For four years, the Superstar Limo showbuilding sat, closed and alone, in a distant corner of a desolate and derided theme park that was hemorrhaging money. But eventually, Disney did craft a plan. A new resort president named Matt Ouimet had extensive plans to bring Disneyland Resort back to life after the penny-pinching days of old, and Eisner’s replacement was coming on board. Superstar Limo, the Hollywood Pictures Backlot, and Disney’s California Adventure were about to get a multi-billion-dollar rebirth.
Monsters. Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue
Four years after Superstar Limo whisked its last guests into stardom, Monsters Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue! opened at Disney’s California Adventure on January 23, 2006. Skillfully reusing Superstar Limo’s queue, vehicles, track, layout, and even the basic layout of show scenes, the redressed ride is certainly not in Disney’s highest tier of dark ride masterpieces, but it is a lovely aside and a perfect fit for the park.
It’s also a rarity: a “classic” style dark ride based on Disney’s modern Pixar films that – but for its otherworldly setting – would feel at home among Fantasyland’s classics.
As in the 2001 film, we’re invited to Monstropolis – a bustling city where monsters of all shapes, sizes, colors, and configurations live, work, and play. The hub of activity is Monsters Inc. where the city’s burliest, hairiest, slimiest residents sneak into kids’ bedrooms via world-bridging closet doors, collecting scares to power the city. Despite their demeanor at work, monsters are terrified of humans, leading to quite the confusion when itty-bitty Boo the toddler finds her way into the factory and clings onto Sulley, legendary scarer.
Guests in line pass through the Monstropolis Transit Authority office (full of actually-enjoyable puns via transit timetables, newscasts, and vending machines) and board taxis for tours of the city. Of course, the in-cab monitors now spring to life with the breaking news that a human child has been spotted in town. “It picked me up with its mind powers and shook me like a dog!” twangs a multi-eyed resident.
It would be easy to write Monsters Inc. off as a “book report” dark ride (that most detested-by-fans format when we simply ride, scene-by-scene, through a three minute version of the 90-minute story we already know) but really; it’s more than that. Perhaps due to the constraints of the already-built show rooms, we see elements of the story of Monsters Inc. from a new point of view, making the ride refreshing and bright, and just different enough to let us relive our favorite characters in a new way. From the seaweed-smell in the sushi restaurant to the “massive” door warehouse, the ride is fun and unique.
Those who watch carefully will no doubt recognize some of Superstar Limo’s DNA living on – the cabs themselves, the monitor screen in each row, etc – as well as some clever re-uses of the old celebrity mannequin bodies. (In a few particualrly easy-to-spot Easter eggs, a karate-kicking Jackie Chan is still there, now just dressed in the Child Detection Agency’s bright yellow haz-mat suit, while the map-selling Drew Carey is now a CDA agent passing out “Wanted” posters of Boo.)
Best of all, the ride ends with a face-to-face encounter with the slug-like Roz, a convincingly curmudgeon Audio-Animatronic who’s digitally puppeted, meaning that she can and will interact with riders. “Hey, you, in the third row! Yeah, with the camera! Make sure you get my good side.”
Rebirths
In 2007, Disney did something unprecedented: they admitted defeat with Disney’s California Adventure. The “Band-Aid” style fix that had brought Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Monsters Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue, and “a bug’s land” to the park in its first years had boosted attendance a bit, but a hundred new one-off rides couldn’t fix that foundational problem with the park’s identity.
That would take some cash. And California Adventure got it. An unprecedented $1.2 billion transformation was announced. Over the course of five years, each of the park’s themed lands would be stripped to the rivets and rebuilt in the style of Disneyland: idealized, romanticized, reverent lands that told California’s stories through new, built-out settings like Buena Vista Street (Los Angeles in the 1920s), Grizzly Peak Airfield (a 1950s High Sierras air base), Paradise Pier, now a turn-of-the-century Victorian Boardwalk, and more.
Hollywood Pictures Backlot became Hollywood Land, swapping out its cheetah-print awnings and pun-filled window displays for sincere Golden Age details that masked the façade-style buildings. That said, Hollywood Land remained by far the weakest of the park’s lands with what amounted mostly to a change in name only; it was the only one of the park’s seven lands to not get a sincere floor-to-ceiling rebuild.
Maybe that’s because Disney had plans.
In 2017, the park’s Lost Legend: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror was swapped out in favor of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. While fans will forever debate the merits of axing one of the park’s few remaining Californian E-Tickets in favor of a “warehouse prison powerplant” that looms over the newly-reborn park, Imagineers explained that the Mision: BREAKOUT! tower would make much more sense in the context of a coming Marvel land.
Still, fans wondered when and where that Marvel land would appear…
Dominoes
In 2018, Disney filed for a massive infrastructure shift around the resort, anchored by a new deluxe hotel on the west side, in Downtown Disney.
The resort’s east side, meanwhile, would gain a new “Eastern Gateway” for the resort, including a much-needed new parking garage and the relocation of the resort’s bus loops. In so doing, the large parcel of land occupied by the existing bus loops (blue, below) would become available real estate…
And given that that new real estate resides adjacent to Hollywood Land (with the Superstar / Monsters building bordering against it, in pink below), California Adventure would suddenly find itself with an attractive expansion pad for a heroic addition… Insiders suggest that a super hero themed land was angled to overtake Hollywood Land in its entirety, or at least the “backlot” pocket containing Monsters Inc. and the park’s former Muppet*Vision theater.
Then the dominoes fell.
Hoteliers on Harbor Blvd. objected to Disney’s Eastern Gateway. Look at that plan above once more and you’ll see why… The new set-up would effectively eliminate the easy pedestrian crosswalk access to the parks that their guests had enjoyed for decades. Instead, pedestrians on Harbor Blvd. would be redirected a block south, then a block east, then a block north on auxiliary sidewalks and corridors alongside Disney’s new parking garage before passing through security and then a bridge over Harbor where the crosswalk had once been. The set-up appeared punative for guests staying off-property and threatened to hurt long-standing hotels on Harbor Blvd.
Meanwhile, the City of Anaheim objected to the new west side hotel that had anchored the infrastructure project, stating that Disney had improperly filed paperwork for the hotel and changed its location within the resort without approval.
Disney quietly cancelled both the Eastern Gateway project and the new Downtown Disney hotel. Instead, the Pixar Pals parking garage was built on the west side (next to the existing Mickey & Friends garage) and a single new DVC tower at the Disneyland Hotel would have to do. Of course, that also meant that the bus loops would remain, and Marvel needed a new home.
In 2020, Avengers Campus finally made its heroic debut, replacing not Hollywood Land, but “a bug’s land.” No doubt smaller in footprint than Imagineers had initially planned for the Hollywood plot, the Avengers Campus nonetheless features a Spider-Man web-slinging dark ride and gift shop, an Ant-Man brewery, and the towering Guardians prison looming over it all. While its scale may not be humongous, its mythology is, connecting to two other Avengers lands in Paris and Hong Kong with MCU-style scope.
Superstar Lessons
All that is to say that Monsters Inc. Mike & Sully to the Rescue got a second lease on life. Despite Disney’s plans to overwrite Hollywood Land with heroes, Monsters Inc. – and all the Superstar Limo DNA it carries with it – is still around. Of course, that also means Hollywood Land is a lone remnant of the original California Adventure. Though placemaking and props may have helped shed its paparazzi-fueled identity born of the ’90s, a Marvel takeover might’ve been the best chance of burying the park’s origins for good.
Fans still rally for the full “DCA 2.0” makeover that was announced during the park’s reimagining, but never materialized (above). However, in February 2020, VP of Disney California Adventure, Patrick Finnegan spoke to the OC Register to discuss the park’s future post-Avengers:
“As the Avengers are moving out, we’re certainly looking at, ‘OK, does something need to move in? Does it go back to where it was?’” Finnegan said of the Hollywood Land backlot. “It’s very much something that we’re talking about.”
Will the remains of Superstar Limo be bured for good? Maybe one day. Until then, the lesson remains:
Superstar Limo is often remembered as the worst Disney dark ride ever built, even by those who didn’t experience it themselves. Like the “original” California Adventure, there’s an aura of infamy around the ride. It far and away represented everything wrong with Disney’s take on California Adventure and, indeed, with the budget cuts, creative drought, and mismanagement that plagued the parks during this time.
While it was short-lived, it will always be remembered. And maybe that’s a good thing. The more we can capture these disastrous stories and nail down the bad decisions behind them, the better chance we have to stop them from happening again. We hope.
So let’s hear from you. Were you “lucky” enough to hitch a ride aboard Superstar Limo? Do you agree with the idea that this could be Disney’s “worst ride ever,” even among our collection of Declassified Disasters? What would your dream “Hollywood”-themed land look like? What attractions would be must-haves? And might California Adventure’s fate have been different if this one, single ride had been swapped out for Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster or Great Movie Ride as once imagined?
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