After-Action Report: The Fantasyland Dark Rides

Wow, how long has it been since I did an After-Action Report post? According to my records, it's been...oh. About three months. It seems longer. You know, when I first began this blog, right after the Bronze Age Collapse, I assumed the bulk of it would be me yammering on about existing attractions and other features, what I like and don't like about them and so forth. Funny, that.

This one has been a long time coming, I think. For some reason, theme park bloggers don't talk much about the Fantasyland dark rides as much as we probably should, considering they are in many ways the bread and butter of Disneyland's branding. The quintessential Disney theme park ride is one based on an animated movie, and these are the classic examples. Even I usually just bring them up in passing rather than applying any sort of analysis; on the rare occasions when I do devote an entire post to just one of them, it tends to be a shorter-than-usual example of its type. These rides just are not big enough to spark many deep and rambling thoughts.

And that's fine. They're bite-sized morsels of delight. So for this post, I'm not going to exhaustively list their individual features or even do much comparing and contrasting between them. I'm just going to highlight a few unique points of each—believe it or not, although they justifiably vary quite a bit in popularity, each of the five Fantasyland dark rides can claim to be the best at something.

Snow White's Scary Adventures

Now, this ride I have addressed in some depth before, mostly to contrast it with the other Princess-based dark ride in the Disneyland Resort. You can read that post here...and you probably should, since I have no intention of rehashing it now.

Instead I'm going to talk about the queue.

The queues for the Fantasyland dark rides are not elaborate. They a) don't need to be, and b) can't afford to be given their small footprints. The “entertainment” while you wait tends to consist of, at most, a mural or similar in the load area that you can look at, and a medley of music from the movie in question, usually pulled straight from the film's score.

Snow White, however, actually has a pre-show of sorts, with moving parts and interactive elements and everything. For starters, you can hardly fail to notice the Evil Queen pulling back the curtains every minute or so to glare down at anyone and everyone within her line of sight. Then you have, right at the building's entrance, the “golden” (actually brass) apple and book. That apple sure makes a tempting prize; why don't you go ahead and grab it?

Finally, just inside the entrance is a barred window overlooking this tableau:

There is a short (5-6 minutes) audio loop consisting of remixed dialogue and sound effects from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, wherein you hear the Witch mulling over her poison apple spell, the bubbling of her cauldron and alchemy equipment, and the raven's caws. It's not visible in the photo, but as you pass by that archway toward the right, you can see the raven's shadow projected on the wall beyond, as if the Witch and her bird were having their nefarious not-really-a-conversation just in the next room.

(There is no next room. The scene is right up against the outer wall of the ride façade.)

All of this was installed during the 1982-83 refurbishment of Fantasyland, at the same time that the name of the attraction was formalized as Snow White's Scary Adventures. Apparently, too many parents of young children had gone in expecting a cheerful fairytale scenario, only to pull screaming, traumatized toddlers off the ride afterward. With the Villain emphasized right at the outset, no one can claim they weren't fairly warned.

That's another unique thing about Snow White's Scary Adventures—it's the only Disney dark ride I can think of that really goes dark. Pinocchio's Daring Journey and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride have some alarming moments, even Alice in Wonderland gets a little freaky at times...but none of them are out to be as hardcore as Snow. It really goes to show that a ride doesn't have to go fast or be rooted in the latest PG-13 action blockbuster to be intense.

Pinocchio's Daring Journey

You probably won't find many people willing to label Pinocchio's Daring Journey the best at anything. It's easily the least popular of the Fantasyland dark rides, with wait times rarely topping 20 minutes even on busy days. And it's got a lot going against it—it didn't even exist until the Eighties refurb, when it took over space from the old Fantasyland Theater, so it has fewer generations of nostalgia to draw on than its companions. The movie Pinocchio isn't very popular anymore (though it should be). And even people in the Disney parks fandom, whom it should be able to fall back on for support, tend to criticize it as the thing that kicked off the trend of “book report” rides—rides that merely provide a third-person summary of their source material rather than a unique experience.

I don't think it's as bad as that. Yes, Pinocchio's Daring Journey is more...let's say narratively coherent, than the other dark rides, and yes it has a lot more appearances of its title character than the others, even after their recent updates, but I hesitate to say it offers no unique experiences. There are plenty of points during the ride where guests, not characters, are the focus of events. You go into Stromboli's cage, you get addressed repeatedly by Jiminy Cricket, you meander through the chaotic environment of Pleasure Island. Riders are not locked into Pinocchio's perspective, but rather coast in and out of it according to the needs of a scene. And most of the time, it's gratifyingly seamless. We see Pinocchio in a hanging cage, his nose extended by two feet (a good reason to use third-person in that moment), and then we enter a large cage on the floor, and when we emerge, Jiminy is yelling at us not to wander off to Pleasure Island. At what point, exactly, did the transition take place?

So that's what Pinocchio's Daring Journey does best—it pretty efficiently squares the circle of sending guests on their own adventure without obscuring the story it started with. It's not as experimental as its elders, perhaps, but it's a worthy neighbor.

Peter Pan's Flight

This is one that got a post all to itself a while back. You can read that here. My opinion of the ride has not changed in the past year or so, so I'll just go ahead and say what it does best out of the five Fantasyland dark rides.

Quite simply, Peter Pan's Flight is the best of the five, as its frustratingly long lines will attest. It hits all the right notes, from the adaptation of a film that nearly everyone loves, to the suspended track providing the closest approximation to true flight that a 64-year-old theme park ride can manage, to the according focus on the flight sequence that caps off Act 1 of the film. It's an experience that has yet to be topped, at least by rides in the same general category.

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

This is the other Fantasyland dark ride that I have honored with its own After-Action Report. In a more recent post, I labeled Mr. Toad's Wild Ride as “transcendent,” by which I mean not that it provides some sort of quasi-spiritual experience, but that it literally transcends its source material, existing fully as its own thing.

What is Toad the best at? That very trick of standing on its own, apart from the movie that spawned it. It's helped by the fact that the movie itself has become so obscure, but even apart from that, this ride adds details to its source material, whereas the others only strip them out in the interest of streamlining for such a transient format. It's the “deleted scene” ride—and what scenes they are!

Toad makes us question our choices in life. How many other attractions can you say that about?

Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland has a couple of unique traits we can discern before we even get to it, just perusing the park map. It's the only Fantasyland dark ride not located in the Courtyard. It's also the only one that simply bears the same title as its movie, instead of dressing it up with a descriptive phrase.

I'm going to go ahead and say that it doesn't need a unique title. The names of the other dark rides tell you something about what to expect from the ride as distinct from the movie that inspired it. Peter Pan's Flight takes you flying. Pinocchio's Daring Journey emphasizes Pinoke's travels out into danger and back home again, more so than the “morality tale” aspect of the story. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride speaks for itself. With Alice in Wonderland, the name of the movie already describes what you can expect from the ride: exploring Wonderland. It is a Disney dark ride distilled to its most perfect form.

And nobody else has it.

The other dark rides have all been copied in at least one other park, even if the copies were removed later. But no other park has, or has ever had, an Alice dark ride. They have to content themselves with Tea Cups and hedge mazes and hat shops.

That means that no one but us Anaheimers gets to experience the best layout out of all the Fantasyland dark rides. Peter Pan's Flight takes you flying and that's rad, but its elevation changes take place within large spaces where the track could easily have done something else. Alice's caterpillar cars move along the ground, and its elevation changes are more built-in, and I literally figured out as I was typing this that they mimic the feeling of growing and shrinking and how boss is that???

Fun fact: the Alice show space intersects with the Toad show space—there are parts of Alice's upper level where if you drilled down through the floor, you'd see Toad. I don't know exactly which parts, and I would love to find out.

(Actually, I would love to have access to three-dimensional computer models of all of Disney's ride layouts and how they fit into their respective buildings and intersect with other rides. I would buy that app. For real. Disney, get on that.)

At the end of the day, the Fantasyland dark rides close down so that they can shoot off fireworks from the Castle parapets.

Wait. Hang on, that was supposed to be a figure of speech.

At the end of the day, the Fantasyland dark rides are a team. They all use the same basic principles of ride design to deliver very different moods and experiences. They have different strengths and weaknesses, but they all support the idea of Fantasyland as a place of fairy tales, fables, and magical adventures. I love them all.

And with that, I have a bittersweet announcement to make. I've thought about this good and hard, and I've come to the conclusion that I can't commit to a weekly posting schedule for this blog anymore. Over the last few months I've watched the following pattern unfold: On Sunday afternoon or evening, I put the finishing touches on a post and upload it to drop Monday. Then I enter some sort of fugue state and not until Thursday do I realize that I have to write the next post. This leaves me scrambling to a) think of a topic I haven't tackled before, b) write the dang thing, and c) find whatever images or other resources I need to properly illustrate it, if any.

That's no way to create quality content for a blog, and I have indeed become increasingly dissatisfied with my output here. Not to mention, this method tends to use up all my weekend creative energy, and all the other things I like to do with my free time suffer. So I'm turning off my deadlines. Don't worry—the blog itself is not going anywhere and I will continue to post. Just not on a weekly basis. Not on a scheduled basis at all, in fact. I will post when I have something meaningful to say about some aspect of the parks, and have been able to put in the time to express it well.

In the meantime, I am reasonably active on Tumblr (link in the sidebar), and there are things going on that are almost certain to generate some thoughts in this tired old noggin of mine. I thank my few but loyal readers for your continued support.