The California version of Little Mermaid (shown above) will bring a nice upgrade to the overall park capacity for DCA, with an hourly ridership pegged at just over 1,800 riders per hour.
The Omnimover is scaled very similarly to the Haunted Mansion, which is a people-eater that routinely hosts over 2,100 riders per hour. However, the Imagineers wanted to slow down the system just a bit from the faster Haunted Mansion speed to allow riders to take in all the scenery and sophisticated animatronics. On Haunted Mansion, the scenes are all dimly lit and the animatronics are mostly extremely basic, and really not much more advanced than a slightly animated mannequin with dramatic lighting. But Mermaid’s show scenes will be finely detailed and much brighter than Haunted Mansion, so there was no fear of ruining the illusion if riders peeked at a scene too long. The 1,800 per hour figure for this new ride is certainly going to surpass the 50 to 75 people per hour that were the average totals for the old Golden Dreams movie that once occupied this space.
But the big Mermaid building is tightly wedged into the land between Redwood Creek Challenge Trail and the DCA parade route, so they used nearly every square foot of space for the show, with not much left over for queue. Because of the space squeeze out in front of the attraction, TDA decided to cancel plans to offer Fastpass for the California version of this big, fancy ride with a budget of nearly $100 Million. The Florida version of the ride, to open in 2012, will have Fastpass only because the Orlando executives handed over a bigger chunk of their property for the sprawling queue that a proper Standby line needs at a Fastpass attraction.
