Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway confirmed

[MisterPenguin]

Nothing makes me more angry than walking in halfway through the opening speech and the portrait already changed.

Nothing? Really?!

What about the price of Mickey Bars??!!!

 

[trainplane3]

HM has gotten into a habit of not letting guests experience the ghost hosts introduction or take in the ambiance in the entry hall before being rushed into the stretch room. Often the show will begin before the stretch doors have closed. It’s pure bad show for the sake of a few seconds capacity.

Which then leads to the complete cluster in the load area with a CM from the other theater yelling at you to move forward when you can't move in any direction.

 

[marni1971]

Which then leads to the complete cluster in the load area with a CM from the other theater yelling at you to move forward when you can't move in any direction.

Yep. Things are designed for a reason.

 

[WowFactor]

who wants to shop 6 or 7 hours a day?

My wife ... Poor me

 

[CJR]

Which then leads to the complete cluster in the load area with a CM from the other theater yelling at you to move forward when you can't move in any direction.

This gets really "fun" when the ride stops too, because they keep pushing people into (and out of) the stretching rooms.

I can't agree more in that I hope they run it more like Dinosaur. Especially when it's new and the ride system may not always work like it should.

 

[mm52200]

They’ll do this at RNRC where they’ll overfill the preshow, then it dumps too many people in the load area causing a backup and the preshow unable to completely clear out and if continues to back up and hold up everything. But if they actually fill it at a smaller number it’ll all operate smoothly...

 

[matt9112]

They’ll do this at RNRC where they’ll overfill the preshow, then it dumps too many people in the load area causing a backup and the preshow unable to completely clear out and if continues to back up and hold up everything. But if they actually fill it at a smaller number it’ll all operate smoothly...

no idea why they don't use clickers to pick a hard number.

 

[neoshinok]

HM has gotten into a habit of not letting guests experience the ghost hosts introduction or take in the ambiance in the entry hall before being rushed into the stretch room. Often the show will begin before the stretch doors have closed. It’s pure bad show for the sake of a few seconds capacity.

Noticing this had made me wonder; When the rooms are being timed properly, does it leave actual gaps in guests boarding? If not, they're really not helping anything by rushing the process. And if so, it seems the timing could be optimized without 'skipping' show elements.

 

[mm52200]

no idea why they don't use clickers to pick a hard number.

I’m pretty sure they have an automatic counter when you walk between the railings at the merge point...but I can imagine Ops ignoring their operating procedure of how many should be in the room and stuffing it with more people.

 

[FullSailDan]

Noticing this had made me wonder; When the rooms are being timed properly, does it leave actual gaps in guests boarding? If not, they're really not helping anything by rushing the process. And if so, it seems the timing could be optimized without 'skipping' show elements.

In my experience when it has been run correctly during slow season, if you stand right next to the sliding wall and exit out when it opens, the last few guests are boarding the doom buggies.

I mean, I get it, you never know when there will be a weird issue with a group, they might need additional walking time or something but I still think it totally screws over the rides story and ambiance when you end up in a big mass of people waiting to load the buggies. And the time with master Gracey is a sad loss.

 

[britain]

Oh absolutely. You can design all you want but it comes down to real life ops to make it work. That’s also assuming the hardware always behaves perfectly. Especially with LPS.

The jury is still out on the preshow. Hopefully they’ll take the lessons learned at Dinosaur and not HM. Especially if it involves a legally required safety video (spoken in a Sideshow Bob style voice)

That's why you got to separate your pre-shows with actually moving platforms.

 

[MisterPenguin]

In my experience when it has been run correctly during slow season, if you stand right next to the sliding wall and exit out when it opens, the last few guests are boarding the doom buggies.

I mean, I get it, you never know when there will be a weird issue with a group, they might need additional walking time or something but I still think it totally screws over the rides story and ambiance when you end up in a big mass of people waiting to load the buggies. And the time with master Gracey is a sad loss.

Or, you can do what FoP does and waits for everyone to be in a room to start and doesn't release them until the next room is ready. It does that seamlessly by padding the room with extra gags as needed. The decontamination bit and the recalibration 'move around' bits are just extra stalling gags thrown in as needed because the previous group was slow loading or unloading.

For the HM you can have some of the other characters, such as Leota chime in with lines.

 

[marni1971]

Or, you can do what FoP does and waits for everyone to be in a room to start and doesn't release them until the next room is ready. It does that seamlessly by padding the room with extra gags as needed. The decontamination bit and the recalibration 'move around' bits are just extra stalling gags thrown in as needed because the previous group was slow loading or unloading.

For the HM you can have some of the other characters, such as Leota chime in with lines.

The difference is HM has the crush - I mean load - hall to take some of the slack. FoP has nowhere to dump the preshow load aside from an empty mainshow.

 

[Marc Davis Fan]

Dinosaur used to rush guests through, sometimes even leaving preshow entry and exit doors open. The preshow became a room to just pass through. The problem being the video also contained the safety information. Last year I was pleasantly surprised to find you couldn’t exit until after the preshow finished (and also allowing the designed crowd control to operate) but we were held from entering until the show in front had finished.

I hope they don't run the MMRR preshow completely like Dinosaur. I'm always disappointed that the Dinosaur pre-show starts before everyone enters the theater, causing most guests to miss the beginning. I think this has to do with the FP/standby merge point being just before the theaters, thus slowing down guest flow into the theaters (unlike, say, ToT, where people gather outside the pre-show room first). Is there any way to fix this problem? I find it to be really, really bad show (and it prevents many first-time riders from fully understanding the story of the attraction they're about to experience)!

 

[EricsBiscuit]

The difference is HM has the crush - I mean load - hall to take some of the slack. FoP has nowhere to dump the preshow load aside from an empty mainshow.

They did not design HM very well. The bottleneck just makes things too uncomfortable.

 

[marni1971]

They did not design HM very well. The bottleneck just makes things too uncomfortable.

There should be no bottleneck if the stretch rooms were run as designed.

 

[Castle Cake Apologist]

They did not design HM very well. The bottleneck just makes things too uncomfortable.

They designed Haunted Mansion very well. The current issue has nothing to do with the design, and everything to do with the fact that current operating procedure ignores the design.

The foyer and stretch rooms are meant to act as preshows and holding areas, and the load hall should be essentially empty before the next group of guests enters it. However, with current operating procedure, the guests are shoved through the foyer and stretching rooms faster than designed, leading to bottlenecks and large lines of guests backing up in the load hall.

@marni1971 I was under the impression that show controls were automated during the 2007 rehaunting, and that Cast no longer had a manual show start option. Is this incorrect?

 

[trainplane3]

They did not design HM very well. The bottleneck just makes things too uncomfortable.

I seem to remember going back to the early 2000s (01-05ish? and any time before then) and having a steady flow without the bottleneck. It's because they used to pace everything. Enter the foyer (?), doors close behind you, watch the painting, then enter a stretching room, watch that show, doors open and you'd just flow right into the load area without the cattle experience..

Now they jam as many people into the foyer and might close the doors, you don't have a chance to watch the painting, load whatever stretching room is open asap (sometimes both are!), and get you out the second the show is complete. Then you hit the bottleneck that should've never been there in the first place.

tl;dr: OPs can't/won't/don't want to run it correctly and it's a bad experience for everyone involved.

 

[peter11435]

.

@marni1971 I was under the impresison that show controls were automated during the 2007 rehaunting, and that Cast no longer had a manual show start option. Is this incorrect?

That is correct.

 

[Castle Cake Apologist]

That is correct.

I thought so. I always see Ops Cast getting flak for this, but I was fairly certain that they no longer had any control over it.

So, that begs the question... did 2007 WDI ignore the design principles of the attraction, or did park management give them a mandate to change the SOP to push more guests through?

I have a strong feeling I know the answer.