Welcome one and all! Y’all come have a ball! Things are very fine, riding on the ole’ Knott’s Bear-y line!” It’s not every day that an attraction manages to truly capture a generation. It’s even rarer that one of those good, old-fashioned family attractions becomes so legendary, its story outlives its lifetime. Yet today, we’re inducting just such a ride into Theme Park Tourist’s library of Lost Legends.
Original characters created by one of Disney’s most legendary designers? Check. A memorable and melodic singalong musical score? You bet. Iconic environments plucked right from a storybook? Uh huh. Enough nostalgic wallop to enchant millions of Southern Californians over a decade-long life? Yes indeed.
And while those ingredients may sound like the making of a perfect Disneyland dark ride, Knott’s Bear-y Tales wasn’t a Disney dark ride at all, but an anchor attraction that could only be found at Knott’s Berry Farm, mere blocks from Disneyland in Buena Park, California. How did one of Disney’s most esteemed Imagineers create an attraction that became a Southern Californian treasure? And how has the concept made a miraculous return? Well, let’s just say… it’s kind of a cute story…
Knott’s Berry Farm
Disneyland may indeed be the place where the “rules” of the modern theme park were born in master-planned form. But make no mistake – Walt Disney knew exactly who he was taking his cue from: Walter Knott.
Technically, Knott’s Berry Farm traces its history to 1920, when Walter and his wife Cordelia drove their Model T Ford to Buena Park, California, renting real estate to restart their lives as farmers. By 1927, they’d built a home and berry stand on the land, plus a Tea Room for Cordelia to sell sandwiches, jams, and homemade pies baked fresh with the farm’s berries.
In 1934, Cordelia decided to weather the Great Depression by using the farm’s bounty to open her Tea Room up for full-service dinners. Mrs. Knott’s fabled fried chicken dinners came complete with salad with rhubarb, biscuits, vegetables, mashed potatoes with gravy, and berry pie for dessert, all for 65¢. In a matter of years, the 20-seat Tea Room became a 350-seat Restaurant with multi-hour waits each evening…
Walter began building a historic 1860s Western mining town – one shop at a time – in 1940 merely as a way to entertain crowds waiting for a table! By the middle of the decade, however, Knott’s “Ghost Town” was an attraction in its own right. In 1947, the Knotts officially established “Knott’s Berry Farm” as a roadside attraction, where guests could buy souvenirs, pan for gold, indulge in chicken dinner, and taste the legendary “boysenberry” cultivated by Knott and fellow farmer Rudolph Boysen of a little rural neighborhood a few miles south called Anaheim.
Knott’s Berry Farm bills itself as “America’s First Theme Park,” and it’s easy to agree. When Walt Disney arrived in town in the 1950s, Knott’s Berry Farm was already a destination! More to the point, Walt often spoke with Walter Knott about his park’s capacity, traffic flow, pricing, and more, all in an effort to refine the “Magic Kingdom” being built down the road.
Everything changed at Knott’s Berry Farm with the arrival of Bud Hurlbut in 1960, whose handshake deal with Knott lead to the construction of two pivotal attractions (and two of the most magnificent classic dark rides in the industry): the Calico Mine Ride and Log Flume – each quite literally an inspiration to Walt Disney, leading directly to his own Mine Train Thru Nature’s Wonderland (and the idea of a hidden switchback queue).
So you can imagine that even if Disneyland is given due credit for being the first master-planned, intentional theme park, Knott’s was undoubtedly its progenitor. Especially in those early days of the 1950s and ’60s when both Disneyland Knott’s Berry Farm were growing thanks to the talents of the first generation of artists-turned-attraction-designers, everyone was learning as they went.
One of those early Imagineers in particular would become the star in our story today…
Rolly Crump
Pencils and paperclips are to thank for Rolly Crump’s career at Walt Disney Imagineering. Initially an animator at the studio (on films like Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and One Hundred and One Dalmations), Crump was what you might call a tinkerer. He’d use simple office supplies to create kinetic sculptures, filling his room at the studio with paperclip-powered propellors that would spin in the breeze from the air conditioner.
Crump was convinced to install his spinning supply sculptures in the Studio’s library, where Walt stumbled across them. So like so many animators at Walt Disney Studios, Rolly was quickly called over to WED Enterprises to lend his distinctive style to the nascent Disneyland. Crump said in his 2012 autobiography It’s Kind of a Cute Story, “When I finally worked for Walt, I think it was the propellers that made him want to hire me. I think he liked my imagination.”
It’s appropriate too that one of Crump’s most instantly-iconic contributions to Imagineering is a project that never actually came to Disneyland – his Tower of the Four Winds that stood as the icon and marquee of “it’s a small world” when it debuted at the 1964 – 65 New York World’s Fair. The nimble, kinetic, beautifully modern sculpture of spinning umbrellas, rotating flags, and revolving flowers was simply too large to ship back to Anaheim with the rest of the ride. (Instead, it was left in place, and eventually demolished to be sold for scrap.)
Of course, Crump did design its spiritual successor – the iconic, Mary-Blair-inspired clocktower, glockenspiel, and geometric facade that serve as the ride’s exterior in California, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong. Surely, one of his most enduring and recognizable projects for the company, the “small world” facade also perfectly captures Crump’s distinct understanding of motion, shape, and joyful whimsy through architecture.
Even still, Rolly’s touch can be sensed all around Disneyland. He designed, sculpted, and hand-painted most of the tikis in the lanai garden of the Modern Marvel: The Enchanted Tiki Room. (Rolly told his hometown paper, the Fallbrook Village News, that it was his idea to dangle “Sparkletts” in the eyes of the tiki drummers in the show so their eyes would glisten as they drummed.) He was also a leading designer behind Tomorrowland 1967 – Walt’s “World on the Move.”
Back when the jury was still out on what, exactly, the Haunted Mansion ought to contain, Crump’s concept was a “Museum of the Weird,” packed with otherworldly oddities, international wonders, eclectic designs, paranormal sights, strange creatures, palm-readers and vardo wagons (above), and living antiques – elements of which still live on in the Mansion’s final form. But unlike his contemporaries – Marc Davis and Claude Coats, for example – who’d spend their careers with Disney, Crump was ready to move on… and we bet you can guess where he went…
Worlds Collide
Though he contributed to the early designs of Magic Kingdom, it’s probably fair to say that Rolly Crump quickly became disillusioned with the increasingly corporate structure of Disney after Walt’s death.
In Disneyland, Walt had recruited animators, background artists, and painters who were given the freedom to pursue passion projects and make up the rules as they went. Rolly often described Disneyland as a project where each WED designers’ touch could be seen in the attractions he or she lead; where projects overseen by individuals with different styles came together as a beautiful whole – what he called a “gorgeous salad.”
To his thinking, Magic Kingdom was doomed to be less a salad and more a melting pot, adhering to a corporate style book and downplaying each artist’s credit in favor of the increasingly-generic “Disney.” Crump said of the Floridian park in a 2018 interview with the LA Times:
“It had no feeling of Disney. […] Disneyland has charm. Disneyland freaking hugs you and kisses you. […] When you go to Disney World and you see the castle, you want to genuflect. And that disturbed me. […] I helped design the rides at Disney World, but we lost the charm. […] The whole thing fell apart. I quit.”
By the early 1970s, Rolly Crump was a free agent.
And wouldn’t you know it? Right about then, back at Knott’s Berry Farm, Walter and Cordelia’s daughter Marion Knott had stepped up and overtaken the family business. With big plans for her father’s Ghost Town, she set out to find talent that could usher in a new era of attractions, including a spectacular new dark ride…
Fortunes and Fires and Bears
Given that attractions outside of Disney’s realm aren’t usually as well documented in their design and construction, many of the best stories about the making of Knott’s Bear-y Tales could easily have been lost to time… if Crump himself hadn’t told them! In both More Cute Stories Vol. 6 and a storytelling interview chronicled in Chris Merritt’s 2010 book Knott’s Preserved, Rolly recalls the unusual circumstances that lead to the ride’s design.
We know that in 1971, Marion Knott decided the time was right to expand the park with the addition of a third themed area. Joining the original Ghost Town and 1969’s Fiesta Village was the new Gypsy Camp. (Note: Today, “Gypsy” is considered a pejorative term to describe the traditionally-nomadic Romani people. The term has been used as a slur given that it’s frequently used to connotate illegality and thievery. It’s used here in the context of the park’s historic themed area.)
A multi-level land built into sculpted cliffs, the nomadic camp invited guests to into flea markets, bazaars, vardo wagons, and mystical fern grottos where traveling performers, organ grinders, fortune tellers, and musicians brought the land to life. Given the success of the Calico Mine Ride and Log Ride, however, Marion reportedly felt that Gypsy Camp needed a dark ride of its own…
Though disguised behind a rocky facade, the land’s largest building offered two arcades (the Gypsy Faire on level two and Thieves Market on level one), either of which offered 20,000 square feet of potential showspace. Crump was personally recommended.
Rolly told Chris Merritt, “I had grown up with Knott’s since I was 9 years old! I remember when it really was a farm! I even remember before the Ghost Town, when my grandfather would take us down there for the chicken dinner and boysenberry pie.” By September 1974, Crump was on the project.
Working with an idea proposed by young Knott’s designer Wally Huntoon (a story of a young boy and his donkey heading to a fair), Crump concepted a dark ride passing through a frog forest and into nomadic Romani camp filled with dancers, artists, mystics, and fortune tellers. Crump recalled that of all his sketches, a favorite among the Knott family was one showing a fortune teller dancing with a family of bears. That’s what lead the family to consult with an outside marketing firm. “I said, ‘You know, Walt Disney never test marketed anything. If he felt it was a good idea, he just went ahead and did it,’” Crump recalled.
Ultimately, though, Crump concedes it was “probably a good idea” given that when the results came back, the crew was tasked with transforming all the human characters into animals and the “Knottsenbear-y” family was born.
As luck would have it, new concepts added to the ride – like the bear family and the idea of an opening scene passing through a boysenberry jam factory – were good complements to a much larger transformation taking place. Coinciding with the arrival of the world’s first modern inverting roller coaster (Arrow Development’s Corkscrew), Marion decreed that the entire Gypsy Camp area that had only debuted four years earlier ought to be redesigned as an ode to the heyday of her parents’ generation: the Roaring 20’s.
With about half the ride installed in the second-story space in April 1975, an overnight fire destroyed nearly everything that had been constructed. (It’s believed that the ride’s destruction was an act of arson related to a union dispute. Marion Knott can be seen surveying the damage in the Orange County Archives image below.)
Despite the massive setback, it was “full speed ahead” for Knott’s Bear-y Tales. With just six weeks until the ride’s planned opening, setpieces were rebuilt and final touches installed. Crump recalled to Merritt, “It took Chris [Crump, his son and Disney Imagineer,] 3 months to build the Chug the first time—because he did it from scratch—and the next one he did in 6 weeks!”
Amazingly, the ride was delayed less than a month, ultimately opening just after the rest of the Roaring 20’s area on July 4, 1975. The old, two-story arcade of the Gypsy Camp didn’t clean up too badly, with Knott’s Bear-y Tales taking up residence in the reclad building resembling a streetcar substation and red car trolley garage.
Ready to head inside? Read on…
Knott’s Bear-y Tales
“Welcome one and welcome all, folks,
To a family fair for all folks,
Riding on Knott’s Bear-y Tale ride!
We’ll go back to the Roaring ’20s,
And you’ll come back a’roarin’ plenty
When you see what the bruins are brewin’ inside!Welcome one and all! Y’all come have a ball!
Things are very fine riding on the ole’ Knott’s Bear-y line!”
In that canon of infectuous theme park melodies, Bear-y Tale’s “Welcome One and All” rivals even the Sherman Brothers’ Disney Parks tunes! Composed by Robert F. Brunner and Bruce Belland (unsurprisingly, Disney alums), the joyful hoedown follows riders through their Bear-y Tale from entrance to exit.
Ding ding! As guests reach the loading platform for Knott’s Bear-y Tales, they stand before a time-honored tradition dating to Disneyland’s classic Fantasyland dark rides: a beautiful mural stretching the length of the station. Painted by Suzie McLean, repeat riders may notice that the mural tells the story of guests’ coming journey to the County Fair, from the Boysenberry Bakery to the Frog Forest; Gypsy Camp to the Weird Woods. A continuously loading line of streetcars is ready to whisk us into a storybook past!
As the melodic fiddle tune of the ride’s theme turns to whistling and humming, our streetcar passes through a poster for the County Fair and begins a surprising uphill climb! Up over a hill, we’ve found ourselves in a cave shining with metallic copper machinery. The cavern factory of the Bear-y fam’ly business is bought to life with musical clanking and creaking, tooting steam whistles, whirring gears, and spinning Crumpian pendulums with beads clattering on spindles.
It’s a joyful playground of sights and sounds, where chickens lay fresh eggs that tumble down ramps; Boysen and Girlsen Bear-y ride spinning gears in their factory playground; all manner of Bear-y cousins grind freshly harvested boysenberries into fresh jam, roll out dough, place finished pies onto an oven-bound conveyer belt, and load up a wagon filled with potentially-prize-winning delights bound for the County Fair. (Just look out for Crafty Coyote, who’s come to snatch a pie right off the cooling rack.)
But with the pies loaded and ready for the fair, it’s time to begin the journey. Our first stop? Frog Forest. The trolleys exit from the cave and into the delightfully musical forest where weeping tree branches and giant mushrooms surround riders.
Crickets chirp all around as playful frogs ribbit among the cattails, going about their chores. Better yet, frogs practice their contribution to the fair – a long jump competition – in a puppeted vignette. A final scene within the Frog Forest sees a gargantuan lady frog don her straw hat, ready to join the journey to the fair.
The trolleys lumber across an old covered bridge, leaving the chirping and humming of the Frog Forest behind. Instead, the sounds of tamborines and cimbalom dulcimers signal the arrival in a nomadic Gypsy Camp. Now deep in the forest en route to the Fair, all incandescent light has faded, replaced entirely with the glowing, otherworldly blacklight traditionally found in many Disney dark rides.
And there’s not a better place to put it to use than the Gypsy Camp, filled with ultraviolent vardo wagons, striped tents, fluttering flags, fine glowing porcelain, and comical signs for various fortune tellers.Even the trees are now aglow in moonlit hues, creating in the Gypsy Camp an otherworldly sense of place. Card readings with ThedaBear, floating instruments and seances with Zazz Owl, meeting with the mystic Sarah who “Sees All, Knows Nothing,” and Palm Reading by Wanda…
Here in the Gypsy Camp, Knott’s Bear-y Tales reveals itself as the work of a master Imagineer, with memorable characters, perfect staging, and exceptionally well set-up scenes.
Still the trolleys trek onward, leaving the camp behind and following arrows and marquees toward the Fair. There’s just one problem. Ahead, signs warn: “DANGER!” “DO NOT ENTER!” “WRONG WAY!” “TURN BACK!” and above them all, a sign painted like a storm cloud with lightning bolts tearing out in each direction, reading, “THUNDER CAVE”! It’s too late, of course, as the trolleys carefully advance in.
As thunder rumbles and lighting flashes, the rocky interior of the cave seems to close in. The streetcar leans forward, beginning a long descent through the cave as glowing, goofy, fuzzy spiders rappel from the cave walls. (Crump suggests that this long descent remain from an early iteration when Arrow Development would’ve manufactured the ride. In that version, this descent through the Thunder Cave would actually have been gravity-powered… a family-friendly roller coaster hill in the dark, with the lightning flashes meant to disorient guests and weaken their nightvision for the scene to come…)
Now in the deepest, darkest part of the path to the Fair, we’ve slid into the Weird Woods. “Population: SCARY.” In fact, the Weird Woods is a forest of DayGlo creatures that are equal parts bizarre and hilarious. Duck-footed bats; chicken-snails; mosquito-birds; llama-donkeys; buzzard dragonflies. These colorful hybrids are characters in their own right, nodding, flapping, and flying past guests as the plucking score of “Welcome One and All” returns.
Dipping down into a bog, a magnificent sight appears ahead: a glittering marquee dotted with flashing lightbulbs. It reads: “ANNUAL COUNTY FAIR”! We’ve made it! After a spectacular journey, the ride’s finale brings us to the County Fair where wonders await. Snakeoil salesman “Doctor Fox” stands at his wagon, offering cures for what ails us – “Corns,” “Hang nails,” even “Nose hairs”!
Madam Wong – the panda bear fortune teller – bangs a gong as riders pass her tent. Theda Bear has made it from the Gypsy Camp, offering her metaphysical services. Nearby, Harry Rabbit and his son Jack perform puppet shows of a magical juggling act! Characters wave from the trees overhead, or float in suspended hot air balloons.
In a rousing, jazzy musical finale, guests pass by musicians, acrobats, and more all as blacklight gives way once more to incandescent lightbulbs. And there, of course, with the Blue Ribbon, is the Bear-y family, being photographed to remember their day at the Fair. As Crafty Coyote tries to reach from his “Pie Thief” paddy wagon to reach a boysenberry pie, Boysen, Girlsen, Flapper, and Elder Bear-y wave goodbye to guests. “Goodbye!” Ta-ta!”
As you know, we always like to end our Lost Legend entries with a ride-through video showing the attraction in action. Knott’s Bear-y Tales closed in 1986 – well before home photography could easily capture a dark ride. Videos of the experience that remain are from its final weeks or days of operation, when the attraction, its audio, and its animatronics had largely seen better days… but a video can still give a good sense of the ride’s spirit and characters! Feel free to watch a clearer, “lights-on” video of the ride at the end of its lifetime here, or the proper show-lighting via home video below:
End of the Ride
By the mid-1980s – after the deaths of her parents Cordelia (1974) and Walter (1981) – Marion Knott chose to step back from the daily operations of the park. A new general manager, Terry Van Gorder, believed that there were better uses for the Bear-y Tales space.
After the summer of 1986, Knott’s Bear-y Tales closed forever after barely a decade – a relatively short life for a ride remembered so fondly! (In an extremely strange twist, the ride was used that fall for Knott’s annual Halloween Haunt event. With most of its figures removed and those that remains turned off, the bare scenes were populated by Halloween props and hidden “Scareactors” who jumped out at guets as they slowly rolled by in 1920s trolleys. You can watch a lights-on video of the experience here.)
It’s easy to see why Knott’s Bear-y Tales was remembered for decades, still talked about in the kind of glowing terms often reserved only for Disney’s Lost Legends. It’s probably not a coincidence. Even though most riders wouldn’t have had a clue who Rolly Crump was, Bear-y Tales was so decisively his; a ride born from the mind of a gifted Disney Imagineer and wrapped in his beautifully vibrant stylization. So what happened next? Read on…
In 1987, the second-story space once home to Knott’s Bear-y Tales was transformed into the Kingdom of the Dinosaurs (coincidentally, produced with the assistance of another of Disneyland’s original cast of Imagineers, Bob Gurr).
It’s easy to fault the park’s then-management for the seemingly short-sighted decision to remove a ride now remembered as a classic, but the new attraction just so happened to catch the “dinosaur” train just before the meteoric rise of prehistory in pop culture thanks to 1988’s The Land Before Time and 1990’s Jurassic Park, arming Knott’s with a marketable attraction tuned to audiences 1980s and ’90s. (During the ride’s first year, attendance at the park was said to have nearly doubled.)
Plus, it must be said that Kingdom of the Dinosaurs was truly a legendary dark ride in its own right. Seated aboard the same trolleys (now reclad like 1920s time machines), guests would travel through the streets of a roaring Los Angeles before entering the wacky Professor Wells’ workshop and entering a time tunnel (its ticking emblazoned into the minds of a generation of Southern Californians). They’d emerge in a prehistoric world, traveling through an Ice Age, the Triassic period, and the Cretaceous, encountering two dozen animated figures in a slow-moving, informative, and immersive ride.
Suffice it to say that for ’90s kids, Kingdom of the Dinosaurs was an icon, separate entirely from their parents’ longing for the cartoon Bear-y Tales of yore. And as far as transformations of a second story of a theme park arcade go, the 1987 ride was unbeatable.
Kingdom of the Dinosaurs lasted longer than Bear-y Tales had, but not by much. In a bit of irony, the popularity of dinosaurs probably helped contribute to the ride’s end. After a firm decade as head of the prehistoric pack, Kingdom of the Dinosaurs gained a new competitor just a short drive away in 1996 when the Lost Legend: JURASSIC PARK: The Ride opened at Universal Studios Hollywood, making Knott’s ride look like a relic of the past.
But the indisputable end of Kingdom of the Dinosaurs can likely be attributed to a certain lack of interest by its owners… and we don‘t mean the Knott family…
Cedar Fair’s Berry Farm
In 1997, Knott’s Berry Farm was sold to Cedar Fair – owners of Ohio’s Cedar Point – for a reported $150 million. The company’s spokesperson told the LA Times, “[Knott’s Berry Farm] is in great shape physically, and it’s a great draw. It’s different from our other parks in that there are not as many thrill rides.”
Consider it foreshadowing. In the years that followed the 1997 change-of-hands, Cedar Fair added the GhostRider wooden coaster (1998), Supreme Scream drop tower (1999), the record-breaking Perilous Plunge splashdown boat ride (2000), Xcelerator launch coaster (2002), and Silver Bullet inverted coaster (2004).
One thing Cedar Fair was pretty infamously disinterested in: dark rides. The 17 year-old Kingdom of the Dinosaurs closed forever in 2004. Given the ride’s lack of upkeep, its ’80s technology, and the relative decline of dino-mania, it may have been for the best. The second floor of the arcade was vacant for the first time in thirty years, and given Cedar Fair’s style, it looked likely to stay that way…
However, in 2011, Cedar Fair’s longtime President and CEO stepped away from the company, making way for a new leader: former Disneyland President Matt Ouimet. Pretty immediately, Ouimet set out to reverse Cedar Fair’s overreliance on bare steel coasters. Especially thanks to his time at Disneyland, the fresh leader was determined to return some nostalgia to Knott’s, too. “This park has a lot of potential,” he told the Orange County Register on his tenth day on the job in 2011. “This is one of those parks that’s a jewel. […] These parks – and Disney’s the same way – have to be part timeless and part timely. You’ve got to respect the legacy.”
In 2013, Knott’s Timber Mountain Log Ride closed for an extensive five-month refurbishment, reopening with all new scenes and over 60 animatronic figures designed and built by San Bernardino’s renowned Garner Holt Productions. For 2014, Knott’s equally historic Calico Mine Ride got the same treatment, with 120 new human and animal characters.
The same year, the company’s Canada’s Wonderland park announced that it would partner with Montreal-based Triotech to develop an interactive, fully-screen-based dark ride called Wonder Mountain’s Guardian in 2014 – what fans expected would be a prototype for a wider rollout of digital dark rides across the chain. At the same time, Cedar Fair trademarked to term “Amusement Dark” – what many fans suspected would be a portfolio-wide initiative to similarly refresh and expand Cedar Fair’s dark ride attraction lineup
Ouimet spoke with entertainment writer Jim Hill that summer, stating “It’s not exactly a closely guarded secret that – when it comes to Knott’s – we’re trying to figure out what to do with the area where Kingdom of the Dinosaurs & Knott’s Bear-y Tales used to be located. Assuming that the Wonder Mountain’s Guardian ride works out, there will probably be some lessons that we learned up in Canada that we can apply down here in Buena Park.”
Like clockwork, Cedar Fair announced that the park’s three-year dark ride spit-shine would turn Knott’s duo of dark rides back into a trio… At last, the old Bear-y Tale space that had sat vacant since the Kingdom of the Dinosaurs went extinct in 2004 would be reactivated. Extending their partnership with Triotech Knott’s would host a third dark ride once more…
Voyage to the Iron Reef (2015)
With a reported budget of $10 million, Voyage to the Iron Reef would take shape on the second story of the arcade – now part of the park’s Boardwalk area in 2015. Knott’s Berry Farm general manager Raffi Kaprelyan said to the LA Times, “We can’t compete with Disney and Universal on budget, but we can compete on entertainment value.”
At least on paper, the ride cleverly connected to Knott’s itself, with a setup that explained that steampunk, mechanical ocean animals had arisen from the depths and were devouring the rides of the Boardwalk area.
Concept art even suggested that riders would see sunken, rusted versions of former Knott’s attractions – including a Bear-y Tales trolley – now feeding steam-powered sea creatures.
Seated in four-person rotating submarine pods armed with “freeze guns,” guests would take to the murky blue depths, traveling through six distinct scenes with 10 interactive screens – most separated by simple but effective practical sets or props. Check out a ride-through, point-of-view video of Knott’s Voyage to the Iron Reef below; having a sense of its flow and layout will come in handy in our continued tale of Bear-y Tale’s legacy…
Even suffering from the drawbacks you’d expect from a dark ride with 10% the pricetag of a Disney installation (like awkward transitions, “video game” level animation, and a distinctly irritating and invariable looping musical hum), the ride recieved pretty lukewarm reception. It wasn’t a great ride, especially for Knott’s, and especially after its historic, animatronic-filled attractions that had been so beautifully spotlighted in the two years prior.
Sure, Voyage to the Iron Reef may not have been a masterpiece packed with joy, warmth, artistry, and heart, but it was – in a manner of speaking – “enough”; a “cool” ride that reactivated a long-vacant corner of the park with a billboard-friendly aesthetic. And being “enough” would just have to be “enough,” right? After all, it’s not like Iron Reef would be sinking anytime soon, much less that the Knottsenbear-y family would even make a return if it did…
… Right?
Hibernation Ends
On November 19, 2019 representatives from both Knott’s and dark ride firm Triotech hosted a joint announcement at the annual International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Expo in Orlando. Just five years after it had debuted, the mediocre Voyage to the Iron Reef was sunk. (A Knott’s spokesperson suggested that the ride had only been planned to last five years anyway, which seems questionable.)
In its place, the hallowed ground once home to the the Bear-y’s Boysenberry Bakery, a new adventure would soon begin…
Voyage to the Iron Reef closed forever on January 5, 2020 to make way for Knott’s Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair – a concept so obvious in retrospect, it’s shocking that Knott’s hadn’t done it to begin with!
Re-using the physical ride system and layout created for the former gaming ride (but replacing trigger-activated “freeze rays” with pull-popper “jelly-blasters”), the new attraction would see guests return to the Boysenberry Pie Factory 35 years after their first visit. Riders would revisit Frog Forest, the “Fortune Teller Camp,” Thunder Cave, and Weird Woods, culminating in a celebration at the County Fair, all while blasting Crafty Coyote and his mischievous, thieving pups as they try to steal Boysen Bear and Girlsen Bear’s blue-ribbon boysenberry pies.
“Knott’s Bear-y Tales carries a great significance and evokes an intense sense of nostalgia for those who first experienced the ride as children in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Triotech vice president and creative director Nol Van Genuchten said. “It’s our goal to capture the spirit, creativity and originality that made this dark ride such a success and thus [honor] the cherished memories of the original attraction.”
One part of honoring the original? Rolly Crump’s son, Walt Disney Imagineer Chris Crump, joined Knott’s and Triotech as consultants on the attraction. With Knott’s archive of concepts, Triotech’s easily-swappable screen-based animation, and Crump’s own know-how, there could be no more fitting an attraction to anchor Knott’s 100th Anniversary in 2020 than the reappearance of the bears and their Return to the Fair.
Except… In March 2020, just a few months into the installation of “Return to the Fair,” the COVID-19 global pandemic forced the closure of Knott’s Berry Farm and all of California’s theme parks. Given the state’s cautious approach to reopening, Knott’s missed its 100th Anniversary season almost entirely.
Unlike the fire that delayed the original ride’s opening, though, the park’s extended closure gave designers the rare chance to slow down, adding more depth to physical sets, crafting new props, and tweaking the attraction’s flow. In an in-depth feature on the new ride’s development by Blooloop’s Charlotte Coates, Knott’s VP of Rides and Maintenance Jeff Gahagan reported:
“The pandemic helped us. Although it’s weird to say that. We were on a tight deadline to turn [the ride] around. But then we had an extra year. We were able to do a lot of tweaking and adjusting, basically upgrading the attraction. A lot of times, you have a ride or an attraction that opens and you adjust after the guests’ reaction comes out. With this ride, we were able to spend that entire year making those adjustments. So that the reaction from the guests is ‘You nailed it, you got it perfect.’”
Knott’s Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair (2021)
Knott’s Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair held its grand opening one year late, one May 21, 2021 – its marquee adorned with very “Crumpian” propellors. Even for those of us who prefer our dark rides without laser guns, there’s so much to love about the new jelly-blasting attraction. With familiar locales so joyfully recreated, the ride includes the delightful smell of boysenberry permeating the factory and an awesome queue.
The ride wonderfully redressed the vast, cold Iron Reef showspace, benefitting greatly from the Bear-y Tales’ moonlit forest aesthetic. Trees cover the “seams” between screens, and the contents of any two screens become one continuous environment. Weeping willow branches lower the room’s ceiling and sound level, making Return to the Fair feel warm and personal; blacklight returns a whimsical storybook aesthetic to the attraction.
In the new Bear-y Tales, guests are whisked through glowing cartoon environments, passing significant physical sets and adorable setups. While the addition of even a single animatronic character might’ve put the ride over the top, it’s still an absolutely excellent redux and a very good ride even without the nostalgic element factored in.
Take a ride through Knott’s Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair below, and be sure to marvel at not just how it manages to revisit the original’s locations, but within the “Iron Reef” ride footprint!
Let’s face it – compared to its nearest siblings at Disney (Toy Story Midway Mania or Web-Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure), the new Knott’s Bear-y Tales probably reads as the most “Disney” of the bunch! Original characters, gorgeous fantasy environments, memorable locales… Crump’s storybook world was reborn in no-less beautiful a way. At the very least, it is without a doubt a spectacularly fitting follow-up to the park’s original ride, and a perfect attraction to anchor the park’s 100th anniversary.
A Crump Classic
Despite his trepidation with Disney, Rolly returned to the “Mouse House” on and off throughout his career. Soon after the completion of Knott’s Bear-y Tales, he was called back to Imagineering by his Imagineer son Chris to contribute to the design of an EPCOT Center pavilion based on health and medicine.
After another five years with the company, Crump left once more, establishing an independent design firm. He returned to Disney for a final stint as an Executive Designer on EPCOT from 1992 to 1996 before retiring for good. His autobiography – It’s Kind of a Cute Story – is an exceptionally recommended read.
Rolly Crump, now in his 90s, still lives in Carlsbad, California – close enough to Disneyland to visit Main Street, U.S.A., where his name is forever inscribed among the park’s “opening credits” by way of the company’s highest honor: a window on Main Street, U.S.A. Crump’s window is – appropriately – Main Street’s Fargo Palm Parlor, offering “Predictions That Will Haunt You,” the “Bazaar, Whimsical & Weird,” and “Designs to Die For” with Crump’s “Museum of the Weird” concept art applied to tarot cards.
As for Knott’s Bear-y Tales? One of the most missed dark rides in California didn’t live long, but it sure did make a bear of an impression. A masterwork of Crump’s tried-and-true aesthetic, the 1975 original was, for all intents and purposes, a Disney-quality dark ride just built a few blocks away.
As a landmark of Knott’s Berry Farm, it was a joyful, spectacular, and downright magical mix of the kind of color, music, artistry, and environments that delighted a decade of visitors – and more to the point – permanently planted the smell of boysenberry in their minds.
And now, nearly fifty years later, a whole new generation gets to “Return to the Fair.” As far as Lost Legends go, we’d call that a happy ending!
