TechStuff Goes To Disneyland (Not Really)

in general. I'm a roller coaster fiend for example. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not claiming to be the biggest fan of Disney theme parks on our network because I sometimes think that Holly Fry actually lives at a Disney theme park. I mean I once went to Epcot down at Walt Disney World and I ran into Holly. And I didn't even know she was in Florida at the time. I mean I was there completely independently and

just ran into her in the World Showcase. So while I won't take first prize for the biggest theme park fan over at I Heeart Radio, I think I can at least hold my own anyway. My wife and I had plans to visit the Disney parks this year, but we've decided to hold off due to COVID nineteen. Now the parks have reopened, as I'm sure some of you know, and there are a lot of measures in place that

are intended to keep visitors and cast safe. Cast, by the way, is the word that Disney uses for employees, as the company treats the theme parks like they are stages, and every employee is in part a performer on that stage. Now, all that being said, personally, I worry about opening something as big as a theme park during a pandemic, even with limits on how many people can come into a park per day and mask man dates and temperature checks

and everything else. I particular really feel a lot of compassion for the cast, who run a higher risk of catching something because they could potentially encounter thousands of people every day that they are at work. So my wife and I have put our Disney plans on hold for the time being, but I figured I could take the opportunity to talk a bit about how some of the

ride systems work. So my wife and I have put our Disney plans on hold, but I figured I could take the opportunity to talk a bit about how some of the ride systems work. Now, you guys might know that I've done a few episodes kind of in this vein. In a classic episode of Tech Stuff, Chris Pallette and I broke down a special effect called Pepper's Ghost and

explained how Disney used that in the Haunted Mansion. So there will be some overlap here, and I'll talk about Pepper's Ghost again just briefly, but mostly I want to talk about some interesting ride systems associated with Disney, though some of them originated elsewhere. Now, when Disneyland opened on July seven teenth, nineteen fifty five, the list of attractions available to ride was rather modest. You had snow White

Scary Adventures. You had Peter Pan's Flight, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Storybook Land, Canal Boats, the Jungle Cruise, the Mad Tea Party, Autopia, and the King Arthur Carousel. Plus you had the river Boat and the Railroad. A little later in n the park would also introduce the Casey Junior Circus Train and Dumbo the Flying Elephant. To kind of set the stage, let's talk about Peter Pan's Flight. It's a type of

dark ride, and a dark ride takes place indoors. Passengers board a vehicle that moves through a series of scenes or tableau. Typically, these tell us story or follow a narrative arc. That's not always the case. Sometimes it's just a series of thematically related scenes. Like there are a lot of horror house seamed rides that you'll find at carnivals and amusement parks that don't really tell a story. They just have seen after scene of stuff jumping out

at you. Lighting and sound effects create a certain experience, and they grew out of stuff that were called mill rides. Old mill rides. Now, this is a ride in which boats would travel down a guide way through an indoor space, typically one that is pretty darn dark. And uh, they didn't necessarily have any kind of operator on the boat. They didn't need one because the pathway was set in a single direction. There wasn't really any way to get

off track. This is where we got the old Tunnel of Love rides famous in cartoons, and I don't think I've ever actually seen one, But in these rides, amorous couples would get on a self guided boat in the dark, and it was so that they could commence to necking, you know, or whatever. I never got to ride on one with somebody else, and I assume there's a very special kind of pity in the eyes of a ride operator who would see me getting on a Tunnel of

Love ride by myself. But the idea was that these rides created a socially acceptable reason for couples to be close and affectionate with one another, because the general perspective on affection was that should never ever be done in public back when these rides became popular. But the genius is credited for taking that concept and then evolving it into the dark ride format were the owners of an

amusement park in New Jersey. The park was called the Tumbling Damn Park d A M. Not that Tumbling Damn Park, and the owners were Marvin Ripfer and Leon Cassidy in n They wanted to build an old mill style ride, but they found that if they were to construct didn't maintain it, it would be prohibitively expensive. And that makes sense.

I mean, if your ride involves hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, keeping everything ship shape as it were, is going to really cost you, not just to make sure it's all watertight, but you know, to maintain the ride and the boats and make sure that you're not getting mold or wrought and all that kind of stuff. It's expensive, so instead they commissioned an indoor ride with cars kind of like bumper cars, and they would travel

down a track. The riders would not have control of the cars, so you wouldn't be able to steer it. The track itself was electrified, kind of like the electric rail on a subway. The cars had contacts that touched this electrified rail, and that way the track could provide power to the cars, which had electric motors on them to power the wheels. It was all pretty simple stuff,

but it was innovative. Legend has it that one rider said after being on this attraction that the ride was really herky jerky, and he felt like a pretzel afterward, and so the ride became known as the Pretzel Ride.

To spice things up, the owners added some effects in the ride, so when the car would hit specific points along the track, it would trip a switch that would provide power to whatever the effect was, which could be a light going off or you know, powering an actuator so that some sort of critter pops up from behind a barrier, typically a skeleton that was kind of like the go to And thus the basics of the dark

Ride were born. Now over the next couple of decades, dark rides popped up in amusement parks all around the world, mostly in the United States, most of them following that sort of spooky horror theme and having very little coherent story to them. But Disney would change that dramatically, and that brings us back to the dark rides of Disneyland.

There were several of those that I mentioned. Snow White was one Mr Toad Peter Pan, and if you've ever been on Peter Pan's Flight at while disney World in Orlando, you know that ride is on a system that is in continuous motion, and I'll be covering that kind of system later on this episode. But the Disneyland version was the type of ride that actually comes to a complete stop at the end of a ride cycle, and that allows the people who are writing it to get off

and new passengers to get onto the ride. Right. Operators would actually control this. They would you know, hit a button to send a vehicle on its way, and otherwise they would hold it until people were safely, you know, secured inside the vehicle. One of the cool things about the Peter Pan ride was that, unlike the others on this list, it's actually a suspended track ride, so the track is suspended above the passengers. The vehicle isn't sitting on a track, it's being it's hanging from a track.

So the rider's cars, those are pirates shipped themed in the Peter Pan ride, are hanging beneath this suspended track, and that allowed the rides designers or imagineers as Disney calls them, imaginative engineers to create sections where the car appears to soar over scenes like the City of London or never never Land. The original Disneyland attraction had nine of these ships on the track during a day, and I had a tenth one in reserve in case something

went wrong. Each of those ships was made of fiberglass and weighed about two fifty pounds or around a d and they were able to carry you know, two or maybe three people if the people were kind of smallish, and a tenth vehicle, like I said, would stand by in case one needed to be removed from the ride at any given point. There was a company called Cleveland tram Rail that actually built the track and the drive

devices for the ride vehicles. And it's interesting because this was a company that wasn't known for making amusement park rides. They built out systems for overhead cranes, cranes that would transport heavy materials above industrial sites, and these cranes would go on trolleys along tracks, and they were using a similar system for these these rides on Peter Pan's Flight. So the motorized trolley would sit on a girder rail, and the trolley had an electric motor that had one

whole horsepower to it. The wheels on the trolley would pinch the rail on either side, and thus you had what was called a friction drive. The wheels would have enough pressure on that rail and would provide the gripping power necessary for things like the vehicle to to go up an incline so they could climb an altitude, or to break so that it wouldn't just slide down a

downward slope out of control. That would be disastrous. The ships hung from the trolley by a pair of masts, and the connecting points on the trolley itself were hinged, so the ships could maintain a level position as it moved around the track relative to the ground, instead of swinging like out at a weird angle. But that swinging

bit became something of a problem. You know that that pivot meant that you could swing the ships left and right, and kids found that out and with a little wriggling started to cause them to swing all sorts of ways,

and that could sometimes cause the ride to stop. For example, in one case, someone was making one of these rides swing so hard that it swung out and hit the interior wall of the attraction, and a component on the ride got embedded in the dry wall of the interior wall, and so the whole thing got stuck and they had

to stop the ride. The track segments are electrical blocks, so you can think of the the entire ride being a series of electrical blocks, and each of those blocks have their own electrical circuit that supports one vehicle at a time. So as a ship moves from block one to block two, another ship can move into block one, and the ship that wasn't block two has moved into block three, and if you time it just right, that

allows for an uninterrupted trip from London to Neverland. The original Peter Pan ride at Disneyland was missing one important character among all those tableau that it moved through, and that character was Peter Pan himself. The reason for the emission was actually on purpose. The original imagineers thought of the ride as taking place from the perspective of Peter Pan, so the passengers were effectively taking on the role of Pan.

The problem was passengers didn't really get that, and so a lot of them walked away one or why Peter Pan was absent on his own ride. It would take nearly thirty years, but Disneyland's ride would eventually add Peter Pan into the experience in nineteen eighty three. The other versions of the ride, like the one at while Disney World, would sidestep that problem entirely. They built Peter Pan into

the ride from the very beginning. They would also install a different drive system to achieve the same sort of effects that were at the Disneyland ride, but without having to contend with the numerous maintenance problems that the tram rail system had in the original Disneyland version. And it was also a very loud system. Imagineer said that the original drive system on the Disneyland ride was was distractingly loud.

Another ride system that would find its way into a couple of different Disney attractions came from the Matter Horn, which was the first steel to roller coaster it opened back in nineteen fifty nine, or steel tubular coaster if you prefer so. It's housed in a replica of the matter Horn the Mountain in Switzerland, but it's at one one scale. And this actually would end up being another first. It was the first coaster housed inside an enclosed structure.

Most roller coasters are outdoors. And you might wonder why Disney would build a matter Horn themed attraction in the first place. Because I'm a Disney fan, or at least I think of myself as such, and I wondered why there was a matter Horn ride. But at the time, in nineteen fifty nine, Disney's movie studio was getting ready to release a live action film called Third Man on the Mountains set on and around the matter Horn. Now I had not heard of this film, so I guess

it didn't quite reach the level of instant classic. I'm sure there are many Disney fanatics out there who are very familiar with the movie. This one was a new one on me. Uh. Though. To be fair, when it comes to the live action films, particularly of the nineteen fifties and sixties, I lost track Man because that studio made a ton of them. However, the matter Horn Ride is still at the park today, even if people don't

remember the movie that inspired it. The coaster cars on the matter Horn are little bob sleds that whizz around the track actually tracks, because there are two intertwined tracks on the matter Horn Ride. The tubular track allows for a much smoother experience than traditional wooden rail based coasters.

The Bob sleds wheels could be made from a hard plastic material like you know, nylon, rather than metal, and the wheels would fit against the track, on top of the track, underneath the track, and on the sides of the track, on the tubes as it were, and that would anchor the coaster car to the track, allowing it to take really steep turns without any fears of the coaster flying off because it was really there. With those wheels and those various orientations, the original Bob sleds could

hold up to four people each. Now Bob Ger, an imagineer who really was sort of a car guy before he came to work with Disney, helped install the system for the matter Horn Bob sleds that would allow for more than one sled on the track at a time. The ride had track mounted wheels that can make contact with the bob sleds as they moved along the track. So these wheels are built into the track itself, and the wheels can either slow down a bob sled or

it can give them a boost. You know, if the wheel is turning really quickly and the bob sled rolls up to it, then the bob sled gets a push from these wheels, or if the wheels are moving very slowly, they can break b R a k E the bob sled and so Gert calls them booster breaks. With the booster breakes, the bob sled speeds could be controlled a bit better, and it was safe to have more than one bob sled on the same track at the same time.

That was another first. A lot of the roller coasters before that you only could allow one car to go on the track because otherwise you could be inviting disaster. But with the system, even if a car were stopped on part of the track, you could use the booster brakes to stop other bob sleds so that there aren't any collisions. The company that actually developed this technology was Ero Development. That was a company that partnered with Disney

on many of Disney's early rides. Walt Disney himself would inform ger Bob ger in nineteen sixty one that he was going to build out a much larger version of this an attraction for the World's Fair that was going to happen in a few years in nineteen sixty four. That particular event would also feature attractions like It's a

Small World and the Carousel of Progress. And this attraction was the Ford Magic Skyway, in which passengers would climb into what look like a forward car and ride along a track, and along that way they would see stuff like animatronic dinosaurs and the futuristic City on either end of the journey. It was essentially a time travel narrative. Some of those set pieces would later find their way into other attractions at Disney Parks. Now, the forward cars

of this ride weren't really cars. There were no motors in them. The engineers had stripped them down to be as lightweight as possible. They installed a flat plate on the underside of the chassis of these vehicles, and the track that the car would travel down had these booster brakes.

These wheels set up in the track every three feet or so, so the car frame would roll up to one of these sets of wheels, and those sets of wheels would give the car frame the push it needed to roll further down the track, or it would slow down the vehicle in order to make it come to a stop and let people off, depending on whatever was needed. The car models that were simulated included Lincoln's, Mercury's Falcons, Comets,

and a brand new sports car called the Mustang. This same propulsion system would later be used for the People Mover, an attraction in tomorrow Land at Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, and that lets people get a view of other stuff that's going on in Tomorrowland. Now, the Disneyland version of that attraction closed back in to make

way for an ill fated ride called Rocket Rods. I'm sure there are people in California wincing as I mentioned that, But the Walt Disney World version of the People Mover is still going strong, or at least it was the last time I was there, which was not long ago. Now, when we come back, will jump on a Doom Buggy and we'll talk about how those work in the Haunted Mansion.

But first, let's take a quick break. The next innovation I really want to talk about is called the omni mover, which is sort of the foundation for a ride system and found in rides like the Haunted Mansion. It was named by Bob Gurn, although he was not the only person to work on it. It was actually a group effort by numerous brilliant imagineers, and it was an approach to solving a crowd management problem, particularly for dark rides. So dark rides have a limited capacity. I mean every

ride does right. You only can fit so many people on a ride within a given amount of time. And traditional dark rides had vehicles that had to come to a stop for unloading and loading, and there had to be a great deal of space between vehicles to avoid collisions. And each vehicle can only carry a certain number of people, which is all dependent upon the specific ride, of course.

And if you look at how long it takes on average to unload and load a vehicle, you can factor in the number of guests who can ride a vehicle at any given time, count the total number of vehicles that are active on the ride, and how long the ride takes from start to finish, and you do a little math, you can come up with how many people can ride a specific attraction within a certain amount of time, such as an hour, and you can call this the

theoretical hourly ride capacity. Now, you know, in reality the number is going to be a little bit lower than the theoretical capacity because you know, stuff works in the real world, and then sometimes stuff doesn't work, so you're never gonna really hit that ideal number. On most days,

you'll just get, you know, somewhere in the range. But the dark rides at Disneyland, the stuff like Peter Pan and Mr. Toad and snow White, had capacities of around five hundred two maybe upwards of one thousand people per hour. That really depends upon which source you're looking at, but most sources actually put Peter Pan closer to around seven hundred fifty riders per hour. So if you have more than people in line ahead of you, you're gonna be waiting more than an hour to get on that ride.

And Peter Pan is one of those rides that tends to get super long lines, partly because it's also a ride that thematically doesn't have any scary parts in it, whereas a lot of dark rides did have scary parts, so it's very popular with kids. Plus the soaring thing is kind of fun anyway. What if you could design a ride so that, you know, barring certain circumstances, the vehicles would remain in motion and never come to a stop.

What if each vehicle on the ride was actually part of a larger moving system, so you can actually pack in tons of vehicles on this ride and you never have to worry about collisions because they're all moving or stopping all at the same time. They're they're not independent

of one another. What if you paired that system with a moving sidewalk so that guests could step on the sidewalk when they were getting ready to get on or get off the ride, and the sidewalks moving at the same speed as the ride vehicles are moving, so from the perspective of the ride vehicle, the sidewalk appears to be stationary, or if you want to reverse that, from the perspective of the sidewalk, the vehicles appeared to be stationary,

makes it easier to get on and off. All of this would be a brilliant approach to expediting guests getting to experience a ride. Bob Ger would work with another imagineer named John Hench to design the Omni Mover system, and technically they designed it for a different ride. It would only get used for the Haunted Mansion a little

later on. In fact, originally the Haunted Mansion was going to be a walk through attraction, but that has its own problems because people walk at different speeds, you can't really predict what the capacity of such an attraction is going to be. This ended up being a nice solution to that. So they had developed the Omni mover for a different ride, but famously, the Haunted Mansion would really make it well known. Generally speaking, think of the omni

move as a chain that makes a complete loop. So it's a loop of chain, and the links in this case are the vehicles, the cars, the doom buggies in the case of the Haunted Mansion. The whole chain moves as a unit around the course of a ride, and the cars will pass through each segment in turn. And because all the cars are linked together, they are all

either moving or they are all stopped. And it'll be a lot easier for me if I just use the Haunted Mansion as the specific example, because then I can refer to the ride vehicles as Doom Buggies, and let's face it, that's just playing cool. The Doom Buggy is a fiberglass ride vehicle that has a sort of clamshell like structure. So there's a seat. Passenger sit in the seat, and it curves up behind you and over you, so

it's like you're kind of cupped in this buggy. And there's a front panel with a safety bar and that rises up as if by magic. According to the narrator of the ride, the ghost Host, he is lowering the bar into place for you. Spoiler alert, he's not. But I'll explain how this works a little bit later. So when you walk up to the loading area for the actual Doom Buggies and the Haunted Mansion, you see a moving sidewalk that's traveling at the same speed as the

Doom Buggies. The Doom Buggies are pretty close to each other, and under the Buggies is a track consisting of a frame and rails. The track itself is three dimensional rather than a traditional two dimensional track. And it's gonna be a little challenging to talk about this without visual aids,

but I will try to do my best. Okay, So let's say you've got a length of track from the Haunted Mansion ride in front of you, and you're looking at it head on, like a cross section, so it's just from one end of the track you're looking down the length of it. If you were to look at this, you would look like a metal rectangle, but the longer sides would on the top and the bottom and the shorter sides are the actual size of the rectangle. And on the top side you would see that it's not

a complete line. There's actually a gap in the middle. That's the slot through which the Doom Buggies base travels. It's where the doom Buggie connects down to the chassis that goes down this track. A little more than halfway down the sides of this metal rectangle, you would see the pair of guide rails, one on either side, one on the left, one on the right. These are the rails that hold up the buggies. If you were thinking of the buggies like a railroad train, these would be

the railroad tracks. Now, each buggy is mounted on an H shaped chassis and that fits onto the track, so you can kind of think of the buggies as being sort of like office chairs that are on casters, except in this case, instead of being on casters where you can roll in any direction, you're mounted onto a track. You can only travel along that track. The wheels on

the buggy chassis can roll over these guide rails. If you were to pull the chassis out of the track, you would see that the chassis also has two other pairs of wheels in addition to those guide wheels, and those two pairs of wheels are on the top of the chassis, not not below it. So what are those four Well, one pair of those wheels are pitch orienting wheels.

If you go back to the description of the track, along that top section of the rectangle where the slot is on either side of the slot, you would see a T shaped rail on either side. One of those T shaped rails is the pitch orienting rail, and the wheels along the top of the chassis grip either side of that rail, and these wheels are connected to an arm that ultimately determines the pitch orientation of the buggy itself.

So as these wheels move along this rail, and as rail changes shape, it causes the buggy to change its pitch again. I could walk through a deeper explanation of how this actually works. But without visual aids, it's really hard to convey that information properly. I guess the simplest way to put it is just imagine that there are some pivots and levers connected to these wheels, so that a small change at the wheels results in a large change,

that being the pitch of the buggy itself. Now, these rails are designed in such a way so that when the buggies are either going up or going down a hill, the buggy itself maintains a more or less level orientation relative to the passengers and the ground below. With some exceptions. There is a steep hill in the Hot and mansioned ride where the buggies have to turn around so that you're kind of in a reclined seating position as you

go down this hill. It's just too steep to be able to uh to compensate for that with the pitch orientation rail. Now, the other T shaped rail, because remember there are two of them. One of them is the pitch orienting rail, the other one is the swivel orientation rail. And so the chassis has a pair of wheels that grip this rail as well, and these wheels connect to a gear assembly that controls the direction the buggy faces.

It can swivel the buggy in a specific direction, so as the wheels move along this rail, changes in that rail caused the buggy to swivel in specific directions, and by shaping that rail precisely, the ride designers could make sure that the passengers are facing the proper direction for any specific parts of the ride. So to recap the guide rails and the guide wheels are what allowed the

buggies to travel along the pathway of this ride. The pitch orienting rail and wheels maintain the buggies level to a degree, and the swivel rail and wheels determine which direction the buggy is facing at any given moment. These are all purely mechanical systems. There are no electronics here, so there's no circuitry. It's just physics based upon the shape of these rails and the wheels against those rails.

It's pretty cool now. The chassiss are linked together and there are one hundred thirty one of them at the Disneyland attraction, so Buggy number one is linked behind Buggy one and in front of buggy number two and so on all the way around, making a full chain all the way through the ride, and they all move together, but they can swivel and pivot independently depending on where they are along the track. So that's safety bar I mentioned.

How does that move into place, Well, it's not ghostly magic. This part of the clamshell design of the buggy is mounted on a pivot arm, so it can move up or it can move down, and the arm has tensions springs on it, and those springs the way the tension is it normally holds the safety bar in the lowered or closed buggy position, So when there is no other force acting on this buggy, it's naturally closed because those

springs are holding it closed. But mounted on the end of this pivot arm are stabilizing wheels, which through most of the ride aren't making contact with anything. They are these tiny wheels that are on the back of the doom buggies and they're usually just up in the air, not touching anything, so that bar stays in place because

the springs are holding it because of the tension. But in the loading and unloading zones there's a special stabilizing rail, a guide rail mounted at a level that will engage those wheels. Uh. This guide rails actually higher up than the track that the chassis is traveling along because that actually extends down beneath the floor level quite a bit. The buggy moves along the track, and when the wheels make contact with this stabilization rail, it forces the pivot

arm to you know, pivot. It strains against the springs, and the springs expand as the wheels are pressed up by this immovable rail, and thus the bar rises up, meaning the buggy actually opens. The clamshell opens up. As long as those wheels are pressed against a rail like that, the door remains open. But as it starts to leave the loading area, that rail starts to slope away, and when it slopes away, the wheels gradually lose contact with the rail and the spring is able to contract and

it forces the bar back into the lowered or closed position. Again. It's a simple, elegant system, purely mechanical, and it means the body of the buggy itself doesn't need any electronic parts except for the speaker system. The sound system that's built into the buggies is electronic, but all the parts that are about moving are purely mechanical as for how the cars move. Again, that's built into the track. It's not part of the doom buggies. It's in the track.

On the underside of the chassis is a grip plate. This is a vertically aligned metal plate, so it's like a shark fin, except it sticking out the bottom of the chassis, not the top, and the grip plate comes into contact with rubber belts mounted on drive motors on the bottom of the track. So think of two wheels with rubber belts on them. They're essentially pressing against each other and they're spinning really fast, and as the plate comes in between them, the belts grip the plate and

push it through. That's exactly how this drive motor is working. So it can make the entire ride move, or it can bring things to a stop. These drive motors are only found on straight segments of track because when the vehicles are going around a curve, they wouldn't align that the grip plate would not come into alignment with those rubber belts. So if you're ever in a part of the ride that's curving, you are not in a section

that is being powered at that moment. So when you're going around Madame Leota, for example, during the seance sequence, you know that it's other sections of the ride that are actually getting the power to move everything at that point. Now, as I mentioned, there are speakers in the doom buggies.

These are electronic obviously, and they play the audio for the ride, and those audio cues are are lined up with whatever area you're going through in the Haunted Mansions, So according to the relative position of your buggy, you hear a certain audio track. If you've ever been on the ride when it has come to a stop, as sometimes can happen, especially like let's say someone with mobility issues needs to get on or off the ride, they may have to stop it temporarily um or if there's

a malfunction in the ride, it might stop temporarily. But that means you'll be stuck in a stationary position and you'll hear the same audio loop for a while. I always seem to get stuck on that hill leading down to the graveyard scene when you're in that reclined position, So I hear a lot of grim grinning ghosts whenever I ride this ride. The fact that there are more than one thirty doom buggies compared to the nine pirate ships on peter Pan's flight, and that these buggies never,

for the most part, stop moving. A lot more people can experience the Haunted Mansion in an hour than peter Pan's flight. Even though the Haunted Mansion is a longer ride, it's more than twice as long as peter Pan's flight. Peter Pan's plays less than three minutes long. Haunted Mansion is more than seven minutes long. So the theoretical hourly capacity for the Haunted Mansion is more than three thousand

guests an hour, and Peter Pan is closer to eight hundred. Now, I mentioned Pepper's Ghost at the top of this episode, so before I move on to other ride systems, I thought I would explain what that is really quickly. This is an old illusion and it pre dates Disney by a long stretch. In fact, there's an early historical account of this that dates all the way back to four

and it's all based off of light and reflection. It's used primarily uh And in the Haunted Mansion in the ballroom party sequence, where a bunch of ghosts are gathered for a swinging good wake. So let's say that you've got a background upon which you want ghostly images to appear like a physical background. People are actually gonna be able to look at this thing. Well. With the haunted mansion,

this would be the large banquet hall. And in front of this background you have a transparent pain of glass or plastic, and it's at a forty five degree angle with respect to the audience's point of view, and out of sight of the audience, off to some side or the other, you have a subject, in this case, an animatronic figure that is very well lit, but the audience

can't see it directly. However, they can see the reflection of these well lit figures on that transparent pane of glass, And because the glass is transparent, the audience can actually see through the figures themselves. They are ghosts. You get yourself some ghosts in that sequence. It's pretty darn cool. So in that ballroom scene, you've got figures that are in a plane above and below the doom buggies because the actual figures themselves are above and below the track.

Now you don't see a reflection of yourself in that sequence, because the doom buggies are not brightly lit. Whereas the animatronic figures above and below you are lit very very well, and just by dimming the lights around those animatronics, you can create the effect of ghosts disappearing as their reflections fade. So the effect is that you're seeing ghosts flying near the ceiling or around the banquet table, when in reality they are animatronic figures that are actually above and below

your doom Buggy spooky. And this sort of effect was possible because the ride designers could determine which way the audience would be facing. Alright, I got a little bit more to say about ride systems before we wrap this up, but first let's take another quick break. The omni mover system has been used in several rides at Disney, though according to Bob Gurr, not all the rides that are

in constant motion are technically omni mover rides. For example, Girl says that the ride system of Spaceship Earth is not an omni mover, despite the fact that on casual glance it certainly looks like one, and in fact, a lot of sources referred to it as an omni mover ride. It's the type of ride that is in constant motion there's a moving sidewalk for you to get on and

get off of the ride. I don't know what it is specifically that sets it apart, but Girr has said, quote it was a one of a kind conveyor, totally unlike and sharing no parts with an omni mover end quote. And he also said he opposed the ride system so much during the development cycle the supervisors moved him to another ride rather than have to deal with him anymore.

But I don't know what the actual differences are. Anyway, rather than try and suss out how and why Spaceship Earth is different, I figure I would talk about a totally separate ride system that was pioneered over at Disneyland. That is the Enhanced Motion Vehicle or e m V. This system is the one that powers rides like India Jones Adventure, the Temple of the Forbidden Eye in Disneyland. Uh, There's Dinosaur in Disney's Animal Kingdom, and there's the Crystal

Skull ride at Tokyo Disneyland. These rides at passengers get aboard a vehicle that looks a lot like a jeep, although it's a jeep that can see twelve people in three rows. I understand that if you were to ride with James Williams of Fun House Fame, you'd best allow him to be in the driver's seat, because he takes

that extremely seriously. Passengers experience a wild ride as if the vehicle is moving along rugged terrain, taking real sharp turns and pitching and rumbling and dipping like crazy, all the while the actual ride vehicle is traveling along a nice, flat, simple surface. Now the secret here is that you can think of the ride vehicle as having three distinct parts.

The part that you're sitting in, the passenger part is called the motion base, and is the bit that gets pitched around during the ride, and it simulates a much more dramatic scenario than what is actually happening. Then you've got the ride vehicle itself, which consists of the hydraulics and the pump, and the computer control systems, the motor, the wheels, essentially all the stuff to make the actual motions and to propel the vehicle. The third part is

out of sight. It's beneath the floor of the attraction. There's again a slot in the floor that part of the ride extends down into. And this third part are they're well, they're called the bogies. Uh. Sometimes people would call them trucks. It really depends on where you're from. Bogeis tends to be British North America. People often use the word truck to describe this, but it's to describe a structure that typically has wheels and axles attached through

bearings and intended for use on rail systems. So the base of a railroad car the wheels that that whole structure holds the wheel and axle. That's a bogeye. Now, in the case of the rides that I mentioned, the tracks and bogies are again below the surface of the floor, so you can't see them as you ride the ride. The ride vehicle connects to the bogies via posts that extend up through that slot on the floor. It's not too different from how the omnimover connects, although the actual

propulsion system is very different from the Omni mover. In fact, you could argue in a way it's sort of the opposite of the Omni mover, as each vehicle on this system is independent of all the others, as opposed to moving in concert with them. So each vehicle has two bogies. One is in the front and one is in the rear, and power flows through the track through the bogies, providing electrical power to the vehicles. That four volts and two

hundred amps. That's impressive. The bogies are also in charge of steering the front wheels. They manipulate the front wheels of the vehicle mechanically. Um It does this by following a tubular guide rail under the floor. The rear wheels are also steerable, but those are controlled by actuators aboard the actual ride vehicle itself, not the mechanical system that's being used by the front wheels and the bogies. The

top half of the vehicle is really a doozy. It's mounted on actuators that can change the pitch, roll, and yaw of that section, just as a motion simulator would. So you can think of it as like taking a motion simulator off of its stationary pedestal and then mounting it to the chassis of an electric car. That's what one of these things actually is. The effect is that the passengers are feeling like they're on board and out of control vehicle, but in reality it's it's very much

controlled and you can simulate all sorts of stuff. For example, to simulate rapid acceleration, the actuators can elevate the front of the passenger compartment, so the car starts to move forward. The actuators increase the incline of the passenger compartment and that presses you back in your seat, kind of the same way as if you accelerated really quickly. It's all just the basic simulator tricks, but added to a moving platform.

If you were to remove the actuators and the motion platform, you would see these simple electric cars following a curvy path, and they might stop or slow down occasionally, but otherwise they would be pretty boring to watch. It's all those simulator tricks that make this an exciting ride. The motion platform is mounted on three actuators powered by the hydraulic pump in the North American rides. In Japan, it's actually

an electro magnetic system. Two of those actuators are in the front of the vehicle, one is on the left side and one is on the right side. The third actuator is in the rear center of the vehicle. Individually, each actuator can change pitch or roll, but collectively they can move along all three thrust planes X, Y, and Z and all three rotational axes, so pitch, roll, and

y'all you get six degrees of motion. The North American ride vehicles have a hydraulic pump driven by a fifty horsepower electric motor, which means that the electric motor for one of these vehicles is fifty times more powerful than the electric motor on one of the Peter Pan's flight ships. I just thought that was kind of fun. It requires about thirty five gallons of hydraulic fluid per vehicle, which means that when a hydraulic fluid line breaks, and it

does happen, it causes a huge mess. That is the reason why the Japanese rides don't use hydraulic systems. They have very strict environmental laws in Japan, and that's why they had to go with an electromagnetic system rather than a hydraulic system for those actuators. Uh. Now, there's a lot of interesting things about hydraulic systems, but this episode is running long already, so I'm just gonna skip that and go straight to talking about the computer system that

controls these actuators. It makes the motion platform move in specific ways that fit the narrative of the story, Like it wouldn't make sense for the ride to simulate slowing down when it's supposed to be speeding up. So the computer system has that all coordinated, but it also has some quirks built into it. So according to imagineers, they programmed each vehicle to have its own kind of personality. So one vehicle might be quote unquote afraid of loud noises.

So if the vehicle gets to a part of the ride that triggers a loud noise, the vehicle might suddenly, you know, stop as if it were scared. Other vehicles might be scared of bugs or an Indiana would really relate to this or snakes, And that means that the ride experience changes from ride to ride. You can write it multiple times and actually get very different experiences, which

is pretty cool. The computer system allows for variation, something that would be in possible with a purely mechanical ride like an omnimover ride. There's one effect in the Disneyland Indiana Jones ride that is truly bunkers because it's going to an extreme in order to simulate something that otherwise it's very simple. So at one point in the ride, you are on this ride vehicle and you come up to Indiana Jones. He's dangling from a vine and the

boulder from raiders. The lost arics starts to roll down towards you. The vehicle tries to back up, but then it has to stop because the way back is trapped, and so it lunges into motion to move forward and move under the boulder before I can crush you. Only here's the thing. Those vehicles can't back up. I mean they physically cannot go into reverse. So the ride designers had to simulate the ride going into reverse, which meant they mounted the entire scene, everything that's surrounding you on

a movable platform. So it looks like you're going in reverse because stuff is moving away from you, but the vehicle itself is staying still. The motion platform, uh, the actual thing on the hydraulics or the actuators, It tilts a bit to simulate motion, to simulate that you're actually moving backward, but the wheels on the car are not turning. Instead, the scene around you is moving away as if the

car is backing up, which is just plain bunkers. I mean, there's an entire section of this ride that has to move around the vehicle just to make it seem like

that car is in reverse. As I mentioned earlier, every vehicle on this ride operates independently of all the other vehicles, So part of this system is a communications network that keeps the overall ride control tower informed of what each vehicle is doing and where it is along the ride, And every vehicle knows where every other vehicle is because

of that ride control tower. It sends out information via radio signal, and that keeps these vehicles from smashing into each other, which I think we can all agree is a good thing. The whole path of the ride is divided up into blocks. Just as I was talking about Peter Pan's flight, same thing is true for this Indiana

Jones ride. There are segments of the ride that constitute a block, and each block has essentially a one vehicle limit to it, So the system won't allow another ride to go into a block if there is a vehicle they're already. It will slow things down and control it so that a vehicle can clear a block before a second vehicle can enter it, and the vehicles also trigger ride elements as the cars go through the ride. System so that specific sound effects and special effects and vehicle

motions are all aligned properly. And to do all of this, every single car has sixteen gigabytes of programmable memory. Technically it's redo the memory, but it's read only memory that you can erase and reprogram, which sounds counterintuitive if you

know anything about read only memory. And of course there are tons of other ride systems we can talk about, and I maybe I'll do a second episode to kind of cover some of those, like some of the boat based systems, or the submersible ride, or some of the others like Sarin, and talk about how those work. But for now, this has been more than enough. I've been going on for about Disney for way too long, so

I'm going to conclude this. If you guys have suggestions for future topics I should cover and tech stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, maybe it's a theme and tech anything like that, let me know. Send me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H