With so much simulated history saturating the always pristine and perfectly maintained Disneyland, it can be easy to forget that this place has a real historical legacy of its own. Any place else in the world with a pop-culture pedigree as powerful as Disneyland’s would do everything they could to preserve and advertise that history, but Disneyland always looks like it was built yesterday even when it looks like it was built in the 1870’s. However, one look at the diminutive Sleeping Beauty Castle centerpiece, not even 80 feet tall and rather square in appearance, reminds us that Disneyland had (relatively) humble beginnings. It wouldn’t be difficult to replace this castle with one of the larger, more elegant designs found in Paris or Shanghai; but to do so would be sacrilege, this tiny castle must be preserved for future generations, and everyone at Disneyland knows that. It’s the most photographed structure in the park not because it has a remarkably sublime presence or beautifully replicates any European landmarks, but because it represents its own history as the icon of Disneyland. Looking at it in person I thought that anything more would have been less, because perfection would have made it blend in too easily and I never would have stopped to realize these were the same walls Walt used as the backdrop when he inaugurated the park over half a century ago. You can even walk inside the castle through a stylized diorama of the Sleeping Beauty story, although it has clearly been updated with modern holographic technology.

Just as the castle is the most famous visual landmark at Disneyland, Dumbo is probably the most famous attraction, despite being one of the smallest and simplest in the park’s line-up. I don’t know why it’s so famous. It must have been when Harry Truman visited the park and refused to ride anything that was a symbol for the GOP. This fame can cause problems because the popularity of the attraction easily exceeds the low capacity that’s inherent in these types of circular flat rides, mitigated only by the fact that it runs very short ride cycles. With half-hour queues for a minute-long circular flight that could be found at any other amusement park or carnival, the balance of customer cost-benefit is tipped heavily towards the unfavorable side making Dumbo quite possibly the worst attraction at Disneyland. I did not bother to test this hypothesis for myself as my interest was as limited as my time, especially as the original iconic attraction built by a fledgling Arrow Dynamics was removed by the early 80’s with the current generation model opening in 1990. Does anyone know if the 1955 equipment still exists in a museum anywhere? If you’re going to wait that long in line, make sure it’s for something that is completely unique to Disneyland.

It’s a similar song over at King Arthur Carousel, except: A; there are more than 16 seats. B; the ride lasts longer than a minute. C; Not only has it operated continuously since Disneyland Day 1, it’s a relocated antique Dentzel model dating back to 1922. Normally Disney attractions try to embellish their sense of history through weathering techniques to give a greater sense of gravitas, but here is the rare (and somewhat bizarre) case in which the reverse is true, as Disney’s efforts to keep the machine looking fresh renders a weightlessly ahistorical, indifferent impression at first glance.

If there is one attraction at Disneyland with a lasting historical legacy that it proudly wears on its sleeve, it would have to be the Matterhorn Bobsleds. Walt Disney was notoriously adamant that the loud, visually intrusive wooden roller coasters of his day had no place in his Disneyland, but also realized paradoxically that his park would not be complete without a roller coaster, and so he challenged Arrow Development to devise a system that would be smooth, quiet, and easily disguisable within the alpine mountain structure envisioned for the empty space between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland.¹ The result of this experiment was that the 1959-built attraction became the first tubular steel tracked roller coaster ever built, a designation that makes riding its rails feel akin to witnessing the first screening of the Jazz Singer. Considering how radically tubular steel coaster technology has permeated and shaped the entire theme park landscape today, it seems almost miraculous that we still have the originating design, largely unchanged from its first format.² The rails maintain a delightfully quirky quality that predates computer design, and the braking mechanisms consist of small under friction skid pads not dissimilar to traditional wood coaster technology. The mountain exterior is almost the same as it was in 1959 save for minor cosmetics and plugging a few holes, and the interior retains the powder blue cavern walls with cartoonishly oversized illuminated crystals and icicles that make modern-day hyperrealists cringe with embarrassment (although these features were part of a 1978 refurbishment, as the original mountain had an empty interior that was more Space Mountain than Expedition Everest). The rolling stock, also necessarily redesigned over the years, maintains the tradition of simplicity and freedom that characterized roller coaster vehicles before speeds, g-forces, and the accompanying litigation required riders to be boxed in and shielded from the onrushing reality around them. The seating design is so low and minimalistic we sit nearly flat on the floor, either with plenty of room to stretch our legs, or snug and cozy if shared with a riding partner on our lap.³ Buckling the singular seatbelt, the brake pads release and we begin our alpine expedition.

We climb the lift hill in almost complete darkness through the center of the mountain, and at the top is a long plateau where the howl of a nearby yeti is heard. Reaching daylight, our bobsled glides around the precipice over the whole of Disneyland before curving downward and gaining momentum. A surprise encounter with the abominable snowman causes a last-second defense maneuver deeper down into the mountain. The convoluted track dips and twists along a high-speed chase in and out of the Matterhorn, sometimes dangling over the edge of a cliff in broad daylight, sometimes threatening to file our digits down through tight rock and ice caverns, sometimes submerging us into an impenetrable fog of darkness, and frequently playing tag with competing bobsled teams as we all run away from a second yeti attack.

Towards the end we open up into the outdoor section of the bobsled run, racing for the home stretch while dodging a few waterfalls. Approaching the base of the mountain, our bobsled hones in on a small lake as a landing spot and we brace ourselves for impact. Ker-sploosh! Sorry Big Thunder Mountain, but this is a splashdown finale done right. Fully submerged track with water displaced by nothing other than the force of the vehicle nose hitting it, it feels uncontrolled and comes with a real sense of danger that a rogue splash could find its way squarely into our face (my worry is fueled by those earlier waterfalls that weren’t shy about their disrespect for the vehicle clearance envelope). It’s a genuine final highlight to an always superb ride that creates the singular lasting impression for the roller coaster to be remembered by.

After only one ride I had no question that the Matterhorn Bobsleds would be my single most favorite attraction at the Disneyland Resort. It’s not just the retro charm that appeals to me (although that’s obviously a valuable dimension), but the Matterhorn is simply a really good roller coaster design, irrelative of the era it was built.

It starts with the rolling stock, of which I am always an advocate for unrestrictive, minimalistic designs. The spacious inline seating maintains comfort and smoothness while creating a high degree of exposure that dramatically heightens the visceral experience, wherein 27 miles per hour never felt so fast. The layout is another success, a long, intricate design that emphasizes flow and continuity over a sequence of divisible big moments. There are no pauses in pacing thanks to a single lift and the use of small skid brake pads for the ride’s blocking, which are installed along any sort of bend or slope where needed, creating uninterrupted action without sacrificing dispatch frequency. (Why have ‘advances’ in block braking technology worsened roller coasters in this regard?)

Yet despite the layout’s simplistic continuity and limited range of maneuvers, the non-computer aided track design imbues the experience with plentiful character (and a few occasions when you may need to brace yourself) that assures no two moments are ever alike, especially when variations in the indoor/outdoor thematic setting are introduced. I would have imagined the first tubular steel coaster would have been full of perfectly straight rails bridged by simple geometric curves, much like the steel wild mice of the era, to save on bending costs. But the track on the Matterhorn seems to have been personally sculpted by Karl Bacon and Ed Morgan’s own hands, such is the array of uniquely shaped curves, dips, and banking transitions that all flow into each other. The top-to-bottom descending layout also manages to hold speed from beginning to end so the thrills don’t start to wear off as it progresses; in fact it sometimes may feel like it’s getting faster the closer we get to the finish line. Because the layout is hidden by the mountain and the two track layouts are completely different, I can never memorize the Matterhorn no matter how many times I’ve ridden it or viewed the video, which always renews a sense of discovery and suspense before each ride that is missing from most coasters.

This would not have been possible without the alpine mountain design, which beautifully hides the layout from view so the coaster’s exact nature is never completely understood in its entirety without access to the blueprints. More than just a façade or a series of props distributed along the track, the mountain represents a perfect fusion is achieved between the theming and the roller coaster, such that it’s nearly impossible to imagine one without the other. Theme and ride are dual aspects of the same singular entity, with the former providing shape and structure for the latter, and the latter providing purpose for the former. Visually the ride is extremely economical, adding only exactly what is needed at each point along our journey, and indulging in nothing more. The retro-stylized interior (the “ice” on the cave walls looks more like icing on a cake) makes for a more humbled ride, one that shifts attention onto the experience itself rather than constantly beckoning us to remark on how clever the Imagineers are.

I realize that so far I have done nothing but gush praise about the Matterhorn, which might not make for the most interesting of reviews, but I don’t know what else to say since the Matterhorn is just about perfect for what it does. It is a fun, joyful roller coaster that I could probably ride a hundred times over and it would never fail to bring a smile to my face. How do I criticize that? The only thing I could possibly imagine adding to the Matterhorn would be an onboard soundtrack, but even that could go wrong in about a million different ways if the music isn’t perfect… and even if it was I’d still be slightly hesitant about it.

Actually, there is one thing I can criticize the Matterhorn for. It was the first modern attraction to regard a traditional exposed roller coaster structure as shameful or aesthetically displeasing. While a wooden coaster probably would not have been appropriate for Disneyland and the Matterhorn is perfect the way it is, its success also introduced and reinforced this notion that a roller coaster is made better by hiding it or making it appear to be something it really isn’t (this is true even of California Screamin’, a steel coaster disguised as a woodie). It’s a sentiment that remains subtly ingrained in nearly all dialogues concerning theme parks to this very day, and I don’t think that’s a healthy attitude for roller coaster enthusiasts to have about their own hobby.

“it’s a small world” was closed for refurbishment on the day of my visit. This might have been a stroke of luck for me, as not only did it mean I wouldn’t feel obligated to ride it and could use that time for an additional lap or two on the Matterhorn, but I also wouldn’t have to write another confused impression in my review and risk a backlash as happened last time. Be that as it may, I should mention that in the time since Disneyland Paris I’ve come to the realization that, despite spontaneously developing acute symptoms of wannabe hipster cynicism when I’m nearby this happiest cruise that ever sailed, from a creative design philosophy “it’s a small world” might very well be my ideal Disney dark ride.⁴

The reason I say this is because “it’s a small world” is one of the few rides (if not the only) in Disneyland that clearly subscribes to the auteur theory. This is a concept within cinema that states there should be a single individual responsible for the creative direction of a work (the author, aka “auteur” in French). Doing so makes the final product become a personally expressive work of art rather than an industrialized process in which everyone labors as an assigned task and creative vision arrives through committee consensus. In this case, one recognizes that “it’s a small world” very much ‘belongs’ to Mary Blair, even though many other people were involved in the creative process. It has a distinctive visual appearance makes it a genuine work of art, unaffected by cliché and the creative constraints of hyperrealism. This authorship gives the ride a warmer, more humanist feel since it functions as an act of personal expression. Although the status of auteur theory within cinema has more recently been questioned, I think at this stage in the history of theme park design a more powerful presence of auteur theory could only result in a very positive evolution in the creative quality of attractions and settings, especially as so many new theme parks spend millions of dollars to create disappointing, uninspired products. I’m still about as interested in Small World as I am in really good children’s picture books (translation: I am not interested), but that doesn’t mean I’ll deny the effort of artistry of either.

With Small World down my search for dark ride perfection at Disneyland seems to be running out of options. The question of whether it’s possible for a theme park attraction to use the grammar of dark rides to construct a compelling narrative and aesthetic experience that’s able to stand toe-to-toe with similar great works on the screen, stage, and page has so far turned up empty. Although I’ve found aspects to be admired in Small World, Pirates, and Haunted Mansion, I can’t say that any of them answers everything I’ve been looking for. Pirates’ success in framing the attraction as an act of storytelling becomes undone with a third-act emphasis on hyperreal imitation in the Uncanny Valley; Mansion’s brilliant narrative arc via the careful cultivation and transformation of mood is overshadowed by its hyperactive technophilia; and Small World’s artistic merits are in service of an idea that’s too twee and simplistic for my tastes (I have to judge on content as well as style). Looking toward the future, Tomorrowland appears fairly barren in high quality dark ride offerings, so if I’m going to find an 11th hour savior it’s going to have to be in one of Fantasyland’s old-school animated film based attractions.

I’ll start with the largest and most sophisticated, Peter Pan’s Flight. This attraction’s most obvious selling point is the inverted seating arrangement in “flying ships” suspended beneath an overhead track. This allows a greater level of immersion as the scenery envelopes us on all sides including below us, which allows for a particularly nifty scene when we soar higher and higher over an expansive model of London aglow after nightfall, seemingly carried aloft as much by the overhead track as by the ebullient “You Can Fly!” musical theme. While the technology and quality of a few of the sets are impressive considering this is an opening day original (although I do wonder how much of the ride today bears any resemblance to the version that debuted in 1955) it’s still a far cry from the efforts seen on later endeavors within the park, and the story does nothing for me. Basically re-creating the feature film in three minutes, my brain was put on overload trying to recall vague bits and pieces from childhood memories that could assemble the mad rush of images and sound clips into anything remotely resembling a coherent story. No doubt there’s a degree of unimpeachability in any attraction that’s managed to last for over half a century, but the ride is a direct precursor to trash like the Monster’s Inc. dark ride in neighboring California Adventure: both attractions that leech off their host movies for storytelling survival. While respecting this attraction’s heritage, I also think the suspended flying mechanism could use a little more updating. The cars occasionally bump and jerk around on the track in a way that’s not conducive to the illusion of sailing on a current of air. Factor in a low capacity that frequently is the cause of long queues, and we’ve got a ride that’s best not duplicated and left alone as the historical relic it is.

Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is another “classic” dark ride with little electric buggies that buzz around past 2D sets on a journey to nowhere in particular. It has one major advantage over its contemporaries in the fact that almost no one who rides it has seen the movie it’s based on, and so the story is allowed to stand on its own two webbed feet. The narrative structure is more aptly suited to the dark ride format, being an episodic series of mostly unrelated misadventures that don’t require complex character motivations to explain the plot. It’s also decidedly more “PG” than one might believe. Aside from a nightmarishly psychedelic cartoon visual design throughout the entire attraction, the wild ride ends with a deadly train wreck, where we are then sent to (this is true) a fire and brimstone spewing Hell. And then the ride is over.

After initial reactions of “what the hell” (literally) I realized that this was exactly the sort ending that should please all the arty-farty pseudo-intellectuals like myself who always characterizes Disney as wimpy storytellers who only produce unrealistically happy endings. We exit in a state of aporia, the illusion of stasis as we giddily boarded our vehicle now shattered and replace with a sense of disresolve. It forces us to confront the experience after it’s over, and we can either deny that it had any significance or accept the absurdity of Mr. Toad’s scenario. This sounds like a gold mine for any theme park philosopher to discuss. So, have I found my masterwork dark ride at Disneyland?

The mere presence of an edgy, unhappy conclusion and an impressionistic acid-trip visual design shouldn’t by itself make the ride particularly deep, especially when every creative writing and art student has at some point in their academic career experimented and failed with such tactics. The attraction is definitely one of the better dark rides at Disneyland, and is willing to go to some darker places to make a lasting impression on the children and adults who ride it, but apart from binding the scenes and gags together with a central character and a vague story arc, does it have any significant value that elevates it above similarly oriented classic dark rides, such as Knoebel’s Haunted Mansion? Given that much of Mr. Toad could be interchanged with its spiritual successor, Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin, without significant alteration to either attraction’s mood or tempo, I’m inclined to answer “no”.

Snow White’s Scary Adventures takes nearly the same technology from Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and applies it across the Fantasyland plaza to a story that everyone is familiar with, based on Walt Disney’s biggest critical and commercial cinematic success. Like Mr. Toad, Snow White’s Scary Adventures pushes the threshold on whether parental guidance should be recommended for young children. In particular a scene in which we navigate through a dark forest of rotting trees with knotted bark frozen into menacing faces and branches extended as spindly fingers is far ghastlier than anything found inside Indiana Jones’ Temple of Cartoon Doom.

While the storyline is slightly better paced than Peter Pan, with more emphasis on mood than action, it suffers from the same setback where many of the events require our knowledge of the movie to draw the proper causal connections between scenes. Who’s the hag with the apple, what are the dwarfs’ roles in all of this, and why does Snow White spontaneously get a sparkly new boy toy at the end? Our experience is greatly enhanced if we’re familiar with the film to bridge the unexplained storyline gaps, but if we do have that familiarity then the dark ride feels derivative. (Although I’m not certain if even the movie adequately explains that last question…) Not that it matters too much since the moral of the story basically is to reaffirm our presumed heteronormative values, which is about as much depth as we could ever hope to extract from any of the myriad Disney princess-snags-a-prince movies. I’ll pass.

And then there was one.

Although it shares most of the same technology and storytelling methods as the other Fantasyland dark rides, Pinocchio’s Daring Journey does not have nearly as rich a pedigree. Walt Disney was never involved in this attraction’s creation, as it opened nearly three decades after the others, copied from a plan designed to fill out Tokyo Disneyland which had opened a few months earlier, and replacing the former Fantasyland Theater. It was yet another attraction designed to strictly copy the key scenes of the film it was based upon, an indication that it was probably the result of a by-the-numbers committee decision rather than an impassioned creative spark of an Imagineer burning to tell a story.

Yet unlike Snow White there’s no major psychosexual subtext, and the villainous characters have been reduced to minor background roles where they act at most as modifiers, rather than drive the narrative. The first couple of scenes are a bit confusing, but the ride quickly finds its rhythm, focusing on images and emotions rather than trying to string together a series of events. Once it does this, Pinocchio’s Daring Journey somehow manages to become a little bit of a masterpiece, one that exceeds the film it is based on.

Pinocchio’s journey is fundamentally an existential quest for authentic being; his desire is to become “a real boy”. Whenever Pinocchio tells a lie and betrays his authenticity, he experiences the horror of being forever publicly marked by his transgression as his nose grows another inch. The story’s Italian origins imbue it with strongly Catholic themes, most notably the idea of original sin and the collective guilt it inspires. At the center of this story is Pleasure Island, a not-too-subtle metaphor for at least a couple of deadly sins, and as we later learn, the price of admission to indulging in this electric playground’s many pleasures is very steep to pay. It is here that the story of Pinocchio becomes most perfectly fitted to a dark ride specifically at Disneyland: a place where everything is a lie and its citizens are all marionettes attempting to pass as humans. Unlike in a movie or novel, inhabiting the three-dimensional space of Pleasure Island implicates us all as equal sinners within the story, our status as silent observers removed as soon as we realize that right now at this very moment we’re participating in the exact same activity that’s about to condemn Pinocchio. The following scene as we pass by crates of naughty children transformed into donkeys sobbing for their mothers as they’re about to be shipped off into a hellish eternity of indentured slavery never ceases to turn my blood cold, and anyone that can ride through this and not feel a little bit like a scared, helpless child again must already be dead.

After that, only a confrontation on the dark, turbulent open seas with the leviathan itself can save our souls, even as it threatens to swallow us whole…

The only thing I could do without is Jiminy Cricket’s “wish upon a star” morale at the very end,⁵ but otherwise the happy ending feels rightfully deserved for once, as the proper resolution after being taken to some very dark corners during Pinocchio’s search for meaning and truth. Imagine how many children would be emotionally scarred if it were to end with the whale? But Pinocchio does manage to become a real boy, and we may feel as though we’ve shared in the same emotional growth. The attraction has the right balance between technology and simplicity, using only what is needed to make the story come to life while never distracting us from the experience by calling our attention to the Imagineer as the clever special effects wizard (here the Imagineer is only the humble artist and storyteller). Pinocchio’s Daring Journey is a truly great dark ride, quite possibly my favorite dark ride in all of Disneyland, and I think it should be one of the first examples referred to if anyone is interested in making a new dark ride into a genuine work of art.

Next: Tomorrowland

Previous: Mickey’s Toontown

Enter Mickey’s Toontown: a garish styrofoam city that resembles an expensive Six Flags Looney Tunes Land rather than anything I would have expected to see at Disneyland. Gone are the restrained, aesthetically balanced European fairytale sensibilities found in Fantasyland (and with it a sense of innocence), and in its place are loopy curlicues and retina-burning colors that resemble a bad Tex Avery cartoon; why the classic Disney characters belong here continues to leave me slightly baffled. Ironically, Toontown’s edgier, caricatured take on the financial success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit feels more dated today than the timeless 1950’s environment of surrounding Fantasyland. (The signature dark ride opened nearly six years after the movie’s release anyway, so even in its prime it was already a bit outdated.) The best that can be said about Toontown is that it’s the one place in Disneyland that hides no shame of its blatant artificiality. Given that the rest of the park works so carefully to achieve an illusion of “magical reality”, the shock of confronting Mickey’s Toontown is somewhat akin to hiring a comedian to heckle the cast of a Tchaikovsky ballet production.

The infrastructure is atrocious as well, being a plainly tacked-on kiddie cash-grab on what was formerly a vacant lot outside of the “official” park borders long established by the Disneyland Railroad. Required to cross a trench beneath the train tracks to access, the area forms a claustrophobic cul-de-sac that requires any visitor to eventually turn around and backtrack their paces. It doesn’t even require a busy day for this pathway to become a bottlenecked sea of people, the quizzical expressions on the entrant’s faces meeting the disappointed gazes of those on their way out. To summarize metaphorically, Mickey’s Toontown is the appendix of Disneyland, a dead-end vestigial midway filled with shit and probably needs to be removed for the overall health of the entire park.

One would do well to avoid this area of the park completely, but unfortunately in my case I had a coaster count to tend to and number 429 was waiting for me at the far back end of Toontown in the form of Gadget’s Go Coaster. This is a small-sized (207 meter) variety of Vekoma Junior Coaster with random blocks of synthetic wood-imitation affixed to the support structure, themed to look exactly like a Vekoma Junior Coaster with random blocks of synthetic wood-imitation affixed to the support structure. The sign out front warned of a 40 minute queue, which was almost enough for me to dump the coaster credit and go straight back out to Fantasyland, but a quick survey of the area indicated the queue couldn’t have been more than half that time, so we joined the line and ten minutes later were seated on the ride.

Given the slapdash mad invention appearance and the fact that it’s named after a cartoon personality named “Gadget”, one would be correct in assuming that it’s themed after a supporting character from “Rescue Rangers”, a short-lived daytime Disney Channel TV series that was canceled three years before the roller coaster opened. The interactive setting the track narrowly dodges between, including a small tunnel and water fountains with jets squirting overhead, makes it marginally better than the average Roller Skater. Then again, the average Roller Skater doesn’t require its single 16-passenger train to service the crowds of the second highest annually attended theme park worldwide.

If you’re not bumming for coaster credits, there is one ride in Toontown that’s worth a peek if lines are short: Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin. It is another Disney attraction that tries to condense the movie narrative into a three-minute dark ride format, a storytelling tactic I generally consider misguided because result is inevitably an incoherent mess. However, it works slightly better for Roger Rabbit because the shadowy, hyperactive cartoon aesthetics take on a nightmarish quality that is amplified by the broken fragments of quotes and images, as if we’ve entered a four-dimensional dream space after falling asleep from a stoned screening of the original 1988 movie. A more memorable effect is a “free fall” scene where the set is built at a 90 degree tilt so it appears as though we’re rushing past skyscrapers toward the ground, with the sort of off-kilter physics and anthropomorphic buildings that so often characterize a good nightmare. There are a few other decent gags including Roger’s arm stretching halfway across the set, the “Bull in a China Shop” room, and numerous instances of synapse-frying strobes, sparks, and psychedelic imagery. Then there’s the spinning device, which allows us to “steer” our taxi cab vehicle in 360° circles, not unlike the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cup ride. You can try to steer your car so you’re kept facing forward (sometimes easier said than done) but at least one time before the ride’s over you’ve got to let loose and crank it as hard as you can so the ride turns into a neon blur. However, this is also easier said than done due to the addition of restrictors on the spin axel.

Like anything else in Disneyland, Mickey’s Toontown is not really bad enough to warrant immediate removal or avoidance when so many other theme parks would be lucky to have a kiddieland of this caliber. But as I already said, even with a reasonably strong dark ride like Roger Rabbit, the area seems tonally incorrect for Disneyland. Should they follow the lead of the Magic Kingdom and replace it with an expansion of the existing Fantasyland, I for one wouldn’t shed any tears.

Next: Fantasyland

Previous: Frontierland

I imagine if Mark Twain could have lived to witness Walt Disney’s interpretation of the American west in Frontierland, he would have been appalled. The revered natural landscapes have been reduced to something worse than a mere caricature. They’ve become a commodity, shrunken down into an easily digestible proportion. Although perhaps Twain would have appreciated the irony that the death of the authentic American experience should come in the form of a celebration of the authentic American experience.

Has society really gotten to the point that we need the Rivers of America to substitute for the actual rivers of America? It’s too much to actually take the time and visit these locations ourselves? We want to romanticize nature but we’re no longer willing to earn it; the very qualities that made this terrain so romantic – the dangerous expanses of land that threaten to consume us as we confront the world standing at a small point across an incredible abyss of time – have all been replaced with the desire for simulated imposters. What does time mean in a theme park?

At a staggering twelve minutes long, the stately sternwheeler excursion aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat is about as slow-paced and idyllic as theme park attractions come. With most of our attention spans recently adjusted downward by dark rides that compress a 90 minute film into three minutes, many onlookers will be rhythmically tapping their toes with mild impatience when the next special sight fails to come into view within ten seconds after the Native American chief finished with his mechanical shtick. Disney teaches the younger generations that real nature is disappointing compared to his fabricated natural environment. It’s hard to tell the difference until we notice that one gets perfect what the other one got wrong. On this cruise the limestone formations are just a little too tidy and the moose are posing just a little too perfectly. Those with an appreciation for the real things will likely have little use in this environment, and those who’ve fallen in love with Disney’s nature are unlikely to have any taste left for the boring, dirty original. Maybe one can appreciate both by recognizing this as a multidimensional historical short documentary, although beware that half of the ‘sights’ our attention is called to are advertisements for other rides and attractions at Disneyland.

My ambivalence towards Frontierland might be because it’s simultaneously the most clichéd themed environment anywhere on Disney property, while also one of their most aesthetically displeasing. The emphasis on natural beauty clashes with the fact that most of Frontierland is anchored by a massive river of tourists filling the main arterial midway, which doubles as the viewing area for the nightly Fantasmic show. The closely contained energy of the narrow Adventureland and narrower New Orleans Square passageways ways gets sucked out into the vacuum as soon as we enter this massive concrete space. Missing is the camp humor found in Adventureland’s recreation of the comic books and serials that once held children in fascination. The relatively serious, “historically accurate” imitation of the old west, airbrushed to perfection, is rather bland and lifeless. The western town consists of a scant few structures such as the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, and they appear so clean and G-rated that one might wonder how Sam Peckinpah ever made a living. Disneyland excels when the experiences they craft have no conceivable better substitute anywhere else in the universe, either in the form of the authentic original or among their theme park competitors.¹ At this, Frontierland doubly fails. Not only can you still find the real Frontierland without leaving the state of California, you can find a better theme park version of the same material without leaving Orange County.

What, then, would Frontierland do without Big Thunder Mountain Railroad? This classic 1979 attraction seems to get right the flair for self-consciously over-the-top theatricality and little touches of humor in the design that I found lacking from the rest of Frontierland. While Disney has never released any exact figures, I’ve heard rumors that, adjusted for inflation, this is the most expensive roller coaster ever built. A lot of the cash supposedly went into research and development on then-unproven steel coaster technology that engineers enjoy free use of today, but it certainly looks like that entire budget was put to use where all could see it as we depart the open-air boarding platform and duck into an elaborate bat-infested cavern on the approach to the first lift. A massive chamber filled with stalagmites and stalactites is discovered off to the left, appearing almost as if we’ve entered the belly of the leviathan as we proceed upward towards the light from the mouth. A cascade of water spilling over the tracks is split by an overhead boulder so we squeeze between the streams in a way that will make sure we keep our arms tucked in. Emerging into the sunlight, our runaway train makes a sharp right bank downhill and the adventure begins.

Thunder Mountain’s greatest trick is that the elaborate mountain set allows the undulating track to remain at or below ground level at all times to dramatically enhance the sense of speed. Canyons, caves, and foliage limit our field of view so we can’t anticipate anything much more than fifty feet in advance, and the attraction is full of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gags like an opossum literally thrown for a loop by our train, or a set of massive gears laid out like a Mickey Mouse head (although if you’re bored enough to be playing spot the mouse ears the ride isn’t doing what it’s supposed to). Granted, there still isn’t any dramatic sense of speed, considering it maxes out at 28 miles per hour, but questions of velocity become irrelevant once we realize we’re moving at the ideal clip to enjoy the scenery while still generating excitement. This technique wrings far more utility per foot of track than I would have imagined possible; there are three full minutes of continual, non-stop action, yet a 2671’ length is, incredibly, shorter than a ride like Top Thrill Dragster.

Yet with all of this successful theory, I can’t help but think that Big Thunder Mountain doesn’t live up to its full potential. For every attention paid to every detail, the broad scope of the entire roller coaster seems to be missing that timeless something. There are three sections of runaway coaster track between lift hills that each last no longer than thirty seconds for blocking purposes. The only dramatic progression I could find between these three sections is that each seemingly becomes even more randomized and meandering than the last. I’d have to mine deep into my memory recesses to recall any specific developments on this ride that weren’t a part of the show setting. Small dip, curve, curve, curving dip, hill, curve… I think there’s a full helix somewhere in the middle. Of course this is all fun in the moment, but my impression was that if Big Thunder Mountain was going to live up to the classic status it is so often vaulted to, it was going to have to eventually pull a trick out of its hat that makes everyone stop and go “wow”, that one thing above all else we’ll remember about the ride. The first two acts are nearly indistinguishable from each other, with the same general speed, length, dynamics, curve-to-drop ratio, and so on… Finally, there’s dramatic progression inside the enclosed third lift, in which a dynamite “cave-in” effect (with bent track rails that cause the train to tip back and forth on the chain lift) seems to be intended as prelude to build tension and raise stakes before the big cathartic finish at the other end.

We would be mistaken. What follows is the shortest, slowest and gentlest of the three gravity-driven portions of track, in plain view of the queue and midways, such that the story becomes actively anticlimactic. After a generic set of more curves and dips, what’s our spectacular finale that defines the lasting memory everyone will take home? A small water splashdown beneath a cheesy dinosaur fossil. I found this disappointing for at least three reasons:

A): We’ve already seen this finale from the queue so no element of it is a surprise.

B): It does relatively little to enhance the passenger experience, designed more for the visual appeal for spectators (see point A).

C): The idea is obviously carbon-copied from Big Thunder Mountain’s predecessor, the Matterhorn, only to lesser success. Not only does this immediately signal cheap creative shortcutting by a company that should know better, but the Matterhorn sports a real splashdown that’s as thrilling to riders as spectators. Meanwhile, Big Thunder Mountain’s splash appears obviously staged with the row of water nozzles “hidden” beneath the track that’s nowhere close to skimming the water.

It’s probably my own damn fault for coming away from Big Thunder Mountain so very underwhelmed, because I made the mistake of riding the Parisian version first. That attraction, the fourth Big Thunder iterant that opened in 1992 with help from Vekoma, has a truly incredible finale: a long continuous descent into an underground cavern that nearly doubles the top speed of the ride before bottoming out beneath the Rivers of America basin. The entire ride is defined by that finale. Every moment, no matter how arbitrary, is contextualized by the fact that it moves us inexorably closer to that final descent. The fast-building momentum at the end creates a slow-building momentum throughout the first two-thirds. The California version is the inverse, and although I always knew it would be weaker by comparison, the resulting psychological payoff is displaced by several magnitudes.

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the original against the newest model, and I’m not respecting the achievement Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was for its time. Nevertheless, I’ll argue that even Arrow Dynamics had achieved much more compelling layout narratives more than a decade prior, and with far more limited resources. All of the original Six Flags mine trains in Texas, Georgia, and Missouri end with their largest, steepest drops, unforeseen into an underground (or underwater!) tunnel. Installations at Magic Mountain, Cedar Point, and Hersheypark all finish with accelerating downward helices that manage to rouse some emotions (and lateral forces) before reaching the final brake run. Even King’s Island’s Adventure Express… well, at least people will always remember and talk about that finale!

Maybe someday I’ll have a chance to return and give the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad another chance. Maybe it will finally click for me, and I’ll understand why it is one of the most-loved mine trains ever built. Maybe I’ll get off it and think to myself, “ya’know, that’s a really good roller coaster.”

Or maybe not.

We did not venture onto Tom Sawyer Island on this occasion; perhaps I would have warmed to Frontierland more if we had. Of this I’m skeptical, however, as my park guide tells me that the island has recently been rethemed to replace all of the musty Twain literary references with newfangled tie-ins to the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise. Huh, pirates in the pioneer west? Well, I guess that’s not quite as bad as Six Flags’ positioning of Greek mythology in their western theme section, especially since they didn’t have the opportunity to promote a lucrative intellectual property as an excuse. While I can’t account for any personal experiences with swashbucklers stranded rural America, my aunt Christine whom I was visiting with did have a story to share about this island. She recalled that on her second date with my uncle they went to Disneyland, where they shared a jarred pickle together at the food stand on Tom Sawyer Island. When they finished they still had the container of pickle juice left over. Rather than dump it, she offered to drink the remainder. This amazed my uncle because he thought he was the only person in the world that drank plain pickle juice. After their Disneyland date finished he called his parents and told them “I think I’ve finally met the girl I want to marry! She also likes pickle juice!”

I guess sometimes there are real happily-ever-after stories at Disneyland.

Next: Mickey’s Toontown

Previous: New Orleans Square

Emerging from the untamed jungles of themed hyperreality in its rawest, most base form, we encounter a time and a place in which man was able to discover something beautiful out of the primordial soup. Just as the real New Orleans created a rich cultural paradise in the Louisiana swamplands, so too did Walt Disney manage to craft an environment slightly more conducive to the emotional riches of storytelling from a swampland of sterilized imitation. While both attractions ostensibly belong in the same “adventure” genre and use many of the same techniques, Pirates of the Caribbean gets right much of what Indiana Jones Adventure got wrong, despite the difference of nearly thirty years of innovation between the two.

A book is not afraid to show that it has a cover and is made of bounded paper, nor is a stage play afraid to call intermission or bring the cast to the stage for a round of applause, even if their characters are supposed to be dead. A good story is never ruined by the conscious revelation that it is, in fact, an invented work of fiction. By contrast, Indiana Jones Adventure was deathly afraid anyone would realize it was actually an amusement park ride, and went to great expense to make sure every loose end was covered up or accounted for so that one might be tricked into believing the adventure was real. But unlike the newer effort, Pirates of the Caribbean is not ashamed of the fact that it peddles in fiction, and in fact it even contextualizes the story in a way that openly acknowledges the dark ride medium it uses.

The entrance façade has nothing to do with pirates or the Caribbean, instead designed with a lovely pastel and wrought-iron French Quarter architectural style, and once inside the building the queue runs past the return channel in which the boats carousel around a small beach diorama. It resembles a high-class Tunnel of Love more than what I traditionally conceive of as theme park ride, feeling as at home at Disneyland as I suspect it could feel if it were a classic at Kennywood or Blackpool Pleasure Beach. This unaffected introduction caught me off-guard, as I was half expecting something that tried to remove the attraction from the world outside and set us in the Caribbean before we even boarded the attraction, much like the version at Disneyland Paris. Even though the lack of building space was as much a necessary blueprint restriction as anything intentionally envisioned by Walt, I actually liked this approach better than the more grandiose Parisian Pirates entrance.

The atmosphere changes as we move deeper into the building, with low light levels magnifying the perceived amount of space inside the station as we wait for our pupils to adjust, the loading area lit only by orange, glowing lanterns. Taking a seat on the six bench boat (an absence of seatbelts make for extremely fast dispatch times) we’re set adrift on a very slow current through an idle Louisiana bayou on a summer night. The amount of measured restraint with this early scene is impressive. Rather than a constant supply of stimuli out of fear we might become bored, the opening scene trusts its audiences will be engaged with the attraction and takes a good two or three minutes to complete, giving ample time to establish the atmosphere, with fireflies dancing in marshes, a dinner party in progress on a nearby plantation house, and the gentle twangs of a banjo plucked by an old resident of a small wooden shack (the vaguely recognizable ‘pirates life’ theme foreshadows the upcoming action in a way that’s not clunky or obvious). The limited color palate of dark black shadows and backlit, swamp haze blues, accented only by the occasional orange firefly or lantern, creates an indelibly impressionistic scene, aided by the equally sparse but effective aural elements. It’s a creative introduction, obviously in part designed to integrate the ride into the New Orleans motif, but it should also call to mind the rich history of American literature that takes place in the waterways of the American south, and frames Pirates as an extension of that literary context.

Then as we leave behind the bayou, the peaceful tranquility slowly gives way as the rumble of a waterfall grows nearer. We tip over the edge and are sent hurdling to the bottom with a real splashdown that somehow manages to avoid spraying any water onto the riders. We have now left behind the world of old pirate stories shared around a Louisiana campfire, and have been forcibly flung into the mysterious world of pirate stories itself. We are hit with a second waterfall; these feel much steeper and faster than they really are due to the open, restraintless seating. We navigate an array of flooding caverns, a metaphysical dreamscape seemingly halfway between the realms of the living and the dead, between reality and memories. Populated by skeletons frozen in time, the slow, haunted rendition of the famous theme song and disembodied warning that “dead men tell no tales” betrays the fact that, in this universe, dead men can tell tales. A lightning flash over a sinking ship in the middle of a torrential storm, the skeletal remains of its captain still standing at the helm, is perhaps one of the most lasting images to be found anywhere in the canon of Disney dark rides.

But you know what they say, it’s not the destination that matters, it’s how you get there. That’s true of Pirates of the Caribbean. From this brilliantly imagined netherworld we eventually emerge at our story’s destination, the “real” world of pirates, where we at first find ourselves caught in a cannon battle between two warring galleons. We then enter the town of Puerto Dorado, which has been overrun with robotic pirates doing what pirates do best: pillaging, plundering, swashbuckling, and attempted gang-raping, just like you’d find in any good family theme park. It’s everything we had been waiting and hoping to find when we first set sail, yet now that it was actually in front of me and we had left the atmospheric, slow-simmering first act behind that made Pirates so unique, I felt a little bit deflated. Where will the story take us from here? What compels the narrative now that we’ve discovered the lost world we were searching for? There are bits and snippets of exposition happening in individual scenes, but nothing to tie it all together. It seems our story is resolved by getting to point at the different gags, and comment on how amazing the audio-animatronics are.

To be sure, these scenes are technically the most amazing in the entire ride experience. Some are fairly rudimentary (the “chasing wenches on rotating turntables” gag is quite obvious to everyone) but others are quite impressive (sword fighting pirates rock!). Some effects have been updated, most notably including some newer figures from the film series, and you can see the evolution of the technical design work lined up next to each other. Historically this is the primary reason the ride was developed: to be a showcase for the burgeoning craft of animatronic design, as the originally proposed viewing gallery would not have been sufficient.

What I find most interesting about this sequence is that the development and reliance on audio-animatronics is generally assumed to have been initiated because hiring real actors would have been too expensive. If it weren’t economically unfeasible, populating pirates with living thespians seems like it would result in a better, more realistic pirates ride. That real humans are better than fake humans is only a logical outcome, right?

But then when we actually imagine how the ride would feel if there were live actors in those pirate costumes, paradoxically the attraction seems like it would be worse off. Part of it is because despite the nuanced first act and noble theme park geek delusions, the element of storytelling is not all that important, and the ride is still judged by a technocentric aesthetic criterion where everyone is commenting or thinking about how creative the designers were to be able to manufacture this environment. “How’d they do that?” Fake humans are better than real humans because fake humans are modern marvels of technology that, most importantly, appear expensive. Real humans are ordinary and stupid, and nobody wants to pay just to watch them stand around at their job like we do every other day of the year unless their job involves them taking off some or all of their clothes.

But it’s also because there’s also something discomforting in imagining that these pirates had a brain behind their eyes and could feel feelings. We embark on this journey to the artificial Caribbean to become voyeurs of sorts, to curiously watch a stranger world up close but without becoming a part of it. It’s the same with cinema: we want to have the solipsistic satisfaction that our perspective is the only one that truly matters in this fictional universe, and the people we’re watching can’t watch us back. The pirates are things, representational objects, and they must not have their own subjective content. If they do, then our awareness of things is reflected back on ourselves. We become another physical prop in this setting rather than a non-positional camera obscura, and this world is suddenly haunted by the awareness of the other’s foreign perspective. It is only of robots whose glassy irises you can look deep into and never sense a motivation to avert eye contact.

It’s been nearly a quarter of an hour by the time the pirates decide to torch the place, at which point it’s becoming time for us to escape back into the world from which we came. Now how are we supposed to do that? According to the logic of Walt Disney, because we discovered this world by going down a waterfall, the only way to get back out must be to go up a waterfall. This is exactly what we do. Just as the first waterfalls are narrative devices to signal the boundary lines between reality and fiction, so does this final effect signal a return from the fictional world of pirates to the slightly less fictional world outside of New Orleans. It’s an inspired idea, although unfortunately it doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in theory. The way they manage to create this ‘magic’ is by pulling the boats uphill with a standard chain lift while water pours down and around the incline. It’s not immediately obvious what purpose this lift has besides the immediate mechanical benefit to solve the spatial problem of getting us back to ground level, and it takes several moments to work backwards to figure out what it represents for the overall story arc.

Rather than unnecessary Johnny Depp animatronics, I’d rather a significant upgrade be applied to this last effect. First of all, to ease the intuition over this backwards logic, the water should flow upward rather than downward so we’re not sailing ‘against current’, which I imagine wouldn’t be too difficult to figure out. Secondly, it should hopefully be as exciting a finale as the first two plunges are. Chain lifts are not exciting, and it was at this point that I was starting to get a bit fidgety with the whole ride. To help heighten the illusion that we’re falling up a waterfall, the boats should be quickly whisked to the top at a variable speed that accelerates as we approach the top (but nothing more than 10-15mph, to be sure). I think LSM technology is far enough along that they could easily appropriate the systems used on the uphill waterslides on a larger scale to achieve this effect, with all the appropriate anti-rollback and blocking safety measures. It would give our voyage the rousing, magical finish Walt Disney intended it to have, would help curb the tediousness that starts to grate after a quarter hour sitting on the same ride, and could even give capacity a slight boost (or at least there wouldn’t need to be as many rafts in service at the same time).

Overall the Disneyland version of Pirates of the Caribbean remains one of the best rides in the park, as well as one of the best dark rides you’ll find anywhere in the world. It’s one of the rare few dark rides that are allowed to breathe as they tell their stories, taking ample time to establish setting and mood. Unfortunately, as lovely and accomplished as the narrative framing is to create a compelling story, the picture inside the frame is only a hologram: lightweight, and not really there when you examine it closely. They’re pirates. The name is the story. It’s an attraction in which both creators and spectators value technology above all else, and for everything Walt Disney was able to get right on his last theme park attraction, it’s missing that key ingredient that distinguishes real human storytelling from a series of human-initiated events. What that ingredient is, I’m not certain. But if I want dark rides to compete with other artistic narrative media, I’m going to have to keep looking elsewhere.

Our search took us through the heart of New Orleans Square, an extremely impressive avenue that’s lined edge-to-edge with French-Creole architecture, and festooned with glittery bead strings and ornaments celebrating a never-ending Mardi Gras. Part of me wishes New Orleans Square could serve as a model for every other themed environment, as they got the intimacy level perfect. Rather than a large, centralized midway designed from the utilitarian perspective of crowd flow control, there’s a series of smaller pathways that wind and curlicue around buildings and under balconies and promenades, keeping the energy levels from dispersing over a wide open field, especially as we are dazzled by the ornate, colorful details that are typical of Royal Street. It invites a desire for exploration as well as an appreciation of the fine details in a way that other themed environments often fail to do.

Yet at the same time New Orleans Square is also one of the worst Disney theme zones because it’s a simple imitation that imagines nothing new or original. It’s so close a copy of the real French Quarter New Orleans that Louisiana politicians have been able to film their campaign commercials here, and no one was the wiser until someone noticed the Disneyland trash cans in the background. (Really.) The question becomes, why am I enjoying this city architecture in Disneyland when I can get the real thing without a passport or gated admission ticket? Convenience is the only answer I can think of, as well as not having to deal with some of the less savory element of modern New Orleans. That’s reasonable, but not very romantic. Ideally a themed environment this immersive should spark a desire to return to Disneyland as soon as possible, but instead I found New Orleans Square made me long for Rome, Paris or Barcelona, places which look just as amazing as the Disneyland version, but also have the advantage of being real and letting me explore for more than a minute or two before I reach the outer boundaries into Frontierland._______________

Granted, those cities don’t have an iconic dark ride built in the middle of them, let alone two. At the far end of New Orleans Square we come upon an elegant white plantation house that, without the demarcation sign, one would never guess was actually The Haunted Mansion. It seems so characteristic that Walt Disney could not tolerate anything remotely imperfect or blemished in his park that even an abandoned house of the undead must be presented in pristine condition. Why pirates and ghosts were tolerable inside the buildings when no traces of them were allowed to tarnish anyplace reachable by daylight remains a mystery to me. Yet in retrospect I’m quite glad Disney’s Imagineering team chose the exterior look that they did. Ramshackled haunted houses have become such a theme park cliché, and it’s made more foreboding by the fact that it appears like a normal house on the outside, the sort of place you remember as a child spending the summer weekend with relatives, with all the creaky doors and portraits of dead great-grandparents.

Once we step inside the aesthetic quickly changes, I would argue too dramatically as it doesn’t match up with the building outside. We’re led into an antechamber where we’re given a cordial introduction from our disembodied ghost host. As he speaks there room begins to stretch vertically, the ordinary portraits on the wall revealing a gruesome scene as their bottoms are elongated… and in a particularly dark twist atypical of Disney, the voice suggests there’s always his method as a means of escape from the mansion, whereupon the lights cut out and a flash of lightning reveals for a split second the corporal remains of our host dangling from a noose directly over our heads. It’s a powerful, macabre image that not even the more ‘serious’ Tower of Terror next door is willing to go quite as far to achieve.

It is curious, then, that the Haunted Mansion never attempts to out-shock this initial effect once we’re loaded into the ride’s omnimover “Doom Buggy” carriages. Even though the Mansion’s debut in 1969 makes it one of the original ghost trains, to this day it still manages to quietly upend theme park conventions beyond merely the unexpectedly clean façade. The narrative trajectory of most horror stories generally starts with a lighthearted, normalized ethos, and eventually progresses into a deathly dark pathos. We’ve all seen those movies: a laughing, playful family or group of friends walks into the creaky old house, and later they walk out transformed into a scarred and bloodied (if not very dead) set of individuals. The moral of this story is always the same. Life is fragile and death is Serious; the grave is more for the dead than it is for the living.

How radical, then, is the Haunted Mansion, which starts with a dramatic, silent suicide, followed by the undead spirits rapping at the door and a séance, then progresses to a full-scale ballroom dance, and finally concludes with a graveyard bash teeming with dancing and singing undead revelers to an upbeat, jazzy performance of ‘Grim Grinning Ghosts’? In this mansion, it is life that is Serious and a confrontation with death is the only way to finally ‘escape’ and have a bit of fun; the grave is more for the living than it is for the dead. By the time we reach the end the humor has gone straight slapstick. We approach a set of three comical-looking hitchhiking ghosts, the setup to a joke where the punchline is we round the corner and see a reflection of our buggy in which the ghost appears to be sitting right between us. This hallway is otherwise completely barren and fits nowhere in the mansion. It’s just one last special effect joke for its own sake, a final gotcha moment so that everyone who steps off the platform is grinning and laughing as much as the mansion’s residents are.

Still, if there’s one fatal drawback to the Haunted Mansion, it’s that too many visitors are going to be on the edge of their seats not because these themes of life, death, and life-after-death energize the narrative arc so much we can’t wait to find out how it ends, but because they’re trying to figure out if they can spot the riggings that show how they achieved the ballroom hologram effects. As fond as I am of my quasi-Heideggerian death-begets-life interpretation of the Haunted Mansion, it’s unlikely the majority of other riders will even consciously notice the shift in emotional tone between beginning and end. Everywhere we look, technology abounds, begging us to admire it. The special effects are so numerous and varied that it’s impossible to not develop an appreciation for the Imagineer’s work while one is still on the ride.  While I’m sure the Imagineers appreciate this recognition (hell, that’s probably why half the effects got included, just to prove to themselves and the world they could build them), it’s very difficult to get lost in the fictive dream of a ghost story if the technical details of the format itself are more attention grabbing than the story itself.

A real ghost story should feel spontaneous, and we watch scary movies half-believing that the events are happening as we witness them (certainly that explains the initial runaway success of the Blair Witch Project). I can’t speak for everyone, but I was always conscious of how precise and scripted every element of the Haunted Mansion had to be. The rising narrative action tends to correlate exactly to the size and complexity of the special effects, and I think it is no coincidence our emotional state seems directly dependent upon how much money and research we believe was spent before us. To find out the house is haunted by real magic would almost be disappointing, as working within the confines of normal physical laws seems far more improbable. By no means is this problem new for Disneyland, nor (I’m sure many would argue) is it even a particularly bad problem to be cursed with… but that doesn’t make it go away.

Somehow, between the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean, I think there exists a dark ride that’s approaching the ideal I’m searching for. Pirates is able to frame the dark ride experience as an original mode of storytelling such that the symbolic intent is better understood, and Haunted Mansion uses the progression of effects to create an emotional narrative arc that’s not completely devoid of intellectual content if you know how to interpret it. If we could somehow contextualize the Haunted Mansion as a symbolic ghost story and make the special effect techniques feel organic rather than attention-grabbing, then I think Disney would have a true masterpiece that would deserve attention from art critics and the non-geek world at large. As it is right now, we’ve got two fairly decent mechanical magic shows saturated with accomplished set designs and plenty of childhood nostalgia. Since my first time with both these rides was necessarily absent of nostalgia, my personal sojourn for the ideal themed attraction would continue.

Next: Frontierland

Previous: Adventureland

The spirit of adventure awaits beyond the entry gate illuminated by the flickering of tiki torches, beckoning explorers into the heart of the uncharted jungles of Africa and Southeast Asia. I sometimes consider Adventureland my favorite of the Disney lands to simply walk around and explore. The pathways are narrower and more intimate, the dense forestation simultaneously provides shade while keeping the field of view nearby, and overall the land is the richest in visual texture of any of Disney’s themed environments. Yet despite the abundance of real trees and natural building elements, the area also seems nearly as cartoonish as Fantasyland, presented as an amalgamation of popular fiction drawing equal inspiration from the African Queen and Around the World in 80 Days. The 1930’s throwback setting in a colonial British outpost, with often comical and sometimes politically questionable props and set pieces, makes Adventureland more of a meta-narrative on the West’s fascination with The Other, rather than a literal simulation of tropical environments. At night the forests come alive as the orange flickering lights dance across the foliage, the contrast between light and dark the most vivid anywhere in Disneyland.

Adventureland, particularly its long-storied centerpiece attraction the Jungle Cruise, is perhaps the most emblematic of the hyperrealist aesthetic. It uses almost all real materials to create an encounter with something that is almost entirely artificial. The Jungle Cruise is a Disneyland original, opening with the park in 1955. Casting off from a remote outpost of the Jungle Navigation Company, our skipper navigates our miniature steamer through a Best-Of remix of the world’s most exotic locales, apparently leaping across entire oceans without our noticing as one scene near Cambodia’s Angkor Wat is followed up by another within the piranha-infested Amazon river basin. In place of living animals are a multitude of animatronic replicas, augmenting a real safari by ensuring the star inhabitants are always ready to snap their jaws at the exact right moment, rather than sleeping or hiding behind a rock as one would disappointingly find on an actual jungle cruise.

Rather than any individual species or landmark, perhaps the cruise’s most famous attribute is the jokey spiel the skippers recite as they lead us through the attraction’s paces, which makes the captive audience ask of themselves if there exists such a thing as a good pun. The Jungle Cruise as first envisioned by Walt Disney featured a scripted spiel that tried to make the attraction believably realistic, not unlike a nature documentary voiceover. The humor merged into the experience over time to the point that Today’s Jungle Cruise is almost a ride-through parody of Yesterday’s Jungle Cruise, an evolution that undoubtedly has many Disney loyalists not laughing. I can understand their point. Unless you’ve got a professional comedian guiding your journey, this narration does tend to distract from the ride rather than complement it, as if the interior and exterior of the steamer exist on slightly unsynchronized planes of reality. The humor does little to humor those who wish to pretend their expedition is real, as one would surely not find attacking headhunters even remotely amusing if believed to be authentic.

That said, the evolution toward comedy was an inevitable, perhaps necessary one. The very presence of obviously robotic animals and non sequitur geography imbues the attraction with a nervous humor born of the cognitive dissonance between supposing the absolute fake is actually the authentic reality. This situation would only be worsened if we were in the presence of a human being who seems to effuse a desire to convince us this obvious falsehood is otherwise, and so it became a necessary device to encourage guests to laugh in order to release the built-up tension caused by the contradiction of the unreality. Those that complain the humor limits the emotional depth of the experience must not realize that the experience is fundamentally limited to begin with.

Well, maybe we should interpret the themed environment symbolically. After all, nobody literally believes the Jungle Cruise is in any way authentic. That shouldn’t matter because all representative art is also unreal, but the fact that it is a symbol for some other ideal is always genuine. Animatronic hippos and lions are meaningful interpretations of some humanistic ideal, and they contribute to a holistic narrative that’s directed on a four-dimensional living stage. It might not be Shakespeare, but it is a form of storytelling that tells us something about ourselves and the world by the end of the six minute ride time.

This seems like a promising defense for an argument that a more emotionally serious Jungle Cruise would be superior to the current pun-laden one. The problem is, who on earth thinks of this attraction in terms of symbolism? Symbols don’t aggressively attempt to steal the identity of the thing they symbolize. Theme parks occupy real space in real time, and there is no media filter or fourth wall that identifies the Jungle Cruise as an intentionally artistic representation. The robotic hippos aren’t just a storytelling device. They must be detailed in a way that perfectly supplants a real hippo as best as they can. There is no act of creative interpretation involved. This isn’t to say that free interpretation of the Jungle Cruise is impossible; it’s just unlikely that many people would understand it other than as literally given. Anyone that goes to Disneyland and thinks about the Jungle Cruise in terms of symbolism either holds a liberal arts degree or is French.

It would seem that if we wanted compelling narrative in a theme park attraction, we’d do much better with the additional forty years of technological and artistic development that could be found in the design of the impressive Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye. My hopes were high. Before even entering the queue, I speculated assertively that this would probably be one of the three best rides we’d find in the entire Disneyland Resort. This was the last major new addition to the Disneyland Park, opening in 1995 a few years before the continually ongoing California Adventure project was announced, and as such it is the most technologically advanced attraction in the original park… to say nothing of the attraction’s gargantuan size or scope. Beyond praise from technology fetishists, this attraction is often heralded for being one of the most successful examples of Disney’s mastery of nuanced storytelling technique in an attraction design. Till now I had always been rather disappointed by the results of these claims, so I was looking forward to some pretty fantastic narratology on this one. I couldn’t wait.

The adventure begins well before we even enter the temple, requiring a lengthy journey through a dense Bengalese rainforest filled with ruins and excavation equipment. Eventually we reach our destination, the namesake Temple of the Forbidden Eye, which begins a winding pathway through dimly lit chambers and corridors filled to the brim with hieroglyphs and defused booby traps. More so than any other ride in the Disneyland Resort, the Indiana Jones Adventure makes the establishment of mood and backstory before boarding the ride a top priority, to the degree that the attraction could lose a significant amount of value if one were to breeze right through the chambers in the FastPass or single rider queues.

In one of the final rooms we’re presented with a short film which spells out everything that remained ambiguous up to that point. Through old newreel footage and instructional spiels from our tour guide Sallah, we learn that Dr. Jones’ discovery of the temple has become an international sensation, but more recently Jones himself has gone missing. Sallah is now conducting jeep tours through the temple to raise funds, which cleverly explains why the forbidden temple has been flooded with obnoxious tourists. Even cleverer is the subtle use of foreshadowing, as Sallah gently warns us that should we discover the idol on our tour, we must avoid looking into its eye. Oh, and also gazing into the idol’s forbidden eye is strictly forbidden. And one last thing: Beware the eye of the idol!

We are reminded of this about once every thirty seconds. Gee, you don’t suppose that’s going to be important later, do ya?

Certainly the stakes are high as we climb aboard our Enhanced Motion Vehicle (EMV), fastening our seatbelts and waiting for the all-clear to enter the temple doors. We’re about to embark on a high-speed, turbulent tour in search for a lost idol, and should anyone on board cross glances with the eye for even a split second, we’ll be engulfed in a raging hellfire and doomed to eternal damnation. I can’t even imagine the insurance policy Sallah must have taken out for this tour company.

Our vehicle kicks into gear, with yours truly behind the wheel in the driver’s seat (yep, we’re doomed), and we thunder around a right-hand bend into the Chamber of Destiny, which is – never mind, too late to explain it, we’re already barreling through the doors and – damn, this temple evidentially does not want to waste our time! Twenty seconds into the tour we’ve already located the idol without even trying. Of course having been berated by the preshow ad nauseum I was dutiful in averting my eyes, but you know there’s always going to be some joker in your car who has to sneak a peek and ruin it for everybody. The idol growls its disapproval as we round another corner and… well, there’s the final remaining mystery from the preride backstory conveniently solved for us in the first thirty seconds: the whereabouts of Dr. Jones.

“You had to look, didn’t you?” he yells as he tries to prop shut a door from evil forces on the other side.

“Hey, don’t be sarcastic with me!” I shout back. “Blame one of these other worthless fuckwads on my tour!”

One thing that became abundantly clear very early in the attraction was that the sense of dramatic timing was atrocious. The sudden transition from quiet, contemplative exposition that’s maintained all the way up to the station, to white knuckle hell on wheels with John William’s iconic soundtrack cranked all the way to eleven, is an extremely jarring emotional shift that left me more confused than surprised. If there were supposed to be any plot developments or rising action before the big climatic turning point of the idol discovery, I couldn’t notice them, and I’d like to think I’m looking a lot harder than 99% of people that go through this ride. This haste to cut directly to the main action sequence is perhaps necessary for vehicle blocking reasons, but I was left feeling deflated rather than elated. With the two big plot mysteries resolved in the first thirty second (discovering the Forbidden Eye and finding Indiana Jones) I was already turning apathetic toward the rest of the story. The motivating action from the exposition hadn’t been defined beyond those two developments, and uncertain where the plot was supposed to go next I was released from the narrative hook before the action even had a chance to cook. Of course now it’s clear we have to escape from the temple, but my intuitive reaction in this case was literally, “that’s not going to be hard, just put this sucker in reverse and we’ll be back out the entrance in twenty yards.”

Even though I’m driving that’s not an option I’m given, and instead we must randomly crash into one scene after another before the ride arbitrarily decides it’s over. What accounts for the remaining 90% of the Indiana Jones Adventure isn’t fundamentally different from any other dark ride shtick: there is a series of unrelated props and gags. The causal relationship between these is not clear, and what exactly we’re trying to accomplish with the plot at this point is even vaguer. It’s just an opportunity to have a series of “neat” technical effects, and to make people jump and squeal several times. All the while our car is bumping and rocking around over “uneven” terrain, an effect that’s supposed to signify this attraction as a top class thrill ride. These Enhanced Motion Vehicles are probably very expensive pieces of technology that took years to develop and would require a million nerd photos if ever given a backstage tour, but during the actual ride they enhanced little besides a sense of motion sickness. The problem was probably caused by my vantage point in the front row, where I could clearly see at all times that the road ahead of me was completely flat and paved with a little guide slot down the middle, which resulted in conflicting sensory data between my eyes and my inner ear.

The story gives you all the basic flavors of everyone’s favorite death traps so that no one feels left out. There’s a mummy chamber, a bug chamber, a skeleton chamber, a rat chamber, and a snake chamber, which I suspect exists only so the sound clip of Indy’s famous quip about snakes could be used. The snake is a gigantic, ten-foot tall, 50-foot long cobra. That’s not scary. I don’t know why people think that taking creepy things and magnifying them ten times larger makes them ten times creepier. The psychology of a phobia of large animals is completely different from a phobia of small animals, and I think (evolutionarily speaking) smaller is more effective. Besides, the fact that it was painted a glow-in-the-dark purple and green pretty glaringly destroyed any lingering suspension of disbelief by that point.

More interesting is the central temple chamber, which has tall vaulted ceilings and deep crevices, which we cross through multiple times throughout the journey. The most effective trick is an excursion on a rope bridge dangling over a fire pit when the Enhanced Motion Sickness Vehicle’s engine stalls out, and a large stone god at the far end shoots lasers out of his eyes in an attempt to destroy the bridge; though for an omnipotent deity on his home turf he’s not a very good shot. The positive aspect of this central design feature is that it puts the adventure on a grander scale, expanding the field of vision far beyond what we’re accustomed to for an indoor theme park dark ride. The down side is that it makes it easier to trace the route of the dark ride path into and back out of the various gag chambers, and we can even see other EMSVs at different points on their journey, reminding us that our adventure is in no way unique.

After a couple minutes of non-stop Enhanced Motion Sickness rampage we finally slow down as we approach a long corridor. Our vehicle hesitates for an extended second, and the music even cuts out. For me this moment of silence actually became the most memorable trick in the entire ride, because it was the only time when there was ever a variation in pacing, psychologically suggesting that something was about to happen, rather than something always happening. The gag at the payoff was not particularly worth it; it was a blowdart chamber that triggered a hundred puffs of air, ineffective because the sound effects suggested projectiles that were large and slow enough that they could be partially witnessed with the naked eye, and that we should all be dead by the time we reach the end, requiring our imaginations to fill in the rest of the incomplete effect. Oh well, it was still one of the better tricks on offer.

Now how on earth are they possibly going to top a showstopper that literally involves stopping the car for two seconds and a bunch of compressed air tanks? Tricky, I know, but those clever designers can always think of something, and at this point I realize we’re probably getting close to the point when we’re running out of budget and need wrap up the freeflowing regurgitation of noise and action and tack an unrelated conclusion on the end that will convince people Disney Imagineers are still master storytellers. Rounding the next corner, we come face to face with our hero dangling from a rope, and he informs us he has a bad feeling about this.

He is right. It seems the Forbidden Eye has doomed us to eternal recurrence, that pataphysical condition where we are cursed to relive our lives an infinite number of times with no remembrance of our previous, identical fates. A giant boulder rushes towards Indy and our EMSV, with apparently no one realizing this is exactly the same event as what previously happened in Raiders of the Lost Ark. A chilling climax indeed.

With seemingly nowhere to go, our EMSV drops down a previously hidden descent at the last second before geological annihilation. This was the one trick that still has me gasping “how did they do that,” as it somehow involved reversing the vehicle and releasing an opening in the track. At the bottom of this drop and around the last curve we encounter one last fake Harrison Ford wiping his brow next to a crumbled boulder, which doesn’t quite make sense because the spatial relations between scenes don’t completely add up. The transition between rooms is supposed to play the same function as a cinematic cut between scenes, and this intention is generally understood by riders, but because we’re occupying real four-dimensional space it doesn’t quite gel as naturally as on film. There is a strong intuition that this Dr. Jones is not the same as that previous Dr. Jones because, well, they’re not.

I also am left wondering how the heck Indy escaped from the boulder. This crucial plot point that distinguishes a happy ending from a tragic ending is left totally unexplained. Potentially another failure at adequately linking causation between dark ride scenes, it seems that after a hundred million dollars in research and development, the best resolution to the story is an appeal to an ironically uncommented upon deus ex machina device. Indiana Jones is unshaken by his improbable near-death escape and cracking casual jokes with the tourists as we’re returned to the station.

At the end of the adventure, I cannot say that I am any closer to discovering the elusive meaningful storytelling I’ve been promised and searching for in theme park rides. I disembarked genuinely confused, unconvinced that I could be feeling so much indifference towards an attraction that had so much money and talent behind it.

The best explanation I have for this is that the human element is completely lost amid the impossibly huge budget. At the most fundamental level, all forms of fiction and art are about the connection of one human being to another, either through the interpersonal sharing of stories or sounds or visual ideas. They took what was originally a successful cinematic idea and tried to translate it verbatim into the themed environment, not realizing what they were losing in the conversion process and doing nothing to bring it back to life in the unique dark ride medium.

On the screen you see live human actors, spontaneously reacting to the world they find themselves in. The director, cinematographer, and editor, meanwhile, are always hiding just behind us, reinforcing a continuous sense of identity as they lead us through this world along with their characters. Our perspective is their perspective, and unless we’re watching surveillance footage, in the movies we take comfort in the fact that no matter whom we’re with or what we see on screen, we are never really alone.

It’s not the same on the Indiana Jones Adventure. Here we find ourselves completely alone and isolated, our perspective shared with exactly no one but ourselves. All the other humans are either lifeless preprogrammed duplicates, droning cast members with no free will beyond serving us efficiently and with a smile, or are just as alone and confused in this vast mechanical world as we are. We share in the thrills and the laughs with others in our EMSV, but more in the way we comment on some natural event like a white water rapids adventure. The attraction’s creators remain anonymously hidden behind the walls, directing the action at us but not with us. Any individual act of creative expression is muted against the vastness of the project and the requirements of the franchise.

This natural deficiency found in recreating a cinematic environment in a real four-dimensional space could perhaps be forgiven if the story was ever compelled by anything deeper than random action and effects, but I’d be hard-pressed to mount such a defense for the Indiana Jones Adventure.

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Next: New Orleans Square

Previous: Introduction & Main Street, U.S.A.

On July 17th, 1955, Walt Disney debuted to the world his vision for Disneyland, welcoming the very first patrons to this happy place dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that created America. While the dedication would make the history books, the rest of the day would be referred to within the company as Black Sunday. From that moment on, the American amusement park would be irreversibly ruined.

It wasn’t the overcrowding, the unfinished cement walkways, the lack of water supply, or the gas leak in Fantasyland that was responsible for the ruination. Those events would be quickly forgotten with time. In fact, it was for quite the opposite reason. What Disney did was achieve a resounding success through the fabrication of a lie. Everything in Disneyland is artifice. Nothing here is real. The buildings are all in forced perspective. The rugged landscapes are all painted. You look into the eyes of a human and there’s nothing behind them but whirring machinery. Despite admitting nearly fifteen million people each year, the place is a ghost town of dead things and ideas, made to appear alive by the forces of consumerism. Socrates would have been much quicker to drink the hemlock if he could have known that over 2000 years later the pinnacle of popular culture would be an imitation of an imitation of an imitation.¹

Disneyland was nothing new, as fake museums and cities had long been in operation. But they were a negligible cultural curiosity, easily ignored by artists and intellectuals. America was the birthplace of Emerson and Thoreau. Its monuments were constructed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and its artistic currency printed by Mark Rothko. It was a place of brutal beauty. Brutal because it was real and sometimes ugly, beautiful because it was true. And what was this country’s beacon shining across the Atlantic, the first sight European travelers would encounter? Not the Statue of Liberty; it was an amusement park. A place where the tawdry and the fantastical became one and the same, where a million twinkling lights symbolized the promises of a generation, and where it didn’t have to be disguised as something it wasn’t to be beautiful.

While Coney Island and its kind were already going into decline with or without Walt, what Disneyland did was cement the term “Theme Park” in the English lexicon. American culture’s interest in imitation wax museums and reconstructed ghost towns were probably destined to become historical footnotes, a minor postwar trend in escapism that offered little creative or artistic potential and was largely (and rightly) ignored by the intelligent public. But then Walt took the concept of faked, “hyperreal” environments and turned it into a national obsession by making it the key selling feature that differentiated Disneyland from the competition, and placed his park on a pedestal so high even the Soviet Premier couldn’t get it out of sight and threw a tantrum when he was denied entrance on his diplomatic visit. Disneyland set a new agenda for the amusement business for the remainder of the century such that the traditional amusement parks of old could never return unaffected by the themed fad. The public was hooked on the absolute fake.

Nowadays we’re given a false dichotomy to choose from. Either it’s an “amusement park”, and it’s just a collection of unadorned rides built on a piece of land for our instantaneous sensual gratification; or it’s a “theme park”, and it’s married to this specific idea Walt Disney had of making little fake worlds that were somehow better and happier than the real world. Although most parks fall along a gradient between the ideals, what the success of Disneyland (and, therefore, the Theme Park) did was eliminate the possibility of a third dimension by constricting our use of language to this two-dimensional plane. Towards one end of the axis are parks where everything must be disguised with artifice, and toward the other is the don’t-give-a-shit carnival park presentation. And if we’re to believe anything that Karl Marx tells us, it’s that our material reality tends to be limited by the language we have to represent it. Is it even possible to imagine a third park category that’s unbounded by both the vanilla-plain “amusement park” and the spectacularly fake “theme park”? Let’s try.

I’d argue that the Luna Parks, Dreamlands, and White Cities of yesteryear fit this third unnamable category. These were places where, relative to their time, attention to detail was no less meticulous than modern day theme parks. Beauty was just as important as the entertainment value, but the difference was the concept of “theming” was completely left out of the equation. What were these places themed to? An arbitrary few attractions theatrically recreated stories and history, but the emphasis was on the act of storytelling rather than simulating and enhancing lifelikeness. Advancing time a couple of decades, we also have the art deco splendor of a place like Denver’s Lakeside Park. It imitates nothing, the park symbolizes only itself, but it would also seem mildly insulting to file it among bread-and-butter amusement parks. What do we call these places?

Of course, the sad truth is that Lakeside is a small historical relic that’s not becoming fresher with age, and its relevance to the 21st century is only slightly more than a nostalgic time capsule. After Lakeside Park, World War II broke out which halted the aesthetic evolution of the business. And before these parks could reorganize, clean themselves up, and get going again, Disney came along with all the power of a media empire and redefined the aesthetic principles of the business such that these dirty parks would be left behind forever. If Luna Park hadn’t burned down and was still as dynamic and innovative as it had been 100 years ago, what would this “brutally beautiful” place look like today? Certainly nothing like the theme park imitation of Old Luna Park that’s currently sitting on that lot. But it’s hard to even imagine, so far has Disneyland and its line of successors redirected the evolutionary line of park design, that even our language has a hard time describing a park that does not fabricate mimesis. And I think we’re the worse off for that.

It’s ironic that for a place that was supposed to inspire the imagination of all who visited it, one of Disneyland’s biggest measures of success is how much it’s been copycatted by every other theme park built in the time since its debut. If you visit enough parks you begin to understand they’re all variations on the same theme, and that lineage can be traced all the way back to Anaheim. There must be a centerpiece icon, and the park must have big midways laid out in a radial or circular design (because crowds absolutely must be controlled along these routes). The entrance midway is always an exclusive collection of gift shops and food outlets, and you can make a good bet that one of the theme zones will involve some element of jungle adventure, children’s fantasy, science fiction, or the western frontier. And theme parks are now always viewed as a synergized distribution channel for some media outlet, with the most technologically advanced dark rides beholden to marketing the parent company’s most prized intellectual properties.

Disneyland is where the brutally beautiful America is sent to die, only to be resurrected in hagiographic form. Even when it imitates a natural or slightly unattractive part of the world, it looks too clean and perfect. Art is supposed to lead us to Truth, but there’s nothing real or truthful about “theming”. Heck, it’s not even a real word. Where were all the grammar Nazis on chat forums when people starting sticking the gerund onto a word that’s already a noun? Nevertheless, it seems to be the only word in our vocabulary that’s capable of describing the scenic things we find in Disneyland and its progeny, that doesn’t have the negative connotation of the next best alternative “imitation”.

When my external environment is “themed”, I go through my day in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance, aware of the inherent phoniness while attempting to make believe it is real. If I don’t look in the direction the designers tell me to look or emote in the way I’m supposed to emote on cue, then the enjoyment is lost. Looking beneath the surface to discover the inner structural machination (literally and figuratively) is a vice instead of a virtue at Disneyland. Even if it seems a harmless game of make-believe, the encouragement of such an ethic should send a chill down the spine of anyone who wishes for a more enlightened society. Thankfully we all have self awareness and control over this cognitive dissonance, and it becomes a source of amusement. Notice how many people laugh when they’re confronted with a themed object that would be horrible if they actually believed it to be real. The unresolved mental conflict produces an emotional response that functions almost identically to humor.

As a result of this conflict, it seems that Disneyland is most appreciated by technophiles who put themselves with at least one foot outside the experiential realm of an attraction so they can look down on the rides and attractions from the same perspective as the designers. The buzzphrase for describing a Disney park is always “attention to detail”. Notice it’s not simply the detailing by itself, the praise is on the transitive act of designing and building an attraction, the attentive role of the Imagineers always beneath the surface of the parkgoer’s judgment. The best part of a Disneyland experience is when one is left wondering “how’d they do that?” I think every Disneyland aficionado secretly or not-so-secretly wants to play the role an Imagineer. Simple spectatorship always offers diminishing returns.

The problem with technophilia is that aesthetics are discussed is rather crass materialistic terms, where quality is usually linked to how expensive it looks, or how little mental work is required to convince one of a degree of realism. Story and mood become ciphers. There’s no intrinsic value to stories or styles; any form is acceptable as long as the attraction is done ‘correctly’. The compliments are rarely just for the richness and depth of the raw subjective experience by itself, although many hold a deep appreciation for the richness and depth of Disney’s pockets. “If this theme looks like it costs more than the competition, then it must be better a better theme!” It’s the nature of the hyperreal worlds of Disney to encourage this kind of appreciation, but I’m not certain if I personally have much use for it.

Before I get an influx of comments complaining that, A): I’m not the right person to criticize Disney because I don’t know how to simply immerse myself in the magic of the experience, B): speculating that I’m actually a closeted Disney fan in denial, or C): accusing me of holding Disneyland to a higher standard than I do for any other park, let me reply to these three comments right now.

A): Maybe. When other future enthusiasts were growing up on the Pirates of the Caribbean, I grew up on the Magnum XL-200. My first complete Disney experience didn’t happen until my junior year of college. Since then I have been incredibly fortunate to visit every Disney park outside the state of Florida in a little over a year.

In that year I’ve discovered something fundamental missing from these theme park experiences, something that could not be solved by more or better theming. Maybe it’s anhedonia. I’m not of the right psychology. I feel elated after being in the presence of a great “depressing” movie, and lousy after watching a Hollywood ending.

But I don’t think this proves me a curmudgeonly cynic. Quite the opposite.

To people who pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars to willfully “escape from reality” for the better part of a week, it is you I feel sorry for. Is life really that horrible? Is the rest of the world really that shitty? You really need to take a Disneyland vacation in the same way you need to take painkillers and antidepressants?

Those who leave behind their critical faculties in the car in order to maximize their enjoyment of Disneyland are the real cynics. Great art needs no shield from close scrutiny. In fact, its powers are only enhanced by critical analysis. If you need to cultivate some form of ignorance to enjoy something, no matter how minor or innocent that ignorance is, then you’ve already failed to achieve an authentically meaningful experience. I’m not saying I have any answers, but I do try to search for that authentic reality using the faculties I’ve been given.

Yes, I too wish upon a star that the world could always be a happy place. However, I don’t believe delusion is ever a good justification for happiness, no matter what the advertisements say.

Don’t worry. There’s still hope for Disneyland, which brings me to…

B): There is absolutely no truth that I’m a closeted Disney fan, because I’ll openly admit right now that I have a great time in their parks and I always look forward to returning. Their human resources and customer relations departments are perhaps the best I’ve ever witnessed in the amusement industry. After being aggravated again and again by bad management at both small family run and big chain regional parks, I cannot describe how refreshing it is to spend a day at a park where the management truly “gets it”. They keep lines moving at an obscene rate, and it is extremely rare that I notice a way in which capacity is not being maximized. I can always count on their employees (err, excuse me, “cast members”) to be efficient and courteous; no small feat considering most of them are pulled from college campuses.

Also, I’ve found the stereotype of Disneyland as a lawyer-heavy, nickel-and-dime happy, borderline fascistic universe to be untrue. In other parks if I try to take a picture where I’m arbitrarily not supposed to be standing or smuggle unsecured glasses on a ride, or violate any other of their 100 victimless rules, I get a screaming pimple-faced banshee sent after me. I am genuinely impressed and appreciative by how much common sense Disney has in establishing their park policies. They don’t hound you to use five dollar lockers at the entrance of every ride. You’re allowed to bring a camera on almost every ride, even many of the roller coasters. The FastPass system is completely free and egalitarian in design. Most impressive, where on-ride photos are present at the exit of an attraction, they do nothing to discourage people from snapping their own photo off the monitors, even though this quite obviously curbs the sale of prints, because they want their guests to have a take-home souvenir even if it doesn’t always mean more money in their pockets. They’re smart enough to understand that ‘clever’ profit-making schemes and constant legal defense maneuvers never achieves the same return on investment that a dedication to customer satisfaction and loyalty does.²

There are also the diversified attraction offerings, the always clean premises and facilities, the quality of craftsmanship, and the obvious huge amounts of research and effort that it takes to construct and maintain such a park. Like St. Peter’s Basilica, one is left in awe at the magnitude of this feat of human labor, so much so that one wonders if God had a hand in creating it. Both certainly attract a great many pilgrims seeking a deep religious experience worshipping their central deities, whether they be Jesus Christ or Mickey Mouse. But above all of this, there’s one reason in particular that I like Disneyland, which conveniently leads me to my final point.

C): I do hold Disney parks to a higher standard than any other park. Besides being the most expensive attractions-based parks worldwide, they’ve also got nearly unlimited creative resources and R&D funds, and have achieved huge economies of scale. Is it not unreasonable to expect more from the company that has always set the standard?

And that’s what I love most. Disneyland is the only place in the world where I can make all the miniscule, esoteric judgments about theme park theory without feeling guilty about bashing the best efforts of those who worked on it with limited means. When I praise other parks it’s usually against a background of limited expectations. If I judged every park at the same theoretical level I do for Disneyland, my reviews would all sound the same and it would be totally counterproductive. Disneyland thinks it is one of the happiest, most perfect places on earth, a place that’s supposed to inspire the imaginations of all who visit. I think that is probably true, as it inspires me to set my ideals at the highest level my powers of imagination can conceive. What is the most life-enriching experience we can conceivably create in the existing theme park format?

In fact, I would go so far to say this makes me one of the best fans Disneyland has, because I respect the talents of everyone involved in making these dreams a reality. Even the harshest of criticism is always in some form a compliment. It means the critic respects your innate potential at the very highest level. Anyone who says “I take Disneyland too seriously and should just enjoy it for what it is,” is making a much bigger insult to the Imagineers than they are to me. They say a theme park (amusement park, whatever we want to call it) can’t be an artistic masterpiece, that we should limit our expectations to disposable vacation entertainment. I say Disneyland can achieve this… and for every failure there are cases where they do indeed approach genius, and make me reconsider how much more perfect perfection can be made.

That’s why I’m going to Disneyland.

Our journey begins with an announcement that here we leave the world of today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy. Under the railroad tracks and through the rabbit hole we go, emerging on the other side in Main Street, U.S.A. This is an idealized recreation of Walt Disney’s childhood Missouri home, complete with City Hall, a fire station, cinema, penny arcade, trolley cars, and Abraham Lincoln. (Remember, this is the idealized version!) Pay close attention, not even space and time are quite what they seem. The buildings, you will notice, are all in forced perspective, meaning that the lower, ground-level floor is built at the standard 1:1 scale, while the second and third levels might be at 2:3 or 1:2, to give the illusion that the upper floors are further away than they really are. What’s more, the shop fronts are all angled slightly toward the Fantasyland castle, so that as we enter the park in the morning it appears as though we have an entire city to cross, while coming back the other way at night with sore and tired feet, Main Street has suddenly shrunken to a miniscule half-block. Even better than a magic trick, not only do the majority of visitors not know how it’s done, we don’t even realize an illusion is unfolding before our very eyes!

Nevertheless, there is a subconscious realization that somehow our bodies have been magnified, and that this smaller, better world is intrinsically linked to the manifestation of a bigger, better version of ourselves. It’s quite empowering and cathartic, which we need at this moment to stave off the emotional deflation of being just another head among the inrushing crowds. And what do we do with our newfound fantastical powers? Surely we won’t waste them on the Disney Gallery, Main Street Cinema, or Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln? No, we’re in Disneyland, so we’re going to partake in that one activity that makes us so smug to be an American: we shop!

Rows of mom-and-pop businesses invite our entrance, tantalizing us with caramelized sweets and playful knickknacks. There are no little Dickensian children pressing their noses against the glass in sad wistfulness in this universe. We’ve already paid our admission up front, so we know everything on display is designed exclusively for our own pleasures. It’s still a functioning Main Street, but one that’s been defanged from of the cruel bite of reality. We’re in a world where rules are only for games, and everything is make-believe. Our eyes are caught by make-believe advertisements, and we step over a make-believe curb to reach the make-believe doors, and inside we find a gigantically oversized emporium of make-believe goods and commodities, which we pay for with our make-believe money that’s burning a hole straight though our make-believe pockets.

Ah, I see what just happened! There is one rule within Main Street that remains unmodified from those governing the world outside of the Disney gates. It’s the law of capitalism. While the attention to detail is immaculate at transporting us back to 1908 in every slightest way, price inflation is the one remaining aspect that has not been adjusted for maximum lifelikeness. The facades invite us to pretend we’re still role-playing a game, even though they know and we know (and we know they know) that the Lincolns we’re exchanging over the counter are still more real than the Lincoln reciting Four Score and Seven Years Ago down the street. But we’re still playing the Disney game, and the first person to say aloud what isn’t make-believe ruins the fun for everyone. By the way, if that’s our working definition of “fun”, then it’s a game that Disneyland is very good at playing.

Me, I’ll skip this pretend consumerism game for now. But I will come back to it at the end of the night, as I’ve got the start of a magnet collection from Disney parks around the world that I need to keep growing. First thing in the morning, I’ve got more immediate concerns in Adventureland.

Next: Adventureland

Disney California Adventure

Given Disney’s frequent self-congratulatory tendencies, it is with some surprise that when they finally decided to construct an amusement park land that’s a simulation of an amusement park, they didn’t use their own neighboring Disneyland as their model. Just imagine the possibilities: Tour the authentically inauthentic jungles of Adventurelandland, and then marvel at yesterday’s vision of today in Tomorrowlandland! If they could have made a “Disneylandland”, it probably would have been the most interesting and honest themed environment they’d ever design. It would allow them to finally declare without veiled pretense that they alone are the ultimate synthesis of pop-culture trash and the cornerstone of Californian identity. Meanwhile I would enjoy getting my mind blown by the meta-surrealness of the whole thing. What magnitude of vortex in the space-time continuum would be created by a hyperreal interpretation of the ultimate example of hyperreality?

At the very least it probably would have shut up a number of the Disney-faithful critics of California Adventure that no Disney property should be tainted by the inclusion of the “unthemed” amusement park rides that were designed for the beach-boardwalk styled Paradise Pier. Seriously, guys, the theme of the park is California culture, and amusement boardwalks are a part of California culture. How on earth does a themed landscape of Roller Coasters and Ferris Wheels not belong here? Last I checked Long Beach, Venice, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, et al, are all still part of the Pacific shelf. None of them have fallen off, yet.______

Actually, that’s too plainly obvious for me to think it’s a legitimate response to what the criticism is actually getting at, so I’ll try again. Seriously, guys, you are latently implying that traditional amusement parks are inherently of poor taste, stigmatizing them to be of inferior social and cultural standing compared to the suburban class-superiority of modern resort theme parks. That’s not a criticism of Disney. It’s a criticism of anything that isn’t Disney! Nothing else at Disneyland has ever been anything more than an imitation of popular culture, and to deny the boardwalk amusement park a place at these theme parks is to disavow that part of society as dirty and ugly at a fundamentally base aesthetic level, so that even a ‘clean’ version is still trash. A part of society which Disney itself is a branch of! Besides, since Disney’s model of theme park design makes it impossible to construct more than a small handful of thematically integrated rides at a level that would satisfy the fans without a budget exceeding several billion dollars, it was the traditional amusement parks that ultimately saved California Adventure by allowing the Imagineers to glut the western edge of the park with numerous attractions you can actually ride.

Now that I’ve spent all my breath defending Paradise Pier, I’m going to flip sides and tear it down. The place does a really shitty job paying ‘homage’ to the historical California amusement boardwalks and piers. It looks more like a candy store exploded in Six Flags. Nor do they watch their visual sightlines, leaving a large concrete condominium hotel (owned by Disney) taking a prominent position along the back of the park. I’m sad to say a lot of the fan base’s criticisms of Paradise Pier do have merit. The attempt to modernize a historical amusement pier results in something that looks like an airbrushed caricature of any generic movie set pier, and the off-the-shelf rides serve little purpose other than to fill in space. I can only imagine how much worse it was with an S&S tower ride crudely themed to a carnival Hi-Striker game in the middle of it. They seem to be trying to shift the visual design from the flashiness of Pacific Park to the vintageness of The Pike as part of their billion dollar renovation, which is the right general strategy. However, this revision to Victorian architecture is entirely superficial, just a few set dressings to make the pier look more dignified and upper class to visitors who don’t realize it is totally lacking in any genuine historical content. As a student of amusement park history, I think there was a huge opportunity missed to resurrect lost treasures of California like the Cyclone Racer, the L.A. Thompson Scenic Railway, or the Laff in the Dark. I think Disney could have taken the concepts of these rides and done something inventive for a 21st century audience, plus it would have allowed the historical authenticity the Imagineers are always lusting after. Imagine, real wooden structures at Disney, just like the originals! Instead they landed us with a Mack Wild Mouse and a cartoon carousel.

The one attraction they sorta got right was the Golden Zephyr, a Harry Traver Circle Swing that was once popular at amusement parks. Having recently been on an authentic 1904 version at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, I was appreciative that they got the mechanics correct. While it’s just like the real thing, there’s also a downside… it’s just like the real thing. There’s a reason they stopped building these nearly eighty years ago. They’re not very thrilling. The silver steel 12-person aeroships have a lot of inertia so it’s rather hard to get much of a swing going. You just circle around in the air only a few feet from the safety of the platform, eliciting a nice breeze and panoramic view of Paradise Bay, and that’s about it. On the plus side, the combination of high capacity and being not a particularly popular ride to begin with means that the queue should rarely be a problem.

Mickey’s Fun Wheel is arguably the most iconic centerpiece of the park, usurping the somewhat reclusive and very grey Grizzly Peak for that distinction. The make-over from Sun Wheel to Fun Wheel seems to have been one of the more positive changes. Not because I hate the sun and need more Mickey Mouse around the parks (and I’m not sure of the logic of swapping the sun and Mickey’s head between the Ferris Wheel and California Screamin’s loop and calling that an ‘improvement’). But because it got an attractive LED lighting package that makes the geometric figure come alive at night. While it looks purty from across the bay, up close in person it could use a lot more plussing. The queue, potentially interesting for its subaquatic location, is mostly surrounded by hard concrete and temporary hand railings, and the gondola cars have an awful metal mesh over all the openings that make picture-taking near impossible with anything larger than a camera-phone, even straining ordinary spectatorship. The slow, continuously moving rotation means everyone gets exactly one cycle. I like this for efficiency reasons, but it also means that if you chose the roller cars you only get two moments where you rush towards the end and fling the car nearly halfway to horizontal. The fixed cars aren’t nearly as thrilling but there’s a better view at the top, if you’re able to enjoy it through all the wires.

We’d skip the Silly Symphony Swings, Jumpin’ Jellyfish and King Triton’s Carousel, which didn’t offer anything I couldn’t find at a local carnival except for twenty minute queues, and move on to the 2008-opened Toy Story Midway Mania. It seems as if Pixar is determined to turn California Adventure into a personal showcase (Cars Land, A Bug’s Land, Monster’s Inc., Turtle Talk with Crush, the Up playground), and so they must also find synergistic opportunities on an old amusement boardwalk. Themed to a set of carnival midway games, this interactive dark ride uses the latest 3D dark ride technology to produce what essentially amounts to five minutes playing on a Nintendo Wii. Needless to say, this makes it the most popular attraction at California Adventure, and is the one attraction where the use of FastPasses would be most highly recommended.

We enter beneath the California Screamin’ superstructure, the stand-by queue a long loop around a sheltered promenade with lots of cute toy-sized details; i.e. “cut here” markings on the cardboard packaging walls. The centerpiece is a larger-than-life Mr. Potato Head animatronic character interacting with guests in line and spectators on the midway. This is one of the most impressive pieces of technical equipment in the park, with digitally projected eyes, fully synchronized lips, and extremely fluid arm movements, completely absent of the rigid mechanical shuttering I’m accustomed to on most of these props, but still able to make strong, forcible hand gestures. The character tries to “interact” with spectators using Don Rickles’ deadpan comic delivery, but this tends to fail because people don’t intuitively realize they’re supposed to respond to him. Instead we watch silently with a quizzical look on our faces, waiting for this piece of technology to demonstrate some other programmed feature for us. The “no response” collection of automated lines get recycled fast, and then he breaks into an annoying off-tone song that tends to promote those holding up the queue to forward movement once again. Actually, the biggest laugh I found in the queue seemed to be unintentional: a poster for a Toy Story midway game called (I kid you not) “Flying Tossers”.

The dark ride vehicles are linked into pairs, with each car holding four people, two sitting back to back on each side. Inside the ride are a series of video screens that the vehicles park in front of, one screen directly in front of each set of riders. Each seat has a mounted plastic gun with a pull-chord trigger, and we are given targets to blast on the screen in a first-person shooter format. Good, old fashioned, American fun, right? The various virtual projectiles (pies, darts, balls, etc.) are rendered with real-time physics, so that the targets you knock down will bounce and ricochet off other objects in the scene, giving the various Sids in the audience a chance to delight in some mayhem. My aunt Christine’s strategy was to carefully pick out a target (the point values vary and there are also a few “Easter Eggs”), aim, shoot, and then move on to scanning for the next good target. My strategy, however, was to just go into each scene John Rambo style, guns ablazin’, spraying custard projectiles across anything unlucky enough to end up on the wrong side of my crosshairs. Yippee ki-yay, rubber duckies! This strategy ended up being the winning strategy, although it tanked my accuracy rating to only 50%. Also, my only take-home was a free sample of carpal tunnel syndrome.

The ride’s fun but at the end of it there’s a nagging feeling that it’s not the sort of fun I paid for in a trip to Disneyland. Midway Mania is basically the exact same kind of fun as it is to play a new videogame at a friend’s party with slightly inebriated vision, and despite the high level of interactivity neither of us had much desire for a repeat experience. So much of what we call entertainment these days involves looking at refreshing pixilated screens, and when I go to a theme park I’d prefer something that’s real and tactile in front of me. The dark ride format is largely wasted in this regard. There’s almost no riding or scenery, as the cars spend most of their time parked at a standstill so you can shoot at a screen for thirty seconds before they speed off to the next game. The only reason I can think of that necessitates a ride system is because each scene is nothing more than the same game with different dressings and movie characters, so you need to have some literal sensation of “moving on” so the repetition feels more substantial than reaching the next level in an iPhone game app. The experience probably would not have been compromised very much if they just built a large arcade with 3D shooter games, but since you wouldn’t have to queue 45 minutes for that, no one would think it was any good.

At last we arrive at California Screamin’, California Adventure’s signature original thrill ride wholly unique to the property, which also happens to have the second longest track length of any steel roller coaster in North America; it is also the longest roller coaster with inversion(s) anywhere in the world. 6000+ feet of track should automatically make California Screamin’ pretty special in the world of roller coasters, right?

The problem is: California Screamin’ is not very special. When I first learned that length statistic I couldn’t believe it was true. How could a layout have that much track but so little substance?  It’s a double out-and-back that features a launch, a loop, and…? The coaster does indeed take a respectable two minutes to get from launch position to the final brakes – quite a long time for continuous forward momentum, by roller coaster standards at least – so it’s not like we’re somehow being cheated. And observing from the ground in person I was struck by how much the coaster structure dominates the midway on all sides. The solution to this discrepancy was answered by an initial front seat ride, revealing to me that a lot of the layout is unmemorable fluff that pads out the ride time.

The progression of the layout is quite uncomplicated, centralized around the singular vertical loop as the moment of climax, with the launch/lift hill combo escalating drama in the first half, and a series of bunny hops and helix finale acting as a steady denouement before the brakes. What are missing from this equation are the flat turns, which we greet after every one or two ‘straight’ elements (including the many block brakes), and it is in these wide, drawn out curves that a lot of that 6072 feet of track is spent. They are pretty fast paced and riders remain excited and engaged through the whole experience (aided by an onboard audio soundtrack that keeps the synapses racing even when the coaster cars themselves are starting to let off the gas), but this non-stop circling around the midway fails to leave a memorable impression due to their amorphous, force-differential shaping and resulting neutral G-forces.

Before this becomes too negative, I must commend California Screamin’ for its merits, which are numerous. As I already noted, the layout elements, as pointless as many of them might be, are at least sequenced in a very logical manner that progresses in a neat and tidy dramatic arc. Emotions swing back and forth from slow escalating tension to fast adrenal release, thanks in part to the LIM technology that allows for an extended midcourse pause – and even the persistently recurring block brakes allow a moment to ‘set-up’ the next action sequence. The water-level launch kicks things off to a rousing start after a nervously playful introduction, a small kick of airtime present on the first big hill, and the penultimate set of bunny hops (with an appropriate musical development) brings it all home; although the helix is a bit of a limp noodle as a ‘grand finale’. Lastly, even though it’s ‘just’ a simple vertical loop, the presentation and anticipation of this lonely inversion works so well that when it finally arrives, it feels almost as awe-inducing as Magic Mountain’s Revolution. Almost.

Plus it’s all very smooth. I must have gotten too accustomed to the Intamin vibration on Cedar Point’s coasters, and I was particularly dreading the boxy, old-make OTSH rolling stock. But these fears were totally without warrant, as the wheels rolled as if on glass, and the seats were MUCH more spacious than the hideous, “modernized” 2nd Gen trains on Colossus, et al. They also allowed room for an in-coach zipper compartment for loose items, an invaluable feature for speeding dispatch times and reducing the risk of loss, damage, or theft… why on Earth don’t more parks besides Disney use these?!?

The on-board music also did much to aid the riding experience. It’s mixed and synchronized to make sure it matches perfectly with the riding experience, slowing down, speeding up, and introducing variations exactly along with the layout. The music’s absence was sorely noted whenever we got a cycle with the speakers turned off, which unfortunately constituted the majority of our rides. The only thing that holds the soundtrack back from elevating the ride to the next level (à la Space Mountain) are the corny arrangements, a combination of tinkly carnival music for the slow parts and a fairly generic hard rock sound for the fast parts. Neither convinced me it wasn’t originally written for a cheap videogame company with the instrumentation arranged by the composer’s MacBook Pro.

Once the pros have been summed with the cons, California Screamin’ equates to a solid, enjoyable three-star thrill ride. I think many would agree. There’s very little the coaster gets wrong… but there’s very little that exceeds expectations, either. This goes back to my original point: 6000+ feet of track and a dual launch/lift system should have been epic. Given the financial and creative resources available when it was being developed, the possibilities could have been nearly limitless. It hopefully doesn’t take much imagination to realize that. I think where California Screamin’ went wrong was when Disney committed themselves not to building a roller coaster, but to building an imitation of a roller coaster. The ride appears just a little bit too perfect. The layout design seems to be based on an animator’s sketch of what the ideal roller coaster would look like from across the Paradise Pier harbor, and this curbs the ability to experiment with potentially more effective layout ideas. Satisfaction of spectators was a higher priority than satisfaction of riders. Visual aesthetic theory is very well understood by Disney and accordingly is placed on a high pedestal. Roller coaster aesthetic theory (i.e. psychological motives, emotional progressions dependant on layout variations, etc.) is not very well understood by anyone, and it’s easy to overlook even though this is arguably the most important aspect of a visitors experience. No one realized how much unexploited possibility remained left sitting on the table once the project was given the green light with 40% of the track consisting of flat banked curves that only looked beautiful from the ground. Lucky for Disney, that fairly well describes the state of modern roller coaster design as a whole, where rides are generally chosen based on how cool they look on a blueprint or brochure, and don’t always correlate to how cool they are to actually ride. California Screamin’ is the poster child for this trend by being the only roller coaster themed to look like a different roller coaster.

Somewhere in the subtext of all of this commentary is an interesting contradiction that how beautiful a roller coaster appears is often unrelated, if not an inverse factor, of how beautiful a roller coaster is to ride. The eye is attracted to continuity and symmetry (maybe in the pursuit of some metaphysical artistic ideal, maybe from a genetic selection process to weed out deformities in breeding), while the adrenal gland is activated by the opposite: unexpected discontinuities that appear to threaten the subject’s existence. For example, one could probably make an argument that Mean Streak is one of the most beautiful coasters ever built, even though the riding experience is generally considered one of the worst in the world. In fact, few enthusiasts will even naturally find it ‘beautiful’ anymore due to their first-hand experience that makes them nauseous at the very sight of the coaster, conditioned Clockwork Orange style. Imagine if someone was a coaster enthusiast only for looking at them, but never riding them, what their top ten list would be? I suspect California Screamin’ would be a contender, but even then I am uncertain about its artificial steel-copies-wood beauty when I compare it to the authentic originals, particularly the work of Prior and Church who were able to work beauty into all aspects of their creations, no matter if your viewpoint was on or off ride. Maybe if Disney wasn’t always so obsessed with producing an ‘improved’ imitation of these originals, they could have for once achieved the unaffected beauty of the real thing. But then people would complain because “that’s not Disney”.

With all of my ride reviews completed for California Adventure, I’ve noticed a recurring theme at this park. Nothing here is absolutely terrible (well, maybe apart from Monsters, Inc.) but nothing is remarkably outstanding, either. My favorite attractions were all flawed in some way, and the least flawed were attractions whose type I don’t particularly care for to begin with. The experience is the Disney equivalent of Purgatory. It’s the place where all the mediocre rides go to wait for their spiritual cleansing (in the form of a $1.1 billion renovation project), while we as visitors wait for our own ascension into the Utopia on the other side of the divide. (It’s called “Disneyland”.) The capstone of a visit to Disney California Adventure was the ultimate embodiment of this waiting for purification: World of Color.__________

We’d have liked to ride California Screamin’ a few more times, but they cut off access to the queue over an hour before the evening water and light show was scheduled to begin. While this is ostensibly in reaction to crowd control issues as people begin to take their places around Paradise Bay, I suspect in reality it only compounds the problem, as we (along with everyone else in the area) were then forced to begin our purgatorial waiting around the lagoon earlier than we might have otherwise preferred.

The game theorist in me always takes pleasure in observing the “irrationality” of such group behavior. Everyone’s self-interest maximizing desire to secure the best viewingspots for themselves results in a negative net loss for all the participants, because the distribution ratios of prime and subprime real estate will always be the same no matter when people choose to arrive, but the total amount of time that everyone has to stand around waiting goes way up (compared to if everyone was able to agree to arrive only ten minutes in advance; on average you’d have the same luck in finding a good spot but everyone also would have been able to enjoy the previous hour riding attractions instead). The problem with game theory is that when competing in a normal form strategy matrix such as this, an understanding of the group dynamics does absolutely nothing to aid in improving my own individual strategy. I’m only awarded the pleasure of enjoying the bitter irony of it all.

 After nearly an hour guarding a valuable spot along one of the tiers of banisters, salvation finally arrives as the lights dim and the announcer makes the introductions, causing the throngs of spectators to start chattering excitedly before there’s a sudden hush, and the fountains start squirting. The technology on display is quite impressive. World of Color consists of a wide variety of highly synchronized water fountains that fill Paradise Bay, including some that are capable of shooting water nearly 200 feet high, and a giant fanned cascade along the back that acts as a movie projection screen. There are also a few additional effects such as fire cannons, lasers, and some weird retracting globe thingies, but these are used sparingly and the show is almost exclusively a supersized dancing waters production. The comparison my aunt made was to the fountain show at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, but noted that the big difference here was the use of high-powered, multicolor LED at the base of each fountain so that the star of the show isn’t even the water, but all the vibrant colors. It makes sense, right? The name is World of Color, not World of Water. That show’s at Universal Studios and stars a Kevin Costner impersonator.

But then there’s the show on display. A mashup of Disney music and clips is about what I expected from World of Color, but stretch it out over a half hour and… damn… do we really need that much Disney? The show contributes nothing new to the world cultural stage. It’s all the same video, the same musical numbers, and the same preprogrammed emotional cues we’re well familiar with. The problem is compounded by the fact that anyone seeing this show will be doing so after the end of a full day at the Disneyland Resort. You’ve already heard the orchestral swells from The Little Mermaid multiple times today, Menkin’s ballad for Beauty and Beast will be on its third replay, and Aladdin’s Whole New World will by now sound very old and familiar. Disney seems to be under the impression that these musical cues will continue to reduce their audience to tears no matter how saturated they’ve become, and let me tell you, after spending only two days at the resort, they milk these songs for every last emotional drop. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if many people are reduced to tears again and again, given how many members of the population have their cultural maturity limited to Disney movies. (A quick defense: I think many Disney films are very rich aesthetic works of art that deserve high status in the cultural pantheon. Here’s one of my favorite movie reviews of Dumbo.)

The point is this: the technology is wasted on the programming. Once the show runs out of its bag of new technical tricks (which after the first ten minutes a lot of the effects start becoming as recyclable as the music), World of Color very rapidly devolves into a self-indulgent advertisement. The few original parts of music written for the introduction and conclusion could be mistaken for a satiric parody of the Disney philosophy, the incessant invocations of “imagination” only revealing how imaginatively bankrupt the entire show actually is. Reconstruct World of Color in any major city around the globe and run a nightly evening program with Holst’s The Planets, and you’ll have a national treasure attracting worldwide media attention. And you know what else? I think that if Walt Disney was still alive and calling the shots, that description would much more closely match the final product of World of Color. A brand new Fantasia scripted specifically to take advantage of the unique properties afforded by this brilliant multidimensional water canvas. That would have been worth an hour and a half of standing propped up against a banister for.

However, if I were the one in charge, we’d hear a lot less of Dukas, and a lot more of Pink Floyd.

It was about 4:30pm in the afternoon when the existential despair set in.

“What do we do now?”

Blessed though we were with short queues, a lightly attended day at California Adventure came with the consequence of running out of things to do just as the sun was beginning to hang at that eyelid squinting level, at which point we sat on a bench to contemplate the emptiness of existence at California Adventure. Also so my aunt Christine could munch on a frozen banana she had been craving. By this time we had completed a loop of the entire park, checking off all the major go-to attractions from our list, and with park-hopping not included on our tickets we were now held ourselves hostage by our requirement to see all the evening shows. Had World of Color not been the big new thing in town, a foray into the possibility of packing up and leaving early might have been more seriously entertained. But our lives would be painfully incomplete if denied the chance to see Donald Duck on a 50 foot tall water screen, and thus we were stuck.

“Let’s see what there is to do in A Bug’s Land,” I said, trying to convince myself my enthusiasm was authentic as I crumpled away my park guide for the umpteenth time. Yeah, A Bug’s Land is really the park’s kiddieland section. But until the next door Cars Land comes online, a day without big crowds means children’s attractions must be enjoyed by kids and adults alike once marathon riding California Screamin’ becomes too tedious. The good news is that A Bug’s Land, as an expansion after the deficiencies of the original blueprints came to light, is one of the nicer environments in the park, mixing real, organic greenery seamlessly with larger-than-life props. It does a surprisingly competent job at making one feel like they’ve been shrunk down to a bug’s size in the middle of a compulsive hoarder’s backyard, judging by all the repurposed refuse left strewn between the giant cloverleaves towering overhead. Although, further complicating this backstory is the fact that we appear to be in the lawn of the Hollywood Tower Hotel, which pretty well dominates most of A Bug’s Land. I trust there does exist a backstory to explain this feature, and it’s not just another case of Disney California Adventure paying no attention to what is and isn’t hidden from the sightlines within their themed lands.

Signature attractions include Flik’s Flyers, a suspended balloon style ride, Heimlich’s Chew Chew Train, a miniature railway through the chewed out discards of yesterday’s house party, and Tuck and Roll’s Drive ‘Em Buggies, a miniature bumper cars ride. Although smaller in footprint than some of these other attractions, it was Francis’s Ladybug Boogie that I decided was most worth the shame of joining a group of kindergarteners in queue for. This is a Zamperla Demolition Derby, a ride type that would otherwise be a minor entry in the spinning teacups genre if it weren’t for a figure-eight pathway of which the mechanics behind it continue to leave me slightly baffled. The question of how the red ladybug cars make the hand-off from one spinning platform to the other is only of slightly less immediate concern than the certainty that one of these times my vehicle is going to clip the others crossing in the opposite direction, as there seem to be mere inches of clearance as they rapidly thread through each other’s pathways. Too bad the spinning mechanism was quite stubborn.

Between my aunt and me, It’s Tough to Be a Bug was the most popular attraction in A Bug’s Land as it required the least amount of shame to stand in line for; here we were only pathetic theme park 3D movie show patrons, not even more pathetic adults riding theme park children’s rides. We just missed the previous showing, so we were stuck in the ‘underground’ waiting room for a considerable amount of time, where we amused ourselves by noting the collection of puny movie posters, re-titling classic films into insect humor (i.e. “Web Side Story”, yuk yuk). Soon the doors opened, we received our plastic “bug eye” glasses, and found our seats.

The storyline was not completely derivative of A Bug’s Life, instead expanding on the cinematic universe established by the 1998 film in a presentation that acknowledges its theme park setting. Our favorite CG animated ant not voiced by Woody Allen, Flik, directly addresses the human audience (as honorary bugs) in his presentation of the wonderful world of insects and arachnids. Rather than reprise the original ensemble voice cast for a big reunion of the franchise, the animators drew up completely new characters, including acorn weevil, soldier termite, a stink bug (extrasensory scent effect warning), and a Mexican Red-kneed Tarantula voiced by Cheech Marin. The story is puttering along in this show-and-tell mode for the first several minutes, when there’s suddenly a huge dramatic turn out of left field. Kevin Spacey’s Hopper shows up (in a considerably detailed animatronic), and promises to rain insect hellfire upon the audience for our exterminating ways. (Did this inspire the scene from Ratatouille?)

What follows is a pretty intense battle sequence in which massive black widow animatronics aggressively plummet from the ceiling stopping inches above our heads, and a wasp attack literally has stingers being jabbed into our spines from a pneumatic device in the seat backs. Jeez, I was even starting to get a bit concerned by this complete disregard for personal space boundaries, the cinematic fourth wall completely obliterated by this point… I wondered how often they had to lead crying children for the exit. For me, I relished the unexpected twist that actually elicited some real involvement for a moment, and the show reasonably exceeded my expectations for what I thought would otherwise amount to just another rehashing of the familiar intellectual properties. Which it still is… but done in a way I wish more of these spin-off 3D theme park shows could take inspiration from. By the way, if we’re to assume that the story is continuous with the original feature film, then there’s some weird pataphysical subtext going on when Hopper gets eaten by a chameleon at the end, apparently oblivious to his previous fate of getting eaten by a bird. It makes one wonders if the film isn’t really a commentary on the Nietzschean concept of eternal recurrence, rather than the more convenient interpretation that the writers ran out of original ideas before the curtain call.

Turn back the clock a few hours to before the start of our existential malaise, and we were just entering Hollywood Pictures Backlot under an elegant, D.W. Griffith inspired entryway (ignore the elecTRONica signs plastered over it), awash in the glow of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. Palm trees, big band, Art-Deco and Spanish Revival architecture everywhere… it’s enough to make the average southern California visitor wish they could see the real thing. Maybe one day.

Actually, I have to admit I found this area rather sterile and oppressive, trying its hardest to replicate the form of Golden Age Hollywood, but the atmosphere is curiously lifeless and two-dimensional. The road terminating in a gigantic backdrop façade that feigns a vanishing point and the unoccupied, forced perspective rows of buildings lining the streets beg us to believe them authentic even though the originals were glimpsed on the way to the park this very morning. It seems a hollow call for remembrance of a glory day, and ultimately Disney’s incessant fixation on idealizing our history seems to say a lot more about our pessimism of the present day.

One of the primary attractions fitting with the movie-making theme is the Disney Animation Building, a large indoor arcade which forms the hub for several interactive attractions. The Animation Academy we were told was a drawing class that runs a few times each hour; I’ll come back when I’m with someone that might really be into this sort of thing. The Sorcerer’s Workshop and Character Close-Up are additional interactive rooms demonstrating the process of animated character design. The real show-stopper, however, is the Pixar Zoetrope, a fully three-dimensional sculpture mounted on a giant spinning disk with strobe lights that creates the illusion of animation when set in motion. The video I captured doesn’t quite do it justice compared to seeing it in person (especially since the framerate of my camera doesn’t synch with the strobes perfectly; a warning to epileptics).

The newest experience in the building was Turtle Talk with Crush, a virtual Q&A with the sea turtle from Finding Nemo, which seats a small audience every ten minutes or so. The main purpose of this appears to be to demonstrate the virtual interactive technology, and to give a local voice actor some permanent employment, although on the technological side, the environment and 3D character isn’t much more advanced than an average videogame; the real trick seems to be coordinating the image respond to the audience on the fly, which I later found out is accomplished through the use of a digitally-linked puppet behind stage. The kids seem to like it and that’s clearly who the design was targeted for, even though the young child called on in our group was a bit reluctant to answer Crush’s questions (or answer truthfully). The actor was at least well prepared for a scenario like this and was able to keep the rest of the audience chuckling while he tried to coax a coherent reply out of the kiddo. The technology could still use a bit of tweaking, particularly in making sure that Crush is always facing the direction of the person he’s talking to. He often makes eye contact just a few feet beyond his intended subject, close but not-close-enough to still feel a bit weird. It’s sort of like talking to Michele Bachmann.

Across the Boulevard midway from the Animation Building is a dark ride whose reason for being I am unable to comprehend: Monsters, Inc. Mike and Sully to the Rescue. Aside from having absolutely no thematic continuity with the rest of Sunset Boulevard, I cannot identify a target audience for this attraction. The ride is essentially a pastiche of key scenes and moments from the feature film, stitched together in a four minute experience that makes the story utterly incomprehensible to anyone not already intimately familiar with the movie. As someone who saw the film about three or four times during its original theatrical run ten years ago I was not part of that bewildered audience, but I can’t say that the attraction had any value for me either. Why? For the inverse of the same reason: because I had already seen the film! Nothing new was to be found here. It was all the same emotional cues I already knew from the film, but blitzing by one reference after another created such jarring tonal shifts that I realized the Imagineers were expecting me to meet them much more than halfway if this was to have any coherence beyond simply being another technology showcase. It was somewhere around when we went from an intense CDA crackdown scene, to idiotic nerd banter pseudo-“comic relief”, to the slow-paced bathroom games scene, all in about the time frame of less than fifteen seconds, that I finally threw up my hands in exasperation and said, “Fuck it, dude. Let’s go bowling.”

What I find sad is that there was a lot of expensive technology invested in this attraction, but it was all wasted on an idea that contributes nothing to the cultural discourse because everything had already been done before in a medium that was better suited to the type of story. Surely somewhere out there, sitting derelict on an Imagineer’s sketchpad, there was an inspired, inventive dark ride concept that could have used this space much better. I know the Disney fanboys probably all love the ride just for the virtue of its existence, but by the end I couldn’t see it as imagined by anyone but a callous marketer. Maybe when you reduce a theme park to an extended marketing tool this is about the best we can expect, but I’ll use Tokyo Disneyland’s Hide and Go Seek version as evidence that there was a totally feasible way to incorporate the characters while doing something original that takes advantage of the dark ride format’s unique capabilities. Even the original Superstar Limo dark ride, as godawful as its description sounded, might have at least been something that my experience of it wouldn’t have felt like a complete redundancy while I was still riding it. An animatronic Roz at the end with the ability to respond to each individual carload with a seemingly personalized script was an insufficient salvo to rescue Mike and Sully. Actually, my favorite bit of the entire ride might have been a sushi menu found in the queue, with dishes such as “Swill and Sour Soup: varmint medley in miso broth”. If you’re not amused by puns, then abandon all hope ye who enter California Adventure. Moving on.

The physiological and psychological machinations of drop tower rides are so uniformly constant across parks and manufacturers that I’ve long since given up trying to write reviews for any individual attractions in the genre. Replacing an analysis with an unrelated joke I think speaks much more about my opinion of these rides, which isn’t that they’re not fun or important thrill icons for their parks, but that they’re such one dimensional experiences that little can be said about them. That all said, I’ve neglected to comment on the observation that drop towers are universally some of the purest working examples of catharsis, and how it is intrinsically linked to the anticipation that precedes it. It’s such a simple concept that it barely even needs elaboration, certainly not for any readers whom have experienced a drop tower first hand and screamed themselves silly on the way down. Strong emotions become pent-up and slowly accumulate, and these feelings are released once the seats are. You ascend body shaking, and you return, if not exactly at peace with the world, at least cleansed of the paralyzing anxieties on the way up. Does this speak to our fundamental situation as conscious beings towards death?

The Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror gets a fully written review from me not just because the scope of its intricately detailed back story and set design puts it in a league apart from ordinary drop towers, but because those simple psychological elements that I associate with nearly all drop towers are strangely absent. That’s not to say that the experience is less rich by comparison. To the contrary, this journey into the unknown is involving at so many levels that what I believe happens is the constant bedazzlement of story, technology, and detail drones out the background psychological anticipation of that singular moment of the freefall release. How can we fixate our minds on the anxiety of some future event when there’s so much happening in front of us right now?

That overload of detail begins in the lobby area that the last section of the queue winds through. It’s as impressive a piece of interior design as any you’ll find in the Disneyland Resort, the elegant interior coated with cobwebs and dust, luggage and personal affects left unattended, room keys hanging behind the reception desk. It’s an eerie snapshot of a bygone era, frozen in time. Whatever horror beset this hotel happened long ago, but witnessing the undisturbed remains curiously implicates us as indirect culprits. We’re then directed by a bellhop into a dingy private study room. With a flash of lightning, the lights dim and a television in the upper corner comes to life, introducing us to the Twilight Zone and explaining the tower’s mysterious past. The story is… uh… well, you see, we’ve entered the Twilight Zone, and, uh… the details are vague… I guess the moral is that if a building requires an emergency exit due to the presence of an extra-dimensional rift, make sure you take the stairwell and not the elevator.

A recurring phenomenon I’ve noticed among story-based Disney rides is that there’s often an inability to establish causal links between narrative elements, or to define the motivating force behind an event. This is principally a problem in dark rides since the scenes have to be relatively static and the actions that transform one scene to the next must be inferred by the context (or the audience’s familiar with the story), although some times the inference is not made clear and ambiguities remain. I’ve heard this is particularly problematic with their new Little Mermaid dark ride between the dark villainy scene with Ursala and the ‘victory’ scene that immediately follows. Tower of Terror suffers from some of the same deficiencies, which is strange because it’s a highly abstract sci-fi theme and they even have a spoken voice narration running throughout the attraction.

Despite Disney’s alleged mastery of storytelling, what remains unresolved for me is: what motivates the elevator drop? I understand that getting zapped into the twilight zone is the proximate moving cause that’s to account for all of the strange happenings, but why does this happen in the first place? Does it just happen randomly from time to time? Is the setting in the Golden Age of Hollywood a necessary allegorical device to the story, or was it just chosen because it looks cool? Who are the characters we see in the elevator in the preshow video? Why do they appear to be random victims, and why do we see so little of them? Is the drop a moral indictment of these people, or of the times and culture they’re living in? What role do we as spectators have in these events?

I want to pull a symbolically meaningful interpretation out of this story. It really feels like there should be some social commentary, as there’s such a strong emphasis on establishing time and place, and holding a mirror up to society’s fears through supernatural symbolism has traditionally been the function of the horror genre in literature and cinema. But no matter how deeply I try to interpret the story told through this ride, by Occam’s razor I always arrive at a conclusion that says, “well, duh, how else is a drop ride going to be explained?” I’d like to think the story necessitated the ride system, but I get the feeling it’s the other way around. Removed of the stylization, all the narration ever says is basically, “we gonna drop yo’ asses ‘cause we the Twilight Zone, bitch.”

Rant aside, back to the ride. So, even though the preshow room makes it seem like a drop is imminent, we’re next led into a large, two-story boiler room where more queue waiting is necessary. This delay robs the urgency of the preshow somewhat when we finally strap ourselves into the service elevator with a simple seatbelt across the lap. Our vehicle retreats away from the closing doors as the shaft interior fades into a starry night sky, and then we ascend the tower, stopping at several floors for a couple of special effect chambers. One shows our vehicle facing a mirror which turns into a “ghastly” infrared reflection. This effect never seemed totally natural to me, almost more like a funhouse prop. The next scene opens up to a long hallway, with a shutting door at the end that turns the walls into another star field, leaving only the door floating in outer space. I was really impressed by this effect on the Disneyland Paris version, but it didn’t work as well here in California. I could still see the outlines of the hall between the illuminated stars, and the door never started to tumble away in space. It’s possible there were advancements in technology in the three years between debuts.

The suspense is weakened by the special effects busily distracting us every chance they get, but it’s not totally absent. There’s only one chance to pop the bubble of accumulated tension, and Tower of Terror blows it with a drop cycle that seems like it was programmed by the same computer chip controlling an S&S Frog Hopper. Instead of a single vertical plummet all the way down into Hades’ realm as the preshow video seemed to promise, we get a series of little weightless skips and drops, eventually pulling us back up to an open panoramic view of California Adventure, and then repeating the cycle again. It’s only the first little ten foot plunge that people scream on. After this everyone’s laughing and cheering, taking pictures, making faces for the cameras, or even taking a nap. Alright, so it’s immensely fun, I’ll grant you that. But this is the Tower of Terror, not the Twilight Zone: Tower of Shits ‘n Giggles (although I would love to see that attraction name printed on a park map, somewhere). This drop program is incongruous with expectations of the story, never answering the stakes it originally set. What should have happened was that we’d get a full freefall crash to the bottom, only to encounter a plot twist as we’re reanimated from the netherworld, and then start a possessed tug-of-war between heaven and hell. But at the end of the bunny hop cycle, it’s the sound of a hubcap accidentally dropped on the cement floor that’s the most lasting, representative memory of the ride, sounding off on how what was supposed to be the existential dread of an impending cataclysmic disaster resulted in nothing more than a bit of lightweight comic relief. There’s catharsis at the end, but is it for the right reasons?

Perhaps current dramatic theory isn’t quite ready to go hand-in-hand with traditional amusement park ride systems for symbolic storytelling to not be rendered inconsequential once the old-fashioned stomach tickling begins. It appeared that our search for genuinely compelling narrative would lead us back to the basics and into the neighboring Hyperion Theater, where Disney’s Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular was performing this evening. This is an impressive venue unlike the standard auditorium set-ups normally found in theme parks, with double balconies and a massive satin curtain. While it clocks in a bit short of a real Broadway show at 45 minutes, in all other ways the production values are nearly indistinguishable from what you’d get for paying $100 to see The Lion King in New York. Overall I was pleased by the show, if not only because we could sit down in a climate controlled room for the better part of an hour and I could reflect on the fact that I didn’t have to get dressed up and hand over an insanely expensive ticket to see a live rendition of a children’s movie. I remember there was a time when I was six or seven years old when I could (and would) recite all the dialogue for Disney’s Aladdin from memory, so I had a slight affinity for this plot in particular. The show is a slightly abridged version with most of the dialogue unchanged, but the scenery is stylized in a way that’s less in line with the cartoon aesthetic and more approaching the new-agey bullshit of Broadway’s Lion King so they can have ventriloquists controlling the animal characters in full view of the audience.

The crowd dutifully cheers at the elephant parade down the aisles for the arrival of Prince Ali Ababwa, and they gasp in awe when Aladdin and Jasmine stunt doubles soar overhead on a wire-mounted carpet. But this sometimes too-faithful reproduction of the source material comes to a screeching halt once Genie takes the stage, whose never ceasing flow of pop-culture witticisms (including cracks at World of Color and elecTRONica) seems to belong to a completely different production. At one time, during one of the key dramatic scenes in a confrontation between Jafar and Aladdin, he literally stopped the production and forced the actors to wait frozen in their spots for several minutes so he could make shadow puppets with one of the stage lights. And you know what, that was honestly one of the best parts of the show, because when you’re copying line for line a story everyone in the audience already knows, you need to establish some ironic distance so it doesn’t feel like Disney has elevated their own story to the same level of reverence as Shakespeare. Also because at times it got to be so absurd I wondered if the whole show wasn’t really an elaborate front for an Andy Kaufman style standup routine. The audience loved it, and so did we, so they’ve obviously found a formula that works. Now, if only one of these days Disney can produce a show with an all-original plot and characters, that isn’t a line-for-line aping of their movies, that would be tops. And then after the encore we could all go ice-skating in Hell!

“Lower your head!”

This is the first official line of instruction one will hear not upon entering a concentration camp, but upon entering the Happiest Place on Earth, the Disneyland Resort. Keep your head lowered, eyes averted, stay in line, don’t question authority, and if the Big Mouse comes by you better wave back and act like you’re happy to see him. Of course, this order of submission was not barked by a gruff armed guard with chin stubble, but by the friendly disembodied voice of the tram spiel reminding visitors of the low hanging roof as we stand up to exit from the trolley. Nevertheless, it was a striking turn of phrase, seemingly deliberately chosen for the emphasis on the commandment of an action verb over other commonly used, passive action alternatives (i.e. “Watch your head.” “Beware the low roof.” Or, my perennial favorite when visiting England: “Mind your head”). It set a slight authoritarian mood as we navigated through the narrow, claustrophobic cattle corrals of construction walls to make our way into the gated fortress that was California Adventure. But there was no reason for an air of paranoia when the weather was this clear and pleasant, as I had done nothing wrong, right?

Right?

“Oh shit, what if they interrogate me? I say my zip code is 90291, not 49643. But what do I do if they ask for ID? Can I say that I’m living with my aunt and not reveal it’s only for ten days? Do I lie and say that I’m a student at USC and simply haven’t renewed my driver’s license yet? No, if I’m going to lie I’d better say I don’t have my wallet with me at all. Can they detain me if I fail to produce proper identification? I don’t think so, but you never know because it’s freaking Disney, man! I’ve heard those legends about the lady being sued for millions for attempted copyright infringement just because she asked to see the Mickey Mouse cookie recipe…”

Disneyland generally sells their deepest discounts on day passes to residents of Southern California, and for this month a visitor from Santa Monica would hand over a full $50 less for the same two-day, two-park pass that a visitor from Lansing would purchase. Since my aunt was accompanying me for the two days and she qualified for the discount, we ended up buying two passes online at the discount rate, ignoring the stipulation that ID would be required to receive the tickets at the front gate, and that the ID in my pocket had a big fat old “Michigan” stamped across it. Never mind that we were both getting the exact same value experience for our money, the marketing caveat meant I was probably intended to volunteer for the higher price. Now as we approached said front gate I realized I was imminently about to cheat one of the world’s most powerful corporations at their own money-making game. Imagine if I had tried to steal a $50 bill from one of their cash registers the world of hurt I’d be in; essentially this was no different! I’m at the turnstile now, handing in my print out. Oh good, they scanned it and are issuing my ticket! Yes, I’m in the park now, I’m all clear, I’m-

“Can I ask you folks a couple of questions?”

My lips said “yes, of course,” while my eyes surely screamed “HOLY FUCK!!!”

“Is this your first day using your two-day Southern California residents discount pass?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask what your zip code is?”

“Nine-oh-two-nine-one.”

The official entered the sequence in a black digital handheld device as I tried not to piss myself.

“Okay, thank you very much. Have a wonderful visit!”

Swoosh. I took on The Man, and I won! My gait freely sauntered down Buena Vista Street, a veritable Danny Ocean riding in style. I almost felt bad for Disney, because they never even got to appreciate how much awesome just went down. I mean, I bought a discounted ticket online when I was technically not part of the marketing initiative it was intended to reach because someone who did qualify bought it for me and Disney apparently has an honor system when it comes to borderline cases such as mine. That’s what I’d call a real smackdown! Of course, now that I’ve confessed it all publicly I guess I just have to hope that no one from Disney will be reading this; or, if they do, they’ll rightly fear my power of the press, as I usually recount in every detail even my slightest annoyances to a growing audience who dutifully and unquestioningly believe everything I tell them, as evidenced by the lack of any critical comments. Should that fail, my only hope is that they won’t take offense that I began my review by comparing a visit their resort to the Jewish experience at Birkenau.

The entrance in its current state of construction does remind me a bit more of the aesthetics of concentration camps than of a Disney theme park, but once finished it should finally live up to the standards it was always expected to meet. While I can’t personally comment on the original California Adventure before the start of the billion-dollar-plus expansion and renovation that is only halfway complete, I’ve read from many fans and commentators that the place was done on the cheap and lacked the Disney ‘magic’. When it was first announced, I wasn’t even certain if I understood the purpose of the renovation. To me, the descriptions of the two lands sounded more like substitutes for one another than upward improvements. Sunshine Plaza had to be converted to Buena Vista Street for no reason other than one would be new and the other would be old, and the old park had a bad stigma attached to it. The only other distinction I could make was that the old appeared to lack the complete osmosis of recognizable franchised characters into every aspect of the park’s design that the new was attempting to correct for; if you’re not constantly aware of a marketing push designed to reinforce the brand image and sell Mickey and Minnie plush, then you’re not really experiencing what Disney is all about.

I’ve since understood the purpose of the changes a little better. I looked more closely at the artist’s renderings for Buena Vista Street and they do look a helluva lot classier than the gaudy Sunshine Plaza. Beyond my initial cynical reading, the emphasis on incorporating more Disney characters in the new Paradise Pier ride themes, World of Color, Little Mermaid, Cars Land etc. shows that the worst flaw of the original park was that it made realism too high of a priority. This may sound odd considering the aesthetic was a bit too eager to use the Crayola colors, but the original design ignored the creative interpretation of the California philosophy, and instead just tried to duplicate in three dimensions a miniature, airbrushed postcard of the real thing. This poses a few problems for an Anaheim-based theme park, not least of which is an attitude of “who cares” when both locals and tourists alike are facing scenes and props that imitate the exact things people saw out their window when they woke up that morning. Disneyland at its best tells a little joke in everything you encounter, but the only thing found at the original California Adventure that told jokes were horrendously corny, obvious, look-at-me puns for shop names. With thematic inspiration limited to postcard visions of the Sunshine State, the park was never anything more symbolic or meaningful than a parody, and cheap parody begins to feel derivative and desperate awfully fast. A visitor’s interpretation of the park was that it was sort of like the real thing in California but really wasn’t; even when presenting an improved vision of California, it still tried to be (i.e. replace) the California outside its gates. Maybe this strategy of simulating a model of the Golden State would have worked in the same way that Tokyo DisneySea’s mostly straight-faced realism works, but combined with the fact that it was built cheaply (well, $600 million is cheap by Disney standards; compared to the fact that the park’s fix-it plans totaled $1.1 billion) it just felt more like a mediocre knock-off.

The lack of focus could also be to blame for the failure. The first question that should have been asked when adding a second gate is, “how will this be strategically different but complimentary to our first gate?” The answer seemed to be that it would be built as a high class thrill ride park that would compete more or less directly with Knott’s Berry Farm and Six Flags, bumping the average household age level that visits the resort upwards a couple of years. Especially because I stepped off the Disneyland tram having originally come from the thrill ride side of the enthusiast spectrum, I found this a valuable strategy. But after laying out the roller coaster and rapids rides in the early stages of blue sky development, this goal lost its focus and the rest of the park became a grab bag of the same old shit Disney has always been doing, but spread too thinly over too tight a budget. Would California Screamin’ and Grizzly River Run alone really be enough to win over any of Knott’s or Magic Mountain’s clientele? Would the themed family environments really win over the existing customer base at Disneyland? No, and as a result they were sitting on a major gated attraction that was the favorite theme park to absolutely no one.

What it really came down to for why the bottom line was suffering wasn’t even that the quality of attractions was particularly low, but that quantity of attractions wasn’t up to snuff. Especially when you’re charging the same ticket price as the gate across the plaza, you can’t let your guests get halfway through their visit and realize they’ve run out of meaningful activities to do, which did happen to my aunt and me. Since I knew I was writing a review afterward I was able to get creative and find activities that probably wouldn’t have indulged in if I was an ordinary vacationer here for my own personal immediate entertainment (and in retrospect there’s even one or two things I missed out on). I’m sure in the Imagineer’s planning phases in the 90’s it appeared as though they had accounted for enough to be a complete ticket gate, because if you take your time and do everything on the map then, yeah, you probably could kill a full twelve hour visiting day. But people don’t do everything in a theme park. Certain attractions are targeted for certain audiences, and people generally only experience the side of the park that is targeted to them. The park was pitched for an older audience but there’s barely a half-day experience in there for those visitors, because a lot of resources were diverted to making sure other audiences were catered to at all.

They also seemed to think that themed areas in and of themselves will pad out a visitor’s day, regardless of if there’s any attraction anchoring it. This could explain why the original Hollywood Studios Backlot was a nice, atmospheric setting that had almost nothing worthwhile to do. The situation has improved with the additions of Tower of Terror for the upper crowd, the Pixar dark rides for the middle crowds, and A Bug’s Land for the lower crowd, and will likely finally be fully realized once the expansion is complete and Cars Land opens it gates. (Unrelated thought: why isn’t this land called “Radiator Springs”? That’s what it is in the movie. For copyright reasons because it must contain the franchise title?)

If I could have been a senior member on the Imagineering team for the original design, I would have replaced the California Screamin’ with an actual wooden replica of the Long Beach Cyclone Racer (dual tracks is good for Disney-level capacity and guest interaction, too), making the entire Paradise Pier area more historically authentic and less annoyingly retro-modern colorful. Then that wouldn’t have made redundant a Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster style indoor launched looping design to anchor the Hollywood Studios (if you’re going to go after the thrill seeking market you need more than one major roller coaster or high speed attraction), although I frankly hate both the theme and the layout of RnRC, so I might have replaced it with a custom film noir storyline and craft a layout more akin to Disneyland Paris’ excellent Space Mountain. (Now I have to daydream for a half hour planning out all the details of that ride in my head…)

Despite the improvements made since the 2001 inauguration, even once I got beyond the construction walls my initial impressions weren’t doing a lot of impressing. The midway infrastructure is a rather peculiar “butterfly” shape that doesn’t manage crowds between halves very well, and when I arrived at the end of the main Sunshine Plaza / Buena Vista Street entry midway, I was pretty much at a dead end with nothing of interest pulling me in either direction. The park lacks a centerpiece icon, which I don’t insist on every planned theme park to have, but if you’re going to forego one, they had better make the midways a lot more intimate than the current swaths of concrete are. I thought the Grizzly Peak would be a significant icon, but it’s actually off to the right side and is fairly difficult to view from most angles.

Turning off into this direction we find ourselves inside the section of the park known as the Golden State, supposed to represent the majesty of California’s natural splendor, but are really a disjointed collection of mini-sections that are basically each support environments for the entrance area of one attraction apiece. The first is Condor Flats, of which the second term is the most descriptive. The goal is to simulate an airfield landing strip, and at this they’re successful as there’s more than enough flat, undecorated concrete around to park an Airbus. The gigantic hangar belongs to the zone’s sole attraction, Soarin’ Over California.

Situated as the nearest major attraction to the entrance gate, it clearly seems designed to be a visitor’s introduction to the California Adventure experience. Soarin’ frames the beginning of a day’s visit with a redundant reminder of all the great things we already knew about California set to a sweeping musical score, just as World of Color now frames the other end of the day with a redundant reminder of how great Disney is set to a sweeping musical score. (It’s the Adventure I’m interested in!) But if there’s one Disney attraction that has me continually scratching my head over its continued popularity and desire for multiple rerides among guests, it would be this one. All it really amounts to is a flight simulator with an IMAX screen. Don’t get me wrong, I like IMAX a lot, but I can find theaters a whole lot closer to home that don’t require me to stand in a succession of waiting rooms for twenty minutes, and these locations usually play something more narratively compelling than five minutes of B-roll aerial footage.

The main selling feature of this attraction is the suspended seating configuration, in which three rows of hang glider seats are attached to a giant cantilever to rack them up into a vertically stacked viewing position from the horizontal, platform-level loading position. This is an effective technique because I’m not used to having my field of vision immersed by the screen also below my feet, although I might like to have known ahead of time which row we were going to be directed into, as we got seated on the far left side of the theatre and the image appeared distorted as a result.

The rows of seats very gently pivot and sway with the curves of the glider; none of the violent, jerky thrashing around that most motion simulators do, although there was occasionally a slight but noticeable mechanical shuddering that indicated some of the fluids might need to be checked. Actually, the main movement the seats make during the ride is a vertical rise and fall of the seats, but this is done so slowly it’s virtually undetectable by the inner ear, and with the constantly moving projected scenery there’s no reference point to tell that you’re now ten feet higher in altitude than you were a minute ago. Unless you’re looking at the edges of the screen like I was prompted when I realized something was going on behind our seats, which if you’re a good and obedient Disney visitor who wants to be immersed in the magic, you’re not supposed to do. I was also under the impression that a number of extrasensory effects would be in use, although the only one I noticed was the strong scent of citrus for the Soarin’ over orange groves scene, which stuck out as being the only time that sensory fourth wall was broken.

The film is unusual because it breaks the rule of simulators by introducing the cinematic montage. Normally for a simulator attraction there’s a continuous, unbroken perspective, but because Soarin’ uses real, live-action footage of California they need to jump from one location to another, and they achieve this spatial displacement with a simple hard cut. The problem is that when the screen takes up your entire field of vision, this hard cut can be momentarily disorienting and breaks the realism of the experience. In traditional cinema, editing works without confusion because the cut emulates the biological function of the eye making a quick scan (you’ll notice that in a dialogue scene using a back-and-forth two shot to film each actor, the camera always stays on the same side of the blocking because if we jump to the other side of the actors for the reverse shot, our sense of individual perspective will be intuitively broken). The amount of freedom an editor has to make hard, fast or unusual cuts generally depends on the level of immersion with the image. Watching a film on a videophone, the editor can get away with almost anything because they don’t destroy one’s sense of individual perspective when the image takes up only a fraction of the viewer’s field of vision. But on a screen like in Soarin’, that entire field is taken up by the image and so the audience has no independent sense of place beyond which the filmmakers provide. This why the experience can feel so exhilarating and life-like, but also why the editors need to be extremely careful not to disrupt the viewer’s sense of having a singular point of perspective.¹

Yet I can’t think of any alternatives that could solve this problem that I would prefer. Trying to do something like have the flight path disappear into a CGI cloud between scenes would look absurdly tacky. Making a CGI environment that puts all the scenes together in one space would also inevitably look fake and cheap. And trying to confine the experience to a localized area would definitely rob the attraction of much of its grandeur and thematic purpose of taking us to all the best sights in California. And in fact, I really like that Soarin’ becomes more symbolic in nature due to its “unreal” cinematic qualities, rather than trying to literally simulate a hang gliding flight. The music by Jerry Goldsmith is the same grandiose symphonic noise that we’ve been hearing in big budget films that hire John Williams or James Horner to cover up sloppy or uninspired storytelling and win an Academy Award, and whether that is a bad or good thing for Soarin’ I will leave the reader to decide.

The question I had throughout the film was “how will it end?” There is no real narrative advancing to an expected conclusion, but there obviously had to be some sense of finality to give the experience closure; it won’t just arbitrarily end on a scene of Soarin’ Over Compton.  However, whatever subject is given the honor of the Final Scene will be implied to be the acme of California, the very zenith of wonderment in a state that we are right now witnessing to be full of locations only wondrous enough to belong shuffled somewhere in the middle. We already had the Golden Gate Bridge at the beginning… so it should have come to no surprise to me that Soarin’ would ultimately advance a narcissistic agenda by making it’s Big Finale an aerial soar-over of Disneyland itself, fireworks ablaze and the fanfare its most triumphant. Hey, I won’t complain because I was so enchanted by the other scenes of nature, modern architecture and sport that I was beginning to question why the hell I chose to spend my vacation time on the west coast in Anaheim, and this final act of Disney’s self-hurrahing helped me and the many other schmucks walking out the exit doors to vindicate ourselves of our choice. “Oh yeah, I guess California Adventure is more spectacular than Yosemite National Park after all…”

This is true. While Yosemite only has El Capitan which requires the better part of the day to see and only sort of looks like a big rock formation, California Adventure has Grizzly Peak, which can be reached from Condor Flats with a minimum of footsteps and looks so much like a big grizzly bear, one almost wonders if it had been designed that way. This area is much more visually pleasing than the previous Condor Flats (real pine needles densely coat the soil next to the pathways, and it’s one of the few places in California Adventure where one can escape the sun by standing in the shade of trees), although for an area themed to a 700,000 acre national forest, my aunt and I certainly breezed in and out of it quickly. Probably less than five minutes in my estimation. The Grizzly River Run was closed for its seasonal rehab. Despite the gorgeous weather, this was evidentially the wrong time of the year to visit for water rides: both Perilous Plunge and the Timber Mountain Log Run the previous day at Knott’s were closed, and tomorrow’s visit to Disneyland would have Splash Mountain also down for the count. What remained was a kid’s playground and the entrance to the Grand Californian Hotel, neither of which had any value to us. There was, however, a Fast Pass booth issuing tickets for preferred World of Color viewing areas, which I didn’t know existed and was lucky to stumble across early in the morning as these would sell out quickly.

With the still at-the-time under construction Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure in Paradise Pier replacing the former Bay Area, the only other part of the Golden State left to see are the Golden Vine Winery (a Napa Valley styled Italian restaurant and the Blue Sky Cellar, a showcase of all the upcoming changes to California Adventure that I somehow missed seeing, though all the art can be found on online fansites anyway) and the Pacific Wharf. The latter is a large outdoor food court stylized to San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf and Cannery Row, and was where we would elect to take a lunch break. The eclectic, earthy appearance is a bit of a contrast to the rest of Disney, but they envisioned it very well even if I’m slightly bemused by the irony of how “perfect” the rust and stains appear. There are several choices for eating establishments spread out over a large indoor and outdoor seating area, including the Cocina Cucamonga Mexican Grill, the Pacific Wharf Café (primarily serving salad and soup in bread bowls, where my aunt Chris decided to get her meal) and the Chinese-style Lucky Fortune Cookery. It was the latter that I got my meal from, mostly because I wanted more experience using chopsticks before I’d be arriving in Hong Kong in less than a week’s time. One of ways in which Disney exceeded my expectations was in the value of the food. Not that it was necessarily all that cheap (drinks are still flirting with the three dollar range), but I was able to get a complete meal bowl for under $10 and the portion and quality was at a level that I’d generally be happy with in a non-theme park setting. Plus, they weren’t afraid to make patrons ask for a fork if they found the included chopsticks too scary, a bit of catering cojones I’m highly appreciative of. Especially after spending a significant amount of time in Asia, and then returning home to Panda Express, being given a fork and looking at it awkwardly wondering “what the heck am I supposed to do with this thing?”

There are a few other diversions to be found among the Pacific Wharf in the form of some “factory tours” of the cooking process for a few of the restaurants. I believe now the featured tours are for the sourdough bread bowls and a Ghirardelli chocolate making tour, although at the time of my visit the latter was still for the Mission Tortilla Factory. It was a fairly brief tour reflective of the fact that the factory only needed the output for one food outlet, but relatively entertaining and a unique respite from more traditional forms of theme park entertainment. I was particularly entertained by the preshow video’s children describing the history of the tortilla as “shared” between Native Mesoamericans and Spanish explorers, with big cartoon smiles on both parties’ faces… in much the same way I suppose they happily “shared” small bits of lead and introduced each other to their favorite microbial friends. After this we were led into a room with a real tortilla press (both my aunt and uncle have extensive experience working on the finance end of the food industry, so she was appreciative of the highly precise mechanical process involved) and at the end of it we got a free tortilla sample hot of the press. While explicitly not homemade, there is something to be said for sampling a tortilla that’s so fresh it still has that moist pliability in your fingers. Plus if the normal food outlet prices are too much for your budget, you can always run around and do the free food tours several times.

According to legend, there once was a time when demons and evil spirits stalked the plains of the west, and the only way to stop them was with a supernatural silver bullet from the Jacob Mining Co., located in parts north of the quaint town of Calico. Operated by a recluse known only as “Just Jacob”, the evil spirits eventually determined the source of the silver bullets and descended upon the town in force. Jacob, however, devised a contraption to outsmart the demons by creating powerful ore cars that were suspended beneath a floating track. The silver bullets could then be rushed through tunnels and caverns as gunslingers sat perched on benches protecting the precious cargo, and this eventually rid the town of its demons.

Thus I am informed by a sign in front of the main entrance for Silver Bullet, a bizarrely incongruous attempt at thematic back story to “explain the ride away”, despite the fact that I read this while a massive, elevated transfer track platform blots the sun from view. Apart from the use of narrative on a laminated sign, there is no attempt to disguise Silver Bullet. It is a roller coaster without subtly or humility. I guess words are cheaper than the cost of ordering more colors of paint than red and yellow. Or someone realized a few days before it opened that long time fans might raise issue with the fact that they were removing a significant section of Knott’s historic Ghost Town for a West Coast Raptor, and so found an intern who had taken a creative writing class in college so she got a break from running coffee for an afternoon.

Several miles away, Scream would go down in history for being the worst example of a “parking lot roller coaster”, but one look at Knott’s Silver Bullet and I determined that it takes only a bare minimum of effort to appease the theme park foamers into overlooking a far greater crime against good taste. Yes, it has a more ‘natural’ location than Scream, over the former Reflection Lake. No, it doesn’t do much reflecting today with all the concrete footers strewn throughout. But what is a body of water to a roller coaster designer other than a flat, open construction arena with a minimum of obstacles complicating the engineering process? CAD works way easier when you don’t have to figure in annoying things like a preexisting environment. In short, Silver Bullet is a sincere attempt to be as much of a parking lot coaster as it can. At least Scream is hidden in the back corner of the park where you can easily ignore it if you want to, and I doubt anyone will shed a tear over the loss of their once beautiful car park. Silver Bullet is the worse offender.

They couldn’t even be bothered to paint it silver. (I’m not counting the supports because, if the legend is true, the track is really floating and those supports are nothing more than an enigma projected by a tricky demon.) The carnivalesque red and yellow track and cars are far less evocative of a western color palate than Cedar Fair seems to think. That is assuming they were unaware that choosing such a bright selection made an already visually intrusive structure hold a total monopoly on attention in the area. Our “Flying Ore Carts” are obviously identified by a WTF ensemble of teal, yellow and orange-red. In the one solitary spastic jism of creativity, the last three of eight vehicles per train were turned yellow, and the lift and its supports are a blanket red… I assume the aesthetic logic being ‘cause it’d look retarded if it were all uniformly the same style of tacky.

As with any B&M coaster there is a formal elegance to the track, but this is generally undone by the oversized steel supports that clutter the scene. These are all dissonant, hard angles, purely functional in design; why no more radial triangles? For example, the cobra roll over the entrance midway might have had a pleasant symmetry to it if the arbitrary double-sided support on the right didn’t mess it up. Yes that is minor nitpicking, but if anyone were actually responsible for asking if there was any coherent visual strategy to the way this high-end fairground attraction would compete for an audience’s attention (which, with its centralized location near the entrance over a former viewing pond, is a big audience), there shouldn’t have been any obvious, easily correctable nits to pick.¹

‘Tis a shame my analysis had to start off this way, because in spite of it all there’s a track layout that is slightly better than that of the average inverted roller coaster… although not one that’s so compelling that I forgive it of the sin of vandalizing a once venerated piece of property in the history of theme parks. The first drop is often ostracized by enthusiasts for being very short and shallow. I for one appreciated the sense of accumulating speed and rushing towards the vertical loop that you don’t get as easily from steeper declines, although I would have preferred had it gone all the way and didn’t pull up with 30 feet of clearance still remaining. The vertical loop is serviceable, but so overused I have to concentrate during the inversion to remember it more than ten seconds later. This is made more difficult in light of the next maneuver, a severely overbanked turn, the first and still only such element on a B&M inverted coaster. We rotate much further than the dynamics of this broad curve necessitate so we’re halfway to weightlessness in addition to being halfway upside down. It also has the advantage of falling further on the exit than it went up on the entrance due to the prior elevated loop, and I’m surprised and pleased our roar into maximum speed is delayed a full two elements after the main drop.

The cobra roll is generally one of the better elements in B&M’s catalogue due to the varied pacing and rotation around the top, and shows up in fine form here. Set above an arterial midway, it could have been an icon for the park if they wanted, but the botched visual design outlined above means that it’s just incidentally there. The follow-up zero G roll is another relatively fun element for the same generic reasons, this one slightly differentiated by continuing the fast rotation of the inversion directly into the inclined helix that follows. This acts as a midpoint for the layout, starting the second half with a rapid succession of reasonably intense flat-spin, overbank twist, and reverse flat-spin. There’s a continuous flow to this sequence I wish more B&M rides had, as I was surprised by how much I liked this arrangement of otherwise familiar elements.

The helix finale I found odd, because while riding it I was actively thinking that the positive G-forces didn’t seem anywhere beyond normal force envelopes, but as soon as it was over I experienced ‘heavy feet’, with that prickling sensation around my socks due to all the blood rushing downward in my legs. This repeated on my next few re-rides, and after browsing a few reviews online I gathered this was not an uncommon phenomenon. The real question was how it could seem less forceful than it really was. My guess is a lot of the sense of force is psychological rather than merely physiological, and Silver Bullet has high G-forces but doesn’t know how to accent them so we fully realize they’re there. The entrance continues directly from the prior flat spin so there’s no snap to announce the arrival of the positives, and the upward spiral means that the inner ear more keenly senses the relative decreasing in speed and force rather than their absolute values. It certainly didn’t leave nearly as strong an impression on me as Raptor’s descending double helix, even though the physiological sensations were much stronger. (The brakes are last.)

Around the corner behind Silver Bullet, Knott’s demonstrates that they are capable of integrating a high density of thrill rides and not have it come off as poorly conceived in their Fiesta Village. It perhaps helps that the zone is named for a colorful, convivial party town rather than a place where the last resident expired during the Hays administration; also maybe because most of the infrastructure and major attractions were built prior to 1997. The Mesoamerican environment is surprisingly beautiful for what could have otherwise been a carnival midway, filled with greenery, flowers, fountains and bright ornamentations. In addition to the new for 2011 Windseeker (not yet completed at the time of my visit), the other large flat ride of interest is La Revolución, a Chance Afterburner-type ride installed in 2004. There are also a carousel, wave swinger, and a Mexican Hat Dance teacup-style flat. And then there are the roller coasters.

Jaguar is particularly impressive, a large temple guarding the entrance with the queue winding through several dark sections of catacombs before terminating in the station platform, bearing more favorable than negative comparison to Dueling Dragons or Indiana Jones. Too bad this kitty never quite lives up to the promise of excellence in the queue. This coaster is more or less the mine train the park never had, with its long meandering layout and family friendly age range. However, the Zierer Tivoli system doesn’t quite capture the same feel as the classic Arrow mine train, perhaps owing to the snug fitting lilliputian vehicles and whiny tire drive lifts. It is also at a lack of any steep drops, and with the ultralong train it chugs along the layout at an even, unvarying pace, robbing it of some of the fun and spontaneity of a true mine train; the arrival of a second lift hill halfway through the layout might barely draw distinction from the rest of the gravity-driven sections, and one occasionally wonders if the whole thing isn’t a powered coaster in disguise.

I still found myself wanting to like Jaguar more than I actually did, because it had the quirky lovability of an independent label struggling to find a niche audience amid the corporate giants. The layout is paradoxically memorable for its unmemorability (I had no idea what was around the next corner or when it would end, and even after riding it I still don’t have a clue), although it obviously screams “shoehorning” at several points. Sometimes extremely clumsy shoehorning, like the long stretch of flat track built directly over the brake run and railroad tracks to bridge from one vacant lot to another, and a lot of track randomly erected over concrete midways. Lucky for Cedar Fair they weren’t involved in the decision making process when Jaguar opened in ’95, otherwise I’d unfairly scapegoat them for these deficiencies just as readily as I have for everything else I’ve found distasteful in the park thus far.

Montezooma’s Revenge is the most difficult roller coaster to find anything negative to say about, because it is a simple but effective classic that has remained nearly untouched by clueless lawyers’ recommendations since it opened in 1977. Apart from the paint selection and some new signage, the Schwarzkopf shuttle loop retains all the original architecture and the same flywheel technology with the cute but vicious little catchdog that scuttles over the launch track. And most importantly (take note, Magic Mountain!), it has the same open-air, lapbar-only vehicles and the absence of any braking until the second backward spike is completed and the train comes crashing back into the loading platform. Although permanently limited to one-train operation, the combination of a full-length seven vehicle train, a simple safety-bar check procedure, and a short ride time mean it might have one of the highest throughputs in the park, depending on the location of GhostRider’s third train and the caffeine levels of the Silver Bullet crew. Even the most hardened theme park cynics would look bad arguing against such a ride, which depending on your attitudes towards everything else in Knott’s could make the Revenge the best ride in the park (though I’m still a loyalist to GhostRider). What’s strange about all of this love is that, at heart, Monty is certainly the shortest, and also potentially the least original layout at the Farm. Maybe it’s just an enthusiast bias for unmodified Anton Schwarzkopf designs, but the smiles and laughter in the station (and scores of children running around the entrance to do it again) would suggest a deeper connection between coaster and rider than mere nostalgia.

Knott’s Camp Snoopy is an area I doubt I would have spent very much time inside if the queue for the 2007 Sierra Sidewinder spinning coaster from Mack didn’t take so long. Along with the previous two roller coasters mentioned and the Pony Express from part one, Knott’s seems to be deliberately positioning themselves to appeal to the young thrill seekers, a populace that often gets neglected (or at the very least, overshadowed) in the world of theme and amusement parks. The only problem with this strategy is that while Knott’s has plenty in this category of Family Thrill Rides, none of them are particularly outstanding by their own merits. Neither Pony Express nor Jaguar are exactly what I’d call top-tier (one’s shorter than it should be, the other longer than it should be), and while Monty is popular, the purist in me is reluctant to classify that one as for the kiddies. Sierra Sidewinder is potentially the best-fitted for this label, but that didn’t mean I found it especially worth my own time.

The problem of low capacity with spinning coasters was given an attempted solution by utilizing a train of four linked cars rather than individual vehicles which require a block brake every ten seconds. This worked on the prototype at Europa Park, but here they were stacking the two trains so badly that it ended up having the longest wait of any attraction. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the employees were more interested in policing the riders than they were in dispatch times, twice triggering an e-stop on the lift just to reprimand some wiley teenagers. The layout’s alright, longer than Pony Express and with more purpose than Jaguar, it has a few good overbanked turns that are unusual for a spinning coaster and a nimble side-to-side S-bend. However, I was mostly distracted from these features due to the spinning cars, which didn’t spin but just had me facing random angles that made it more difficult to tell exactly what was going on. My vehicle didn’t rotate more than 180° from its starting position, only finally managing a complete rotation on the banking snap into the brake run. And this was as a single rider in an unevenly weighted car. My sour opinion was mostly caused by the long wait cutting into the evening hours when I haven’t even completed a first loop of the major rides yet, so I’ll give it a second chance on a day when I have more time to waste.

Crossing the train tracks, I found myself walking upon the Boardwalk; a 1950’s California styled collection of thrill rides and nostalgia that unfortunately smacks of the most clichéd and overused theme of any section in Knott’s. If they’ve got their history right, the economy of 1950’s America was motivated exclusively by diners and gas stations, along with the occasional surf shop on the progressive west coastline. This area was previously known as the Roaring 20’s when the actual 1950’s were still less than two decades young, which makes me ponder if we won’t soon be seeing it rethemed again in a few years to a time when the nation had an Atari console and legwarmer based economy. Anyway, the first attraction I found was the Supreme Scream, a triple-sided 250 foot tall S&S Turbo Drop, and one that I was more than happy to ride when I found an empty queue. However, life is short and there’s nothing to be said about this drop tower that hasn’t been said about every other equally 1-dimensional tower ride. So I’ll make better use of the time you would have otherwise spent learning nothing new about faster-than-freefall acceleration by sharing a laugh instead. In the video below the cinematic legend Orson Welles attempts to film a commercial for a California winemaker after sampling the product he’s endorsing.

Mwahaaaa, the Swiss roller coasters have always been celebrated for their excellence. Of the California coasters, Xcelerator is one of their most xcellent. Looking back, I’m surprised it didn’t make more of a stir in the enthusiast community than it did when first unveiled. It had no more fanfare than an average coaster announcement, just a simple press release and watercolor rendering that told us Knott’s was building another roller coaster. I remember it took a while of looking at the simple artist’s rendering before it hit me what a revolutionary concept this actually was, the 80 mph launch into a vertical 200+ foot spike with 90° heartline twists on the way up and down. I guess the perception was that Intamin was riding on the S&S Thrust Air 2000’s coattails, and the vertical twists were merely an inverse of Premier’s already half-decade old Mr. Freeze coasters. But Intamin made it work in a way that none of their predecessors were able to do, and for better or worse Xcelerator set the agenda for the Swiss firm for most of the decade that followed (possibly at the expense of their traditional gravity-driven megacoasters that mostly dropped off the map after 2002).

Closing in on a decade later, Xcelerator remains just as easy to overlook, but as Knott’s headlining thrill ride that goes toe-to-toe with the big dogs at Magic Mountain it retains a devout following amid the Los Angeles home base. While the rocket coaster design evolved into considerably more ambitious or complex designs, there’s a raw crudeness to Xcelerator that has never been replicated in newer models. The absence of any over the shoulder restraints, the launch directly out of the station loading platform with extremely little warning, and the crest over the top hat remains the most regularly overspeed of its type. The visual appearance is no more subtle than Silver Bullet’s, but the pink and teal structure is at least at home amid the other razzmatazz amusements on the 50’s boardwalk, and a preponderance of neon and chrome with the detailed Chevy fiberglass casings look good with the massive steel columns. A gigantic parabolic arch suspended in midair with the triangular stepladder supports on either side is also iconographic in a way that’s missing from Silver Bullet’s signature cobra roll. Besides, the location is set along a highway bordering the back of the park, and it only dislocated a much lamer freakshow coaster, so Knott’s lost nothing and gained everything with the addition of Xcelerator. A word of warning for first time visitors, the queue for the front car starts far away from the station and is poorly marked with no advisories to the extra wait time. As a result, the right side of the division will generally fill with an hour or more worth of folks who just get in whatever line they see people in, while the seating for cars 2 thru 5 on the left can be briskly walked up and in ready to launch position within five minutes.

Part of me wishes for the prolonged, multi-part suspense of a launch initiation such as on Top Thrill Dragster to squeeze out as much tension before a sixteen second ride as possible (first slowly clear the station, then wait in the standby position for the first train to launch, then crawl up into the real launch pad, wait for the cable catch to reload and the last block to clear, the countdown, etc.). But there is something much more shocking about sitting in neutral the station, the eager onlookers behind the gates you were just standing behind still within easy conversational speaking distance, and without any preparation being blasted back into the headrest at blistering speeds and then catapulted into an angel eye’s view down upon Buena Park in the space of about five seconds. You feel a much closer immediacy to the experience, like watching a deadly animal without any protective barriers between the two of you.

From my couple of rides, the negative G’s were consistently strong over the entire arch, with none of the momentary settling back down into the seat at the top that the later rocket coasters have their hydraulic motors tuned for. I will probably not be the very first person to mention that after the top hat the overbanked figure eight is unnecessary and basically only serves the purpose to extend the ride long enough such that the second train has at least has time to make it into the station before the first is re-entering the brakes. Nevertheless, the coaster does need something after the tower to flesh it out (Stealth and Zaturn are empty experiences by comparison), and with the small lot and inversions not possible without the addition of shoulder harnesses, I suppose this configuration is as good as we could have hoped for. I’m not a fan of overbanked turns on the Intamin megacoasters, but at 80 miles per hour on a small lot of land, even these have a bit more bite to them. We slide into the magnetic brakes completely lost of breath, our ‘57 Chevy having never once let up on the gas pedal since the lights turned green. Granted it was only twenty five seconds of breathlessness, but these days fewer coasters are able to leave me gasping in disbelief for that length of time at all.

Once I had grabbed a couple of laps on Xcelerator, I moved on to the rest of the Boardwalk to complete my tour of the park right as the sun dipped below the western horizon. At the time of my visit, the area beyond the Coasters Drive-In would have been more deserving of the Ghost Town title. Perilous Plunge was closed for a repainting that would take the better part of the year, and the Sky Cabin still sat suspended in silence despite being given a stay of execution once the Windseeker project was relocated to Fiesta Village. Rip Tide, the floorless HUSS Top Spin, was also off the table for me due to its many drenching water jets… I might have been in sunny California, but for me it was still the middle of January at night. This left the Boomerang as the last attraction I would sample. Normally I’m pretty precise about the order of attractions I rides so my day has a tidy narrative to it, but time somehow slipped away from me and so it was the Vekoma clone that would do the honors of wrapping up my review:

Uhh… I didn’t absolutely hate it? No, really, there was a time when I was getting on board when I reflected how glad I was to be alive in this moment in history. And that was much more a genuine reflection of how fortunate I was to be given a chance to live today’s experiences, rather than in horror of its potential termination at the end of a Vekoma-designed cobra roll. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of this Boomerang’s life and the installation of something like an S&S El Loco (an eight-seater model, like the one going into Australia) in its place. The purple and lime green track does Knott’s few favors. After I was done, I went to finish the final hour with two stellar front seat rides on GhostRider, and that was without question the wisest way to conclude the day.