Good times... to panic

There you are, teasing a raft into a boat-eating rapid, tapping the brakes as your bike sputters down an oddly canted fire road, kicking for a foothold on granite wall, way too far from the ground below.

Now what? Now what? Now what? your cortex asks itself, perhaps several times a second, perhaps ordering up spritzes of adrenaline to help you cope with the risk. Then come the endorphins. The congratulatory chest slams. You didn’t panic, fumble, die. It feels good. You want to repeat the exhilaration.

Entertainment capitalists know this, which is why Southern California theme parks will, by the end of June, have sprung five new major “thrill” rides on us -- an unusual windfall by all accounts. They know that we crave opportunities -- real or illusory -- to shake loose our dormant fight-or-flight hormones and send them coursing through our veins.

Common sense and a handful of tentative studies assure me that unless someone has certain health problems, the danger of so-called thrill rides approaches zero. Marketing hype hints otherwise.

In fact, today’s fear merchants know that the harder they poke at anxieties, the more people they’ll lure onto whatever sick new mutation they’ve cooked up in the ever-accelerating evolution of “amusement.” With that in mind, I pulled together a crew of teenagers -- including, sometimes, my own -- and set out to determine whether the rides are as terrifying as the commercials and billboards imply.

Revenge of the Mummy, the Ride

Universal Studios Hollywood is trumpeting the Mummy as “the most advanced thrill ride ever conceived.” I approach it with cocky sang-froid. This is mainly because the ride doesn’t open to the public until June 25, and park officials have stubbornly refused to let me and my teenage crew ride it, giving preference to a smarmy group of 170-pound water-filled, L-shaped plastic manikins.

Still, I figured that just pulling on hardhats and walking through the squat, Costco-sized building in which the ride is taking shape would be scarier than riding the new Legoland coaster. And so it is -- mainly because of the demented satisfaction that creeps across creative director John Murdy’s face as he ushers us through this hieroglyphic-graffitied “Tomb of Imhotep.”

The “movie-based immersive story” into which the attraction will hurl visitors is familiar to anyone who has seen writer and director Stephen Sommers’ 1999 “Mummy” and its 2001 sequel. After winding through the rumbling tomb’s entrance, visitors will climb aboard 16-passenger “mine cars” with subwoofers under each seat. Then, for 2 1/2 minutes, they’ll roar past Mummified scenes, forward and backward, at speeds up to 50 feet per second.

We follow the track into the tomb’s depths on foot, passing welders, plasterers, heaps of golden treasure and animatronic creatures with piercing red eyes. At one point, Murdy notes that a 450-pound mummy will fall from the ceiling at the speed of gravity, stopping just short of the cars’ passengers.

“Riders will hear him being eaten, and warm water will dribble on their heads,” he says, casually tugging at scraps of rag and faux flesh dangling from a robotic skeleton’s skull. “We’re trying to break down the wall of perceived safety and mess with you.” As it happens, a twin Revenge of the Mummy opened last week ) at Universal Studios in Florida. Early reviewers weren’t frightened into paroxysms of gush. I’m eager to test it myself, to confront the balls of fire and swarms of flesh-eating insects Murdy and his team have so kindly concocted on our nervous systems’ behalf.

Coastersaurus

Legoland is a gentle park that stepped into a void left by Disney when the executive Mouseketeers apparently decided that devotion to the bottom line trumped Walt’s stalwart embrace of children’s innocence and began pandering to shifting conceptions of cool.

With that in mind, I didn’t worry that the park’s new Coastersaurus, which opened in April, would traumatize. Looking up from the line snaking into this “junior” roller coaster, we see parents and young children beaming with joy, not terror, as they zip by at a pokey 21 mph.

Other coasters in the park -- the Dragon and the Technic -- go faster and higher, offering views out to the ocean a few miles away. But Legoland never strays far from its core mission: nudging visitors to participate in their entertainment, to uncork their own imaginations.

So it hardly matters that the only special effect on Coastersaurus is the big green and gray brontosaurus that turns its head slowly as “runaway mine cars” swoop around on a track so short the attendants let riders go around twice. What’s important -- and awe inspiring in its own right -- is that the dinosaurs are built entirely of Lego blocks.

Journey to Atlantis

SeaWorld’s first real thrill ride dominates the Mission Bay landscape like two monstrous tangerine and turquoise silos linked by green tubing.

Like the Mummy, Atlantis is supposed to be story-driven. After riding it five times at a press preview, my test crew and I step out of our boat grinning, soaked to near hypothermia but still sketchy as to just what the sweet-voiced narrator was talking about in insisting that we had redeemed the mythical kingdom through bravery and willingness to live in harmony with the ocean world.

Plot problems aside, the ride provides plenty of dramatic tension. Seated side by side in eight-passenger “Greek fishing boats,” we ascend high enough to see most of San Diego. A quick turn delivers us to a precipice, and within seconds we plummet screaming 60 feet into a trough of water, kicking up waves big enough to sink a small sailboat.

Now our boat floats into the tower. Water gushes from a grumbling wall. An earthquake rumbles. Then, although press materials assure us that we are being guided by “dolphin spirits,” images projected on the walls and ceilings suggest we’re being rammed by cranky cetaceans.

Where the illusions fall short, however, reality impresses -- even if the cheesy projections don’t distract us, it’s cool that an elevator has lifted our boat almost eight stories.

A door opens. We spill onto another track. A hard-banking descent through a series of turns and whoop-de-dos invigorates just enough to make us hop right back on and go again.

The real excitement at SeaWorld, though, is not the ersatz kind. It’s odd but riveting to exit the ride and find ourselves staring through 36-foot high windows at rare black-and-white Commerson’s dolphins as they rocket around in 130,000 gallons of water -- right there in the ruins of Atlantis.

Tower of Terror

As we approach Disney California Adventure’s latest attraction, my oldest daughter poses a question: “Haven’t you always had issues with this sort of ride, Dad?”

Well, yeah. For blackmail’s sake, my wife keeps pictures of my terrified face to show it. That’s why I ranked the rise-up-high-and-drop-down-fast attraction as a serious fear inducer.

The ride is based on the old “Twilight Zone” episode in which a lightening strike causes bad things to happen in a Hollywood hotel. Like the Mummy, Tower of Terror helps suspend narrative disbelief through the use of detail. A basement boiler room sporting a hodgepodge of industrial pipes, gauges and dials cranks and groans. Old props from the television series -- remember the creepy fortune-telling jack-in-the-box?-- clutter a library and help absorb our attention as that room stealthily lifts us to the hotel’s top floor.

From there, a ghoulishly blank-faced bellhop leads us to an elevator -- you know, the old-fashioned kind with rows of high-backed seats fitted with safety belts. Then, as we brace to begin our ascent to the fabled 13th floor, the thing plunges and a wall flies open, revealing that we are already at the ride’s apex, staring out from a nauseating height at Mickey’s sprawling kingdom. The rest is all screams and laughter as the elevator pogos up and down, several floors at a time, playfully taunting to pleasant effect our most basic of panic instincts.

Tornado

In photos, the ride’s fumigation-tent yellow-and-blue pattern creates the illusion that riders are quite likely to fly upside down and freefall to a painful death by 10,000 fiberglass splinters. Up close, this new Six Flags Hurricane Harbor offering is slightly less intimidating.

As we shoved off into the maw of this monster, I immediately remembered why I’ll take a water slide over other thrill rides any (reasonably warm) day.

For one thing, immersion in water while wearing a swimsuit is far more pleasing to the senses than the sticky feel of wet cotton other so-called water rides produce.

Then there’s the predictability factor. At Universal, Mummyman Murdy explained that he and his crew painstakingly program randomly generated surprises into their ride so that it will seem fresh time after time.

Tornado is programmed by chaos theory.

Ten times I climb the 74 steps. Ten times I plop into the bright yellow inflatable raft, intertwine my feet with three other riders and let the 5,000-gallon-a-minute current propel us down a 132-foot tube. Ten times the smaller tube squirts us spinning into a mammoth funnel. Each time we slosh madly up the far wall, then, water blasting eyes and nostrils, back down twirling until gravity finally dumps us, fully invigorated, into a swimming pool.

The ride lasts just 25 seconds. In that time it briefly evokes the coveted, hard-to-replicate rush of surfing and the jolt of whitewater rafting. And like a wave or rapid, the current puts a slightly different spin on each descent.

My teenage test crew continues riding -- a total of 31 times. I stand on the Tornado’s 75-foot tower, dribbling water and looking out to distant mountains, with their promise of real adventure. I also listen to the shrieks spilling over from Magic Mountain, where people pinball around on the sculptural arcs of roller coasters far more frightening than any I rode for this review. And I think how glad I am that grown adults have become so adept at “messing with us.”

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The hot list

California Adventure: More than 22 attractions in three themed areas, including “The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.” Call for hours. $39.75-$49.75; 2 and younger, free. Two-day Park Hopper Tickets, $78-$98. 1313 S. Harbor Blvd., Anaheim. (213) 626-8605, Ext. 4565. (714) 781-4565.

Legoland: More than 50 interactive attractions, family rides and shows including “Coastersaurus.” Opens most days at 10 a.m.; closing hours vary. $36.95-$43.95; 2 and younger, free. One Lego Drive, Carlsbad. (760) 918-5346.

SeaWorld: More than 20,000 mammals, fish, reptiles and birds. “Journey to Atlantis” opens Saturday. Call for hours. $42.95-$49.95; 2 and younger, free. 1720 S. Shore Drive, Mission Bay, San Diego. (714) 939-6212. (619) 226-3901.

Six Flags Hurricane Harbor: Opens Saturday for the summer; through Sept. 26. “Tornado” is the latest thrill ride at this water park. Call for hours. $16.99-$23.99, 2 and younger, free. Combo ticket with Magic Mountain, $56.99. 26101 Magic Mountain Parkway, Valencia (818) 367-5965. (661) 255-4100.

Universal Studios Hollywood: “Revenge of the Mummy” is set to open June 25. Open weekdays at 10 a.m.; weekends at 9 a.m.; closing hours vary. $39.75-$49.75; discount programs available. Admission to CityWalk is free. 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City. (818) 508-9600. (818) 622-3801.

Bob Sipchen, editor of the Outdoors section, can be reached at bob.sipchen@latimes.com.