I always thought that Rio del Tiempo felt like an old advertisement for a Mexican vacation.
It was. All the World Showcase pavillions are supposed to be exactly that.
I really liked El Rio Del Tiempo, particularly the
first couple rooms where you're still in a flooded temple, listening to echoes of native American music before seeing strange visions astral of Aztec dancers. It was so unlike anything else at Disney World, even Maelstrom.
Every single thing about the Fiesta Tour overlay is wrong.
...except for the concept. I'm all for trying the ride in with the old Three Caballeros movie, but it needed to be done in a way that actually made sense within the context of the ride- or even the ride's name, ie.
have Panchito give a tour to the other two birds (and us). That's not what happens.
The biggest of the ride's many flaws is that there's a complete disconnect between the ride system and the videos you watch while on it. It's a slow-moving, peaceful boat ride in which you pass by movie screens showing very short, frenetic cartoons. Unlike, say Splash Mountain, or Maelstrom again, there's no rapid speed or darting turns to help us feel excited about what we're seeing. It's just a lot of noise that disturbs what otherwise would be a nice little boat ride.
The screens themselves are, of course, awful. There were almost as many screens in Rio del Tiempo, but their use originally was as windows to an outside world, making the space of the ride feel larger. Other than the peddler sequence, none of the people in the film loops tried to get our attention, and the rider could glance from "window" to window at her leisure. Now each screen competes with each other one for attention, blaring its own audio track and trying to get across some kind of gag every 3.5 seconds. Moreover, the little vignettes shown on the screens just aren't that good. The animation is smooth enough but moves very quickly, superimposed on top of live action footage that is also often moving very quickly, while the riders' viewpoint is also constantly moving. It's just not that fun to watch, especially when it's basically the same gag over and over again.
The use of screens here is bad enough, but there's just nothing special done with them here. No transparent eyeliner screens, no projection effects that allow the characters to "leave" the screen, just plain, small movie screens. It woudln't be so glaringly obvious if they hadn't left so many of the nice 3D props and animated dolls in the ride. This really emphasizes the flatness and cheapness of the screens, and makes you wish they had sprung for a set of Panchito and company as actual animatronics, if only for the finale, which had an absolutely perfect circular space to install them.
And then, to add inconvenience to insult, the ride always ends with a 4-minute wait in front of unload since they perpetually keep too many boats in the canal and they back up at the station.
