News Zootopia and Moana Blue Sky concepts for Disney's Animal Kingdom

[Brer Oswald]

It was implied or presumed that the ride would be a Mystic Manor type which is why I posed the question.

Implied by whom? Fans?

 

[WaltWiz1901]

Instead, we get gigantic empty rooms for the vehicles to crawl around in and parking the riders in front of a giant screen for half the ride.

Yes, but Ratatouille still parks the riders in front of a screen for more than half the ride. Runaway Railway parks the riders in front of a screen at one point, too, and most of the rooms are humongous and empty.

(the extremely long lines for Toy Story Mania and Peter Pan say otherwise)

Find it funny how you criticized trackless rides for parking riders in front of a screen (which, as previously mentioned, is not at all to blame on the technology itself, but rather the designers of the scenery it's accompanying)...yet used the wait times for another ride which also parks riders in front of screens (interactive element notwithstanding) as proof that tracked dark rides aren't unpopular with park-goers

See also Tokyo's Beauty and the Beast ride, which is about seventy-five percent "dancing" around in gigantic rooms with the animatronics confined to one side. The "Something There" sequence should've been a brief glide-by, not a room for the vehicles to spin around in for ten minutes.

Admittedly, while the ride itself looks infinitely better than any of the three trackless dark rides in WDW, that particular scene does drag it down. Even with the desire to make it different from the other trackless dark ride in TDL!Fantasyland not too far away, there's a few things that could've been executed better than they actually were.

I don't think the tech itself is too limiting; I just think they haven't been imaginative enough in utilizing the positives of the tech over the downsides. They too often fall back on having at least one giant, mostly empty room so the vehicles can move around each other.

There are things the trackless tech allows that can't be done with an omnimover, and some which probably couldn't be done with a non-omnimover tracked ride, but they shouldn't just automatically default to trackless either. It's not as though omnimovers or other tracked rides are obsolete and worthless just because trackless tech exists.

I think there’s a time and place for trackless. Particularly if you want to create scenes that are “non linear” in nature. But for the attractions with mostly linear ride paths, a track system would probably be the best bet.

Took the words clean out of my mouth!

I think LPS can be used in an effective manner (see Hunny Hunt and Mystic Manor for two great examples of such), but there's still a place for Omnimovers and traditional busbar rides, too.

 

[Kev1982]

I think the system used doesn’t matter. Its what’s around it.