Disney’s Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance--The Most Incredible Theme Park Dark Ride Ever
As Disney prepares to reopen, and I finally am getting to caught up, i wanted to write a little about the most amazing theme park dark ride ever made: Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Disneyworld and Disneyland. Back in the before times, on school break in January, I flew down to Orlando to take a chance at seeing it. My friend worked on the attraction for a couple years but the ride is so popular that even he couldn’t get guaranteed access. So we got to the park before sunrise, and waited to get a place in the virtual cue on the Disney app at park opening time. It was a surreal scene, thousands of people waiting in the dark and then “woo-hoos” coming from various places as people got spots in the virtual cue. Luckily, we got a spot, and all the spots for the day were gone within a minute or so. Before the pandemic it was getting a bit more reasonable to get a spot on the ride, but several months of closure certainly have built pent up demand and I imagine it will be back to craziness for a long time when it reopens.
I had already watched ride through videos before going on the ride and I’m glad I did. There’s no way to really take it all in unless you are able to ride it multiple times, which seems unlikely any time soon. Here’s a ride through video:
What’s most impressive about the attraction is the level of integration, and the details of the theming. I don’t recall seeing a single show light, speaker camera anywhere in the attraction (or the entire land—the area development is really incredible). I think the integration is really practical these days through thousands of hours of pre-visualization and planning, and also really incredible control systems integration. This attraction is a perfect example of the stabilization of show technology I wrote about last year (read articles here). I don’t think a lot of technology had to be invented for this attraction, but instead a wide array of effects—old and new—were utilized and integrated extremely well. As I wrote in those articles last year, we are really only limited today by our creativity, and this attraction is a prime example of that.
Here’s a video that explains (mostly accurately according to friends at Disney) some of the most amazing effects in the attraction. (Note that when they say “Musion” effect they really mean Pepper’s Ghost, still a staple of these attractions, I wrote a bunch about that here).
In summary, here’s what I think is really amazing about this incredible attraction:
Visual and technological integration
Integration and flexibility of control
Attention to detail
Polish and quality of work
And of course if you’re a serious star wars fan there are whole other layers to this thing but I’ll let others react to that. I really want to ride this thing like 10 times in a row but that’s probably not going to happen for a few years now. But Disney has thrown down the gauntlet to other theme parks like Universal, who did the same thing to Disney years ago with the Spiderman ride and then the Harry Potter world. This is a quantum leap in integration and ride quality, at a time when Universal has recently just been churning out boring 3-D motion base rides.