Slashdot Mirror
Lost Disney Rides Recreated in CGI
Dan Howland writes "Disney closes the rides, but the CGI geeks love them too much to let them disappear. 'Adventures thru Inner Space,' the Disneyland ride in which you shrunk down to the size of a molecule, ran from 1967 to 1985. Atommobiles.com is a fan site which includes this elaborate CGI recreation.
The Walt Disney World version of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride closed in 1967. Virtual Toad is in the process of re-building it." I was born after 1967, and I've ridden MTWR many times, so perhaps they're talking about an older version.
if they got cease and desist letters for "infringing Disney's property."
My IP is 192.168.1.100 Hack it if you want.
Soon all Disney rides will be in CG and you'll see advertisements on TV with kids begging their parents to 'log on to Disneyland'. The only problem is that people will not be surrounded with merchandise.
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
If they can do a good enough job recreating the rides, their Whuffie's going through the roof!
Sadly, I'm so out of touch -- it's been so long since I've been to Disneyland, I never realized they shut this ride down (Inner Space). This and Space Mountain were my absolute favorite rides as a kid.
I'm sad to find out (very belatedly) that it's gone, but happy to see that someone is doing something to preserve it. Even looking at those images of the huge ice flakes brings back a lot of very old memories.
Mr. Toad's Wild Ride closed on September 7, 1998, according to the Save Mr. Toad's Wild Ride site. It was a fantastic ride; too bad Disney closed it. :(
I was born after 1967, and I've ridden MTWR many times
I went on Mr Toads Wild Ride back in 1993, at the young age of 9, and after that I vowed to never experiment with LSD or other hallucenogenic substances.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
to the best "make-out" ride ever.
At least to this hormone driven teen in the late seventies (before the geek gene fully asserted itself). Ahhh memories.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
You get the great disney rides, but without the psychotic crowds and (usually) smelly and slimy water, etc (seriously, what the hell is up w/ the smell in disneyland, anyways?)
--
Power to the Peaceful
I remember reading a book about Disneyland, and the favorite joke about the Inner Space ride was this: The disney employees could always spot the horny teenagers hoping for a nice long, dark ride. When asked how long the ride was, they'd intentionally give the teenagers a made-up answer like "Nearly an hour." Then they'd wait for the teenagers to suddenly emerge from the ride and struggle to put all their clothes back on, in full view of the waiting patrons... Good times!
pot.kettle(black);
Hand bar operates automatically
Nice :).
Sex - Find It
If you love memories of disney rides long gone, check out http://www.yesterland.com/yester.html
absolutely great website if you wondered whatever happened to your favorite ride!
pot.kettle(black);
Just the other day I bumped into the Inner Space guy and chatted to him about this very project. It's a small world after all.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Considering they sent cease and desist letters to a daycare. I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Not only is Mr. Toad's Wild Ride no longer at Disneyworld, but it's slated to be taken out from Disneyland, too. Sucks, because that's one of my fav rides there!
-- Rob
Y'a jamais des choses qu'on peut pas se débrouiller ; juste laisse-moi t'aider!
I went to Disneyworld 20 years ago and was inside the big golf ball- Epcot's "Spaceship Earth"- when there was a mechanical failure of some sort and the cars stopped moving. They sent someone to run down the track and tell everyone to stay in their seats. We were stuck there for almost an hour. When it happened we were passing by the Renaissance scene. There was an animatronic setup where a bunch of Renaissance Italians were gathered on some steps, and one of them was teaching the others from a book. The other was nodding like if he was listening- nod, nod, shift down, nod, nod, shift up, repeat. If you see less than one cycle of that, it looks convincing, but after a few hundred cycles it starts to look fake, like the guy isn't really listening or learning anything.
I felt bad for the people a bunch of cars behind us. They were trapped in the Dark Ages. But the real victims must have been whoever was passing by the animatronics of the 19th century telegraphist- with the telegraph rattling up and down and the guy spelling out letters of nonsense. They must have lost their minds.
I am one of the biggest Disney weenies in the world. I've had an AP since I was 15, and I long for a return to the old days of Disneyland. I would love to see a full-on 3D recreation of Disneyland in various eras, that could be "walked thru."
Two sites that I frequent are Yesterland.com, which features pictures, descriptions and memories of the almost every "retired" Disneyland attraction, and MiceAge.com, which features backstage "exposes" about Disneyland and the people who run it.
This reminds me of a website called Virtual Midway, which features some defunct attractions at Cedar Point. No fancy CGI but still fascinating (to me, at least).
on.
That feeling is actually in your inner ear, and it can be simulated by stimulating it with lowlevel electrical shocks. I remember a couple companies were working on bringing this kind of device to the mass market, but it never materialized, probably for legal reasons.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Next time read the website before posting. The Mr. Toad ride wasn't even built in 1967, Walt Disney World wasn't even open until 1971. And they finally removed the ride in 1998. Despite the protest of people who wanted to keep it.
Come on, these days you should implement things as Java web services, or maybe a simple LAMP solution using MySQL and Perl, Python, or PHP. CGI is just so mid-90s!
Oh, wait, you mean Computer Graphics? Not the Common Gateway Interface? My mistake.
Seriously, every time I see CGI I have this moment of confusion when I try to map the subject into my little web development world. Too much time writing code I guess.
The Tomorrowland Flying Saucers were the ultimate futuristic version of the old bumper cars...individual pods that actually hovered above the ground, supported by bursts of air blasted from below. .
Each saucer would carry one big guest (or two little ones), and they could steer their saucer just by leaning their body in the direction they wanted to go. The saucers would become the bumper cars of tomorrow, and your mission was to plow into as many other saucers as you could before your time was up.
The saucers debuted on August 6, 1961. Their 16,000 square foot arena was divided into two sections, each with 32 saucers. .
Beneath the floor of the arena were four 100-horse power motors. Together, the motors blew more than 300,000 cubic feet of air per minute up towards the bottom of the floor. A small amount of air escaped through little openings between the thousands of circular plates that made up the floor itself. If a saucer was over one of the plates, the saucer's hollow bottom deflected the air back down to the plate. The force of this downward air flow popped the plate open fully, allowing a massive amount of air to pass through. It was the force of this air that caused the saucer to rise. When the saucer moved away, the plate snapped shut.
From the first day, the Flying Saucers were plagued with problems. If a guest was too heavy, there wasn't enough air in the world to lift it up. And if a guest was too light, it was difficut to tip the saucer in any one direction, so it simply stayed in one spot, bouncing up and down. And the constantly colliding saucers did little to help the condition of the guest's spinal cords. Worst of all, if two sauces collided just right, the speeding saucer would wedge under the saucer it rear-ended (if, indeed, a circle can have a rear end) sometimes flipping it upside-down. . . The attraction finally closed for good on August 5, 1996...
Sorry, meant to say that MTWR closed at WDW in 1998. See www.savetoad.com for more info than you need.
As a young boy, I found that ride with Michael Jackson very touching.
Anyway, one of the logs had an entire crew of young men, who looked quite muscular under their t-shirts, and they had military-style haircuts (I don't know enough military to tell Marine from SEAL from other units, but these guys looked quite trained well beyond Basic and they had some kind of military haircut). Anyway, these guys took the paddles and got a rhythm going, and not only did they get their log throwing a wake, the Disneyland "guide" was in the back with this expression of sheer terror and hanging on to the rudder for dear life. That alone was worth the price of the park admission.
Trish: When are men going to learn that women want romance, not "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride"?
Brodie: Be fair, alright. Everyone wants "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride".
do not read this line twice.
I asked my wife if she'd heard of this ride, seeing as she was raised in Southern California before her family moved to Seattle in the early 80's. "Wow, That My Favorite Ride" she said, and told me all about the sights and sounds.
.avi files, seeing as we have a Mac, but the .mpg's ran great and really blew her away how realistic it all looked.
.avi we got to hear but not see, and also how the cars would go to the left after entering the miniaturizer, as opposed to going straight and actually turning into those little timy cars in the injector device.
.avi's with .mpg's please. It's yet another closed msft standard.
It was kind of disappointing to not be able to access the
She mentioned a big eyeball that would peer down at you after the "miniaturization" process, which was maybe included in the
Also, the cars would jiggle about as they moved along the track, which would be a nice touch instead of the clinically clean super smooth tracking that the default CGI outputs.
Can't wait to see more, and replace the
I took a quick look at both sites (only one of which worked) and didn't see the obvious: where are they getting data? They need a plan showing ride track, figures, effects and show lighting. They may also need speed profile data - I believe the Toad vehicles are dual-speed, actuated by a cam that follows a hump in the floor. Are they simply going to fudge the geometry based on recollections? Guests do not get a good feel for how a ride is built by riding it. And yet, I think even the unremembered details contribute to the overall impression.
Audio tracks are also an issue. For the simulation to feel right, they have to be localized to the location of the speaker. A tape recording made in the ride usually sounds like muck, and would probably violate copyright as well.
In the absence of a convincing plan, I guess that this will be an impressionistic reconstruction that misses a lot of the detail. Really, there is no way, either technically or legally, to do a good job without the cooperation of Disney.
They brought them back in CGI, only to be shut down again by the long lines of Slashdotters spilling soda and nachos on each other, trying to cram into a website that only seats 30...
We got stuck in "It's a small world" with that damn song going over and over and over. Talk about an earworm, that's got to be the worst one ever. To this day, I can elicit a visceral response from my folks by launching into that song.
The gnome-things were all smiling, though, so they seemed to be enjoying it well enough. Hell, we were just passing through, they're stuck there 24x7.
Swear to Primus, I was at Disneyland (CA) just yesterday, and my son wanted one ride on "Pirates" before we left for the night. So since I was already dog-tired and wanted to go home, the boat goes and gets stalled at the foot of the final lift before the ride ends. Probably took us 20 minutes to get out of there.
I think if I had to listen to "A Pirate's Life For Me" -- along with the animatronic pirates grunting as they hauled that treasure chest -- for another ten minutes, I would have personally hunted down all of the ride operators involved in that fiasco...
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net