Dark Rides
parkworld-online.com DARK IN THE PARK 2014
Following our special feature on Ratatouille: L’Aventure at Walt Disney Studios in Paris (see page 36-38), Park World is pleased to bring you this round-up of other new dark rides entertaining theme/amusement park audiences around the world in 2014. If you are one of those handful of parks that still hasn't got such an attraction (and we've visited a few recently that haven’t) then take this opportunity to get some inspiration and start thinking about what kind of dark ride you could create for your guests in the coming years. Your family visitors will thank you for it – we guarantee!
Calico Mine Ride Knott’s Berry Farm
nott’s classic Calico Mine Ride reopened on 14 June following a top-to-bottom refurbishment after almost 55 years of operation. The attraction, unusual for a dark ride in that it features a full train hauled by a locomotive (rather than single cars), was created by theme park pioneer Bud Hurlbut. It now includes dozens of new richly-detailed animatronic figures, state-of-the art lighting, audio and special effects.
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Originally opened in November 1960, the attraction found a special place in the heart of Walter Knott, founder of the famous park outside Los Angeles, who had worked in actual mines around the turn of the century in the Calico mining region. Hurlbut worked tirelessly to incorporate authentic touches into the attraction, befriending several miners and visiting dozens of mining sites around California. Knott’s Berry Farm’s design team, in partnership with local company Garner Holt Productions (GHP), has elevated Hurlbut’s '60s design while preserving the original mining experience. Now nearly over 120 animatronic characters populate the experience, spread across classic and re-imagined scenes. An old miner inside the first tunnel (as pctured left) welcome guests into the Calico Mine and warns them of the dangers that lie along the rails ahead. Despite the massive mining operation depicted inside the mine, since the attraction first opened no character has ever actually found gold in the mountain. As part of the renovation, one lucky miner is now seen striking it rich with gold in hand!
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New excitement is also found at the chain lift, where trains pass by a nervous miner carrying a canary in a cage for safety into the unknown diggings ahead. The animatronic canary is just one of many new animals now part of the attraction. The attraction’s rustic wooden loading platform has been refreshed. Guests embark on the eight-minute journey aboard fully refurbished, hand-painted mining cars featuring a new sound system. To replace the live
commentary that used to provided by the train's operators, Garner Holt Productions (GHP) has installed a cutting-edge RFID playback system to play on-ride narration and audio effects. “The spiel is based on the original 1960 script, and has new points of interest and stories in the voices of three character narrators so that each trip through the mine is unique,” explains Garner Holt. “Our objective with switching to pre-recorded narration was to achieve a consistently good show for the guest. Often live operators were difficult to understand, sometimes weren’t the greatest actors, or a combination of both. Now, every trip includes a clear, well-performed spiel. That makes for a much richer experience.” The twisting, turning tunnels and expansive caverns were completely repainted, including a brilliant new colour scheme in the “Heaven Room”. Here passengers find the glorious sight of the thousands of spectacular stalagmite and stalactites accompanied by the original musical score. The Calico Mine Ride is recognised as being significant to the development of dark rides and the theme park industry in general. “Before the Mine Ride,” offers Holt, “dark rides were almost exclusively trips through dimly lit rooms in small two-person vehicles which would encounter a series of simple, very crudely animated scenes and 'stunts'. The attraction featured fully-developed and richly themed exterior rockwork. The ride vehicles were themed, not merely painted. The Calico Mine Ride was in this sense fully-immersive. The central ‘Glory Hole’ scene which is passed by vehicles several times during the attraction has been since adopted by other major rides including the Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea.” Bill Butler, GHP’s director of creative design, believes that the best dark rides have always had a direct, rather than linear, approach to storytelling. He describes the Mine Ride as, “a place where a series of little stories are unfolding. We have a mine, inside the mine we have various scenes, within these scenes we have characters performing an action, interacting with each other, with the guests, but there is no A to B, B to C, and so on. Disney’s Pirates of the Carribbean, Haunted Mansion, even something like the Jungle Cruise, are the same. It’s a tough and usually not a successful exercise to put too much linear storyline into an attraction, to do so it’s either too simple to be interesting, or too complex to be satisfying. The Calico Mine Ride is perfect in that sense.”
knotts.com
AUGUST 2014
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