Podcast: The Ride - ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

The boys discuss the Disney World attractions ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter and Stitch's Great Escape. A discussion that tests the limits of friendship when Mike makes a shocking confession. Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/ FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi there, I'm Ryan Reynolds, and I have a list of things I like to have on set. It's just little things, like two freshly cracked eggs, scrambled, with crispy hash brown, sausage crumble, and creamy chipotle sauce from Tim Hortons. From my rider to Tim's menu, try my new Scrambled Eggs Loaded Breakfast Box. Podcasts are great because they help us make the most out of our routine. We learn about the fall of the Ottoman Empire while we drive, keep up with news while we take the dog for a walk, or turn folding laundry into a comedy show.

Make the most out of your time with the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard. A credit card that can get you unlimited free grocery delivery and the most PC optimum points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard. The card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit PCFinancial.ca for details. Warning, the following podcast is about extraterrestrial alien encounter, the scariest ride Disney ever built. Be on the lookout for Tim Curry, Kathy Najimy,

Ray J, and Kato Kaelin. And keep your ears peeled for multiple hair-raising mentions of the beloved character Spinlock. Seize the future on Podcast The Ride, the theme park podcast where three men reminisce about what good little boys they were. My name is Michael Carlson. I'm joined as always with Jason Sheridan. Hello. I'm really fumbling. This is the third time I've done the intro. And Scott Gairdner. And hi. You powered through it. the intro uh and scott gerner and hi uh you powered through it you got there and now we're off and running um uh today we're going to uh talk about alien encounter which has like a subtitle of like extra terror estriol is that right that's right

terror in all caps estriol alien encounter uh but also it's one of those, there's like a slash in it, like the universe of energy, because since 2003 it has been Stitch's great escape. Although maybe not for much longer. People wrote us on Twitter and encouraged this as a topic because we thought it might be closing, but Disney says it's maybe not closing. Disney says it's coming back, yeah.

Was it 2003 or 2004? 2004, I guess 2003 to 2004 was the changeover period where they did all of the alterations on the ride. They put a beard on the one robot that they couldn't otherwise replace. We'll get to all that. Yeah, we'll get to all that. But Scott, you had some stuff before, right? Oh, yeah. Well, I wanted to take a little of your time to talk about a

local los angeles attraction it's not in a theme park but it's accessible to anyone who's strolling hollywood boulevard and it's a place called hologram usa now this is a place uh shout out to jason walliner who turned me on to to this place. You gentlemen have not been here, but have I told you anything about it? No, I don't know anything about it. From scratch, Hologram USA. I think the actual, like Extra-Terrestrial, it's got a more specific title. If you look at the marquee on Hollywood Boulevard, it says FilmOn.TV Hologram USA Theater. Oh, boy.

And then really big under that, Billy Holiday Hologram USA Theater. Oh, boy. And then really big under that Billie Holiday hologram show. This used to be, I think, like a laser show theater. Is that right? Or a lasarium kind of thing? I'm not sure. Maybe a porno theater before that. I think I was looking up the site

and I think there's a few weird little seedy theaters on Hollywood Boulevard. This particular one, I think, may have been a church right before its conversion into a hologram, into the Church of Holograms, the Holy Temple of Holograms. Was it a porno theater before it was a church?

I think it did some time as a porno. If you're on Hollywood Boulevard, you were a porno theater at a certain point. A porno theater, and before that, a newsreel theater that very quickly slid into poro at a certain point and before that a place where charlie chaplin used to live this is an observation yeah uh i'll credit our friend ryan perez for this that he we were at some bar he's like they told us charlie

chaplin used to live here and he's like if i go to one more goddamn place where charlie chaplin once lived i think everywhere in hollywood i've been to a house that claimed that charlie chaplin lived there yeah worsening wells uh worsening wells i feel like also had a similar thing because worsening wells was crashing a lot later in life and i feel like oh worsening wells lived here i feel like i've also heard multiple houses of like worsening wells died here and it's like this is the third one i've heard about that he died in they were they all moved around a lot charlie chaplin and orson welles the original pete holmes they did a lot of crap yeah it's so weird is it that these people is it a lie to get people into your place and give it prestige or is it a uh is it just

people who heard of i think it's uh yeah it's a game of telephone maybe well not telephone i guess because the name's changed It doesn't change. So I've heard Liz Taylor. It's a whisper down the lane, or whisper down the line, whatever you call it. Right. My friend lives in Liz Taylor's old house. He lives in the attic. And the whole house is just a big dump where a bunch of dudes live.

Although I think they recently moved. That's a whole other podcast. But yeah, there's a giant house where like seven people live in. But it used to, at one point be the wonderful liz taylor house just her not her and seven other she didn't live with seven other seven other dude dirty seven frat guys she married all of them at once her seventh husband was seven guys yeah uh okay so anyway whatever this once was today is the thriving film on dot tv hologram usa theater and so this has been up for like a year or so on hollywood boulevard if you've if you live in los angeles you may have passed by this marquee that says billy hologram uh billy

hologram that's why she was chosen was the proximity of her name to hologram billy holiday hologram show and and if you watch the ads for it, it advertises itself as being from the makers of the Tupac hologram. So that adds it some prestige and some pedigree. But when you go into this place, well, first of all, several things. I bought an e-ticket. This is an event that your

minimum of new hologram show that you're getting is an hour of material. That's how it's presented. You get an hour long hologram show, and that is is is uh is an hour of material that's how it's presented you get an hour-long hologram show and that is supposed to be 30 through some trickery wow means i've got to do it for free um but the but then you go in and they try to like they don't have the technology to scan your ticket correctly like the e-scan doesn't work which gets you very excited for the hologram technology waiting just behind uh another weird red flag at this place they have a cbd oil popcorn

hell yeah what yeah what is that oh cbd okay uh i don't know about this jason lit up yeah well cbd Well, CBD oil is the non-psychoactive part of marijuana. THC is the psychoactive part. CBD oil, widely, like apple cider vinegar, people say, has a lot of positive health benefits as an anti-inflammatory, as a sleep aid, a lot of benefits. That's an unprepared statement from you. No notes. He's not looking at his notes.

I've been reading it. Well, I have a CBD vape it does it is great for sleeping and it it actually like when my shoulder has hurt before it's like helped helped with that i have that shoulder like uh that shoulder elbow ache we all do from holding our phones all the time oh yeah that's repetitive stress injury well here we get well we're in the jason wheelhouse so they're selling cbd pop because the other thing about cbd oil like up into a certain point you could buy a pretty weak version of it at like whole foods like you could buy it as like an herbal i went to some hipster restaurant that had cbd oil cocktails which cocktails which I gotta say they cost about as much as the hologram show

and did absolutely nothing to me whatsoever yeah the other thing is like CBD oil if you buy it like if you have a medicinal marijuana card or I guess a recreational anyone can get it now it is more expensive I don't know if it's more expensive are you lobbying for the

CBD industry I've never more expensive i don't know if it's more expensive are you lobbying for the cbd industry i've never heard you on cbd right now freebies of any listeners are i've never heard you speak so eloquently about anything it's a current upset it's a current interest oh wow well so the theater's got you covered cbd oil popcorn which I'm sure works and is not just a bizarre scam that this place is pulling. Anyway, so just to get into the meat of it, you walk in and there's just shows happening all day, first of all. So you get an hour's worth of hologram material. But also you could just – it's open from noon to 10 p.m. So if you were a Hollywood Boulevard homeless person and you could get together $30

or probably just go into the lobby, talk to the two stoners behind the register, say, look over there, and then just go and sneak into the theater the other way. You've got a place to sleep for 10 solid hours in very comfortable chairs. Did they not make you leave after the show? No, you could stay in the Hologram Theater

as long as you want. You start at noon and you're in all day. So there's just a constantly going loop of hologram attractions and also hologram trailers which is very exciting to see. But the main show that you come in and watch is a Billy Holiday

hologram show. And you can immediately tell that this is not the same thing as the Tupac hologram. It is not Tupac's face melded onto a realistic living body. They just got an actress to play Billie Holiday and she just performs. It's like watching a still shot of a concert filmed over black and just projected life size in front of you. It's like watching a concert video with no cuts is basically what you do. So and she does lip sync the real Billie Holiday songs, the recordings of them.

So you're watching a live concert of prerecorded Billie Holiday songs, not by real Billie Holiday at all. It's just some actress and also like but sometimes there are magical elements like when she'll start a song her band will magically appear in a puff of smoke but there's another part where just a like modern white guy roadie comes in and gives her a mic stand and then walks away and i can't tell if that was a joke of some kind or just like a way to poke through the magic or if it was just carelessness um it's it's one of the strangest things i i've ever seen uh but i actually wasn't there for the billy holiday

hologram show i was there for something else called uh let me make sure I get the title right, Ray J and Kato's Sexy Hollywood Freak Show. Oh, good. What? It is a show co-hosted by Ray J who I believe was in the Kim Kardashian sex tape. Also on a show called For the Love of Ray J and then Kato

Kalin. Kato Kalin, America's most famous house guest. I believe that's his nickname for a while. Eventful crashing that ever occurred. He took the mantle from Orson Welles. Yeah, he took the mantle from Orson Welles. So, yeah, I don't know why these guys, we kept questioning where do they know each other from? Why are they friends?

They come out and they're wearing sparkly spangled costumes. And they do a lot of talking over each other material the comedic crux of which is calling each other gay like oh more like gay jay no more like gato galen do they really say gay jay yeah wait and this is they call each other they call them gay jay this is holog filmed holograms doing yeah you were watching something that is it is life-size, but just projected. And by the way, just this illusion, it does nothing for you. Nobody would walk in and go, wow.

You're just watching, like, the way these things work, it's an illusion called Pepper's Ghost, where it's very simple where something's projected from down on the floor, and then via angled glass, it looks like there's kind of a ghostly effect. Right. And this is in a lot of Disney rides. It's basically how they do in the Rock and Roller Coaster. They're using it in the-

Sure, on a mansion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Fast and Furious attraction at Universal has this very stiff part where a bunch of people... Party goers. Yeah, really well-lit party goers all dance in one place. You can tell they're very careful to not move from the one spot they're on. So anyway, this is a thing that would be a part of a separate Disney attraction. It would just be one thing in the line of a Disney ride, but they're masquerading it as its own event and you're supposed to pay $30 for it. You're supposed to pay like a third of a day at Disneyland to go watch. And then once the thing gets going, it's like after this, this like unlistenable claptrap between Ray J and Kato, then you're watching, then it's like it is a literal freak show

where guys are banging nails into their nose and there's like, there's burlesque stuff. There's sexy girls in 40s lingerie spinning around on a, like a carousel horse with a bunch of dangly things coming down. It's like, it's this very lame Hollywood Boulevard kind of, uh yeah like the the freaks and kooks and uh uh like oh it's a little bit randy um but there's this stuff like

like the the screen is split into three thirds and like here's a guy banging nails into his nose here's a guy here's a sword swallower and here's a guy banging nails into his nose. Here's a guy, here's a sword swallower. And here's a sexy lady just dancing around. And those things don't interact with each other whatsoever. It's just like three unrelated freak shows all going at the same time. It's one of the odd, oh, on the website, they describe it as featuring many of Los Angeles' best alternative performers. They drop a lot of letters from alternative.

And then it's over in 17 minutes. $30 for 17 minutes of content, and then it loops? Yeah. And then you see the sleaze again? Yeah, if you stayed in there, you would get to watch it at least ten times in a row. Wow. If you watched it all day. The big story with this thing is that it's concocted by a Greek billionaire named Alki David.

And Alki seems to be a very litigious man, so I want to be careful with what I say about him. I want to really carefully say that he is very hot and cool and very cut. He clearly works out a lot. And I think he runs a perfectly legitimate business. That being said, other people do not feel this way.

He's been sued many times. He's currently... He basically bought the... He did not do the Tupac hologram. He bought the technology after the fact so that now he can claim he's the owner of the tupac hologram he bought the technology after the fact so that now he can claim he's the owner of the tupac hologram no he had nothing to do with it but he's gone out of his way he's sued people who try to do holograms he sued fox after matt graining appeared with a hologram homer at comic-con And they settled. He had something.

Meanwhile, he's getting sued by other people. He was sued by a company called Roy's Boys, which is literally the sons of Roy Orbison, who asked him to come up with a hologram of Roy Orbison. And from the sounds of the synopsis of the lawsuit, he just didn't do it. He would call and just like, hang on, give me six months. They'd check in again. This is like the dark side of fame right here.

This is something else. The dark side is screwing over Roy's boys? I mean, this is like... Well, buying the rights to the ghosts of dead celebrities. To recreate and either do it poorly or not at all. Scott, I don't think I told, when you said you want to talk about this, I decided to say this for the podcast. My experience recently with Hologram USA, almost simultaneously as you were, you posted

like some pictures or some video clips from there uh uh you know over the holidays and i was back visiting family in in pennsylvania and new jersey and uh there was a night i don't know if it was the same night but it was around the time you had gone to this uh i was watching i think it was like one of those affiliates that's different in every city like my network tv so it's like my cincinnati my philadelphia my los angeles oh sure sure and like uh uh i think they were playing like two of the daniel craig bond movies back to back every commercial break i saw there was a commercial for a hologram usa on hollywood boulevard no kidding i mean back at home? Back in Jersey. And I don't see, I have cable in LA.

I don't see commercials for it. And I live a mile and a half, two miles from it. But I saw a commercial every commercial break. And I remember the Puff of Smoke guy. You watched it where the big band appear behind Billy Hollander? The big band appear. The best was when they did a time lapse of them building a stage for the hologram but because

there is nothing on stage it looks like they just time lapsed the construction of an empty stage. They took black and made it more black. They put on ten layers of black paint. But they showed it so many times.

Weird. Oh, I'm glad you found this. In between clips of quantum, in between quantum of solace segments. Weird. If you Google Alki David harass, there are many pages of results right away. Oh, boy. That's always a good sign. Again, allegedly.

I'm not Alki. I'm not saying anything. I'm just talking about your Google results. We. Oh, boy. Always a good sign. Again, allegedly. I'm not saying anything. I'm just talking about your Google results. We love you, brother. We love you. He's also an actor. Oh, yes. Good point. I'm looking it up on Wikipedia.

He's directed a bunch of films, and he's in all of the films as well, and he'll be next to a more famous actor, and they will present him right after as if you know him. So in the trailer, it's like judd nelson alky david they very confidently you know alky you all know that the last thing he was in was bob thunder internet assassin and he played mr network scott is dr modem is this a fever dream you had that you create? It became a tulpa. It became an idea that became real. It became like a person. I'm starting to wonder that.

Yeah, it had a very, it also like it smelled weird in the place. Like paint was recently put in. So maybe there's a paint huffing aspect to this. Maybe I just. Was it the popcorn? I think I took that CBD oil popcorn, wandered into... Did they also have regular popcorn?

Was that an option? No. Just CBD oil. So if you took a kid in there, you weren't paying attention. It's going to have to get real mellow. You should not take a kid on Hollywood Boulevard. You shouldn't take a kid anywhere near anything Alki David is doing.

I think he could be a good guest, though, on the show. Absolutely. I think maybe we should try. Yeah. Alki, if you're listening, please. If you're listening to the definitely not a special cut of the episode that we sent you that deleted a lot of materials. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. If you're listening to the regular audio that we have sent you, please come on. Hook us up. Hook Jason up with some CBD oil popcorn. Oh, boy. Oh, yeah. Let's have a real chill conversation about your armada of holograms and your upcoming hologram shows real John Lovitz will soon be doing the first ever Hologram Comedy Show.

Hologram Comedy Show. He's taking a break from his residency. He currently has a two-man residency in Vegas with Dana Carvey. And he's under lifetime contract at the Laugh Factory on Sunset. So he's gotten himself in a lot of messes and another one now is the hologram show maybe the hologram is a way to ensure that he can perhaps fake his own death but not have to get sued by the laugh factory i think he's probably just trying to get back to to try it to tie it back into our normal subject matter he's he's

trying to get back to the john lovitz Comedy Club, the former City Walk Hollywood. He's just trying to get the gang back together, get the John Lovitz Comedy Club reopened, get the Kevin Smith Podcast Lounge in there reopened. Was it named after Kevin Smith? Yeah, there was the Kevin Smith. Was the Smod Castle in there? No, the Smod Castle used to be on Santa Monica Boulevard. Right, by where we used to do improv shows. By where we used to do improv. It was a black box

theater where people used to do improv and take classes and then it became the Smod Castle and now it's back to being a black box theater where people do improv. Boy, the commonality of all this, if anyone listening is not already in Hollywood and or Los Angeles,

come on out. Look what you're missing. We're sorry. Come on out. Come, Shay. Look what you're missing. You're missing the Smod Castle. You're missing Hologram USA. If you move here and don't immediately find a place to live, I'm telling you, Hologram USA, you could probably hide in the rafters for a couple months. Yes. And crash at

Liz Taylor's house. Live where Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles and Pete Holmes all lived once uh so there you go hologram usa check it out uh uh yeah it gets uh five hologram stars from me uh scott garner great that's great you can quote that alky all right we'll be right back welcome back to podcast the ride uh we are now going to talk about an attraction that i have to confess i've never been on because i was too scared what alien encounter this is a revelation here let me tell this quick story uh i saw i was reading disney adventure magazine we were going to disney world it was a big trip i was very excited about it and i was reading about alien encounter and i kept talking about it i kept telling my mom

alien counter is coming but it's not going to be open when we're there because it said you know opening whatever july i don't remember when it opened uh and i was very excited about it so we got down to disney world we were at tomorrowland and my mom went, the ride is open. This is crazy. It was soft opening and my face dropped. And I said, I don't want to go on it. And I didn't. And my dad and my little sister did go on it. I didn't. I sat outside and was just a little coward.

I was too scared to go on it. It's a shame that I carry with me to this day. This is unbelievable to me. And I'm revealing it on the show right now. Because I am the polar opposite of this. This is an all-timer for me. No, I know, and I've never told... I've known you for almost 10 years now.

I've never told you that I didn't go on Alien Encounter. I've done this multiple times. I'm ashamed of myself. When I would go... Like, this... As a kid, like when I was like, what, like 10 to 14 and we would go down like tomorrow, like that was my home base because Alien Encounter, the People Mover and Carousel of Progress. I could and Space Mountain before it started to beat the shit out of me. I would just just I could be there just for hours, for hours. And I would run back there. My family would be like, we're going to go back to the hotel.

And it's like, all right, I'll be back in a few hours. The park's closing in 15 minutes. But I can knock out one more of these. Hey, I want to make sure we don't forget. Let's give a shout out to the Visionarium. We got the Timekeeper and the Visionarium. I love the Timekeeper, too. I love the Timekeeper.

And I was sad when that went away, too. Like, the redo of Tomorrowland, which came, 94? Was that like Tomorrowland 94? Tomorrowland 94 and Sunny Eclipse. Don't forget Sunny Eclipse. Well, Sunny Eclipse, we all can agree on. I think we all love Sunny Eclipse. There was so much for anyone who doesn't know.

They redid Tomorrowland in 1994 at Disney World and added a lot of mythology. They made it a land that all connected. The People Mover was no longer called the People Mover. It was called the Tomorrowland Transit Authority. It was like the bus that took you around to the different places like the Tomorrowland Convention Center, which is where Alien Encounter takes place. They justified every... Why was I excited about this?

I loved it. It turned it into a municipality. I got a new phone, and it, for whatever reason, didn't transfer over, but my ringtone is the old man going, now arriving, Rocket Tower Plaza. Oh, Rocket Tower Plaza. That that's right and it's just and

it's this old guy i forget the actor's name but he he was the voice of a lot of disney rides for a while at some point they switched it out and it was like a young surfer dude and the last time i wrote it like a few years ago i was just so mad that they got rid of this old man talking about all the different public transit your favorite character an old man i loved it but like alien encounter i it was so great i'm sorry scared the hell out of me it scared i wish i went on and i wish i had the courage i would go on it now re-psych myself up but like really so you were scared oh i was scared yeah no i was scared little boy but i just like i was a coward i was just a coward i couldn't and no one like forced me my mom should have gone go on it somebody should

have said something yeah i also i same thing i haven't been on it either i'm not i don't feel tormented about it i feel fine i've made peace with the um me being a little and scared um i don't know it i also here's something I realized when I was looking at the timeline of the attraction, I realized that, so there was, this attraction opened and it was too scary originally. Too scary. Too scary. And it closed for six months to make it a little less scary. A little less scary.

It was still horrifying. Yeah, yeah. I don't think they undid that aspect of it. And I feel like Michael Eisner, too, was like, people are like, this little less scary. A little less scary. It was still horrifying. Yeah, yeah. I don't think they undid that. And I feel like Michael Eisner, too, was like, people are like, this is too scary. And he's like, I think we can make some minor story tweaks. And honestly, I don't think it's scary enough. That was always the rumor.

He wanted to punish people more. But apparently, the version, the kind of testing out version, the beta version of Alien Encounter, was only open for six weeks, and I realized I was there in those six weeks. I might have been there too, then. I might have been there too. It would have been like Christmas 1994.

No, I wasn't there. And then it officially, the grand opening was in the summer of 95. It was soft opening on and off for like six months, it seemed like. It was soft open on and off for like six months, it seemed like. It was one of those, I think when attractions are retooled, they don't get away with it in the same way that movies do.

When you hear that a movie is having a lot of trouble in reshoots, that could indicate that it's a big mess and it's having a lot of problems, but it can come back full force and be better than ever. But I feel like if a theme park attraction has trouble, it almost never gets over that. There's just an asterisk with it like the rocket rods another mission space oh yeah yeah that's right you know yeah they had to work out the kink of it killing people yeah they had to stop that which it hasn't done that in a while but like there's never a line no one really cares about it like it was just a heart it was a harbinger of things to come all

kind of in sort of the same era roughly right 90s uh early 2000s yeah a lot of like you know disney's attempts at scare attractions and thrill attractions have had a lot of trouble i mean i think this is easily the the scariest like big budget like big two disney and universal theme park ride that they ever made uh uh and for me like i really don't like to be scared that much but this was like the exception because like did you guys watch a ride through of it yeah but you can't youtube ride through yeah uh shout out once again to martininsvids who has a pretty good recreation of, you know, has the source audio and has like

a recreation of the pre-show and the ride itself. It's a dark, not only is it scary, it's like very cynical. Like it's a very dark ride. There's a lot of dark jokes. Tim Curry is like a very mean robot uh very mean animatronic

who like tortures a very cute animatronic skippy yeah like i can't stress enough this watching the ride through of this is sort similar to me of like watching classic simpsons episodes where it's like i may not remember it like every joke in it but it's just like I may not remember it, like every joke in it, but it's just like, I am remember it, remember a lot of it like in my bones, like subconsciously. Wow. And like, this is how big of this ride. It's probably my favorite ride.

This and the Adventurers Club, like this is like built into the DNA of my personal interests. And you're sitting here with two wieners who wouldn't ride it. Two wieners who wouldn't ride it. Two wieners who wouldn't ride it. Should we leave you? We'll just go outside for a while.

I was pretty busy leading up to this recording and it's probably for the best because I feel like I would have gotten obsessed reading about this. You would have gone through a real emotional journey. You would have bullied the two of us when we were little. I you would have been our first four hour like gone through a real emotional journey you would have bullied the two of us when we were little i probably would have because

another thing i liked about the ride was stand well for one thing it emptied in into a gift shop i believe it's still there the merchant of venus uh which in the day used to sell alien encounter merch which was all i also was very into like I have a lot of the merch. I thought it was a very cool design. What merch do we get? Just with the logo or was there like a plush Skippy? Oh, I have still in the box action figures. And the packaging is the tube, is the teleportation tube.

That's great. And so one is the monster and then the other is a set of skippy sir the robot and then fried skippy uh uh i had no idea these existed i would i would like these actually though i would have to if i had them and displayed them in my home i'd have to like write out a note that said uh this is from an attraction that was too scary for me to ever yeah i'm not a true fan of this the sign out front uh uh the sign out front with the alien that says alien encounter and like sort of a weird i don't know metal thing uh which is also next to the sign that says excess tech which is the fictional company in it

i have both like lapel pins of the Alien Encounter logo. I have a t-shirt of the XS Tech logo that Mike and I ordered. And Scott, too. Disney puts out these throwback shirts every now and then. They're a line of shirts called Yester Ears.

And sometimes we'll pool our orders so we save money on the shipping. Sometimes there's buy two, get one free. And so we split the cost. And yeah, and I, as soon as this line came out, we're like, oh, that Disney shopping village one looks cool. And I'm like, order me the excess tech one now. Boy, a real chairman clench.

Yeah, it was a real. We should maybe back up yeah i was gonna say the basics of the because like yeah let's go back my wife didn't know i mean i'm gonna need to lay down let's yeah jason's overheating between the uh marijuana oil and the popcorn and alien encounter jason may have 108 temperature right now and we may have to rush him to the hospital because there's steam venting from his ears so the so the yeah the origin of this ride is that they were trying to do an alien ride the movie alien or aliens uh they were going to do something like that michael eisenhower wanted to do like a scarier ride you were going to disneyland originally right and it was yeah i was going to be in disneyland as

well yes the ship from alien and the company behind it like waylon yutani from the movies the company behind it was going to be the fake company getting you into this ride. Okay, gotcha. And then do we know what the plot would have been? You're in the ship, so it's like, it is the plot of the movie. Like the alien gets loose in the ship. I'm sure, or like testing something and a xenomorph gets in

or something like that. Sure. And then that everyone's... The policy used to be that Disney rides had to be based on PG or G movies. Now the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are PG-13 movies. So that's an exception. They've shattered the rule. They've shattered it a little.

They did use the rights for Alien to put into the great movie ride. Yes. That sequence an exception. They've shattered the rule. They've shattered it a little. They did use the rights for Alien to put into the Great Movie Ride. Yes. That sequence. Yes. But it was, I think, the subject of a lot of infighting within the Imagineering organization. By the way, this whole thing apparently started because Michael Eisner, when he took over the Walt Disney Company, he took his son Breck for a tour of Disneyland. And he came out of it going like, it's lame. There's nothing cool here.

There's nothing edgy here. So he wanted to do a ride that would impress his son. And he was, I think, wait, no. Michael Eisner was pairing that before. Never mind. I thought maybe he had a previous relationship with the Aliens franchise, but he just wanted to bring that property

into the play. Just a side note about Breck, Michael Eisner's son. I do believe that Breck has a lot to do with decisions Michael made overall. If you like the approval of Splash Mountain and stuff i think

breck has a lot to do with that that's right so we can thank breck for some of the best attractions for going dad i want this ride this is a cool ride dad so like i think uh kudos to breck is what i'm saying star tour splash mountain alien encounter breck has a lot to do with thrilling stuff some of those early 90s uh late 80s rides. He came up with the Indiana Jones Mara language. Right. Did diagrams explaining how the rocket rods would work. Centrifuge is his fault. Let's get Breck Eisner on the show, too, in addition.

Did he become a director? Is he a director of films? That's a good question. I have no idea. I feel like there's a director Eisner. We'll have to look that up later. Anyway. Totally sure.

That being said, the three-star review, we mostly do research. Yeah. I just wasn't planning on doing a lot of Breck Eisner material. I'll have it next time. Back to dragging our three-star review. I'll never get over it. Can he re-review us and be like, they didn't know anything about Breck Eisner? If he re-reviews us, he'll'll probably say i was attacked personally by the podcast we're well we're uh we're also

treading the line too with this ride because there is a lot of speculation online of like you know there was some imagineers that uh you know really wanted to um you know they just stuck with it because after the alien idea was scrapped, like people kept pursuing like we should do something with this alien idea, even if it's not that movie. And then they brought in George Lucas to like, you know, consult on or give them advice of how to do this. But who, according to the Jim Hill synopsis of events, he kind of checked out. Once he was given producer credit, he was not terribly involved. He was not a prequels level of involved in the creation of Alien. Right.

And if you are not in the entertainment industry, sometimes the title of consultant or producer, that can mean people are very hands-on and are very responsible for stuff. Or it can mean they would pop by for an hour a couple times and collect money yeah and then collect uh a year's worth a middle class uh uh income an average middle class income for a couple couple hours grab more money than you make in a year yeah to send a couple emails that's hollywood baby so so yeah so when that stuff kind of all fell by the wayside the imagineers then had to than you make in a year to send a couple emails. That's Hollywood, baby. So, yeah, so when that stuff kind of all fell by the wayside, the Imagineers then had to make their own mythos, their own characters,

so they created all these different things. They created this fake company that would be the basis for the ride, which is called XS Tech. Is that the letters XS? And there's a lot of jokes of, like, if something is only worth doing with too excess. If you can't do it with excess, it shouldn't be done at all. This is like a Halliburton type company that has like, it's dangerous.

Like they're really trying to give you the jokes, but they're trying to be like, this is corporate overreach. This is corporate. Yeah, the corporation is the bad gone mad yeah it's kind of like in gen and jurassic park where like you're trying to make a comment on human beings uh overreaching in a theme park yes with evil corporations within yes disney land and universal. It's pretty odd. Yeah, and so the basic premise of it is that this company, Excess Tech, is giving a demonstration

in the Tomorrowland Interplanetary Convention Center. Convention Center, public transit systems. I loved all this stuff about Tomorrowland 94. I think the aesthetic, too, that sort of future that never happened aesthetic, every time I've been down there the last few years I'm like as long as the lights are on as long as they're like the purple and green neon and stuff it's like this still looks pretty good like I think it still looks good because it's they leaned into like yeah this future never happened they. They redid Tomorrowland in Disney World in 1994 and in Disneyland in 1998. And I think most people would agree the 94 Disney World was much more successful than the 98 Tomorrowland. Tomorrowland 98 really kind of looks like shit.

As Disneyland nerds. Tomorrowland is sad and I walked by it on Saturday with my girlfriend, and I just went, oh, I made that noise. Because there's just things. I looked at this tomorrow where tomorrow the people mover would load in, and it's empty, and it's not moving, and it's just sad. It's very sad to see our Tomorrowland right now. And it won't be fixed for many years is also the problem.

There's so many. It's what makes me, it's why I don't like some of these things like Pixar Pier because why are we doing that when we could be improving Pixar Tomorrowland which Tomorrowland in the uh as yeah your your love of Disney World Tomorrowland probably equal to my love of Disneyland Tomorrowland growing up it was where all the best attractions attractions were. It's Star Tours. It's Captain EO. Still a lot of great attractions. Yeah.

It's crazy how rough that land looks with like how many E tickets and D tickets are like concentrated. Yeah, I know. Just like overloaded with so many strollers. It's just crawling with like the strollers reproduce. When they like strollers get together with other strollers and breed and make new strollers while they're sitting there. If they had just recreated like a smaller scale version of Tomorrowland 94 out here, like again, I think it would still look good as it stands. Like what was going to happen was a massive plan called Tomorrowland 2055, which would have seen Alien Encounter reproduced in Anaheim as well as

there was going to be a flying saucer in the Carousel of Progress like a new flying saucers which was an original opening day Plekdu's Fantastic Intergalactic Review which is something I don't know a lot about but I love that title I would have loved to have seen

if you go to Disneyland today it, for a long time now, it's been the Star Wars Launch Bay, which is where you go meet Chewbacca, and there's some fun little things in there. But it's like massive real estate in Tomorrowland that you could do a pretty major show in, and there has not been a reasonable, well-done attraction since America Sings closed.

Yeah, I don't think there's been a Circle Vision thing in there. reasonable, well-done attraction since America Sings closed. Yeah. I don't think there's been a Circle Vision thing in there. I think they were talking about putting the Timekeeper in there. I think they were talking about putting the Timekeeper somewhere out here, too. The Alien Encounter was supposed to go where the Pizza Port is right now. Oh, my God. So the Pizza Port, which is regularly everyone's... I feel physically upset now.

Our past guest, Mike Mitchell, loves Pizza Port, which is regularly everyone's... I feel physically upset now. Our past guest, Mike Mitchell, loves Pizza Port, but he's the only person I've ever heard say that. Pizza Port, I think, is like everyone's least favorite restaurant. It's a cafeteria. Now that he's not here, now that we're not afraid of bully Mike Mitchell giving us a blowback on Pizza support. No, it's like yeah, I think the graphic design

in there is miserable. It smells like a cafeteria. It smells like a Chuck E. Cheese. Yeah, it's very Chuck E. Cheese. Yes. And yet without robots, the thing that was the salvation of Chuck E. Cheese. All they have to do is plug Sony Eclipse in there and we go, well, it smells like a Chuck E. Cheese and the graphic design is

terrible, but there's a fucking robot playing piano an alien robot singer and we'd all be like well it's pretty good yeah and then they do have a salad i like there is okay i was i get a decent you can get a decent if you scrub back on the podcast like about a minute or two i'm about to say they have a decent salad i swear so go back and listen i'm about and then someone talks and i go well why do i have to fucking talk about a salad? I think you're making this up. I think you're fronting so that you're not on Jason's bad side again. I am trying to kiss up to Jason,

but that is a thought I had. My friend is scared of Alien Encounter, and he doesn't even know about that cool salad. I'm not hanging up. Podcast canceled. And the thing that happened with Tomorrowland 2055 is that fucking Disney Paris was such a financial fuck up for a while. This is a drag on the company.

I hate to get off the top because we keep getting off topic here, but that happens all the time, and that drives me nuts because there's certain things like when Shanghai Disney was being built and it was going over budget then all of a sudden there was garbage everywhere in disneyland they had cut staff and like garbage is overflowing from bathrooms and they had like yeah this is what happens when other countries disney parks start to go to shit

or something gets behind schedule is that we in disneyland who have been supporting the park for years we suffer because of it and it's upsetting and it's not fair but then it swings the other way where it's like you know there hadn't been a new attraction for a while and then you get a big new uh thing like guardians of the galaxy and they're like two billion dollars infused into anaheim over like 10 years yeah but that was 20 years after a new attraction, and it's still not a new attraction. Yeah, that's true. It's still a repurposed. I don't want to put all this on just Disney parks in other countries

because that makes this a Trumpian viewpoint. Well, it's not the. The other countries are dragging down our U.S. parks. It's not the other country's fault. It is the Disney Corporation's fault. That's true. Well, the worst Disney parks probably are Disneyland Paris. And I haven't been to Hong Kong, I could say.

It seems like kind of chintzy-er and they need to put more money in. But I think they're sprucing it up. But also Disney World budget problems from things like the wristbands, the magic bands. Yes, the magic. That's true, too. They've blown a lot of money. Something like that. Disney World does some program that burns a lot of money, and suddenly we're cutting

things from Star Wars land out here. Disneyland, which is doing great, hometown pride, is taking the fall for Disney World's mistakes. Very recently, they had to cut a ride from Star Wars Land. You were going to ride on the back of these beasts of burden. It was a bantha, right? A bantha. Yeah, sure.

I'll assume you're correct. I think it's a bantha. But yeah, because of Disney World, Disney World didn't have the money to do that, so Disneyland lost it. We would have had one more attraction, a big cool creature attraction that would have made...

It's crazy. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah this stuff i say uh what's the political version it's like it's like state funds versus federal right oh yeah i think we need to like separate i agree well they've they've recently i think separated because before there was a policy that disney world had control over decision making for anaheim as well which is crazy but I think they've stopped that now, which is good. I also think Disneyland should just break off from the company and be

its own thing. It should totally be separate. It should have its own budget so we can get regular new rides and it doesn't have to be like, oh, well, the Pirates of the Caribbean bombed. You guys aren't going to get a new Tomorrowland until 2030. And their budget should be $150 billion a year.

Yes, that's true, too. I think it should be a public service. I think we should nationalize Disney World and Disneyland, just like we should nationalize the internet as a public service, and also Amazon. We're getting to the point where Amazon just needs to be a public service. That's true, too. This is going to be the path to drilling in Disneyland.

Yeah, that's a good point. You're going to start drilling into the Matterhorn if you start going this way. So alien encounter. I also, I'd like to say, I'm a little self-conscious. I feel like this is one of those where we're just like talking about our nerd issues. Yeah.

We definitely are. So apologies. But look, we apologize in episode one this was gonna happen we're just we're gonna get all we're talking about our stuff uh uh you know hey this one's one for us but people have told us they enjoy the sincerity and i'm gonna tell you i mean there's very i i there's very few things i'm this sincere about like alien account uh yeah uh uh i mean it's just yeah from the pre-show through the ride i just love it well take take us through it explain the uh the the attraction to us but i think the bells

are the very fundamental basics of it it's like a it ends up being a theater show in the same place where there used to be an attraction called mission to mars and before that uh flight to the moon rocket to the moon yeah i think mission to Mission to Mars. Well, what was there when Disney World opened? I think they did Mission to Mars. It was Mission to Mars, yeah. A little while. And it was a circular theater with a bunch of seats that were all surrounding a porthole

where you could watch a rocket take off and you would land on the moon or Mars, depending on which iteration it was. So they took this same circular theater setting and they put a big tube in the middle and created this experience where an alien teleports into the theater and then using a technology

that they were very keen on at the time, binaural audio, which is like very sophisticated, sort of a lot going on, left to right speakers. That combined with, you know, with like water and I guess, I don't know, other different effects. The harnesses. The harnesses that you're strapped into would like push down on you as if the alien was walking across your shoulders,

as if it was walking through the aisle. It was very, uh, it was cool. It was cool. And people would scream every time. Also, if you weren't sitting up straight,

if you were slouching, when those harnesses came down, uh, it would really push down on you. Like it could be a tight fit. I saw a complaint about the new iteration about stitches, great escape, but which uses the same harnesses.

But, uh, there was a Yelp review where somebody said, if you were a mother reaching out for your child, you would not be able to reach them. Another reason, if I could reach for mommy, why am I going on this ride? I think it's pretty easy to grab someone's hand.

But if you wanted to put your hand across, maybe not. And it's not a good place to make out. No, it's not a good place to make out. You can't put your arm around somebody. You are strapped in. You are strapped in. You strap in. Also, if you start to freak out, you're fucked.

I'm sure there was an emergency release, but they didn't really tell people. I would have freaked out. Mike, you and I could have both been in institutions for most of our childhoods if we had gone on this ride. I'm glad we didn't. It's probably a good thing. A lot of this ride takes place in total darkness. One of the first episodes, I told the story of going on this really shitty UFO ride

that was in the dark where I thought we were going into space and I almost had a meltdown. So yeah, this would have sent me... Although, I was old too. What was this? 95? When did this open? Yeah, 95. 95? I was 11. That wasn't 5. But this is probably one where it's okay to be scared

because one... Adults were scared too. Yeah, adults were scared too. So many of the jokes in this ride are about how the employees of this fictional company, these aliens, don't give a shit if you die. There's so many mean... A lot of the characters are mean. There's a lot of dark jokes. What's so many mean, like, it's a lot of the characters are mean.

Like, there's a lot of dark jokes. I mean, what's interesting about it, and I'm trying to think if there's an equivalent other than, like, in Gen for Jurassic Park, is that the bad guys are all the people that are talking to you and entrolling. Like, all of the aliens and that robot are bad guys. They're hurting people. You're right. This is not. Except Skippy. I mean, people. You're right. This is not... Except Skippy. I mean, Skippy is...

Yeah, Skippy is good. Skippy is an innocent. Skippy is a good alien, but he gets hurt and that robot at the start hurts him. And he gets fried. The robot hurts him a lot. He's constantly fucking with him.

Honestly, as a kid, I thought that was... I love the dark jokes that the Tim Curry animatronic made where he just like just him. Wasn't Phil Hartman the voice too? Phil Hartman was originally a voice and he was goofier. And then they're like, no, this guy's got to be darker.

Yeah, they had to make the pre-show scarier so that you weren't thrown by how scary the actual show was. So for those six weeks, and now I really wish I had done it, but for six weeks there was a Phil Hartman animatronic. He was a different character named Tom 2000. Later Tim Curry became Sir, and then Phil Hartman would not appear in the park again until Enchanted Tiki Room Under New Management

in which he plays one half of the bird agent team William and Morris. Oh boy. We will get to that. We will get to Tiki Room. That's another one. We've got 45 minutes of complaints on Tiki Room. Another one where a beloved

attraction becomes something mystifying in the 90s or 2000s. There were so many of those, and we covered this already with Ellen's Energy Adventure. You will find this is a common umbrella topic for these episodes, the bad nineties or two thousands reboot. Um,

so just to hit the big beats of this ride. So you, you walk into like, yeah, what is a fictional, uh, space age convention center, uh,

lobby. Um, and, and there's a video, you know, explaining the history of this excess tech company and they're demonstrating this new technology and this is also green aliens bunch of green aliens the makeup looks really good on these aliens and they should say this is a star-studded uh the film stuff looks a little

cheap like the actual quality of it sort of video but there's like name actors underneath all that makeup there sure are the first actor you'd see it's not her voice oddly enough but the actor playing it is tyra banks under makeup and she's the one explaining the history of the company and then you see uh the head of the company chairman lc clench uh played by Jeffrey Jones. How have we not been able to avoid controversial figures? Because the world is horrible. It's the reason why.

We'll come back around to that when we come to the ride closing. Or not Jeffrey Jones. Jeffrey Jones, of course, had a child pornography charge. No worse than that. Oh, yeah. I think there's taking photos

in a shed. It's the guy. It's the principal from Ferris Bueller. Mr. Looney. Very sad that he did bad things because he was so great in many 80s and 90s films. Howard the Duck. He's in a lot of stuff. He's not a good movie, but he's not a good stuff.

He still worked after, too, which, anyway. This is insane. Chairman Clench. Yeah, he played Chairman Clench. And then the two alien scientists, Dr. Femus is played by Kathy Najimy. Najimy? This is how I can tell you love this role.

You said Dr. Femus without any attitude or anything. Just very earnest. And then Dr. Femus without any attitude or anything. Just very earnest. And the Dr. Femus. And then, of course, the instigator, the one who makes everything go wrong, Spinlock, portrayed by the great Kevin Pollack. Kevin Pollack is Spinlock, who fucks everything up. We need to get Kevin on the show to talk about Spinlock. I bet we could get Kevin on the show to talk about Spinlock.

He took his fedora off to portray alien spinlock so after they tell you a little bit about the history of the ride you go to like a second pre-show area with sir uh the simulated intelligence robotics uh uh that is portrayed by tim curry the great tim curry and then he has like two teleportation tubes there with an adorable animatronic named skippy an adorable alien who they would sell lots of stuffed animals of and he demonstrates the technology and takes delight in torturing skippy by using this technology on him and teleports him from one tube to another tube where he's all like fried a Looney Tune after they've been shot with a cannon.

I have a Skippy toy as well from Park Stars. Oh, yeah. Sorry, I should have added that earlier. You can buy the toys, huh? You didn't live the experience. I'm sorry. I would like a... What's Kevin Pollak's character name?

Spinlock? I would love a Spinlock toy. Do you have Spinlock? No, there weren't any alien action figures. That sucks. I wish. Dr. F? No, there weren't any alien action figures. That sucks. I wish. Dr. Femus, the Kathy Najimy character, wears this very odd plastic or tin looking dress. I would like to have the full.

I'd like to have her weird shiny space dress. It's like a space dress, but the design is kind of like when there is a nurse in Downton Abbey. When there was a matronly nurse and they're wearing like a tent. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Really fans out. But it's in space. Hey, if you don't know the ride that we were talking about, if we have not convinced you to look up a ride through of it.

Yeah. Check out Dr. Femus' space dress. So after Tim Curry fucks around with Skippy for a while. And then the thing is he teleports skippy skippy gets fried and then he's like the best thing is like you can pause the teleportation so then skippy is disappears and he's just in the air he's just kind of like hovering between like uh mike tv and willie wonka yeah like mike tv that's perfect yeah uh and then there is footage of Dr. Femus

and Spinlock telling you what's about to happen. That one of you is going to get transported to their planet. And then Chairman Clinch bursts in and he says, no, I'm going to transport to them. And they're like, uh, alright. Alright, dude. What is interesting is that that's supposed

to be the better scenario, but if you think about it, transporting Jeffrey Jones into a room full of children is a lot less scary uh or a lot more scary excuse me than transporting the alien who are all locked in place who are all locked in place cannot reach them uh-huh yeah uh that's i think there's another maybe you and i just both had a bad feeling about jeffrey jones. Maybe the universe was sending us a signal. A signal you didn't get, Jason. Even if you saw a clip of the pre-show, you would know that Chairman Clench did not get to the head of this company ethically. I mean, you don't make that many space dollars being an ethical businessman.

There's weird implications of what else XSTech did. Yeah. One of the things their company does is planetary restructuring, which implies blowing up planets, I think. Yeah. There's a whole list. I should have written it down, but yeah, there's a whole list of terrible things that this company is up to. Little Easter egg, there is a receipt or invoice from XSTech in the collector's office in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Oh, yeah. So the Tyvon collection did business with XSTech? Yeah, they did business. There's a billing. There's a carbon copy. There is some real great little Easter eggs in that Guardians ride for Disney fans. In the line, you're looking at the collection of Benicio del Toro, and there's a lot of odd imaginary.

And believe it or not, the collector is a big Disney Parks fan. Yeah. So he's got figment in one of his little cases. Anyway. So then you're loaded. Yeah, you're loaded into this theater theater and you're strapped in these harnesses like come down all at once like very slowly lower into this theater full of people and you know the film starts to play i think maybe it's in the room where like the film is like all

right we're going to transport one of you that's yes that's where it's explained the chairman clench we will not be transported but but Chairman Clinch will come to us. Which is a very odd part of the ride where he says, no, if only one of you came, I could only meet one of you. But instead, I can shake each hand. I don't know what he's, this whole, I don't know. The drama of Chairman Clinch wants to meet us.

Yeah, they don't really set that up of like why he's so hell bent. I mean, he's very much like a politician who's like, I want to roll up my sleeves and go to a diner and shake some hands. It's very weird. It's unexplained. But so, you know, it's Dr. Femus is trying to reconfigure the machine for this this change. And then Spinlock goes like, no, fuck it. Just do it.

We got to do it. Spinlock messes everything up. Oh, it's his fault. And because a planet gets between the teleportation signal. They transport Clench to another planet. And then they're like, oh, we got to get him out of there we got to get him out we got to get into earth and they're like well there's this life form it looks about right and he's just just do it it's him it's him and then they transport him into a teleportation

tube and that's when you realize like i think they got the wrong alien yeah there's a joke where it's like uh since when does clench have wings uh and it's like it is a monster it is a monster scary shit yeah it's scary shit um it's usually partially obscured by like fog a lot of the time which just makes it even more frightening does it appear in the tube kind of like screaming and writhing around oh it sure does breaks out okay yeah and then it's they it the glass like they do a cool effect like a lot of the fear in this ride comes from like classic like theatrical effects like playing the audio from different angles a lot of smoke and mirrors type of stuff um and then like the tube is empty and the power goes out. And so like the implication being the alien, this monster alien is crawling around the room.

And they had to know the fact that he has wings is one of the things that they had to change when they shut it down. Because that was like a lost story point. They had to show that the alien has wings to let you know how it's flapping around and flying from one part of the theater to the other. Oh, sure. This was one of the things that a lot of people, like the problems that this ride had and the story issues kind of stemmed from that they wanted to do the movie Alien. And that's an alien that you've seen, that you understand. You don't need the backstory because you're coming in aware of the franchise. And a lot of the issues that this ride had is that they had to reverse engineer

and tell you all this stuff about excess tech and since when does it have wings. They had to explain the alien to you in a way they wouldn't have had to with the xenomorph. Okay, this, again, this sounds like a note that is parodied in Hollywood movies a lot of just like, well, this character's at his house and then he's having lunch with his boss what happens in between like how do we how does he

get to the restaurant and it's like who gives a shit like the alien can climb i just solved it i fixed it the alien can climb the xenomorph has like limbs like long limbs that like can make him climb or her climb but this also like this alien like like the model of it, it's like got like a dozen legs and it's got giant claws and it's got wings. It's like, OK, it can get around. The theater is not that big. Another important thing to note in terms of theme park exposition is that nobody is paying attention whatsoever. Only psycho little kids who are going to start a podcast 20 years later have heard the words excess tech or Dr. Femus or any of this bullshit. So future Imagineers, just remember, no one is paying attention.

It is funny because you would, how many people have done, like this thing was open for how many years? Eight years? Just under 10 years if you were to 10 years this give a test to every dad who went on this ride do you recognize this logo the excess tech logo what is the percentage of dads who would know what that is is it oh very low two percent the main logo of the ride it's no i know that i'm just saying if you were to give all this iconography and all these different things in the backstory and like would a dad ever remember anything would he remember spin lock show him a photo of spin lock the number yeah but your dad is a weirdo my dad my dad went on it i don't know if i go hey dad you know who

spin lock is he would not know what i mean like i remember seeing this face uh right right after i saw my son weeping openly in public. That was another one of my favorite activities with this ride is standing in the gift shop, which was full of stuff I bought or wanted to buy, and watching people exit. And I would just watch people crying, just watching scared children leave this ride. And I remember me and my mom talked to like some of the

employees once we're like hey do a lot of people come out really scared of that ride and they're like all day all day long all day every day yeah they got constant complaints complaints from people because they didn't know how scary this thing was and their child would be traumatized it was i mean it just made it that much better like there's never been like a better again yeah i mean it's scary it's just such an odd thing to have it in disney then that's what adds to it i mean halloween horror nights has nothing on this ride i mean you know what you're getting into there this is like it's it's a fucking convention center you're going into a lobby it is a great misdirect because you're in disney and tomorrowland and it's so bright and cheery.

It's right off of the hub. It's right there. You can see Cinderella's castle and then you're about to get eaten. Yeah. I think it's pretty great. That story is crazy to me. It was effective. For as much as we were too scared to go on it, it really did mess kids up.

I'm curious if there was legitimate psychological damage for people. I mean, I got to think. Pretty amazing. And I just like that it was a bold thing. I like that they did something very different than they'd ever done before. It's noticeably different than any other attraction in the history of Disney World. The next big thing that happens in the ride they send a maintenance person in and so there's like this is again another smoke and

mirrors trick where it's like someone is in the rafters above the theater and there's like a dangle a light that moves so it looks like a flashlight walking around and they go to repair it and then they they they he has like a night vision camera on that he's wearing and like on the one screen you once he plugs it back in you see what he sees and it's the monster and the monster eats him multiple people die in this ride like and this guy dies horrifically he is screaming you there they drop droplets of water on you as if it's his blood. As if it's his fluids. That's pretty crazy.

They use the droplets of water to be the breaking glass, too. Like, when the monster breaks out, they spray water at you, so it feels like you got sprayed with, like, little shards of glass. Like, it's really wild. And then, yeah. Did you still, like, when you, do you remember specifically like first time, second time, third time?

Like, did you, were you able to brace yourself? How bad was it? The first, I think every trip, the first time I would be scared. Cause I would forget stuff.

And then after the re rides, I would just like, I just liked all the beats of the ride. I also like, like to laugh at everyone who had Infanto I like to scream I remember talking to people like I've been on this before and they're like no and I'm like this is great

let me ask you this did you have a secret fantasy that you would get eaten I mean oh maybe I mean I've always longed for death sweet touch I've always longed to touch sweet touch that's what i always long to touch the edge no i know so i was wondering if you were like this is the time it happens this is the time

it happens i feel like there is and i can't remember if i read that there's like one broken seat there's always one broken seat with like an excess cover on it i i forget but like there they left a lot of the uh excess i mean they reused a lot of the stuff for stitch uh we haven't even gotten to the stitch i know as well we shouldn't um and so then eventually the power comes back on they lure the alien back into the tube this is at the very end when you get the fullest view of him and he's the alien is screaming there's flashing lights everywhere there's there's he's leaning through the broken glass and then they slide the tube up and i i think they're like they don't even try to teleport him out of there they just like full power he's gonna explode and then he like

explodes uh uh oh which gets me to another thing he explodes right as the tube starts to close and they do spray the water again so like you got the like you got alien goo and you got alien parts and there's also some piped in dialogue and from as if it's uh audience members saying it and at that point like when you first see the, there's a very faint cry of someone goes like, oh, what is this? My mother-in-law. And then at the very end, when the alien explodes, someone goes, oh, my mouth was open. Like this is weird. Wow.

These comedy guys. It's a real like theater actor. My mouth was open. Yeah, it's a real hammy joke. And then like New York tourist. Man, my mouth was open. Yeah, it's a real hammy joke. A New York tourist. I forget what the closing lines, but Dr. Femus and Spinlock come on the screen.

They do not address the fact that Chairman Clench is stranded on a strange planet and probably dead. He's probably dead or injured. Depending on the atmosphere. Yeah, depending. He could breathe that or not. They say, and at that point breathe that or not. They say, like, and at that point, they're not even sorry. They're like, well, the future, you know,

you gotta break some eggs to get to the future. Like, there, I forget what the line is. Probably another play on excess. And then the lights come up, and you leave. Having survived, what is essentially a traumatic experience? You try to walk out with your knees

shaking with your knees shaking yes yeah if you can manage to not faint uh and on your steps to the gift shop um i mean besides like yeah i mean i saw some kids coming off crying but most people were like laughing going off you know most people were like wow that was crazy like that was great and in a better in like a better area that was more appropriate for it i think it would have been a big hit like if it was in a universal park or something i think because because this is a beloved attraction actually like yeah as much as this thing got because it you know gets ripped on for being scary it's just because people weren't expecting it and kids are expecting a fun much more pleasant experience it's also long lines like once all

that tomorrowland stuff like that tomorrowland everything was pretty popular there except carousel progress which is slow and for old people and i still love it and the people mover which never stops running so there's rarely a line because you just walk into the car so i agree oh boy i've been transported to 94 tomorrowland to 94 tomorrow i loved it there so uh eventually this ride but eventually they're like this is people are complaining too much and they i mean i don't know what the hourly capacity of it was either i'm not sure if it was huge it always had long lines but they they did close it in 2003 and why is the quiz because why well there's yeah there's two two schools of thought it's a mix that it was like too scary and then also like it didn't help that a child molester was one of the main characters

and a villain a sinister villain leering at you. I'm guessing it had more to do, because you can redo a video. Yeah, you can refilm that. You can refilm. Who was a villain at the time? Who was a character actor who was evil who should have, in 2003... Willem Dafoe.

Billy Zane. Oh, Billy Zane, Willem Dafoe. That's a little late. That's a little late. Yeah a little late yeah i mean nick cage would have been a get sure probably an a-lister probably wouldn't have put all that who knows maybe he's a big disney parks fan who should have been clench if you could recast recast clench i now would be a mocap thing man now clench yeah oh it would all be mocap and it would all be a simulator and yeah yeah so the uh they'd mess it up uh yeah what was i

gonna say uh i think that like this is an area too now they've talked about putting like a virtual reality wreck it ralph thing in that because it's a small area so so yeah it's a small theater i mean and it's it's like the it's built into the infrastructure of other stuff, like the People Mover track and multiple gift shops. So they kind of can't totally destroy it. They just keep reusing this theater. They keep trying to figure out how to reuse the infrastructure. Yeah. So it's limited in what they can do with it.

Well, which is why they closed the ride and gave it this overhaul, an under an underwhelming over underwhelming overall that would, that is called stitches, great escape. And if you had to synopsize this ride, it would be everything we just described, but with stitch and, uh, wacky Tim,

Kurt, the Tim Curry robot has a, a police uniform and a beard now. And he's nice. And he's nice. And the projections on the screen or the the film segments are all animated um you know i oh and and uh instead of the alien dripping his slime on you uh stitch burps a chili dog smell in your face yeah that is the main headline when you

a lot of different uh theme park websites and lists and podcast a lot of theme park media has declared this the worst attraction in all of disney world and the really the the crux of the argument is always stitch burps chili dog not like it's not fun it's not pleasant it's not i mean you listen to the audience they're all just like if you like stick i mean i guess it's it makes sense, like, why I mean, Lilo and Stitch was, like, a pretty big hit, right? And it's, like, the one thing that's, like, survived

from that era of Disney animation that people like. The Treasure Planet era. The Home on the Range. Lilo and Stitch is the one thing I think people actually do have affection for. I do find it a very endearing thing. Yeah, it's cute. But this is, they very much were like, alright, let's take out the family stuff actually do have affection for. I do find it a very endearing thing. It's cute. But this is,

they very much were like, all right, let's take out the family stuff and the Ohana means family, family means no one gets left behind. Let's get rid of all that. Let's get Stitch. Let's get the alien scientist to torture him.

But not like torture like the old alien scientists who torture people. No, no. It's like Stitch being a goofball. I'll admit this. I've never been on this one either. I have not either.

I think I've been to Disney. And I've been to Disney. Yes, I've been to Disney World, yeah. It's just there's too much stuff to do in Disney World. Both times I've gone in the last 10 years. It's like, well, am I going to go on Stitch's Great Escape or go on Space Mountain or go over to Animal Kingdom? I would imagine your girlfriend, similar to my wife, who does not have the pain tolerance that I do, I need to experience every horrible attraction. She would love to never again go on Journey into Imagination or sit through the... I mean, this isn't a bad attraction, but the American Adventure,

I remember her just staring daggers at me. That rules. The American Adventure rules. Lindsay liked the American Adventure, so she, Ben Franklin. But also, again, this is, the climax of the show is Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin. Ben Franklin on the set. Shaking hands. Poorly shaking hands.

It's great. I don't, I'm not going to blame my wife here. I'll say that.ly shaking hands. It's great. I don't, I'm not gonna blame my wife here. I'll say that. No, no, it's not. I didn't go on and it had nothing to do with Lindsay. I just, we were like

under the gun to get other stuff done. It does feel, I mean, it's very melancholy for me when I've written it. It's been very, because the old ride meant so much to me.

And I was just like, this seems like a friend I used to old ride meant so much to me and i was like this seems like a friend i used to recognize but it's so much is gone uh similar same harnesses same tube it's all the same stuff so much of it they barely changed and the other thing is the time key i used to love the timekeeper too i didn't ride that as much because it was just a movie and it was a little long i have never ridden the monsters in glass floor i don't even know what it is and just because i'm like no absolutely not two i think pretty dynamic interesting new attractions not based on uh in other intellectual property alien encounter and the timekeeper which

will cover at some point i am sure uh but the uh these were replaced by these I think yeah these these very lame quick you know like shove them in kind of attractions based on the only popular movies Disney had at the time yeah right that that Monsters Inc thing seems so I guess they are for little children this is what I'm forgetting yeah but children I don't think people like them the other thing is what I've read in Stitch, kids still kind of cry and scream because it's still pitch black a lot of the time and weird noises are coming at them. Yeah, and it's touching you.

We'll do Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, which I did do, and I scared the shit out of me as a little kid. I was so scared. I don't like those snakes. I don't even like Shrek 4D when they poke you in the back when those seats poke you in the back do people like this do people like it's tough to be a

bug when like the bugs all crawl yeah i hate that i hate anything like this it's amazing i'm scared of it yeah it's but people like you're being molested by these people like being scared some people like being scared and that's what's what's different about the three of us is that most theme park people not most i shouldn't say but a lot of theme park there's a big contingent now of halloween horror nights people that like this they like being touched by college students and masks they like like constantly going ah like i don't like that i like a six minute House, the old House of Horrors at Universal. I had a headache after it. I was so like, stop.

Stop yelling at me, college students. I have a story I'll save for another day on that. But yeah, friends made me go through that once and it sucked. And then I got the biggest fuck you at the end of it. And yeah, I want to save that for another episode. These scream freaks who are taking over our nice, cute attractions. Get out of here.

You're a bad element. And yeah, look, at least Universal shoves them into the night, the unruly nighttime. We're nice. These people, these weirdos out of my daytime parks. Yeah, we're nice boys. We want a pleasant experience. We want a nice park. Or at the very least,

if you're going to make it scary, spend a lot of money on it and get some character actors in there. Yeah. Yeah, more indelible characters like Femus. Or just Tim Curry. Just put Tim Curry in there. Big influence for me.

Tim Curry. Sure. Real fond of him. Yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. Also, this isn't about this ride, but the fact that the Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor was a ride where you can text in a joke, and then they'll tell the joke you texted. What an unpleasant.

I might as well say it now, because I'd love to not do an episode about the Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor. I'm sure we will. If we're doing this in three years, I think we'll have already gotten to Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor. We'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel. We'll be doing that on the roof of one of our... That'll be our... Like the Beatles.

That'll be our last episode as Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor. We're doing it on a roof for a crowd. You know that it's been rough. Our personal relationships have frayed. People gather down. They're doing it one more time. Jason's got some cool new girlfriend

dressed like Dr. Femus. Who we don't like. She likes to dress this way. I didn't tell her. She was dressed this way when we met. We're both very normal and healthy together. I think this is probably an attraction where we should do

the thing that we often forget to do, which is plus it up, keep it as is. Yeah. Burn to the ground for insurance money. Because it's a big question. I don't know what you do. The rumor is, like you said, that this Wreck-It Ralph attraction is coming in. Although there's sort of a rumored

issue with that is that there's a really amazing Super Mario Kart attraction on the way. And they don't want to look like shit. Because this would be, the rumor is it's a ride based on Sugar Rush. The Go-Kart, yes, game that they play. Mario Kart-esque game that is in Wreck-It Ralph. So is that sort of, does that end up being a lesser version of what probably yes well also like those VR sets that parks are experimenting with putting on people not only is it time consuming to put them on people and secure them the technology outpaces

uh uh innovation innovation outpaces like people's expectations. So like if it looks good for six months, it's going to look like shit in a year, you know? And also people can do it from their home. People can buy VR for their home. So you got to compete with that. Right. Yeah.

I think, I always think that stuff is weird. Like shove the idea that, uh, I mean, I think some fun rides came out of Disney wanting to do video games in the parks i like uh buzz lightyear astro blasters and i really like midway mania but i think you uh there's still i think you can't go nuts with that i did not like the knots berry farm video game ride journey to the voyage to the iron

reef that was yeah that's bad that's that's a headache-inducing ride. Sure. Yeah, not fun at all. So, yeah, this video game stuff, I don't know, and the VR, I don't know. I'm really not sure what you do here, but I bet the idea has occurred to you guys as well

that with the Disney-Fox merger, well, we talked about it on the last episode. Talked about it on the last show. They could do the original version on the Nostromo with a Xenomorph, and I'm all for it.

Yeah, if we're doing the scale, I would say bulldoze the one in Tomorrowland, build the original version, but let's get crazy with it, so plus it up. Have people in there always that are plants, maybe, that get sucked out of their seats

or bloodied up, or have half the audience have part of the things move. So like the seats go, like people go missing. So like lights go back on and maybe the person next to you is gone. Dad is gone. Have the Prometheus, the weird Prometheus god creatures. Oh, that's great.

In there. And then, of course, I mean, fold spinlock into the weyland uh utani mythology yeah everything is alien but also spinlock and dr femus are there and make ridley scott do another one of these alien movies but spinlock is in it and he's interacting with uh fast benders what david is that the character's name the robot character so yeah put david on the ride too david is out the eyes like obviously like talking to you before the ride and then like spin lock like knocks him over like gets him wet because he's a robot and that's bad and like he starts the short circuit or something you have a little levity before the horror um does paul riser go in

yeah paul riser goes in ripley goes in in. I think a live, yeah, live actors. That was what I thought. Like a live Ripley, like C2 3D. That'd be fun. There's a lot of stuff you could do. And I think the grand finale, you do it like the, I don't know why they didn't do this. This would have been good in the original Alien Encounter.

Like in the movies, you blow the alien out of an airlock, and you got fans blasting. That's great. That's a cool effect. Yeah. Yeah. Big whirlwind of a wind, a whirl of wind. Sure.

Yeah. I'm very well spoken. This would be a great ride. And I think, you know, obviously it's tough like, you know, to set the mythology and, you know, well, I think we need to change it from Phil Hartman to Tim Curry so that we know that it's a scary ride. And so that kids are. Why don't you put up a big red sign that says no kids?

There was a thing saying this attraction may be too scary and intense for young children. But people so rarely. They made it look like one of the like more bored. Like one of the like we legally have to put on this, like, fine print ride. They say that about everything, but not every ride made little Mike's and Scott's pee their pants. Yeah. They mean business here. Some cast members would be like, you know what this is, right?

Like, you know this is super scary, right? And others would be like, hi, welcome to Access Tech. Come do our presentation. Hey, welcome back, Jason. Welcome back, you small little butterball. You weird, weird little butterball. Your iHeart future Mr. Femus shirt. Did you get tired of riding the PeopleMover for an hour?

Because if it's not busy at night, they'll just let you sit on it. They'll let you stay on it. Hey, there's a hack. That's not a PeopleMover hack hack but a tomorrowland transit authority hack oh yeah uh oh that's another one too where it's like i mean it's great it's still there i love that it's still there but last time i was there i was like could i rip an mp3 of the old people mover narration and listen to it through headphones so i don't have to hear this teen like i could queue it up and have my own little experience give me my old character actors give me this old man and then when you ride stitches ride you can put on hurt by johnny cash during

the ride oh yeah or just spin lock i just yell spin locks lines uh during during you cosplay as spin lock too at most conventions uh yeah conventions day jobs whatever have what have you day to day uh when stitch comes out you yell lock him up yeah i lock him up check your privilege stitch riders uh so i think we we have agreed uh it's somewhere between uh yeah plus it up somewhere else but it's ahead it was ahead of its time because i don't even think at this like horror nights wasn't a big thing in the mid 90s i think it was just they were starting but it was now it's a whole it's a phenomenon it's the most popular thing that universal does people want to piss in their pants it's not not us but people want it so they this would they

were really kind of forward thinking in a lot of ways maybe just set up a different land entirely called piss land and trump robot can go and piss land too also dark dark humor like again like dark humor usually like a little bit of it and ride it's fun and different it makes it stand out which is mother-in-law jokes nothing darker than that that's that's the the the seed of of my uh uh getting into comedy was like this dark humor and then the hammy nonsense of the adventurers club and it's just never gone away and so i remain incredibly niche and unmarketable in my career so when you're on marin when you're on wtf and he asks you who your guys are you're gonna say spinlock um uh were you a sir guy you're sir kind of guy the colonel puppet and the giant idol from the

adventurers club oh yeah and he's gonna go like no, you and I aren't so different. You and I aren't so different. You ever do heroin? No, Mark. Oh, boy. Well, look forward to that episode coming up of WTF, and we'll be right back. All right, welcome back. We now are presenting our second edition

of our now recurring segment, Animatronic of the month and before we get going with that i i want to congratulate the last winner of animatronic of the month striped shirt pirate trying to get the key back from the dog from pirates of the caribbean uh thank you so much uh congratulations to you i hope uh you animatronic have felt some increased pride while doing your repetitive work over the last month two months I don't remember when we did this last but feels like forever ago but hey stripe stripe shirt pirates where does a badge of honor on your on your striped shirt and but now it's time to yank the badge away from you and give it to another deserving animatronic who does such excellent work every day in a Disney

park somewhere on the globe. Mike, I think you're first. Hello. My pick for animatronic of the month is uncle Orville, the drunk man drying out in a bathtub on the Carousel of Progress. Move over, Bobby Moynihan.

This is the original drunk uncle. Uncle Orville, you're great because of your Mel Blanc-voiced, out-of-tune singing, your weird Uncle Sam costume, and also being a very rare thing at Disney World, a naked robot. It's a thrill being able to see a naked relative of that character John up close.

So today, I salute you, Uncle Orville. I hope you do as your brother John asks. Stop being a leech and start looking for a job. So, what have we determined here? The theme of the episode where Jason is a lot more active

and agitated than usual, you just convulsed when that began. Well, Scott, I guess my animatronic of the month is an example that we should probably talk to each other before doing this segment, because my choice is also old Uncle Werbill. Tell us about him. Oh, he, as Mike said, is a lazy man

who spends all of his time in a bathtub, specifically wearing a giant Uncle Sam hat. He is the permanent house guest of John and his family. And he miraculously invented a system that John calls air cooling, which in this case is a giant ice cube sitting in front of a fan. And so this lazy idiot somehow invented air conditioning uh to make his time uh engaging in the sin of sloth that much more pleasant uh lazy uh lazing around enjoying cool air why those are two of my favorite pastimes. So I'm also throwing in my hat into the rig for Uncle Orville. So God bless you, Uncle Orville. You're also my pick for animatronic of the month.

Wow. So this could be a two-way race. Yeah. Well, I think we could do the vote a couple ways. We could put on the Twitter where you cast your votes, Mike's Uncle Orville and Jason's Uncle Orville, but maybe here's where we really form a little difference. Would you like to declare different years or decades of Uncle Orville?

Well, I'll say this. Uncle Orville did change. He used to be Cousin Orville in the original, and he didn't have the Uncle Sam costume on for a while. Oh. So we both talked about the Uncle Sam costume. So honestly, we cannot. We have to do the same one.

We have to do the same one. All right. Because he shows up in the last segment of Carousel of Progress, but it's just a toilet flushing, as if to imply Uncle Orville now is also a house guest, but just takes long shits all right well since i'm not taking that one since it's just a shit sound effect and not not a fully built robot uh why so it'll be it'll be my choice versus your two and i have a feeling one of yours is going to win because mine i mine is a little bit more of a of a point

i'm making is this the best animatronic? I don't know, but I think it might be the most put upon. I'm talking about from the 3D movie It's Tough to Be a Bug, the villainous animatronic Hopper. Hopper is already hated and booed by children in two different theme parks. Plus, he's straight out of Pixar's fourth worst film, according to kid film critic Lights Camera Jackson. Not to mention,

he's typically most of the year stuck lifeless in the rafters of his own theater while Disney changes out the Tough to Be a Bug theater to show trailers for things like, I don't know, their live-action reboot

of Chicken Little. But the worst burden that animatronic Hopper faces is that he is cursed with a voice that most people assume is Kevin Spacey. It is voice that most people assume is Kevin Spacey. It is not and never was Kevin Spacey. In both the attraction and the video game, Hopper is voiced by Pixar director Andrew Stanton. Stanton is a two-time Academy Award winner,

the man behind Finding Nemo, WALL-E, and two episodes of Stranger Things. There is almost no animatronic with a higher pedigree of voice talent, and yet everyone assumes, Hopper, that you are voiced by a creep. So today, I raise a glass of bug juice to Hopper and his Oscar-winning, non- harassing voice. It's tough to

be a bug, but it's extra tough to be animatronic Hopper. Wow. Wow. Great choices all around. Isn't it a shame that uh because people think that yeah it's occurred to me that people think that they're they're getting yelled at by an animatronic kevin spacey and yet it was it is not him and he is the voice in the movie he is the voice in the movie not on the ride of the ride or the game the grass the grasshopper we're all making a lot of assumptions that we've assumed that you remember who Hopper was. We've assumed certainly

that you know who John is. For the memorably named protagonist. He's the protagonist of Carousel of Progress that you follow throughout the years on his journey. And he's also another character that is exactly like Jason. Yeah. A kindly old man in a rocking chair.

With a thick sweater. Who's eternal. I do like the idea that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of robots and the second time we did this, Jason and I picked the same character. I've been worried about the same thing. The seventh most prominent robot on that ride.

There's 45 presidents alone, hundreds of pirates, 999 ghosts, and yet you managed to choose... A large man in a bathtub. presidents alone hundreds of pirates right hundred nine hundred ninety nine ghosts for sure you managed to choose uh a large man in a bathtub and it makes a lot of sense yeah somehow psychologically attracted to this large this uh this man in bathtub uh okay well so uh go to our twitter go to at podcast to write on twitter and cast your vote for animatronic of the month. Is it Orville, Orville, or Hopper? Enjoy that.

The results will get back to you whenever we remember to do this again. And you've survived Podcast the Ride. Thanks for listening. What do we plug? Twitter. Podcast the Ride at Twitter, at Instagram. Podcast the Ride at Gmail if you want to send us an email.

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