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.

The Hollywood Studios that never was, and always will be.

I love Hollywood Studios.

I’ve graduated from, like, ninety-seven universities, but I have more pride in a theme park. Honestly, it’s my alma mater.


Working at the Backlot Tour changed my life. My writing flourished, and my filmmaking matured. I met some of my best friends, hid from my troubles, fell in love, began my quarter-life crisis, and made a Difference.

I stood beneath the Earful Tower as they removed the Disney-MGM Studios logo. I returned when they painted the Hollywood Studios logo.

And it needs to be razed.

The whole park. It’s lousy. It started lousy, it’s getting lousier, and the future holds no signs of delousing.

Its theme is lazily defined and lazily maintained. Its layout is tortuous. Half of the attractions are irrelevant, and the other half are poorly conceived.

Nothing in Disney brings out my Daddy Issues as much as Studios. Somewhere in there, there’s a great park...a park I’m proud to have in my ancestry...but I take every lousy aspect as a personal offense.

So please excuse the tone of this article. It’s a little severe in places, but that’s only because I care.

Rest assured, that passion will be reflected in forthcoming articles on how I intend to improve Studios. The stuff I’m about to introduce may be the most exciting work you’ll see on this blog.

So let’s give Studios a bath, remove its glasses, let down its hair, and teach it to enunciate its haitches.


Why can't Studios be more like a park?
Parks are so tasteful, yet bursting with flair,
painstakingly themed, but to us, laissez-faire!
They excite and delight each parent, teen, and brat!
Why can't Studios be like that?

What is a theme park?

Let’s establish the basics.

It’s tempting to say that a theme park is an outlet for escapism.

We could certainly use one. Prison lobbyists are increasing the demand for new prisons by paying Congress to extend criminal sentences. Sex offenders in Miami must live under a bridge because it’s the only place in the city that isn’t within 2,500 feet of a school. South Africans are raping babies to “cure” their AIDS.

Please let's go to Disney World.

Except...

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?