Imagineering Theory: Princess's Interesting Dark Ride

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

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

It's safe to say that out of Disney's entire stable of Princesses, Cinderella is the star of the show. Maybe it's because her name is on the castle at the most heavily promoted theme park, maybe it's because her story is the ultimate rags-to-riches fantasy for girls. In any case, her popularity often prompts fans of the parks to wonder why she doesn't have her own dark ride, and occasionally to propose one on message boards.

However, I feel safe in saying that such a ride would not work. A dark ride succeeds when it manages to draw guests into the world of the film, and the movie Cinderella just doesn't spend very much time in interesting locations. Nearly the entirety of it takes place in the Tremaine house, and it's certainly an elegant house, but still just a family domicile not too different from many guests' own homes.

You might be able to build a cool ride based on the ride to the ball, the ball itself, and then the panicked flight therefrom, but at that point you're out of dark ride territory and maybe into a thrill ride concept, a là the Seven Dwarfs' Mine Train roller coaster.

By contrast, I almost never see anyone offer up ideas for a dark ride based on Sleeping Beauty, which is odd because visually it's an extremely memorable movie. Maybe it gets left by the wayside because it's not very successful as a Disney Princess movie? Aurora has a lovely singing voice, but she really doesn't do much in the story, and most of what she does do comes before she puts on the royal gown, which is blue for most of the movie but invariably depicted as pink in the merch, so there are all these layers of separation between Aurora/Briar Rose, the leading lady of Sleeping Beauty and Aurora, the Official Disney Princess.

Anyway.

I think you could make a really stunning dark ride out of this movie simply by bringing the art of it to life. This is one of the most gloriously artistic movies made by the Disney animaton studio while the founder was still alive. It looks like a medieval tapestry or stained-glass window come to life; if Imagineering could replicate that in three dimensions, the resulting ride would be outstanding on that merit alone. Fortunately, the film also boasts a number of really impressive settings that we would all love to ride through, from the idyllic forest glade where Aurora and Philip first meet,* to the regal halls of King Stefan's castle, to the eerie will-o-wisp-lit towers of that same castle while Aurora is hypnotized, to Maleficent's own nightmarish fortress, to the claustrophobic forest of thorns...holy cow I want them to do this! Can we convince them to do this?

Here again we have a lovingly designed and wonderfully realized animated castle, and I'd say you could make a superb dark ride just out of exploring it. Have you ever noticed how, in the movie, the atmosphere in the castle parallels the Beast's mood and character development? When he's angry and snarly, we have dark scenes of rundown rooms with broken furniture. As he and Belle warm up to each other, we get more brightly lit scenes in pleasant places such as the library and the breakfast nook. A ride where we experience the emotions of the movie as mediated through lighting and set design would be pretty excellent.

This movie features one of the original members of the official Disney Princess group, but I'm not sure it counts as a “Princess movie” per se since Jasmine's not the main character. It may be a moot point, because I do not consider this movie good source material for a typical, low-to-medium speed dark ride. Like Peter Pan, the only way to do it justice with a ride is to focus on the flying sequences, but unlike Peter Pan, Aladdin features multiple such sequences, and some of them are pretty high-octane. This is another candidate for a thrill ride, is what I'm saying.

And yes, I know about the bog-standard carnival spinner in Orlando.

I'm just going to leave this here.

Make no mistake, I love Mulan. I love all the research that went into designing and detailing the backgrounds. I love the soundtrack. I love Mulan herself, the first post-pubescent Disney heroine whose story is not primarily a love story, and the first Disney heroine of any age who outright kills people. Not saying violence is a good thing; just saying this was a gutsy move on Disney's part, producing an animated war movie and making no bones about the fact that people die in wars. I still remember the gasps in the theater when we got the reveal shot of the burned-out town, followed by even larger ones when we saw the massacred army, right there on the screen. In an animated family film.

That said, it's a poor choice for a dark ride, because what's going on inside the characters' heads is far more important than what's going on in their specific surroundings. Mulan is arranged around events, not locations. Some of those events are location-dependent—our heroine couldn't very well have triggered an avalanche in her own garden—but ultimately the movie's appeal is rooted in its characters and the trials they undergo, not its setting. Its fantastical elements do not extend to the film world itself and there is no equivalent of the Evil Queen's dungeon or Ariel's grotto—places that are thrilling just to visit.

This film, on the other hand, gets a lot of mileage out of its setting elements, from the city of New Orleans itself to the untamed, semi-mystical bayou to the barely-glimpsed “Other Side” where Dr. Facilier makes all his friends.** Between that and the high percentage of its scenes that take place at night, you could make a really solid, classic-style dark ride out of it with little trouble (and lots of great music). Modern projection mapping would allow for some really kickass effects involving those summoned shadow creatures.

Damn. I keep making myself sad, coming up with fantastic ideas that will never happen.

At the risk of alienating roughly half my readership (Hi, Sis!), I have to say that Tangled doesn't provide much in the way of dark ride potential. Setting-wise, it's a very cozy little film, isn't it? The royal palace and the hidden tower are close enough together that Flynn seems to have gotten from one to the other over the span of a morning or so. Like Mulan, it's a movie where the internal journeys are far more important than the external ones and the highlights of the plot are centered on events rather than the locations where those events occur. Tangled is far better suited to being a show, or maybe a themed Renaissance Faire, than a ride of any kind.

I know Anna and Elsa have not been officially inducted into the Disney Princess club and that there are no current plans to do so because they're just that darn profitable as a separate brand. I'm including them anyway, because I think we all know darn well that the movie was made with the intention of adding a couple more sparkly dress designs to the inventory.

Even taking that into account, this is a special case. Desperately scrambling to keep up with their own runaway success, Disney developed a Frozen dark ride for Epcot's Norway pavilion, replacing Maelstrom.*** Unfortunately, they went the lazy route, leaving the original flume in place and just re-dressing the scenes with character figures and so on. Taking a ride layout that was designed specifically for one ride and building another, entirely different ride around it, is just a bad idea on the face of it. And sure enough, the overall report is that the ride is not very good. To the Imagineers' credit, for once they didn't just take people on a literal tour of the highlights of the movie. Unfortunately, they seem to have found a concept for a movie tie-in ride that is even worse...to wit...literally, explicitly making a ride with no larger point or purpose than seeing the characters. It's Frozen Meet-and-Greet: the Ride.

I mean...yikes.

Which is not to say that you couldn't make a good dark ride out of Frozen. Nearly all of its big scenes hinge on what's going on in the environment at the time, whether that is an Elsa-created blizzard or Olaf's summery daydream-scape. Whatever you might think of this movie as a whole, you have to admit that it looks fantastic. Try to imagine a dark ride scene built around Elsa manifesting her ice castle, or the grove of frozen willows, or the geothermal hotspot where the trolls reside, or...

They blew it. What a wasted opportunity.

Moana also is not an official Disney Princess, but give it time. The movie itself makes a joke about what it takes to qualify as a Disney Princess, and by its own admission she fits the bill.

There's also some superb setting design work on display in this movie. Polynesia is an inherently appealing setting as it is (which is why we have the Enchanted Tiki Room), but here it's bumped up several notches with elements like the cave behind the waterfall, the Kakamora's “bamboo Mad Max” boats, and of course Lalotai, the Realm of Monsters, where everything is dark and neon-bioluminescent and jeez, Disney, just figure out where to put the dark ride already!

The main caveat, and it's a big one, is that a traditional bus bar system simply wouldn't work here. For thematic reasons, it would have to be a boat ride—no excuses, it would have to be—and you can't control the speed of a boat in a flume as finely as a bus bar car. So the presentation of the scenes would have to be more continuous, like an Omnimover (or like Pirates of the Caribbean), making it tricky to incorporate any significant moments. This is where a ride system like Maelstrom's—or like Splash Mountain's, for that matter—makes sense, allowing for climactic moments timed with drops and splashes. Any sort of flume system requires scads of space, however, so we probably won't be seeing a Moana ride done right any time soon, if at all.

I was right; that was interesting! Till next week!

*A four-year-old sneering at a newborn does not count as a meeting.

** I'm guessing one of them is Adele. (I can't claim credit for that joke.)

*** This makes me angry, because I had hoped to experience Maelstrom for myself someday.