Vanilla Ice presents The Cool As Ice Rapsperience: The Ride
As done in the style of an early 2000s Jim Hill/Al Lutz behind-the-scenes expose, and with apologies to both of them.
Good morning, everybody! How was your weekend? I spent most of mine doing yard work and helping out tourists who took wrong turns down my street... spring on Cape Cod, gotta love it. In between all that though, I did have a chance to answer one of you guys’ questions, and boy, is our topic today a doozy.
Hi Snoopy,
I have to say, an attraction that’s always fascinated me was the Vanilla Ice dark ride that Universal Orlando kept open LONG after Vanilla Ice faded out. I think it was almost a decade or something. I went on it once and it was so weird. Would you mind telling me what happened there?
-Joey1234
Well certainly, Joey. I have to admit it’s always fascinated me too. In fact when I had a chance to talk to some Universal creatives a few years back who had worked on the initial 1991 expansion of Universal Studios Florida, it was one of the topics that seemingly all of them wanted to talk about when it was brought up. They all had different opinions on where it went wrong, and hearing them talk about it you could tell that they themselves seemed a little baffled by the end result.
It’s an interesting story, and one that I’m all too happy to be able to share with you folks; if nothing else, it’s a good way to get my mind off of housework for a little bit. So, have you grabbed a cup of Main Street Starbucks coffee? Got your Joeffrey’s donut and some fresh-squeezed OJ? Great, then let’s get going.
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An attraction like
Vanilla Ice presents The Cool As Ice Rapsperience: The Ride doesn’t happen by accident, so to really understand what went wrong here then we’re going to need some context. The opening of Universal Studios Florida in the summer of 1990 could charitably be described as a bit of a fiasco. Rides were breaking down left and right, attractions weren’t finished in time and negative press began to hound the place. These problems persisted in the months that followed and had Universal executives understandably sweating bullets - they had spent an estimated $500 million on the place and nothing seemed to be going right. And so they immediately launched a “reset”, which consisted of giving away thousands of dollars worth of free passes and millions of dollars allocated for expansion plans.
This “second chance” was an opportunity that they did not want to waste, but all the same didn’t have the budget for major enhancements. So they tasked Universal Creative with coming up with cheap but workable fixes, which led to things like The Blues Brothers Show and How to Make a Mega Movie Deal (and a fun fact for you Halloween Horror Nights fans, the first iteration of that event was born out of this expansion). With the exception of Back to the Future: The Ride which had already been under construction, there were no new rides that were being added as a part of this fix. This concerned quite a few people within Universal, since almost half of the parks rides were either down for permanent fixes or only seasonally operating due to mechanical problems.
Copyright Universal Pictures. All rights reserved.
This is where our attraction today comes in. If you can believe it, it was born out of a conversation that Vanilla Ice had with a certain Universal executive after an impromptu visit to Universal Studios Hollywood during the filming of the infamous 1991 flop Cool As Ice. He’d mentioned to the unnamed executive how cool it would be to have his film be featured as part of the park’s storied Studio Tour, similar to the Jaws and King Kong portions of the attraction.
This got the wheels in the head of the studio boss moving. While there were no plans to update the Tour, he could certainly accommodate Van Winkle’s desire in another way. Florida needed rides after all, and weren’t most of the original attractions there just stand-alone versions of Hollywood’s Tour scenes anyway?
If this sounds strange to you, remember that this is a Billboard chart-topping artist who the studio had plans on working with for a good while into the future, and a presence in the parks would help cement that relationship. And besides, Disney had a great relationship with Michael Jackson following Captain EO, why couldn’t Universal have their own version of that? So that afternoon a few phone calls were made, over the weekend a contract was written up and by Monday it was signed - an attraction in Florida based on the upcoming Cool As Ice, with an option to expand it to Hollywood in the future.
Robert Matthew Van Winkle, aka
Vanilla Ice, from "Cool As Ice".
Copyright Universal Pictures. All rights reserved.
Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, the theme park designers weren’t made aware of the deal until after it was signed.
And these designers, to hear them tell it, were already being spread pretty thin with the other Universal expansion projects. The parameters they had to work with (the new attractions had to be inexpensive but a draw, easily placed, short development time) were small to begin with, and now they had an actual ride to build on top of the shows.
To make matters worse, when it was discovered that there was no money to make the attraction any bigger than a C-ticket then it was decreed that this new Vanilla Ice attraction would be a dark ride, similar to the E.T. Adventure. And the Universal creatives only had a few months to design, build, test and open it, because Cool As Ice was set to be released the following October. And make no mistake, the ride WOULD open in October to coincide with the films debut; the executives had been burned with enough bad press about the opening push-backs of other major Orlando attractions to put up with another humiliation like that. This time wouldn't be like those attractions, this time would be different.
Keep in mind the theme park designers were told all this in April.
So a new attraction thrown on the small team’s development pile on top of other projects, low budget, had to be completed in less than seven months, needed to be based on a movie that was not only unreleased but that the creatives were only vaguely familiar with. You all with me so far? Good, because here’s where things get a bit complicated.
Universal Studios Florida on opening day.
Photo taken by Bobby Corker.
Vanilla Ice had certain… requests for this attraction. Namely, the guests needed to ride on the motorcycle that he rode in the film, doing “bada**” things. The ride would end at a huge Vanilla Ice concert, all the while his music would play throughout the attraction. An audio animatronic version of himself would pop up at random points and spout off movie quotes at the guests.
The executives in turn had their own requests. The ride needed to feature characters from the Cool As Ice film. It needed to be a “huge draw”. It needed to end in a gift shop. It needed to feature Vanilla Ice songs also featured in the film. And, most importantly, it had to be done on a budget.
Keep in mind that, with all this talk of film accuracy, the theme park developers had no idea what Cool As Ice was about. They were only ever given certain plot details, some of which were from older drafts of the script. The film makers were afraid of leaks and wanted to keep certain elements a surprise (though what those elements were I don’t think anybody really knows), and that included withholding information about the production.
And so, with the demands lined up, a timeline to do the project and vague ideas as to how to do it, our brave creatives set out to accomplish a rather Herculean effort. Could they do it? Well anybody who’s been on the attraction will tell you that they could not, but in fairness to them it was an uphill battle from the beginning.
First of all, the name. “Vanilla Ice presents The Cool As Ice Rapsperince: The Ride” is a horrible thing to call an attraction, and all of the creatives I spoke with agreed. “Originally it was just going to be Cool As Ice: The Ride” said one, as so many other Universal attractions are called. “But the executives really wanted to hammer in the fact that it was Vanilla Ice, so ‘Vanilla Ice presents’ was added to the front.” The “Rapsperience” part was born out of a compromise: during production the title became Vanilla Ice presents The Cool As Ice Experience, and after a fashion Experience became X-Perience to showcase how hip and modern the attraction was.
“Keep in mind that this was an on-the-cheap dark ride, not some E-ticket experience, and none of us were happy calling it that” said another, “While some higher-ups wanted to make it X-Perience, other thought it would be too similar to ESPN’s X-Games, while one actually thought it alluded to something inappropriate. So we just kind of relented and threw ‘rap’ in the front so no one would argue the point after that.” And of course since it was 1991 and rap music was mostly new to the mainstream, “The Ride” was thrown in at the end to tell people exactly what it was. “An awful, messy title for an awful, messy attraction.”
Copyright Universal Studios Florida. All rights reserved.
Now that they had the title, the creatives needed a starting point. That came easy enough - as Universal Studios Florida’s first dark ride E.T. Adventure was their version of Peter Pan’s Flight, they could just base this new attraction on another Fantasyland ride. “By default it was Toad” said one designer, referring to the classic Mr. Toad's Wild Ride attraction that entertained guests at the Magic Kingdom from 1971 to 1998. “We couldn’t do Snow White since that was the ‘scary’ one, so we went with the crazy one. It made more sense.”
What didn’t make sense to the creatives was how the attraction was supposed to progress. “Again, none of us had seen Cool As Ice or really knew anything about it. We only had a character list, a song list and a vague idea of the plot.”
The plot, for those of you who haven’t seen the film (which is probably most of you reading this), follows a rapper played by Vanilla Ice named Johnny Van Owen who drifts from town to town playing gigs. Upon arriving at the film’s setting he falls in love with an honor student named Kathy Winslow, despite disapproval from her stuck-up boyfriend and her father who happens to be in the witness protection program. After a contrived series of events that include a showdown at a construction site, Johnny wins Kathy’s heart and they ride off into the night.
“See? You say it and it’s just ridiculous. We had to make a ride off of that, and we didn’t even know that much of the plot.” What they did have though were brief character descriptions, that sometimes contradicted other information. “I’m not sure whoever wrote those up really knew that much either. The first sentence mentioned that Johnny was a rapper, and then the second sentence mentioned his bodybuilder past. I’m not even sure the character was supposed to be a bodybuilder. It said the brother character was kidnapped by Johnny to get back at the father, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case in the final film. None of us knew that at the time though, so we added it in.”
And so with what they were given, the creatives had to string together an attraction within less than a month. That meant that whatever layout they used needed to be finalized within three weeks to accommodate development and construction. That began the mad dash of actually getting it done. “The reason the final attraction was a mess was because we really had no time for brainstorming and the people involved with the individual scenes weren’t communicating.”
Another recounted “I remember narrative was a big problem. Those Disney dark rides are usually first person, so we wanted to have characters in the ride interact with the guests.” The problems really hit when a consensus couldn’t be reached as to who the guests were. “At some points they were just guests, at some points they were special VIPs to the Vanilla Ice concert at the end, and at one point they were accompanying Vanilla Ice - a concept we had would be that he would hop aboard the bike and hitch a ride with the guests to the concert.” In the final version, all three narratives ended up being present.
The Magic Kingdom's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
Photo taken by Mouseketeer Alison.
Basing the ride on Toad helped the time-strapped designers in other ways. Because the creatives were given what amounted to a shoestring budget, they could aesthetically afford to borrow some of that attraction’s lower-tech effects like cut-outs and strobe lights. “That was certainly a saving grace, but in the end I do think it was to the attraction’s detriment. Toad has a style to it that works, but ours just really came off as choppy.” Another disagreed. “If it had been animatronics and moving set pieces, the ride would have looked even worse and more embarrassing. The style wasn’t the problem so much as the time frame that we did the ride in.”
“I remember they day we handed it off.” recalled one creative. “A lot of us were relieved because it meant that we could focus on the other attractions for the expansion, but others like myself were not looking forward to seeing the final product. The approval process was very quick - I think they were just checking to make sure that we had met all of their requests, and after that they rubber stamped it and handed it off to the developers.”
I didn’t get a chance to speak to any developers or construction workers who built the attraction, but from what the designers tell me it was a bit of a mess. “I would get calls from the head of construction asking me rather baffled if this was really how the attraction was supposed to be set up, or if there were pages in the outline missing. I would, rather embarrassed, have to say no, that’s how it is, that’s what we came up with. It was pretty hard having to dwell on it like that when we just wanted it out of our lives, but there was no time or money for revisions beyond that. Besides, there were other attractions we had to focus on beyond the Vanilla Ice thing.”
Luckily for Universal the ride came in on time and under budget. This meant that the extra funds could go towards a strange marketing campaign, of which the original ride’s designers had nothing to do with. “They had some really strange ads. I’ll never forget one that had the father character from the film threatening guests for hanging around Vanilla Ice, saying they’d never have a chance with his daughter if they kept associating with ‘riff-raff’ or something. Then they’d show the ride and Vanilla Ice would be like ‘Forget what he thinks, let’s have some fun!’ I think it was supposed to make prospective guests seem like rebels, but it was just creepy and weird.”
The "Cool As Ice" Premiere, October 1991.
(L-R) Cuba Gooding Jr., Soleil Moon Frye, Jared Leto.
Photo by Barry King.
The attraction opened on October 18, 1991, the same day as the Cool As Ice film. “I think all of us were hoping that another attraction would be ready to open with the ride to divert some attention away, but it had the whole day to itself. And that was unfortunate, because it’s all the press focused on.”
For those of you who have never made the trek to Universal, the attraction’s queue took place in a garage. The garage was filled with numerous parts and motorbikes, showing off what the guests would soon be riding on. Following the queue into a backroom storage area, guests saw boxes of personal memorabilia, supposedly belonging to the Vanilla Ice character Van Owen. “None of us knew what were supposed to be in the boxes, maybe weights or exercise equipment? We just wanted something for the guests to look at.” Exiting the garage onto a nighttime set that looked like a city street (“We think Disney nicked that from us when doing the loading area for Rock N Roller Coaster” joked one creative) guests boarded two person seating motorbikes and proceeded into the attraction.
After entering through the front door of a bar, guests saw Vanilla Ice and his band performing “Ice Ice Baby”. “I don’t know if that was in the movie, but it was his big song and so we figured we’d show it off first.” It should be noted that Ice’s clause meant that every time he appeared he would be an animatronic figure, contrasting with the other flat cut outs, making for a rather bizarre experience. Not helping was the fact that these figures were prone to breaking down often, which usually made the 3D figures less expressive than the flat characters.
As mentioned above, another part of the clause was that Ice would spout off phrases whenever he appeared. “Hey y’all.” said the character in the bar scene. “It ain’t where you from, it’s where you at, and right now I’m here with you.” Also mentioned above, remember what I said about the designers having no idea who the guests were supposed to be? Well…
Crashing through a wall guests entered a back alley, where they found themselves getting chased by the rogue cops from the film. “We’ll get you, rapper! Tell us where Gordon is!”, Gordon being the father on the run from the cops.
Michael Gross as Gordon Winslow, "Cool As Ice".
Copyright Universal Pictures. All rights reserved.
Next guests found themselves at a horse farm where they met Ice’s love interest Kathy and almost run her over. Kathy’s boyfriend shows up and blasts the guests for being “a worthless rapper and biker”.
Taking a turn guests meet up with Van Owen's posse. "Hey man, who are these people? Are you going to be ready for our concert tonight?" they ask. Rather than answering them, the bike plows through the group and knocks a few of them over.
Then guests meet up with a concert producer who offers them free tickets to Ice’s latest concert… before the guests run him over too. It should be mentioned now that Van Winkle’s character in the ride is referred to by both his character name Johnny Van Owen and as his real life stage name Vanilla Ice at different points.
After that guests end up at a construction site. The foreman yells as them to get out as they go crashing through various wood planks, cement mixers, steel beams and dirt piles. “You rotten kids!” he shouts at guests. A second Vanilla Ice figure shows up and says “People can be anything they want to be, as long as they’re willing to work. And that’s all I’ve been doing. With a little help.” Another reminder: in each individual scene, a different Vanilla Ice song is blaring from the speakers, even if it doesn’t make sense. “We weren’t sure where the music was coming from, but the contract called for Vanilla Ice music everywhere, so that’s what they got.”
Following that guests end up at Kathy’s house where Gordon opens the front door, holding a rolling pin. “You jerk Van Owen, how dare you kidnap my son!” he shouts at the guests… before getting run over as guests enter the house. After driving through a living room and knocking things over guests enter the kitchen and give Kathy’s mother Grace a scare while knocking things over there as well.
Exiting the house guests enter the backyard, and get chased by an angry dog. Crashing through a fence, guests end up on some railroad tracks and are about to get run over (“Our nod to Toad” said one designer) before Vanilla Ice shows up and tells them to get off the tracks. They do just in time, and Ice tells them to “Drop that zero. Get with the hero.”
They then follow Ice to a huge Van Owen concert where he performs “Get Wit It” and thanks everyone for being such a great audience. With all that over, guests travel to the unloading area (backstage at the concert) and they exit into a record store selling early 1990s hip hop memorabilia.
Copyright Universal Pictures. All rights reserved.
To say that the ride had a poor reception would be an understatement. Like the film it was based on it was treated as a bit of a punching bag, emblematic of all of early Universal Studios Florida’s main problems: cheap, thrown together, too much of an emphasis on flash over quality. “It was a disaster” said one creative “And we were expecting disaster, but even that caught us a little off guard.” The worst part was that, unlike similar attraction Superstar Limo at Disney’s California Adventure that closed after a year, the Cool As Ice attraction couldn’t be closed. “It was in the contract with Ice that the ride had to be there for fifteen years. We were really stuck.”
Needless to say the attraction didn’t make it’s way over to Hollywood in any form and continued to drag along at Universal in Orlando until it was mercifully closed in 2006, when the contract was up. Perhaps it would have been best if the executives had just done what Van Winkle wanted in the first place and made it a small scene in Hollywood’s Studio Tour.
And with that folks, I’m off. I hope that answers your question Joey as to what “happened there” with the Cool As Ice ride.
See you next time!
I'll be back to finish out the season soon enough.
