As a final change, I’ve gone ahead and addressed the Rock n’ Roller Coaster problem. Frankly, this launched indoor coaster is badly placed. It takes up a strange section of real estate that prevents the park from expanding into otherwise-obvious expansion pads, and it necessitates a very, very tall and conspicuous showbuilding that’s disguise as anything but the big warehouse it is. So to be honest, the smart move might’ve been to just eliminate this ride entirely or (if we’re being fully “Blue Sky”) move it. But in my attempt to be at least reasonably realistic here, I decided to keep it. But with a change…
[This] feels like the perfect place to roll it out into the bigger picture reimagining. I called it INVASION! A so called “Transmission From The Twilight Zone,” this relatively simple overlay of the existing ride would see guests come to Sunset Radio – a 1930s radio station reigned over by metallic antenna towers.
Inside, guests would find themselves as the legendary 1938 broadcast of the radio drama adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. As urban legend goes, listeners across the nation mistook Orson Welles’ immersive radio drama for the real news, believing that alien invaders had indeed made landing on the East Coast and setting off mass panic in the streets.
While the veracity of the story is debated, it makes for a compelling start to a thrill ride when, ushered out of the radio studio with Welles wondering aloud if “anyone will buy it,” we’re launched into an otherworldly thrill ride of the imagination as the real sounds of the radio broadcast launch us into a wild ride. Halfway through the experience, ten-foot tall incandescent bulbs would illuminate the interior of the coaster’s “spaghetti bowl” of track, revealing that in actuality, we were inside a radio, swirling around like the electrical connections powering the broadcast.
That would make this version of the ride not only an allusion to a real, historical event and a peek behind the curtain on Foley effects, but an “in-universe” (and kinda “out-of-universe”) experience that would be a little heady, a little weird, and a big thrill. Rod Serling’s voice would greet us on the final brakes: “Around and around she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows. What happened here is yours to be believed or disbelieved. One way or another, if you’re seeking something strange, you can find it through a strange and wonderful machine called a radio… tuned to the Twilight Zone.”
