Date:10/31/2020-11/8/2020
Destination: Orlando, Florida
Goal: Orlando Parks, Cape Canaveral
Distance: 961 Miles
Means of Travel: Flight
Potential Credits: 24
Day 5
The night before, two decisions were made. First off, Tim was joining us at Hollywood Studios this day. This caused us to get up at the asscrack of dawn to book our spot on Rise of the Resistance. Second...Ben and I skipped dinner so we woke up starving. Happy to see Biden only needed one swing state more and Pennsylvania was getting tighter and tighter, we headed out and went to McDonald's for a much-needed breakfast before heading to the last Disney park of the trip: Hollywood Studios!
Another park I had seen as a kid, albeit for a morning only as we spent the least time here. But also the one I know has grown and evolved the most since I was last here, so let's check it out!
I never gave the "city" midways in this park the credit they deserve. But having been around the country now and having seen LA, having seen New York City, I have a whole new appreciation for the mid-century US cities you see represented here. And Christmas in the fifties is one of my favorite holiday tropes so this killed the Holly Jolly game for me.
Toy Story Mania was first on our to do list, and it's honestly cute! I loved the Toy Story area how it shrinks you down to the size of a toy in Andy's backyard, they really paid good attention to detail translating your childhood mess into lights and buildings and other things you'd see on a midway. The ride itself about busted my shoulder with that stupid pull string you use to fire, not to mention Ben and Tim wiped the floor with me score-wise, but it was a cute little way to combine a dark ride and video games. Think I prefer Wonder Mountain's Guardian as far as this concept goes but this is fun too!
Alright, we're too old for toys, let's break out the big guns! Ladies and gentlemen, time for Tower of Terror!
I was never really a Twilight Zone person, we had actually watched a few episodes earlier on in the trip on Halloween and it's fun and all, but just way too dated and campy to take seriously. But it works perfectly with this ride. It feels exactly like an abandoned hotel in an aged part of LA. For its age the theming is on point, and I love the unpredictability of not knowing what drop cycle you're going to get.
I also love that this is the park's new icon, replacing the Mickey wizard hat. It's immersive, it's movie magic at its finest, and it's actually very thrilling and fun. The perfect ride to represent this park hands down!
We then did a historic and infamous coaster for me...my first looping roller coaster: Rock 'n' Roller Coaster! When I was 8 I was terrified at the prospect of riding this, I had never done a looping coaster before and had a full blown indecisive freakout in the queue about whether I wanted to ride it or not, one that my father to this day has not let me live down! And not only did I finally do it but this thing got me super fired up and excited, it was the highlight of the Disney 2003 trip. But 18 years later, after riding coasters with up to nine inversions, being hung upside down on two El Locos and Mystery Mine, having dove literally headfirst into Tatsu's pretzel loop, and acquiring a taste for classic rock when I was in college, I was confident I would have a different stance on this.
Did I have a different appreciation for it? Yes. Did I get off of it screaming "THAT WAS TOTALLY AMAZING!!!!" like I did 18 years ago? Maybe not as dramatic but the sentiment was there! This thing kicks ass! Little rough around the edges but a thousand times smoother than Flight of Fear is back at home! I still think it lost its crown as my favorite Disney coaster to Space Mountain simply for Space Mountain's ejector, but it's still a very close second. Diving and flipping around in the dark with cool light-up props and good music is fucking awesome!
We did the Cars show next, probably the Disney franchise I like more than the average person. I like machines and stuff and the original Cars is one of my favorite road trip movies ever, I love the message behind it. Plus we had a lunch time coming up, and I had a mini heart attack when we found out Rise briefly took a shit while we were waiting in line. But the show was fun, I loved the Lightning McQueen animatronic. It made me wish this park had gotten Cars Land instead.
Your table is ready! Up next was a meal that Ben had been hyping since we planned Hollywood Studios in the trip: Mama Melrose's! His family is of Italian-American descent so this was kind of my chance to experience a part of his heritage that he's told me about. And to make lunch even more relaxing, Rise went back up!
And if you know me, you know I love me some good Italian food and a beer! Got a Blue Moon and it really hit the spot on a hot Florida morning!
This might have been the best meal of the trip, honestly. It was a rigatoni with a cream sauce, shrimp, spinach, and sun dried tomatoes and it was absolutely delicious, a total step up from the food court fajitas from Magic Kingdom yesterday. It was a nice, cozy meal that was homey and perfect for Christmastime.
Our next ride was the new kid on the block: Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway. This had a line but it was cool seeing it. My family and I loved Great Movie Ride and I take it most of the queue hadn't been changed, but I knew it had a lot to live up to having replaced such a beloved ride in my eyes.
I had also never ridden a trackless dark ride, so seeing these things just autonomously driving themselves through the station on nothing but a bare concrete floor blew my mind. Nothing but a floor to guide this thing!
WOW!!!!! This ride is incredible! New favorite dark ride, easily! Seeing this thing snake around like a train and then just break apart and skirt around these scenes that look exactly like the inside of a cartoon screen blew my mind. The trackless technology here is cool but the other thing that blew my mind was the projection mapping that goes on here. That last scene where you're about to get crushed in a factory where the machines just fold up into trees and the room just transforms into a sunny day at the park? That's amazing! They literally turned these scenes into whatever their imagination wanted, from a pleasant Polynesian island having a volcano erupt to a really cool city scene where you enter Daisy Duck's dance studio and the vehicles waltz and conga with one another? My mind was absolutely blown.
But on the way out, Ben warned me, "if you like that, remember it's Rise of the Resistance junior..."
Is it a worthy replacement for Great Movie Ride? Yes. Being at the center of the Hollywood-themed park in the Chinese Palace Theater, whatever goes here should be good and it should represent what the park is all about. If using projection mapping to suck guests into a vintage Mickey Mouse short isn't the ultimate celebration of movie magic over the years, I don't know what is. Hats off to the Imagineers for this beautiful piece of art and engineering. They outdid themselves.
We did the Frozen show next, and I'm not gonna lie, it wasn't something I wanted to do initially. When I first saw Frozen, I loved it. Then it stuck around. And around. And when I worked at Walmart they looped it on the display TVs all night long. Over. And over. And over again. I grew so pissed off the second I heard a few notes of Let It Go, but Ben and Tim insisted the storytellers in this show were funny so I just kind of went along with it and chilled out in the air conditioning. Not gonna lie, I did get a few laughs out of it. It was the perfect way to kill time before heading back to Star Wars as the Rise boarding groups slowly went up.
I had landed in two planets far, far away on this trip. Once landing in Pandora in Animal Kingdom, once landing in Florida at MCO. And gonna be honest, I was never that huge into Star Wars once I grew out of it as a kid. I had no idea which movies I had and hadn't seen, and up until this trip I never saw any of the sequel trilogy. But doing my homework, as I had watched every Harry Potter I watched every Star Wars. Okay, every Star Wars from New Hope up through the sequels after Ben called me to yell at me for starting with Phantom Menace. And honestly, I thought the newer movies were the best of them, with my favorite being Force Awakens. So not quite the seasoned Star Wars nerd you'd expect to find here, but I did like the movies.
You saw my grand reveal video for Diagon Alley. We did the same thing in Pandora. You walk in, and out of the blue something massive and incredible appears and takes your breath away. Galaxy's Edge doesn't do that. You walk in, there's a few small blocky buildings, umbrellas, and a lot of trees. And it gradually gets more dramatic as you head back until...
There it is! The heartbeat of Galaxy's Edge is all around this huge plaza with the mountains and Millennium Falcon.
It's stunning. Like, it's big, rugged, and larger than life, just like the films.
Enough gawking at it, let's go fly this thing! It's been three weeks since I got in a fender bender, what can go wrong?
One would imagine that stepping aboard a spaceship would feel futuristic and dramatic, right? But this is in the timeline of the sequel trilogy, the same sequel trilogy where Millennium Falcon was sitting in a scrap heap and Rey called it garbage. Flying a spacecraft isn't enough for you? Let's fly a broken spacecraft!
The queue really feels like you're entering the same Millennium Falcon on the midway, there's even a gantry where the thin sheet metal floor buckles and pops as you step on it. This being said, I was not expecting the ops to be as sarcastic as they were about the condition of the ship. We were told to clap and cheer as sarcastically as possible for the family exiting before us after they just wrecked the hell out of it. So Tim took gunner, Ben and I took pilot, with Ben steering and me controlling elevation. There was definitely a lot of panicking, a lot of getting a feel for how hard it was to fly the damn thing, and a LOT of yelling between the three of us. But we successfully completed the mission and didn't damage the ship too much. I had fun, this is a great attraction simply for how sarcastic and deadpan it is, especially in an area themed after a fairly serious franchise.
Up next? After waiting an entire day and hearing for months from Ben how great this ride was, it was time for Rise of the Resistance!
Ben advised me to keep my camera down and get fully immersed in the experience. I was told the locals here love to get into it and act along with the theatrics. So I kept my camera down, snapped a few photos on my phone, but here goes my firsthand account as a First Order prisoner:
The entrance to Rise of the Resistance is inconspicuous, as a rebel hideout should be. You enter a preshow with a really cool Rey hologram (actually Pepper's Ghost) and a BB-8 animatronic that actually appears to roll around and everything. You're then taken outside and loaded into a parked ship awaiting transport. The single door closes and it feels comparable to riding a city bus in standing room, but you actually feel turbulence as the ship shifts around on course. However, a First Order Star Destroyer shows up and uses a tractor beam to pull you into the ship's bay. This is where the ride gets dramatic.
The door opens, revealing a spaceship bridge with a wide view of space, a huge TIE fighter, and an army of stormtroopers. A First Order soldier, complete with the scary fascist uniforms steps in and orders your group off the ship one by one. You don't go until they tell you to go. We were allowed to take photos, but at the end of the hall there was a section of queue where you were to be loaded into an interrogation cell. So Ben's over here like "oh crap oh crap oh crap!" whereas I'm just doing what I say so as not to get killed, "yes sir, no ma'am," the like. Not gonna lie, once I allowed myself to believe what was happening to me, it was kind of scary! I was being taken prisoner and Ben, Tim and I were about to be thrust into a holding cell to be interrogated. What would they do? The rack? The guillotine? The Chinese water torture? Make us listen to Taylor Swift on a loop?
So here we are in a sizable cell, standing on our assigned colored dot, no way out except the door where we came in. There's a conversation going on over head with Kylo Ren. Once that preshow is done, I see a little hand sanitizer dispenser in the corner and decide to kill time and kill COVID by washing up. So I stroll away like four feet and wave my hand under it to activate the pump...and RIGHT as it responds to this the wall has a giant molten hole melted in it and the resistance is rushing in to bust us out! We're rushed into these trackless dark ride vehicles, not unlike the ones used on Mickey and Minnie but with a droid on the front, and I'm scrambling to get my seatbelt on as it did that stupid thing where it stops up as you pull it. So Ben's screaming at me to hurry, I'm trying to hurry, and the First Order is supposedly after us. Click! I got it!
Ride began with the two vehicles in our group passing two empty droids, a standoff ensued until they were informed it was a prisoner transport. You then sneak around the corridors of the spaceship for a bit before being noticed by two stormtroopers that blast you as you back up. Now usually, you see something shot at you on a ride and it's just an effect in front of you. Wrong! Projection mapping, breakaway panels, and the use of rapidly-spinning LED blades was used to actually look like lasers were flying through the air and damaging the ship! I saw this and I legit ducked, that was not an effect I was prepared for! Next up you enter that famous tall room with the AT-ATs parked and enter the elevator, which lifts you up to eye level with the AT-ATs. Two stormtroopers blast you again as the vehicle backs up, again more effects, more sparks, and more projection mapping. This looks exactly like real, damaging lasers are being launched at you. You then sneak around a bit more before walking in on Kylo Ren who catches you and chases you. You hide behind a closed door...and then a freaking lightsaber comes out of the ceiling and cuts an arc right over your head, molten metal and everything! I had no idea how they did it until Ben told me after! From there it goes into another really cool scene: the gun bay. You have laser cannons that are blasting and sliding back from the recoil before moving back into positon. The trackless system is a lifesaver here as it slides and ducks in between these cannons as a space battle rages on outside. After one more convo with Kylo Ren you enter the escape pods you were looking for...and you actually feel it drop off the underside of the star destroyer! It then bounces and rolls around, avoiding crossfire, before crash landing inside the ruins of another spaceship. It then backs out, rounds a corner...and you're actually in the same spaceship you saw on the screen in the escape pod! I was blown away by this ride. So many convincing illusions, such great presentation, everything was just hit out of the park! "So what'd you think?" Ben asked me.
"I think you'd make a really bad prisoner," I told him. But he knew my thoughts on it. I was blown away. Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railroad had just been my favorite dark ride for less than six hours.
We then walked around Baatu as I got a blue milk (actually a sort of Blue Hawaiian made with rice milk, it was somewhat chunky but tasty). Not really one to photo dump but enjoy this:
Istanbul, Turkey is a major bucket list city for me and I know from Imagineering Story that this area took a lot of inspiration from Istanbul. The crowded marketplaces, the call to prayer echoing throughout the day, the towering domes of the mosques, the ancient stone buildings, all of that. This was very apparent in Galaxy's Edge, it perfectly captures that otherworldly feel I imagine you would get from being in a land so different from ours.
Heading from Baatu to Andy's backyard, we hit up Slinky Dog Dash next. We got stuck listening to the spiel over and over again moments before we got on as they had stopped to sanitize, but we got to ride it and that's what counts! Honestly, it's the weakest of the newer Mack coasters I've ridden but it's to be expected with what it is. It really is an oversized Wacky Worm with a pull back launch. It's cute, the theming is fun, but the ride itself has zero substance. Alien Swirling Saucers was also a walk-on while we were over there, that was fun. It felt like a newer, more updated version of those older Whip rides.
We had been watching the clock all day for this next moment and it did not disappoint! We all know I love me some space, specifically SpaceX, that will come later on this trip, but there was a SpaceX launch set to come from Cape Canaveral that night. So we set up shop, it's dark, and I have the livestream up. I had used the compass to see where it would be, I was watching it like a hawk, and right when they launched it on livestream we saw nothing...
...and then this little orange flare appears in the night sky over Hollywood Studios! I was at Disney World watching a SpaceX launch tear up the night sky over the Christmas lights! One of the coolest things I ever did! Sure it was just a flare that fizzled out when it hit MECO but it was absolutely incredible. Like, I teared up a little.
We had a bit of time left at the park, so we went back to Tower of Terror and did that again! I had never ridden it at night and I loved that view of it from the top all lit up...before we were dropped. That cycle was really cool because we got the standard drop, a full length drop, and then a half drop followed by another drop. A sort of fake out drop, if you will. I liked that much better than this morning.
Oooh we had time to snag one last ride on Mickey and Minnie before close! Nothing can stop us now!
...until the ride broke down. We're in Daisy's dance studio about to boogie tf out and she's just staring at us with those projected eyes, blinking occasionally. It was pretty uncanny, but Ben and Tim said it was normal. Eventually we waltzed and conga'd our way out of there and got off the ride Scott-free.
Like last night, we stuck around and snagged a few night photos. Like I said, I love a good old-fashioned mid-century retro Christmas and they nailed that vibe here. I did a fifties Christmas-themed section called Tinseltown in Planet Coaster, built in 2018 for an RMC called Frozen Timbers and to get a second coaster for 2020, and this is among the closest I ever felt to actually being in Tinseltown. This is Christmas in LA right here, walking around this really cool retro Hollywood street with all these cool shiny tinsel Christmas decorations everywhere alongside palm trees and warm weather. One of the best and most unique Christmas things I had ever seen out of a park. They even got the garlands over the street that I love!
Tim drove Ben and I back to Ben's car and we headed back to his apartment, grabbing Taco Bell on the way home.
Hollywood Studios definitely gets the "most improved park" award for 2020 in my book. The Toy Story stuff is fun, the Star Wars stuff is amazing, Runaway Railway blew me away, my two new favorite dark rides are at the same park, combine that with having grown into the park and the cool approach they have to Christmas and you have a park that really wowed me. Sure it isn't that cohesive, the themed areas don't always flow together the best, but that's a minor complaint when you look at the amazing thing Disney has on their hands. I didn't feel magic yesterday, but I felt magic today. Movie magic, through and through.
UP NEXT: Ben and I make a splash and a crash as I make a horrible mistake at the last park of the trip, plus RMC Connoisseurs gets the VIP treatment at Fun Spot with the new upgrades on White Lightning and I willingly get my ass drenched and love it!
