| Route 66 | Cities | Beaches |
Beech Bend |
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Hollywood Studios
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| Getting There | Rides | Shows | Other Activities |
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Hollywood Studios is not primarily a ride park. It is for adults and informed kids who want to revel in the great movies of the 20th Century, learn a bit about how they are made, enjoy the shows, attend the concerts, and eat in cleverly themed restaurants. It only has four rides and one hybrid ride/show. But each of the three has its devoted fan base and each is worth waiting in line for. |
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| Rides | Magic Kingdom | Epcot | Animal Kingdom | Blizzard Beach | Typhoon Lagoon | Universal Studios | Islands of Adventure |
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Star Tours has recently been redone and is an amazing experience. There are 54 possible adventures --- you can visit Tattoine, join the Jedi in one of their battles, search for Yoda, take on the Death Star, etc. --- and the computer randomly selects which one you get. Disney visitors are thus riding time after time "collecting" adventures. The Starspeeders (see left) cost $500,000 apiece and Disney bought six of them. The same vehicle is used to train pilots in NASA and Air Force programs. These new models are much more comfortable than the originals. The whole ride redo cost $50 million. You begin the ride with an AC38 droid piloting the Starspeeder, but when things get hairy C3PO takes over. These are the original C3PO, R2D2 and droids from the film, but for the 2011 redo they were significantly upgraded, with more sophisticated circuitry, sensors and voice technology. As always, lines are horrendous, so FastPass is critical. |
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| Tower of Terror takes the drop ride concept and advances it to a whole new level. The premise is that you're wandering around in a hotel suddenly abandoned in 1939 due to some unknown event. As you can imagine, Disney imagineers have had a field day here, right down to 1939 newspapers left opened, suitcases left by the elevator and food left uneaten on the restaurant tables. The atmosphere includes Rod Serling, who lets you know you have just entered The Twilight Zone. After numerous preliminaries, you enter the elevator, which, unlike most, has seats. You rise to the top floor, where supposedly your room is located. These are special elevators. Rather than letting gravity pull the cars down, the motors and cables pull them down 15 times faster than usual. When the elevator drops, therefore, you are pulled all the way out of your seat and experience a few seconds of actual weightlessness. The elevator bobs up and down, giving you a few partial drops and one heart stopping full drop. The hotel is 199 feet tall,, to avoid the 200 ft. limit which would have required that they place an airplane beacon on the roof. This is one of the nation's all time great drop rides, but you should be very careful of taking kids younger than eight on it. There really is a moment when you're plunging down in darkness, lifted out of your seat, when you begin to wonder how exactly they're going to stop your descent in time to avoid disaster. We have personally seen young kids traumatized and needing 30 minutes outside to recover. However, we've also seen young kids loving it and wanting to go back on right away. It depends on their prior amusement park experience. Teenage males love it, can't get enough, and could ride it all day. Many Disney lovers consider this the greatest ride at any of the parks. Lines tend to be reasonable, partially because the staff are good at moving people through, and partially because many people find the idea of plunging down an elevator shaft terrifying and stay away. |  |
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The Rock n Roll Coaster is a good coaster with great music and theming. The premise is you've come to hear Aerosmith play but they'e suddenly summoned across town so they invite you to come along. You accompany them out to the alley where you get into a stretch limo and embark upon a wild ride. First you accelerate from 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds. You're riding in the dark with Aerosmith music blaring. Along the way you roll upside down several times but you're moving so fast you almost don't notice. If you're a hard core coaster enthusiast this won't blow you away since it lacks the big drops and helices. But it's certainly fast --- only Test Track is faster either in acceleration or top speed. The first inversion subjects you to 4.5 Gs. This a very smooth and very comfortable ride, especially considering that you're rolling upside in three inversions, two loops and one corkscrew and the rest of the ride consists of sudden twists and turns. Disney went to great length to guarantee riders did not incur headaches or backaches as in most looping coasters. The track is 3,400 feet, or more than half a mile long. But you're moving so fast it still lasts less than two minutes. This is one of the few roller coasters in the world in which the best seat is the front, not the back. A lot of people think this is either the best ride in all of Disney, or at the very least one of the top two or three. Lines tend to be ridiculous. Go during Early Magic, or get a FastPass. If you've never ridden an inverting coaster, this would be the ideal place to start. |
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