4. Mystical Music Dust
Attraction: Mystic Manor (Hong Kong Disneyland)
What Guests See: Mystic’s Music Box
How It Works: Video
When our tour of the Modern Marvel: Mystic Manor begins, our first stop is the Acquisitions & Cataloguing room, where the kindly Lord Henry Mystic and his mischievious monkey, Albert, await. The newest addition to their collection is a music box whose enchanted tunes are said to bring life to the lifeless – a silly superstition, of course! But when Albert can’t help but touch the gem-encrusted music box, it winds, opens, and releases its enchanted “music dust” – floating, effervescent, otherworldly glowing specs that somehow hover in mid-air over the box, then race off through the room, coating its antiquities and treasures.
The dust spreads throughout the mansion, floating over riders’ heads and touching artifacts throughout Mystic’s collection. The dust’s starring role, though, is in the big finale, where it pulses through the home and absolutely fills the Cataloguing room as it’s sucked back into the music box to set everything right. The dust is pulled overhead and spirals into the box. How does the magical dust float in mid-air, appearing in front of animatronics and scenery and even moving over riders’ heads?
5. Haunted Mansion Ballroom
Attraction: The Haunted Mansion (Disneyland Park, Magic Kingdom, Tokyo Disneyland) and Phantom Manor (Disneyland Paris)
What Riders See: An Otherwordly Dance
The first half of the Haunted Mansion is an eerie trip through a mansion of spooky settings. After Madame Leota’s seance, however, the spirits begin to materialize. Their big debut is in the magnificent ballroom scene, where guests in their Doom Buggies glide along a balcony overlooking a regal ballroom below. The dancers and diners seem to glow with a ghastly, otherworldly, translucent, see-through supernatural glow. They disappear and re-appear effortlessly as they dance across the ballroom floor.
How It Works: If you’re a hardcore Disney fan today, you probably remember being absolutely bamboozled by the Haunted Mansion ballroom as a kid. The trick seems impossible, or at least impossibly high-tech. In reality, it’s perhaps the oldest trick in the book, and one of the most well-known secrets of Disney Parks. The effect, known as Pepper’s Ghost, dates back to the 1500s. In the 500 years since its invention, the effect hasn’t changed much, and Disney didn’t do any major overhauls to the simple trick.
What you’re seeing are actually reflections of a ghostly dance (with animatronics on turntables located below the ride track, seen in the rare Passholder-exclusive photo above), reflecting off a massive sheet of glass that separates the Doom Buggies (and the animatronics below them) from the dance floor scenery. By turning lights on and off, the “ghosts” seem to disappear. It sounds a lot more confusing than it is, and once you get a grasp on how it happens, you can actually make some physical sense of the effect while riding.
You can see the same effect all over the dark ride world, just usually on a much smaller scale. Even at the Disneyland Resort, Pepper’s Ghost effects are used in Monsters Inc. Mike and Sully to the Rescue, and Pinocchio’s Daring Journey. It’s also what brings the “ghosts” to life aboard the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.
6. A new spin on an old tale
Attraction: HEX: The Legend of the Towers (Alton Towers)
What Riders See: Going For A Spin
HEX is an ingenious dark ride that re-tells a real local legend centered around Alton Tower’s historic eponymous estate. That local legend tells of a centuries-old curse that whenever a branch from a nearby oak tree would fall, a member of Earl of Shrewsbury’s family would die. It took only one instance of the curse being true for the Earl to chain up the tree’s branches in iron chains (all true – the tree can still be seen a few miles from the park). The ride picks up where the story left off, imagining a secret vault hidden in the real historic estate where the Earl experimented on the single fallen branch.
Stapped in to a massive theatre, a haunting orchestral score begins to reverberate as the theatre slowly swings forward, then back. The pace increases as the swing lurches in larger arcs, revealing more and more of the ancient estate chamber. Finally, the swing slowly turns all the way upside down revealing gnarled roots eating through the chamber’s floors, where the knotted tree begins to resemble a face. It’s a dizzying, discombobulating, and seemingly supernatural experience.
7. The Enchanted Mirror
Attraction: Enchanted Tales With Belle (Magic Kingdom)
Video: Another Portal
The Enchanted Tales With Belle attaction that opened as part of New Fantasyland in the Magic Kingdom in 2012 is the single surviving “play-and-greet” from a handful imagined for New Fantasyland. lkthrough and a show. The adventure begins in the quaint cottage of Maurice, Belle’s father. The cottage is littered with his many inventions and gadgets.
The queue becomes a guided tour when guests are invited into Maurice’s workshop to view the most incredible thing i the cottage: a magic mirror given to him by Belle and the Prince so that he can always visit them in the castle so many miles away in the forest. By repeating an incantation, the mirror begins to stretch as its reflective surface becomes an image of the castle. As the image flies through the castle’s turrets, its lands on a doorway. Somehow, the mirror becomes the doorway, splitting down the middle and swinging open into the castle. Guests step into the mirror doorway as it still crackles with green electrical energy.
How It Works: Lukcily, the Art of Engineering YouTube channel figured this one out for us. The effect is just really ridiculously cool and the epitome of the kind of "how'd they do that?" magic that makes a day at a Disney Park so memorable. In fact, we imagine quite a few kids – and perhaps even more parents – have laid in their hotel bed that night wondering how the mirror effect worked.[/su_spoiler[
Magic
Disney and Universal parks are all about the unimaginable. These effects give us a rare look into how that magic comes together. A fusion of engineering, art, storytelling, music, light, and sheer hardware, these sensational special effects require precision timing and must work continuously, all day, every day.
Let us know in the comments – what other astounding effects bamboozled you as a kid (or now)? Which effects can attractions not live without? Then, make the jump back to our Passholder Extras page to explore more!
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