Perhaps you've been lucky (or you just don't visit parks that often), and you've never had a ride stop for more than a moment while you're on board. But anyone who's ever worked attractions in a park knows that shut-downs happen somewhere in the park every day. Typically, a shut-down only lasts a few minutes, until a crying child is calmed, a misunderstanding with a wheelchair party overcome, or a falsely-flagged sensor reset. But as we saw earlier this week Universal Orlando's Hollywood Rip, Ride, Rocket, a shut-down can last hours when people are stuck in a location not easily accessible by park employees.
Please share your favorite theme park ride "break-down" story, in the comments.
Speaking of comments, a comment on our post on that incident reported that It's a Small World also was shut down at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom this week, for about 45 minutes. Visitors stuck on that ride (where the famous theme song continued to play for 30 of those minutes) were offered an additional Fastpass to the ride of their choice as compensation for their ordeal.
That got me thinking: How long would you be willing to endure being stuck on It's a Small World in order to score a Fastpass for any other ride? Let's assume that it's a busy summer day, and all other Fastpasses for that ride have been distributed, so this is the only way to bypass the stand-by line. And let's also assume that the Small World theme song is playing the entire time while you're stuck. How long would you wait, stuck, on Small World to get an-otherwise impossible Fastpass to Tower of Terror? (Probably a few minutes, right?) To Toy Story Midway Mania? (Probably longer?) To the Swiss Family Treehouse? (Zero-point-zero minutes for that one, I'm guessing.)
Taking a page from fantasy sports geeks, this could be the new metric for measuring an attraction's popularity. Let's call it "MSOSW" for "minutes stuck on Small World" — the number of minutes you would be willing to endure on a stuck Small World ride to get an otherwise unavailable Fastpass to that attraction. Which attraction would you assign the largest MSOSW? Which ones would get a zero? How many strange looks can we get in the park while talking about various attractions' MSOSW value? Surely no more than baseball geeks talking about VORP, right?
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The third time we launched into "Now is the time. Now is the best time. Now is the best time of your life...." there was nervous laughter - a few loud laughs as we realized we had to hear the song again along with the girl on the electric waist trimmer stuttering "Gee, Babs..."
The fourth time, someone yelled out "Gee, Babs..." and got a big laugh from the crowd. Eventually, some were even singing along - sarcastically with "Now is the time..." . By the fifth - it was like Rocky Horror. Audience member shouting along line-for-line, even inserting a well-timed joke here and there.
Oh, it got old. Soooo OOOOOLD. Unforgettable though. we toughed it out together for about eight or nine runthroughs. Maybe an hour.
With the lights on, we were able to see al the detail that went into one of our favorite rids of all time and take plenty of pictures.
We actually found the experience enjoyable because we were able to slowly walk out along side the track with four ride operators and they stopped and pointed out where hidden targets are on some of the high scoring aliens.
It was like getting a guided tour / preview that Robert get's to enjoy from time to time.
They let you dance on the ride? :)
Later in the day, the same thing happened, but this time we were stuck in Madame Leota's seance room. That was better than being stuck in the graveyard, but I think we were stuck in there for 20 minutes. It seemed less than the first time we were stuck. I am very clumsy and so I never try to take my phone out of my pocket when on rides so I didn't check how long we were stuck. I was afraid I'd drop my phone out of the Doom Buggy. We heard all the Leota music and her spiel many, many times though...and of course all that emergency warning recording and then all that Spanish (which I assume was just repeating the English).
After about 30mins, a young lady sitting in the front of our boat started singing "Uh Oh Uh Oh, I really have to pee" to the tune of the Pirate song. Everyone started laughing and then started sining along. That must have did the trick because shortly after, the ride started up again. And when we got to the end, there was now long wait at the rest rooms. :-)
My wife and I got stuck in the Little Nemo ride in Orlando for about 25 to 30 minutes on our honeymoon. This was pretty tame as far as being "stuck" goes, but it forever etched the words of one of the scenes (the manta ray singing) in our brains.
To this day, it only takes one of us starting to sing "Ooooohhhh...!" to put us right back on that ride as newlyweds :)
If I remember correctly there were two lines of dialog that rotated every 15 seconds or so, and we must have heard them maybe 50 or 50 times each.
"OOOoooohhh......Let's go explore, explore, explore...Let's go explore the big blue world!!"
We also got stuck on Toy Story about a month after it opened in CA and had to evacuate the ride on foot with cast members leading us in single file lines, all the emergency and overhead lights on, and the majority of the screens and effects turned off. Kind of interesting to see the ride that way really.
It was a long time, maybe a half hour again, but we at least got to play the scenes for however long they ran. They quit keeping score after the first time but it was still fun. We also got a pair of "front of the line" passes that the cast member at Soarin' (I think) handed back to us and told us to go back to Toy Story with them as well since we didn't get to experience the right way.
All in all, it ended up being a good memorable experience :)
The way Kings Island handled it was mediocre, being in the HOT sun that long and the sun right in our eyes was terrible and we got passes to skip a line and sit anywhere; so all that for one front seat ride on Diamondback was "good enough" but I'm sure a place like Disney would have handled it differently.
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