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.

Armchair Imagineering: Escape From the Shadowman!

I've inspired myself! It happens sometimes—spend enough time spitballing ideas, and one of them is bound to stick to the wall. While writing last week's post, I liked my sketchy idea for a dark ride based on The Princess and the Frog so much that I decided to develop it in more detail. It's a pity I was sick a few weeks ago and had to do a filler post, or this would have come out just in time for Mardi Gras, but we all have to play the hand we're dealt.

Premise

Dr. Facilier has turned us into frogs because...reasons! We must escape his shadow-minions through the Louisiana bayou and return to New Orleans before midnight on Mardi Gras because...also reasons!

Obviously, this ride concept references the plot of The Princess and the Frog in only the broadest of strokes. I keep saying that the best rides are those that focus on the guests rather than making them passive observers to a narrative, and I stand by that. We're not here for Tiana and Naveen. We're here for us.

You'll see what I mean when I get to the details of the ride itself.

Imagineering Theory: Princess's Interesting Dark Ride

Last week, I noted that there are actually very few Princess rides in the Disney theme parks (because it's hard to make a good ride out of a love story) and then did a little analysis of the two that do exist in the Disneyland Resort: Snow White's Scary Adventures and The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel's Undersea Adventure. This week, I thought it might be fun to follow up on the first bit. Which Princess movies would make good dark rides? How best to translate the themes and settings of a given movie into a quality ride?

It promises to be an interesting intellectual exercise, at any rate, so let's get going!

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.

After-Action Report: Radiator Springs Racers

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.

Imagineering Theory: The How and Why of Dark Rides

In this Imagineering Theory article, we’ll explore that staple of Disney theme parks, the animated film-based dark ride. We’ll see what makes them effective, what doesn’t make them effective, and how this information has typically played into actual Imagineering decisions about which films to turn into rides.

For starters, what is meant by “dark ride”? While any ride taking place in an enclosed building can be considered a dark ride (even if the scenes are actually well lit), for the purposes of this article we’ll consider only the “classic” type: a ride involving a simple, relatively slow-moving, electric-powered vehicle that transports guests through a sequence of blacklit scenes that tell a story. Disney’s dark rides are an elaboration of the “haunted house” type of attraction found at many amusement parks dating back to the early 20th Century. These primitive precursors provided the ride system and the basic special effects, but tying it all together with a story was Walt Disney’s own innovation.

However, while the story is the thing that sets Disney dark rides apart from their competitors, it is not the most important factor in creating each unique experience. Indeed, most dark rides do not do a very good job of summarizing their respective films. Notable scenes may be whittled down to a single image and line of dialogue, placed out of order or eliminated altogether, while less plot-relevant sequences may be given disproportionate attention. This is because the job of a dark ride is not to simply tell the story, but to allow the riders to experience it for themselves by transporting them to the fantastic settings depicted in the film. Place, not plot, is the most important factor.