I
have a love-hate relationship with Cars Land. The
Cars franchise may well be Pixar's weakest concept,* and it really
has nothing to offer me in particular. There are several reasons, but
for our purposes here, the main one is that I'm not interested in
cars. Never have been. And especially in the context of a theme park,
where I prefer to be surrounded by things I don't
see and hear every hour of every day. If it had been my decision to
make, I never would have put Cars
in a Disney theme park, especially not to the extent of building an
entire huge themed land.
And
yet...
And
yet...
I
cannot deny that Cars Land, apart from the dumb name, is really,
really well done. I
mean, look at this:
And
that's not even the town part. This is the town part:
This
is Imagineering at its placemaking best. The attention paid to detail
here is phenomenal. You walk into Cars Land, and you're there,
in a tiny town in the American Southwest, with jagged cliffs of red
sandstone in the distance. I'm sure it helped that they had the
setting pre-rendered in three digital dimensions for their
convenience, but they still had to figure out how to create it in
three actual
dimensions, and it's stunning work.
A
lot of cleverness went
into the execution. The businesses of Radiator Springs have been
translated into typical theme park fixtures. The hippie VW bus's
“organic fuel” station is a beverage stand, the paint shop is a
clothing store, the souvenir shop is...a souvenir shop. Businesses
with no ready counterpart have either been adjusted or made the sites
of rides. But the area's tentpole attraction, Radiator Springs
Racers, isn't located in the town at all—it takes place on the
outskirts, amid those magnificent buttes seen in the top photo.
I
actually haven't been on it many times—three or four, total, since
it opened.
This is because a) it's in the park I don't favor, b) it's Cars,
and c) the wait time frequently tops two hours. But I never regret
riding it. It's too dang good...maybe the best execution of a ride
concept in years.
Actually,
calling Radiator Springs Racers a ride is underselling it. It's three
rides in one, plus a fantastically immersive queue that expands on
the source material in a charming way. I'll start with the queue
since—as mentioned above—we're going to be standing in it for a
while.
Stanley's
Oasis
In
front of Cars Land’s firehouse is a little statue of a rather
goon-faced Ford Model T labeled “Stanley – Our Founder – 1909.”
This is one of the details from the movie that was slavishly
reproduced for California Adventure, but the park expands on it with
a complete backstory concerning this character and the
founding of the town. It’s whimsical, but has the air of a more
grounded small-town history.
This
backstory forms the basis of the Radiator Springs Racers queue area,
which winds its way through “Stanley’s Oasis,” the original
rest-stop/tourist attraction that eventually evolved into Radiator
Springs. Using a ride’s queue to explain its backstory is nothing
new for Disney theme parks, but there’s a twist here—the
backstory isn’t really for
the ride. Stanley’s story doesn’t bear on the average guest’s
understanding of Radiator Springs Racers. It’s more the case that
the backstory
explains the queue—they
needed a large area to hold people waiting for this top-notch
attraction, and it would make neither geographical nor logistical
sense to use any portion of the town itself, so the Imagineers
invented this little outskirts area for the purpose and wrote a town
history to tie it in. Otherwise we'd all be spending two hours
shuffling through generic landscaping and wishing we'd remembered to
bring an umbrella to use as a sunshade.
That’s
the sort of thing I like to see in a movie tie-in attraction—give
people the iconic stuff from the movie, sure, but don’t stop
there. Expand.
Make the world of the movie real
by showing us that there was more to it than just the parts required
by that particular story.
As
for the content of Stanley's Oasis, it's a series of kitschy little
car-related displays—collections of antique radiator caps and
license plates from different states, a few old-fashioned gasoline
pumps—that must be of sincere interest to car people. It's not my
cup of tea, but I don't begrudge them.
Ride
#1: The Scenic Drive
Upon
boarding the actual ride, you (and another car, the reason for which
will be revealed shortly) embark on a nice little scenic drive of the
rural area adjacent to the town. It's not quite as wooded on the ride
as it is in the film, but the landscaping is lovely and naturalistic,
and we get an up-close view of landmarks like the bridge and
waterfall:
There's
music too: an abridged version of “McQueen and Sally” from the
Cars
soundtrack. The music in that film is a distinctly mixed bag, but
I've always been fond of that track, especially in the way it swells
from simple country-bluegrass instrumentals to an orchestral fanfare
reminiscent of epic Westerns. And that leads us into the next part of
the ride...
Ride
#2: The Dark Ride
Look,
when I said it was three rides in one, I wasn't kidding. After about
forty seconds in the fresh air (it feels longer, fortunately), your
car enters a darkened show building and you get...a classic style
Disney dark ride.
This
is the part I really was not expecting. All the advertising for the
ride emphasized the outdoor portions. And if you'd told me before the
fact that Disney was planning a dark ride based on Cars,
I probably would have rolled my eyes hard enough to break windows
with the shockwave. Imagineering's recent track record with this
format has not been stellar; the demand for character branding means
that guests are often relegated to the role of spectators to movie
scenes reproduced a little too
faithfully to be worth the bother. (Compare this to older dark rides
that give guests a first-person perspective of the action, which is
often rendered in a more-or-less impressionistic fashion for a more
visceral experience.) It's bad enough when they do this with a good
movie such as The
Little Mermaid;
the prospect of doing it with a mediocre one would have been too much
to bear.
Radiator
Springs Racers doesn't deal in impressionism, but in presentation and
content it's much more like a classic dark ride than like most of the
newer ones. It recaps some of the memorable moments of Cars,
but with you
as the protagonist. The characters address you directly and you
experience those film moments in the first person. Because, you see,
this is not a synopsis of Cars.
This is a new story about some previously unknown cars who arrive in
Radiator Springs and, after a bit of kerfuffle, engage in an
impromptu race.
Ride
#3: The Thrill Ride
Remember
how the cars have been moving through the ride two at a time? This is
why. Toward the end of the dark ride portion, the track splits. You
and this other car are going to race.
First, as an excuse to include more characters and some fun effects,
you both have to get gussied up. One side of the track leads to the
tire salon and the other to the paint shop. This part is genuinely
fun and cute on both sides—the one bumps your car around to
simulate rapid tire-installation and then lets you check out your new
whitewalls in a mirror, and the other has nozzles spray a bit of mist
that honestly smells like paint. Then you hear some inspiring words
from Doc Hudson before literally heading off to the races.
I
want to take a moment here to praise the audio-animatronics in this
ride. Simply put, they're phenomenal. They really move like the
characters in the movie, with light bobbing motions, and they talk
like them too. Granted, some of the characters, like McQueen and
Sally, have mouths that are just little mobile apertures in otherwise
smooth front ends. These animatronics' mouths are projections. But
then you have the ones whose mouths are their front bumpers, like Doc
and Sheriff, and the Imagineers have recreated that design in solid
real life, and it looks amazing.
I
often lament the proliferation of projection effects at the expense
of practical ones, and this
is why,
people. There's no real comparison. A real thing will always beat a
picture of one, and if this ride proves anything, it's that
Imagineering can make real things nearly as flexible and versatile as
pictures if
they are allowed to.
You don't have to give a fig about Cars,
or even about cars, to appreciate the talent and ingenuity that went
into making these
cars live.
Good
stuff. Good, good
stuff.
Okay,
so, the race. Once outfitted with your new tires/paint, you exit the
shop and pull up alongside the other car, the split tracks now
parallel. And this is where the ride dabbles in expert psychology.
You sit there for just a few seconds, juuuuuuuust
long enough to glance over at the other car and make eye contact with
one of the riders. And suddenly, this race—this race that you only
had an inkling you were going to participate in—matters
to you. That smug tourist over there is going down.
Then
you launch back outside to begin the race itself. And I do mean
launch—the
ride uses electromagnetic propulsion to get the cars moving up to 64
mph. Between that, the tight turns, and the element of “competition”
(however illusory), there's plenty here to keep thrill-seekers
entertained. On the whole, however, the race is probably the weakest
segment of the ride. High speed is high speed, and without extra
effort put into the scene-setting, one fast ride is pretty much like
another. Compared to what precedes it, it's pretty ordinary. But
still, you
want to win,
and that makes every second riveting.
Of
course, whether you win or not, you still get to enjoy the
spectacular finale as your car coasts back inside the show building
for the beautiful Tail Light Cavern:
Yes,
the idea of tail lights as natural formations is silly, but the
execution is pretty stunning—not quite on the level of the caverns
in Pirates of the Caribbean, but an ambitious creation all the same.
Natural luminescence in caves is one of those things we just find
compelling, and its placement here at the end of the ride makes it
feel like a true reward.
Something
like Radiator Springs Racers doesn't exist in a vacuum, and not only
is it impressive as it is, but I would characterize it as a welcome
surprise. Too often these days, it seems, the decision-makers use IP
as a substitute for innovative attraction development, hoping to
entice guests through the power of brand recognition so they can
slash the budgets. They didn't do that here and the results speak for
themselves—this ride, and the surrounding environment of Cars Land,
make the Cars
franchise palatable even for someone like me. It all just leaves one
nagging question...
Why
couldn't they put this kind of effort in for something that deserves
it?
*
The Good Dinosaur was
very disappointing, but at least the premise was fairly ambitious.
Cars is extremely
conventional by comparison.
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