The birth of Disney's dark ride

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Finally convinced my daughter to go on Pirates and the Mansion, insisting (again) they are not scary in the give-you-nightmares senseā€¦ she was blown away by the magic of the rides - the same magic that has captivated me for almost 40 years since my first visitā€¦

One passage in this article stands out above the others: that the Imagineers would have been a part of Maker culture. Such truth, yes, but I think they WERE - at least, they were instrumental in, well, MAKING Makers.

And is there any other theme park out there that inspires that?

One of the scariest dark ā€˜ridesā€™ was the extraterrorestrial alien encounter before they toned it down.
Youā€™re strapped in a chair seeing a teleporation demo when they beam in a flying HR Giger type alien.
The Alien breaks out of itā€™s containment cylinder and then the lights go out. Almost total darkness. You hear it flying around you and feel the air from itā€™s wings, you feel the floor compress under itā€™s weight as itā€™s behind you breathing hot air on your neckā€¦a flick of itā€™s tongue on your neck.
Up stairs on the cat walk a technician with a flashlight is trying to restore power and he gets killedā€” dripping a warm liquid on you.

I still have marks on my arms when I took our 9 yo nephew to that one. They did a great job of giving an unseen entity realistic sense of presense and weight.

They had a lot of complaints about it and refurbished it with a comical Sitches Great Escape thing which I havenā€™t seen.

ā€”Edit: I had to look this up to see if my recall was correct. Yupā€¦right down to the hand crushing. http://www.mickeymutineers.com/2013/02/the-extraterrorestrial-alien-encounter.html

We went on the Stitches version last year. You can still see the bones of the old versionā€“the seats look like the ones from the dropship in ā€œAliensā€ and so forthā€“and even though itā€™s supposed to be amusing itā€™s still sort of unsettling when the lights all go out. (Stitch does things like ā€œburpā€ and you get a blast of chili-dog-scented hot breath from right behind you.) I can definitely see how it would be pants-wettingly terrifying with the Alien theme.

No mention of the Museum Of The Weird? Whateverā€¦

One of the things about Stitch is that heā€™s Experiment 626.
Which was a Gill Scott Herron song that was popular in the late 78. Tuskeege 626 --the code for an experiment about Syphilis.

My new book covers the Museum of the Weird, of course - in fact, my extensive interview with Rolly Crump works its way through the entire book. This bit is simply an excerpt from the introduction.

This ride is about as ā€œdarkā€ as an episode of Scooby Doo.

The ā€œdarkā€ in dark ride is in reference to literal light, not to tone.

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