Special Features Archives

June 2, 2022September 29, 2023

Secrets of the Resistance: Inside the Imagineering Tricks That Bring Disney’s Greatest Modern Dark Ride to Life

There’s never been an attraction anywhere on Earth quite like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance – nothing as massively scaled; nothing as committed to immersion; nothing as filled with inexplicable, impossible, and ingenious Imagineering moments. More than an E-Ticket, this next-generation experience is one-of-a-kind… and yet, it’s made possible entirely by the Imagineering landmarks that have come before.

Today, we’ll set off into Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance to explore nine of this ride’s most surprising moments and inexplicable surprises. So be warned: if you haven’t experienced this 21st century masterpiece – or if you don’t want its jaw-dropping effects spoiled by learning their inner workings – maybe instead make your way to another in-depth feature.

For those who are ready to set off from Batuu and take on the might of the First Order, hold on tight. To uncover the Secrets of the Resistance, we’ll walk through the Rise experience from beginning to end, describe how its greatest tricks work, and explore the Imagineering “ingredients” – the prototypes and precedents – that add up to make this once-in-a-lifetime ride possible.

Stories in the Extra Features and Special Features collections of Park Lore are all about connections – they’re the threads that interlace between the Lost Legends, Declassified Disasters, Modern Marvels, and Possibilitylands you’ll find in our Main Collections. In other words, these features are for people who really want to dig deep.

This article and hundreds more are available for Gold and Platinum Members who help support this ad-free, clickbait-free, quality-over-quantity collection with a monthly membership. Park Lore Members can access more than a hundred Member-exclusive articles, unlock rare concept art and construction photos in every story, stream audio across the site, tune into podcast exclusives, and receive an annual member card and merch in the mail!

If you choose to join Park Lore’s community of Gold and Platinum Members, you’ll instantly unlock this story (and of course, a lot more). You can learn more about joining and supporting Park Lore (and browse all the available Extras and Special Features) in the “Memberships & Perks” menu above. If you can’t afford a Pass, please contact us; we’ll make some magic happen.

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May 2, 2022November 28, 2022

The New Coaster Wars: Busch Gardens’ PANTHEON and IRON GWAZI as a Case Study on a Changing Coaster Era

A new era of the “Coaster Wars” is upon us… but it looks a whole lot different than the one you’re used to.

In the evolving industry of thrill rides, something has changed… With records broken and re-broken, ceilings shattered, and park lineups packed with giant coasters, the age of being the “biggest,” “fastest,” and “tallest” has turned out to be pretty unsustainable. Instead, a new model is emerging – one where parks compete not with each other, but with themselves, looking for custom, personality-packed rides that can be beautifully integrated into their parks existing collections, history, and legends…

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February 1, 2022November 28, 2022

Genie+ 101: Your Guide To Getting Your Magic and Money’s Worth at Each Walt Disney World Park (as of Fall 2022)

There are lots of incredible resources out there for folks looking to plan a Walt Disney World trip. Frankly, that’s far from our primary purpose at Park Lore! While I’ve assembled these guides as what I hope are helpful, fun, and accessible little walkthroughs that I’ll work to keep updated at least quarterly as policies, prices, and attractions change, consult Disney’s official channels and top-tier experts like Touring Plans for the most up-to-date details. For your information, these guides were last updated Fall 2022.

Magic ain’t gonna make itself. And that’s exactly what we’re here for. Sure, Park Lore doesn’t often dip into “trip planning,” but the “Year of the Genie” has cast a spell across us all, fundamentally changing what a Disney Parks trip looks like… and what it costs.

Launched on October 19, 2021, Disney World’s paid-for replacement for FastPass+ has arguably altered a whole lot about making the most of a Walt Disney World visit, and today, we want to offer our lived advice for how to get your magic (and money’s) worth from Disney’s controversial new “service.”

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October 19, 2021May 5, 2022

The Waiting Game: A Brief History of Queueing and The Many Lives of Lines at Disney Parks

What’s as classically-Disney as Mickey Mouse, Dole Whips, and spinning tea cups, but never shown on a Disney Parks commercial? Waiting in line.

From day one, waiting has been an essential (and for many, frustratingly memorable) component of any visit to Disneyland or Walt Disney World. And for nearly seventy years, generations of Disney’s engineers, experience designers, show writers, and executives have been trying to make guests’ waits shorter, more entertaining, more interactive, and – to the point of today’s tale – more managable.

In the great balance of guest experience, operations, and per capita spending, FastPass, FastPass+, Disney Genie+, and Lightning Lane have all taken swings at solving Disney’s supply-and-demand capacity dilemma. But altogether, Disney’s quest for the perfect virtual queue may still be ongoing, and the journey from standard queues to Genie+ is a wild ride in its own right… Today, we’ll dig into the history of waiting and explore how Disney’s 21st century solutions have created as many problems as they’ve solved.

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June 4, 2021July 10, 2021

AVENGERS: Custody War – Disney & Universal’s Co-Parenting Plans for MARVEL Super Heroes

“Avengers… Assemble!” Well… if only it were that easy.

Forget Thor and Loki; Wanda and Agatha; Iron Man and Thanos. When it comes to Marvel superheroes, one of the most cosmic clashes of all time isn’t been heroes and villains at all. Instead, it’s between two entertainment titans engaged in a decades-long war over control of Central Florida, now embroiled in an unlikely custody battle over a teenager from Brooklyn… with web-slinging powers.

For those outside theme park fandom, it’s one of the oddest bits of “fine print” in modern pop culture: that somehow, despite Disney’s $4 billion purchase of Marvel outright in 2009, the company is forbidden from using its own heroes at its flagship resort. To make matters worse, not only is Disney practically powerless in leveraging its pop-culture-dominating IP in its own theme parks, but those heroes have somehow been ceded to their comic-book-esque archnemesis just a few miles north.

So how can Universal hold Spider-Man hostage? What’s the legal asterisk that explains the slow drip of Marvel heroes into Disney Parks across the globe… including Florida? What does the future hold for Disney and Universal’s uneasy co-parenting of Marvel heroes in theme parks? Like all custody battles, it’s… complicated. So we may as well start at the beginning…

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February 27, 2021August 25, 2021

MyMagic Minus: The Rise and Fall of Disney’s Billion Dollar Pre-Planning MagicBand Empire

Standing in the sunset glow of Batuu… alone; gazing up at fireworks from a Main Street that’s… empty; a family perfectly sized to capture that Splash Mountain photo… with no pesky strangers in the log. Anyone who’s made the mistake of mentioning “Disney World” in earshot of a smart speaker or so much as Googled the possibility of a trip will quickly find their browser filled with these rosy images of a Disney Parks vacation. In the alternate reality Walt Disney World depicted there, there’s an unspoken guarantee: your family will find a Disney trip as effortlessly magical as all those ABC sitcom families in the ‘90s did.

Of course, anyone who’s actually been to Central Florida will tell you that those dreamy plans quickly evaporate upon arriving on Walt Disney World soil. There, reality checks you fast. Pathways surging with people; restaurant reservations sold out six months in advance; multi-hour queues in parks notoriously short on rides yet packed with E-Tickets; transportation, ticketing, theming, and infrastructure from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s butting up against one another in continuous conflict.

In the mid-2000s, record crowds (and record prices) were beginning to break the spell of “The Most Magical Place on Earth,” sullying Disney’s reputation for courtesy, efficiency, and show. MyMagic+ was the sleight of hand that would bring the magic back… An abstract-but-ambitious billion dollar undertaking, Disney World’s all-at-once modernization was meant to add ease and simplicity back into a visit; to make Disney World as frictionless as promised; to leave guests effortlessly traversing (and spending money) across Disney’s Central Florida campus. Did it work? Well…

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February 27, 2021May 1, 2021

Enchanted Tale: The 30 Year Wait for a “Beauty and the Beast” Ride and Its Unusual New Genre

“Book reports” – staples of middle school and, as it turns out, sometimes Disney Parks, too. In fact, you don’t have to be part of theme park fandom for long before you stumble across debate about “book report rides.” It’s a not-so-flattering description for an all-too-common subset of Disney dark rides that merely condense the 90-minute story you already know into a 90-second ride-through.

For better or worse, “book report rides” don’t deviate much from the story you (hopefully!) recall by heart. Beat-for-beat, song-by-song, note-for-note, these condensed attractions don’t draw from Disney’s pantheon of Imagineering-original characters, myths, or worlds, but instead rely on animated classics and nostalgia. Often, guests are cast as mere “observers,” passively gliding through three-dimensional recreations of the scenes they’ve seen a hundred times on screen.

So when Tokyo Disneyland announced a new Beauty and the Beast E-Ticket dark ride, there was little doubt among fans that it would be a “book report” ride… but at least it would be a well-deserved one! After all, as we explored in our in-depth, two-part Special Feature dive into the Disney Renaissance, Beauty and the Beast is often considered one of the greatest films of all time, and it’s weirdly underrepresented in Disney Parks! So if any timeless tale in Disney’s portfolio deserved an epic E-Ticket retelling, it would be Belle’s…

This in-depth article is just one entry in Park Lore’s one-of-a-kind Special Features collection, where we explore the threads that connect between rides, parks, and pop culture! From Imagineering’s secret Society of Explorers and Adventurers, to the history of Chuck E. Cheese; from Disney and Universal’s AVENGERS: “Custody War” to the two-part tale of animation’s rebirth in the generation-defining ’90s Disney Renaissance!

Special Features are typically available exclusively for those who support this evolving theme park history project with a monthly Membership. It’s been unlocked for a limited time, but if you enjoy what you read, consider becoming a Park Lore Member for as little as $2 / month!

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November 17, 2020December 12, 2023

THE DISNEY RENAISSANCE, Part II: The Stories of Disney’s Legendary ’90s Animation Collection

Before a warrior chose her path… Before a young lion became a king… Before a beauty tamed a beast… Before a street rat unleashed a genie… There was a little mermaid. And for a generation of ’80s and ’90s kids, there will never be a “cinematic universe” to rival the one that began on November 17, 1989: the “Disney Renaissance.”

In fact, few studios ever accomplish what Disney did in the ’90s when – for a full decade – the studio released an unbroken streak of box office blockbusters earning universal critical acclaim and literally defining a generation. The Disney Renaissance is today remembered as a high water mark for Disney (and for animation) that’s unlikely to ever be matched; a time when Disney’s heralded return to the world of fairy tales, fables, and folklore produced some of the most heart-wrenching, powerful, generation-defining, and timeless films ever.

In fairy tales, there are a few tried-and-true conventions you can count on… good triumphs over evil; villains get their comeuppance; wishes come true; love conquers death; a kiss breaks the spell… you know, real “happily ever after” stuff. But the Disney Renaissance could not have happened without the turmoil that came before. There is no dawn without the darkness before, so if you haven’t, be sure to jump back to our Disney Renaissance, Part I Special Feature – a sort of must-read prologue to the story.

After all, today, we’ll jump in right where we left off: just as a newly-assembled dream team of leaders, animators, storytellers, and songwriters prepared to take the biggest gamble in Disney’s recent history: to return to the animated fairy tale genre that Walt himself had created with Snow White fifty years earlier…

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November 17, 2020December 11, 2023

THE DISNEY RENAISSANCE, Part I: From “Once Upon a Time” to the Dark Ages of Animation

Es war einmal… Der var engang… Il était une fois… Había una vez… 很久很久以前 … Once upon a time… For a thousand years and in practically as many languages, those words have been passed like heirlooms from one generation to the next; centuries of invitations into worlds that never were but always will be. Tales of little mermaids, sleeping beauties, princesses and frogs, snow queens, and magic lamps have been told, retold, written, assembled, reimagined, and shared for a millennium. Today, though, these legends transcend their cross-cultural origins and take on their most iconic forms as part of one collection: Walt Disney Animation.

From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs through Frozen and beyond, Disney’s catalogue of fairytale adaptations haven’t just been childhood-defining cinematic classics; they’ve become the definitive versions of fables for generations. Like the stories they’re born from, Disney’s enchanting animated fables feel altogether timeless, even as they evolve to showcase new artistry, new talents, and new messages for new ages.

But among Disney’s pantheon of folktale-inspired favorites, there’s no single period that can match the ‘90s when – under cinematic new leadership, Disney could do no wrong. Releasing hit after hit after hit at the box office, the boundaries of animation were quite literally redrawn. It’s a tale tailor made for our Special Features collection, where we explore the interconnected stories that shape the themed entertainment industry, from the Rise of the Simulator to the Ride the Movies era; the massive mythology of S.E.A. to the “Pixarification” of Disney Parks.

And since all great tales begin with “Once Upon a Time,” know that this entry is merely the prologue… In it, we’ll trace the story of Disney animation from the origin of fairy tales to Walt’s “first princesses,” then onward through the “Dark Age” of Disney Animation and to the rising dawn that came after… However, it’s in our The Disney Renaissance, Part II Special Feature that we’ll finally arrive at the nine blockbuster hits of the ’90s and explore the princesses, parks, and pop culture they shaped… So settle in and let the story begin…

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September 2, 2020February 2, 2021

Editorial: Disney Parks Should Get Rid of FastPass. Hear Us Out With Our 7 Reasons Why.

NOTE: This Editorial feature was written before the COVID-19 pandemic saw Walt Disney World’s phased reopening in July 2020 with FastPass disabled. It’s being presented in its original form here, but consider how Walt Disney World’s virtual queue system now has the opportunity for a “hard reset.” Will FastPass come out the other end at all? There’s a lot that remains to be seen… but we sure hope Disney recognizes these seven factors that made FastPass a pretty frustrating experience…

There’s almost nothing that can compare with the endorphine-drenched sensation of sailing past a full queue for your favorite E-Ticket with a FastPass in hand (or in-app). Since 1999, Disney’s FastPass service has truly redefined a day at the parks for a generation of Disney fans. The problem is that the ways it’s changed your favorite park aren’t always for the better.

FastPass has become so deeply engrained in Disney Parks operations, it’s hard to imagine visiting a park without it. And yet, there’s an argument to be made that if FastPass flashed out of existence, a visit to the happiest place on Earth may be happier. I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out… Let’s start at the beginning to see why Disney created FastPass, then dissect the seven ways that FastPass might be making your day at Disney Parks worse…

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