Am I the only person who hates Forbidden Journey? The land is great obviously but that's where the whole wizarding world project shines.
I've been on Forbidden Journey dozens of times and I've never liked it, never thought about it after the fact, the way I replay and desire to experience again HM, Indy, SM, Soarin, Pirates. Jurassic Park and Transformers are both, in my opinion, better attractions at USH than forbidden journey.
The sets are terrible. It is just an oversized haunted house with unrealistic halloween decor-looking animated figures, and they shove you right up against the walls 90% of the time to hide the rest of the ride system from you, while exposing their terrible production design quality in the process. The womping willow is one example, where you can see the top of the tree and the ceiling and the lack of success in the creation of this scene didn't lead the team to throw it out altogether, as it should have. The motion is terrible. The animation is terrible. the kuka arm does NOTHING to deliver the sensation of flight (it is a terrible simulator for screen-based ride sequences, and performs better I think with practical sets). The think just jerks around in ways that match up with messy, unrealistic motion paths on the screens. You can see the edges of the domes, the images curve in the dome and it doesn't produce a 3d effect in doing so. "Theyre flying!" is one of the first lines in the ride, and there is such excitement in the voice. I should feel elated that I'm flying. Instead, I am 3 seconds away from a migraine from the crappy green wormhole and being jerked around in a practical set a fraction as interesting as the queue. They literally took the biggest human aspiration: flying-and made it terribly boring, the least memorable part of the ride, a transition rather than a focus, the act of flipping pages in a book. The practical effects and screens are so blatantly unrelated that you never get to suspend disbelief for one or the other. You can see the other ride vehicles, which is the best part, except you aren't supposed to. I would rather sit on an omnimover through the queue than ever ride KUKA forbidden journey ever again.
Clearly not a fan of the ride or the ride system, but I think the ride system would really shine in a ride in which it was diegetic. The flying bench excuse doesn't cut it because once on board there is no emotional relationship with or awareness of the vehicle. It should be more visible, INCLUDING the track. The entire ride vehicle structure should be emphasized, which would allow for ginormous, kinetic show rooms like the temple in Indy in which several vehicles are observed along different parts of the scene, becoming part of the show beyond the show and effects immediately related to your vehicle. One example I thought up the other night was for this ride system in a wonka-like candy factory, with the ride system and vehicle being part of a massive industrial assembly line. Perhaps the "benches" are dispensing ingredients like sugar on different scenes/ candies, pushing us toward a variety of scenes that give us a variety of room scale, set decor, and play with light vs dark as well. It would also insinuate that the riders are sweet, which is kind of charming. Or we are a stamp, pressing the [wonka] logo into different candies, which would make an aggressive stamping motion that lunges riders right up into the show scene's envelope and back out again a repetitive, funny, 100% diegetic head-chopper-type gag along the way. Or, less, oddly, we are on an elaborate tour, with an elaborate transportation system, with no more ambitious or risky exposition. But in this case, the thrill of seeing these technologically sublime tracked robots flying around a beautifully-decorated room would be encouraged and leveraged, rather than suppressed the way it is in Forbidden Journey, where the scale of the show building and the scale of the vehicles are both irrelevant.
