One night, after Disneyland had closed, Imagineer Joe Lanzisero tried an experiment. He and his team took a Teacup from the Mad Tea Party (1955) attraction and attached it to the track of Pinocchio’s Daring Journey (1983). He wanted to see what a narrative dark ride would be like if the vehicle could be spun by the rider.
He quickly realized that he was on to something good.
Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin (1994) is thirty-years-old today, 1/26/2024. Its story is mired in invention and legal complications, all of which often overshadow just how much fun it is. It’s a dark ride that uses practical, physical, effects and distorted perspectives in order to put a guest into a cartoon world — the same sort of goal that Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway (2020) was going to attempt to reach through much more complex means many years later.
While the tenor of Mickey’s Toontown has shifted quite a bit in the intervening years and Roger Rabbit’s presence there has been allowed to wane — partially because Disney doesn’t own the rights to the character completely — the ride, in Anaheim in 1994 and Tokyo in 1996, brought with it a number of innovations that are worth revisiting.
The Interactive Queue
This is one of the earliest examples in a Disney park of the queue actually building up the narrative excitement. Other queues certainly had theming, but this one took you to downtown Toontown, into the dark part of the city that you don’t see in the outside land, where guests could see silhouettes of the Weasels and Jessica Rabbit in upper-floor tenements, peek in the window where Baby Herman sits offstage reading the paper, be shooed away from a local speakeasy — The Ink and Paint Club — by a gorilla bouncer and listen to various voices and radio programs that feed into the plot of the attraction.
In another year Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye (1995) was about to take this to a whole new level, but Roger Rabbit did it first (and Roger’s has held up better).
Combining Physical Thrills with Dark Rides
The combination of narrative dark rides with thrills has become Disney parks’ bread and butter these days with the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (2014), Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind (2022), Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance (2019) and Radiator Springs Racers (2012) topping the list of the most popular attractions in their respective Disney parks, but Roger Rabbit got there first by simply overlaying a spinning thrill vehicle onto an elaborate dark ride.
It’s not a white-knuckle thrill, but it is a very early attempt to integrate more radical physical motion into the dark ride formula.
Cars with Personalities
Radiator Springs Racers was not the first encounter audiences had with anthropomorphic autos within a Disney park. That honor goes to Benny and Lenny in the Car Toon Spin.
Individualized Ride Experience
For a dark ride, the school of thought was that designers should do everything they could to draw the audience’s focus where they wanted it, to where the story was. Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin threw that idea entirely out the window by allowing the guests (once they had been squirted at with Judge Doom’s “dip”) to spin the car in any direction as fast as their muscles (and the onboard governing devices) would let them.
Later rides would find different ways to individualize the ride experience via modified vehicle mechanisms — Indy’s enhanced motion vehicles, Rise of the Resistance and Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway’s trackless vehicles — but Roger Rabbit is the only one that lets that experience be modified by the rider themselves.
Radically Shifting Visual Perspectives
The Disney parks have always used forced perspectives to enhance size and scope, but the Roger Rabbit attraction is the first to use it to tilt the visual axis of an entire room to give guests the sense that they’re falling. Both Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway and Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure do something similar today with screens and enhanced motion, Lanzisero’s team did it first, with paint.
With Roger, as a character completely knotted up in rights disputes between Disney and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, his presence in the parks will almost assuredly continue to diminish. The addition of the Car Toon Spin’s big brother, Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, has even moreso obscured Toontown’s connection to the feature that, at one time, was considered to have saved Disney animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). But as a bridge between the old-fashioned fantasy dark ride and newer high-tech multi-media extravaganzas, it still deserves a place of distinction: the first ride to try and put a guest right smack in the middle of a cartoon.
Happy Birthday, Car Toon Spin!
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
