After-Action Report: A Tale of Two Dark Rides

Much to the delight of little girls (and often the chagrin of their parents), Disneyland features what might charitably be called a lot of Princess content. There’s the Castle, of course, with its walkthrough attraction. Several shops focus exclusively on Princess merchandise from dolls to costumes to stationery sets, the Princess movies are favorites for abridging into stage shows, every parade has a Princess unit, and the Princess character meet-and-greets eventually got so popular that an entire sub-district of Fantasyland was built around them.

But you know what the Disney Princesses don’t get very many of? Actual rides. And this is true not just of the Disneyland Resort but of Disney theme parks as a whole. Seriously, how many rides centered on a Princess character can you think of? Like, three, right?

This may be because for all their popularity and grandeur, the Princess movies are not ideal for conversion into rides. Remember the cardinal rule of good attraction design: Put the Guests in the Center of the Action. Most of Disney's Princess films actually don't have a lot of action per se, focusing more on an internal journey (falling in love, discovering self-worth, etc.) than an external one. Show someone a movie, letting them spend upwards of an hour getting to know the main character, and you can usually get them to go along with an internal journey. But a theme park ride rarely affords its participants more than about ten minutes to absorb its content—nowhere near enough time to develop a sympathetic bond with a character, even if they weren't distracted by the physical presence of it all.

Nowhere is this clearer than in comparing the two Princess rides that can be found in the Disneyland Resort. One the one hand, we have Snow White's Scary Adventures, the classic that does it all right, bizarre points and all. On the other, we have The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel's Undersea Adventure,* the newcomer that falls flat in so many ways.

The Fairest One of All

Snow White's Scary Adventures may be the archetypal classic dark ride, and in that sense it works because of, not despite of, its strange presentation. People often comment wryly on the abruptness of its ending, especially the way it goes directly from the climactic showdown with the Witch to “happily ever after” without so much as a segue. However, that isn't the only weird thing about its “story.” This ride, like most classic dark rides, is not really interested in offering a beat-for-beat summary of the movie that inspired it. It is rather about setting and atmosphere—especially, as the title indicates, the frightening parts of Snow White's journey from oppressed drudge to “happily ever after.” This is why it works when a dark ride focusing on a love story can hardly help but fail—it is much, much easier to get theme park guests to play along with being scared than with falling in love. The latter is far too personal and intimate.

Theme park historians point out that in the classic Disneyland dark rides, we the riders take the place of the main character...but that's an imperfect description of Snow White's Scary Adventures, which features many scenes where Snow White was never present in the film. I've heard the interpretation that the ride sequence represents a nightmare Snow White is having sometime after the fact, with all the images of her ordeal blending together illogically, but that notion has its own problems. Why would a peaceful interlude in the Dwarfs' jewel mine—a place Snow White never visited—feature in her nightmare? Why would she dream of the Queen transforming into the Witch when she never had any inkling they were one and the same? Doesn't the very idea of her having nightmares afterward undercut the “happily ever after” ending of this simple fairy tale? Most importantly, there is no reason to impose a literal reading of any sort on the exercise in impressionism that is a classic dark ride.

So if Snow White's Scary Adventures isn't exactly a narrative in first-person perspective, then what is it? Like I said above: it's an exercise in impressionism. The ride ushers you through a sequence of very brief scenes whose importance lies in their immediate emotional impact. The cottage scene, with the performing dwarfs and friendly onlooking animals, charms. The jewel mine, with its glowing colors and innocuous music, delights. Most of the rest of the ride, with its simultaneously dark and garish palettes, threatening score, and jump-scares involving the Witch, startles and horrifies. There is a logic to the sequence, but it's not a narrative logic but rather one of shifting mood—we start out in the bright, celebratory cottage setting, pass through the mysterious but still pleasant mine, and then take a hard turn into horror territory. I think the “nightmare” interpretation appeals to people because there is something very dreamlike about this ride. Actual dreams often consist of little more than imagery and emotion tone, upon which our waking minds may impose a sense of narrative after the fact. Snow White's Scary Adventures confuses our conscious minds, which expect a narrative. But our subconscious minds, which engender dreams, are right in their own milieu here.

This is the correct approach to take for such a short ride. Snow White's Scary Adventures doesn't have time to be anything other than impressionistic. Bless the Imagineers for realizing this, way back in the Fifties—for getting things right on the first try in this novel medium. Actually, I don't quite remember the first version of the ride, before the 1983 makeover of Fantasyland...but if it was anything like the version that ran in Orlando up until the mid-Nineties, it was even more dreamlike (and less like a straightforward retelling of the film) than it is now. All the classic-style dark rides use their associated films as a jumping-off point more than a script—emphasizing, de-emphasizing, and re-ordering various aspects and plot events as needed to create the correct mood to fill around two to three minutes of ride time—but Snow White's Scary Adventures shows just how far afield you can go without veering into total abstraction or making the film branding seem wholly arbitrary. It's not as thrilling as Peter Pan's Flight, as deliciously transgressive as Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, or as trendy as Alice in Wonderland, but it's a good 'un.

A Headstrong, Lovesick Girl

So if classic dark rides need to be impressionistic and sketched in broad strokes in order to convey a single mood within a very short timeframe, what about the newer dark rides, which tend to be much longer? Surely they can afford to hew closer to their source material? Maybe...but I have yet to see it done well. When it comes to really empathizing with a main character, ten minutes is hardly any better than two, so it's still a poor format for expressing a personal internal journey.

The sad thing is that in many ways, The Little Mermaid is an ideal animated film for conversion into a dark ride. It's one of Disney's iconic works, much of it takes place in exotic environments that guests can enjoy visiting even in the absence of a narrative throughline, and the plot is anchored by noteworthy, instantly recognizable events that could easily be converted into the beats of a traditional dark ride. In fact, Imagineers recognized its potential and began developing a ride concept in the Nineties.** Unfortunately, that project was shelved for a couple of decades and what we eventually wound up with...uh...

Look, I'm not saying The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel's Undersea Adventure is a bad ride. But it falls flat for me. How can one Princess dark ride be so great and another—built, no less, with the benefit of decades of further developments in attraction design and technology—so mediocre?

Well, one problem is one that's probably going to dog the art of the animated movie-based dark ride for the foreseeable future: the focus on characters. I think it's safe to say that starting with the Renaissance, the Disney Princess movies began doing a much better job of making their leading ladies into memorable characters than they had in the classic era. Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora—as well as the protagonists of many other classic animated films—are basically ciphers, neutral personas who are more acted-upon than acting and hence are easy for any given viewer to project into. This makes it only natural to frame a dark ride as being from such a character's own perspective, as riders can slip right into that viewpoint with no hesitation. A character like Ariel, on the other hand, has a well-defined personality and a strong screen presence. We can all enjoy watching her perhaps, but not all of us will find it easy to imagine being her.

Beyond that, there is the issue of character-centered branding that basically demands a ride based on a movie include ample visual appearances of its leading character(s). The long and the short of it is that there is much more benefit to be had from building a Little Mermaid ride that frequently shows off Ariel to its riders, than building one that drops them into her perspective.

Now, this doesn't have to result in a lackluster “book report ride.” For example, Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin includes multiple appearances by Roger without relegating guests to the role of mere spectators. It does this by presenting an all-new adventure in Toontown in which the guests get caught up. But that's a special circumstance that definitely wouldn't work for The Little Mermaid, which is a self-contained fairy tale, direct-to-video sequels/prequels and Saturday morning cartoons notwithstanding. A better bet might be the Pinocchio's Daring Journey approach, where guests slip in and out of Pinocchio's perspective, sometimes seeing him present in the scene, sometimes experiencing his trials for themselves.

The Mermaid dark ride, unfortunately, takes neither approach. This is a by-the-numbers book report ride in every sense of the word. We get on the ride. Scuttle tells us we're going to see Ariel's story. We see Ariel's story—or rather the musical highlights of it***—in sequence. Scuttle tells us we just saw Ariel's story. We get off the ride. At no point do the characters interact with us in any meaningful fashion; for the most part they appear completely oblivious to our presence. Most of the time, we're not even really in the scene, but off to one side of it. Watching.

There's a reason, of course, why the characters on the ride can't pay us much heed. Unlike most dark rides, which use a bus bar system with a 30-second (or so) gap between cars, TLM~AUA is an Omnimover. This means that it can't utilize the standard dark ride trick of having each car trigger the dialogue and effects of a scene, which then reset afterward for the next car. Its scenes have to play continuously in accordance with the continuous passage of ride vehicles. And that means that none of the events of the ride can go anywhere. Each scene has to exist in a sort of hovering stasis, presenting a situation that is perpetually in the middle of occurring, allowing no one to witness its beginning or ending because then the timing would be off for someone else. If Ursula makes a grandiose threatening gesture at you, then she is not making it at the people to your right and left, leaving them with an inferior ride experience.

This sort of thing is completely fine with an Omnimover ride in the vein of the Haunted Mansion, where riders are not being presented with a story so much as an experience in a fantastic location. But for a dark ride made in the “book report” mold, supposedly recreating a specific tale, it's poison.

So the problem with this ride is a snowballing one—a series of inferior design choices that exacerbate each other, instead of being potentially mitigated by more solid ideas. Again, it's not that it's a bad ride. But it is underwhelming. And—given the potential that was tossed aside—disappointing. I think it's reasonable to say that something has gone wrong when even casual theme park guests like your ride building's exterior and queue better than the ride itself. (And it is a lovely exterior. Credit where credit is due.)

I don't pretend to know everything about ride design. My Imagineering degree comes from the University of Armchair and is signed in metallic Sharpie by someone called D. Dilettante. But I do have nearly 40 years of field experience when it comes to analyzing Disney dark rides, and I know what does and doesn't work for me. And I know I'm not alone in thinking that Ariel's Undersea Adventure is missing something vital in comparison to the dark rides of yesteryear. Hopefully this little compare-and-contrast helps to zero in on what that something is.

* The Disneyland website spells it with a tilde. So that's what I'm doing.

** A CGI rendering of the ride was included with the bonus material for the Special Edition DVD, and I highly recommend watching it.

*** My sister and I have given the attraction the snarktastic nickname, “The Little Mermaid: The Soundtrack: The Ride.”