Podcast: The Ride - Rocket Rods

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Disneyland replaced it's beloved PeopleMover with a clunky attraction that contained hard stops and sudden bursts of speed. Was it the worst ride ever? Was it maybe kind of good actually?  All we know is that if Michael Eisner was involved surely there was something redeeming about the experience. Donald's Quacky Duck City is up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide  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

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Warning. The following podcast may rattle and grind so much it renders your speakers unsafe to use. You may encounter claustrophobic hallways and a nail-biting round of picking numbers from one to three. Today, we examine the notorious, barely-opened, Tomorrowland-destroying 90s Disneyland attraction, the Rocket Rods, on Podcast The Ride. welcome to podcast the ride a podcast about theme parks where conversation and riffs fly at breakneck speed and then you know slow down every six seconds or so because you don't want to go at two breakneck speed i'm scott garner is mike carlson that is really that sums us up so perfectly yeah yeah big runs and then kind of and just you know and then take our time we'll find the next one okay there we go there's another run good yeah some funny

talk and then uh you know we talk about uh i love lucy actor william frawley for a while to slow down to cool things down to make sure that we don't get too too hot too fast this is very humble of you to call frawley a slow down as opposed to one of the fastest tracks well could ever do it excites me internally but i don't know that it does that to the audience that's a speed ramp to you the mere even like thinking thinking that you're going to say him that gets your heart palpitating and then it coming out of your mouth and then watching jason light up when you say it and then watching me be indifferent which lights you up further that's true yeah frolly was almost too exciting for me frolly was like a straight away. I think the wind-ups, like the curves, are more like saying things like,

25 million, May 22nd, 1998, saying the items. That's true, that's true. But I guess it's the connective tissue. It's what gets you from straight away to straight away. Jason Sheridan, hi. Hi. Yeah, today we are continuing the As Kicked Down the Curb Tomorrowland series. Now in its third or fourth year. Yes, yeah, as delayed as the real place.

And here's kind of what brings us back to this. We wanted to do kind of the essential steps in telling the story of what brought us to the Tomorrowland we in advance of D23. Yes. Which is in August, where the big Disney convention, where there is the thought that maybe we will finally get some announcements. Well, that's what the feeling is, because of all this movement with Disneyland Forward being approved and with Ron DeSantis and Disney making nice, now they've dropped a lawsuit

against him and now it seems like they're they're paving the way for a big expansion down there as well and they've booked what they booked the honda center for the actual theme parks panel at d23 this year yes and just a reminder the honda center is one of those uh venues that has the no bag rule unless they are clear plastic. Right, you have to have a clear plastic bag as if you're going to visit Magneto in prison. Yeah. You just have to make sure. Well, hold on. He could do some damage with those zippers, you know?

Oh, that's a very good point. So you should have a plastic zipper if you're visiting Magneto in prison. Is this so that they don't want people filming the panels? Is that what they do? I don't know because they live stream it this they don't want people filming the panels is that the idea uh i don't know because they live stream it it's i don't know this is also like certain venues have this rule yeah this is dodger stadium when we went to see elton john like they kind of did this to my mother who had a purse so it depends yeah venues just in general i don't know if it's easier to see if you have a knife on you a lot of baseball stadiums have have that but what if it's a clear knife

or a clear gun and you're back with clear bullets well we're back to square one now erase the whiteboard yeah you've changed everything so i wouldn't put it past disney to book a very large venue and then not deliver that's possible uh-huh it is kind of the current disney way to take a big space communicor and then sort of do nothing with it yeah so it's possible they're gonna get drag everybody over there everyone's gonna get really excited like worked up in the lat into a lather and then they're gonna say well we're thinking about doing a few things and then they'll float a few ideas and then they'll send everybody home with like a poster like a poster of the new country bears and then like half the people there will be like i think that was good yeah and then the next day

they like sober up and they go what was that i paid 400 for that some of them but some of them never will some of them stay drunk forever some of them will will stay drunk forever. I drink the Kool-Aid and the Kool-Aid stays in me. So, yeah. So what you're saying is I believe there's a chance. I believe there's at least a percentage of a chance that new Tomorrowland stuff will be announced because they need to do this. So I want to get our Tomorrowland stuff out of the way before because I want to see what our, because now we can then gauge our predictions versus what might be announced. So we'll get to see who is right

or maybe we'll all be a little right. If there, yeah. And if we pull things out because what we're building to is this episode where we fix Tomorrowland and all the different paths to figure out how to do so. And yeah. So if we accidentally predicted some things

or if we said some things that are vastly more exciting than what gets announced, yeah, that's a good call. I still, I hear you saying, maybe this is the year we get Tomorrowland. And I think about like an Angels in the Outfield scenario where there's like an orphan who's like, maybe my dad will come back this time. Maybe my dad will stick around this year.

Yeah, I know. My pops, he cares about me. He loves me. I know it. Even though he's got a leather jacket, he's not just going to keep riding this time. I guess if we really want to gauge, there's a bigger chance they'll announce

that like Disneyland Forward stuff like over by the hotels, which is where they're going to expand. That's more likely that they just announce a bunch of stuff from over there. I think it is. Than saying Tomorrowland is going to finally get its redo. I think, yeah. And I think new is going to be more exciting than redone or fixed. Even though we know this is like, you know, i were a homeowner which i am not sure i

would imagine that you know there's things like the it's more exciting to try to add to turn the you know to turn the garage into a guest house or whatever but when you've got like when the plumbing stinks when there is a like a terrible sulfur smell in your house. That's not an exciting way to spend the money, but you sort of have to do it, right? That's true. They did announce that they're going to make the vehicles in Autopia electric. So I think that's also partly why some people think, okay, well, there's some movement in that area of the park.

That's at least an indicator that the clue that that unlocks, I feel, is that Autopia and subs don't get demolished because if they're investing in there at all yeah right yeah it's not like that is gonna become avatar so that news is a disappointment to me because i would love that area to go and for it to become evident but i know but at least i i remain excited and I don't know if we'll get an announcement soon-ish, but Avatar is the thing that they keep saying.

Yes. I don't know if we'll get it this year, but it seems like a given that there will be something Avatar coming to the parks. That picture is awesome. But it's a matter of visiting

over on Disneyland forward. It's probably not Disneyland proper, which maybe doesn't make sense. There's weird dca rumors too i don't know i don't know well you'll be excited to know that some of the houses at the catino story living will have shutters not just blinds what if they do that they drag everybody into this big honda center room and they just mostly talk about catino they talk about their

different like housing developments they're building seems really possible i posted about this i noticed a really mundane catino video and so it might be like ladies and gentlemen welcome the designers from shea homes very well i don't know yeah in between like john favreau coming out and doing nothing yeah they do a lot of that with people of course they brought dick van dyke out to announce the mary poppins thing that never happened god they did yeah in 2019 they brought him out and they're like dick van dyke everyone goes nuts of course and then he's they're like and of course in epcot we're doing the mary pouncing which it turns out that was gonna be nothing basically like a spinner ride maybe really and canceled

oh man people like oh is it gonna be like that tony baxter ride he developed like before he worked in imagineering that there's a video about and it was like on the carousel and then things would leave the track and they would go along a dark ride you ever seen this you start on it was the idea that you would start on it that you it feels like you're on a carousel horse that's on a carousel, and then it departs and keeps going. Right, like in the movie, the first movie, yeah. Okay. The first movie?

Yeah, well, you remember the sequel. You mean the only Mary Poppins. Let's, come on. No, no, wait, hold on. Quit fucking around. You mean in Mary Poppins, the only movie. Well, you're gonna- Mary Poppins 1.

I refuse. Mary Poppins one i refuse mary poppins three uh uh is a topsy origins is it topsy well that's more of a disney plus streaming series oh okay it's eight episodes topsy origins which in which topsy doesn't appear until the very very end well she doesn't be how we how did she become topsy is the question everyone's asking. That's the question. How did she turn? Is it Turning Turtle?

Is that the song? I'm so disappointed in you for not remembering the name Topsy. You're remembering her famous song. It's a lot of T's. All right. It's a lot of T's. So disappointed in you. That should be on the forefront of your mind at all moments.

It's Turning Turtle. It's almost like if you can't quite remember it, maybe that means that it's time for the runner to be retired. Is that a thought? That's something, isn't it? Well, Jason can't. So I guess if Jason can't remember it, then fine. I'll only bring it up three times a year and not six.

What's the name of Madam's owner, the ventriloquist? The long dead ventriloquist madam's not my thing okay yeah but it's been said i this is my new rule if we can't all remember it it's out who do you don't remember who operates madam uh this is not fair this is not any sort of barometer i think it makes it indicates a lack of interest among all of the hosts of the show. It indicates that if it is not penetrated, everybody in the room. He's Googling it. Then why are we?

No, no, no, no, no. Put the phone down. That doesn't count. I'm just dismissing some notifications. About what? Pill reminders. Of course it's that. I didn't want them to interrupt my notes.

I have my notes over here. Okay, okay. All right, so moving on. No more turtle, no more whaling flowers and madam. There I said it. So today we are, I think this is a kind of a crucial piece of what brings us to the tomorrowland we've had for so many decades now. This is really the culprit. And it's also something that is kind of a dwindling resource in this show.

We are running out of things to talk about, topics that you could possibly call Disney's worst ride. Right. And here we have a definite, very solid candidate, and that is the Rocket Rods. I've been looking forward to the Rocket Rods a lot. I mean, I remember it very strongly. This was in 1998.

Jason's slowdown facts that you said earlier. May 22, 1998. Part of the new Tomorrowland redo. And what I remember strongly, and I think I've talked about this before is how this was right around you know I was clearly I was a big Disneyland kid in this era and where in this you know getting to be a kid then in the early 90s in the first half of the Disney decade where it seems like things just keep getting better and better there There's Toontown, and then there's Indiana Jones, like the ultimate just like raise of the bar

of themed entertainment. Where are things going next? What are they doing next? And what they did next was take away the electrical parade, replace it with light magic, this upsetting thing about pixies, then this, then new Tomorrowland. And all this in the same time that the simpsons got bad

this was a time that let me know that institutions can fail me um that maybe i can't trust the long-running hallowed institutions that give me the entertainment that i enjoy the most the end of innocence yeah in a lot of ways it kind of was yeah in a in a time that's already awkward upset you know i consider it part of like sure was middle school bad because i didn't know how to talk to girls and i didn't know what current music to like yeah but i'd say like equal to that was disneyland starting to not be good anymore yeah oh wow we were still cooking on the east coast we had animal kingdom we had the islands of adventure preview center and islands of adventure after it you put preview center in the running of the park itself i was going

chronologically i know that i know mike that Islands of Adventure Preview Center had a big impact on your adolescence. Yeah, it really... All the girls loved hearing about the Preview Center. So that helped me with girls, too. And I guess there's going to be some kind of jazz club at their city walk. They're not calling it E-Zone anymore. Pretty cool. Anyway, how about a smooch?

Also, the Scott Baio song, Howdy Talk to Girls, helped me out a lot too with that oh good yeah rick springfield wrote it of course okay and as a cover you know that helps too but instruction manual song instruction manual um so uh okay well you're right you know what you You do paint that on the East Coast. This is not so much your problem. It was my problem. I'm a big Disneyland guy, and this was highly anticipated, and it kind of all undeniably was let down. Did you clock any of this at the time? Were you aware that rocket rods and a disappointing new Tomorrowland were going on?

Or do you not clock it until you uh start going to disneyland as your park and there's still kind of the remnants of it i don't clock it at all at this time it's not even on my radar i'm more focused on islands of adventure and i don't i don't even know if i knew what rocket rods were until like 2000 like late 2000s okay wow wow yeah kind of the same i was thinking about like because eventually tomorrow in 98 eventually you get buzz light year after it a few years later and i was like oh the first time i went to disneyland is like 2006 and i definitely was like so that used to be the people mover and it's just empty and then it's dawning on me like oh that's coming up on 20 years ago and that track remains empty yeah yeah well in that i mean it's been empty technically since 2001 so we have what yeah 23 years of empty track it's wild

right that's a good basic to bring up kind of before we get into the whole history but cliff notes of it rocket rods were a high-speed replacement for the people mover which we did a few episodes about uh slow moving very pleasant trip uh through the the second story of tomorrowland remains in disney world under a different name uh but kind of this just like you know hey that's something like a something the whole family can do an attraction that really wasn't hurting anybody yeah be hard to complain about it i think but somebody somewhere gets the idea what if this was a rip roaring roller coaster rocket ride yeah i'm yeah it's it's just a funny thought to have because it's like why what if somebody was like why don't we make the train

around disneyland go super fast you're like i don't think that's the point of this yeah like i like going fast but why would you use the same track and change a thing whose point was to like look at everything in a pleasant way yeah it's just a funny idea and then to carry out it's like it was cursed from the beginning the idea itself is flawed you're right yeah let's take the columbia river boat let's take let's take the mark River boat. Let's take the ship. Let's take the Mark Twain. Yeah, yeah. Rockets on the Mark Twain.

Jason, what if Mark Twain went really fast? If it went from a 12-minute ride to a two-and-a-half-minute ride or something. Yeah. What if, okay, it spins around and shoots around the lake really fast? Yeah, and they do not put in any chairs or restraints. So everyone is nauseated people are just constantly thrown in the water multiple times a day unless you hold on yeah yeah so yeah that's just it's up to you that system would reward someone like jason who knows the ship very well you would know where the railings were and the the secure items as a but you wouldn wouldn't grab a life preserver because that's going to snap off.

Yeah, and you would get to hug his favorite ship, too, which is nice. Yeah, for dear life. But you would give a few kisses while you were there. Well, if I'm already there and I'm already hugging. Exactly. If you're already hugging, you might as well be kissing, yes. So, yeah, who's like, why don't we take a thing that goes nice and slow and make it fast?

It's a really good point. Yeah. Take the castle and put it on a pole and have it like go up and down. Like, huh? Turn it into a big slingshot ride. Hey, these horses are interesting. We have down Main Street. But what if we made them like race?

What if we had people like racing on horses down Main Street? Like, I don't know if that's the point of the horses, but okay. Yeah, boy. Well, you've really driven right to the core. That's true. I mean, it's like they're – and that's what they're doing. They're doing a 180. They're trying to turn one type of experience into another.

But the question is, did anyone want that? And if you're going to do a new roller coaster, why wouldn't you do that from scratch? Right. Yeah, just do a different thing coaster why wouldn't you do that from scratch why right that's the yeah just do it do a different thing yeah yeah of all the things to fix in tomorrowland i don't think the people mover was one of them right um and and that's where i i'll get into kind of some tomorrowland 98 history because uh okay so it's the early 90s and it's clear that in all the parks there is a tomorrowland problem but

especially in disneyland i think that one was was struggling the most and this narrative that said a lot by imagineers is just like you know keeping things futuristic trying to predict predict the future is very tricky because the present catches up to the future and i feel like even like staying staying current don't even not even aiming futurism, but staying current is really tough. Yeah. Which has led to all of these, like we've touched on some of them, but these like kind of like inane exhibits that get lapped pretty quickly. So always sort of a struggle. But what's weird is, I mean, I think it was kind of a fraught land always.

Like the Tomorrowland of the 50s seems real rough, right? Then 67 is the first big redo and they put in you know some of the primary pieces you get carousel theater and you get rocket jets up on the platform and we're getting closer to like the building blocks of a land that can't really go anywhere past that we finally start getting locks there are attractions that are locks that you can't do anything with maybe like aesthetic plus ups or new movies or whatever but that's what something i think is so strange about the land is that it's a fraught land but space mountain lock star tours

lock yeah uh magic eye theater what's in it is not necessarily a lock, but at least there was a time where it being a movie theater is a lock. So, you know, if you're going to redo an entire land, you've got trouble here because there are locks to work around. And rides that you probably want to keep open as much as possible. Hard to just blow up the entire thing and start over, which is sort of what they did for Fantasyland. The Tony Baxter's very successful Fantasyland redo. It was all just demolished and rebuilt. But something you can't really do here. The things that they need to change.

Mission to Mars. We talked about that. That is like a 70s view of space travel. Yeah. And that's true of a lot of these things. You got America Sings, which is a show for the Bicentennial in 76, which was there until 88. They finally clear it out.

They kick all the robots out and send them over to Splash Mountain. That's been sitting vacant since 88. Yeah. Circle Vision, still not a lot i remember that was feeling like a ghost town right by mid 90s and they're playing a movie from 84 uh it's just full this is like a this is a messy yeah but of all the things people movers and not no one of anyone's complaints change the vehicle if you change it because like the people mover there had tops on it unlike disney worlds yeah so you changed the look of the vehicles perhaps something i don't

know neon stripes the answer is this is before they realize the answer is always neon stripes right yeah put a neon yeah strip or something on the sides or something like you could do well yeah and that almost could have saved rocket rods but it it got cost cut and then uh was gonna get in and then they just shut it down that was a possibility it was it was some lighting stuff but so around this time they're also they're starting to solve the tomorrowland problem in other parks with kind of this notion of future that never was not trying to be literal sci-fi future but kind of a more fantastical version of it uh euro disney does they don't do tomorrowland at all they do discovery land which is this steampunk punk european fantasy jules verne hg wells pseudo victorian kind of vibe a lot of bronze and gold

and copper uh of all the things in euro disney that were there from day one that this land is a banger i think it's still really great and they have not had there's been some changes to it but i think like essentially the aesthetic has remained and it's really good i could see why this they started clocking this as the answer we're not going to try to keep up with whatever rockets are being used in real life anymore yeah uh it was just aesthetically really great tomorrowland 94 in Magic Kingdom is fantastic. Yes. That is this other kind of sci-fi fan, kind of more routed through 50s, 60s, you know, kooky B-movie, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon.

And so, all right, we're starting to get some examples of like how we do Tomorrowland that's this fun, like always relevant sort of where they don't have to keep updating it. Which brings us to what they wanted to do here, which is Tomorrowland 2055. Right.

We haven't talked about this a ton. This is one of those things that's very haunting because anything you see, concept art, logo, boy, this looked really cool. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, I know. It's, that's, I guess, it's imagining like what it would look like now and like i'm like yeah it would probably like make tomorrowland like my favorite part of disneyland maybe yeah i think so i think yes it's glowy it's crystals there's kind of a story and the crystals are part of it there's made there's potential for a whole we dig into everything about this and speculate what what this would have been but there are all these like exciting possibilities especially of what the big the non-locks become right mission to mars becomes

alien encounter which we got in florida but this might have been like a better venue for it it might have made sense carousel theater becomes plectu's Fantastic Galactic Review. Again, I think there's a whole, we need to try to find every drop of information. Yeah, this is not a lot. The Circle Vision Theater probably gets the Timekeeper show, which went to Florida, which finally gave a story to one of these 360 Circle Vision movies

with animatronics and robin williams here uh the successful show really good show i assume that's what it would have been here um so big possibilities cool possibilities very distinct and different from the other new tomorrowlands they've figured out uh but euro disney fails and this is part of the there's the most frequent uh you know it's the most frequently recurring words in theme park history but euro disney fails and then x yeah it's really it reveals it feels so much more dire now now knowing that they're not going to ever do like a big land that has a bunch of like original characters in it it almost feels like if you had the time machine it would be so

important to go back in time and either like stop euro disney from being built so tomorrowland 2055 can get built because we know in the future it will be impossible yeah so it's like the last chance yeah for us to have something crazy like this with a bunch of like original characters and not just a bunch of movie rides i have a time machine i i know where i'm going. I'm going right to Europe in the mid 20th century. Oh, are you Hitler? You're going to go kill. No, no, no, no, no, no. Way more important.

I'm going to go. I'm going to find Michael Eisner. You're going to kill Michael Eisner. No, no, no. I love Michael. No, I'm going to shake his hand. Say fine work so far. Yeah.

I just have some information that you might want to see. Right. And I'll let him keep doing his job because he's doing a bang-up job right and then you would i would also like tell him like they're gonna come for you in the late 1990s or early 2000s like here's how we get around that and here's how you reign a ceo until you die like i would also there's be other stuff i want to do if i'm going to talk to him in the time machine yeah um and yeah make sure that he's still running the company now oh man that's a that's a very good idea yeah yeah just give him all the answers to the test and then you know what you got a time machine let him go back and kill hitler give him the glory yeah right

that's good because imagine how that shores up support for everything he wants to do you're gonna argue with this guy this is a guy who put in Star Tours and killed Hitler. Hello. I'm here in the bunker. I've just strangled Adolf Hitler. With his own hand. He strangled him. That's right. I killed him. No big deal.

Are you Adolf Hitler? Goodbye. I'm Michael Eisner, chairman of the Walt Disney Company, and your killer. Now it's time to go back to the future, where I may reign until I'm 120. CEO of Disney. I know, because you take that piece away, and then we get the full Disney decade. But basically, they need to do something there are literally there's literally empty yeah attractions uh uh you know what was a big plus up in the late

80s now is a somewhat outdated 3d movie a singing and dancing show starring an accused child molester yeah this needs to go a lot of things need to happen uh so they need to do we have to figure out some version of a tomorrowland redo but it's good i don't think it can be tomorrowland 2055 but let's keep all the people on it because it's the best people on it it's tony baxter it's bruce gordon who was part of uh splash mountain yeah um so these are this is part of what's heartbreaking about it is that there's like the best of the best, but they have been severely handcuffed. They are given a third of the budget that they want it, which probably still like trickles that like gets less and less as they do

the whole thing. That, that is interesting to think about. Like, well, even before this redo, there was some ghost town elements of tomorrow. Like it's like history rhyming.

It's like, well, still a ghost town now, but was also a ghost town before the ostensible redo. And some of the things that remain the big problem areas today were the problem areas then. I mean, it's like it fixed it, it you know like a ride that they were tired of running or that they might have stopped running entirely became a restaurant which makes them money yeah but it's not the most exciting thing they could do yeah carousel theater is the this is the biggest tragedy area in the history of disneyland yeah uh it's insane yeah it's it's like these places are cursed uh so look, because it's Tony Baxter, you have to imagine that this is part of it,

that he was kind of the main voice behind Discoveryland, which was very successful. And that's where it becomes, well, what if we sort of Discoverylandify our existing Tomorrowland, which is why we get Astro Orbiter. But Astro Orbiter has all these pieces that are too complicated and too heavy

too heavy yeah that tower so you got to move it to the front of the park and we've complained about this before nobody likes that this is like a big uh traffic bottleneck and it's crazy and then they just took the bones of the old rocket jets and set up a show that they don't run anymore right um this is all crazy captain eo is replaced replaced by Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. That is fine, but it is not new. That has been running at Epcot for a little while. Innoventions. This is not the same Innoventions from Florida.

I might argue worse, right? Seems like it. Do you think? Yeah. I guess only I went of the three of us. Yeah, I didn't go, so? Seems like it. Yeah. I guess only I went of the three of us. Yeah, I didn't go, so I don't know firsthand. It was pretty inane. There's a big tree in the middle and this kind of unpleasant Nathan Lane-voiced robot.

It was not a good deal, I didn't think. Yeah. I saw it later in the 2010s when there was like a throwback house of the future that was mostly bad windows touch screen that the iphone had already lapped it uh yeah those touch screens did not work it's where it's marty mcfly's house in 2015 where the fake windows break and he gets into fights with the mechanics of it there was an hour-long wait to try a segue again we're talking 2010s occasionally awesome-o would come out very rarely and then there was some testing stations where you could test out Disney Infinity.

Is that what it was called? What was that? That was that video game. That was the Xbox game that you could buy little figures for. Yeah, the little figures. This was a few rounds of Disney Interactive layoffs ago. And it was like, all right, all the characters get together and they meet and they gave up on that idea all companies eventually did like fighting game where all the characters

meet uh nickelodeon does it warner brothers has it but it's mostly for free on your phone this wasn't a fighting game this this wasn't like a street fighter. It was like an adventure game. People might have liked that. People might have played it. It's too successful of a genre for them to do. Was that still called Interventions? When it was that house? I think so.

Yeah, I think so. Because I don't think it changes until it's, it doesn't change fully until it's Star Wars Launch Bay. Launch Bay. Launch Bay. With no offense to the Launch Bay. The Launch Bay. We always wanted to go to a star wars launch bay yeah the movies remember when they kind of like had a corner of a room paint it like the cantina bar i do yeah there was no characters there there were no characters there

was no drinks seemingly uh so that being said meeting chewy was fun and we did it a few times well good news i think you can still do it i think that's probably right uh but this entire building and the only thing that's good about it is like a room the size of your bedroom where you meet chewbacca yeah in 30 years that's all that's been good there is meeting chewbacca and if you go back to america sings you might say it's, it's been good there in 40 years. How long are we talking? 50 years. If you have that perspective.

Mission to Mars, the attraction is replaced by a restaurant. And the restaurant that it was supposed to be was a Tony Baxter conceived restaurant that was like a Planet Hollywood of all the old tomorrowland vehicles so you could eat in a people mover car or what else a rocket jet or a monrold monorail car or whatever it was gonna like pay tribute to the past and reuse all these things but in a clever

way everybody wants to like yeah pop into one of those eat pizza in one of those. Yeah. But that got cut, and it just became, it's a cafeteria. Yeah. Yeah, hey, put a pin in those old ride vehicles, because they'll come back later on. They do, they do have a way to get all that stuff out of the junkyard. Yeah, cut.

The main thing that happens here is a paint job. We are going to turn Tomorrowland into Discoveryland via paint. So everything gets paint that is supposed to be like bronze, gold, dark brown, some emerald green. And this leads to something that I don't recall if we've ever talked about

on the show before. The brief, strange era where Space Mountain was brown. Yeah. You guys ever see brown Space Mountain in person? Not in person. Not in person. Not in person, no. It was really strange.

I saw, I went to Discoveryland. I like the colors of Discoveryland. It's pretty astounding, and they've kept it up. This looks like, I don't, it's just, it's a very shit brown, right? Yeah. It's not gleaming. It's not gold's a very shit brown right yeah it's not a it's not gleaming it's not gold it's shit it looks like it literally rusted over or like it just looks like something's wrong i guess

that's really what it looks like space mountain is sick space mountain is sick or it's like it's a reverse et et gets very white rightT. gets very white when he's dying. When Space Mountain is dying, it gets unwhite. Well, sick E.T. Space Mountain. I've never thought about it like that. Me neither, yeah. It looks like the park is decayed or something. It's post-apocalyptic. Post-apocalypse.

Yeah, yeah. You found Disneyland 200 years after anyone's been there. Rust-colored. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It 200 years after anyone's been there. Rust colored. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's odd. It was so weird. It also, I swear, had an effect of making it look smaller.

Like the mountain looked worse. I believe that. Really weird. I just like, even going by Splash Mountain, seeing it now being changed to Tiana's, I'm just like so amazed at how much it fooled me, how big I thought it was. Just taking some of the pieces away from it make me go, oh, wait. In my mind, it's like huge and it's way back.

And if you look at how it is now, you're like, oh, it's much closer than I think it is. Oh, interesting. And it's much smaller just because it takes away some of like the whatever laughing place stuff and the whatever. What do you call them? Briars, I guess. Briar patch.

That's what you're saying? Yeah. So all that stuff. So I would imagine that even changing colors on things, sometimes you would now be, oh, wait, it's not as big as I thought it was. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess that log did a lot of heavy lifting at the top of Space Returns. It really did.

In terms of it added an extra 10 or so yeah it really did so yeah seeing seeing this a different color would be interesting yeah it was it was all really weird being around like what just like this case so this was the plan this the plan was some different paint and then a lot of attractions from other places yeah and if you just viewed all of this and they're calling it new tomorrowland uh we don't have a lot here that's genuinely new and that's why the heat was really on the only genuine new attraction the brand new e-ticket they were calling it wow rocket rods the new high speed and and that's like in this tomorrowland tradition of inventing types of technology showing us what the future will hold why in the future we'll all be driving around in rocket rods uh these wait till you see it

actually is sort of like now that some cyber trucks are around it is like as dumb and clunky as a cyber truck yeah to some extent yeah that's true might rather drive drive a rocket rod around that actually let me let me bring up that because that's something okay that that tony baxter restaurant where you're going to eat in the vehicles um the the bar disney is very high for how cool a new vehicle looks in a futuristic vehicle looks the rocket rod itself oh yeah yeah yeah is really it's just so like it's like functional it's like kind of an atv or something yeah it looks good really ugly yeah like if i'm being nice it's somewhere in the world of like if i'm squinting we're not that far from like the journey to the center of the earth ride vehicles so that's now i'm being i'm really stretching to even get it there but if you if you see it from a distance because those that's sort

of a similar kind of this odd long right uh you know past but future vehicle but like would you want to would you want a toy of rocket rods would you want to well now because of the kitsch factor or the yeah sure yeah but no it does it's not like a particularly cool vehicle if you're judging it against like the ninja turtle vehicles this is not even in the top five or ten. As you judge everything. As you judge the people in your life against. Right. This is not as good as the toilet taxi. Also, there's...

I love my dad, but is he as cool as the toilet taxi? No, he's not. There's so much contradictory stuff with Tomorrowland 98, and Rocket Routes especially, because it's new. It's like people move it before us, it's a potential future transit. And each vehicle holds as many people as a Toyota Corolla. Yes, and is like a third as long.

A third as long, and it's heavy. Like, it is heavy, and it is destroying the road it's on. Yeah, yeah. Really grinding it up. Yes. And the start-stop, don't worry, it's destroying the engine inside of it. Yeah, it really, God, it really is just a, like, a self-immolating ride vehicle. Yeah.

But at least it's whisper quiet. Actually, no. It's the opposite of whisper quiet. That was the big thing when these were running, if you were on it or if you were just in the park, because no attraction was more present than the people mover. It's silently going by while you're in the line for Star Tours or in a shop or something. Now rocket rods are up and running,

and it's just... It's somewhere between fireworks and a leaf blower yeah these were very industrial so annoying unpleasant sounds watching a few uh like three or four different ride feet ride through videos i wrote down the note of like these sounds are caustic like this is i don't like i don't like hearing this and i can't tell because there is some sound effects along the way where i'm like oh that's pumped in and then i'm like how is some of these sounds i think are the requirement like that this is the sound it makes to move if yeah if you were on it there would be fake motor sounds and yeah but if you yeah you know that they were real sounds because you would hear it so loud if you weren't on it so now you're in tomorrowland you're

just walking around so what do we do next i don't know maybe we head over to uh dumbo just like so jar and which and the fact that we kind of like shake the tracks is so you're like you're in a war zone now tomorrow land this is this is this is a future in which a war is going on and like fight i assume these things are armed i assume there's cannons in the front of the rocket rides. Oh, but they don't work. Yeah, luckily. They don't work consistently. For the opponent, they don't work. Yeah. Is there anything, what's the most annoying, like, sound a ride makes when you're not on?

Like, is Autopia the answer to this? Like, when you're like, come walking around Autopia, you hear, and you're like, it's like kind of unpleasant. Ooh. Is there something that beats that? Or like, maybe, depending on where you are, when you're like, it's kind of unpleasant. Is there something that beats that? Or maybe, depending on where you are when you're on the Universal tram or waiting for the Universal tram,

just be given that it is an actual heavy-duty motor. Yeah, maybe. Like a poorly kept up drop tower ride. Yeah, they do that hiss and then the launch and then the yeah because they don't really make a sound when you're bouncing down the magic mountain um superman ride sounds horrible oh yeah yeah well but a magic mountain in general yeah that's a different category i guess they aren't concerned with noise pollution you'll get all sorts of interesting noises

the magic mountain yeah yeah well it's a magic mountain is just a chorus of irritating hydraulics and then people going like fuck you he's screaming at a tweety bird he's screaming at his life-size tweety bird you birds aren't big he won the tweety bird and now he spent all day cursing at it i'm gonna pretend this is my mom i'm gonna do this what i wish i could do to my mom uh well magic well we could do a whole final four of magic mountain unpleasant ride noises yeah yeah the worst sound yeah yeah the word the worst real sounds that i actually did here yeah this is this is going to lead me to it to a final four thing i'm gonna

play here now that all the pieces are in place right and we've said what they have um and and this this kind of shows you why they needed a new attraction a thrilling attraction and why they could so that disney could do kind of a like aiming at 11 year olds almost six flags-esque uh commercial right this this is how they presented new tomorrowland back in 98 if you think the coke machine is cool you should see the rest of the place if that was probably pretty indiscernible to a listener. Here's a whole other thing. Okay, we got a new Tomorrowland.

What do we want to feature first? Well, we have a Coke machine that shoots Coke out from, that launches it up into the air and then a cast member grabs it. Right. Did you guys know this was there? No. Launching Cokes? I think they might still have this.

It works, you mean i saw a recent like like youtube short showing one of these really i think you can launch your soda if you do if you want to get your soda real shaken up if you want to drop nine dollars on your soda and then lose half of it to bubbles bursting out how would that not have happened by now where we got a soda launched at us? Or in the air, I mean. Like that, I feel like we've, I've had a soda in Tomorrowland a few times.

Have you ever had a soda launched to you? I don't think so. Well, it's not at you. It's up in the air for the cast member to catch. Right. You watch a soda launch show. This was one of their genuinely actually looking back now this might have been their biggest attraction in this era most successful one yeah yeah yeah

it's what if it remains listener have you seen the soda launch where can we find the soda launch next time so it's like a rocket the coke is a rocket yeah yeah so they do have rocket cokes you gotta give them that uh here's what else they have wind blown kids whoa it is like it's like a surge commercial or like yeah like you said like a six flags commercial yeah they're going for extreme there's a little bit of fish on yeah yeah um the on the rocket rods which shows you how much they're they're pushing it and like a honey i shrink the audience is kind of secondary to that and here's what here's what i wanted to bring up i had an idea and i was like let me just workshop this on the show yeah let's see see if you like it we didn't do a final four this year we were doing the saga or taking a break from the saga uh i had an idea for one and and maybe this is obscure maybe there's a mini one

on the second gate or something but here's here's my idea the frequent footage final four what this would be is a competition we all watch a lot of disney specials and parades and ancillary material this would be the ultimate showdown of the footage that they show you all the time we're talking walt pointing at the big map oh right we're talking walt's given opening day speech a lot of walt we're talking walt yeah yeah stepping on the train tracks and like pointing out where they're gonna be we're talking mickey on top of spaceship earth right we're talking uh uh making it look like the the big lion is coming out of the screen in honey shrink the audience uh fozzy with the big pie i don't know if anything comes to mind for you guys in terms of frequent footage oh't we like to know what is the best frequent footage?

Family react, there must be a reused family reacting of mom, dad, and 2.5 kids going like, oh. Probably. Like being startled by something pretty low key. Yeah. I think if we thought about,

I feel like there's also things where like in the foreground, there's like a fire eater and then it like zooms past the fire eater into whatever fun. Yeah. Or like Indiana Jones with the map and then he closes the map and then heads into the temple. Oh, I got a good one. Tower of Terror guests.

Oh, yeah. Standing. That's a great one. Terrifying a generation of neurotic children. Yes. Yeah. And then like the the uh the arrow pointing to the floor is going haywire yeah and the footage of like just the the hydraulics

like just the mechanics of it dropping way faster than the ride um that's really good i feel like if we put our minds to it well let me i'll i'm just throwing this to the listener i'm not married to this idea but i figured I'd workshop it here. If you want to hear the frequent footage Final Four, or submit ideas for the frequent footage Final Four, because I think we have to know. How far would Walt on the train with the stuffed Mickey, waving it with his hand, like peering out Ronald Reagan?

There's a lot of you know that's why i'm like maybe this is second gate because this is really like this is for this is this is like a fellow travelers kind of idea we all know yeah they'll if you're listening and you know what i'm talking about then you're as versed in it as we are footage of the parade with the big inflatables the big inflatable like when it was the mardi gras yeah the mardi gras kind of yes totally yeah yeah i'm sure if we put our minds to there's a lot it's gonna be very 90s tape heavy yeah yeah well this is when the media explode this is when it went from like we've made we made three disney world specials through all of the 1970s right we produce 300 hours every year of beer advertisement. Some of it's parades on TV.

Some of it's specials. Some of it's vacation planning VHS. Yeah. I don't know if this is frequent enough, but there's footage that I really like from downtown Disney where there's a guy alone playing a saxophone on cobblestones and there's a Mickey spotlight that he's standing under i don't know i i know i guess i that's familiar i think i can i imagine pleasure island

footage like specifically a bunch of fireworks going off like helicopter shot there's probably like two parents dancing that they use yeah that's what i'm imagining yeah dutch angles of the neon sign of the like each sign of each club definitely yeah i think we'd get there and listeners i really would if there's if you've got one in your head and you know you've seen there might even just be like the one shot of rex like waving from like there was there's a lot of footage or the same audience all like swaying when you go into the death star yeah i think it's definitely an area oh yeah yeah plummet both in the tube like someone who all nervous in the tube and then outside of it with the water shoot yeah like you see the water spraying similarly splash mountain but the camera does a thing where and jurassic park the right where it makes it look like all right there goes the thing and then it looks like it goes upside down like

the camera the pov goes all the way the other way also scaring neurotic children um so well there we go let us know feelings about that avenue anyways and to bring up somebody who might factor into frequent footage final four um i was somewhat upset to discover the answer of who in the world wanted a faster people mover and i will now read this quote as a type a person i wanted something faster than the people mover quotes michael eisner ceo and chairman of the walt disney company. So this is one of those misguided. This is why we need the time machine. I guess it does drive to him because he, we know this. We know that he was, as CEOs are, he's a Steve Jobs type.

I have a big idea. I'm going to drop this into the room and then leave and then assume in three months that you figured out the very difficult to pull off idea. I would say he was a more for good version of that than a lot of CEOs are and better ideas specifically within it than other CEOs. That said, this was not one of them. Although, well, hang on. I think we're going to make the same point maybe. It doesn't have to be done this way. It's the thought exercise.

Because when you hear it, a fast... Using those tracks for now a high-speed ride is not the craziest thing in the world. That kind of sounds good, right? Yeah. I just... Track-wise, it didn't have to be... Like, they could have added to track.

Like, they could have... There's other versions of it you potentially could have made work in a better way than than just dumping a fast thing on the existing yes track yeah um i know that's kind of what he was thinking but which is giving him some credit yeah yeah yeah well that that's what happens and maybe it maybe it's worth going into the end of the history here a little bit uh so yeah the notion was not slow moving little tour on the people mover something uh fast and thrilling and for the teens uh but uh and so well so they start planning something maybe it's not like maybe you found some of this jason uh this this all was information

from the season past podcast when they talked to Tony Baxter. But I don't know that I really heard this, that the original pitch was something called Fast Track. Fast Track was the notion here. And this was happening concurrently with Test Track. And this was to be sponsored by General Motors, the very same sponsor. So with a sponsor, you've got money. They're already in it on this other thing.

The long working relationship, thanks to World of Motion. And this is where it gets frustrating is hearing Tony's description of what this could have been. Designed to be three times the budget they ended up getting. Rocket Rods was a wire a wireframe vehicle at night they were all to glow and one of them did we had one on the track and it looked so great it looked like a dimensional wireframe design come to life tronish i'm assuming yeah i bet tronish uh and kind of predating that second

version of test track and mainly communicate it was going to communicate something the idea that at least at night that you would understand that you're looking at a blueprint that came to life yeah yeah moving around because as what ended up happening was it's just these like big weird clunkers yeah they don't seem like anything but like okay that's something i see what this could have been um also would you believe it was all this stuff guests would visit a design center where they would customize their vehicles and the attraction would capture a photo of them riding and their design was going to affect the the colors and how it would all all of that stuff all the stuff the test track ended up doing in the second round. Right. And it seems, maybe I misremember.

Was it supposed to be affecting the lights and the colors on the actual vehicles? Because test track did this and it was unspectacular because you would just get like kind of a mocked up photo of it at the end. Yeah. But would this actually affect the exterior of the vehicle? Because that's actually a really cool idea if you like i want a purple vehicle and it's got orange stripes on it and then you would see that from the from like down i don't i don't know and if you're and if you have somebody if your mom didn't go on it she could see what your vehicle looked like she could take a

photo that would not turn out well at all because it's night right of course and with a lot of uh difference in light but you would see all the vehicles would be at the very least you would see all the vehicles be different and unique that everyone and now we're in we're back in people mover territory where the colors are different yeah or atopia where here comes a red one here comes an orange one cool idea if that wasn't what they were planning maybe i i don't know i don't have there's not enough yeah i can't remember that because i heard this interview but we need to talk to him again but i mean that's yeah that sounds really great and now it's like yeah every guest shows it now we're in the realm of indiana jones where you like the the experience is customized and a little bit

different every time that's something that's pretty good. But here's what happened. Across the country, Test Track. We've talked about Test Track. Test Track was a big mess, right? Like testing went very badly. They delayed it a bunch of times. And apparently General Motors was so worn down by this process that they're like, you're on your own with that other one.

We're not doing another one of these again. Finish up Test Track, and then that is the end of this. So they pull out. Now there is not money to make the vehicles glow. Well, that's okay, right, because we'll still be able to make a cool high-speed attraction. Yeah, well, about that. And then here is the real killer,

that they can't bank the turns on this. They have to use the literal same track. This is a high-speed roller coaster type ride with no banked turns. And it kind of serves as a living illustration of why curves need to be banked. Can we define banking? Because I kept seeing this and I couldn't quite picture what it meant in my head well like like turning the track yeah i think yeah it's it's it's angling it it's angling yeah so that because at least and this actually this was very helpful that tony illustrated this and

credit to season pass again um he says we all knew knew the track needed to be banked in order to keep the speed up once you made the reduction to go with the level of the people mover track so that never banks at any point that's just flat it had to slow down to take each curve that was to keep you from flying out now that's a very interesting little physics yeah lesson that's if you just went if you just went, if the rocket rods didn't slow down, like gravity would want to take the people just like out into the ride. I guess, yeah. It's really weird. It's interesting.

Okay, yeah. So banked turns are to, it's in order to keep the speed going. So you can do just a straight away fast but then at some point you have to turn uh so that's the idea so they would have had to like maybe they could have kept some of the infrastructure but at least the turns they had to and now if you start thinking about that track it's all turns it turns yeah constantly constantly yes it goes around space it goes around the round building space mountain it goes around the round building the carousel theater yeah nothing but turns this thing is all turns and

it had to be slow the new high speed ride has to be slow way more often than it's fast that's why like i i would have been like i guess you could just do put the new vehicle on the track and then just do the test track thing and build another section of it that's new track to go fast at the end. Oh, sure. Yeah. Oh, you do it like test track. Yeah. Right. That, at least, you still get the PeopleMover experience.

You don't have to put in a new track in that part. That's true. Yeah. But then you can find, I don't know where it would go exactly, but. You could still even keep it like a little tour as you go. Right. So you can like actually enjoy seeing,

you know, the star speeder in that room. You can still do the projection tunnel. And then at the end, you just get a big like. Because that's all anybody, I mean, this is going to be blasphemous, but that's all anyone cares about on Test Track. Let's be honest. people don't like a demonstration of precision tires some people like it i know they're gonna be mad at me but not all i ever care not radiator springs

not radiator springs no that's a slow tour through radiator springs yeah and then you go fast at the end and they yeah they could rebuild the last. And they could rebuild the last chunk. They could have rebuilt the last chunk of it, Mike, to do what you're saying. I mean, they rebuilt the monorail track God knows how many times. I don't know where it would go. I'd have to look it up.

Yeah, I don't either. Maybe this will be part of my pitch. I don't know that they have rebuilt them. At least the layout has remained the same, the monorail track. Haven't they moved? I the layout has remained the same, the monorail track. Haven't they moved? I think they have tried to not move the monorail as often as possible. I think actually, and I could be wrong about this,

but in my head, the route that it takes through California Adventure and then back to where it lands, what used to be the hotel, I think they've kept it roughly the same because they want to not move. That's major heavy- right right pylons and yeah that's that's tough to i and it's never it hasn't shortened right around utopia and that big long that ought too long it takes a long yeah you look really like a helicopter landing or something now i think they've like probably removed parts of it but then reinstalled it where it was i think but i think but i might be right actually i think because i think that yeah park and downtown disney changes have all sort of happened around the they've tried to not blow up the monorail

that's a big expense but it is interesting then that idea if they they couldn't have tried not to i guess they did try to not change the people mover. That's what they had to do. I don't think it changed at all. It's a problem, and it's still a problem. It's still there, and I always thought like, you always hear, oh, they can't just reopen the people mover. You can't reopen the people mover.

I always thought it was because of OSHA regulations because there are parts um in that first section where you can just kind of touch the walls and if they had left the people mover it would have been grandfathered and i realized rocket rods did so much wear and tear on this track yeah it really wore down yeah yes because when you have the and, and this is where it all, it just all emanates from that initial decision of, let's try to do all this on the cheap, all of Tomorrowland and this attraction, especially not like,

you know how we save money. We don't bank the turns. That's what we do. Well, it ends up costing the money in the long run, in the long, long run, because now it's a ride that has to slow down and then speed up again

constantly and in kind of an erratic way so there's parts of a track that we're not expecting to have like a all right now like really heavy cars are gonna like and like maybe stall a little bit in this area so thus like plaster starts falling down on. I think there were situations like this where like pieces of that track were falling down on or near. Yeah. And it's not, it is like, it is old building, old infrastructure now is having like an earthquake every five minutes that it is not been prepared for. It's not been built for essentially. No reinforcements whatsoever. Right.

I don't know if this thing's going to make it through an earthquake. You worried about that? Not only that, we're going to do our own earthquakes here all day, every day. Yeah, basically. Every few minutes. Not even every few hours. Every few minutes.

Constant earthquakes. And it will be as loud and annoying as earthquakes are. This is, again, this is contradictions because it's like every now and then like when you said the the ceo comes in drops a big idea and you figure it out that sometimes ends up with something interesting sure or like working within restrictions ends up with something interesting but there's so many confusing parts of this. Of like, oh, Euro Disney, you know, it ate up all our money.

So it severely restricted the budget for this. Well, okay, we're gonna do this Tomorrowland like the one at Euro Disney. Well, wait, wasn't it? That's a country. You just said it lost a bunch of money. Well, this was an aesthetic victory though

but you mostly are gonna have the money for paint yeah the money's gotta go to pit what do you what are we gonna what are we supposed to do not paint space mountain brown the audience has been loud and clear on this they want space mountain brown yeah uh they don't care if the right they'll be fine with a ride that slows down all the time. Where if you watch that ad that I played earlier, that's something I didn't say about it. Is that like, you know, rev up on the all new rocket rides. And then it like, it's, you watch that initial launch, which is exciting. And it's funny. When do they cut?

When do they cut away from the excited teens? Maybe exactly where the curve and, and that's true in all of it. If you watch like press footage they did like a cd-rom press kit and all of the footage ends precisely at the point where it does the very first curve thus indicating that this is not a truly high speed right it also starts by doing kind of an odd looking wheelie i guess in theory it's a wheelie but it's such an odd looking thing it's like oh is it supposed to be doing that is it wheelie or is it problem is it unbuckling at the top is it starting to come loose is it gonna flip over all the way right uh no initially it did wheelies because

that's what like maybe we need to pick apart the premise what is a rocket what does this phrase mean because they're kind of once it's up and running they're like it's like a race car of maybe we need to pick up the premise. What is a rocket? What does this phrase mean? Because they're kind of, once it's up and running, they're like, it's like a race car of the future. And Mario Andretti's gonna ride in it when we open it. So it's a race car.

And that's why it does a wheelie. So in the future, you will be in future race cars that will get you, but then what's a rod? How much did that cost? How much did it cost to get? Well, hot rod is what they're going for yeah i guess i assume rod okay rocket rod but how is this a viable public transportation solution

how are we all right it takes a lot of mustard to ride in a super fast race car how do you like this this can't be how we get down to the civic center and yeah no we can't it doesn't even look cool even if it was unrealistic as we said earlier it's it's both not practical and uncool and too loud and too loud like it should be if it's rocket rod it should look like um the neutrinos and ninja turtles car which is like a flying hot rod car i don't know if you guys remember this yeah they had a toy too the villains actually it was a villain's toy but it was like a it was like a old car and then the wheels would like fold up into it and fly like that's like a cool space hot rod or something that you would want to go on this

i it doesn't look like a rocket rod because i think you would know if it was like an old time car that could fly you would know exactly what a rocket rod is and what it was supposed to be wait a minute i'm remembering something there is another history and maybe that's what this is but there's probably some other episode maybe like unbuilt tomorrowlands is kind of the idea here yeah but i believe in tokyo there was something that is much closer to what you're describing where there's still like kind of a 50s thing right uh 50s but future i think and maybe this was rocket bikes i don't know i think tokyo had something that's pretty close to what you're saying interesting where like it's fun now we're

well you know where we are we're in the dexter jetster area i didn't say it and i didn't say it but i thought it yeah yeah my man um i am i right about i'll try to figure out rocket bikes tokyo but or you know that's the the name that's like the name is bad name because it doesn't it's not showing you what the name is like you're right. Hot Rod is like, you have to represent 60s. Right. You got to represent whatever the song Shut Down by the Beach Boys

was about. But there's no 60s to it. Yeah. It's just a big clunky thing where you really see that engine, by the way. It's just like, that's a very present,

which makes it so industrial. Yeah. And other things, you're like, where do they hide the mechanism on this thing? you see it you really see it it's right there it looks like a go-kart if it explodes i'm yeah sometimes you see the service vehicle on the monorail track at disneyland yes which looks like almost like the hobo uh car on a train track to some degree but this looks like a service vehicle more than it does an actual ride

vehicle to me. It's like a thing that would push a train that's broken. Yeah. Right. Like they send a rocket right out to fix a people mover. That's just the way it doesn't, it doesn't convey fun to me. It looks like some sort of completely functional vehicle,

like just perfunctory vehicle that just sends a maintenance worker out. I was correct that there was, Tomorrowland was going to become, or at least part of it was going to become sci-fi city and there were going to be, and it looks like flying kind of hot rod things too. This is good. I mean, maybe, you know, maybe that's the other episode. It's unbuilt, but that might group enough together.

But as for the one that was built and built on a budget um something we haven't talked about is the queue and i have very strong memories of the queue because did i say that i did this i did do rock rods uh and um another thing that hasn't been said is that uh as far as those blank areas, the non-locks in Tomorrowland, Circle Vision Theater was one of them, and Circle Vision became the line for this. It became the queue for Rocket Rods.

So a former attraction is now a line. I was thinking, when I started looking up videos and posts and stuff i was like man what was the cue for that i've never quite understood it because i know you entered at buzz lightyear but where did you go and the answer was enter where buzz lightyear is end up in a circle vision and then go through a tunnel to then go upstairs that is correct yeah so the door that you still would use for buzz light ear that was like the same thing probably that was the pre-show of circle vision uh circle vision became uh after this it became the bulk of the buzz light year ride and then yeah then you would have to like go through a very dark and claustrophobic tunnel that would get you down to the bottom of

that tower to get you to the loading area so instead of because you used to have remember it's still that way in disney world that it's those little speed ramps you go up a nice little ramp and now i'm instead you got to go under it now i'm under the earth and i remember being in there and like that's what they figured out this is so weird and by the time that you're at that point uh the the narrowest area with the least entertainment you have probably been in this room for at least an hour this was a punishing line this was crazy maybe 90 maybe two hours there there is a great video online and i started watching it and i was like what account is this and then i started laughing because the answer was a long time theme

park designer david cobb had he he has his youtube is kind of like an archive because he just digitizes his videos. He just put up 30, 40 minutes of going around the islands of adventure construction areas when he was working on Men in Black, Alien Attack. I believe, as I recall, you rented out a theater to watch that.

Well, no, the Cinerinerama dome is empty right now you know um there's some real cinema here but cobs old movies he he records the queue he he's with someone and they're in the circle vision and i i believe it's person he's with goes we've been in line for about two hours now. Oh my God. We've seen this Circle of Vision movie about three times. Wow. Because it is such a weird looking room. They were only using all of the screens occasionally. Yeah.

And the main queue part is so, it looks so cheap. It's so dark. Yeah. part is so it looks so cheap it's so dark yeah and they're playing old disney like walt stuff or old tomorrowland footage that's fine but then there's old ride vehicles they've painted wire frames over it just well that's yeah that's where that idea came in and also tony bagster's notion of could we use the old vehicles in some way. So, you know, you have a couple things. You have, like, here's literal blueprints.

You're almost supposed to be in the Imagineering lab where they're dreaming of new futuristic. So you've got, like, here's blueprints for a Space Mountain sled. That's what they're called? Never knew that. The Nautilus submarine, the Mark III 3 monorail and then a rocket rod then you've got actual big vehicles like a monorail or a rocket jet or a submarine but they're all there now they are painted like living blueprints so mostly blue and then with like orange electrical tape and by tony's own admission this thing was so bootstrapped that it was like him doing it and all the other guys were like we gotta turn this into something

we can't just like open this up and it's an empty room let's all right everybody put some tape on this thing so it's like it's tony hand making yeah yeah um it's so sad that it came to that but he tried he tried for us he really did it's it is an interesting experiment there is also at some point there is like a board that says future expansions like future stations and it has both angels stadium and the Hockey Arena listed as a future station. It's really confused. This piece, this I like a lot, actually. I mean, boy, I'd buy like a poster of this that shows you all the places where the rocket rods might go.

You know, right now, you're in the central terminal, but it might go to Innoventions someday. Oh, good. It might go to, what's that might might maybe maybe uh uh it might go to disney's california adventure before it opened this i kind of like that it's like a nod yeah and there's little symbols representing these things and california venture is represented by an orange that was that was the the orange was yeah the symbol of the park um and i like the big orange we haven't done a episode about the big orange park. I like the big orange.

We haven't done an episode about the big orange. We know you like the big. He's talking about the big orange before, though. Yeah, I like the big orange. You wish it was there instead. There was some point in like 2015, 2016 or so where I was like, should I go back to the big orange? And I was like, oh, it's gone. You thought for a second the orange was there? For a second, I thought the orange was there. And I'm like, well, S's gone. You thought for a second the orange was there? For a second, I thought the orange was there

and I'm like, well, Silly Symphony Swings is a better experience, but I'm like, kind of like the big orange. Is that where you sometimes, like you had a dream where you were in high school and you wake up and you go, oh, my test is, oh, I'm not in high school anymore. You forgot the big orange.

Yeah, but it was a waking dream. Oh, okay. I was like, did they take away the big orange? I see. Did they take away the Malibu? Oh, they did was a waking dream. Oh, okay. I was like, did they take away the big orange? I see. Did they take away the Malibu? Oh, they did. Yeah. Oh, okay.

Duh. And then a single tear rolled down your cheek. Single, yeah. Pour one out for the Malibu. Some of them will be like, Jason, you're going to a better place. It's a place that still has the big orange. You'll see as many big oranges as you'd ever want. Yeah, anyway. You'll see as many big oranges as you'd ever want. But the queue, the wireframe route, you could kind of see that.

It's like, well, they were trying something. They tried to make this something. Even like you could tell it's like, what is it now? All right. It's like we're experimenting with a mass transit. Come on. Is that anything? Maybe that's something.

It'll take you to the beach you'll go to the beach on a rocket rod what a beautiful los angeles where you take a you ruin everyone's time at the when a rocket rod pulls up kicks up a bunch of sand gasoline on your shoes so now scares a bunch of seagulls they all shit and fear onto families if it doesn't bank it shoots a lot of the humans out of the vehicle it throws them from the vehicle what a wonderful experience los angeles by getting tossed onto its curbs there is okay it's not the exact we were talking about the repeated footage, but there is a lot of the genre of people just off the ride going, oh, it's great.

You go so fast. Oh, I loved it. You know, that is a certain type. That could be its own Final Four. It's just people going like, it was a trip. Oh, I had such a good time. Best reactions. Yeah.

Or just saying the name. Rocket Rods! Rocket Rods! That's good, yeah. If you don't have anything to say, can you just yell Rocket Rods? Can all 10 of you teens yell... When you're done clowning around, just yell Rocket Rods, and we'll just keep rolling and do whatever after that.

We'll never be done clowning around, bitch. Okay. All right, well, here's your ticket for free coke and uh you can go on your way i'm so sorry hey give me five more okay uh here's six you didn't do what i told you you're gonna die um but so yeah it is really weird it's a you know we got some stuff they're using like old they've showed some of the Timekeeper movie in the Circle Vision. They're keeping you entertained.

We gave you 20 minutes of footage that will loop seven times. And then you go through a very dark tunnel. I don't remember the handicapped access situation here. This is a weird, and if you were claustrophobic, this was just, this was a rough line. A lot of problems.

A lot of problems. Also, it seemed like people were just kind of ambling about or sitting on the floor of that circle vision like it seemed like yeah probably it seemed like in movies you know it seemed like in a jurassic world or american godzilla where everyone's just kind of shaking off what just happened and like the national guard is kind of trying to assure people but like everyone's in the solar blankets yeah everyone's got solar blankets on central casting member it's like they have the band-aid on their head and they're trying to make a meal of oh sentences do we have can somebody do balloon animals can we cheer up people in here

uh yeah yeah that's that's the vibe. No, people needed therapy after making it through this line. But here's, yeah, the buildup was like insane. You're just like, boy, is this going to be. And then it's a little hard to talk about this ride experience. We've alluded to it. But yeah, you know, if you're there in the first two months, you get a fun, fast launch with a confusing wheelie

and then you slow down right away and you go into star tours and then it is just like speed not speed speed not speed um but then you get into like you know imagine now you're in like autopia area where you're a little more free and here's what i remember is that like all right we're not we're not curving as much here. We're getting some straightaway. Like that area and it's open and you're not just in weird. You watch those ride-throughs and you're really like, this is like an industrial hallway. This is like see cracks in the.

And then you're like, well, wouldn't have been cool if they had kept that Tron tunnel. And then you're going super speed through the Tron. No, no. Took that out. That's gone. No more of that. In fact, sometimes you can just look into an active construction site. Yeah. Because this

opened before all... Well, I was going to say all of InnoVenture. Like, there's footage of people going through what will become InnoVenture, but it wasn't ready yet. Oh, it was late. So it's just work lights half on. My God.

And there was something. Did you catch the, you saw it in person, the mirror early on? There's a moment where, when it would look into one of the buildings, where they just put in a giant mirror, so it looked like you were about to hit another, that trick where it looks like another car is coming at you, but then you start to slow down. So the effect doesn't really work,

you know? God. God. How did, imagine the morale. Imagine being Tony and you know, this has come to pass and you're like, yeah,

we lost that one. And we know, and we know and they knew they knew this was not going to be there's people like there's beam counters going it's going to be fine actually it's a little bit different it's kind of predictable that a roller coaster would just go faster and faster the longer you were on it

this is a crazy this is a loose cannon of a ride we don't know what's going to happen I almost think it would have been cheaper to redo this Tomorrowland with a scaled down Tomorrowland 94 theme. Sure. Yeah. We'll just repeat some stuff.

Repeat some elements. Yeah, sure. The people mover technically is different in Florida, so they wouldn't have been able to clone that. They wouldn't have been able to clone that. They wouldn't have been able to just change the ride vehicles. Just keep the old ones then. Just keep the old because

if they had left Tomorrowland alone that white mid-century aesthetic would have come into fashion again and they would have been able to milk the nostalgia box. It still looked a little... wouldn't look it would look old though the way that it looked it wasn't very it was

extreme it was very 80s and i'm fond of it and they've kept the elements that still work like the neon mickeys right right it was kind of a hodgepodge but then they just put in a new hodgepodge it still has that rocket yeah i'm not saying it's good i'm just saying the aesthetic even if you look at the old photos i'm like it would it's still the aesthetic has come back around it just looks old it would look old now i'm not saying it's better or worse i'm just saying i don't know if they could have done nothing and it would still have i mean i guess it may be what you're right it would have been better but it would still feel old it would still feel tired they've tried to change tomorrowland in florida where it's like oh let's replace that busy sign with a more minimalist sign yeah let's take out some of the neon green and purple and some of the fins and i'm like i

think it looks chintzy or like why did you take that all out yeah yeah they really can't i mean what they're what they're aiming for now is neither here nor there they just yeah they need to like really pick and do aesthetic to all this and stick to it yeah here's here's let me get to this though is that at the end um you know there's there's kind of like a pure tunnel that's you know like the the matter horn is on the right of you and you're kind of up above the queue of the rocket rods. And at this point, you actually do pick up some speed. You are going pretty straight. You get hit with a strobe light and a blast of air.

And that's one of the last things that happens. And I don't know. I was 13. I was not a thrilled junkie and I'm still not now. But around that point, I was like, it's actually kind of all right. You know what? That little part, I didn't expect the hit of air. I didn't expect that.

And then you get one more little straightaway before you finish it out. It actually, I think it closed with its best stuff, which still sounds very chintzy. I'm still, I'm describing like haunted house stuff. Right. But it was at least, it was like a little bit of a jump at the end. I've alluded to this, like this might be an insane opinion. I mean, I'll at least land at this. I liked it enough to not call it the worst ride they ever did. Still in your memory.

Yeah. Yeah. And I don't, now I can't, I'm not fully qualified to say I didn't go on Superstar Limo. I don't know. I got enough of a little charge out of it that even with all of this, at the time, I was kind of like, Rocket Riders isn't bad. Yeah. Well, because I didn't go on it, so I'll never fully know.

But it's a lot of the stuff surrounding the building of this and the failure of Tomorrowland at this time does get attached to the rocket rods as well. Yeah. Well, it's like it's the nerve center of the entire thing. Yeah. Nerve center shut down. And the fact that the track is just sitting there makes it worse. And like when you look back on it now, if that had been just like track ripped out or they just replaced it with something, maybe it would be, oh, yeah, Rocket Rods.

But Rocket Rods now has such a connotation to the epic failure of Disneyland when obviously there were more unpleasant rides. The flying saucers famously didn't work. Stuff that I'm sure was less fun to actually go on sure than rocket rod which might have been a bit frustrating because of the bank the not the slowdowns yeah but of course going fast around tomorrowland to some degree would be fun yeah at least some fast yeah some fast happen i mean to me no question no question rocker rods better than current journey into imagination oh interesting i'm declaring that for my my personal taste that's another thing though because what came before was so much better it's hard not to compare it and really hate the new version or dislike a lot

of the things in the new version i think though that even if i didn't know the original if i maybe even more so like okay what is this i know nothing it's called journey into imagination yeah and a shrill dragon looks like a skunk and then has a buzzer i'll say this i've never been on rocket rods but uh uh it's better than mission uh space people are gonna be mad about that but i you know what i might not really don't like mission space you're not uh my opinion wouldn't be far from you yeah but i would maybe i would notch mission space up because like better place making uh better videos despite my issues with gary sinise and grappling over the daddy award i i still there's enough like production that's all you're all you're

right about that all that but i find the actual ride so unpleasant yeah that yeah i would i bet i would say i would rather go on rocket rods than mission space yeah you're right the building is cool and all that stuff surrounding it is cool but the actual ride itself I'm sure it was way more fun. Is your choice mission space, you think, of worse? At least Disney? I think so. Yeah. I think so. I just, especially doing the hard, the one that's tougher on your brain.

I just like left it disoriented and like claustrophobic. Yeah. I think I might still go, unless there's something I'm forgetting, I might go current journey jason you got a thought i don't know yeah i'm trying to think on this mission space is a good one rocket rods is just so much i keep thinking about how they took out a people leader the people mover like people mover was a people eater yes it was people eater and it just uh uh never had too long of a wait florida has a little bit of a long wait occasionally nowadays but it feels like um people mover never had too long of a wait and it also added a huge line attraction like it added a huge weight yeah so that's all true effect you do not want operationally yeah let's talk about like

because that's what i'm saying is i'm shocked and as much as i wanted to like get into the the confusing and irritating history of this thing and and the line was horrible line was awful to be in yeah i came out of it still a little bit like notching this right up higher than i thought that i would so i'm like in terms of things you've been on just like the experience itself, forget any context. Do you have a knee jerk of like, man, I hate being on this. It would be cool to race around the railroad track at Disneyland. It would be cool. It would be cool, especially at night.

Yes. Yeah. If they were like, oh yeah, by the way, now you go like 50 miles an hour around the train tracks at Disneyland. I go, I'm interested in doing that. Yeah. Yeah. So I can see see yeah this there would be fun elements of this yeah it's a bullet train now still use tracks it's a bullet train yeah and

i wouldn't have been so precious about it at the time of like oh the people movers going on like now of course it's a blasphemous thing to do get rid of the people mover but right at the time i would be like yeah cool faster great i was for it then yeah i just didn't know it was gonna be this if they said we're making every ride at disney 25 miles per hour faster i would have been for it every ride is gonna go faster this summer at disneyland we're turning up the juice on everything and i'd be like hell yeah let's do this because you're hoping that like when they do that they'll put the chili peps back in you know well i Well, I'm hoping for all- You get an appropriate soundtrack.

Chili Peppers took over two rides at Disneyland 15 or 20 years ago. I'm hoping for all the rides at Disneyland one year. You want full discography. Full Chili Peppers. Every single, no repeats of songs. Every single- Right.

Yeah, yeah. Yep. So every ride will have a Chili Peppers song on it for a summer. That's my hope. Pirates of the Caribbean, you just hear By the Way seven times. Yes. Yep. So every ride will have a Chili Peppers song on it for a summer. That's my hope. Pirates of the Caribbean, you just hear, by the way, seven times. Yes. Pirates don't interact with the song whatsoever.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, on the first drive. Yeah, yeah. It's just a lot of long intros, too. Mm-hmm. There'll be live tracks where they kind of jam out an intro. Sure.

It's a small world, so it just has has a four minute flea-based solo. Yeah, yeah, of course. Because you got to get, it's an eight minute ride or something. So how are you going to get that length of song? Chili Summer. Oh, please. Yeah, yeah. Every ride goes 25% or 25 miles an hour faster and the chili peppers are on all the rides.

That's my dream for a big event. If we're not getting Quacky Duck City, that's what I want. Well, shocking news. Disneyland has closed. Disneyland finally, permanently, after many decades, has kicked the bucket.

Okay, wait a minute. In this scenario, is it because people don't want to go because of red hot chili peppers or is it because all the rides broke? Oh, I don't know. Is it because people are like, oh, I't know uh yeah people are like oh i don't want to hear those red hot chili peppers a little calm a little calm b okay yeah i think if well if

you got if you like didn't know what you were like oh it's it's the storybook land canal boats it's really nice you're gonna see little villages where all the characters live all right let's do Mommy! Mommy! They didn't bake the curves! I'm flying out on a boat, Mom! Is there a ride we think we could legitimately make faster and it would work? That's a good question. Well, Railroad is pretty funny. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you could make that go a little faster, probably.

If I understand the physics of trains, and I think I do from the film Back to the Future 3, you just have to throw in different colored logs, and that makes the train go progressively faster and faster. That's a good point. Different color. Oh, into the engine? Yeah, this is Dr. Emmett Brown's system. Yeah, you just get, you know, all right, now you go to yellow, now you go to orange, now you go to red. I got to rewatch this movie.

I do not remember the logs. No, it's a color-basedbased log system and that gets the train up to 88 miles an hour you gotta have your colored logs regular logs are not going to do it for you right so get some colored logs start that makes sense for the train yeah what's the train song oh which song with the red chilled peppers yeah oh uh let me think here pairing uh i'm trying to think of a good what's on Blood Sugar Sex Magic maybe the title track from Blood Sugar Sex Magic I think that makes sense just for family friendly

could you change the name to Blood Sugar Train Magic yeah everybody can enjoy that that at least has one of the Disney words that's true that would help great great everybody can enjoy that that at least has one of the disney words that's true that's kind of the most disney friendly chili pepper song maybe they build the whole firework show around the song blood sugar sex magic so like they would at least

like fit the brand do they say the phrase in the song oh yeah okay blood sugar baby she's magic Blood Sugar Baby, She's Magic, Sex Magic, Sex Magic. Train Magic. Train Magic. Train Magic. Uh-huh. Story. Blood has to come out. Blood Sugar Story Magic. I think Blood has to come out of its Disney.

Story Sugar Train Magic. Story Sugar Train Magic. Wish. Wish Magic. Wish Magic. Wish Magic maybe is the line then. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's good. Yeah, you're going to have to make some edits. Actually, we're thinking sugar is a little dicey because there's kind of a sexual, like, hey, come here, sugar. Can we make that imagine just to be safe? Okay, yeah. All right. So the song is now Dream Imagine Wish Magic.

Dream imagine, wish magic, wish magic. Yeah. It's kind of a hard, one of the harder songs in their Magic, Wish Magic. Yeah, it's kind of a hard, one of the harder songs in their catalog, I think. It's a tougher sounding song, not as poppy. Now when Alan Menken puts his new lyric song on, Alan Menken will get on it. Anyway, not to avoid the question,

but I think in terms of unpleasant, maybe the Astro Orbiter at the front of this land. Is your least favorite ride? Really? I'm trying to think. I just keep going through rides, and I'm like, well, I like all the vehicles. I like all the trains.

I'm pretty good with Mission Space, although I feel like last time I rode it, I was okay, but the time before that i was pretty beat up and living with the land is not your choice huh scott's choice is not living with the land maybe my choice is something i don't feel comfortable saying okay excuse me excuse me maybe i there's certain things certain areas where i can't express myself all right in this country you're being censored yeah you're being censored i mean i think're being censored. Because of woke. I do think genuinely, I don't think you guys

have been hard enough on that journey. And it's not even like the Dream Finder, none of that. I think in and of itself, that thing is such a piece of shit.

I don't like it. Don't get me wrong, but I would rather go on it 10 times than do one Mission Space, I think. I just really don't like Mission Space.

I might be on the same page with you there. Funny how so many of the choices are in Epcot. What a bummer situation. That is interesting, yeah. But thank God Epcot now has Cornhole. Cornhole and Hulu. Hulu, yeah.

Just to get to the end of this situation, they knew right away this was not going well. Operationally terrible. Shutdown all the time. We're in the rise of the resistance zone of shutdowns probably every day. rise of the resistance zone of like shutdowns probably every day because of the slowdown speed up that they had all right computers are going to manage how we track where all the vehicles are wait that vehicle isn't where we thought it would be because

of the slowing down and speeding up computer what do you think malfunction malfunction steam computer system breaks down every car stops in its tracks yeah because they couldn't pinpoint exactly where everything was supposed to be everybody get out of your rocket rods really precarious elevated scary for kids to evacuate from almost no clearance um so that's all a disaster um then like, I mean, I think they did a big shutdown. Three months. Early on. Wow.

Right after. You know what? I'm seeing one month. Oh, one month. One month. In one month, they scheduled a one-month refurbishment, which became three months. Then it opened and nothing was fixed. It limped along like this until fall 2000 and they said

ah guess what seven months it's gonna go down for seven months we will see you in spring 2001 and then uh some reporters start asking the the people in charge of disneyland hey it's spring what's going on with that thing and they're like yeah all right you guys it's spring. What's going on with that thing? And they're like, yeah, all right, you guys, it's not happening. Rock and Roll has gone forever. Wow. Cynthia Harris, I forget what she was, if she was the president or somebody big at the resort. She was the president. Said to the press, said to a newspaper, the high-speed attraction was never able to perform to its design show standards.

The problem was a budget-conscious decision to run the high speed rods on the people movers unbanked track can you imagine today current disney executive saying what really happened not saying well we are imagine nothing imagine upping some new experiences that we're going to dreameroo for you by 2032. Like there's no way they don't just like censor, censor. Cynthia Harris, a real, you know, she's shoot from the hip. She's a whistleblower. The cornhole has been shut down as a drunk man in his 30s wung a bag at a six-year-old's head.

It did not perform as expected. I like the verb wung. Wung. It can only be described as wung. An action so violent it has never occurred until now and requires a new word. I mean, that's crazy.

They just said, and this is where you really have to like, imagine if they, look, it's had its problems, but it's clearly, like, a hit, and it's working very well. But you, like, imagine if they, two years in, Rise of the Resistance is gone. We're not doing it. It broke. It didn't work.

It never worked. Like, never mind on Rise of the Resistance. The ticket going down fully. it never worked like never mind on rise of the resistance the the ticket that was going pretty wild fully animatronics uh the statue keeps vomiting the gleason the statue keeps vomiting and we don't know why i'm all gleason's bile uh and he's up above the guests so it lands on the guests and if you're asking does he exorcist yes he exorcists he spins around and around and around and there is no way to stop him

we don't even want to get near him well the sort of the canon room is I think rocking itself because that's never going to run again I've heard those canons are never going to run in Rise of Resistance which is my favorite room that's what I've heard because it shakes the foundation like we're talking about gives earth those cannons are never going to run on Rise of Resistance, which is my favorite room, but most people's favorite. That's what I've heard.

Oh, because it shakes the foundation? Like we're talking about, gives earthquakes, mini earthquakes to this building. And that's what I've heard. I don't, I'm not an expert.

I've never talked to an engineer about it, but that's what people say is that, yeah, these things are off forever. Make them out of, make them out of bolts of wood. Like make them out of like particle board. That's the idea, yeah. I think they're lighter than we think they are but still the mechanism for making something that big move so much that's a bummer yeah that's true if it's true that's a bummer yeah it's like a mini rocket rods within

right that's yes so yeah there's partly of like uh this isn't working and luckily for them their sake it's only one room yeah yeah but yeah imagine that on a on a bigger scale it's really crazy that should be in a mario ride also by the way something like that yeah because it feels like such a mario level oh true yeah when you go in and out they have like more of a risk of actually hitting you. Yeah, yeah. I saw that 2000 to 2001 refurbishment. That's when they were going to put on the glow in the dark, like the glowing night lights. Oh, that's interesting. Wow, wow.

So that would have felt, maybe there's a version where they got it there. I like to imagine a world where like, all right, so let's see, we're going to do, we'll pop over to, you know, we'll go do Haunted Mansion. And then I think I got a two o'clock rods. We'll do rods. And then.

Sure. I mean, I think it's, yeah, if they, they were probably like the track is going to fall apart. We can't, we will have to rebuild the track. And then just no one ever was interested in shutting down that big of a chunk of Tomorrowland. Which they had just done. Right. This had just happened. And you know what else is, here's where it gets depressing too, is that part of new Tomorrowland, we got a new ride.

Then that goes down. Once you've seen Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, you've pretty much seen it. I don't know if you need to keep doing that over and over. Submarines, gone. Submarines, gone with new Tomorrowland. So we've lost one. Right, right. I mean, and nobody likes the brown.

The brown gets repainted very quickly. Right. It's almost, if you take away Astro Orbiter, there's almost no signs of New Tomorrowland in general. Buzz Lightyear came in there, cleaned up that area. So it was this big, this, you know, cheap for them them but too expensive for something that didn't stay wow what a giant waste of money i know just don't do the rocket rods if you're gonna yeah on it that much i wonder how soon into development they realized yeah like oh shit

yeah and they had to put on a break and then tony had to go do all the press yeah yeah clips of him like because the future is the land of dreams and that is where i don't even know he's dying inside start i'm crazy i guess it could be the face of it yeah awful uh that sign that rocket rods closed i believe sold at one of the disney land auctions huh at the at the i think i saw it at the uh i'm remembering it was at the exhibit in the burbank mall one of the more recent auctions that is kind of set up as if it were a museum right i'm like it's a rocket rods thing and it's the rocket rods is closed today's sign the sign promising the rods will be yeah yeah but the rods did not come back there were no rod i have found on ebay or depop

there are rocket rods t-shirts and the sellers know what they have because those t-shirts are always 80 or 90 dollars okay those are the real deal those are remakes those are the vintage they're vintage yeah yeah wow true vintage rod merch um i like just calling it rods like if it's turning around that's what happens like all right yeah quick quick rod and then we'll do spaceman we'll roll over there if we have time i'd rather if we had to pick i gotta do we gotta do rods i think rods i'll do rods yeah let's do there if we have time. If we had to pick, we got to do Rod's. I think Rod's. I would do Rod's, yeah. Let's do Rod's, but let's do it before we go to the pizza restaurant because that pizza and then a ride on Rod's,

you're going to feel a little gnarly. The pizza restaurant, which is called Rod's Rocket Pizza Port, they changed the name due to the now beloved success of Rocket Rods. It's part of the Rod universe. Right, right. And they'd have had a movie, too, probably by now. Oh, yeah, yeah. Disney announces Rocket Rod.

Disney's Rocket Rod movie. Yeah. Verbinski is back. Gore Verbinski is doing Rocket Rods. Yeah. Now, that, by the way, still could happen. From some of the announcements recently where you go, I don't know why they're doing that oh i know club 33 movie you're like why not a rocket rod movie talking about uh yeah i know actually and with rocket rods you could be a little more freewheeling

that's right yeah yeah uh i mean i'm kid brain i'm thinking about thomas the tank engine but like you know like a plucky upstart vehicle named Rocket Rod who wants to go fast, but he doesn't know how to bank on turns. So all his passengers always go a-flying. Rocket Rod doesn't mean to cause concussions, but he just gets too excited on the straightaways. I like that Rod is a guy or a character. Yeah, yeah. Give him a little face. I'm Rocket Rod. yeah reboot it just as a

france i'm i'm seeing it right now kids are crazy for transportation my pitch is more of an american graffiti with rocket rods racing and stuff you know yeah future american graffiti is my pitch what if they just what if all it is is you climb up there, it does just the straightaway and then it doesn't bank. It's like a, it's a race to the end of the entrance to Tomorrowland and then you just back it up and you do it again. It's a 15 second ride. Rocket rod drag races. Okay. Fine with me.

Some kinetic energy there. And a sexy girl robot waving the flag in between. Yes. Now I'm very interested. Gentle bots, start your engines. Gentle bots. I guess I made the rule. That's the other rule.

Women can't go on the new rocket rods. Women are not allowed to go on the new rocket rods. Seems a little odd, but okay. I don't know how they'll enforce that, but all right. It seems confusing. Can I say there's been a lot of teases about Rocket Rod, or about Rocket Rod, it's about the People Mover of the Year's 2010

former Disneyland, I think, president, George Kalogridis. I don't know. Kalogridis? What I do know is we can never bring it back as it was originally. But don't worry. Everyone understands the passion everyone has for it. Hang in there.

So keep hanging in there, everyone. What year was that, you said? 2010. 2010, okay. A lot of hanging. Well, we've done a lot of hanging. We can still hang. Rhodey walking along the track a while ago.

People spotted him. The legend of Rhodey walking along the track a while ago people spotted the legend of roadie over a few years before this is we don't have footage of this but this is a this is a frequent legend and a frequent anecdote it's like we're supposed to get hope because an imagineer went to a place we need more than this we need hope that's big enough to fill a honda center and the imagineering documentary is holding a model that looks like it possibly could be a Space Mountain. And Rhodey's in charge of the new Space Mountain. Rhodey, fired.

Never mind. He's gone. He's been fired. He's going. Early retirement. He's been put into early retirement. He goes to Virgin Galactic, but he's not there anymore. I don't know if that's going already.

He was at Imagineering for a seminar or a master class. He was in Epcot a couple months ago. So everyone wants things to be real. This is the saddest hunting for crap. Switch cast is seeing a guy walking through a place. Oh my God, Rhodey's walking through Epcot. Wait, in terms of history rhyming, new Epcot, it's done,

Communicore Hall, the picnic area is is open then immediately test track 2.0 closes like you were saying oh well it's closing they are redoing it oh yeah the new test track is down excuse me going to be built now oh they're doing the full refurbishment yes uh but when you said like tomorrowland 98 and the subs are closed, it just reminded me of like. That's how they do it. Look over here. This keeps happening. They roll it.

Yeah, they roll them over. This is why I love this. Like, it's my favorite theme park aesthetic is Disney future. Yeah. It's one of the things I think they do the very best. Maybe the thing they do the very best. Why is this the most problematic area? Why did these have to struggle?

Why are these the areas that don't get the infinite budget? This is what I'd like to see change. And it's in just to tie the Tomorrowland story back together. It really, unfortunately you have to say if it's, I don't want to blame Rod himself now that I've, I've humanized him. I don't want to put this all on Rod's big clunky and loud shoulders.

I, it's the decision-making to cheap out on Rod's big, clunky, and loud shoulders. It's the decision-making to cheap out on Rod's that has still left this decaying husk of a track that now they're back to where they were. We're exactly where we were. Space Mountain, a lock. Star Tours, a lock. Everything else, not a lock. All these spaces that need to be filled. You could blow up any of these things any second, and nobody would care.

But it's a land. You got to get rid of that track. Even if you don't replace it with anything, the track has to go. But also you want to keep people going to Space Mountain. It's a, we've gotten nowhere since 1998. It's really crazy. What percentage of hope do you have that this is the year at D23

that we finally hear something? Well, that's interesting. Okay. What I think is going to happen is that we will get a, like, I don't know, 50% new Tomorrowland announced. Like, there'll be maybe one thing. Maybe it's a version of Tron. Maybe it's one thing that's, like, a big shiny thing, and then a lot of little things. That's kind of, that's what I think.

And I think there's a good chance of that. You really think this year? You are doing a parlay bet that they do something to Tomorrowland. Because the Autopia, I think, is kind of a hint to me the announcement of autopia being electric in what 2027 is a hint that we're gonna do stuff but it's not gonna be some massive thing that we kind of want where they rip out the subs in autopia and build a whole crazy new big thing over there okay yeah so i kind of think they're gonna do half and half yeah it's gonna plus up some stuff there it's gonna make it look better maybe pull out the people mover track and then i don't know if it's tron or if it's some maybe it's i don't think they're gonna do a tokyo and rip out our

space mountain i'm i wouldn't i hate it i wouldn't hate it i would but there's things they need to do first that's the thing like of course i'd love that but we we got a big list i've heard my guess was that we they were just gonna put the guardians coaster in there in tokyo but apparently that's not the case it's a new kind of coaster i was wrong about yes wow so it's a totally new and i don't know that they know what it is yet cool um but yeah so that's i think there's a very good chance we'll get like three small announcements for tomorrow and then maybe one moderate to big announcements and they'll tie that as well now we're doing something with Tomorrowland. That's my guess. I don't think I can go with you.

You don't even think that's happening? I'm too hurt. But I think maybe in two years we get, but I think priorities are specifics about Avatar. I think in general, you could feel that they are pushing, like in a lot of the season forward, it feels like about how they're going to get

frozen and tangled and that kind of thing yes I think that we're getting all that first I think that's all priority but I almost and maybe I'm wrong about this is I feel like they're going to hedge some bets still on what they're fully doing with all of it I think they'll show more

of the avatar and they'll say it's good but I don't know that they'll show us where it's going yet i could be wrong about that but like that all feels like that is still a little bit of motion this is all complete guesses i don't know what i'm talking about but that all still feels like we're not quite sure it feels like some of the magic kingdom stuff is a little more close to reality beyond big thunder stuff okay i keep hearing rumors about that so i almost get a sense of like i bet they know where that stuff is going more than they exactly know what disneyland forward is if it's a third park if it's just extensions of the two parks it's a whole i don't know this episode is just is us betting oh betting yeah yeah and putting actual putting actual money

on yeah i'll put money on it yeah yeah that Yeah, that's fun. Ooh, that's interesting. Yeah. It's going to be hard. We're just going to do it along with us too. I don't exactly know how to structure that. I don't know how to make a betting odds and whatever.

Well, with Fanatics.com and ESPN, you can use ESPN bet and keep it in-house at Disney somehow. I think we'll, you know what we'll probably have to do is

we'll each come in with sort of a guarantee of like, i believe they will show concept art of a frozen land or mini land with a new frozen rock like we'll have to come in with sort of a bet and then you the other two will have to say i will take you up on that i don't believe that's happening like i think we're gonna have to do that as opposed to like figuring out an official board of all the different because like yes you're right tell tangled frozen avatars we know how do you determine odds that are in the mix this is a mess it has to be just like between us but yes it would have to i would have to say like okay i i believe they will show uh wakanda and they will show a Black Panther

ride specifically and it's in Disney I don't know you could say it's in Disneyland forward and that's where it's going to go I'll have to bring in a specific thing that you will have to either agree or disagree with me on and I guess it can be as specific as we want it to be right right

but it's still going to be tricky because maybe it has to have a qualified like it'll have like it's tough because it's too hard we shouldn't really work it out on the air because it's boring but it is like when you're betting on some of this when you're betting on the super bowl and when you bet on the super bowl bet on football games in vegas you can bet on the coin toss you can bet on like like whoever is doing the halftime show like what songs they will say like we could go yeah so micro it's more like that i think i think it's more like that yeah yeah oh yeah you could bet on yeah like is like is does the score have

like a nine and a six in it right you could go that um i think that's what we do what if it's hey let's simplify bingo okay yeah we do bingo cards okay if it's, hey, let's simplify. Bingo. Okay, yeah, yeah. We do bingo cards. Okay. And it's either how many do you light up or if you get lines. That's funny, too. Yeah. Okay, so we got Tomorrowland 2055 episode. We've got repeat-

Frequent footage final four. Frequent footage final four. We've got potentially unbuilt that could go into our land 2055. We've got prop bets. We've got a prop bet episode, but then we also have to fix Tomorrowland, which if you guys want, we can assign our assignments right now if you'd like.

Do you have that worked out? Well, yes. It's pretty simple. It has to be randomized, doesn't it? Well, right. So I have assigned one through three. Oh. And I could have jason pick a number and you'll pick a number and then i'll get whatever's left over because i chose the numbers okay so that's pretty random this is a little nerve-wracking right now so remind remind everybody what the system so the fix tomorrowland basically uh we're each going to have a different assignment and a different budget essentially and

a different mindset in a lot of ways because somebody is going to have to fix tomorrowland in a budget less money than this rocket rod era i think or at least similar at least similar at least similar to rocket rod where like you can kind of do a rocket rod type overlay or change to one existing ride there but it's going to be a lot of paint you're gonna have to be you're gonna have to really like like figure out economical ways to make tomorrowland better yeah somebody is going to get the budget for a realistic 2024 tomorrowland okay meaning say they gave it a healthy budget but what would disney in 2024 do it's going to be a lot of ip it's going to be a lot of cloning from other parks so all that's obviously the other two people will have to police you if you decide to like act like you could put in like a goofy movie ride or something we go that is not

right what 24 24 disney would do but it also doesn't have to be that a bunch of it just turns into grass with cornhole and hula hoops it doesn't have to be but there will be a when in doubt yes future grass portions of tomorrowland and then the third is maybe i don't know maybe the most fun uh big budget blue sky and you can maybe put a few originals that like you have a massive budget here yeah it's maybe like they sold espn yeah you have all that money now the albatross is gone uh-huh and you really i i will like whoever gets that i think we'll be able to sort of have carte blanche to do some ip maybe some original bring back old stuff yeah like that's maybe the most fun one and that's that's gonna be a big that's gonna be i think, the one that I want the most.

Okay. But that's the fun. We're going to have to trust that you aren't lying over there. Well, I have it written down what the numbers are, so you guys can see that I'm not going to give myself the thing. Okay. So I have numbers assigned to each one, one through three. Yeah. And I will, let's just say Jason picks first, one, two, or three, and then I will give you your assignment.

Two. Jason, you got budget Tomorrowland. Yes. And now it's up to between Scott and I, and one of us gets realistic, healthy budget, but they have to be within the sort of confines of what Disney does in 2024, and the other gets the fun blue sky one. Okay. Scott, you have to choose either one or three what do you choose this is very important three choose scott gets the blue sky yeah

tomorrow wait that was the order you read them i didn't think you would give Blue Sky to three. That was the third one you mentioned. Well, that's why you overthought it, because I did it exactly how I had listed it. Oh, wow. Jason has a problem with the mechanism here. I honestly think I got the worst one. Budget would have been my second choice. If there's some way we can trade, if want to like one did you come up with a reasonable trade i have realistic 2024

what they might announce at this year's d23 so i mine is the most boring one because it's going to have to be ip it's gonna have to be a lot of cloned rides um but it's a good i'm open to a trade with you now with jason oh no i i got budget i got my assignment okay i got my assignment i love that you got budget but i but you have now yeah you have to be the most creative with little money to fix tomorrowland okay so you're really gonna have to get in there and imagine what you would do with with just paint and again you can do sort of a rocket rods ish level redo of an existing ride in tomorrow or maybe build a very small kind of ride using that money it could be i'll even say it could be like web slingers level oh okay that's still expensive but it's a smaller ride it's not they

would never have called that any ticket i don't, I don't think. Yeah, maybe either of you, I'd say, could allude to a ride that is a giant lie that will never get done. That's true, too. That's always a big option with the modern Disney company. That's true, too. Yes, I can lie a little bit. But yeah, so you guys have the better assignments, I think. Mine is the most boring, I believe. But I'm going to be it's interesting

Thought exercise it's an interesting thought experiment Yeah well thank you for being a randomized Martyr sure Well hey that's great well I'm glad we've done The connective tissue we've identified the Problem maybe this has all taught us something that we Can use right in our In this eventual episode which should be a

Lot of fun well we'll get to that before D23 happens, before either we get some stuff we want or we get our hearts broken. But for now, you survived Podcast the Ride. For three bonus episodes every month, check out Podcast the Ride, the second gate, or get one more bonus episode on our VIP tier Club 3. You'll find all of that at patreon.com slash podcasttheride. Now I get to go outside and look up at the big, beautiful blue sky.

Jason gets to look down at the ground, the dirty ground, the space mountain brown on the ground. Start counting my dirty pennies and not the fun way. I usually count my dirty pennies. Forever. Dog. This has been a Forever Dog production.

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