5. THE BAIT

How you know if you're "the bait": Your only job is to hold on tight

The Good

Okay, so if you begin as a "tourist" or "trainee" and then end up with the responsibility of saving the world, you become a "savior." If you begin as a "tourist" or "trainee" and then end up helpless, you're the bait. And frankly, it's usually more fun than it sounds.

A great example is Universal's THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF SPIDER-MAN, in which guests' routine trip through the Daily Bugle's press office finds the phones ringing off the hook and the reporters having walked out amid reports of the Sinister Syndicate stealing the Statue of Liberty. Editor-in-Chief J. Jonah Jameson has no choice but to recruit guests to step aboard the news-gathering SCOOP to set off into the mean streets of the city, where a quest for headlines turns guests into a toy batted back and forth between villains. So while we begin as trainees, things go wrong enough to leave us at the mercy of the Syndicate, with Spidey himself saving us as every turn. Did we help? Um... no. We kind of made things worse. But we had fun doing it!

California Adventure's GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY - MISSION: BREAKOUT! probably lives here given that guests enter the mysterious warehouse of the Collector to view his intergalactic oddities (including the captured Guardians themselves) but are swiftly recruited by Rocket to use their gantry lift tour clearance to sneak him aboard. With Rocket on top of the elevator and the controls hotwired, guests are propelled into a weightless, chaotic, laugh-out-loud escape attempt. At the end, as Star Lord waves goodbye and thanks guests for their help, the team's sardonic Drax even asks, "Why are we thanking them? They did nothing." And he's right. We were the bait. (It's made even more explicit in the ride's Halloween sequel, Monsters After Dark, when Rocket instructs riders to distract the monsters set loose in the tower by "screaming real loud, and looking delicious.")

See also JURASSIC PARK: THE RIDE in which guests are knocked off course and spend the rest of the ride trying to survive an onslaught of carnivores with basically no actual hope for self-preservation besides luck. 

The Bad

The Bad of the "bait" role is really just its quantity. At Universal Orlando, it can feel like you end up helplessly subject to an onslaught of villains, monsters, or disasters more often than you're picking up 3D glasses (and that's saying something). Being "the bait" is a little bit like low-hanging creative fruit. It's fun to have something goes horribly wrong, and it's easy to place guests into an inescapable situation while someone else controls the stakes... or worse, no one does.

Frankly, one of the best-known examples of guests being hopelessly batted around at the whims of others has to be HARRY POTTER AND THE FORBIDDEN JOURNEY. Yes, it's a technological masterpiece... But c'mon. On board, guests are helplessly (and somewhat nonsensically) tossed from bad guy to bad guy, encountering dragons, Dementors, Basilisks, Acromantulas, the Whomping Willow all in the course of a three minute onslaught that really has only the flimsiest of "stories" to justify its existence. Riders are unceremoniously tossed from place to place with nonsensical transitions, and have absolutely no role but to hold on tight. As a "best of" montage giving Potter fans what they want, it's a major coup. As an example of good narrative storytelling? Well...

6. THE CHARACTER or THE EMOTION

The giveaway: It's all about exaggerated emotion

The Good

As many Imagineering fans will be quick to tell you, when Fantasyland's classic dark rides initially debuted, none actually had physical representations of the characters they were named for. No Snow White in SNOW WHITE'S SCARY ADVENTURES. No Mr. Toad in MR. TOAD'S WILD RIDE. The idea at that time was that you were the character; that you were seeing through Snow White or Mr. Toad or Peter Pan or Alice's point of view, and that you were in turn experiencing the story through their feelings – hence the amping up of the scares, chaos, beauty, and trippiness, respectively.

Famously, visitors failed to connect to the concept and wondered why, for example, Snow White was no where to be seen in her own ride! As such, future revisions to the dark rides retroactively added lead characters. But what has stayed true is that guests still inhabit those characters while on board... perhaps not physically, but emotionally. Now our journey through Snow White's Scary Adventures places us just a few precarious feet behind Snow White, thus experiencing all of the frights that came with her flight from the Witch; our madcap journey through London may not be as Mr. Toad, but we surely feel his motor mania firsthand; though we see ALICE IN WONDERLAND, we also see how vivid and peculiar Wonderland was to her.

The point is that though the specifics and the concept have changed, some of Disney's most classic and beloved rides still rely on guests experiencing what the character experienced, but exaggerated for the medium. It's a powerful, invigorating, and – importantly – intuitive way to be! No one has to tell you that you've experienced the joy of PETER PAN'S FLIGHT; you know it! You feel it! 

The abstractionist version of "the character" role is probably the one you take on when you're aboard SPACE MOUNTAIN. You're not a "trainee" flying to space, really... you're just experiencing the wonder of space flight. So even though it's not an IP character, you're stepping into that raw, exaggerated emotion in much the same way.

The Bad

We know, we know. As readers are quick to remind us, we always pick on STITCH'S GREAT ESCAPE. But it's a perfect example of guests experiencing the role of a character going wrong. In theory, Stitch's Great Escape was meant to make you feel the chaos, humor, and unbridled mayhem of Stitch. It was a focused, in-depth character study that exaggerated the character's most grotesque features. Considering that guests' overall experience of Magic Kingdom as a whole allegedly ranked higher on days when Stitch's Great Escape was closed, it obviously didn't quite land.

The problem here is probably that Disney chose the wrong attributes of the character to have guests endure... er, um, experience. A great many words have been written by Disney Parks thinkers about the attraction, but one compelling thought is that Disney's quick cash-in on the then-popular Stitch character failed to account for the fact that the juvenile, mean-spirited, gross-out character (whose features were all exaggerated in the attraction) is not the character fans loved. Quite the contrary, it was Stitch's evolution away from his messy, mean start that made families fall for the cuddly alien. Basing an entire attraction on the "before" of his before-and-after personality was... bad. 

Put another way, both Snow White's Scary Adventures and Stitch's Great Escape are examples of attractions that took a single character, exaggerated their stories, and then created attractions that allowed guests to embody their core emotions... it's just that one had a foundational flaw.