Funny you should ask I rode it for the first time today.
It was not bad,
as I had read online, and evidently they made some fixes so perhaps that accounts for it exceeding expectation. This show is geared to the very young set and my guess is that it over delivers for them. It is a musical for sure and that carries the show. There were very few dialog driven scenes and most were musical numbers. Not a lot of "surprises" as it is kind of a book report of the movie. A series of vignettes. It was the big AA show fans have been asking for, so they got it. A white light dark ride and that creates issues with seeing things that should be hidden, but I'm the wrong guy to ask because I seem to look everywhere you shouldn't as a habit. There are limitations to what AA's can do and they had some figures with very fluid and complex moves, other very limited, and to a degree the good ones by contrast accent the static ones, but that's the nature of shows like that. You could knit pick things all day, but at the exit the parents with the small kids had to take them on again. They liked it a lot. It succeeds for what it seems designed to do.
Here’s my criticism of the Little Mermaid Ride (I was going to mail something similar to this to Guest Relations as I always get marked for surveys outside the parks.)
I was really looking forward to enjoying this attraction with my 4-year old niece, as she is a big Little Mermaid fan. Unfortunately, the ride didn’t appeal to her, or to myself. My comments are listed below:
1. The Ursula scene might have been a bit too scary for my 4-year old niece, who is an Ariel fanatic, probably due to the super-sized Ursula audio-animatronic. However, given that Snow White’s Scary Adventures, and Mr. Toad, also scared her, this is probably a minor point.
2. The show lights were far too bright for a dark ride. While I appreciate the time and effort that went into making the audio-animatronics, the bright lights made everything look plastic and fake as the light really glints off of everything and makes it look artificial.
3. The characters/music were way too loud. I know that a rendition of the songs from the Little Mermaid is a big draw for the ride, but I strongly feel that the volume is too high! Almost as though it was a musical instead of an attraction. I would have preferred a much toned-down, yet still perfectly audible, soundtrack.
4. The corkscrewing fish in the ‘Under the Sea’ scene looked fake as a thick twisted metal beam connecting them was plainly visible. Established dark rides like Peter Pan’s Flight don’t reveal the mechanical backbone of the effects, so I was disappointed with the unfinished feel of the ride.
5. One scene utilized a television screen (for the transformation of Ariel to a human), and a 2-D cut-out of Ursula. Somehow I was expecting more. (I recently heard that John Lasseter is changing the CG imaging of Ariel to make it look more like the movie, maybe this will help make it less cheezy.)
6. The outside of the show building looks like a Barnes and Noble. The sign introducing the ride is too high up for anybody to notice it. I wish that Disney went with sinking the show building into the ground, and building a King Triton’s eatery on top part of it, which would allow viewing of World of Color.
7. There isn’t a gift shop at the end of the ride. Though some guests complain about this, my niece wanted an Ursula doll, and probably would have wanted to buy a Little Mermaid t-shirt too, if we could have found one. I got something off of Amazon. The one time I counted on Disney using the gift-shop as an exit technique, and they . . . decided not to go there.
8. The use of the omnimover/clamshell as a ride system destroyed the immersive angle of the ride, restricting the view to 180 degrees. In the haunted mansion, which I believe uses a similar system, most of the ride is in darkness, so you don’t need, or, want to look around behind you. If the ride had the open feel of Peter-Pan, it would have been much more enjoyable.
9. My four year old niece missed the opening shot of Ariel in the water above the clam shell, which is sort of at an odd angle to begin with. The ride simply wasn’t as skillfully constructed as Haunted Mansion when it comes to coordinating Omnimover movement and field of view with actual scenes.
10. Lack of details. There wasn’t a lot of real-looking seaweed, or oceans plants, just fake cut-outs. I think that trying to make the ride look too much like the movie, (and thus cartoonish), worked to the ride’s disadvantage. I was expecting something on the scale of the graveyard scene in the Haunted Mansion, but on Mermaid you could pretty much take everything in in a couple of glances.
11. The ride just doesn’t gel. Certain scenes are taken almost verbatim from the movie, and the soundtrack sounds like the same one from the film, giving the ride a pre-recorded industrial feel to it. I thought that the ride might utilize instrumental versions of music from the movie, and mostly use visuals to tell a story slightly different from just plopping down scenes from the film. I would have liked riding in a vehicle similar to the one used in Crush’s coaster, with Ariel swimming next to the ride vehicle, so you feel that you are swimming under the ocean, similar to how you feel you are flying to Neverland in Peter Pan's Flight.
11. Little Mermaid is not as good as Peter Pan’s Flight. I really enjoy classic Disney dark rides such as Peter Pan, where you really feel like you’re inside of the world created in the movie. You feel like you were in the Darling’s nursery, and flying over London and Neverland . . . the animated ‘woosh’ of water on the clamshell, followed by a Small-World like musical rendition of the Little Mermaid doesn’t really transport you to Ariel’s world. I know that this may not have been the intent, (instead going for an exact musical review of the film’s songs), but knowing that Disney could make a great Little Mermaid ride makes riding the ride anticlimactic.
