Team Gurr Presents: Half-Moon Valley, a B-Movie Take on Sunset Blvd
Land Description and Backstory
On the outskirts of Hollywood in the Valencia desert there's a small town that's tiny on size but HUGE on character. Even before "The Incident", Half-Moon Valley was a popular stop-off on the way to Tinsletown. A desert oasis of sorts that took on all the charms of a Route 66 stopover with its own classic drive-in movie theater acting as a calling card to the B-Movie culture Half-Moon Valley attracted.
Some wonder how Half-Moon Valley got funded, and that's actually pretty simple. It's a government town. On the outskirts of the main drag lies a secret bunker meant for military experimentation and weapons testing. The town itself while home to thousands of hard-working people wouldn't exist without the military funding it all.
This is a badly kept "secret" that entirely got out of the bag on the day of "The Incident". On this infamous day hundreds of experimentations from the government base got loose. Some of the most famous photographs include giant ants, a massive hairy Bigfoot like creature frightening townsfolks, and most famously of all the dreaded Martians who wielded deadly incinerator rays in spite of their rather campy appearance.
The military acted fast and The Incident was over and done with in under and hour. In that time though, the town's identity changed forever...becoming a 21st century Roswell for a new generation. Tourists now flock to Half Moon Valley to see the town still ravaged by the attack of the Incident but wearing the damage proudly on its sleeve. Half destroyed buildings, a crash-landed Martian space craft, a mold of Bigfoot's footprint, and holes in the ground left by the giant ants are among the many sightlines on display as tourists wander the town.
The base remains elusively secretive, though word on the street is the government has been bringing in teams of volunteer soldiers to contain whatever secrets still behind the steel walls just off to the side of the town's main street. Half-Moon Valley remains an incredibly popular hotspot for alien conspiracy theorists and a fun stopover for road-tripping families on their way to LA. It's a town with a colorful history and a potentially even more colorful future that's still in the process of being written.
Mars Attacks
Mars Attacks will act less as a direct adaptation of the Tim Burton film and more as a spiritual successor, using the basic concept and some of the film's iconic imagery as a jumping off point to a new story set in Half-Moon Valley's elusive government testing center. As volunteer soldiers, guests enter the steel Jurassic Park style double-doors and head out into a large scale desert compound.
There's a couple smaller showbuildings, but generally speaking what used to be the Rock N' Roller Coaster is now completely transformed into the desert horizon you see before you, with the world's first Rocky Mountain Construction Company T-Rex coaster sprawled out over the landscape.
The queue will take place in a very obvious "Fake Rock" that pays homage to the Knott's Berry Farm Calico Mine Ride showbuilding, specifically how you can blatantly see that it is, in fact, a show building after literally rounding a corner from its iconic façade.
The queue starts with a full on recreation of the Calico Mine Ride queue with a switchback upfront followed by a ramp up the rockwork with a small stream on the side. once you hit what would be Calico's station you enter the government base...labeled very subtly...GOVERNMENT BASE.
The queue will basically be a series of military hallways not unlike that of Transformers: The Ride. It is here where our cast shines as the queue is laden with countless TV monitors filling us in on the story of the attraction. Dwayne Johnson plays himself...and also the president of the United States. He has a very confident take-charge demeanor to him in light of the fact that his vice president played by Josh Gad can be actively seen panicking and making doomsday preparations in the background. A fictionalized First Lady played by Emily Blunt comes in even more take-charge than The Rock.
Dave Bautista plays the president's Head of Security...tough on the outside but completely looses it the second he comes in contact with anything remotely alien-related. Tig Nataro plays the volunteer coordinator and acts as a lesion to the guests, also providing the safety spiel. Zendaya plays a character simply known as Rookie, basically meant to be a super-generic "Hero" character. Finally to round out the cast Jesse Plemmons and Kristen Schaal provide comedic relief as Mr. and Mrs. Scientist, two bumbling nerds trying to explain The Incident and what the guests have to try to stop through humor very much akin to Bill Nye the Science Guy and the Dinosaur pre-show.
Reaching the station, an over the top military marching music score composed by Danny Elfman can be heard as we board our RMC T-Rex trains. The first section of the ride takes place in the main show-building and essentially works as a story-driven way to get us up a lifthill without having a big lifthill be part of the attraction's sightlines. Taking inspiration from Space Mountain, guests pass through three indoor smaller lifts each around 50 feet tall. In between each of the first two lifts guests can see large clawmarks and lazer-beam damage all over the hallways. On the last lift Lisa Marie's iconic Martin Girl character from the first film smiles ominously at us as we reach the ceiling of the show-building and go careening down a beyond-vertical 140 foot plunge straight into a large scale dive-loop.
Disorientated, guests take note of the GIANT crashed UFO on the side of a large sand dune. This UFO completely dwarfs the small, tacky looking one found in the middle of town square and features a very impressive lighting package especially for night rides. After some signature RMC air time courtesy of a double down straight into the UFO, guests pass through the inner workings of the alien craft and get a jump scare from Disco Martian, a Disco Yeti parody dressed like John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever and featuring the flashing lights effect for the purpose of guests traveling too fast through this scene to be able to comprehend AA movement.
Launching out of the spacecraft, guests go through a large stall that features enough hang-time to take note of the HUGE alien rib-cage poking out of the sand, with a horrific and goofy looking giant skull poking out for good measure. After two intense ejector airtime hills, the coaster reaches its block breaks and enters another show room where an AA of Martin Girl gets alarming close to the guests.
This is a very advanced AA that features both the fluid movement of the Navii Shaman as well as the "walking" abilities of characters such as Hondo and Olaf. President Johnson comes over the attraction speakers and announces he's sent in some backup. With that the room lights up revealing a ton of stacked oil-drums. An AA of Dave Bautisa as the Head of Security faces his alien fear head-on as he charges at the alien queen. The oil barrels start to go ablaze as we launch out of the showbuilding mourning Bautista's heroic sacrifice.
They don't have long to mourn though. The single rail T-Rex track pulls two classic RMC "breaking wave" turns filled with floater airtime then travels back to the station through a series of very effective bunny-hills. Going through the exit guests pass a monument to Dave Bautisa's head of security as well the president's makeshift office where we can hear a conversation between President Johnson, First Lady Blunt, and Vice President Gad going on in the next room.
On a whole, Mars Attacks promises to be a large scale competitor to Universal's Velicoaster and Busch Garden's Iron Gwazi. It's Disney's most intense coaster Imagineering has ever designed, but it's still got all the hallmarks of immersion that a Disney E-Ticket has come to be known for.
CAST
President - Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson
Vice President - Josh Gaad
First Lady - Emily Blunt
Head of Security - Dave Bautista
Volunteer Cordinator - Tig Nataro
The Rookie - Zendaya
Mr. Scientist - Jesse Plemmons
Mrs. Scientist - Kristen Schaal
Attack of the Mutant Director from Mars
As you make your way down Half-Moon Valley you encounter the Theater of the Stars, a dusty old rundown theater from the Golden days of Hollywood but left behind and repurposed by the people who have taken over Half-Moon Valley.
Inside, you will catch a brand new stage show hosted by visionary director Edward Treebranch as he sets up his newest masterpiece, a film where he wants the audience to be the stars as he welcomes in the horrifying cast of monsters that he will be featuring in his magnum opus.
The show begins with the smoking ruins of a crashed spaceship. A group of unnamed scientists immediately arrive and begin poking at it with sticks until the latch opens and out steps a horrifying alien with multiple tentacles and heads and sharp teeth and can breathe fire. The monster begins to toss the scientists around, throwing them before stalking off the stage to the background.
Suddenly, the army arrives as Sergeant Armyman steps out and warns the audience that something dangerous has crash landed and they are now in an active war-zone until they can take out the monster. Armyman tells the audience that they won’t be using bullets because bullets can’t kill evil space aliens, but instead, it’ll take a monster to beat a monster.
From here, different scenes focus on multiple classic monsters, such as the Robot Monster from the film of the same name, a giant Gila monster, Giant tarantula, Cat Women of the moon, the octopus from Monster from the Ocean Floor, the Cosmic Man, the zombie aliens from Plan 9, the blob, and even Santa Clause work together to try to beat the alien, but somehow, this alien makes it out alive every single time.
Armyman then finally tells the audience there’s only one thing left to try, and that’s to give the alien what it wants the most: love. Armyman’s daughter, who just shows up in the last act, runs up to the alien and kisses it, stopping it and causing it to shed its horrible exterior, revealing a handsome space man wearing a sparkly spandex outfit underneath. He addresses the crowd and says that no matter the monsters he faced, he wasn’t evil, he just needed love. With that, the audience erupts in applause and are escorted out.
COMING IN PHASE TWO
Journey into the strange world of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and join Joel, Crow, and Tom Servo as their forced to endure Dr. Clayton Forrester and TV’s Son of Frank’s latest experiment in breaking the mind through terrible movies. Board an elevator and be sent through a diabolical gauntlet where guests are forced to watch three terrible movies at once while fighting gravity and the terrible effects of motion sickness. Will you survive The Gauntlet?
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), but you did an excellent job communicating the main plot points of them to guests who aren't familiar with the source material.