17. Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin
Given that it was largely upstaged by the Disney Renaissance it sparked, it’s easy to forget that 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was one of the first sincere critical and commercial hits for a down-on-its-luck Disney in decades. Held up as evidence of Michael Eisner’s studio chops, the hybrid animation / live action film was directed by Back to the Future’s Robert Zemeckis and co-produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment – a Hollywood powerhouse production that garnered universal acclaim, three Academy Awards, and a whole lot of money. In the late ’80s, Roger Rabbit was practically an honorary member of the “Fab Five” – a character as beloved as Mickey himself.
Disneyland’s Toontown opened five years after the film. The land doesn’t look much like the gritty 1940s Los Angeles depicted in the detective caper. Instead, it looks like a ritzy, gated community suburb of Roger Rabbit’s Toontown where high-earning stars like Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Goofy might live. But Roger did leave his mark on Toontown when Car Toon Spin opened in 1994.
Rather than a mere “book report” that retells the movie, Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin sends guests on a new adventure into Toontown to uncover a ring of weasels smuggling Dip – an acetone-based liquid capable of dissolving otherwise-immortal toons. The ride’s “schtick” is that after running over a puddle of spilled Dip, guests vehicles (“Lenny the Cab”) gain the unique ability to spin with a flick of the steering wheel, like a Mad Tea Party teacup on rails. (The ride’s winding layout means that it’s nearly impossible to keep the cab facing forward, even if you try.)
Though it exists only at Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland, Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin is a cult classic, fan-favorite dark ride. It includes several noteworthy gags, including the spinning cars, an extended “falling” sequence, a cleverly-staged close encounter with a Dip sprayer, and a genuinely genius effect where Roger saves the day with a “Portable Hole,” creating a last-minute escape from the madness out of a solid wall. The ride also contributes to the California and Japan parks’ enviable dark ride counts.
18. Mystic Manor (Hong Kong Disneyland)
The E-Ticket culmination of Hong Kong Disneyland’s first multi-year growth spurt, the Modern Marvel: Mystic Manor is typically regarded as a magnum opus of 21st century Imagineering. That’s probably because it’s got just about everything that leaves Disney Parks enthusiasts with heart-eyes: it’s located in the most remote and least-visited Disney Resort (which helps maintain its mystique); it was among the first trackless dark rides; it’s an “IP-free” creation with original characters the likes of which American parks feel unlikely to ever see again, and it’s tied to the deep, fan-favorite, inter-park mythology of S.E.A.
Though it’s often called a spiritual sister of the Haunted Mansion, that’s doesn’t really paint the whole picture. Sure, both rides are spooky-but-silly musical “tours” of supernatural estates, but Mystic Manor is very much its own thing. Inside, guests board “Magneto-Electric Carriages” for a tour of Lord Henry Mystic’s prized collections of antiquities. It all goes wrong when his mischievous monkey, Albert, accidentally activates a magical music box, breathing life into the vaunted, vaulted collection. What follows is a madcap mystery adventure as guests follow the flowing music, causing such chaos that the house nearly tears itself apart before their very eyes.
Considering the esteem Mystic Manor is held in, it may be surprising to learn that the ride is relatively small! The showbuilding is only about 25,000 square feet – half the size of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion (eh hem… and small enough, by the way, to fit beautifully into our Ideal, Built-Out California Adventure…).
But the ride’s size really works to its advantage. Rather than expansive graveyards or grand ballrooms, the spaces you pass through on Mystic Manor really do feel like the compact, cluttered rooms you’d expect of the mansion you see outside. Projections, animatronics, simple gags, and inexplicable special effects deepen the ride well beyond its small physical scale. Plus, the carriages guests ride on pause in just about every room for a brief show scene, and their trackless movement sees them pivot, reverse, separate, and reorder themselves in a continuous ballet. It all adds up to a joyful sensation of truly being lost in the home, discovering something new around every corner.
If you want to uncover the mysteries that await within each of the mansion’s collections, we took a tour through the history of the Modern Marvel: Mystic Manor in that stand-alone feature…
19. Journey to the Center of the Earth
Until the modern wave of big budget expansions where Flight of Passage, Mystic Manor, Rise of the Resistance, and their generational cohorts shifted focus, most of the 21st century was spent with one attraction commonly regarded as the greatest modern Disney dark ride on Earth. Topping countless “Imagineering Bucket Lists” and singlehandedly inspiring a lot of flights to Japan, the Modern Marvel: Journey to the Center of the Earth stood then – and still stands now – as an icon of what Walt Disney Imagineering can do when given boundless resources and the creative freedom to think outside the “IP box.”
Journey to the Center of the Earth has everything going for it. To start with, it’s the unquestioned anchor attraction of Tokyo DisneySea – which is itself often regarded as the best theme park on Earth. It’s located in the park’s Mysterious Island – a jaw-dropping, 360-degree immersive land based on the science-fantasy novels of Jules Verne – and is housed inside the park’s icon: the 189-foot tall, fire-belching Mount Prometheus. It’s also a Verne inspired ride opened just as Magic Kingdom and Disneyland Paris were closing theirs.
It was really only Disney’s post-Wizarding-World, rushed return to innovation that gave Journey to the Center of the Earth serious competition in the genre (including, for example, many of the rides on this list). But for many, Journey remains a must-see peak of Imagineering, and an iconic masterpiece held up alongside so many of Disney’s 21st century best… and for good reason!
Riders technically enter the queue for the ride on the “middle” level, accessed via tunnels carved through the peak and lit only with excavation lamps and lava flows. The queue passes through the laboratories of Captain Nemo himself, recording that which has been unearthed on his subterranean voyages. Visitors eventually board deep-earth “Terravators.” And from there, a close look at our hand-drawn layout of Journey to the Center of the Earth reveals one of the ride’s cleverest tricks (and a significant behind-the-scenes spoiler for those who haven’t made the trek to Tokyo yet…)
From there, earth excavators carry guests through progressively deeper geologic environments – crystal caverns, bioluminescent forests, and – eventually – into an underground tremor that cuts off the planned route and sends guests into unexplored layers of the planet. Of course, the journey reaches its boiling point when guests disturb the dripping egg sacks of the “Lava Monster” – a pressure-forged, crustaceous, deep-earth arachnid who ranks among our Best Audio-Animatronics on Earth – and rapidly accelerate up through the Earth, bursting out of the side of Mount Prometheus for a high-speed ring around the caldera. (Visitors to the ride’s VIP lounge can watch the creature’s infamous attack from a private viewing hall.)
Another interesting fact revealed by the ride’s layout: the spur line on Level 3 doesn’t lead directly to a vehicle storage or maintenance area, but to an elevator that carries ride vehicles down to a storage and maintenance bay on the ride’s lowest level.
20. Radiator Springs Racers
On June 15, 2012, Disney California Adventure opened… again. More than 11 years after the park has initially debuted, the all-at-once, Grand Re-Dedication served as the official culmination of a five-year, billion-dollar, master-planned redesign meant to reimagine Disneyland’s second gate from the ground up. We walked through the park’s history and its grand rebirth in an epic, three-part Disney’s California Adventure feature that’s a must-read for Imagineering fans.
By far, the highlight of California Adventure’s reopening was Cars Land and its Modern Marvel: Radiator Springs Racers. Reportedly costing $200 million all on its own, the headlining attraction not only gave the park its own, sorely-needed, exclusive, must-see, “bucket list” E-Ticket, but it also anchored Disney’s first ever “Living Land” – using the same “plucked-from-the-screen” ethos as Universal’s Wizarding World. Packed with incredible Audio-Animatronics, jaw-dropping landscapes, and a free-wheeling ride system, the ride is certainly one of the best modern Disney rides on Earth.
By the numbers, Radiator Springs Racers must be among the biggest attractions Disney has ever designed. Between the 65,000 square foot showbuilding and the Ornament Valley landscape, the ride occupies nearly 6 acres – a pretty jaw-dropping number in Disneyland’s tiny parks. Riders first enjoy a drive through the desert before ducking into the caves of the Cadillac Range, kicking off a runaway adventure through Carburetor County.
While traveling through a neon-lit Radiator Springs, the ride path splits, sending every other car into Luigi’s or Ramone’s for fresh tires or a new paint job, respectively. With one ride track having become two, pairs of cars line up at the starting line, accelerating into a wild, winding race around the incredible rock formations of Cars Land. (During the high speed race, the ride reaches 40 miles per hour – a good clip, but not quite as fast as the 65 miles per hour reached by its sister, Test Track). The whole thing ends in the Tail Light Caverns, where the winner and loser rejoin with a parting message from Lightning and Mater: in the end, we’re all winners, because we made new friends.
21. Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance
In 1959, Walt Disney oversaw the simultaneous launch of the Submarine Voyage, Disneyland Monorail, and Matterhorn Bobsleds – the first “E-Tickets,” and not coincidentally, the starting place for this list. Sixty years later, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance arguably transcended the category for the first time. Perhaps best described as an ultra-E-Ticket (“U-Ticket”?), Rise of the Resistance is a staggeringly complex experience.
The attraction begins on Batuu – the remote, Outer Rim planet invented to be the setting of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge – just after the events of The Last Jedi. Tasked by Rey to join the Resistance in its battle against the fascist First Order, recruits are loaded onto an Intersystem Transport Shuttle (ITS) to rendezvous with General Organa on the Mid-Rim planet of Pacara. But en route, the ITS is intercepted by the nefarious General Hux, who pulls the ship aboard Kylo Ren’s Star Destroyer, the Finalizer.
Recruits are herded out of the ITS and into the Star Destroyer’s hangar, then subject to “interrogation” by First Order officers. It all comes to a head in an interrogation cell, where Resistance operatives make a risky play, breaking us out and loading us onto prisoner transports (piloted by on-board First Order R-5 droids reprogrammed by the Resistance) to get us to the ship’s Escape Pods and back to Batuu before the Resistance arrives to strike against the Finalizer. Phew.
Part of what gives Rise of the Resistance “U-Ticket” status is that it’s not really a ride so much as a multi-part attraction that includes no less than three separate ride systems. We dedicated an entire feature to uncovering the secrets of Rise and how it all works, with every jaw-dropping moment really being a “best-of” masterclass on Imagineering’s tricks culled from elsewhere and combined into one unimaginable package. There are just too many moments in the ride to walk through each one here, so we recommend zooming in on our hand-drawn layout, or jumping to our Secrets of the Resistance Special Feature…
Tap and expand our hand-drawn layout above to see all the details, or visit Park Lore’s Flickr for the full-sized, high-definition version… But as you trace riders’ journeys through the Finalizer and back to Batuu, it’s worth acknowledging that the scale of Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance – in setting, narrative, and ambition – is so breathtaking, that a layout like this one can lend context, but it can’t truly do the experience justice.
…And That’s Not All!
Though we’ve tried to collect some of the world’s most unbelievable, one-of-a-kind, headlining attractions here, make no mistake – our other two collections house their fair share of exceptional attractions, too!
In our THEN & NOW collection, you’ll find the layouts of Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, Frozen Ever After, Horizons, and more.
Plus, the HERE & THERE collection includes industry-changing E-Tickets like Space Mountain, Revenge of the Mummy, Soarin’, The Haunted Mansion, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, and more.
So make the jump to either feature to continue exploring hand-drawn ride layouts from around the globe! And remember that you can explore HD, full-sized versions of each of these layouts on Park Lore’s Flickr, where you can also download and license them for use in your own creative storytelling projects! Until then, I need to go ice my drawing hand.
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