartoons are no different than live films.)

“Something really special about our queue here is that we're actually walking through ‘Mickey through the Ears,’” Kibler explains. “The Tunetown Hysterical Society has set up an exhibit. So while we are on our way to go see ‘Perfect Picnic,’ we can look at these different eras of Mickey Mouse cartoons. It's a great opportunity for families to come together and point to their favorite shorts from ‘Steamboat Willie’ all the way to ‘Potatoland.’”

Among those are hidden nods to other Disney favorites. Tucked away in the Mickey Mouse disco area is a “Scrooge and Marley” ledger book; all the names listed in the book are cast and crew members from “Mickey’s Christmas Carol.” Also in the disco area is a gold record Mickey “earned” for “Mickey Mouse Disco.” On the plaque it says he sold 23 copies — a nod to 1923, the year of the company’s founding and the inspiration for the current Disney100 celebration. The record label is G-Force Records, which is the label from the Aerosmith Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

The area of the queue that has the most little details, by far, is the concession stand. In addition to the character-shaped popcorn, there are lots of insider references. The totals on the cash registers are 11.18 and 19.28 (no dollar signs), those milestone dates. The condiments are from Begorra Orchards, a reference to Patrick Begorra, the storied “Little Man of Disneyland.” On the bottle of barbecue sauce: a nod to Smoke Tree Ranch, the Palm Springs retreat where Walt and Lillian Disney vacationed often. On the “Partners” statue in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle, he’s depicted wearing the Smoke Tree Ranch tie pin he famously wore. (In the Disney California Adventure statue, the Smoke Tree logo is on the bottom of his foot.)

The candy has incredible detail, too. There are Laugh-O-Grams, a nod to Disney’s first animation company, which went bankrupt before he started The Walt Disney Company. The Gummi Bears are made with “real Gummiberry juice,” just like from the ’80s cartoon “Adventures of the Gummi Bears” on the Disney Channel. Mallard Cups are a reference to “Darkwing Duck”; instead of Darkwing being “the terror that flaps in the night,” this box says, “These are the treats you eat in the night.”

There are so many more Easter eggs, too many to list, including references to the Imagineers who designed the ride. But why put so much focus on all of these little hidden details in this one ride in particular?

“This is such an important milestone for us, bringing Mickey and Minnie to Disneyland to Toontown,” Marnie Burress, a portfolio project management executive working on bringing Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway to Anaheim, tells SFGATE. “We have to get this right.”