Wait Until You See Disney’s New Attraction: a Fun Line : Amusement: State-of-art queue outside Roger Rabbit ride aims to keep patrons laughing instead of fuming.
At Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin in Disneyland, you can expect to stand in line 20 minutes for a four-minute ride.
You might not notice the wait, though. The attraction, which opens officially today, is designed to keep people entertained from the moment they queue up.
The line winds past a manhole where sinister voices can be heard from below plotting Roger Rabbit’s demise. A brutish-sounding bouncer at the door of a speak-easy orders visitors, “Beat it!” And a pressure cooker spews out a brew that supposedly dissolves cartoon characters on contact. Scrambling to draw customers as the recession wears on, theme parks are putting new emphasis on the least popular part of their attractions: the wait.
“No longer do you just stand in line and look at your neighbor,” said George Ladyman, vice president in charge of design for the Six Flags Theme Parks Inc. in Parsippany, N.J. “Now you have the sights, the sounds and the smells, a total sensory experience from the moment you get in line.”
The notion isn’t new. Walter Knott, seeing crowds waiting for seats in his wife’s fried chicken restaurant in Buena Park in the 1940s, hauled some shanties in from the desert for patrons to explore while they waited. The resulting “ghost town” became Knott’s Berry Farm.
And theme parks are hardly alone in their concern about queues. A variety of service industries over the years have tried to take the wait out of waiting as a way of generating consumer appreciation and loyalty.
Restaurants and banks have experimented with freebies if service is not completed within a specified period. Some supermarkets promote their policy of opening a new checkout line whenever customers are standing more than three or four deep at the cash registers. Other businesses where customers have to wait, including some post offices, have contracted for wall displays that print the latest news and sports in a continuous scroll, a service called Silent Radio.
The stagnant economy has forced businesses, especially in the service sector, to pay more attention to repeat customers, and few industries are doing so as ferociously as amusement parks. In the fun business, few things are more of a drag for patrons than being at the end of a long line.
A 1984 Harvard Business School study titled “The Psychology of Waiting Lines” found that slow service can do more than ruin a customer’s day. “The bitter taste of how long it took to get attention pollutes the overall judgments that we make about the quality of service,” the study concludes.
Walt Disney Co. is widely regarded as the leader in the art of queuing.
“They are unsurpassed,” said Richard Larson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has studied queuing for 20 years.
“People have complained to me that they are so successful at this,” he said of Disney, “that on off days they can’t move people through the queue channel fast enough because they are entertained in line.”
In that context, Roger Rabbit is considered a masterpiece of sorts.
Based on a 1987 movie that starred Bob Hoskins interacting with a bevy of animated characters, the ride is a Disneyland version of a carnival fun house. Patrons drive individual taxicabs through a pie-in-your-face cartoon land.
As one of the few major rides in the park’s new Mickey’s Toontown, Roger Rabbit is expected to be a big hit--and that means long lines. So Disney engineers created an elaborate “pre-show”--their term for activities to kill time while waiting for the main attraction--to keep the anticipated crowds entertained.
“We know we are going to have a wait. So how can we make that wait time as enjoyable as possible?” asked Norman Doerges, executive vice president of Disneyland. “It’s a combination of keeping people moving and finding little surprises along the way.”
To make sure people keep moving--and thus feel that they are making progress--Disney came up with a complicated mathematical formula for adjusting the width of the line. The more people who can be accommodated on a particular ride every hour, the wider the queue.
Engineers also studied the shape of the line itself. The Roger Rabbit queue twists so that visitors see only a dozen people behind and ahead of them, thereby disguising the size of the crowd.
Disneyland also typically posts signs telling patrons how long to expect to wait before boarding a ride. MIT’s Larson said that such notices are crucial, for they satisfy consumers’ need to know just how long the wait will be. As if to prove that point, Disney visitors fumed one day last week when the signs were missing from the Roger Rabbit ride.
“It was a very long wait,” complained Sarah Maldon, an Australian visitor.
Other theme parks are following Disney’s lead in planning fancy pre-shows for the coming summer’s attractions.
Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia is building an entire Gotham City to keep patrons amused while they wait to board the Batman roller coaster. And Knott’s Berry Farm is constructing Mystery Lodge, a special-effects theater where the 13-minute pre-show will be as long as the main event. The line for the attraction will snake past a roaring waterfall and be shaded from the sun.
“You want to make the experience of standing in line as pleasant as possible,” said Pat Scanlon, executive vice president of BRC Imagination Arts in Burbank, which is developing the Mystery Lodge for Knott’s.
But worse than a long line is no line at all, at least from the theme parks’ point of view. If a ride has no crowd outside, that means visitors just aren’t interested.
“A line,” Scanlon said, “is an indication that it is worth standing in.”
