The construction of almost any new theme park ride is a major undertaking. Engineering rides that are thrilling, but completely safe, is not an easy task. Specialist firms can charge millions (or tens of millions) of dollars to the biggest park operators for the installation of a new roller coaster or dark ride. For attractions that are particularly ground-breaking in nature, the design and construction process can be excruciatingly difficult. That was the case for some of the most innovative attractions ever created, which in some cases involved creating all-new technology for the purpose of entertaining theme park visitors. Let’s take a look at 5 world-renowed attractions that were shockingly hard to build…
5. Terminator 2: 3-D – Battle Across Time (Universal Studios Florida)
In 1992, Universal approached Gary Goddard, whose company, Landmark Entertainment, had worked on the Conan the Barbarian stunt show at Universal Studios Hollywood. It asked Goddard to produce a design for a live-action stunt show based on Terminator 2, similar in style to the Conan show. It would replace Conan at the Hollywood park, as well as becoming a new attraction for Universal Studios Florida. Goddard immediately decided that a stunt show was the wrong approach: “Very quickly, I realized that a traditional ‘stunt show’ was just far and apart from the emotional center of T2. I thought, an Arnold [Schwarzenegger] look-alike, taking punches at a live actor in some kind of tinfoil suit? That would be a disaster.” Two days before a key meeting with Universal to discuss the attraction, Goddard had a breakthrough: “I was in a restaurant having a late dinner and I was scratching around in my notebook. And I said, okay just think: ‘What would be cool?’ What could happen in that theatre that would be cool? And I got this idea of the liquid metal – the T-1000 – coming off the screen in 3-D and suddenly forming into the Robert Patrick character, and when the process was completed, the character was a live actor in the theatre who leaps out at the audience.” 
The idea impressed Terminator 2 director James Cameron so much that he came on board to direct, bringing the movie’s stellar cast with him. But actually implementing it proved to be immensely challenging. Filming the type of fast-moving action sequences favored by Cameron in stereovision would prove to be one of the biggest problems. To capture the 3-D image, two 70mm cameras were employed. One shot down into a beam-splitter, while the other shot through it in order to align the two images. The resulting camera package weighed some 450 pounds – approximately the size and weight of a washing machine. “They were huge and cumbersome and finicky,” recalls effects guru Stan Winston. “And who wants to be married to something that’s huge, cumbersome and finicky?” “‘3-D sucks’ was the popular sentiment on the set,” joked Cameron, who would later go on to direct 3-D epic Avatar. “It’s just really hard to do.” If the cameras moved slightly out of position, then a whole scene would have to be re-shot. To prevent this, an elaborate “cable-cam” pulley system was devised, carrying the cameras at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour for the chase sequences. By the time production was completed, the film sequences would cost some $24 million. At 12 minutes long, Terminator 2: 3-D was the most expensive film ever produced at the time, on a per-minute basis. The 3-D issues aside, the production of the live-action sequences was a fairly standard affair. However, the digital effects required for the attraction would be breaking new ground. In total, nearly 50 digital artists at specialist firm Digital Domain would work for nearly 6 months to bring the Terminators to life, in what was the first ever use of digital effects in a 3-D movie.
Two additional screens suddenly be revealed for the final scene, which would take place in an entirely computerized environment. This posed further problems: “It was the amount of data we were dealing with,” says graphic artist Judith Crow. “We were used to doing commercials, or feature films with shots that were maybe 10 to 12 seconds long. Here we were producing CG that runs for several minutes in a row, across three screens, two views per screen, and suddenly we were faced with manipulating this enormous amount of data.” Every frame would have to be created twice, once for the left eye, and once for the right. With work on the effects nearing completion, Goddard and Digital Domain became involved in the painstaking work to synchronize the timing of the stage show with the on-screen action. The slightest change would often require significant re-work from the effects artists. Universal’s management would frequently visit the show building to find chaos. Goddard recalls: “They would see things not working. They would see actors on a break for four hours while the tech team tried to track down a bug in the show control system. It certainly looked like they had a $60 million bomb on their hands.” With a week left until the attraction’s opening date, Universal executives demanded that the production team be ready to show the attraction to a test audience in 48 hours. Goddard was furious, but was left with no choice: “We did the show for them. It was a miracle that we got through it – without a stop. Everything worked. And the audience went ballistic. That is no exaggeration. They were stomping their feet and shouting and clapping. It was unbelievable. I got a call that night at about 8:30pm. Universal ordered us to do two more shows the next day. The survey numbers were so high – higher than anything they had ever seen on any attraction before, that they thought there was some kind of anomaly that affected it. So we did two more shows the next day, and again, the surveys were through the roof.”
4. Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln (Disneyland / New York World’s Fair)
Having pioneered the concept of the theme park with the opening of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney turned to his next challenge: how to create realistic-looking human figures to populate his rides and shows. He contracted with the State of Illinois to produce just such a character for the New York World’s Fair in 1964/65 – one that would bring President Abraham Lincoln back to life. Despite being under incredible time-pressure, Disney’s Imagineers made huge strides towards creating a realistic human figure as they prepared for the show. Just a week before opening day, “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” passed its initial test at the company’s headquarters in California. The figure was shipped to New York the next day. Things immediately began to go wrong. The shipment was delayed by a day due to heavy traffic. When Lincoln was set up in the Illinois Pavilion, it delivered its speech as planned, then went into convulsions. The temporary wiring in the pavilion was faulty, and permanent wiring wasn’t installed until the day of the opening. Then a transformer broke down, leaving the show without power for two days. To Walt Disney’s dismay, Lincoln was not ready for his big preview in front of Illinois dignitaries and the international press.
However, by the time of the grand opening, the Imagineers had somehow pulled it off. Some observers were shocked at their ability to bring historical figures back from the grave. “Shake Lincoln’s hand,” said Daniel Cohen in a Science Digest article. “Its texture is enough like real flesh to make you cringe. It’s moist, for the vinyl plastic skin exudes a fine oil over a period of time. The plastic even bruises.” After the World’s Fair, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln was shipped to Disneyland, where it continues to entertain guests to this day. Audio-animatronics, of course, have become an integral part of Disney attractions, as well as rides at many other theme parks.
3. The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man (Islands of Adventure)
Image: Universal
As far back as 1997 – two years before the ride was due to open at the under-construction Islands of Adventure – Universal was making bold claims about The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man. It would, the company modestly promised, be “the greatest ride ever built.” Despite its reputation for risk-taking, Universal originally intended for Spider-Man to be a much simpler attraction. According to Ben Lovelace, who worked on the ride in addition to the Incredible Hulk Coaster, it was initially conceived as a simple dark ride, with a chain of cars passing by a film of some sort. However, when in 1995 Disneyland opened Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye, combining an innovative motion vehicle system with stunning special effects, Universal felt it needed to up the ante. “We always try to make things a little higher, a little faster, a little bit more dynamic, so we have something to market technologically,” said Lovelace. “Universal pushes the envelope.” For inspiration on how to top Disney’s creation, Universal looked to its own attractions. The company had just finished work on Terminator 2: 3-D, which had combined 3-D on-screen action with live sets in new ways. Also analyzed was Back to the Future: The Ride, which combined the simulation of motion with huge projected images. The plan was to take the best elements of both attractions, and place them into a dark ride setting. Lovelace describes the goal: “In Spider-Man, it was combining all of that together on a vehicle that moves on a track. Combining every technology we could think of in one show.” The bar had been set extraordinarily high by Disney, and Universal was now attempting to leap over it. “A lot of people, even in our own team, didn’t believe it could be done. But we said: ‘We think it can be done, we think we know how to do it, let us try,’” recalls Scott Trowbridge (now head of Imagineering at Disney, but formerly with Universal Creative). “It was a difficult, trying process from Day One basically, but with a huge carrot at the end.” 
Spider-Man’s first-of-its-kind ride system would enable Universal to create a wide range of sensations. “We can simulate flying, falling, bumping and hitting,” boasted Trowbridge.The attraction would boast thirteen 30-foot-tall projection screens, twelve of which would show 3-D footage. To create the illusion of depth, 25 large-format projectors and dozens of smaller projectors would be used. Many of the screens were rear-projected, in a first for a 3-D movie. A major problem for the ride’s designers was that 3-D films are traditionally designed to be viewed from a stationary position, but riders on Spider-Man would be whizzing past, often tilting and rotating as they went. “3-D has always been very restrictive – you have to sit in the middle seat, halfway back because that’s the only spot where the 3-D really works,” explains Trowbridge. “We had to find a way to make 3-D work from a moving point of view. To solve the problem of the distortion that you see as you move past the screen, we developed a process that we call ‘squinching’. This basically is predicting what the distortion is going to be and counteracting it with additional distortion in the opposite direction.” To anyone looking at the screens from a standing position, the image would “move and squash into a whole bunch of things that look really weird.” But to riders, “that screen is a window onto a virtual world.” Universal patented the “squinching” technique, which had not previously been employed by any ride. 
Sound designer Carl Hartzler also faced challenges. The large screens would make it difficult to contain the audio in one place, so it was decided that the majority of the audio would come from the cars themselves – that way, it would not “bleed” into other scenes. 18 Infinity Kappa speakers from Harman International, identical to those used in car stereos, were added to each vehicle. For a realistic effect, though, some of the audio would need to come from outside the vehicles, so that it appeared to be coming from characters on the screens. This was also problematic, as Hartzler explains: “Normally, in a movie theatre, the system is behind the screen; the screen is perforated and audio floats through it. But the screens we were dealing with could not be perforated, so we didn’t have that opportunity. We put the Renkus-Heinz speakers in front of the screen, aimed them at the screen, and bounced the sound off that. We were very leery of that, but it was a vinyl surface, and it bounced off pretty well.” To coordinate all of these different elements, Itec Productions developed the Ride Show Supervisor software for a central control computer. This would know, to within one thirtieth of a second, when each effect would need to be executed. Each car would also be equipped with three computers to help trigger the action. “All the systems had to be very reliable and very accurately synchronized to make it work,” Trowbridge said. “If you feel the bang a second after you hear the bang, it sort of spoils the illusion.” 
The final scene of Spider-Man would boast an incredible special effect that brought together all of the disparate technologies employed by the ride. Doctor Octopus would shoot the riders’ Scoop vehicle with his levitation gun, sending it flying 40 stories into the air above Manhattan. It would then fall off a skyscraper’s roof, plummeting towards the ground below before being caught in Spider-Man’s web. Set supervisor Phil Bloom explains how the effect was achieved: “[It is] a series of effects built on top of each other. One has static scenery with some lighting cues. We also have an actual physical building that has motion that drops away from us, and makes us feel like we’re rising. All this is synced with a movie projection screen. Add in the motion effects of the vehicle and some wind effects, and you feel like you’re flying in the air.” The drop at the end would, in reality, be about 10 inches. Speaking in the aftermath of Spider-Man’s debut, Trowbridge was elated. “Whenever I go into the attraction, I put all my identifying marks away and go incognito just to hear what people are saying. I walked up to the front-door operator and asked how long the line was, and she said about an hour. I said, ‘Wow, an hour?’ And there was this couple in the front of the line, and the woman said, ‘It’s worth it! It’s worth three hours!’ And the guy said, ‘You know, it was designed by NASA!’ And I said, ‘Really? That’s fascinating. I did not know that.'”
2. Nemesis (Alton Towers)
Alton Towers, the most popular theme park in the UK, faces some of the biggest restrictions of any theme park when adding new rides. Because the park is built in grounds of a decaying gothic mansion, heritage authorities enforce strict rules on what is and isn’t allowed. For example, no rides are allowed to be taller than the tree-line – which makes building world-class roller coasters a little difficult. After the Tussauds Group bought Alton Towers in the early 1990s, it was determined to add a major new coaster in spite of the restrictions. It turned to legendary designer John Wardley, who was keen to create a unique, custom experience that could not easily be replicated elsewhere. His biggest issue was how to achieve this within the strict planning constraints placed on the park by the authorities. “We probably have the most trouble of any park in the world when it comes to getting planning consent”, Wardley explained during a presentation to mark Nemesis’ tenth anniversary. “It’s dead easy to build a high roller coaster. We had a huge problem. Our site here at Alton Towers does not allow us to build big, high rides. We couldn’t build anything that went above the trees. We couldn’t build anything that could be seen from outside the park. How on earth could we build a sensational, world-class roller coaster when we had to keep the thing no higher than the tallest tree on site?” Wardley and his team floated helium balloons above the site, in order to establish the maximum height of the coaster. It rapidly became clear that there simply wasn’t enough height available to create the fast-paced experience that Alton Towers needed. The solution was simple: build downwards, into the ground. The team proposed excavating an enormous pit, an unusual approach that would cost a fortune. Management were receptive, though, and so were the local authorities. 
The actual coaster would be a ground-breaking design, too. Wardley had heard that the newly-formed Swiss firm Bolliger & Mabillard were building a prototype coaster for Six Flags Great America near Chicago. He persuaded his friend at Six Flags, Harold Hudson, to put him in contact with the firm – and learned that it was building something totally unique. Wardley was staggered by Hudson’s description of the new attraction. The “inverted coaster” would see riders sitting in trains that dangled beneath the track. Unlike existing suspended coasters, though, the ride’s trains would be “floorless”, with riders’ legs dangling freely beneath them. Not only that, but it would be capable of including loops and other inversions in its circuit – something that existing suspended coasters with their swinging trains, could not do. “That’s impossible,” was Wardley’s reply, “you can’t turn an inverted coaster through loops.” B&M, though, had found a way. 
The next challenge was to design a track layout that squeezed as much excitement as possible into the limited footprint imposed by the pit. “Although we curse the various statutory bodies that control Alton Towers’ heritage, they do force us to be creative”, Wardley concedes. “It would be so easy and so much cheaper if we could just throw steel up into the air way above the trees.” Between them, Wardley and B&M were able to come up with a design that worked, packing four inversions (two corkscrews, a zero-g roll and a vertical loop) into the circuit. The construction of the ride was tortuous, requiring the enormous pit to be blasted out of the rock. Incredibly, the park spent as much on the pit as it did on the coaster itself (some £5 million). It was worth it, though – Nemesis recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and is still one of the most popular rides in the UK.
1. Jaws (Universal Studios Florida)
Image: Universal
Universal Studios Florida opened in 1990, and Universal made the brave decision to dispense with the formula that had worked so well at its original park in Los Angeles. Instead of cloning the Hollywood park’s tram tour, it opted to take elements of the tour and blow them up into separate, full-scale attractions. One of those attractions would be based on the Jaws section, itself based on the classie movie directed by Steven Spielberg. In Hollywood, Jaws’ great white shark lunges out of a lagoon at the Studio Tour’s trams. The Florida version of the experience would be significantly expanded and enhanced. Riders would now board flimsy-looking boats, placing them in much greater jeopardy. Jaws would actually grab the boats with his sharp teeth, before dragging it around the lagoon. Even before work started, it was recognized that developing the Jaws attraction would be a hugely complicated undertaking – perhaps more so than any other attraction at Universal Studios Florida. Legendary Disney Imagineer Bob Gurr, then with Sequoia Creative, recalls: “I had no reluctance to decline to bid on giant jobs if I thought the idea was too risky. Once, as a VP in a themed entertainment company, I no-bid on a monstrous job in Florida that had sharks in it.” Gurr’s decision was to prove to be a wise one. The biggest challenge facing Jaws’ developers was how to enable enormous, life-sized models of sharks to move through a large body of water, with perfect timing so that their movements coincided with those of the boats. Former Universal show producer Adam Bezark recalls: “You can imagine how complex it must be to get one giant mechanical watercraft to swim up and bite another giant mechanical watercraft – which is moving – with absolute precision, hundreds of times per day.” The sharks, “swimming” at 20 feet per second, would not only grab the boat, but would then drag it around the attraction’s seven-acre lagoon. Weighing some three tons each and measuring 24 feet in length, they would move through the water with a thrust equivalent to that of a Boeing 747 engine. To enable this, nearly 2,000 miles of electrical wire and 7,500 tons of steel were part of the lagoon’s construction. Computer-guided hydraulic systems were used to control the actions of the sharks. The construction and testing of the Jaws ride was fraught with problems, with the key issue being how to overcome the enormous drag caused by the water when the giant robotic sharks went from a dead stop to a rapid lunge. During testing of the boat attack scene, the shark would often lie in a stationary position at the bottom of the lagoon, refusing to emerge. Other times, its teeth – which were real shark teeth, glued into the model – would rip the pontoons on the boat. In total, MCA spent more than $30 million to produce the Jaws ride, making it one of Universal Studios Florida’s most expensive attractions. However, it was forced to close it just months after opening when it proved unable to operate reliably. It was rebuilt over a period of three years, at a staggering cost of $40 million. 
This time around, the company brought in Oceaneering International’s Advanced Technologies Group to build the sharks. The company had been contracted by Universal as it was a specialist in building the heavy-duty hydraulic machinery used by undersea oil rigs – its work on the updated Jaws ride would be its first foray into the entertainment business. The Oceanineering International team built no fewer than seven fiberglass-and-steel great white sharks, which proved to be much more reliable than the original versions. At various points during the ride, the sharks surged from the water with a force equivalent to a 500-horsepower engine. All of the underwater equipment was encased in hard plastic to prevent corrosion. To achieve their rapid forward lunges, each of the sharks was attached to a hydraulic lift. This apparatus, weighing 12 tons, was mounted on a wheeled platform, enabling the sharks to move around the lagoon. The platforms themselves sat on underwater tracks. The updated Jaws ride debuted in August 1993, but was officially categorized as undergoing “technical rehearsals” until early 1994. It continued to thrill guests until its removal to make way for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Diagon Alley, which is due to open in summer 2014.
