I will never understand the decision by Disney to try to quell uncertainty and negativity by releasing a POV from a high-quality camera that’s fixed to the log in one position. Just give someone a phone!
As far as the ride, I like the lighting and I love the animatronics. I just don’t know about everything else. There is a big difference between watching a ridethrough at home and actually being on the damn thing, where sensory overload can make the experience feel more “full,” but the video really doesn’t give much hope. From what I could see, there was an attempt to replace “business” with “atmosphere,” which is simply misguided for a ride like this. You need to be constantly distracted on a ride like this; giving the audience time to think and ponder works on a simple dark ride, but not an E-ticket thriller like this flume. So much space in these vast warehouse rooms are taken up by a simple aesthetic and not actual character work — and there’s so much opportunity for it!
That’s the biggest loss to me: replacing a show that has lots of fun bits and business featuring critters with another show about critters that have zero “business” outside of plot-dictated musicality, and therefore barely any personality to run with. Speaking of plot, that element really fell flat for me. I’m a big fan of the story element of these shows — not like a Joseph Campbell “Hero’s Journey” snob, but I do see it as a crucial element — and it seems like this show has 3 different stories trying to compete with each other. Jonathan Gold (food reviewer for the LA Times) said that the number one question he asked himself when reviewing a meal was “why?” Why this plate? Why these ingredients? Literally every element of a meal had a “why” element, and only the best chefs could give a fair response to every “why.” There is a lot of “why” here and I struggle to guess what the responses could be from our chefs.
It’s all truly bizarre for a company with this creative pedigree. It’s wrong to put all of this on the names of one or two Imagineers; it’s not like any one or two people can possibly have that much pull in an organization like this. However, there is a troublesome trend here with WDI to make shows like this too broad; there’s a sense that this was designed with the intent to make it easily digestible for all countries and cultures (you never know when Tokyo will give up the ghost), thus stripping it of any identity at all. This isn’t limited to just WDI, but all of Disney nowadays, and that’s just the way things go. It’ll be very funny when TBA gets shuttered in 30 years and an entire generation will lament the loss of their childhoods.
I still plan on riding to make a final judgement, but as someone who was all-in on this, I feel like Disney hand-delivered a reality check.
