See You on the Movie Rides : Disney’s Indiana Jones Joins Park Attractions That Are Based on Films

It’s a long swing of the rope, figuratively--if just a few steps literally--from the venerable Swiss Family Treehouse to Disneyland’s new Indiana Jones ride, opening today to a well-primed public. (If you’re not reading this in line, don’t even think about it.) Animatronic Indy is the latest--some will say greatest--example of a major theme-park thrill ride to be based on a hit movie.

And, not to sound too shill-like, but this is just the kind of cross-breeding we like to encourage: Anytime Disney deigns to spin a popular film off into a ride rather than, say, a losing professional sports franchise, it’s a sign the universe is in its proper order.

Disneyland has been translating ephemeral movies into permanent amusements ever since the park opened in 1955. (Even the landmark Matterhorn was based on a film--the forgotten 1959 adventure “Third Man on the Mountain.”)

The Universal Studios tour tested the pool in the mid-’70s with the parting of the Red Sea and a pesky shark as tram attractions and just in the last decade it began offering stand-alone rides that could compete with Disneyland’s.

Bringing up the rear is Magic Mountain, with but one movie-themed ride to date--the ballyhooedBatman roller coaster, opened just last year. But Time Warner’s buyout of the Six Flags chain two years ago augurs a glut of more motion picture tie-ins.

So never mind novelizations. How well do rides re-create the experience of going to the movies? Based on a grueling series of field trips, we offer this comparison survey of SoCal cine-thrills and their respective filmic sources.

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Indiana Jones Adventure: The Temple of the Forbidden Eye (Disneyland, opened 1995)

Will this leave you--to quote Alison Doody describing Sean Connery in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”--”giddy as a schoolboy”? Probably, unless you don’t like spiders and snakes or really, really, really rough four-wheel-drives. This is an E-ticket (your parents can explain the reference, kids) times 10.

Call it “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dramamine.” Disneyland’s newest shakes you into submissive jelly for 3 1/2 minutes, all the while alluding to scenes from all three Indy movies. Your transport is a Jeep that does everything but flip sideways on its sputtering way through a cursed archeological dig.

In the “pre-show,” known to you and me as the line , John Rhys-Davies--the one actor from the films to take part here--narrates faux-newsreel footage explaining how Indy (a guy who looks just like Harrison Ford) mysteriously vanished on a subterranean treasure hunt.

Upon finally entering the temple, you, too, tick off the angry god in question. Your punishment is to be sent reeling as you’re subjected to a series of near-misses: a striking cobra; a rickety bridge; laser beams that send down crumbling rocks, skeletons and other time-tested Indy antagonists. (Certain elements of the ride are programmed to occur at random; if you’re really lucky, your car stalls in the rat room, and you feel the sensation of Willard, Ben and friends underfoot.)

The climax: A boulder straight outta “Raiders” rolls right at you, with anima-Indy swinging on a rope overhead, helpless to keep you from becoming road kill. You survive, but don’t get to stick around long enough to watch Mouseketeer Sisyphus push it back.

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Batman the Ride (Magic Mountain, 1994)

All right, so the ride itself--one short minute of the most furiously disorienting roller-coaster action ever--has nothing to do with the movie. (Although, after exiting this loopy, literally footloose maelstrom, you may feel as if the Joker has just given your brain an acid bath.)

But Magic Mountain’s design for the coaster’s “pre-show” is a wickedly amusing expansion of Tim Burton’s Art Deco-meets-decay dystopia. It’s the thrill ride as cynical social commentary--a vision of urban squalor that, perversely, is pretty much the exact inverse of Disneyland’s Main Street.

Think of this Gotham City as post-ruinous L.A., but with classier signage--the Streamline Moderne mentality transported, Brigadoon-style, into a blighted neighborhood. The queue forms in a lovely city park (donated by Bruce Wayne), but once you get beyond some “Building a Better Tomorrow” construction signs, the real Gotham rears its head: A police car strewn with bullet holes atop a busted fire hydrant is the last sign of civil authority in a wasteland of graffiti, wreckage and criminal portent. That’s entertainment.

Farther up the stairs, inside a besieged Batcave, Alfred the butler explains that your only way out of this nightmare of American degeneracy is to be pulled out head-first at up to 50 m.p.h. through a series of tight 360-degree loops, reaching 4 G’s before ending up at zero gravity in a climactic loop.

Cool!

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Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin (Disneyland, 1994)

Doggone if you don’t really feel as if you’ve entered some kind of live action-animation mix after a minute or two on this one. And double-doggone if you can distinguish whether you’re the live action or the cartoon, so successfully paradigm-shifting is the design.

The highlight of Disneyland’s toddler-oriented Toontown not only re-creates the “Who Framed” story line, it also captures the screwy scale of a universe where nothing is quite a straight line. Tex Avery, and Tim Leary, would be proud.

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Back to the Future (Universal, 1993)

Christopher Lloyd’s nutty professor and Thomas F. Wilson’s bone-headed Biff return from the movie series to set up a chase scene to span the ages: “Back to the Bumpercars.” It appears from the 45 minutes or so of “pre-show” footage that Biff has broken into the lab, stolen a DeLorean and taken off for eons unknown. Your role is to tailgate through millennia past and future, bump Biff back into the ‘90s, and not ask which decade Michael J. Fox was last seen in.

The technology is an advancement on the motion-control screen/seat synchronization first made famous by Disneyland’s Star Tours. The difference is that here you’re speeding toward an eight-story Omnimax screen in your rudderless hovercraft, with special effects directed by Douglas Trumball made to look swell at about 100 times scale. Repeating “it’s only a movie” doesn’t take away from the menace of the T. rex that literally swallows you up along the way.

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Backdraft (Universal, 1992)

For 10 minutes or so, you get the equivalent of a “Backdraft” electronic press kit, with Ron Howard, Scott Glenn and Kurt Russell recalling on screen how they nearly got their britches burned. Next, you stand inside a chemical factory catching on fire bit by bit, with resulting gas explosions that have you checking yourself for singe marks. This is a re-creation of everything strongest about the film: all of the pyromaniacal glee, none of the script.

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E.T. Adventure (Universal, 1991)

There was a sequel to “E.T. the Extraterrestial,” but if you’ve been busy going to the movies, you missed it: This Universal ride is it. First, though, you relive the climax of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 fantasy, with a flurry of government plates pulling up in the forest to forestall the li’l one’s departure. Having avoided the feds and phoned home, you take off, “flying” over the suburban landscape, as the high-altitude atmosphere grows colder. Soon comes a gust of humid air, then imminent arrival on E.T.’s home planet.

The ride’s whole second half takes place on this distant orb, full of psychedelic patterns and animatronic ‘shrooms--buddies of E.T., we presume. Suffice it to say that if these were the late ‘60s, the line for E.T. Adventure would be backed all the way up Universal’s quarter-mile escalator--not necessarily with kids.

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Splash Mountain (Disneyland, 1989)

Odd that Disneyland would base a ride on a movie that it will not put out on video or even theatrically re-release in recent years: “Song of the South.” If the millions of kids riding this each year have any idea what a briar patch is, it is probably through oral tradition.

This ride offers the most schizoid series of events: It’s basically a long, pleasant raft ride through “zip-a-dee doo-dah” territory, climaxed by a terrifying plunge. Then again, that explains the arc of life to kids about as well as Uncle Remus could.

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Star Tours (Disneyland, 1987)

Or, “Ewoks Ripped My Equilibrium.” Before there was a Back to the Future ride, there was this errant motion-control trip through an iceberg and in and around a few warships, at the hands of a fuzzy but inept pilot. It still holds up (and the seat-belt instruction film, with the Wookie getting ticked at the smoker, is still inexplicably funny). But wouldn’t you pay double at this point just to be allowed to watch that whole room shaking back and forth from the outside?

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King Kong (Universal, 1986)

Kong--or his 12-foot head, anyway--menaces a “Brooklyn street set.” The big fella is effective, even without Jessica Lange in hand. Still, a visiting journalist gets the queasy feeling that what many tourists enjoy most is the moment when a helicopter with a female TV reporter on board falls head-first into power lines and bursts into flames. Well, better bashed by Kong than by Newt.

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The Red Sea (Universal, 1973)

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it--and Universal Studios’ parting of the Red Sea (a rare nod to a rival studio’s picture, Paramount’s “The Ten Commandments”) is the most venerated of all the special-effects shows on its tram route.

As the waters close behind you and Moses, the tour guides will point out that this body of water was also the swamp where Norman Bates dumped Janet Leigh’s car in “Psycho.” Only when you come back around the “sea” much later do you learn that this Red Sea was also the Black Lagoon where a certain Creature resided. One likes to imagine the Egyptian soldiers not just swallowed up by the sea but tangling with the Gill-man as they breathe their last.

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Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Peter Pan Flight, Dumbo Flying Elephants and Snow White’s Scary Adventures (Disneyland, all 1955)

Peter Pan’s lighter-than-air journey is the antecedent of Universal’s E.T. Adventure. The Dumbo ride remains a good place to stick the 4-and-under set for a few mild minutes. But for putting the fear o’ God into the wee ones, you just can’t beat Snow White and Mr. Toad for sheer mortal terror.

After four decades, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride still has the distinction of being the only world-class kids’ ride that abruptly climaxes by sending everyone on it to hell. It’s all in good fun, but all the same, Mom and Dad, do be careful about thinking out loud you’d sell your soul just to get through the Indiana Jones line in under three hours.