After-Action Report: Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin

Since bringing it up in the bunny-themed post of a couple weeks ago, I've been thinking I should devote a post to Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin. This is one of the most overlooked rides in Disneyland—not just by the general public, who tend to miss it due to its back corner location and lack of timelessly beloved central characters,* but by Disney theme park bloggers, who ought to know better. This is surprising, because it's one of the best dark rides in the park, weaving together flexible source material, an innovative ride concept, nifty effects, and an absolute commitment on the part of Imagineering to make the experience as seamless as possible within the limitations of the format and the mid-Nineties technology they had to work with.

But wait! There's more! And this is something that only occurred to me fairly recently—Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin is the first narrative Disney attraction I can think of that deliberately takes place in the themed land where it is physically located. I'll come back to this later.

The Source Material

I doubt there will be many people taking the time to read a Disney blog who have never seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but if you're one of them...you should fix that. It's a really fantastic film...so fantastic, in fact, that the author of the book that inspired it decided it was the “real” story and retconned his own work out of canon. It's simultaneously an affectionate parody of the film noir genre and a sterling example of the same, and of course it represents an absolute triumph of cinematography in its nearly flawless blending of traditional animation and live-action.

For our purposes here, though, the most important thing this movie achieved was introducing the concept of Toontown to the public consciousness. Disney had toyed with the concept of cartoon characters as actors portraying roles before, but this movie made it explicit and mainstream, and further postulated Toons as an entire category of being: celluloid-based life forms with their own community where the only law of physics is the Rule of Funny.

What's not to love about that?

Besides being a fun idea in and of itself, Toontown provides an immediate hook for further stories taking place in the film's continuity. Post-war Los Angeles—at least as the movie portrays it—is a fairly indifferent setting, but Toontown is rich with possibility.

And (Mickey's) Toontown is precisely what the ride gives us. There is no hint of Eddie Valiant, Dolores, R.K. Maroon, or the infinitely freaky Judge Doom, but the queue and ride combined give us not only Roger and Jessica, but Baby Herman, all five Weasels, Benny the cab, and even the gorilla bouncer at the Ink & Paint Club. Naturally, this departure means that the ride cannot simply recap the movie, but must tell an altogether new story involving these characters...and the guests. (See below.)

The Concept

It's interesting to note how many of Fantasyland's rides, especially in the beginning, were just standard carnival rides with a Disney veneer and a gimmick.** Dark rides are fun houses used to recreate scenes from animated films. The Mad Tea Party is a Tilt-a-Whirl that lets riders impart their own spin.

And Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin is what you get when a dark ride and the Mad Tea Party love each other very, very much.

Supposedly, Imagineers tested this concept by putting an actual Tea Cup on the track of the Haunted Mansion and riding it through while spinning, but I am skeptical. The rides can't be that modular, can they? If you want to tell me they kitbashed something involving the base of a Doom Buggy and a stripped-down spinning rig from a Tea Cup, I can believe that. But there's no way you can just put one ride vehicle on the track from a completely different, mechanically specialized ride, and have everything still work.

Never mind. It doesn't matter how they decided it was a good idea, because it manifestly is a good idea. The hybrid concept adds a dash of guest control—“interactivity,” if you like buzzwords—to the narrative structure of a dark ride. Good dark rides (good rides in general) already cast the guests in the roles of protagonists, whether by having them retrace the adventure of the main character in the source film, or by presenting an entirely new story (that nonetheless hits many of the same beats as the source film, because that's the stuff that makes us want to enter that world to begin with) which focuses on the guests. Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin, as mentioned above, takes the second approach...and then kicks it up a notch by making the guests literal hands-on participants in the motion of the vehicles. The effect of their participation is obviously cosmetic—the track layout is what it is, and in that sense you're not really “controlling” your car any more than when you frantically spin the unconnected wheel on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.*** But the psychological dimension matters. We feel like we're contributing.

And in all honesty, how we choose to spin that wheel does slightly alter our experience of the ride by changing our viewing angle. The Imagineers went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that we'd have something appropriate to look at no matter which way we were facing—a challenge rarely faced in dark ride design—and as with most top-level Imagineering efforts, there are so many clever details that you can ride dozens of times and still not catch them all.

The Effects

Well, actually, I'm just here to talk about one effect—the “portable hole” via which Roger saves your bacon at the end. This effect is so completely convincing—an obviously flat object is held up against an obviously solid wall, transforming it into a tunnel—that I've seen multiple people drive themselves to distraction trying to figure out how it works. (They usually wind up assuming projections of some kind are involved, because these days, projections are always involved.)

The actual secret is pretty well known at this point, but if you want to preserve the mystery...best skip to the end of this post, because I'm about to spill the beans!

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To recap, toward the end of Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin, we are in the Gag Factory warehouse. We approach an exterior wall, through which a Dip machine has crashed, with Smarty Weasel at the controls, threatening us. We hang a hard right to avoid the danger, moving parallel to the wall, only to find ourselves headed for a dead end. But wait! Roger Rabbit is there, and he's found a crate of portable holes! He holds up one easily big enough for us to escape through and, while we watch, stretches his arm to apply it to the wall, which visibly continues behind it in the meantime. Voilà—the wall sprouts a tunnel through which we flee the warehouse and return to the Toontown Cab Co.! Huzzah!

There are actually two effects in this scene, although the portable hole so overshadows the other—Roger's stretching arm—that most people don't bother to think about it. It's pretty simple: The arm is a long rod that extends through Roger's gloved hand and behind the “hole,” out of sight, and the glove, affixed to the hole, slides along it.

The hole effect itself is almost as simple, though the rig that operates it is quite sophisticated. The “tunnel” is basically a squared-off arch, painted black on the inside, that slides in and out of the wall. The portable hole is a flat black shape attached around the entrance, while the side of the tunnel nearest the riders is a mirror that reflects the wall and floor so that they appear to continue behind the hole. And that's it! It's all clever mechanics and a well-worn optical illusion—no digital projectors needed!

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The Thing I Said I'd Get Back To Later

Disney did something interesting when Mickey's Toontown opened back in 1993. They put it about that the area was real. Not merely simulated like other areas of the park, but the actual, real town where the actual, real Mickey and Minnie and Roger Rabbit not only live now, but have always lived, since decades before Disneyland was even built. So the official story goes, the presence of Mickey's Toontown in Orange County is why Walt Disney decided to locate his park there—so the characters wouldn't have far to travel in order to show up for parades and autograph signings. Mickey's Toontown wasn't built in the early Nineties, oh no...it was merely opened to the public at that time.

The result of this conceit is that Mickey's Toontown, in its entirety, is probably the best-developed, most cohesive themed land that has existed in Disneyland since Bear Country was forced into an identity crisis in the late Eighties. With most lands, the exterior walkway areas are plenty immersive, and the individual attractions may be top-notch, but there's not such a sense that the latter are really connected to the former...or to each other, for that matter. Are the Jungle Cruise and the Enchanted Tiki Room part of the same continuity? Do the miners working in the tunnels of Big Thunder Mountain relax after their shift at the Golden Horseshoe? They might in your headcanon, but the possibility is not explicitly supported by the theming on display. Adventureland and Frontierland (and Fantasyland and Tomorrowland) are well-designed, lavishly detailed sections of a theme park, but not exactly believable places in themselves.

Mickey's Toontown, however, is presented as a real place, and its individual attractions are things to see and do in that place, not separate adventures that just happen to be accessible from it. You can wander the residential neighborhood, and go inside some of the houses. You can explore the downtown area and get food at the same eateries and shop in the same stores that the Toons do. And you...can...get in line for a theme park ride?

The façade and loading area of Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin are made out to be the “Toontown Cab Co.,” and the elaborate queue is themed to resemble the back alleys of Toontown, but that blatant ride title sign is not doing any favors to the supposition that this is the real town where the Toons live. All the other attractions here have names that are diegetic—that is, they would be called the same thing in-universe that they are called on the park map. We go to Mickey's House for a photo with the famous mouse, just as Donald Duck goes over to Mickey's house to carp about the relative sizes of their parts in the latest Disney Channel script. But if we take the area at face value as a real community, we can't imagine the residents having cause to visit “Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin.” That makes no sense as the name of a feature within the town.

So does the ride break the premise? Eh, sort of. It redeems itself, at least partially, with what I mentioned back at the beginning of this post: Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin takes place in Mickey's Toontown as we already know it. It has major scenes set in locations—the Power House and the Gag Factory—that you can also see outside the ride, as part of the environment. It cannot be overstated how effective this is in making the ride feel, after all, like a natural part of the area. We can possibly overlook the gaudy entrance sign as a weird fluke. Clearly this adventure has existence and relevance beyond the boundaries of the ride itself.

And that's something we rarely see anywhere else in Disneyland, including grander, more popular, or more “classic” rides. The Haunted Mansion is magnificent, but it doesn't take you on a tour of New Orleans Square. None of the rides lining the Fantasyland Courtyard are set in a Bavarian village. Thus riding them, while a fine experience in itself, provides no additional context for anything else in the themed lands where they are situated. This should not be taken as a knock against these rides! On the contrary, for every land and ride to take the literal approach used by Mickey's Toontown and Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin, would be unnecessarily and detrimentally limiting to the variety of attraction experiences we can expect from Disneyland. It's the sort of thing that's best in small doses.

Way back when this blog was barely getting off the ground, I put up a post lamenting what then seemed to be the inevitable destruction of Mickey's Toontown to clear the way for the Star Wars area. For the time being, it seems that will not come to pass after all—Toontown recently underwent a surface-level refurbishment (it may still be going on) that would almost certainly not have happened if it were slated for the wrecking ball. With no small amount of relief, we can surmise that here at least, Upper Management demonstrates some respect for the accomplishments of the last generation of Imagineers. Let's all show them they made the right choice and shower some love on this underappreciated ride!

* Roger was kind of A Big Deal in the late Eighties and early Nineties, as an emblem of the “new Disney,” freed from the weight of the past that was keeping it stuck in the Dark Age. However, once the Renaissance really got underway, he got pushed into the background, because it turned out people liked the old formula when it was done well.

** Or sometimes not even that—e.g. the King Arthur Carrousel.

*** Everyone else does this too, right?