Naplesgolfer
Well-Known Member
Your making me feel really old!
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Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway confirmed
- Thread starter wdwmagic
- Start date
Mike S
Well-Known Member
My response was to his list of movies he’d show to his own kids.
Missing20K
Well-Known Member
Welp, I feel old.
Movielover
Well-Known Member
disneyworlddad
Well-Known Member
For what it is worth, I'm 31.
Footlight Parade- Never heard of it outside the ride
Singin' in the Rain- Love this movie, own it, have watched with my 4 year old
Mary Poppins- Love it, my four year old loves it
The Public Enemy- Dont think I have seen this one but have watched some older gangster movies
A Fist Full of Dollars/The Searchers - Own the searchers and love it, watched first full many times
Alien- Never saw it,
Raiders of the Lost Ark- Can't tell you how many times I have seen it
Tarzan the Ape Man- dont know if I have seen this specific one but have seen older Tarzan movies
Casablanca -Great movie, watched many times
Fantasia- Used to own it on VHS
The Wizard of Oz- Own it
ppete1975
Well-Known Member
The problem wasn't the movies in GMR. It was the presentation. They could make a ride about a movie in another language that was boring as hell but if the ride was awe inspiring and jaw dropping no body would care. Heck in the good old days they occasionally made rides based on a new experience. Where it failed and why I wasn't a fan, was presentation. I personally felt (my opinion only), was it felt like I was riding in a warehouse at the wax museum, with occasional gags ala a poorly planned jungle cruise. Unlike Jungle cruise or pirates where its mostly static dummys or one move animatronics the theming around them brings you into the mood (youre in the jungle)... because these were movie sets it didn't bring you into the world. For GMR to be a great ride.. it would have had to have had animatronics or a better story... it never made you feel like you were a part of the movie or even backstage...
Imagine if you felt like you were in Casablanca and the figures were life like and moved... you felt the wind blow had the smells of the runway the prop of the real plane swished and you could smell the diesel fuel and everything else around you was dark..... then the temperature goes up and youre in the jungle (a life like jungle) you hear animals then tarzan lets out a yell and a lifelike tarzan swings by....
To me that would have felt like Disney.. instead it felt like a lower theme park...
has anybody seen the video of the flintstones ride? Static figures on a boat ride... no magic.
Imagine if you felt like you were in Casablanca and the figures were life like and moved... you felt the wind blow had the smells of the runway the prop of the real plane swished and you could smell the diesel fuel and everything else around you was dark..... then the temperature goes up and youre in the jungle (a life like jungle) you hear animals then tarzan lets out a yell and a lifelike tarzan swings by....
To me that would have felt like Disney.. instead it felt like a lower theme park...
has anybody seen the video of the flintstones ride? Static figures on a boat ride... no magic.
Purduevian
Well-Known Member
Ok OG Trilogy Star Wars is like Wizard of Oz, the EXCEPTION to the rule that most movies don't make it past 2 generations. I of course will be showing them that... and maybe Back to the Future.
I watched Forrest Gump is High School History class
. Seriously though, I am close (maybe about 3-5 years younger) to the age Disney is targeting. Disney make A LOT of money off families with young kids... many of those parents were born in the late 80s to early 90s.
FrankLapidus
Well-Known Member
It didn't fail.
It's a bona-fide classic that could have done with a refresh over the years. Some might not have liked it as much as others did, but the Great Movie Ride was in no way a failure of any kind.
Indiana Stone
Member
I think another issue is actually finding these movies now that places like Blockbuster are extinct. I personally subscribe to TCM so I have been able to catch a lot of classics like these, but outside of using an illegal download not many are readily available to stream (at least in Canada).
Side note - I watched high noon the other day with my young son and we loved it.
CaptainAmerica
Well-Known Member
This. It's pretty much consensus that Avatar was a mediocre movie and very few people have seen Song of the South, but Flight of Passage and Splash Mountain are world-class attractions regardless.
ppete1975
Well-Known Member
I get your point, prob a bad choice of words. Why it at the end didn't have huge lines, and it was decided to close. I never heard people speak about it was my comment on a failure. I have never heard anyone say it was their favorite ride, or they have to ride it, or its on the level of HM, POC or even smallworld. But it did create memories for people, and I'm sure it was some peoples favorite so not a failure. Not sure I would categorize it as a classic though. But I don't want to start another debate since this is supposed to be about the new ride.
ChewbaccaYourMum
Well-Known Member
That could be a reason. And I'm not saying the movies in GMR sucked or were bad at all.. I've seen a few of them and enjoy them, but that's about it. Being a 25-30 year old guy, I more consider movies the poster I replied to listed as my "classic" movies that I either discovered or my parents or family showed me. GMR should have always been updating. It's no knock to the movies that were in the ride, they are historical and the the foundation of the movie world we all love today! Keep some of them, but more scenes should have changed every 5 years or so to be more relevant with movies people in my generation consider classics and ones that are also historical for moving the movie industry forward to where we are today.
Disney Analyst
Well-Known Member
That’s exactly it! The ride made you a passive viewer instead of taking you into the middle of the action.
Lensman
Well-Known Member
It could partly be that, but I wasn't really interested in great classic movies when I was younger. As I matured, though, I've seen more of the old classics. For example, I only recently watched Fiddler on the Roof and learned to appreciate it, and I have yet to really appreciate Casablanca or Gone with the Wind.
I have loved Singin' in the Rain for a long time, but it doesn't surprise me that it's not even in the lexicon of high school musical productions - I've always thought of the movie as much more of a thing than the later stage version.
I think the decline of the attraction's popularity was right in line with the decline of the thematic integrity of the park itself. As other have said, GMR was the thematic centerpiece of the park, but as the park's theme degraded/migrated, it was harder and harder for guests to grok the theme of the ride itself (which I think was described nicely by @Goofyernmost).
I agree that execution kept the attraction from being timelessly popular. Of the film genres/rooms covered, I like the musicals section and the final Munchkinland set, but the gangster film section, the western genre, the adventure/Indiana Jones set, and the horror/mummy and jungle/Tarzan sections were merely meh after a while. I thought that the Alien section was pretty good. But with most of these, the movies are way better than the ride and did a much better job of projecting place and scale than the attraction itself.
I wonder if licensing also played a part in keeping the ride from realizing its potential? I feel like The Godfather should have featured more prominently. And there a bunch of other movies I would have featured, but as I was enumerating them I figured out that people who aren't movie buffs might not appreciate them as much as I do. Or that though great movies, they don't represent popular genres for Hollywood.
At any rate, though I'd prefer that GMR be "fixed", at least MMRR isn't inconsistent with old Hollywood.
ppete1975
Well-Known Member
If you had an amazing ride about old movies, it could do something even better. IF you hadn't seen it in awhile, youd leave saying.. man I need to watch ____ again. Or if you had never seen the movie, you would leave saying.. "man I have to see singing in the rain" "that scene from Casablanca.. I have to see the movie now to experience that emotion". So in theory it would never be dated... the worst thing you might have is AP's who can memorize every line and so get bored because it wouldn't change... but that doesn't seem to hurt HM, POTC, JC... that brings up another point how do people with aps.. not get bored... do you take breaks from rides?
DinoInstitute
Well-Known Member
Agreed. I miss GMR and don’t agree with its closing as much as anyone else, but at this point it really feels like beating a dead horse.
TeriofTerror
Well-Known Member
Agreed.
My sincere apologies to everyone reading this thread for my small part in feeding this beast of an argument. I am truly, truly sorry!
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FrankLapidus
Well-Known Member
Because Disney don't like adding new attractions if they can get away with it, they'd much rather replace existing ones. Even when it's a mistake to do so.
I can only speak for myself but I'm usually at WDW in September/October/November time and I rarely saw GMR at less than a 30 minute wait time - I don't know the hourly capacity of the attraction but I always thought that, in spite of it being slow-moving, the amount of people that could be put in the cars on each turn was a factor in keeping lines reasonable but I might have been wrong about that.
I think it was as much of a classic as Tower of Terror or the original Backlot Tour or Star Tours were/are - Disney-MGM Studios was a classic park, one that's potential was probably not fully realised before it became a thematic mess, and those attractions were its backbone. The new attraction might become a classic in its own right but it will open into a park that doesn't really know what it is anymore. Attractions like the Backlot Tour and GMR suffered because they became marooned in a mish-mash of ideas and concepts because Disney couldn't, and still can't, decide what they want the park to be.
I'm optimistic for the Runaway Railway - because of how I felt about GMR, it's got an incredibly tough act to follow but I'm hoping it's a positive step forward for the park's identity as a whole, as well as a great attraction.
Eloquently put
