We hate to love them, and love to hate them – rides that are “so bad, they’re good.” Like a laughable cult classic movie whose earnest actors have no idea they’re making meme-able moments, sometimes the worst things can become the best… if you just change your expectations and your perspective. And today, we want to highlight a few of our favorites.
Fair warning: it’s hard to say where the line really is between “laughably fun, so-bad-it’s-good cult classic” and “just plain old irredeemably bad.” For example, while you might’ve chuckled at the “what were they thinking” absurdity of the Declassified Disasters: Stitch’s Great Escape, The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management, or Superstar Limo, guests paying top dollar for Disney Parks admission didn’t. So your mileage may vary!
But here are a few tried-and-true, cult classic attractions from Disney and Universal parks that are almost lovable for their ridiculousness… if you have the right perspective…
1. DINOSAUR
Location: Disney’s Animal Kingdom
For better or worse, being “uneven” is sort of DINOSAUR’s thing. As we explored in our in-depth history of the ride, that’s because it’s lived multiple lives. The version that opened with the park in 1998 was a terrifying, loud, and serious ride… but an update to coincide with the release of Disney’s 2000 film DINOSAUR saw the ride adjusted to compensate for an expected upturn in family attendance. On-board narration was updated to be more lighthearted and comical, to refocus the story on the ride’s Iguanodon and Carnotaur, and to explain what’s happening in the dark, disorienting, and loud ride.
To this day, DINOSAUR just can’t seem to figure out what it wants to be. Sometimes, it’s a serious, thrilling, and downright scary journey that’s rough, wild, and filled with actually-terrifying dinosaur Audio-Animatronics. Sometimes, dinosaur’s necks end in black curtains with glittering fiber optic star fields, blacklights flicker against obviously-painted jungle backdrops, plastic pterodactyls are bolted to the ceiling, and big, cartoon-proportioned dino-heads roll toward you on rails.
Don’t get us wrong – DINOSAUR is a blast. It’s a wild, audacious, and silly E-Ticket that finds a clever (but let’s be honest – not better) new use for the ride system and track layout of Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure. It’s a true gotta-see-it classic. But part of the fun of the ride is acknowleding its inherent contradictions, faltering special effects, and ridiculous split between self-serious thrill ride and on-the-nose absurdist adventure.
Will it last forever? We’re not sure… But for now, it’s a campy, ridiculous, prehistoric chase that’s easy to appreciate from multiple perspectives.
2. Poseidon’s Fury
Though it was an opening day attraction at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in 1999, the attraction we explored in its own in-depth feature doesn’t look anything like it did back then. That’s because the original Poseidon’s Fury was billed as a headliner for the technological park, but pretty quickly floundered. Part walkthrough, part special effects show, Poseidon’s Fury was meant to be a new age E-Ticket, but guests found the walkthrough build-up to a special effects battle between Zeus and Poseidon to be confusing, anticlimactic, and even boring.
Using the existing rooms, special effects, and flow, designers transformed the attraction in 2001. Though assembled in mere weeks, the “Band-aid” version of the show has surpassed two decades of existence. Guests are now guided through the temple of Poseidon by a hapless intern of the Global Discovery Group, who accidentally awakens an ancient evil and then must uncover the lost Trident of Poseidon, open an ancient connection to the sea, and find Poseidon to defeat his foe once and for all.
The attraction includes appearances from Christina Pickles as a goddess and Star Trek’s Jeffrey Combs as the laughably named “Lord Darkenon,” a practical stand-up routine by walkthrough guide “Taylor,” and a climactic battle between two men in Spandex superhero suits, often reaching past the projection screen’s frame and zooming in and out in ridiculous, slow-motion, Renaissance Faire style combat.
All that is to say: it’s a masterpiece. Seriously. Beloved by practically everyone, Poseidon’s Fury is so bad, it’s good. It’s a lovable mess of an attraction. After a few months of running full-speed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Universal decided to scale back its operations a bit, closing Poseidon’s Fury in August. Slowly but surely, social media rallied behind the return of the attraction, crescendoing in its full refurbishment and reopening in March 2022 gloriously unchanged.
Seriously, it would be easy for Universal to wipe Poseidon’s Fury off the face of the earth. It’s the only remaining attraction in the park’s Lost Continent (often seen as a first-tier expansion pad), not to mention the only attraction at the entire resort not themed to an existing IP, but created in-house. Sure, eventually, it’s certain to go the way of the dodo. But until then, let’s appreciate that this madcap attraction – which includes two of the coolest special effects on Earth – continues to exist for us to enjoy.
3. Journey into Imagination with Figment
There’s a whole lot we could say about EPCOT’s Journey into Imagination that would make park purists livid. As we all know by now, the pavilion opened in 1983 and – like the rest of EPCOT’s Future World – was anchored by a lengthy, informative, educational dark ride. Of course, rather than being a ride through the history of industry, Journey into Imagination whisked guests away on a colorful, vivid, joyful ride through “sparks of inspiration” like art, science, technology, literature, and performance. It goes without saying that that Lost Legend: Journey into Imagination is long gone.
In 1999, it was replaced with one of those totally-irredeemable, 100%-bad, zero-fan replacements Disney’s too good at – the Declassified Disaster: Journey Into YOUR Imagination. A very, very, very bad ride, Journey Into YOUR Imagination axed the iconic Dreamfinder and Figment in favor of “Dr. Nigel Channing” (played by Monty Python’s Eric Idle) leading guests on a tired tour of the “Imagination Institute” and its half-dozen illusions.
Luckily, feedback was so toxic that Disney arranged a quick fix. In 2001, the ride closed to become Journey Into Imagination With Figment. The ride keeps the Imagination Institute setting and Dr. Nigel Channing, but adds back the colorful, creative dragon Figment (albeit, in annoying form). Put simply: Journey Into Imagination With Figment is WAY better than Journey into YOUR Imagination, but nowhere near as good as Journey Into Imagination. Got it?
So obviously, we wouldn’t exactly call the current ride “good.” More like “good enough.” Granted, like Poseidon’s Fury, the quick-fix, low-cost, Band-aid version probably should’ve gotten a proper redesign sometime in the last twenty years, but it limps along okay as a ride with no wait and few fans.
Still, we rank Journey Into Imagination With Figment as “so bad it’s good.” That’s because frankly, it’s insane. Yes, it’s filled with twenty-year-old CGI animation, dumb “direct-to-video humor,” and an unappealing setting. But it’s also a whole lot of fun to see Figment (even in annoying form), to hear the iconic theme song “One Little Spark” again, and to see how relatively cleverly Imagineers reorganized the awful middle form of the ride to make use of its (few) strengths and add more of the fantasy, silliness, and musicality it needed.
The point is: the current Journey into Imagination is a mess. Absolutely. But no one would ride it arms crossed and pouting. It’s an enjoyable enough experience in its way, and if you can overcome your (righteous) anger at the loss of the original or your (totally earned) frustration that Disney hasn’t done anything to really fix the most broken ride at the resort, then at least you can laugh at how insane the ride’s existence is at all.
4. Fast & Furious: Supercharged
Please hold the tomatoes. Let us explain.
Yes, Universal Orlando’s Fast & Furious: Supercharged is almost certainly the worst ride at a major park in Central Florida. Like, it easy ranks among the worst of our worst rides of the century so far. It’s also entirely inexcusable, because the ride opened at Universal Studios Hollywood in 2015 where it served as the “grand finale” of the famous Studio Tour and was very negatively received… so for some reason, Universal decided to copy it back to Florida as a standalone experience? And it wasn’t even easy to do! Universal literally demolished the showbuilding that had housed Earthquake (later, Disaster) since 1990 and built a massive new ride building in its place.
If you’ve been lucky enough to miss it, all you need to know is that Universal’s Fast & Furious ride is neither fast nor furious. Despite Fast & Furious being the 8th highest grossing film franchise of all time (and by far the biggest box office cash cow in Universal’s library), the ride sees guests load onto “party buses” (trams in disguise) where they’re subjected to the same laughably-bad Musion projection scene and “action-packed” projection tunnel finale as in Hollywood. The busses buck and tilt while surrounded in CGI visuals about as convincing as a PlayStation 2 video game, all while fog machines blast pressurized fog. It’s a delerious, pointless, and downright stupid experience.
So far, it just sounds “bad,” right? But something does make Supercharged “so bad, it’s good”: Universal Team Members. Apparently having either gotten approval to acknowledge the ride’s awfulness or just having chosen to go completely rogue, the Team Members stationed in Supercharged make a laugh-out-loud experience. Seriously. The multi-room, multi-part pre-show designed for the ride (clearly an attempt to make it feel like more of a standalone experience since the ride itself is literally just the tram segment copied-and-pasted) gives Team Members a chance to ad-lib in call-and-response” to pre-filmed segments with the franchise’s stars.
Saying the queue is more enjoyable than the ride is a pretty damning statement for a theme park, but in the case of Supercharged, it’s very true. With the right combination of Team Members, the lead-up to the ride is a seriously good time. It’s just a shame it has to end in the ride.
