After-Action Report: Radiator Springs Racers

I have a love-hate relationship with Cars Land. The Cars franchise may well be Pixar's weakest concept,* and it really has nothing to offer me in particular. There are several reasons, but for our purposes here, the main one is that I'm not interested in cars. Never have been. And especially in the context of a theme park, where I prefer to be surrounded by things I don't see and hear every hour of every day. If it had been my decision to make, I never would have put Cars in a Disney theme park, especially not to the extent of building an entire huge themed land.

And yet...

And yet...

I cannot deny that Cars Land, apart from the dumb name, is really, really well done. I mean, look at this:

And that's not even the town part. This is the town part:

This is Imagineering at its placemaking best. The attention paid to detail here is phenomenal. You walk into Cars Land, and you're there, in a tiny town in the American Southwest, with jagged cliffs of red sandstone in the distance. I'm sure it helped that they had the setting pre-rendered in three digital dimensions for their convenience, but they still had to figure out how to create it in three actual dimensions, and it's stunning work.

A lot of cleverness went into the execution. The businesses of Radiator Springs have been translated into typical theme park fixtures. The hippie VW bus's “organic fuel” station is a beverage stand, the paint shop is a clothing store, the souvenir shop is...a souvenir shop. Businesses with no ready counterpart have either been adjusted or made the sites of rides. But the area's tentpole attraction, Radiator Springs Racers, isn't located in the town at all—it takes place on the outskirts, amid those magnificent buttes seen in the top photo.

I actually haven't been on it many times—three or four, total, since it opened. This is because a) it's in the park I don't favor, b) it's Cars, and c) the wait time frequently tops two hours. But I never regret riding it. It's too dang good...maybe the best execution of a ride concept in years.

Actually, calling Radiator Springs Racers a ride is underselling it. It's three rides in one, plus a fantastically immersive queue that expands on the source material in a charming way. I'll start with the queue since—as mentioned above—we're going to be standing in it for a while.

Stanley's Oasis

In front of Cars Land’s firehouse is a little statue of a rather goon-faced Ford Model T labeled “Stanley – Our Founder – 1909.” This is one of the details from the movie that was slavishly reproduced for California Adventure, but the park expands on it with a complete backstory concerning this character and the founding of the town. It’s whimsical, but has the air of a more grounded small-town history.

This backstory forms the basis of the Radiator Springs Racers queue area, which winds its way through “Stanley’s Oasis,” the original rest-stop/tourist attraction that eventually evolved into Radiator Springs. Using a ride’s queue to explain its backstory is nothing new for Disney theme parks, but there’s a twist here—the backstory isn’t really for the ride. Stanley’s story doesn’t bear on the average guest’s understanding of Radiator Springs Racers. It’s more the case that the backstory explains the queue—they needed a large area to hold people waiting for this top-notch attraction, and it would make neither geographical nor logistical sense to use any portion of the town itself, so the Imagineers invented this little outskirts area for the purpose and wrote a town history to tie it in. Otherwise we'd all be spending two hours shuffling through generic landscaping and wishing we'd remembered to bring an umbrella to use as a sunshade.

That’s the sort of thing I like to see in a movie tie-in attraction—give people the iconic stuff from the movie, sure, but don’t stop there. Expand. Make the world of the movie real by showing us that there was more to it than just the parts required by that particular story.

As for the content of Stanley's Oasis, it's a series of kitschy little car-related displays—collections of antique radiator caps and license plates from different states, a few old-fashioned gasoline pumps—that must be of sincere interest to car people. It's not my cup of tea, but I don't begrudge them.

Ride #1: The Scenic Drive

Upon boarding the actual ride, you (and another car, the reason for which will be revealed shortly) embark on a nice little scenic drive of the rural area adjacent to the town. It's not quite as wooded on the ride as it is in the film, but the landscaping is lovely and naturalistic, and we get an up-close view of landmarks like the bridge and waterfall:

There's music too: an abridged version of “McQueen and Sally” from the Cars soundtrack. The music in that film is a distinctly mixed bag, but I've always been fond of that track, especially in the way it swells from simple country-bluegrass instrumentals to an orchestral fanfare reminiscent of epic Westerns. And that leads us into the next part of the ride...

Ride #2: The Dark Ride

Look, when I said it was three rides in one, I wasn't kidding. After about forty seconds in the fresh air (it feels longer, fortunately), your car enters a darkened show building and you get...a classic style Disney dark ride.

This is the part I really was not expecting. All the advertising for the ride emphasized the outdoor portions. And if you'd told me before the fact that Disney was planning a dark ride based on Cars, I probably would have rolled my eyes hard enough to break windows with the shockwave. Imagineering's recent track record with this format has not been stellar; the demand for character branding means that guests are often relegated to the role of spectators to movie scenes reproduced a little too faithfully to be worth the bother. (Compare this to older dark rides that give guests a first-person perspective of the action, which is often rendered in a more-or-less impressionistic fashion for a more visceral experience.) It's bad enough when they do this with a good movie such as The Little Mermaid; the prospect of doing it with a mediocre one would have been too much to bear.

Radiator Springs Racers doesn't deal in impressionism, but in presentation and content it's much more like a classic dark ride than like most of the newer ones. It recaps some of the memorable moments of Cars, but with you as the protagonist. The characters address you directly and you experience those film moments in the first person. Because, you see, this is not a synopsis of Cars. This is a new story about some previously unknown cars who arrive in Radiator Springs and, after a bit of kerfuffle, engage in an impromptu race.

Ride #3: The Thrill Ride

Remember how the cars have been moving through the ride two at a time? This is why. Toward the end of the dark ride portion, the track splits. You and this other car are going to race. First, as an excuse to include more characters and some fun effects, you both have to get gussied up. One side of the track leads to the tire salon and the other to the paint shop. This part is genuinely fun and cute on both sides—the one bumps your car around to simulate rapid tire-installation and then lets you check out your new whitewalls in a mirror, and the other has nozzles spray a bit of mist that honestly smells like paint. Then you hear some inspiring words from Doc Hudson before literally heading off to the races.

I want to take a moment here to praise the audio-animatronics in this ride. Simply put, they're phenomenal. They really move like the characters in the movie, with light bobbing motions, and they talk like them too. Granted, some of the characters, like McQueen and Sally, have mouths that are just little mobile apertures in otherwise smooth front ends. These animatronics' mouths are projections. But then you have the ones whose mouths are their front bumpers, like Doc and Sheriff, and the Imagineers have recreated that design in solid real life, and it looks amazing.

I often lament the proliferation of projection effects at the expense of practical ones, and this is why, people. There's no real comparison. A real thing will always beat a picture of one, and if this ride proves anything, it's that Imagineering can make real things nearly as flexible and versatile as pictures if they are allowed to. You don't have to give a fig about Cars, or even about cars, to appreciate the talent and ingenuity that went into making these cars live.

Good stuff. Good, good stuff.

Okay, so, the race. Once outfitted with your new tires/paint, you exit the shop and pull up alongside the other car, the split tracks now parallel. And this is where the ride dabbles in expert psychology. You sit there for just a few seconds, juuuuuuuust long enough to glance over at the other car and make eye contact with one of the riders. And suddenly, this race—this race that you only had an inkling you were going to participate in—matters to you. That smug tourist over there is going down.

Then you launch back outside to begin the race itself. And I do mean launch—the ride uses electromagnetic propulsion to get the cars moving up to 64 mph. Between that, the tight turns, and the element of “competition” (however illusory), there's plenty here to keep thrill-seekers entertained. On the whole, however, the race is probably the weakest segment of the ride. High speed is high speed, and without extra effort put into the scene-setting, one fast ride is pretty much like another. Compared to what precedes it, it's pretty ordinary. But still, you want to win, and that makes every second riveting.

Of course, whether you win or not, you still get to enjoy the spectacular finale as your car coasts back inside the show building for the beautiful Tail Light Cavern:

Yes, the idea of tail lights as natural formations is silly, but the execution is pretty stunning—not quite on the level of the caverns in Pirates of the Caribbean, but an ambitious creation all the same. Natural luminescence in caves is one of those things we just find compelling, and its placement here at the end of the ride makes it feel like a true reward.

Something like Radiator Springs Racers doesn't exist in a vacuum, and not only is it impressive as it is, but I would characterize it as a welcome surprise. Too often these days, it seems, the decision-makers use IP as a substitute for innovative attraction development, hoping to entice guests through the power of brand recognition so they can slash the budgets. They didn't do that here and the results speak for themselves—this ride, and the surrounding environment of Cars Land, make the Cars franchise palatable even for someone like me. It all just leaves one nagging question...

Why couldn't they put this kind of effort in for something that deserves it?

* The Good Dinosaur was very disappointing, but at least the premise was fairly ambitious. Cars is extremely conventional by comparison.