Rumor Stitch's Great Escape Replacement— Don’t Hold Your Breath

[MisterPenguin]

Pardon my crudeness, I'm away from my Photoshop PC. I know it would not be this simple but this red square is roughly the same size as the entire Transformers facility at Universal. This is just fun to speculate about and again, putting a darkride in this spot would be very difficult, but possibly a different company would come up with a clever solution to squeeze in a ride, que, shop, and utilities...

View attachment 553972




Depending on how the utilidor is laid out underneath they could also do a tunnel connection. Either way would lead to some interesting results.

Transformers is two stories, that's how they make it fit.

Constraints for our armchair imagineering...

I've scoped this out earlier and got similar numbers:

SGE: 18.4k sqft / .42 acres
Snacks and shops: 9k sqft / .2 acres
Total: 27.4k sqft / .64 acres

Peter Pan: 13.5 sqft / .31 acres

So, yeah, you could have a repeat of one of the shortest and lowest capacity dark rides in that space.

For comparison, Buzz is .55 acres.


View attachment 285644

Pooh: .44 acres
Mermaid without the extensive queue: .55 acres

SGE is .42 acres.

Pan is .31 acres.

View attachment 410346

 

[Movielover]

Transformers is two stories, that's how they make it fit.

Correct, no reason why they could not do that here, or even put the second level down on the utilidor level. You could really play with that space to fit a ride in there. Will Disney do it? Most likely no, but its fun to armchair...

 

[MisterPenguin]

Correct, no reason why they could not do that here, or even put the second level down on the utilidor level. You could really play with that space to fit a ride in there. Will Disney do it? Most likely no, but its fun to armchair...

Sure, but that would mean a full demolition and rebuild.

I'm sure Disney would prefer to make something fit existing architecture.

Although... a full rebuild might wind up being cheaper than all the retrofit kludges.

Although... a full rebuild might set off a real estate tax increase...


Anyhoo, my archmair imagineering says to take over the entire building including Cosmic Rays for a nice, long dark ride. Then beef up and keep open Tomorrowland Terrace and add another QS by the restrooms. No one will mourn the passing of the stage.

 

[marni1971]

Depending on how the utilidor is laid out underneath they could also do a tunnel connection. Either way would lead to some interesting results.

Crudeness pardoned sadly there’s no Utilidor there. It’s further east.

 

[ᗩLᘿᑕ ✨ ᗩζᗩᗰ]

The obvious armchair solution is to rework Tomorrowland into an Arcadeland. It seemed to be going that way. You could do the Space-themed Pizza Planet (and arcade) anything WiR (though preferably something tied to Hero's Duty and the Cybug alien swarm concept and NOT Sugar Rush) and then of course TRON, another arcade game. Not sure if going Pixel adventure land vs World of Tomorrow land is a great idea but it seems the logical choice nowadays. Tomorrowland's always been a mixed bag anyway.

 

[marni1971]

The obvious armchair solution is to rework Tomorrowland into an Arcadeland. It seemed to be going that way. You could do the Space-themed Pizza Planet (and arcade) anything WiR (though preferably something tied to Hero's Duty and the Cybug alien swarm concept and NOT Sugar Rush) and then of course Tron, another arcade game. Not sure if going Pixel adventure land vs World of Tomorrow land is a great idea but it seems the logical choice nowadays. Tomorrowland's always been a mixed bag anyway. something as good as it used to be.

 

[ᗩLᘿᑕ ✨ ᗩζᗩᗰ]

If only. But that's not Disney's MO.
I'd welcome Timekeeper and A.E. back in heartbeat.

 

[UNCgolf]

Buzz kind of limits the ability for laugh floor to expand into those spaces

Good reason to go ahead and eliminate Buzz, which is old, bad, and doesn't really fit in Tomorrowland anyways.

 

[Creathir]

Crudeness pardoned sadly there’s no Utilidor there. It’s further east.

That could mean a tunnel connecting the two buildings could theoretically be possible then on floor 0 right?
(Expensive and costly, but offers the ability to have a larger ride space)

 

[Rich Brownn]

Crudeness pardoned sadly there’s no Utilidor there. It’s further east.

But there is a break room under there

 

[marni1971]

But there is a break room under there

I was always fascinated as a kid by the projection basement rooms for M2M

 

[Rich Brownn]

I was always fascinated as a kid by the projection basement rooms for M2M

Back in the old days, when there was a power failure for a second, the computers would go nuts and the AAs would literally rip themselves apart if they weren't E=stopped. I found this out my second day at work (I was at Grand Prix at the time and we took our breaks under FTM) and the power went out. All the "moon" girls yelled 'glitch!!!!' and ran out. What a way to begin your WDW life. LOL

 

[The Aracuan Bird]

The obvious armchair solution is to rework Tomorrowland into an Arcadeland. It seemed to be going that way. You could do the Space-themed Pizza Planet (and arcade) anything WiR (though preferably something tied to Hero's Duty and the Cybug alien swarm concept and NOT Sugar Rush) and then of course Tron, another arcade game. Not sure if going Pixel adventure land vs World of Tomorrow land is a great idea but it seems the logical choice nowadays. Tomorrowland's always been a mixed bag anyway.

Arcades are past their retro nostalgia phase. They started off as the new thing. They quickly became dated. They hit their nostalgia phase in the 2000s. Now they are dated again.

Arcades done have the same longevity as, say, old Nintendo, because the games were simpler, and the era didn’t last very long. WiR’s biggest mistake was moving to “social media” for the second film rather than console gaming. What made the film popular is dated, and the focus of the sequel was uninspired. Until they do something new with the IP, there’s really nothing interesting it can bring to the parks.

 

[owlsandcoffee]

Tomorrowland used to be about travel. Air travel, space travel, automobiles, even the CV had time travel for a while. I see no reason why in today's world commuter spaceflight, renewable energy sources, and new forms of transportation can't continue to inspire. You could easily just put in a new MtM type ride, with some serious updates and more exciting theming. I honestly think Timekeeper would work just fine as it was, except with seats maybe. And the IYHW space is enough to put in a high-quality ride about some new kind of travel. High speed rail or something, sponsored by Amtrak.

The Speedway actually has enough room, barely, for a slightly reconfigured version of the layout they were originally planning at WED. Do that, put some hydrogen/electric motors in the suckers and you're good to go.

TRON is fine. SM could use some refurb. Tear down the gift shop to open up some walkway.

 

[Disney Maddux]

Something I'll always be sad about is how as time went on, and especially during the last year of its run, the cannons were really starting to lose their touch, and it was not uncommon to see them never even come down and for Stitch to be avoiding invisible plasma firings.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Can a modern Disney pull off small dark rides? I'd assume there's both design and compliance challenges to overcome. Disney keeps going bigger with their darkrides for whatever reason. But if we're talking a smaller footprint; it does make me wonder about that "Black Box" concept that was discussed earlier.

Remember that in the mid-2000s Disney did convert the CircleVision theaters at Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris into Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters Inspired By Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story 2. While it’s been 15 years there haven’t been any big paradigm shifts in regulations and small dark rides are still built in places like the Legoland Discovery Centers. Disney’s big issue is costs have spiraled completely out of control in the years since Buzz Lightyear. Disney can’t justify spending $100 million on an actually small dark ride.

 

[doctornick]

Crudeness pardoned sadly there’s no Utilidor there. It’s further east.

(Realizing this has little relevance to what modern Disney would actually do with the space...)

Question: since all of the MK is essentially "on the second floor" and if there is no Utilidor below the Stitch building, should they be able to dig into the level below the existing building and build into it without the typical problems of going below ground in the area? Since they'd not actually be digging into the native swamp grounds but instead into the infill they used when building MK to begin with?

 

[deix15x8]

Anyone know how the space compares to Star Tours in Disneyland? If they ever get around to consolidating Star Wars and removing that in DL a shared project that could replace Star Tours in DL and SGE in MK could boost the project budget.

 

[The Aracuan Bird]

Remember that in the mid-2000s Disney did convert the CircleVision theaters at Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris into Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters Inspired By Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story 2. While it’s been 15 years there haven’t been any big paradigm shifts in regulations and small dark rides are still built in places like the Legoland Discovery Centers. Disney’s big issue is costs have spiraled completely out of control in the years since Buzz Lightyear. Disney can’t justify spending $100 million on an actually small dark ride.

Why would they need to spend $100 million?

 

[UNCgolf]

Why would they need to spend $100 million?

They shouldn't need to, but that's how much they spend. Little Mermaid cost $100 million and it's pretty terrible.