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Technological Terror

Imagineers knew that they wanted to expand the Disney-MGM Studios with more ride capacity, more thrills, a certifiable headliner, and at least one new genre: horror. Of course, Disney isn’t quite synonymous with horror, which is why it became difficult to decide just how horrific a horror ride should be. On one end of the scale, designers allegedly looked into acquiring the hit slasher films of the era (like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street) to create a gory, grotesque, terrifying attraction.

Image: Disney

On the other, Disney reached out to famed filmmaker Mel Brooks, who was of particular interest because of his 1974 film Young Frankenstein, which practically invented the “horror-comedy” genre. Brooks worked with designers on early plans for a dark ride called “Hotel Mel,” which would’ve sent guests through an abandoned Hollywood hotel being used as a hot set for a haphazard horror film.

More funny than frightening, Hotel Mel never made it off the drawing board because of its unclear tone, and because it didn't fulfill Eisner's need for more thrills.

Image: Disney

But the idea of a long-abandoned, once-glamorous hotel looming over “the dark side of Hollywood? Disney’s designers doubled down on the concept, merging it with the still-popular first-generation freefall tower, originally envisioning that they’d simply build a derelict hotel around the ride’s distinctive L-shape.

Image: Disney

While this version of the ride would've been simple by necessity and contain only the most basic of special effects, it would've become the thrill ride that the Disney-MGM Studios needed.

Given just a little more innovation, however, the park's cinematic drop tower took on its truest form. We can feel lucky that, when The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror opened at Disney-MGM Studios in 1994, it didn’t look or feel anything like the Intamin first-generation freefall ride. Instead, Disney’s patented AGV (Autonomous Guided Vehicle) system and engineering work from Otis (whose day job is to make sure elevators don’t fall) created something entirely new… and like all great Disney E-Tickets, it’s rooted in legend.

The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror

Image: lostmalfoy, Flickr

“Hollywood, 1939.” It’s the famed setting of the tale of the luxurious Hollywood Tower Hotel – “beacon for the show business elite,” and a veritable fortress for the royalty of Tinseltown. The massive 200-foot-tall hotel is indeed astounding – a Neo-Mediterranean tower with Spanish Revival influences; twisted columns, pointed minarets, sunset-tiled roofs, and a lofted, script neon sign: THE HOLLYWOOD TOWER HOTEL.

There’s just one looming problem… growing closer and closer, you’ll find that this palatial fortress is scarred. A massive, blackened burn is charred across its face, with decaying plaster making it appear that the front of the hotel has fallen away… and yet, there’s no debris; no rubble; just a wing of the hotel, gone as if lifted away. Its once-glamorous gardens are misty and overgrown; its fountains dry and cracked; its golden signs tarnished… even still, distant, echoing jazz standards from the 1930s reverberate across the barren, derelict property…

Image: Disney

Brilliantly, Disney acquired CBS’s The Twilight Zone, the creepy anthology series that had run on CBS from 1959 – 1964 featuring the acclaimed hosting and writing of Rod Serling. Sometimes sci-fi, sometimes fantasy, sometimes horror; set in the past, present, or future; the eerie, unsettling, series followed the unlikely events that unfolded to ordinary people who had unknowingly “crossed over into a land whose boundaries were that of imagination” – The Twilight Zone.

The Twilight Zone is the perfect canvas for a “horror” attraction that balances perfectly on Disney’s strengths. And inside the once-glamorous hotel, that story unfolds: Halloween night, 1939; a rogue lightning strike that caused the hotel’s foremost guest wing to simply flicker out of existence; a “night very much like the one we have just witnessed”; a maintenance service elevator, waiting for you…

Image: Disney

Escorted through the hotel’s grand lobby, its mysterious library, and into the imposing boiler rooms – inexplicably alive despite the hotel’s abandonment – guests board freight elevators to rise up through the haunted hotel and the electrical echoes of that fateful Halloween night.

Along the way to the fifth dimension, guests find themselves transported back to the Hotel’s heyday, encountering the spirits of those lost inside; watch as the elevator is absorbed into the Twilight Zone, hovering in endless space; and  – most memorably – have all expectations crushed when the elevator advances out of its shaft, driving horizontally down a corridor as the walls melt away to reveal the Fifth Dimension itself.

Image: Disney

Equal parts dark ride and thrill ride, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror redefined Walt Disney World and stands as an unequaled pinnacle of Disney Imagineering… And boy, did other Disney resorts around the globe want that technology…

Spin-offs

From the moment The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror opened, Imagineers began working on concepts that would bring the technology to Disneyland… In particular, ideas focused around a ride they called Geyser Mountain, that would place the explosive ride technology in Frontierland, allowing guests to tour subterranean crystal grottos and hot springs before being blasted skyward by the “Old Unfaithful” geyser.

Image: Fan concept via Andreas Seltenheim, via Disney & More

You can learn more about Geyser Mountain in our Possibilityland: Never-Built Disney "Mountains" feature, as well, because in the late ‘90s designers were hard at work on a brand-new, unprecedented second theme park set to join Disneyland! This new “California Adventure Park” was going to shatter expectations by doing away with the dated, idealized, overly-optimistic landscapes of Disneyland in favor of a hip, edgy, food-and-wine themed park packed with “MTV attitude.” Since Disney’s California Adventure would obviously make the original Disneyland feel like a dusty relic of the 1950s, Geyser Mountain would be just the thing to pry guests away from California Adventure to give Disneyland another chance, helping balance the crowds that would descend on the new park.

Of course, when the renamed Disneyland Resort’s second gate opened in 2001, it was bad enough to earn its own in-depth Disaster File: Disney’s California Adventure. It turned out it wasn’t Disneyland that needed the boost, but California Adventure.

Image: Disney

So a version of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror was fast-tracked for the park’s Hollywood Pictures Backlot, though – in true end-of-Eisner-era fashion – the ride would need seriously reengineered to save money. In this case, that meant the elimination of the trackless, self-driving AGVs, which in turn eliminated the horizontal “Fifth Dimension” scene. That, then, required the ride to be “flipped” with the showbuilding positioned out front of the drop shafts with a new, more efficient and less expensive ride system that also made the physical structure shorter, wider, and less imposing.

Image: Disney

Dropped into the miniscule park, the ride lost its looming position at the end of a custom-built street while also eliminating the expansive campus of overgrown hotel grounds. To fit its new structure, California Adventure’s version of the ride was re-skinned in a unique, geometric “pueblo-deco” architectural style, fusing warm adobe hues with oxidized teal domes, patterned metal work, arrowheads, flat roofs, sunbursts, and art deco elements. We traced the unbelievable story of this Hollywood Tower Hotel and its unthinkable closure in its own in-depth feature, Lost Legends: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror – a must-read for Disney Parks fans.

Image: David Jafra, Flickr (license)

There was still hope for a Geyser Mountain to be added to Disneyland Paris’ Frontierland, but when Paris’s second park was even worse off than California Adventure, it, too, got the cheaper and more efficient version of the ride, which to this day is a headliner at another Disaster File: Walt Disney Studios Park.

4/4

Disney’s California Adventure had opened in February 2001.

Image: Disney

Just seven months later, Tokyo Disneyland expanded into a multi-day, multi-park resort, too, with the opening of a second gate: Tokyo DisneySea. At a cost reportedly topping $4 billion, DisneySea cost at least six times as much as California Adventure. And to look at both parks, it would be impossible to imagine that they were designed or financed by the same company.

But that’s because they weren’t.

Tokyo Disney Resort is neither owned nor operated by the Walt Disney Company or a subsidiary and never has been. Rather, the Tokyo-based Oriental Land Company (OLC) owns and operates the property somewhat like a franchisee, paying Disney enormous royalties to use characters, trademarks, and licenses, sharing attendance, food and beverage, and merchandise revenue, and in return earning access to Disney’s library and its Imagineers.

Since OLC operates independently, it sets its own budgets for projects, which is why – when rides are cloned from American parks to the Japanese parks – Tokyo Disney almost always ends up with the grander, more built-out, Blue Sky version, no expense spared. It’s what makes Tokyo Disney Resort a Mecca for Disney Parks fans – a must-visit, bucket list destination packed with one-of-a-kind or at least best-of-its-kind rides and attractions, intermingling perfectly with welcoming, respectful, proud Japanese culture and crowds.

Image: Disney

So you can bet that OLC was determined to bring a Tower of Terror to Tokyo. There’s just one problem… The Twilight Zone is relatively unknown in Japanese culture, and certainly not a brand that would draw visitors. Sure, Disney could spend big bucks marketing CBS’s The Twilight Zone to build brand recognition… But in true Tokyo Disney style, creativity is key.

That’s why we now leave Halloween 1939, the Hollywood Tower Hotel, and The Twilight Zone behind. Are you brave enough to face the horrors that await inside the Hotel Hightower? On the next page, we’ll step into the largest cross-continental story Disney has ever told and see how this one-of-a-kind Tower of Terror is one of the best themed rides on the planet. Read on…

 
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