Dark Rides 101

And that includes everything from thrill rides, of course, which I do love, though I'm now of an age where I can only do a couple per day or else I risk having motion sickness all day long. It's very frustrating because I used to be the kid who would just jump on a throw ride over and over and over again. Can't do that anymore. But one of my favorite types of ride actually is the thrill ride. It's

the dark ride. Now, the definition of dark ride kind of depends upon the person who is defining it, so I'll give you my definition. To me, a dark ride is an indoor attraction in which you board some sort of vehicle. It could be a boat. It could actually float on a channel of water that winds its way through the attraction. It might be one of a series of vehicles mounted on a moving belt way, like the Omnimover system that you would find and say the Doom

Buggies of Disney's Haunted Mansion attraction. It could be a suspended vehicle where the rail is actually above you, like Disney's Peter Pan attraction. In fact, I think I'll probably be referencing Disney a bit in this episode because a lot of my own personal experience on dark rides relates to Disney World. And you ride through the experience and along the way you see stuff that is interesting. That's like your basic dark ride, right. These rides have served

different purposes throughout the years. Some of the early early dark rides gave young couples a chance to court one another during a time when public displays of affection were strictly taboo. We'll talk more about that in a moment, but generally speaking, they are all intended to tell some sort of story. Now, sometimes it's not a full narrative,

you know. There are plenty of dark rides that are in the haunted house genre that have no discernible, coherent story to speak about instead that just consist of a series of disconnected scenes of sometimes dubious terror inducing abilities, you know, like a skeleton leaning out at you or something. But sometimes you do get a full, although condensed story. And this should come as no surprise, because we humans,

we love our stories. This podcast is, when you boil it down, just a way for me to tell stories to you. The story could be about how college drop out launched a company that served as a very efficient way of parting wealthy fools with their money allow you know, paronos. Or it might be about the most interesting products that never actually materialized. We framed things in terms of story, and dark rides are a physical manifestation of that, or at least they can be. And of course we make

our own stories when we experience these rides. So I thought it might be fun to look back at the history of dark rides. Where did they come from? And how did they evolve over time? Well, let's start with the first question of where did they come from? And there's a simple answer for this, and then there's the more interesting, thorough and Jonathan style answer. At least it's

interesting to me. But the simple answers. You could say they come from Kennyworth, Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century, really the early twentieth century. But to really understand this, we have to go back a little bit further, all right, So way back in eighteen twenty five, the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company ordered a locomotive, a steam powered locomotive,

from Robert Stevenson and Company. So Robert Stevenson, in turn was son of George Stevenson, sometimes known as the father of railways. These guys were in England where steam technology was really at the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. The purpose of this particular locomotive, called the Locomotion Number one, was to serve as a passenger train, which would be

the first of its kind on a public railway. You know, they had had steam engines pulling carts that had people in them before, but this was the first time it was actually going to be on a public railway to become a conveyance of transportation. And this particular public railway was the Stockton and Darlington Railway. So the Locomotion Number one had its first official run on September twenty seventh, eighteen twenty five. It reportedly took about two hours to

travel a grand total of eight point seven miles. That's not exactly burning up the track, but it's faster than walking. Now, the locomotive would become a utilitarian way of transporting people from one place to another, but it also could be a way to take in the sites of the surrounding countryside. It was a method of transport that could be both practical and leisurely, and eventually that thought would evolve into

the philosophy behind various amusement rides. Some were more geared toward thrills, you know, having a locomotive pull you up a hill and then coast down the hill afterward, and some were meant to take riders past tableau of one sort or another. There were railways pleasure railways where they the people who operated the rail would even set up sort of a tableau for people to look at as they passed through different areas and you know, just give

them something to look at. That kind of thing. That actually became an attraction at various places, particularly in the UK. All right, so there was that that was part of what was going on in the nineteenth century that would lead to the development of dark rides, but there was something else that would also be important that was happening across the pond. Here in the United States, let's talk

about water powered saw mills. Now, maybe you've seen one of these in person, maybe you've seen, you know, footage of one, but if you haven't, just imagined. There's a wooden structure. Typically it's built alongside or even over a river or a significant stream. Often you're talking about a dammed waterway, so that there is a higher level of elevation where the water is being held back, and then you know the lower elevation beyond the dam, where water

is at a much lower level. And then you have this wooden structure that's built right there that has a large water wheel on one side of it, and usually you have a trough that carries water from the elevated part of the water area and allows it to drop

down over the top of the water wheel. You could have a water wheel that's just has the bottom making contact with the water itself, but the trough version was little more reliable, and so the water goes through the trough, it hits this water wheel, and you know, the water's just driven by gravity. You're not using like pumps or anything, and the water starts to turn this water wheel. It

begins to rotate the water wheel. The water wheel is connected to an axle that connects via gears and cogs and a piston to power the up and down reciprocating motion of a large saw. So think of like a hand saw, but much much much bigger, and it's connected to wooden structures that themselves are connected to these cogs and gears, and so as the water wheel turns, it

makes the saw go up and down. You would place lumber on a vice like platform that attached to a ratchet, so it could only go in one direction while the ratchet's engaged, and this platform, because it's also connected to this this system of gears and cogs, would push the lumber toward the saw, eventually making contact. The saw would start to cut through the lumber and it would go

through most of the length of a log. It would usually, you know, it would stop like a couple of inches away, because otherwise your vice like platform would get sawn in half too, and that wouldn't make it very useful. But

this ended up saving a lot of labor. You were making clever use of the natural elements of your area, and also things like gear ratios to create the right amount of force, and you didn't have to do all that backbreaking saw work yourself, just the last couple of inches per you know, board that you were making, So you're working smarter, not harder. You're letting the water take on the hard stuff. Really really clever, Like I recommend watching videos of it if you're interested in clever but

relatively simple mechanical systems. It's fascinating stuff. But water powered sawmills, you know, they became really popular in the United States. The state of Pennsylvania had a ton of them. But then as steam engine technology reached a point where it was fairly reliable and not entirely dangerous. Early steam engines were known to be quite dangerous because the boilers had a tendency to explode if too much steam pressure was

built up inside of them. While the steam powered sawmill began to make the water powered kind obsolete, and the steampowered versions could work even more efficiently than the water powered Once well, this meant that those water powered lumber mills became less useful, and many times they were just outright abandoned because you weren't going to get any business because of the steam powered lumber bills that were opening up.

In fact, entire towns would be abandoned because the towns had grown up around the lumber industry, and without the water mill of the neighborhood and operation, there really wasn't enough industry to support the town, so folks would move away. The water powered mills just became known as old mills because you know, they were the steam mills were the new ones. And this would bring us back to storytelling, which I'll explain after we come back from this quick break. Okay,

you've got these old mills, these abandoned old saw mills. Well, when we encounter a mystery, such as a town filled with empty houses and shops that are just slowly going to decay, our imaginations begin to fill in the gaps of our knowledge and we start to ask ourselves questions could have led to this, to create this abandoned town? What stories are lingering in those empty buildings? And words

like ghost or haunted start to pop up. The undeniably eerie environments inspire us to imagine specters and phantoms around every corner. Now, the truth is probably far more mundane. You know, people left because there was no more work at the lumbermill. But when all we have are the structures and whatever else was left behind, we start to

create spooky stories to explain stuff. Now, if you're the entrepreneurial sort, you might think, huh, folks, sure are interested in abandoned places, but it's usually not safe to explore such abandoned spots on your own. What if we could simulate those types of spaces and tap into that curiosity, the stuff that makes imagine as run wild, and to do so in a controlled and relatively safe environment. I bet folks would hand over a nickel to experience that

world's turn on such thoughts. Now, I'm not really sure when the very first Old Mill ride opened. I do not know for sure which ride was first. I do know that the one that is the oldest and is still in operation is actually called the Old Mill, and it opened all the way back in nineteen o one. It may not be the very first one, but it's

the oldest one still in operation. It has had several different names over its history, including one that deals with a certain kitty cat who hates Mondays and loves lasagna. Boy Howdy, did that ride get some terrible criticism, But these days it's back to what it used to be. It's known simply as the Old Mill's. Particular ride is located in Kennywood, Pennsylvania, not too far from Pittsburgh. Kennywood itself takes its name from a family who settled that

part of Pennsylvania, the Kenney family. Anthony Herron Kinney, who was born in eighteen thirty five, made his money in coal or possibly farming, or maybe both. Historical records aren't in full agreement on this point. His family had what I must imagine was some picturesque land that Anthony repurposed into a picnic ground, So the area became associated with leisure since shortly after the American Civil War. During the Civil War it was associated with battle because one was

fought near there. But skip to the late eighteen hundreds. Then this banker named Andrew Mellon, who came from a family of wealthy bankers, leased the picnic land on the Kenney estate to build what is called a trolley park. By the way, this Melon was one of the fellows who would eventually create what would become Carnegie Mellon University or Carnegie Mellon if you prefer I always pronounced it Carnegie because that's how Carnegie pronounced it. But Carnegie Melon.

So you might say, what the heck is a trolley park? What is this thing this guy made? Well, Companies that ran trolley lines would sometimes construct a destination at the end of the lines themselves in order to entice folks to come out and use the street cars, even on days when people weren't heading into work. So this was

a way to maximize fairs sales of tickets. You know, you build something interesting at the end of the line, and sure enough families are going to go and check it out, and you can still sell tickets even if it ain't a workday. In some ways, the famous Coney Island was a kind of trolley park, though Coney Island was also a seaside destination in its own right before all of that, but the amusements at Coney Island were

built as kind of a trolley park. So Andrew Mellon was looking for a way to make even more money from the local population of Pittsburgh, so he got the idea to build a trolley park on Kenny's property. Before the turn of the century, he had built a few attractions there. There was a dance hall, there was a carousel, a couple of other things. He used electricity there. Electricity was a pretty new thing in the United States, and so it was all lit up. It was a fancy

place to go. And the trolley park's name became kenney Wood. And in nineteen oh one we would get the dark Ride that is now the oldest one still in operation today. So the Old Mill Ride recreated those forbidden abandoned locations I was talking about earlier. The folks around Pittsburgh really familiar with sawmills. There were lots of abandoned ones in Pennsylvania. According to Graham Stanley Baker, who a research paper about dark rides, there was an average of one sawmill every

eighteen square kilometers in Pennsylvania. They were littering up the place and yet still mysterious. And so this ride would let folks get a taste of what it might be like to explore the ruins of an abandoned lumber town. This particular ride was a boat ride, one in which guests would take a seat on a small boat that would meander its way through a canal that took the riders past various scenes. By being clever with light sources, the ride creators could direct attention to specific sites and

keep other things in the dark. This gave the ride builders the chance to construct the story they wanted to tell and make sure that riders are directing their attention to specific elements. Now, the Old Mill style of ride proved popular, and it also was relatively easy to maintain. Right, you didn't have that many moving parts. You didn't have to worry about water quality and changing that out and filtering it out and cleaning it occasionally because otherwise, man

could that get nasty. But typically the mechanical parts consisted of a paddle wheel that would create the gentle current that would carry boats through the pathway. So you didn't have to have motors on any of the boats or anything. The water itself just had a current to it that would naturally push the boats through the path And so other trolley parks and later amusement parks began to make their own version of the Old Mill ride, themed to various things. A lot of them were themed to the

Old West. I've seen a ton of Old Mill ride footage, and it's a lot of stuff about drifting through like a Western landscape, like saloons and all that kind of stuff. Something else that would kind of merge with dark rides much much later on was called phantom rides. This one's interesting because the riders don't actually go anywhere. They're stationary. This type of attraction leveraged a new kind of art form,

that of cinema. See back when folks were still experimenting with film, before we would get stuff like an actual story, we got footage of all kinds of things you've probably seen cliche examples of early snippets of film, like a train going into a tunnel, for example, or coming toward the screen, and reportedly people in the theater panicked and ran because they felt the train was going to burst

through and crush them. Well, one thing that some early experimenters slash filmmakers did was they would strap a camera operator to the front of a vehicle like a train, and the camera operator would shoot footage as the vehicle moved through a landscape, so you kind of get this

first person view of passing through an area. And it was a way to virtually visit places that you might not ever get to go and real life kind of like me watching these YouTube videos so you could watch as the vista of say Switzerland, passed around you, and crowds really liked it. And one feller had this idea of how to take this basic concept and make it

even more immersive. That feller was William Keefe, who thought, if you built a fake railway car and you outfitted it with windows that looked out onto screens on all sides, you could project a panorama of images on those screens, they may look like the car was actually traveling through these landscapes. And if you know, you hired some folks who would stand on either side of the railway car out of sight, and then you rock the car a little bit, or maybe used a wind machine to blow

air at the passengers. It would really boost the illusion that they were actually traveling through those locations. But Keith didn't have the cash to build his idea himself. Then he met an influential man in Kansas City, Missouri, named George C. Hale. Hale had served as the fire chief for Kansas City. He had even participated in international competitions between different firefighting companies that had traveled in Europe. As a result of that, and he had accumulated a decent

amount of pocket change. So Keith tells Hale his idea and Hale agrees to back it, and they patented the idea in nineteen o four, and then a little bit later Hale would buy out Keith, and at the nineteen oh four Louisiana Purchase Exhibition or the Saint Louis Exhibition, Hale brought his idea and set it up and he called it Hale's Tours and Scenes of the World. A little subtitle on the poster informed you that trains would leave every ten minutes. Of course, these trains didn't go

anywhere themselves. They were stationary. They would just appear to go because of the screens. It was a simulation and really a dressed up film of trains traveling through different places. But it was a big hit. It was big enough for Hailed to make a whole bunch of these, like hundreds of them, for the United States and beyond. Like they became a popular attraction, not just in the US

but also in Europe. They were something of a novelty because after you experienced at once, you didn't have much reason to do it again. But you know, they generated a lot of first time foot traffic, virtually speaking early on, and elements of the experience would find their way into future dark rides. So while this particular example was short lived, elements of it would have ultimately come back and be

reincorporated into the dark ride experience. Now around here is also when we got a variation of the old Mill ride known as the Tunnel of Love. It's actually pretty remarkable how this particular concept has outlived the real thing. I mean, I'm sure there may be a few Tunnel of Love themed attractions out there, but I've never seen one in person, and I think it's a fairly safe bet that most of y'all I've never seen one either,

let alone been on one. I'm not saying none of you have, so don't at me about this, but I bet most of you have not. And yet the Tunnel of Love is iconic, right, I mean, if I say Tunnel of Love, people immediately have an image of what that means. It's something that's found its way into countless films, TV shows, cartoons, lots more. In fact, I think, let's see, the most recent version I saw was in season one

of Schmigadoon. There's a tunnel of love in that season, and the reason why it's iconic gets back to stories, all right. So what the heck was a Tunnel of Love? Generally, it was another boat ride, and it was one where boats had these little narrow benches, which meant that a pair of riders would need to be pretty snug with each other in order to fit. Moreover, it had lots

of dark sections in the ride. In some cases, the ride was intended to play up to the more romantical of motivations, with pleasant scenes that you would pass by. Other versions of the ride were designed to be spooky, haunted experiences and thus encourage couples to huddle closer for safety, and they served an important social purpose. They gave couples a bit of privacy where they could express some physical affection to one another out of sight of all the

lucky loose. In fact, this is a big deal. A guide on etiquette in America that was published in nineteen hundred declared that kissing in public was quote a reprehensible custom and should not be tolerated in good society end quote. And that would be the prevailing opinion in America for a few decades. So the Tunnel of love represented a safe space to avoid scandal and ignominy, and I'll still allow couples to mockingmit their smooch chums as it were,

that is, to smooch up a storm. Of course, couples would sometimes seek opportunities to steal a kiss or three on other types of dark rides. The Tunnel of Love might have been the most overt version for this activity, but really, when opportunity comes a knock in your lips, best be a lock in. And importantly, these rides also gave opportunity to people who didn't conform to society's concepts of gender and gender rules and allow them to express

affection without fear of putting themselves in harm's way. I'm sure their entire research papers about the role of dark rides with regard to the LGBTQ plus community. The Tunnel of Love type rides, the ones that were implicitly or explicitly for making out only enjoyed a brief moment in the sun or the dark attitudes in America about displays of public affection, at least between heterosexual couples with people

who identified as male and female. They would slowly change over time, and they were helped in large part by the burgeoning film industry, which turned out romance films at an alarming pace, and suddenly a behavior that was once seen as something that must absolutely never happen in front of other people under any circumstances was now being displayed on enormous screens across the United States. Plus folks did all sorts of wacky things in the process, like the

dainty lifting of a leg in mid smooch. Like the glamorization of kissing was a byproduct of this era as well, and so Hollywood really helped usher in an era in which folks could occasionally get away with giving a peck or two in public without immediately being labeled as the shame of the entire town, which was very progressive, but it did lead to the end of the tunnel of love, because if you didn't need a space to do this, and you could do it anywhere, why would you pay

money to go in a rinky boat in a dark tunnel. Okay, we got more to talk about with dark rides in just a moment, but first, let's take another quick break. Okay, let's get back to dark rides. In nineteen twenty nine, Leon S. Cassidy, who got involved in the entertainment biz when he first took a job as a piano player for movie houses that were showing silent films. Ended up saving up his money and formed a partnership with Marvin Rempfer, and together they filed a patent for an invention called

an amusement railway. This was a single rail system that many dark rides would use in the decades ahead and still in use today for a lot of dark rides. The patents summary includes the description quote The front portion of each car is guided by a wheel engaging a track, while the rear portion of said car is supported by wheels which run upon a floor which supports the track. The rear wheels being spaced from the track so that the rear end of the car may lash or otherwise

move transversely of the track end quote. So one wheel in front, which would be on a rail, so it's almost like a train wheel. It's got the indentation, so it is snug to the rail, and then two wheels in the back that would run along the floor on either side of the rail. One of those rear wheels would be free to move of the axle so that it can make really sharp turns, and the other one would be connected to the axle so that it just

moved in time with the axle itself. The amusement railway would conduct electricity, and this would provide the energy needed for an electric motor in the cars themselves to propel guests through the amusement. So rather than the old mill rides which used a current of water to push people through, and this one, the cars themselves would have a motor that would move them through the attraction. The motor would drive the rear wheel of the vehicle. The front wheel

again is connected to the rail itself. And further, the inventors intended such a track to be used within a dark ride, in particular because the patent says, quote preferably the pleasure ride portion of the track is within a darkened building, and a further object of the invention is to provide entrances and exit vestibules for said building through

which the track passes. Said vestibules being divided with car opened self closing doors so arranged that light is excluded from the building when a car is either entering or leaving end quote. So the dark ride part is important, so much so that. The patent even says the doors going in and now the building need to be self closing so that you don't let light into the dark room.

The illustrations on this patent include a simple layout for such a ride, with the rail following a circuitous curving path through the inside of a building, and it will

take the riders through various scenes. The type of ride became known as a pretzel ride because like a pretzel, the rail would appear to twist back on itself, though never crossing over itself because then you could have collisions and stuff, and Cassidy and Renfer created the Pretzel Amusement Ride Company, which would manufacture such rides for parks and traveling carnivals. This kind of ride had some obvious advantages

over old mill style dark rides. Namely, it was much easier to put them together because you didn't have to dig out canals or put together water tight troughs to hold a boat, or manage thousands of gallons of water. So it served as an alternative ride model that was more accessible to would be amusement park owners, and particularly

to traveling amusement parks or traveling carnivals. Another important invention in the dark ride history was the black light, which was not made specifically for dark rides, but it would become heavily used by dark rides. So a black light is a fluorescent bulb that emits ultraviolet light that when

it hits fluorescent materials, causes them to emit visible light. So, in brief, a fluorescent lamp has a bulb that holds a low pressure gas inside it, and it's typically a mixture of one of the noble asses along with some mercury vapor. When you run a current through the bulb, you have these little emitters inside the bulb that heat up, and when they get hot enough, they start to release electrons into the gas inside the bulb and this ionizes

the gas. It becomes a plasma. Plasma is an ionized gas, and the plasma begins to emit ultraviolet radiation, which we can't see directly, but we can see when it hits fluorescent material and makes it fluoresce light up. Now, you're typical fluorescent bulb used in places like offices has a coating along the inside of the bulb itself that actually absorbs this ultra violet radiation and then emits visible light.

Because otherwise we would just have black lights in our offices, and while that might make posters look real groovy and stuff, it would not be conducive to getting stuff done. You could also just use this approach to make a bulb that just amidst UV radiation, which is really what a black light is, although you might have black lights that block specific bands of UV radiation because you know, if

you're exposed to UV long enough, you get sunburnt. Pairing a black light with objects that are painted with fluorescent paint, you can create an effect where you have objects that are brightly lit in an otherwise pitch black environment. Because we cannot see ultra violet light, we don't see that the whole environment is lit up by that light, right, we can't see that, but we can see the stuff

that is reacting to the ultra violet light. And so black lights can illuminate vibrant, colorful objects in an otherwise pitch black environment. It's perfect or spooky horror themed attractions. A lot of horror themed dark rides use black lights to illuminate the various scares that are along the way. It's also used in less sinister stuff. Some of the

dark rides at Disney Parts still use this method. If you go in, you might notice that your socks, or your shirt, or your hat or whatever is glowing because there are black lights at play. William H. Biler got a patent for a black light invention back in nineteen thirty five. I'm not exactly sure when the first amusement parks started using black lights, but it's definitely a popular

technique in dark rights today. So I tried to find out what was one of the earliest or perhaps first dark right to use black lights, But turns out carneys are not the best historians. Another invention that would affect darkwright design was the chain lift. So Philip Hinkel gets the credit for using a chain lift to pull a roller coaster up the top of a lift hill, whereupon the roller coaster would then depend upon gravity to propel it to the end of its track. So a chain

lift is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a chain belt, so it's a really, really really big loop of heavy duty chain. It engages with a drive motor, which will cause the chain to rotate around some otherwise inert pulleys, and the chain will end up going the length of the lift hill. The roller coaster cars have a hook like latch on the underside of the car.

Thus latch is called a chain dog. So when the roller coaster car is moved up against the base of the lift hill, the chain dog catches on the chain itself, so the chain then pulls the roller coaster up along with it all the way to the top of the hill, whereupon the chain dog disengages with the chain and once the roller coaster is over the hill enough, then it goes the rest of the way through gravity. These days, also roller coasters have anti rollback devices. Essentially, these are

linear hatchets. They catch on to the track so that if the chain were to fail, then the roller coaster would not roll backward. It would just stop in place because the ratchet would not allow for backwards motion. That's what actually makes the clackety clack clack sound as you are on a roller coaster that's going up a chain lift. If you're hearing like a clack clack, high clack clack,

that's that linear ratchet, the anti rollback device. That's that's it's like a saw tooth and it's it's forward motion. It allows to click against the track itself, but it does not allow it to go backward. It's a basic ratchet operation there. Anyway, about half a century after Hinkle first used this for a roller coaster pretzel style ride, manufacturers began to make use of chain lifts themselves, which gave them the opportunity to make two story dark rides.

They could, you know, end up creating a longer ride experience in a smaller footprint sized building, which was great for traveling carnivals. Right. You just have a little chain lift hill there that lifts the car up to the second floor, and then you can let them navigate through that. They eventually come down a hill, they navigate through the first floor, and then they come to the offloading onloading section of the ride. It became very popular with traveling carnivals.

A lot of the haunted dark ride attractions I have seen at these carnivals are two story versions. Now, there's a ton more to say about dark rides, but I do want another piece to fall into place before I wrap this particular episode up, because I feel like I could do at least one more, probably a couple more episodes about dark rides, so we can kind of think of this as dark rides one on one. But the other piece I want to talk about it is actually

not a technological piece. It's the story. So a lot of dark rides had you stuff to look at, but most of the time it was a fairly disjointed experience.

In haunted House style attractions, it was some sort of monster or a ghost or gooley or a grizzly scene that you would see briefly, and then you would turn a corner and it would be a totally different one, and it wouldn't really necessarily follow what you just saw, like, it wouldn't be connected thematically necessarily other than generally gruesome or scary thing. But rarely did you have a full narrative.

Walt Disney would change that with Disneyland. Now, some of the rides in Disneyland definitely fall into the general dark ride category, and unlike their counterparts, they would try to tell a story. When Disneyland first opened in nineteen fifty five, it did so with a few such rides that were

available to guests. Snow White's Enchanted Wish, Peter Pan's Flight, and Mister Toad's Wild Ride were all verys of dark rides, and all three told condensed stories, though I should add the Mister Toad Ride included a pretty amazing deviation from the story, not just of The Wind and the Willows, but even the Disney version of The Wind and the Willows, because, as I recall, you end up going to Hell in that ride, and that was not in the movie, or

at least the Underworld. If not Hell, you go to the underworld at the end of Mister Toad's wild ride. That wasn't in the film, but it is in the ride, which makes it truly amazing. So really, I guess I should say Mister Toad was inspired by The Wind and the Willows, but not a condensed version of the Disney film adaptation, unlike Peter Pan and snow White. My point here is that Disneyland emphasized narrative in Dark Rides more

than what had come before it. So Disney himself understood the power of stories, and he used technology to bring people into story in ways that they otherwise could never do. It wasn't just about thrills or delighting the audience. It was about enveloping people within the tale itself. It actually reminds me of how classic Disney fairytale movies would begin with a book that would open and then we the viewer,

would be brought into the story through the book. Disney wanted to do the same thing with the park, but for real zies to a point anyway, some theme parks would attempt to mimic what Disney did, to varying degrees of success, one of which I got to experience. So here in Georgia at six Flags Over Georgia, once upon a time we had a ride called Tales of the Okefinoki.

It was sort of based on the work of Joel Chandler Harris's the man who shared the Uncle Remus Stories, which Disney would actually use as the basis for the film Song of the South. But Six Flags Over Georgia didn't exactly have the rights to this, so it was all kind of a vague reference to the Uncle Remus stories without it being too overtly Disney light because that would have brought probably some pretty serious litigation against the company.

And again the setting was the Okefinoki Swamps, so it's kind of a combo there. I have vague memories of this ride because I'm actually old enough to have gone on it when I was a kid, but it closed in nineteen eighty for a few reasons, the big one being that there was a fire that affected that attraction, but also it was just generally not the best designed ride, so they closed it down. They used the same track

in the same pathway. It's a boat ride, so use the exact same thing to house a second ride, which originally was called the Monster Plantation, but then after a refurbishment and some careful thought about how the word plantation has some pretty nasty connotations to it, it is now called the Monster Mansion. I mean, I'm still of the the rich opinion, so I still have issues with mansions, but not nearly the same as plantations. Well, today, dark

rides can be augmented with more high tech features. For example, the Amazing Adventures of Spider Man at Universal's Islands of Adventure in Orlando uses motion simulation and three D projections and three D glasses to create an immersive experience along with practical effects that are happening in the actual environment,

including fire effects. It's pretty darn neat so I will most likely revisit this particular topic and go more into the history and evolution of the dark ride, because I think there's so many cool stories like I think we can do almost an entire episode about the Omnimover, for example, technology that Disney developed that allows for a continuous operation of vehicles and greatly increases the ride capacity of an attraction, well at least if you really pack them in there,

like the doom Buggies of Haunted Mansion. For things like Peter Pan's flight, you're looking at a really long wait unless you get there early in the morning. Folks who are familiar with Disney know that all too well. But yeah, this is just a little hint of it. I'm sure I could also talk about things like animatronics as well

as other effects. There's some great effects that have been used to varying degrees of success in dark rides that involve creating walls of mist that you can project on and create almost like a holographic sort of experience, which is incredibly impressive when it works and really disappointing when it doesn't. So I will likely do more episodes in this range because I do really really love these kinds of rides. I love them for the technology, I love

them for the storytelling. I love being able to just inhabit a different world for a short while I love sharing that experience with loved ones. I have two nieces who just their reactions to these things are priceless. So to me, this is one of those technologies that, when it's done well, really ends up being an incredibly fun time.

Even if you were to be the cynical type and talk about how it's ultimately a way to sell tickets, Yes, sure, I get it, you have to have capitalism in there, otherwise who's going to pay for the upkeep of the attraction itself. But it doesn't take away from the enjoyment of the actual experience when you're in it, at least not in my opinion. So we'll come back to this.

We'll do more episodes about dark rides in the future, and we'll dive into some of the other technologies being used, things like augmented reality, three D projection, the animatronics, like I said, and even things like trackless ride systems, because there are those as well being used in dark rides, and all of them are fascinating, But they're all built on top of this basic idea of having a controlled environment where people can enter a world they otherwise could

not or should not go into, and how to really make those imaginations pop. Okay, that's it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you would like to reach out with suggestions for future episodes, please do so. You can do it on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW or you can reach out on the iHeartRadio app. It's free to download and free to use. You just put tech Stuff in the little search field. It'll pop over to the podcast page. You'll see a

little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave up to thirty seconds of voice message to me. Let me know what you would like to hear, and I'll talk to you again. Release soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.