This weekend, emotions are running high through the Disney fan community. On one day, Walt Disney World is shutting down two decades-old attractions that were opening day features at each respective park. In Epcot, the Universe of Energy will finally stop traveling theaters into the primeval world (and through a lesson about energy sources)… but the greatest grief of all comes dead center in Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
In the 1980s, shortly after taking over as CEO of The Walt Disney Company, Michael Eisner spotted a piece of concept art for an Epcot pavilion that WDI was shooting around ideas for. The Entertainment Arts pavilion was to be the sister of the creative arts’ Imagination pavilion next door, with the highlight attraction being “Great Moments at the Movies”. The attraction featured smaller versions of the traveling theater from the Energy pavilion, taking guests into the heart of several beloved films. Coming from a film executive background at Paramount, Eisner quickly remembered the Universal Studios Florida pitch he had sat in just months prior and recognized that this could be something much more.
After a round of conversations with head Imagineer Marty Sklar, Walt Disney Studios Florida hit the ground running with two highlight attractions: Great Moments at the Movies and the Backstage Studio Tour. The front half of the park was an idealized 1930s and 40s Hollywood in all its golden age splendor, with the back half the actual working production studio. Unfortunately, Disney was still struggling in its fight to be seen as a studio with much live-action relevance, Mary Poppins having still been its biggest non-animated hit at the time. Eisner already delved into teritary studios such as Touchstone or Miramax, but Disney itself had yet to gain its strength back.
To compensate for this, Eisner struck a deal with Metro Goldwyn Mayer, also known as MGM for logo and name rights. Thus, Walt Disney Studios Florida suddenly became “Disney-MGM Studios”, with a litany of separate licensing deals to be made so that the company so synomous with the timeframe that Eisner wanted guests to be immersed with could be prominently featured in the theme park. It’s easy to forget that branding was almost the deepest extent that MGM’s influence went into the park. They were otherwise hands off until numerous disagreements truly soured the relationship. (as the park’s name today would imply)
Eisner hoped that this would give a boost to the park’s thesis attraction, still called “Great Moments at the Movies”. Indeed it featured such famous MGM properties as “Singin in the Rain”, “A Fistful of Dollars”, “Tarzan the Ape Man” and “The Wizard of Oz”, but also 20th Century Fox’s “Alien”, Warner Bros films “The Public Enemy”, “Footlight Parade”, “The Searchers” and “Casablanca” along with Paramount’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and Disney’s own “Fantasia” and “Mary Poppins”. Guests enter thru a full-size replica of the famous Chinese Theater into a theater playing trailers for the various films to come, only to go through the sidedoor and find themselves in a massive Hollywood soundstage. Boarding a pair of boxy, oversized tram cars, a live host takes them through a theater entrance into the sets of various films where the world of the movies truly comes alive. In either a seedy gangster underworld or a bustling western town, a ne’er-do-well hijacks your vehicle until a temptation leads to their demise. The host rescues the tour, whisking you to the Wonderful World of Oz and a salute to a century of cinema.
Both live actors and audio animatronics brought the attraction to life, retitled “The Great Movie Ride” presumably to entice guests more. Debuting with the park in May 1989, it was one of very few attractions at the start, and the only completely ride-through attraction. It shimmers with a romanticized look towards popular cinema in a heyday when re-issuing of films was giving way to the ever-growing home video market. Aside from the (intentional) lack of films featured from Universal, the ride was directly targeted to appeal to nostalgic tastes at the time, and delivered some of the most unique elements in a dark ride ever seen at the time.
The attraction was not without its issues, however. For one, it was one of the longest attractions on Walt Disney World property, clocking in at a robust 22 minutes. Also, some effects were prone to breakdowns, including the “Footlight Parade” sequence which has been at a standstill since late in the opening year itself. It was also a victim of one of MGM and Disney’s first licensing disagreements. In the original concept, guests passed Casablanca as the sepia tones gave way to a black-and-white tornado with massive wind turbines hidden behind projector walls. A (projected) house blows past the vehicle and lands with a crash as the room goes dark and doors fling open to reveal Munchkin Land in Oz. From here, the same two Wizard of Oz sequences that stayed with the ride for nearly thirty years would play out, until you got past Dorothy and her companions in the forest, now entering through a green Oz-plated door. Suddenly guests would find themselves in the Emerald City palace, approaching the Wizard of Oz bellowing at them with darkened guards on the side. The host notices a curtain downstage moving as he says the signature line “Do not pay attention to the man behind the curtain…”, sure enough the curtain opens revealing either the bandit or gangster who presumably died. The character chuckles and yells “Cut!” as the lights shine on the guards: signature character AAs from the attraction including either the bandit or gangster, taking a bow, bringing the attraction full-circle and to a close.
MGM demanded that the licensing fees for Oz was measured in number of scenes included, and at the last minute (during construction) Eisner blinked and reduced the Oz scene amount from four to two. In an attempt to add more Disney to the attraction, the Imagineers replaced the tornado with Fantasia (the wind turbines are still there) and the finale was hastily redesigned to be a fast-paced widescreen montage featuring various famous film moments. Granted, it is thankful that The Great Movie Ride didn’t turn into essentially a Wizard of Oz dark ride for its last third, but the finale is still rather anticlimactic for such a novel attraction.
The other thing to remember is that the attraction is set-up as another “behind-the-scenes”, but this time the sets are alive with magic in your tour. This was a presentation device that followed suit in Disney-MGM Studios for a large amount of its first five years. The first to break the mold was “The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror”, which fully took place in the intended setting with complete immersion. With its uncompromising theme and thrill factor, the attraction was quickly an outstanding hit for the theme park. Along with the failed production studio aspect of the park (see my other article on this topic for more detail), this was a sign that the cracks were forming in the park’s original intention.
Throughout the 90s, despite updating the finale film, The Great Movie Ride slowly started to slip in public favor. The attraction’s intentions was to swap out various scenes for updated, newer movies. However, Disney’s popularity started to rise in film, while the park spending started to decline. Eisner felt no need to splurge on the licensing fees on another company’s property to spruce up an aging ride, and any popular properties of his were earmarked for higher aspirations. Numerous GSAT surveys came in that guests started to feel the attraction aging, which was already a decade old around 2001 when they started to spread the seeds of a possible replacement. One of the most tossed around ideas flirted with utilizing “CAVE” tech (short for “Cave Automatic Virtual Environment”), with would surround guests with screens that would move with them in a virtual environment. The technology only had one true public use, that of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” virtual attraction at the former DisneyQuest. Imagineers still utilize the technology today to virtually walk around their proposed lands or ride unbuilt attractions by inputting the model into a computer.
This proposed attraction was based on the Disney Villains, sparked by a recent merchandising trend that got red hot. Outside of replacing The Great Movie Ride and using CAVE tech, not much else is known about this concept. This is most likely due to the September 11th attacks, which impacted tourism hard. Although The Great Movie Ride was spared an early demise, it also felt the burn from the crippling fallout as capacity was halved for most days of the year. Instead of an A-car peforming a bandit show, with a B-car encountering a gangster, only the B-car was driven out. This made the cowboy scene, which featured a spectacular pyro effect as a bank was blown up by dynamite, elusive and rare. This also decreased repeat visits for the attraction by most guests, as the same show was now constantly seen. It also did not help that Disney-MGM Studios became a thrill park, with the motion simulator Star Tours, the what-it-says-on-the-box Rock N’ Roller Coaster, the aformentioned Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and even the Backlot Tram Tour, now mostly focused around Catastrophe Canyon. Guests were taken aback by the slow moving dark ride of The Great Movie Ride, filled with films who constantly were getting less and less popular with contemporary audiences.
In 2008, the tug-of-war between MGM and Disney came to an end as MGM refused to sign the licensing contract. The park’s name was thus changed to “Disney’s Hollywood Studios”, with the “Studios” notion being on its last legs. No longer did the Backstage Pass walkthrough work, and the Tram Tour had been whittled down to a hallow shell of itself. Yet the final nail in the coffin came from outside Disney: Universal threw open the doors to “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter”, where guests could fully step into the world of the boy wizard and visit Hogwarts Castle. They doubled down with Diagon Alley four years later, and this newfound success made Disney burn with jealousy. Guests were largely uninterested in film trivia or the behind-the-scenes, this is all stuff that DVDs or the internet could give them inside their own house. Instead, they now crave stepped inside the worlds of these films and becoming a character in an ultra-immersive experience.
One may look at The Great Movie Ride and think, “doesn’t this comply? After all, the ride is going into the movies, right?” Not exactly. The Great Movie Ride takes you past movie scenes enacted in real life, and there’s interplay with the host and gangsters, but guests don’t play an active participant in anything. Even the idea of becoming Dorothy in Oz was neutered. In addition, there are rafters above you at all times, stage lights in plain view. You depart from a soundstage dock and the notion of “the movies” is repeated ad nauseam. It’s an approach that tries to emphasize both ideas of being immersed yet being reminded all times that it’s fake.
Granted, this seems to devalue a large part of the experience and what it’s meant to be. The sets are hyper-detailed, the ideas unique and groundbreaking with some fantastic animatronics and atmosphere. Yet it doesn’t seem to fit in with the park that Disney’s Hollywood Studios is striving to become. Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and Toy Story Land open within the next two years, which are two themed lands that seek to immerse guests into the worlds of these films. No longer is the park a “studio” experience, and The Great Movie Ride doesn’t seem to fit in with the immersion. Of course, the dated quality doesn’t help much at all. So what could Disney do instead? Surely there’s a compromise?
In 2015, Turner Classic Movies signed up to sponsor the attraction as part of a deal between the channel and Disney. In return, TCM got to air “Disney film parties”, which screened classic content from the Mouse’s library. The sponsorship promised an “update” to the aging attraction, which amounted to little more than TLC, new narration and signage, forced synergy and an updated finale film. The awkward script truncated the on-ride host’s dialogue and created “dueling narrators”, with Robert Osborne taking the bulk of the heavy lifting. Disney was unable to rid of the live hosts as they were essential to the attraction’s narrative. It was truly a square-peg-in-a-round-hole situation. Adding to the awkwardness was last March when Robert passed away, giving a ghostly, eerie touch to the experience. In addition, the whole endeavor came across more as a cheap ploy to have guests watch TCM than a genuine celebration of popular film.
At that point, the GSAT surveys were heavily bottoming out as most guests found themselves bored by the attraction’s sluggish pace and uninterested in its classic taste in film. Pending on the cast member, the live interaction elements could come across as hokey, especially when the hidden mics stopped functioning and suddenly once they got off the tram things sounded much, much more amateurish and frankly, un-Disney.
It often felt to the company as if they couldn’t win aside from a complete overhaul. Could they have? It’s possible, but clearly they have other priorities in mind.
It’s now time we talk about the idea of a thesis attraction: an attraction that sums up everything your park is to be about. At EPCOT Center, that attraction was “Horizons”, a ride that takes literally all aspects of the park: communication, energy, health, transportation, agriculture, sealife, imagination and merging world culture and saw how we could use all of them to build a better tomorrow. Yes, many see “Spaceship Earth” as the thesis (after all, it is the park icon), but I felt Horizons fit the bill more. Now that Horizons is gone, obviously Spaceship Earth has taken the mantle, but it’s not quite as strong.
The Great Movie Ride handled the idea of a thesis rather impeccably for Disney-MGM Studios: it represented the golden age of Hollywood by taking you through the Chinese Theater, entered guests onto a soundstage and celebrated the world of the movies by recreating some of the most beloved classics in film history. It was about Hollywood, movie making and movies themselves. For nostalgia and film buffs, this was a can’t miss, as it was absolutely drenched in the world that it was submitting you into.
Yet, does that represent the future of this theme park? As I said earlier, the new lands are about hyper-immersion, about literally stepping into these Disney film worlds. So why not make “Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway” the new thesis attraction?
At this point you may be balking at your screen, but hear me out on this one. The park will still have you enter through the “Hollywood That Never Was”, and the attraction has guests entering the Chinese Theater. What if they left the queue mostly alone until the pre-show room? Instead of film props, we pass by a small museum talking about the history of Mickey. Outside, prominent billboards advertise “STAR WARS” as though we’ve entered in a time and place where 1937 and 1977 intersect. The theater doors open up and we shuffle inside to see “A New Hope”, but first comes a Mickey cartoon. And the magic moment happens when we step inside the cartoon.
After the attraction, we are released to experience our “feature presentation”, whether it be Star Wars, Toy Story, Indiana Jones, The Muppets or whatever may come to the park next. But we’re primed and set up: this is a theme park in which we can actually fully step into the world of the movies, with Hollywood as our gateway.
Whereas “The Great Movie Ride” didn’t fully go all the way. You were always on the set, or just out-of-reach. Mickey’s ride will be fast-paced with multiple physical elements combined with brilliant projection mapping to make you feel as if you are in the cartoon proper. This is the perfect way to speak towards the new direction of “Disney’s Hollywood Studios”, or whatever name comes ahead.
Whatever may come, purists alike will be forever upset about the demise of “The Great Movie Ride”, even though the warning flags have been planted for decades. Even through the lukewarm reception to the TCM redo, heartbreak can be heard shattering throughout the community.
It, of course stands to reason that the attraction’s beginnings at Epcot would lead to such an outcry. It’s a long attraction, contains a plethora of audio-animatronics, wonderful ideas and has various strands of strong emotional connections that most diehards can attach themselves onto. I also am aware that there is a gigantic Cast Member outpouring, as those who worked the attraction came to fall massively in love with it. I am in no position to tell anybody their emotion is misplaced or misguided.
Yet it’s also a heavy reminder about how fragile these works of art can be, and the complicated web that is tied when something suddenly disappears. Disney only offered one month for fans to say their goodbyes, and with that a decade of on and off uncertainity is immediately erased. We can piece every parcel of logic building up to this weekend but ultimately that doesn’t matter.
However, the future is ahead of us. The best we can do is hope for the best, and smile that “The Great Movie Ride”, despite the shortened timeframe, ultimately got a fantastic sendoff. Multiple walkthrough events were had, enabling many to capture as much detail of the ride as possible.
With this article you may think that I don’t care much for the attraction, which is not exactly true. The detail of the sets is unparalled, the concept of the live actor hijacking your vehicle is wonderful and I’ve always appreciated the vintage rose-colored glasses look at film. Yet at the same time it’s disheartening that it was never updated much, that they wouldn’t spend much to fix broken effects, allow the actors to be heard or constantly play both shows.
Neglect and the sands of time is key in the demise of the once “Great Movie Ride”, but thankfully for one month, it got to be truly great one last time.
Traveling Salesman is a Columnist for the Boardwalk Times.
