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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?)
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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?
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.
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Power to the Peaceful
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.
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.
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.