JOURNEY TO ATLANTIS: The Seafaring Story of SeaWorld’s Would-Be Wonder and Waterlogged Adventure Ride

The Atlantis experiment

Journey to Atlantis was a test… a prototype, to see if Busch Entertainment could rally its creative forces and deal a competitive hand against Disney.

Could SeaWorld transform itself from an animal park into a theme park? Maybe, but Journey to Atlantis wasn’t the way to do it. Frazzled effects were the least of its problems. Though the ride designers had concocted a compelling story (our guardian seahorse protecting us against a siren’s song), they failed to tell the story in a comprehensible way.

Clearly meant to tell a nautical fable using Splash Mountain’s medium, Journey to Atlantis instead felt like an incoherent mess, with any semblance of story difficult to discern at best. Disconnected scenes feel as if they were designed by entirely different production companies, with wild variation in style, substance, lighting, and sound from scene-to-scene, and practically no apparent upkeep after opening.

The building’s exterior told a better story than the interior could – a design crime coincidentally committed by both SeaWorld’s Atlantis ride and Universal’s Atlantean companion Declassified Disaster: Poseidon’s Fury. And that’s a real shame.

Ultimately, the failings of Journey to Atlantis must’ve been obvious. It was clear that even if SeaWorld could become a theme park, it wouldn’t be a good enough one to take on Disney and Universal. Without the intellectual properties, in-house talent, and big corporate budgets of Orlando’s other parks, SeaWorld couldn’t keep up in an escalating arms race. Busch quickly diverted any future funds for the park not into dark rides, but nicely-decorated roller coasters.

Journey to Atlantis’ follow-up was Kraken, a sincerely stellar steel coaster built right next door to the dark ride in 2000. Kraken is beautiful, slithering and slaloming through subterranean caverns and beneath ornate, Atlantean marble plazas burst upward from the sea monster’s rage, and even casual observers would note that the added scenery and detailed queue (sending guests past the watery, translucent eggs of the creature) elevate the experience above a traditional amusement park.

Manta (2009) and Mako (2016) became the park’s other must-sees, giving SeaWorld a trio of steel coasters as its headliners (and each tying in a complementary animal exhibit in what’s become the new de facto model for the park). New management did attempt to go the dark ride route again with 2013’s Antarctica: Empire of the Penguin (part of a mini-land meant to follow the new “land” craze kicked off by Universal’s Wizarding World), but it, too, fell flat and probably deserves its own Declassified Disaster entry…

Atlantases arise

Still, Busch Entertainment and Mack (the ride’s engineer) were contracted, so two more Journeys to Atlantis were built for each of SeaWorld’s remaining parks. To see what SeaWorld’s executives thought of Orlando’s Journey to Atlantis, one needs only to examine the two Journeys to Atlantis that followed…

In 2004, SeaWorld San Diego opened their own, though any pretense of creating a Disney-quality ride was gone (above). Mostly an unabashed – if nicely decorated – water coaster, the ride contains a single “dark ride” style element: a concealed elevator lift hidden in a blue-domed, sandstone tower. You can watch a video of SeaWorld San Diego’s Journey to Atlantis here.

In 2007, the third SeaWorld in San Antonio opened a Journey to Atlantis, too. But in Texas, the ride lacks even a single show element. Instead, it’s a traditional shoot-the-chutes splashdown boat ride, albeit with two turntables that rotate the boat for a backwards camelback drop between the lift and the main splashdown. You can watch a video of SeaWorld San Antonio’s Journey to Atlantis here.

It seemed that SeaWorld had learned its lesson and backed away from any detail-heavy dark rides.

But just because they’d eliminated dark ride elements from later installations didn’t help the confusing – and increasingly poorly-maintained – Orlando ride. Given the company’s “school of hard knocks” realization that Disney-level detail wouldn’t be their forte, they more or less left Journey to Atlantis to wither as, years after year, special effects flickered out, lights dimmed, and audio tracks came unsynched. After decades with nothing more than routine refurbishments, the cracks were beginning to show. SeaWorld’s sunken city wasn’t going to fix itself. It needed to be addressed.

And here’s the part you won’t believe.

Mermaid-No-More

In early 2017, a most peculiar change came to SeaWorld Orlando’s Journey to Atlantis.

After an otherwise normally-scheduled winter refurbishment, the ride re-opened in March 2017 without much fanfare. But the first riders reported something unimaginable: any hint of a story was gone.

Allura and Hermes are entirely absent. Guests instead sail past remnants of the characters – often static figures – that remain unlit and unanimated. In fact, riders even sail beneath the enormous “Medusa” figure of Allura – now mostly-concealed by darkness – with the lift hill beyond lit with soothing blue. Allura’s piercing green eyes having gone dark.

Now, before you go thinking that online commentators simply caught the ride on a bad day post-refurbishment, consider what else changed: the musical score and sound effects that once narrated the emotional arc of the ride (since the characters and sets needed some help) disappeared. The ride is now scored by a continuous loop of soothing, ambiant, relaxing music (borrowed from the park’s closed cirque-style A’lure – Call of the Ocean show) with generic celebratory Greek music on any exterior parts. 

And don’t misunderstand – Journey to Atlantis’ story was a barely-comprehensible mish-mash of vignettes, vaguely describing a fight between good-and-evil anyway… But by outright removing the story rather than refining or rebuilding it, Journey to Atlantis now stands as one of the most disjointed, discombobulated, and downright dissatisfying rides in Orlando.

Think about this: Journey to Atlantis is now a plotless sight-seeing tour with a drop or two along the way. You can’t miss the unbelievable experience of the “plussed” Journey to Atlantis… Watch it here:

The change is strikingly equivalent to the destruction of a must-read Lost Legend: TOMB RAIDER – The Ride at Kings Island, as new management stripped it of its musical score and special effects, replacing them with generic audio loops, a purposefully missing plot, unplugged special effects, and a lot of darkness.

How deeply confusing and telling that – faced with a troublesome ride – SeaWorld opted to simply shut off the special effects, mute the story, and make it a leisurely sightseeing cruise with generic, gentle ocean tones… A strange and cataclysmic end to a gilded experience – a beautiful building with an undercooked experience inside; a half-attempt at meeting Disney without any attempt at follow-through; a thoughtful story lost to neglect and insufficient storytelling.

The saddest thing, though, is that Journey to Atlantis had such potential, and still does. A compelling location, the start of a satisfying story with commendable original characters, and a fantastic finale now squandered as one of the most passively thoughtless rides out there.

Disaster, Declassified

At least for now, it seems that SeaWorld doesn’t know what to do with its disastrous dud of a dark ride, and that’s heartbreaking. Why improve it if it’ll never beat Disney? Why remove it if it’s already there? A remnant of a bygone era and a victim of its own ambitions, Journey to Atlantis isn’t worth the walk through an empty queue… and that once-gleaming potential seems dimmer and dimmer.

Of course, that leaves armchair Imagineers and enthusiasts hard at work, imagining their own solutions to what plagues Journey to Atlantis and how the buried emotional epic of a battle between seahorse and siren could’ve been fixed. Tender loving care could’ve seen Atlantis relaunched as a 21st century dark ride with compelling characters, stunning special effects, and sincere magic. But given SeaWorld’s finances, perhaps it’s best to admit defeat and move on.

And that’s where you come in. In the comments below, let us know: Have you ridden this “Declassified Disaster?” Is Atlantis truly as sunk as we believe? Are you surprised by the changes SeaWorld made to try to curb the ride’s deterioration – simply turning off its special effects, muting its story, and making it a sightseeing cruise? What would you do to restore, rebuild, or entirely reimagine the tale of Atlantis, a golden seahorse, and an evil siren?