Walt Disney Studios Park

Marne la Vallée, France – Monday, March 22nd, 2010

If I was unsure what my reaction to Disneyland Paris the previous day would be, I was even less sure of what I’d think of the Walt Disney Studios Park located next door. Disneyland Park at least was universally well-reviewed, it was just a question of whether I’d ‘get’ that whole Disney mindset. The Studios park, on the other hand, I had heard some – if not bad – at least tepid things about, that it lacked enough things to do or its own identity, or was just sort of thrown together to give the Disneyland Paris complex a marketing boost after it failed to live up to expectations in its first few years. The big difference is Disneyland Park is themed to fantastic worlds of the imagination, while the Studios Park is themed to movie warehouses. How’s that fair?

My hotel was one stop RER train stop away from the Disney complex in Val d’Europe (I stayed in a place called the Etap Marne la Vallée, I’d recommend it if you’re on a budget since it’s fairly new, costs less than €50 a night, and is a very short walk from the train station) so I planned to get to the Studios Park close to ten so I could get a ride or two on Crush’s Coaster before the lines for that one started filling up. I got to the gates less than five minutes after opening at 10am, found the place didn’t look very crowded being a Monday in March, and went straight to the Toon Studios section where I found Crush’s Coaster was posting an 80 minute wait. Huh? Sure enough, it somehow already managed to collect a full queue. In reality it would have been about half of that, except for it broke down for close to a half hour which did put the wait at around 75 minutes or so. Not the best way to start the day.

It might have been a mistake to choose this Maurer spinning coaster system since the single four-person cars, even with their fast, steady dispatches, still can’t meet the capacity demanded by a Disney park on even an incredibly lightly attended day such as this one. As a result I had to make this my only ride on Crush’s Coaster for the entire day, which was a shame because it might very well be the best ride in the park (plus it’s the only major attraction of theirs that is still totally unique to the Paris Studios Park). The platform area is dressed up in a very attractive “Australian harbor at sunset” setting straight from Finding Nemo, which was sort of weird feeling since it was still morning. The spinning cars work well as turtle shells, my suspicion this is why Maurer won the contract, although Mack’s spinners could work just as well, and their model allows for multi-car trains and a higher capacity.

The pre-ride starts out with a small lift hill right out of the station. From here there’s a small right-hand dive into an outdoor stretch of track that works as a photo opportunity for onlookers to get a shot of the ride in action. It just as quickly zips back indoors. I imagined that after this it would go straight into the main chain lift, but the dark ride continues for another couple of block segments, past scenes of jellyfish and the dreaded anglerfish, and then upon engaging the lift hill there’s a long pipe from the “sunken warship” part of the movie with an effective (and large) Bruce animatronic that surprises us at the end. Cool stuff.

Then we get to the top, and the ride promptly suffers from what should probably be called “Dark Knight Syndrome”. Namely, after a greatly themed pre-ride section, it disappointingly culminates into a Coaster-in-a-Box. There’s actually fewer props on the main section of Crush’s Coaster than on the Dark Knight; in fact, there’s none. Swirling disco balls meant to give the effect of rushing bubbles in the EAC are pretty much all this ride was outfitted for. But unlike Dark Knight, I’m sort of okay with this setup. The layout isn’t a bunch of low-speed switchbacks, but is rather fast and intense, and with as much spinning as we got I doubt I could see anything anyway (actually, I don’t know, maybe there were props inside it that I could never focus on). Apart from being a Coaster-in-a-Box it’s exactly the same as Waldameer’s Steel Dragon which I liked quite a bit, and this one is certainly no less of a ride, so I must give it a positive rating. Still wish I could have gotten more rides on it.

After Crush’s Coaster I got a fast pass for Tower of Terror and then moved on to the opposite side of the park to hit up the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, except for that it was closed due to mechanical reasons. The Moteurs… Action! Stunt Show next door appeared to have just let in a line of people, so I quickly decided to join that instead. There was no hurry, as they continued to let people in for a good 25 minutes after I found a seat, with nothing to do. Here was a good reason for checking one’s park guide to figure out when the official show start times are, as I could have easily fit in another nearby attraction in the time I spent sitting and checking my cellphone clock wondering when this was going to get underway (not that there were any other nearby attractions, at least ones that were open). It finally started and it was pretty much what I expected: lots of car tricks involving handbrakes, lots of motorcycles doing wheelies, five-minute buildups to a stunt that lasts five seconds, a couple bits of comic relief, a couple of big fireballs, and all done under the pretense that this is how movies are made. I’m fairly certain real movies don’t shoot their action sequences all in one take using a three-camera sitcom set-up, nor that any movie would consist of watching from the exterior cars do choreographed handbrake spins around each other. It was at many times thrilling to watch, although I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a person in the audience secretly wishing to see an accident occur; in that regard the show was a disappointment. At 45 minutes long it was at least a complete show, and again it was nearly as entertaining listening to the performers try to fit both French and English into the show and not have it come off as unnatural.

Finishing with the show, which glorified special effects and Hollywood action tripe, I really do have to wonder if this entire park was even designed with a French market in mind. Total representation of French cinema: null. And no, Ratatouille does not count, which is expected to get an extensive dark ride in the next couple of years after the Toy Story Playland is finished. Now that I think about it, I do recall the Méliès brothers were briefly represented in history part of the Art of Animation, although that should be an absolute given no matter what country it’s located in. The degree of Americanization in the Studios Park is quite significant, even compared to the Disneyland Park next door, and while there might be a genuine market for this stuff in France, the phrase “cultural imperialism” continued to whisper gently in the back of my mind. Granted, I’ve not been in France for long enough to get a sense of what the average citizen’s relationship to Hollywood versus their own domestic cinema is, but I am rather stunned that they couldn’t accommodate any references to Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Georges Clouzot, or even Jacques Tati, at least none that I ever noticed. Not even Amélie, for christssake! I thought Disney Imagineers were supposed to take pleasure in putting little treats like that for fans that care enough to look for them to find… although it’s probably just as well that those French New Wave pioneers stayed as far away from any Disney association whatsoever, as I always feel jealous whenever something I thought was a personal, insider interest is appropriated by the same mainstream culture that celebrates James Horner soundtracks as a mark of cinematic excellence, it just makes them feel cheap.

At some point the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster finally reopened, and unlike the Crush’s Coaster which had hour-plus waits all day, this one was consistently able to move through its queue in under ten minutes. The interior of the queue is modern, with lots of rock and roll posters and collectables on display sure to please the fans out there. That is, the fans that listen to English or American music as I couldn’t find one piece represented by a band that would sing (or scream) its lyrics in a language other than my own. Then we get to the preshow, which is a bit problematic for several reasons: 1), an attendant has us form two separate lines to get into it, but they let the first line fill up before sending people into the second. These remerge after the preshow, meaning that the people that got to fill in the beginning of the second line get to ‘cut’ in front of those put at the end of the first. 2), there’s going to be a lot of remixing of one’s relative position in the queue anyway since the preshow room is rather oversized leaving room for guests to mill around, and for the cleverer guests to mill around in the direction of the exit doors, at least as far as they can get without attracting the attention of other guests already at the front of the line who realize the same thing. 3), this issue of line-jumping does matter, since after a preshow which is supposed to get everyone amped up for the imminent ride there’s still a ten minute wait on the other side. 4), there’s no point to this preshow anyway since it’s about thirty seconds long and sets up no back story or anything (as far as I could tell the band is building a roller coaster and they want you to ride it… I hope the Imagineers didn’t have to stay up too late working on that one). 5), God, I hate Aerosmith, I didn’t even know anything about them before today, but after watching the same clip of the band members hanging out around the studio trying to get attention from their lead-whatever as he rattles on about how amazingly cool he is, I wish I could go back to that state of ignorance I had on the group before I came to Disney. However, the boarding platform is a decent setup, lots of lighting effects and clear viewing space to watch a train launch, which looks pretty fast with the strobe lights and everything. Best of all, as I mentioned they move the trains through with great rapidity and the queue attendant assigning seats assures every spot is filled and ready to go for the next dispatch while generally being easy on taking specific seat requests.

Loaded into the train we round the corner and wait for the launch. A countdown sequence with lighting effects, and then we’re off down the runway. The acceleration is neither as sudden nor as fast as it appeared from off-ride, and it seems quit halfway down the launch zone before we’ve reached full speed. Partly this is to accommodate a stretch of anti-rollback brakes at the end of the launch, but it also seems as though they’ve dialed it back from its full potential. Nevertheless the train surges up into the signature rollover element, which is hugely reminiscent of the opening element from Premier’s Flight of Fear spaghetti bowl layout, only without the third inversion, the intensity, or the lapbar-only trains. Still a good element, though. Afterward the train rises back up around a large right curve. And it keeps on turning right as swoops back down, and back up, and all the way to the first block brake. From here we start to turn left, and we keep on turning left, dipping up and down a little bit, until there is a corkscrew, which allows a change of direction so we exit it once again turning right. And we keep on curving around to the right until there is another brake run (and the transition from curve to flat is not even heartlined, the track just starts to level out along the last part of the curve causing some unexpected laterals. C’mon, Vekoma, you built this in 2002, this is stuff that Stengel and Schwarzkopf had figured out some twenty-five years earlier). After this brake run comes a real surprise… we go left! The train continues around a wide left turn, making some gentle carousel hops up and down, until it reaches a brake run whose length suggests it was designed for a train entering it at some 70mph.

Now that it’s over, I can only think, “Wow! Was that really… necessary?” It’s not an actively displeasurable experience, not really rough and only slightly uncomfortable where it starts to pull excessive lateral g-forces (and really, those are sort of the highlights of the ride), and the interior lighting and effects are decent, better than the disco balls in Crush’s Coaster at least. But there’s absolutely zero purpose to the layout at all, it’s as if the designers and Imagineers forgot what a coaster is supposed to do so they just filled it in with whatever was easiest to design effects around. The soundtrack adds extremely little, not quite able to overcome the sound of the train roaring around the track, it’s like someone just hooked up their iPod to the cars and made us listen to random Aerosmith tunes (the fact that the coaster has nothing for pace or progression would make it a challenge to sync any sort of music to help improve). It’s especially unnecessary in the light of already having Space Mountain next door, and the only reason I can fathom its existence is because they already had the blueprints from the original Florida version, and they needed to pull an E-Ticket attraction off the shelve to include in the new Studios Park so this is what they got landed with. I’m not begrudging this coaster’s existence, far from it as this and Tower were the only two things I bothered to get re-rides on all day, and in the case of Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster that would mean many re-rides (with the short lines, on the order of some 15 or so rides before I was done with my days at Disney), but considering the amount of money this costs, I wish it could have been given to Cedar Fair or someone who could have taken it and made a coaster much more worth my while (and given my general feeling towards Cedar Fair’s creative skills, that’s a pretty low opinion). Makes me long for the days when I was riding the most cookie-cutter B&M sitdown layout imaginable, listening to Whole Lotta Love as we crested the top of the lift, and still thinking it was pretty great.

Around this time my fast pass for the Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror was ready, so I went over to grab another one (it and the Genie flat ride were the only rides in the entire park with flash pass access so I just kept on grabbing more Tower tickets and never once waited in the regular line). I think this won a poll some months ago for the best single attraction in the state of Florida, so needless to say I was curious to see why the high praise even though I was aware the Parisian version was slightly less adored than its Floridian cousin.

I’ll start off by saying: I can see the reason for the high praise. The attention to detail in the queue and preshow is great, the architecture great, the attendants great, the backstory… well, not so great. It seems like it has potential but the preshow television just shows people get on an elevator, elevator gets struck by lightning, then elevator plummets… that’s not a Twilight Zone story, that’s a technical malfunction as an excuse to theme a drop tower ride (but wait, the people show up as ghosts for some arbitrary reason afterward). I thought the main selling point of a Disney attraction is that they were expert storytellers, why am I getting all these pedestrian narratives in every themed attraction that tries to tell a story? No matter, it’s more about the atmosphere anyway, and once we’re loaded into our elevator car is when things get interesting. As the doors close, the car backs away from them, the lights going down and the scene appears to turn into a starry field. We’re taken up one level, the doors open, and we see a hotel waiting area, with a large mirror on the back wall reflecting the passengers. Suddenly there’s a flash of lightning, the light changes to reveal a ghostly version of the same scene, and the passenger’s reflections are now black and blue outlines. The doors close and we rise another level. They open, and the people we saw board the elevator in the preshow video are standing in a doorway. There’s an amazing effect where the hallway seems to stretch away from us, and then the walls all disappear to be replaced with a starry sky, the doorway still hovering on its own while it starts to twist away slightly. This effect really got my attention because as far as I could tell the set started off entirely with practical effects, but by the end they had clearly manipulated it in ways I can’t even begin to comprehend. The elevator rises once more, and then we drop.

Did I say “drop”? I meant more like “bounce”. The car bounces us up and down several times as if on an oversized Frog Hopper, then pulls us back all the way to the top, where the doors open and we get to look out over the park and see Space Mountain off in the distance while the cameras take our picture, and then it bounces us down the shaft again, each time providing a fun boost of weightlessness, but by this point everyone is laughing instead of screaming. It repeats the cycle once more before returning us to the lower level, the star field returning as we re-approach the doors, the narration closing out the Twilight Zone theme (complete with the beatnik percussion) and the experience is over. Fun ride, but not in any way terrifying.

I was a bit let down in that regard. Sure, more families are going to ride this than if it were at other parks, but the main appeal I generally associate with these tower rides was the psychological suspense building up to the big drop, and both factors were mostly absent on Tower. I was particularly surprised by the lack of suspense, since it seemed like that was the one thing that the theme would most dramatically increase, but instead with the narrative whisking us away from one cool special effects scene to the next I found I forgot or didn’t care about any build-up to a big drop that was in my immediate future, and was just focused on what was going on right now. Then the drop does hit, and it’s only 20 feet deep before it pulls up to bounce us around some more, and by that point any lingering traces of tension have all been dissolved. From the outside I noticed the doors that open when the cars are at the top of the tower are still a good 50 feet below the actual top of the tower, and I had to wonder why they didn’t use that extra vertical space they had built. It still gives a fun boost of air, but on re-rides the tension-building aspect was especially weak because I knew there was nothing to build tension for, I just had to enjoy the special effects on the way up and laugh at the fun bouncy drops on the way down, and that was as deep as any emotional reaction went. So I’ll reiterate those points: impressive technical skills and a fun ride cycle lead me to see why it’s earned some high praise, but as a full experience I personally felt like it did not live up to what I had been promised. I still did it about five times.

I’m sort of running out of rides to talk about, so I’ll briefly review some of the other ‘things’ I did at the Studios Park. I only had to drop down about €12 for lunch to get a croque-monsieur, bag of chips, soft drink and slice of cheesecake (what other options do I have, I’m trapped on an island where everything that doesn’t require a train ticket is owned by Disney… the worst part is that actually didn’t seem like that bad of a deal at the time!), and then I also had a quick look around at the construction site for Toy Story Playland. The Studio Tram Tours were unfortunately out of commission to accommodate the construction, but I think once it’s done the park will be another step closer to feeling more “complete”, with the Ratatouille dark ride on line afterward being one of the main things still missing to finally let the park live up to its full potential. What these attractions have to do with filmmaking, I don’t know, but that’s a limited theme for a park anyway and it needs whatever it can get. I’m curious though how they’re going to manage the queue for the R/C Racer Intamin Halfpipe coaster, since they seem to be even lower capacity rides than the Crush’s Coaster. I thought I saw on a blue-print that there would be two tracks side-by-side, but I could only see one completed track while I was there.

The Art of Disney Animation begins with a preshow lobby room filled with displays of varying historical value such as a zoetrope and other such devices, while clips from the earliest years of Disney animation play against a wall. We’re then led into a movie theater which gives us a ten minute show demonstrating the Art of Disney Montage, with clips from numerous Disney and Pixar films assembled together in a way meant to arouse the same emotions felt from our favorite movies but instead reveal just how much Disney has a tendency recycle the same plot and character devices. That’s not even to rag on Disney too much since there’s probably a lot of depth that could be analyzed from that basic story structure Disney uses time and time again that would explain precisely why it doesn’t lose its affect after multiple viewings, or even for that matter why it needs to be reinterpreted into different stories. From there the main part of the show in the next room was a mix of a live action performance with projected screens. The performance was in French so I had to wear headphone giving the English version (which took away from the fact that it was being acted out live). There actually was some insight into the creative process, in this case specifically, designing the character Mushu in Mulan. I don’t think I would have missed much if I just heard the live French version.

Scattered between more Tower of Terror and Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster rides, I eventually found I ran out of time in my day and had time for only one more new attraction. Originally I wanted to make it another ride on Crush’s Coaster but that would have eliminated all the time I had left in the day, so I decided to make it something I hadn’t done yet and caught the last screening of CinéMagique. I have no idea what audience this was intended for. For one, you have to be bilingual to understand everything that’s going on because there are no subtitles in English for the sections in French, nor French subtitles for those sections in English. It’s mostly in English however, which made me at times wonder if this had originally been made for the Florida or California parks until a French section came in reminding me it was clearly filmed just for the Studios Park in Paris. It’s mostly just a half-hour long movie sitting in a giant theater, but they incorporate some physical effects (the first time it happened I was really surprised until I figured out what was going on… I won’t give it away for those that might be seeing it for themselves). Once again, the art of montage is on full display, only this time with live-action movies that span the history of cinema, and starring Martin Short as he stumbles around from one famous movie scene to the next, his comedic skills on display here consist almost entirely of grinning at the camera. The films represented range from all over (Charlie Chaplin, a scene that’s a mix of footage from the Good, the Bad and the Ugly with Once Upon A Time in the West, Star Wars, Titanic, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Casablanca, Some Like It Hot, Mary Poppins, The Full Monty, Pinocchio, The Pink Panther, The Exorcist, The Silence of the Lambs, and more. Again, this attraction seems better marketed for English speakers than French, as not one of the films reference shows anything to do with French cinematic history, which is considerable and yet completely neglected by Disney. Although as I finish writing this I’m hearing the harmonica theme from Once Upon a Time in the West play in my head which makes me want to watch it again, so I at least got that benefit.

I’m going to cheat a little bit since that was my last ride of the day at the Studios Park, but afterward I went over to Disneyland since they were open an hour later and got a few more Space Mountain rides in. The next day, since I still felt like I hadn’t seen everything I needed to see at the Studios Park, I made that the first stop of the day up until noon, where I got a couple more attractions I missed on the first. First of all, I made sure to really get there at park opening this time, and I got to be one of the first in line for my second ride on Crush’s Coaster… there was still a half hour wait until they would open the ride for us, by which time a full queue had formed behind me making an immediate re-ride impossible. But I did get to catch the Cars Quatre Roues Rallye, a Zamperla Demolition Derby that basically replicates the motions of any normal spinning flat ride, but with the unique exception of that the cars run on a figure-eight track. I’m not sure exactly how the technology works that allows them to make the switchover in the middle of the figure- eight, but it results in a chaotic scene with some extremely narrow calls as the cars dive between each other’s paths. Good ride, although the low capacity probably hurts it on busier operating days. A video clip I took on board the ride can be watched here.

Between a few more Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster rides I finally managed to get Armageddon – Les Effets Speciaux, which I had tried to do the previous day but the first time the queue attendant decided the people ahead of me would be the last people let into the next show and turned me away (literally, told me to get out of the queue altogether), and the second time after joining the mostly full waiting area for some five minutes, was told it was going to be another fifteen minutes until we were let in, at which point I realized my schedule was already far enough behind from the Crush’s Coaster wait and the delay in starting the stunt car show that I decided to bail. So I finally got to do it on the third attempt and while it most likely wasn’t worth it there wasn’t anything else better to do with my time. After a preshow explaining how we’re filming a scene for the movie Armageddon (Really? Michael Bay is the best IP they find for this? I’ve said this several times already but I’m in France, why do I have to deal with this sort of crap all the way over here?) we’re led into a space-ship themed special effects chamber that supposedly undergoes a meteor barrage. There are numerous lights and bursts of fog and rocking floors and the occasional pyrotechnics, culminating in a huge fireball that erupts twice in the center of the room (which I was in very close proximity to and got doused by the water sprinklers meant to control it, thank you very much for asking). Of course everyone cheers and we’re funneled back out the exit. I grab one last ride on Tower of Terror and then move on to finish the rest of the day at Disneyland Park.

Next: Disneyland Paris (Part 2)

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