Why the hate for Little Mermaid ride?

[correcaminos]

Two words....

Disco Ariel .

If you look closely? You'll still see the (defunct) Disco Ball on the ceiling .

defunct? It was there and working last week.

To me it's a cute ride. Nothing special. 5 minute wait is the limit for us though on it.

 

[TheGuyThatMakesSwords]

defunct? It was there and working last week.

To me it's a cute ride. Nothing special. 5 minute wait is the limit for us though on it.

Oh no..... somebody turned on the Disco Ball again? .

 

[correcaminos]

Oh no..... somebody turned on the Disco Ball again? .

It seemed to be. I saw it spinning and there were the little white lights spinning around like a disco ball give off.

 

[Prototype82]

It has good show quality and the queue is wonderful. It's a must-do every time for me. It's not a tour-de-force, but it doesn't deserve the hate that it gets. I love the sensation of "going underwater". I get that people wanted it to be more but sometimes I feel like people forget that Mr. Toad's Wild Ride was made of plywood.

 

[donnylambb]

My family ride it every time we go. It usually easy to get on and nice and cool in the summer! Not my favorite but I never will hate it.

 

[geekza]

I'm of the opinion that not every ride needs to be an E-Ticket. I mean, I've heard so many people, myself included, talk about their love for the PeopleMover. Why? It's relaxing, you get a nice breeze in the hot Florida climate, and you get glances into Space Mountain (though not like you used to) and at part of the original Progress City model. It's not flashy, but it has withstood the test of time and never has a line.

To be perfectly honest, Mr. Toad was not exactly a technological showcase, but it was fun and is greatly missed. Snow White (which I will admit was a better attraction than LM) was a simple ride through the story, at least in it's final incarnation. Peter Pan is as simplistic and short a ride as you can get, but people love it.

I still think that LM gets a bad rap because of the pre-release hype and not because it's a bad attraction. It's far from perfect, but it's good.

 

[tissandtully]

I don't hate it, I actually think the first scenes in the ride all the way to the amazing Ursula AA are really well done. After those scenes though you can see they ran out of money or something, really wrapped up quickly and a cardboard Ursula dying in the background, lol.

 

[Ismael Flores]

I don't dislike the ride by any means, but from a critical standpoint I can think of the following:

Some lazy and inefficient design choices. A little too much time spent looking at rocks, and a poor transition from the final scene to unload. When they built the ride in Anaheim, they were restricted because they used an existing building. At WDW, they could have tweaked and improved the design, but doing a carbon copy is easier and cheaper.

The lighting and atmosphere could have been a bit better, particularly the Under the Sea scene. It feels like you're in a ride building. They adjusted this a bit since at Disneyland, not sure about WDW.

Overall, it's a perfectly good dark ride. I don't know why anyone would hate it.

They did not use an existing building in Anaheim.

The building that was there was a theater and it was completely demolished. The only thing that remained was the rotunda which was never part of any building. It was a free standing rotunda used as a outdoor queue area.
The land used was narrow but long and therefor the attraction was designed for that space and then duplicated in WDW.

 

[Ismael Flores]

I'm of the opinion that not every ride needs to be an E-Ticket. I mean, I've heard so many people, myself included, talk about their love for the PeopleMover. Why? It's relaxing, you get a nice breeze in the hot Florida climate, and you get glances into Space Mountain (though not like you used to) and at part of the original Progress City model. It's not flashy, but it has withstood the test of time and never has a line.

To be perfectly honest, Mr. Toad was not exactly a technological showcase, but it was fun and is greatly missed. Snow White (which I will admit was a better attraction than LM) was a simple ride through the story, at least in it's final incarnation. Peter Pan is as simplistic and short a ride as you can get, but people love it.

I still think that LM gets a bad rap because of the pre-release hype and not because it's a bad attraction. It's far from perfect, but it's good.

I agreee, LM got a bad rap because of ore-opening hoopla that was released partially by Disney and the fan base.

The online forums hyped it up as being something huge and equivalent to darkrides like pirates. Disney never said or hype it in the form.

Disney also made the mistake of showing us the original designs for a Mermaid ride that was going to be built years before but never was. The change from over head track to a simple omnimover co pletely changed the look of the ride.

The over the head track would have been much more believable in recreating the up and down water level changes needed for the storyline

 

[CptRon]

This hits the many, many nails on their heads.

To add:
snip
2. Plastic fish. Glued to the wall.
snip

All that plastic. We went shortly after it opened, so it's been a while, but the overwhelming smell of plastic is what sticks in my memory. I hope it has dissipated some by now.

 

[danyoung56]

I'm of the opinion that not every ride needs to be an E-Ticket.

I could not agree with this more. Some times a good C or D ride is a great thing!

...the PeopleMover ... never has a line.

Well, that's not exactly true - quite often there's a long line out into traffic.

 

[Tim Lohr]

I'm of the opinion that not every ride needs to be an E-Ticket. I mean, I've heard so many people, myself included, talk about their love for the PeopleMover. Why? It's relaxing, you get a nice breeze in the hot Florida climate, and you get glances into Space Mountain (though not like you used to) and at part of the original Progress City model. It's not flashy, but it has withstood the test of time and never has a line.

To be perfectly honest, Mr. Toad was not exactly a technological showcase, but it was fun and is greatly missed. Snow White (which I will admit was a better attraction than LM) was a simple ride through the story, at least in it's final incarnation. Peter Pan is as simplistic and short a ride as you can get, but people love it.

I still think that LM gets a bad rap because of the pre-release hype and not because it's a bad attraction. It's far from perfect, but it's good.

I think you're right that most of the complaining stems from it not living up to the hype of "New Fantsayland", I don't know that the "ride" lives up to the "queue" in Florida. The ride was designed for a somewhat small space at Disney's California Adventure, and the exact same ride was duplicated for "NEW Fantasyland" even thought the ride itself isn't really "new" or unique to WDW, and given how large the queue area is in Florida, I feel like most of the show scenes seem kind of tiny by comparison. The "Under the Sea" scene is great, but it's at the beginning of the ride, which just compounds that problem, there is nothing as big or as spectacular as the "Under the Sea", each scene just gets smaller instead. There was plenty of room to make the show scenes a little bigger in Florida, the Ariel Meet and Greet area could have been ride space, but they just didn't want to spend the time and money to re-design it and figure out the logistics, and draw up new blueprints... they built a fine C/D ticket ride, but gave it a E ticket kind of queue, which seems a little weird to me

 

[Randyland]

30 years ago, it would be UNHEARD OF to have any negative comments about ANYTHING Disney... Now it seems common to read all kinds of things, from dissatisfied, or disappointed, Guests.... And excuses offered such as it being a business... Clearly something has changed and Disney's image has had a fall from grace. When a company's biggest asset is it's image, it is a dangerous game not to maintain the Core Values which created that image... Decades of loyalty can be lost overnight.

 

[brb1006]

In his Season Pass Interviews, Tony Baxter takes a number of potshots at the Little Mermaid ride. He derides it as a purely book report ride- "Oh look, here's a mermaid. And she's doing exactly what she did in the movie"

 

[geekza]

In his Season Pass Interviews, Tony Baxter takes a number of potshots at the Little Mermaid ride. He derides it as a purely book report ride- "Oh look, here's a mermaid. And she's doing exactly what she did in the movie"

Baxter has did some amazing work, to be sure, but he's not the ultimate authority on what makes a good attraction. Remember: He's the one responsible for the Finding Nemo sub overlay at Disneyland. He's not a fan of the kind of dark ride that Mermaid, Snow White (RIP), Peter Pan, and Pooh fall into. That's fine. I enjoy them and many others do, too.

I don't think anyone would argue that Mermaid is perfect, but it's also not the travesty that many make it out to be.

 

[NEmickeyfan]

I rode it shortly after NFL opend.... and my reaction was (and still is) "plastic....and more plastic" I will continue to ride it, I'm sure, but shouldn't it be a more than just a short ride to get out of the heat?

 

[Tom Morrow]

Here’s a couple thousand words on why...

http://www.themeparkconcepts.com/2018/02/27/why-is-mermaid-so-bad/

This is a great read.

This ride has never resonated with me, and, I think most people as well, but I had a hard time putting it into words other than noting the obvious pacing issues. I always dismissed it as a ride that was meant to be capacity filler and nothing that was really meant to be special, but it's pretty clear from this article that with some tweaking, it could be/could have been better.

 

[spock8113]

"it could be/could have been better." ah yeah, probably.
I just find it amusing that someone would go on and on hyper-analyzing a kids ride.
A kids ride, that's all it is.
My kids enjoyed it and it tells a simple story with music.......................now lets go eat.

Until they get ride builders who have serious vision like the original Imagineers, this is what will do.

 

[larryz]

"it could be/could have been better." ah yeah, probably.
I just find it amusing that someone would go on and on hyper-analyzing a kids ride.
A kids ride, that's all it is.
My kids enjoyed it and it tells a simple story with music.......................now lets go eat.

Until they get ride builders who have serious vision like the original Imagineers, this is what will do.

Or they'll take good, imaginative concepts, and budget them to death.

 

[geekza]

Or they'll take good, imaginative concepts, and budget them to death.

You make a very good point. I do think that we've seen time and time again that Disney has creative people with big ideas, but whereas old-school WED would work and rework an attraction until it was as good as they could make it, now the work seems to go into paring an attraction down to the least-expensive version that can be created and still be accepted by the guests.

I enjoy LM, but I would 100% prefer the version that was shown in the early mock-up video. 7DMT is another one that seems fine for what it is, but was severely cut down before it was built. Now, the coaster part barely exists. Had it been its original length, I would be all over it. As it is, I can't justify the excessively-long queue just for the cool AA figures in the middle.