Disney parks are largely built on nostalgia, and this series of blog posts is largely making the argument that nostalgia is good.
So here, we have what is basically "Nostalgia: the Attraction." Nostalgia for Audio Animatronic extravaganzas. Nostalgia for the golden age of Hollywood. Nostalgia for two studios who were once giants of the industry.
In the late 80s, MGM and Disney partnered to build a combination theme park and movie studio. Both were past their prime, with their greatest hits having come long ago, but nonetheless icons of film history. That balance very quickly shifted as one studio -- at just about the same time this attraction opened -- started to experience a massive resurgence that continues to this day, making the idea of them ever having been "past their prime" a weird statement.
The other studio, meanwhile, had a ton of film legends the were ripe for featuring in an attraction, but never had been, and that nostalgia was seized upon in some extremely smart ways in The Great Movie Ride.
When Disney-MGM Studios was built, the idea of Main Street U.S.A. was copied, but with a mid-20th century Hollywood street, rather than turn-of-the-century America. Then, instead of a castle at the end, they borrowed the design of the iconic Chinese Theater.
Inside that theater, you did not just see a movie, but were transported into the realm of movies themselves. The queue wrapped through a screening of the coming attractions in a collection of trailers I can still hear in my head today, before being taken to the ride.
From there, the nostalgic magic happened. Your ride vehicle was the second (correct me if I'm wrong?) use of a trackless system following the Universe of Energy, seemingly moving across the floor freely, though guided by a wire below; technology that would influence other attractions (not) soon to be seen on this list. In the tradition of the Jungle Cruise and Living with the Land, your vehicle came with a live host who told you about the scenes ahead in a dialogue peppered with classic movie lines.
The real nostalgia for GMR, though, was not so much what you saw from the vehicle, but how it was conveyed. We've talked about Carousel of Progress and The American Adventure, these shows that invented then perfected the use of Audio Animatronics for story telling. GMR was arguably the last ride to build massive show scenes chock full of Audio Animatronics to create detailed, layered, physical show scenes to travel through, populated by "actors" to bring them to life.
The catalogue of MGM film history was visited liberally. Instead of a dark ride about a movie, this was a dark ride about all movies. And instead of show scenes necessarily being one film at a time, they often grouped several together by genre. Effectively, rather than being in a musical, or in a western, you were the land of westerns, or the land of musicals.
The very first scene featured the chorus girls of Footlight Parade, spinning in massive formation like a human wedding cake, with bubbles flying overhead, setting the stage for the extravagance to come. Gene Kelly swung from a lamp post over your ride vehicle, with rain perpetually dripping down from above while he sang in it. Mary Poppins floated in the air, her handbag cleverly hiding the arm connecting her to motors on the other side of the wall to give the perception she was flying.
Possibly the most elaborate and detailed scene came in the underworld, representing popular gangster movies with a dark and seedy set of back alleys. I will argue it was one of the best show scenes ever made in a dark ride, with a ridiculous amount of care put into it signage and buildings, and an elevated train track thundering overhead.
It also had a wholly fascinating twist. I talked about the "actors" littering the attraction in the form of Audio Animatronics, but here we also have actors in the form of our guides on the ride vehicle; guides plural. Here in the underworld, your vehicle is commandeered by a gangster, sending your host away at gunpoint, and using your vehicle as one for a getaway from the cops.
This was entirely too unique and clever. It absolutely introduced a human element that could make your ride experience better or worse from re-ride to re-ride (see Cruise, Jungle), but there is absolutely no way to expect something like this if you're not a theme park aficionado going to the parks constantly. I can still remember to this day being stunned as a four year old thinking this was a real kidnapping. Even if you don't have a preschool level of imagination, the idea of your guide swapping out mid-ride throws you for a loop as to what exactly the rules of this attraction are, while also further reinforcing the idea that you are in the movies, not just watching them.
From there, you had a few more wonderfully detailed show scenes. A western town featuring John Wayne and Clint Eastwood (where you were maybe kidnapped by a bandit if you hadn't already met your gangster). The Nostromo from Alien served to create jump scares and unease with the iconic sounds from the movie, and xenomorph animatronics leaping out at you, as well as a figure representing one of the best movie characters ever, Ellen Ripley.
Which reminds me, there is currently no xenomorph animatronic anywhere. That should be fixed.
Thanks to the partnership with Lucasfilm, this attraction didn't just have MGM and Disney legacies, but also the then-recent Indiana Jones. Moving through the temple of the lost arc of the covenant saw your gangster actually fried into a skeleton and your host rescuing you, before taking you through a zombie film, through Tarzan, Fantasia, and Casablanca, then eventually into another highly-detailed scene where she told off the Wicked Witch of the West in Muchkinland.
Among some, it became a bit easy to sneer at GMR for having dated film references. By the time of its closure, much of the MGM content had moved past "legendary classics" and straight into "ancient film I've never heard of." Meanwhile, in the two decades since, Disney had produced an unbelievably massive collection of modern classics that felt weird -- to some -- to never be seen at all. In short, to quite a few fans and casuals alike, the "nostalgi" concept no longer worked.
While that may not be wrong for them to feel, however, that completely ignores what was great about GMR. Completely ignoring what properties were used in the attraction, the ride as a concept was amazing. The extensive use of AAs, the highly detailed show scenes, and the creative use of living Cast Members to guide you, made this attraction something else entirely. It was a massive statement on dark rides as a genre, with fully realized physical spaces that were amazing to behold. It was a grand, ultimate realization of an era that is bygone but does not need to be; just speaking on theme park attractions, not even touching film.
Also, though, while I am not a cinephile, there are some attractions coming up here that end up as high as they are because I cannot emotionally detach myself away from the fictional universes they represent. For a not small number of our friends -- those who are cinephiles -- this attraction represented many fictional universes they cared about at once. It also represented a non-fictional universe they care about: the craft of classic film. That absolutely has to be respected, if any of us are to have any of our fandoms respected at all.
Despite not being personally among those ranks, however, there was always a section of The Great Movie Ride that never failed to make me emotional. I am a casual when it comes to the craft of film, yet even this part got to me; every single time. It was the very end of GMR, seen to the right of this paragraph. Your guide, having just toured you through a large-but-inadequate handful of legendary movies, played for you one last montage of movies not yet seen. With a perfect combination of memorable scores, gags, shots, and lines, it somehow managed to convey effortlessly the magic and power of film. The Great Movie Ride was not my favorite attraction, but that ending segment might just be my favorite way of summarizing the entire idea of what I just experienced, and I will still revisit it on a regular basis.
That's the magic of nostalgia.
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