A dark ride for Dinoland!

Dinoland, USA seems like a natural location for a dark ride, since its animals must be animatronic. (Real dinosaurs are represented by such a demanding union that it’s not worth hiring them.)

The difficulty is making a dinosaur dark ride that appeals to all ages.


At the end of the day, I'd prefer this to a stinkbug farting on me.
We have to establish a tone that’s awesome, without being too scary. We’ll start by figuring out the setting.

I have a theory about the relationship between settings and dark rides, but I’ll discuss it in-depth in a later article. For now, let me over-simplify: dark rides can be (1) stylized, (2) set indoors, or (3) set outdoors, but during the night.

Pocahontas' Colors of the Wind.

Created by my sister, Emily, my friend, Tim, and me.
Lately, the parks have been projecting film onto unconventional surfaces.

It started with mist screens in Fantasmic, and now we’re seeing film projected onto whole buildings, like Disneyland’s it’s a small world.


From 0:01 through 1:29.
We like this trend, and feel that it deserves its own attraction.

Hence, Pocahontas: a dark ride that experiments with projecting film in unconventional ways. The centerpiece of the ride is an interpretation of the “Colors of the Wind” scene.

Yes, the World of Color has a Pocahontas scene,
but ours is a ride, and ours is better.
Let’s ride through, shall we?