After-Action Report: Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy

Can you believe it's October already? Bring on the Halloween-themed posts!

Space Mountain is probably the last ride you would expect to see dolled up for a holiday—any holiday. I mean...it's Space Mountain. There just aren't any major holidays where outer space is a big deal. Galaxy Day? All Comets' Eve? These are not actual things.

On the other hand, sometimes you get some interesting space motifs for Halloween. Aliens—abducting, probing, mutilating livestock, hunting us for sport, bleeding our planet dry*—are starting to take their place alongside more traditional horror monsters such as vampires and zombies and Swamp Things. Depending on whom you ask, they might be scarier than the old mainstays...after all, aliens might actually exist!

So maybe it's not too surprising that Space Mountain is the recipient of what is, in my eyes, the only proper Halloween overlay for a Disneyland attraction so far.

Some people find Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy inappropriate for just the reason given above. It's admittedly somewhat gimmicky, more fantastic than futuristic, and an injection of horror into a ride that arguably needs no such thing. But I like it. It's an interesting concept, well-executed. Space Mountain is about as close to a blank slate as a themed attraction can be while still qualifying as themed, so it's nice to see some experimentation to make it a little more specific.

Actually...in at least one respect, this version of the ride is superior to many of the permanent attractions to come out of Walt Disney Imagineering in recent years.

Here's why: It doesn't tell you what's going on.

It's often said that what sets Disney theme park rides ahead of the pack—or did, until the likes of Universal figured it out and it became the industry standard—is that they tell a story. Not content to simply strap you into a vehicle and subject you to a series of sharp motions and/or pop-up scares, Disney rides are usually arranged according to some sort of narrative logic. But here's the thing...“tell a story” is a phrase with multiple related but distinct meanings, and the most obvious one isn't necessarily the one that makes for the best themed experience. This is where I think the current generation of Imagineers often gets it wrong. They go with the most obvious meaning and “tell stories” via rides by introducing us to a third-person protagonist and showing us what they do from beginning to middle to end.

In short, they wind up making movies in ride form. On the surface, that might not seem to be a problem. After all, Disney movies are great! But watching a movie is fundamentally a vicarious experience. You sit still in a theater or someone's home, and everything that happens, happens on the other side of the screen. And there's nothing wrong with that, and movies can be powerfully affecting and satisfying experiences. But for people of most dispositions, having your own adventure is bound to be more satisfying than merely watching someone else's.

Good theme park rides take this into account and place the rider at the center of the action. Enough words have been spent on this principle, both here and elsewhere, online and off, that there's no need for me to expound on it here. What I want to point out is that thrill rides achieve this to some extent by their very nature. Even a roller coaster that is content to strap you in and subject you to a series of sharp motions is still subjecting you rather than Ariel or Captain America. This probably accounts for their popularity.

And it's even better when the ride designers manage to combine the excitement with a narrative. Disney's coasters do this very simply, via extensive theming. The “plot” of the Matterhorn Bobsleds is that you're bobsledding down the Matterhorn and having close encounters with the Yeti. The “plot” of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is that your mine train's brakes are out and you're careening all over the mine. The “plot” of Space Mountain (normal version) is that you're...joyriding in space? Something like that. Like I said, it's barely more than a blank slate. Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy ups the ante: you're zipping around space being pursued by a terrifying monster.

The best part? That's all you know.

Besides the Happening To You vs. Happening to Someone Else dichotomy, storytelling in a theme park ride can vary in how much of the story it tells. Do we get details or just suggestions? The Indiana Jones Adventure gives us a lot of specifics about the ride's setting and history, mostly in the queue (since the ride itself bounces around too much to be an effective detail-delivery system). It's done quite well there, with the information presented diegetically in the form of news broadcasts, temple décor, and an in-character filmstrip, and works well to make the fiction come to life and draw you into the story. By the time you board your transport, you've had a crash course in the purpose, iconography, and recent history of the eponymous Temple of the Forbidden Eye and can fully inhabit your “role” as a 1930s tourist hoping to gain the god Mara's favor.

Make no mistake: the Indiana Jones Adventure is a wonderful ride, in large part because of how immersive it is. But there is a downside to that much detailed info-dumping—every piece of information handed to the riders closes down that much potential for them to apply their own interpretations. There is no room, for example, for you to decide that the gifts of Mara are Personal Insight, Spiritual Treasure, and Purification, because the queue tells you, repeatedly, that they are Visions of the Future, Earthly Riches, and Eternal Youth.

Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy does nothing of the kind. The monster appears on the sign at the entrance, the viewscreen in the load area is showing some seriously corrupted video data, and...that's it until you're on the ride and being targeted for whatever mayhem the creature has in mind.** All you know going in is that this is the Halloween version of Space Mountain, so it's probably going to be scarier than normal, and if you take it at its word, ghosts are involved. No attempt is made to hand-hold you through the scenario. If you want more, you get to make it up yourself.

No, that wasn't a typo. I mean get to, not have to. Indulging your imagination is not a chore. On the contrary, it's immensely fun and satisfying, and Disneyland is at its very best when it encourages the process—when it raises questions but offers no concrete answers, only hints, open to interpretation by anyone who cares to take a crack at it.

(Come to think of it, Disneyland's other ghost ride does the same thing. There's something about ghost stories that invites this approach.)

The questions raised by Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy include: What is the monster? (Is it, as the ride title implies, a ghost? If so, a ghost of what?*** Is it an alien? An energy being? An artificial construct? A hallucination caused by low oxygen?) Why is it so hostile? (Is it hungry? Is it defending its territory? Is it the guardian of an alien civilization? Is it just evil on principle? Is it even really hostile, or are we misinterpreting its behavior because we don't know anything about it but that it looks scary?) How far will it go to catch us? Could it potentially threaten Earth? In such a case, how might it be stopped?

I could go on like this, but hopefully you get the idea. Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy may be more gimmicky than futuristic, but it's also a half-completed round-robin story that has just been handed off to you. Where will you take it from here?

* You know, in case we're not doing it fast enough ourselves.

** If you're in the area at night, you can also be treated to a series of projection effects on the exterior of Space Mountain depicting various attacks by the monster. They are very vague, however, and do more to provoke your curiosity than to reveal anything.

*** Given that it appears to made of solar flares, I like to think it's the ghost of a star. Why not? Stars have a life cycle of a sort, and “die” when their time is up. Why shouldn't they leave ghosts?