The collaboration between amusement parks and movies is totally natural… Until things get weird. Since their inception, amusement parks have used rides to carry guests through their favorite stories and fairytales. Disney brought the concept to new heights with his original Fantasyland dark rides, and the rest is proverbial history. Now, it’s almost inconcievable to operate a major amusement park without at least some movie tie-ins. Studios open their own parks, while independent operators license characters to bring their stories to life.
Once in a while, though, things just don’t jive… Here, we’ve collected a countdown of the seven downright oddest film-to-ride translations. From ultra-intense experiences built around family films, to family rides themed to ultra-intense movies, things just didn’t line up quite right in these rides. Have you ridden them? Did you have any inclination that things were a little off?
7. SAW: The Ride
Image: Thorpe Park
It was, of course, odd to hear that Thorpe Park in England had partnered with the gory and grotesque Saw film franchise to build a roller coaster. And while the ride is fantastic, it does prove to be an odd pairing. After a grisly industrial queue suited for a haunted house, the ride begins with a brief dark ride portion recreating some of the more famous tricks and traps from the movies as the coaster cart dives and twists to narrowly avoid each one. A stretched out in-line twist dramatically spirals over the corpse in the bathroom from the first movie.
The ride then exits the showbuilding and engages with a 100-foot tall vertical lift hill, followed by a 100-degree (that’s more than vertical) drop toward spinning saw blades below. The nimble Gerstlauer Euro-Fighter proved another unusual choice when Revenge-of-the-Mummy-style indoor dark ride might be more obvious, but it ultimately works. The relatively short experience includes an Immelmann loop and a dive loop before it’s over. Somehow, SAW: The Ride works altogether, but it’s an unusual concept to base a mostly-outdoor coaster after a horrific and gritty R-rated torture film.
6. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride
Mr. Toad is a character in the beloved novel The Wind in the Willows. Disney interpreted his story into a double feature called The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (a package film with two separate segments: one with Mr. Toad, and a second with Ichabod Crane and the tale of Sleepy Hollow). When Disneyland opened in 1955, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was one of its original classic dark rides in Fantasyland, set among Snow White and Peter Pan (later adding Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland). That said, Mr. Toad has always been the odd man out with Fantasyland’s other dark rides retelling classic fairytales.
But Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is just a strange creature. Placed into buggie motorcars, riders are set loose into the passages of Toad Hall. They crash into the library, burst through the fireplace, and nearly knock over suits of armor before making their way out into the streets of London where the chaos continues. Ultimately, the cars pass through a bar where a bartender tosses beer into the air, then continue on to a courtroom, where a judge sentences them to prison. Then the ride takes a sinister turn.
The cars round the corner en route to the jail and are struck by a train. After a few seconds of darkness, riders emerge in hell. Yes, hell. Fiery red caverns in the shape of the Devil, pitchforked demons, steam, and even Satan himself. A dragon coughs onto riders, who then round the corner and exit.
To be clear, neither the film nor the original story sends Mr. Toad to hell, making the ride’s finale even more unusual and nonsensical. Even if Mr. Toad is an unusual choice for Fantasyland’s fairytale setting, his Wild Ride is one of Disney’s most fabled and beloved attractions. And by our count, the only one to send riders to hell and back.
5. Backlot Stunt Coaster
When Paramount’s Kings Island debuted The Italian Job: Stunt Track in 2005, it represented a future for family coasters. Parks were saturated with mine train style rides, and the evolution of the family ride would need to happen soon. Casting riders as stunt car drivers in the finale of The Italian Job and its famous MINI Cooper chase sequence, the ride was perhaps the first launched family coaster in the world.
Aboard ¾ scale MINI Coopers (complete with decals, headlights, mirrors, license plates, and even working doors), riders were launched to a respectable 40 mph and into a minimalist parking deck, spiraling up and around through a triple helix (just as you do in real parking decks). An unusual take on the classic “first hill,” the ride then sent the train slaloming between roaring police cars, through an overbanked turn, down a set of stairs, and to the ride’s big moment. Stopped in an industrial shipping yard, a helicopter armed with dual machine guns rose up and opened fire, striking barrels of “gasoline” and spraying riders before a second round of gunfire lit the gas in an explosive plume and blasted riders into a dark tunnel, only to burst out of a billboard and splash down in a Los Angeles concrete aqueduct under queuing guests.
The ride was indeed a fantastic evolution of the family coaster that had tremendous opportunities to signal a new genre of ride – launched, themed, and detailed, but appropriate for families and park budgets. When Cedar Fair purchased the Paramount Parks chain, they quickly de-themed any movie-based rides, and Italian Job: Stunt Track became the generic Backlot Stunt Coaster. On-board audio was disabled, effects died off one-by-one, and the charming MINI Cooper trains were painted over, losing their doors, mirrors, decals, windshields, and lights to become vaguely car-shaped blobs. Today, of the three clones of the ride, Canada’s Wonderland’s has it the worst, not even bothering to stop at the helicopter mid-course brakes since not a single effect there works. Either way, folks are liable to wonder why the generically named ride just so happens to exactly recreate the finale of The Italian Job.
4. DINOSAUR
When Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened, it had only three rides. Even if it had more, Countdown to Extinction would still have been a standout. The ride – which is physically a near-identical clone of Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye – sends guests to the brink of extinction just moments before an asteroid strikes, killing off the dinosaurs. Their mission is to locate an Iguanodon and bring it back for study. Aside from pitch-black darkness, meteor showers, and muddy paths, guests have one big obstacle: a terrifying Carnotaur with wild eyes, bullhorns, and a very loud roar. The ride was fast-paced, frightening, and intense.
In May 2000 – two years after Animal Kingdom and Countdown to Extinction opened – Disney released a $130 million dollar film called DINOSAUR. Seemingly coincidentally(?), the film’s protagonist was an Iguanodon, and its antagonist was a Carnotaur, both of which had been the featured dinosaurs in the unrelated ride at Animal Kingdom. Shortly after, Countdown to Extinction got a name change to promote the film: DINOSAUR. Little changes occurred here and there, like placing a statue of the film’s Iguanodon outside the building and placing film clips into the pre-show to make the connection obvious. (For our part, we still don’t understand if the ride was designed to compliment the film and just opened years earlier than the film did.)
On the ride, the programming of the enhanced-motion vehicles were reduced to account for the children who would be riding now that it was tied to a PG-rated film, and deliberate attempts to make the ride less intense were undertaken. Today, the film DINOSAUR is mostly forgotten (it didn’t make as big an impact as Disney had hoped anyway, and the fifteen years since haven’t made it a cult classic) but the ride continues to borrow its name. That said, it’s still a pretty terrifying experience whizzing around the jungle in pitch-black darkness pursued by a horrifying dinosaur with scientists screaming over the radio that you’re not going to make it since a giant asteroid is barreling toward you.
3. The Dark Knight Coaster
In 1992, Six Flags partnered with roller coaster manufacturer B&M to build Batman: The Ride, the world’s first inverted roller coaster (wherein riders, four-abreast, are suspended beneath the looping track like a ski-lift). The ride was revolutionary, and ignited the construction of dozens and dozens of inverted coasters until most every major thrill park on Earth had one, even up until 2014. So when Six Flags announced that they would be building new coasters based on the gritty, dark Batman reboot, The Dark Knight, people were ecstatic. When Six Flags further revealed that the rides would be indoors and feature dark ride style elements, people conjured images of Revenge-of-the-Mummy style scenes with animatronics and detailed sets recreating the realistic and acclaimed film, morphing suddenly into a wild and out of control roller coaster experience in the dark.
No, nope, and huh-uh. Inside an oversized corrugated steel box at Six Flags Great America, Great Adventure, and New England were identical Wild Mouse coasters. Yep, the same transportable, carnival model of roller coaster infamously installed at Animal Kingdom as Primeval Whirl or California Adventure as Goofy’s Sky School was placed inside of a box and named after a gritty dark superhero film.
Along the zippy back-and-forth circuit of the family ride, it passes unmoving statues of Batman lit by strobes, billboards, and disco balls, all with the steel walls and concrete floor visible around you. It’s not that Dark Knight is a bad ride or that it wasn’t well done by Six Flags standards at the time… It’s just that it’s a horrible representation of the intense and realistic dark reboot of the Batman series that apparently inspired it. New England’s was eventually dismantled and relocated to Six Flags Mexico, but the three versions of the ride currently around today are a sincere reminder of how product placement can be done poorly, and a ride based on a film should at least match in tone and intensity.
2. It’s Tough to be a Bug
If The Dark Knight Coaster wasn’t intense enough to match its source material, It’s Tough to be a Bug had quite the opposite problem. Based on the G-rated Pixar film A Bug’s Life, this 4D theater presentation at Disney’s Animal Kingdom and Disney California Adventure seriously misjudged its audience.
The attraction begins playfully enough, with Flik – the kindly ant protagonist of the film – welcoming guests and naming them honorary bugs. He hopes to show off some of the incredible skills that insects have developed to live in this world so that we might leave with a better appreciation for the bugs all around us. Of course, that in and of itself ends up a harrowing experience, as air blasts simulate a tarantula’s poison quills shot at the audience, and a termite sprays guests with “acid.”
But then, all hell breaks loose. Hopper, the evil grasshopper from the film, appears suddenly in a cloud of fog and in the form of the one most incredible animatronic creations on Earth. He condemns humans for their treatment of insects, using old sci-fi film clips to show how we demonize his kind. When a 3D flyswatter doesn’t put an end to us, he fills the theater with pressurized fog that’s blasted from every corner of the room, filling it in seconds. Then, black widow animatronics rappel from the ceiling, dangling inches above guest’s heads. A pneumatic rod in each seat back then simulates a hornet sting in each guest’s back.
It’s absolute chaos, and families often go running out of the theater with screaming children. Signs outside warn that the attraction may be too intense for children, but there’s no way to adequately prepare them. Even kids who love bugs are traumatized from the experience. Our friends at Touring Plans collect guest tips, and one mother wrote in to describe her family’s experience at the show: “[My] 11-year-old refused to talk for 20 minutes after the fiasco, and the 3 1/2-year-old wanted to go home – not back to the hotel, but home.” Pretty wild for a 3D movie based on a G-rated film.
1. Splash Mountain
Splash Mountain tells the clever and timeless folk tale of Br’er Rabbit, a mischievous hare who lives down in the prickly briar patch at the base of Chickapin Hill, and who’s tired of working all day! So he packs his knapsack and decides to leave home forever to find the Laughin’ Place, where they say you never have to work, and you just sing and dance and laugh all day. But the dastardly Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear are hungry for rabbit stew, so they take a shortcut and set a trap. When Fox catches Rabbit, he threatens to skin him alive atop Chickapin Hill. But the clever Rabbit knows just what to do. He uses reverse psychology (“Oh please, Mr. Fox, whatever do you, don’t throw me into that there briar patch!”) to convince Br’er Fox to throw him down from the hilltop and into the briars… right back home!
It’s a clever story, and one that’s a little difficult to pick up amid all the singing and dancing of the hundred-animatronic cast along the 10 minute flume ride. But it’s not an original story. Splash Mountain is entirely based on the 1946 film, Song of the South. The tale of the Laughin’ Place is one of the parables that Uncle Remus tells to Johnny, Ginny, and Toby during the film – which blends live action and animation. “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” was the film’s big number, winning the 1947 Academy Award for Best Song.
Certainly, most visitors to Splash Mountain have no idea whatsoever so it’s based on a film. That’s because Song of the South has often been deemed racist due to its depiction of race relations in the Reconstruction-Era Georgia. While it’s had a number of theatrical showings over the years (most recently in 1986) and small bits and pieces have been included as special features on various Disney DVDs, the film has never been released on home video in the U.S. To be clear: despite what your friend’s cousin’s brother says, he does not have the movie on VHS or even Laserdisc. The film has been released in its entirely in Asian and European markets, but there has never been a home media release in the United States.
Maybe its for the best: film critic Roger Ebert – who had a well-known opposition to any attempt to keep a film from an audience – famously supported Disney’s non-release position. Disney CEO Robert Iger said in 2010 that there were no plans to release the film on home media, calling it “antiquated” and “fairly offensive.” That may be true, but it’s odd to think that the film inspired one of Disney’s most well loved (and expensive!) rides!
