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.

It Came From the Fandom: Yesterworld Entertainment

(My excuse this time around is that I'm on vacation and taking it easy. I'll have something more interesting next week.)

Our subject this week is Yesterworld Entertainment, a YouTube channel focusing on theme park attractions that are either extinct, or have been heavily altered over the years. The curator addresses not just Disney parks, but Universal Studios and even films and video games, and occasionally does long-form podcasts with other theme park vloggers. The presentation is straightforward, with an abundance of photos and video clips showing what once was. Most YouTube channels can't tell me anything about Disneyland that I don't already know, but I've learned a lot from Yesterworld. There's no attraction too big or too small for this channel, as long as it has a detailed history. As of this writing, the most recent video is this one about Peter Pan's Flight:

Give it a watch! There's enough here to keep any theme park fan busy for hours or days!

Unauthorized Fun: The Stormy Weather Tour

So it's been raining, here in sunny Southern California, and we're all a little confused. It kinda makes me envy those Annual Passholders who are in college or whatever and can just jet down to the park whenevs, because Disneyland is lovely in the rain. It's cool, much of the crowd dissipates, and it's especially nice after dark, with all the lights reflecting in the wet pavement.

But if you think about it...every day at Disneyland is a stormy one, at least if you use your imagination. A surprisingly high number of attractions use storm imagery to set the mood, drive the plot, and/or shake things up. Howling winds, torrential rains, thunderbolts—all these can be found in abundance throughout the park, in the form of special and practical effects. With a little creative planning, you could spin a little “meta-story” out of some of them.

And creativity is, after all, what my Unauthorized Fun category is all about!

It does not need to be literally raining for you to take advantage of this unofficial tour; in fact, you'll have more control over the beats of the “story” if there's no real weather to contend with. On the other hand, a little real rain wont hurt you either. It's just for fun, after all.

Let's start the tour!

After-Action Report: Peter Pan's Flight

You know what I don't talk about enough? Peter Pan's Flight. Let's fix that.

Peter Pan's Flight is the most popular of the Fantasyland dark rides by a country mile, with queues that regularly top 45 minutes. Granted, this is partly because of its low capacity for its ride type—the ornate pirate ships only seat two or three where most dark ride vehicles seat four—but let's give the ride's content plenty of credit too. Most people probably assume the secret of this attraction's success is neatly summed up by its title: it's based on Peter Pan, one of the most evergreen films in the Disney Animated Canon, and it lets guests fly.

The impact of that second bit cannot be overstated. There have been other suspended rides in the history of the Disneyland Resort, but none have ever managed to replicate anything like the atmosphere of Peter Pan's Flight, as you whiz through the stars over London and then Neverland. The Skyway, when it was around, lacked any sense of mystique; Soarin' lacks narrative structure and offers only an illusion of forward movement. Peter Pan's Flight is a proper adventure, taking place in what is perhaps the quintessential world of adventure.

But I would argue that there is another key ingredient to the ride's popularity: it is perhaps the single best example of classic dark ride design philosophy in any Disney park. It is about as far from a “book report ride” as you can get without literally presenting an original plot.* Instead of summarizing the events of Peter Pan, it strips the movie down to its emotional core. There in the heart of the film, we find, simply: the thrill of flying and the wonder of removing from our humdrum urban lives to a world of childhood magic. Accordingly, most of the ride is devoted to the airborne journey from London to Neverland, and even that is rendered impressionistic, with forced-perspective models and fiber-optic starfields, rather than being a “faithful” reproduction of the film scene. Everything else about the movie, even the central conflict between the children and Captain Hook, is almost literally an afterthought.

Can you even imagine a ride like this being built nowadays? If they had to invent Peter Pan's Flight from scratch in the current era, it would be called something like Journey to Neverland With Peter Pan**, more emphasis would be placed on all the song sequences, not just “You Can Fly!”, and Peter would be prominent in every scene. It would certainly remind people of the movie, but it would in no way feel like the movie. It almost certainly wouldn't build up 45 minutes' worth of queue at a time, judging by the way guest enthusiasm for the Little Mermaid ride has cooled.

This is why, when Peter Pan's Flight went down for extended refurbishment and gussying-up a few years ago, I was dreading what they'd do to it. I assumed, quite reasonably, that they'd stick in a bunch of imagery taken directly from the movie at the expense of the ride's unique qualities. The first part came to pass, but fortunately with a light enough touch that we were spared the second part. It has changed far less than the Alice dark ride did when it got its own “upgrades.”*** It's still very much the quirky classic it's always been (or at least since 1983).

I can make an observation along these lines: of the five dark rides in Fantasyland, popularity seems to correlate to some extent with adherence to the more traditional principles of dark ride design. As mentioned, Peter Pan's Flight is the most popular. Alice in Wonderland is nearly as abstract and also well-liked. On the other end of the scale, Pinocchio's Daring Journey is of more recent vintage than the others, leans toward the “book report” side of things, and is usually a walk-on. Obviously, there are many other variables to consider, but I think we can safely say that it doesn't hurt a dark ride's reputation to use the impressionistic approach.

So why have the Imagineers largely abandoned said approach? Clearly someone believes that guests want more literal and linear stories in dark rides, but the pattern I have just observed proves, at the very least, that there's more to it than that.

In any case, I'm really glad we still have Peter Pan's Flight as a counter-example to the current line of thinking.

As a final note, here's something I bet you never noticed before. As you turn the last switchback in the queue (before the turnstile), take a look to your left.

* Not that presenting an original plot is necessarily a bad way to go. Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin presents an original plot.

** Punchy attraction names are a dying breed.

*** I'm not convinced most of them are upgrades; can you tell?

Beyond Blue Sky: The Disneylands Within Disneyland

Some Disney attractions could be considered “theme parks within theme parks,” and usually the fans don't think much of them. The stand-out examples here are Chester & Hester's Din-o-Rama (Animal Kingdom) and Paradise Pier (California Adventure). The first has often been called inappropriately cheesy and cheap-looking.* The second elicits the burning question: “What is the point of an amusement park-themed amusement park?” Whatever your personal opinion of these areas, you can see the complainers' point. We prefer Disney attractions because they aren't just the same old off-the-shelf carnival rides in the same old dingy, unadorned carnival setting. It feels like a betrayal when they backslide to the minimal theming effort typified by California Screamin' and Triceratops Spin.

But sometimes recursion can work. There are at least two miniature Disneylands within Disneyland. They have been operating for decades—one of them goes right back to July 17, 1955—entertaining thousands of guests every day, and to the best of my knowledge even the most persnickety park aficionado has not called them out for being redundant or inadequately themed.

In fact, most people don't even seem to notice that they are, effectively, miniature Disneylands.

Imagineering Theory: You're Just Projecting

I am not a big fan of digital projections and similar technology in theme parks.

It's not that it's not cool stuff in itself. I can definitely appreciate the accomplishments of computing and optics required for it to work, and some of its applications are downright stunning. It's thanks to digital projection that we can actually look into the eyes of Mara:

The Buzz Lightyear animatronic in the queue of his ride is pretty sharp, and his mobile face is achieved via LED screen technology:

So this family of technologies definitely has its place. What I dislike about it is the way it seems to be...taking over. Nearly every new attraction being built these days uses screens and/or digital projections in some way, and they have been added to several attractions that didn't previously use them. This would be fine enough if it were a reliable way of improving an attraction, but in practice the results are quite mixed, ranging all the way from “Wow, awesome!” to “Okay, um, why?” and hitting pretty much every point inbetween.

The thing is, there isn't just one reason why these types of effects can be underwhelming. It's actually a tricky realm to navigate, and I hope Imagineering treads carefully in the future so as to avoid the pitfalls and show off their new toy at its best.

As for what those pitfalls are? Read on...