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"Around the World in 90 Minutes"
Yes, I said 90 minutes.
The primary focus of the day was the last day of the IAAPA trade show; we went to the Magic Kingdom for the IAAPA party in Tomorrowland, not for a day at the park, so we didn't even leave the show until it closed. Then, somewhat irritated by the bus arrangements that had been made, we decided to drive to the Magic Kingdom. IAAPA and WDW had originally planned for everyone attending the IAAPA party to take the bus, but the general concensus was that the bus arrangements were really not suitable, given our particular situation...and apparently, that of a bunch of other people. So the event organizers made appropriate arrangements.
Of course, the reason the transportation arrangements were so critical is that there is no such thing as a close parking space at the Magic Kingdom. All parking is in a very large lot nowhere near the park. You then take a tram to a monorail station, then a monorail ride to the park. The arrangement is interesting, and probably made a lot of sense until they started doing private parties after normal hours...which necessitates having the staff to keep the transportation system going until the last customer staggers out of the park. And I imagine that is why they wanted the IAAPA partygoers to take the bus.
Enough with the background already. We drove to the Magic Kingdom parking lot. Immediately upon entering we got an example of why Disney has such a good reputation for customer service. When we got to the parking tollbooth, the attendant knew all the details we needed to know...where to park, which park entrance turnstile to use, and what we needed to do to gain admission to the Tomorrowland party...just show our tickets at the gate and pick up IAAPA wristbands on the way in. Easy enough. We boarded the monorail and headed for the Happiest Place in the World [Footnote 1].
Unfortunately, what followed was a logistical problem that was almost certainly not Disney's error: at the park entrance, a long line formed because they ran out of wristbands for the IAAPA party. I turned to my companions and said, "No problem; all they have to do is let us in the gate now, and have us pick up the wristbands on our way into the party...what is the big deal?" And within a few minutes, that is exactly what happened. Score two for the Disney organization: apparently, logical, rational thinking wins out in the daily operation of this park.
Once inside, knowing that our time was very short, we headed immediately for Big Thunder Mountain. I was a little disappointed that it was dark by the time I rode, and I was sitting in the last car of the train. I understand there is quite a lot to see on that ride, but it was too dark for me to see any of it. That aside, it is actually a pretty decent coaster, with possibly the loudest chain lifts I have ever ridden. Officially, each car seats six riders, but the seats are the widest undivided bench seats I have seen on a coaster...much like the very old Arrow trains (Hersheypark Trailblazer comes to mind) but with no center support for the lap bar. Clearly the train was engineered to handle both parents and a young kid in each seat...a great idea for a ride such as this one. Big Thunder Mountain is a delightful 'all audiences' coaster. Let me explain that a bit. It seems to me that by and large, coaster designers like extremes. For us coaster nuts, they build them higher, faster, loopier, more forceful, whatever. Then, when it comes time to build a coaster to accommodate children, designers seem to like incredibly tepid designs. The assumption is that young kids can't stand any excitement. Well, with Big Thunder, the Disney engineers ignored those usual rules, and built a ride that is thrilling enough to please someone who has ridden 94 other coasters, yet not so wild and intimidating that it scares away the kids who barely make the 44" height requirement. No, it isn't the best coaster around. No, it isn't my favorite. But for the Magic Kingdom, it is darned near perfect. I just wish I could ride it a few more times.
We left Big Thunder Mountain, and after a brief conference, we headed for the Haunted Mansion. We walked up to the closed entrance door, and knocked. A few minutes later, we were ushered into an octagonal pre-show room, the famous stretching room without doors or windows. It is an interesting feature; the floor is solid, so in this case the ceiling rises. The room starts with about a ten-foot ceiling; paneling for the lower seven feet, then a crown molding above which is a painted or papered wall with several portraits. What is particularly interesting about this is that the room stretches proportionally. I had long thought that the gag worked by merely raising the ceiling and lifting the unpaneled wall. That section does, in fact, become taller. But so does the paneling, meaning that the opening one walks through to exit the room is considerably taller than the opening to enter the room. I hesitate to call it a door, because, as the narrator states, the room has no doors or windows.
That room is followed by what is probably the best documented and most well-known dark ride in the entire country, so I will not even attempt a rundown here, particularly since the full script is available on the 'Net. As rides go, it is getting to e a little bumpy. Unike PKI's Phantom theater, there is no point on the ride where the vehicles turn to face each other, so I didn't get to do my little routine of being totally freaked out at the sight of other real people [Footnote 2]. Oh, and once again, when traveling downhill in the Mansion, you do so backwards. I'm telling you, it's a Disney thing...
After the Haunted Mansion, we headed for Splash Mountain. The queue for this one is fun, though there was an uncharacteristic lack of direction at one point. Clearly, when the ride was built, a queue was constructed. Looking at the way it works now, that original queue was found to be too short, and a second entrance and a big zig-zag queue were built. We entered through the second entrance, but bypassed the outer maze due to the light crowd. This left an unexpected decision point at what I will refer to as the old entrance. From there, the hike to the ride platform includes photos, clippings, memorabilia, and even the homes to introduce you to the ride characters. This is helpful for people like me who only have a vague recollection of the Brer Rabbit stories and can't remember ever seeing Song of the South. The ride itself is a wonderful bit of storytelling, with more lifts and drops than I could keep track of, including a roller-coaster drop like the one on Kennywood's Log Jammer. One comment, as well...for me, the wettest spots on the ride were the first lift, and a brake at the end of the ride. Both spots involved waterfalls and jets adjacent to the ride, not the ride action itself. This was important to me as I was carrying an unreasonable amount of electronic equipment with me (camcorder, palmtop). Surrounding the ride are scenes from the stories with animated figures (the jumping fish right next to the boat are particularly neat...) and lots of music. This ride is billed as just a big Shoot-The-Chute ride, but it is unlike any Shoot-The-Chute I have ever seen. It's a kind of a cross between a dark ride and one of those new Hopkins Super Flumes. I think it is probably unlike any other ride anywhere, Disneyland excluded of course. The drop is decent, but as on all chute rides, don't expect airtime here. Splash at the bottom is fairly minimal, in fact I seem to recall reading someplace that there is a hydraulic catcher/decelerator at the bottom of the drop.
By the time we exited Splash Mountain, the fireworks were starting and we were making our way to Tomorrowland. I really like what they've done with the place...it looks like something out of a 1950's science fiction movie. In fact, I remember chuckling when I saw the video telephone with the rotary dial, and thinking it was absolutely correct.
For the IAAPA party, food lines were set up around the area, and the large central platform beneath the huge Zamperla Mini-Jet (I believe that was the boarding platform for the PeopleMover when I visited fifteen years ago...) was set up as a stage, with the plaza below available as a dance floor. This was my third industry party in as many days, and the only one that had a sound system that actually sounded decent. Not merely decent, but actually good. Too many people have this wacko idea that if you crank the bass up so much that you can't hear anything else, that is 'good'. Ugh! Praise to Disney for using a DJ and sound engineer who aren't deaf! Anyway, meanwhile, most of Tomorrowland was operating. Once we finished eating, we headed for the Alien Encounter.
***Chicken Chute: This section contains potential spoilers.
Alien Encounter begins with a morbidly-cute preshow in which a cute little furry alien creature named Skippy is teleported across the room. He gets singed a bit, but is otherwise not too much worse for wear. Due to the design of the cylinders used for Skippy's little trip, it took me a while to figure out the mechanics, but I think I figured it out. It is very impressive, and very clever.
After seeing this mostly-successful demonstration, we are ushered into a larger room with a large transportation tube in the center. This theater I recognized as it was the Mission to Mars theater last time I was in it, roughly fifteen years ago. The room has received a major refit, with an open catwalk above, the previously mentioned tube in the center of the room, and for reasons which are left completely unexplained, the seats have been equipped with strange shoulder bars. Now, the real reason becomes apparent during the show: there are balloons in the bar which simulate such things as people leaning on your shoulder in the dark.
Anyway, we all took our seats, and watched on video monitors as the president of the company announced that instead of picking one of us to go visit them, they would run the system the other way, sending him to meet us right there in the theater. He stepped into the transmission chamber and began his trip across the galaxy.
Unfortunately, what ended up in the tube in front of us was not him, but something else picked up en-route. Something vaguely resembling the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. Whatever it was, it was obviously very hungry, and clearly in a pretty nasty mood. Well, you might be in a nasty mood too, had you just been plucked off of your home planet and dropped into a tiny glass tube in the middle of an auditorium. As you can imagine, the creature promptly works to free itself from the cylinder, and is unfortunately able to break through the glass, leaving broken wreckage behind. To make matters worse, because it is so much more massive than Mr. Chairman, several fuses in the building have blown. It is more or less here where the lights go out. Luckily, a technician happens to be nearby, and he makes his way through the auditorium behind you (you know he is behind you, first you can hear him; second, he is feeling his way along the seat backs in the dark, looking for a flashlight. He finds one, and makes his way up to the catwalk to try and figure out what went wrong. From the catwalk, he verifies that we haven't lost anybody...not yet, anyway. But the creature is still safely contained behind some kind of force field, which holds just fine until someone makes the mistake of saying something like, "Everything will be just fine as long as we don't lose the containment field". Of course, that is the obvious cue for the containment field to fail, letting the visiting monster loose to wreak havoc in the dark auditorium, harassing people, breathing down their necks, and so forth. As it is dark, no one can actually see this monster, and perhaps that is also why no one gets eaten. It is of course reasonable that if we cannot see the creature, then it must not be able to see us, either [Footnote 3].
Well, one way or another, the creature is finally contained and sent packing. It isn't clear where he is sent to, nor do we find out what happened to the company chairman. But whatever it was, it isn't in the theater anymore, and from our point of view, that is what is important! We exit through the doors opposite where we came in. There was one thing that surprised me...I seem to recall that when it was Mission to Mars, that whole seating area was built on a large, primitive motion base that could bounce up and down. I expected that when the creature was thrashing around in the theater, the room might shake...but it didn't. Hmmm...
*** End of potential spoilers.
We walked over to the large building at the center of Tomorrowland and boarded the elevator to the big rocket ship ride. Well, my Dad and I did; the rest of our group went and did something else. I don't know what but I think it involved a gift shop. The rocket ship ride is fairly new, as the original was replaced a few years ago, and it appears to be mechanically exactly the same as a Zamperla Mini-Jet, only a lot bigger. A kind of a fun ride, but as with any of the Super Jet/Roto Jet rides that use inline seating, it can be quite a reach for the control handle if you are riding solo. Back when Cedar Point had one of these, it was one of my favorite rides. While riding, we got to watch the fireworks going off at EPCOT. I would hate to pay Disney World's pyrotechnic bill!
Finally, the moment I had been waiting for all week had arrived. We hiked over to the Space Mountain entrance and walked down (and back up) the terribly long corridor to the ride buiding. As we approached the top of the ramp, below the tower, the ramp split into two queues, one to oour left, one to our right. We went to our right, and I looked up to see the stars, and to watch an object fly past that looked a little like an oversized chocolate-chip cookie [Footnote 5]. Just as I was trying to decide whether the sky I was looking at was over the ride or just over the queue, we were called to take our places adjacent to the track. The train has two cars, with three seats per car, each seat holding one rider. I sat in the last seat of the lead car. Hmmm...It's been while since I rode a coaster where the lap bar was wider than the seat...reminds me of the Galaxi at Indiana Beach in that regard. The result, of course, is a lap bar that you quickly forget about.
The ride itself was suprisingly rough...meaning 'bumpy'. It runs in near total darkness except on the lift and in the tunnels, with only the swirling stars overhead, in front, and below you. There are luminous strips on the car, and I wonder if that might not be part of the ride's effects arsenal: because you can see these fairly large luminous patches on your car, your pupils fail to dilate completely, and you cannot see the track and structure surrounding you. The result is a neat effect...the wild-mouse layout means that you truly feel as if the car could go buzzing off into deep space at times. And on this ride, the roughness actually helps a little, to remind you that yes, you are going somewhere. Because otherwise you wouldn't be sure. Although it would be truly frightening if the long drop...which can produce a little airtime...were suddenly perfectly glass-smooth, giving you the feeling that you had broken loose and were suddenly plummeting through the blackness. As coasters go, there isn't much to it, and I wonder that the designers never considered wrapping the track into a figure-8 or doing switchbacks...most all of the turns are the same direction, and they all feel like 90 degrees. One could probably model this ride on "Coaster". But it is a fun ride, and like everything else I did in the Magic Kingdom, it is completely unlike any other ride I have ever ridden. I just wish I'd had the time for more rides. I did return and ride the other track, this time in the lead seat of the pilot car. That time, I opened the iris as far as it would go and tried videotaping in hopes that at least the stars would come out. Unfortunately, they didn't. Oh, well, I'd never know if I had never tried... 8-) Oh...I also found that ride to be much smoother, but I don't know if that is because I was in seat #1 instead of #3, because the train was half-empty, or simply because that track runs better.
By this time, we had to leave. A walk back to the front gate (the Magic Kingdom really is a tiny place...) and a monorail ride back to the parking lot (WDW really is a huge place), then a long tram ride back to the car (that parking lot is enormous!). IAAPA was over. And so was my roller-coaster season [Footnote 6]. I just wish I had enough time to come back the next day...but it is a very long drive home. That was probably my last amusement park visit until April. Or so I thought...
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: Well, if Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth, then that exact description cannot logically apply to the Magic Kingdom. But as the latter is based on the former, the description ought to be similar... 8-)[Return to text]
----------Footnote 2: What can I say? Some of us are easily amused.[Return to text]
----------Footnote 3: It's another reference to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, which appears in Douglas Adams various works entitled, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a wholly remarkable book which has absolutely nothing at all to do with amusement parks, roller coasters, or the Walt Disney Company.[Return to text]
----------Footnote 4: Isn't it fun reading through all the footnotes?
----------Footnote 5: I've baked cookies for years. Believe me, I know what a chocolate-chip cookie looks like.[Return to text]
----------Footnote 6: In the interest of technical accuracy, it should be noted here that the Magic Kingdom was NOT, in fact, my last park visit of the season. At the time, I had no idea that I was going to drive past (and stop at) yet another park on the way home. As to WHICH park I stopped at on the way home...I will leave that open to speculation. The trip report is coming soon. [Return to text]
--DCAjr.
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