For 28 years, the signature attraction at Disney-MGM Studios (and later Disney’s Hollywood Studios) was The Great Movie Ride, which took guests on a tour through Hollywood history. Animatronics and human actors brought riders inside the scenes from classic films like Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, and many more. While crude by modern standards, The Great Movie Ride had a folksy charm all its own. It was a great movie ride.
You might call the ten attractions below the Not-Great Movie Rides.
They are all inspired by motion pictures, but they took entertaining source material and turned them into underwhelming or downright boring theme park attractions at Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and more. Most have long since closed to make way for better and more thrilling experiences, but a few of them are still in operation, disappointing tourists day after day after day.
Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin
Almost every Disneyland around the globe has a version of this ride, a moving shooting gallery where guests try to rack up points by zapping targets inside a blacklight-heavy environment. Most of the variations of the ride are okay, but the original one at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, which is now over a quarter century old, has some issues. Most centrally: The blasters are bolted to the cars and can’t be picked up or moved around. (You’re supposed to instead spin your ride vehicle left and right to assist in the aiming.) Add in some 25 years of wear and tear, and you have a frustrating experience — more Toy Story 4 than Toy Story 2.
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Dragon Challenge
When Universal first added a Harry Potter area to its Islands of Adventure theme park, they saved money by re-theming a roller coaster that already existed in the park to the Wizarding World. What was previously known as the Dueling Dragons coasters became “Dragon Challenge” within the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The two coasters were fine, if unexceptional — but apart from the rethemed queue, the attraction had nothing to do with Harry Potter. (The idea of “dueling” coasters, with the rides launching simultaneously and passing near each other on their respective tracks, was also abandoned within a few years, reportedly after two guest injuries.) Universal apparently recognized the ride wasn’t on par with the rest of the impressively themed land, and by 2017 they closed Dragon Challenge and replaced it with the explicitly Harry Potter-inspired Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure.
E.T. Adventure
A largely debunked Internet legend had it that Steven Spielberg, who is a paid consultant to the Universal Studios parks, has exercised some sort of contractual control that keeps the last remaining E.T. Adventure ride open in Orlando, purportedly because he was so upset about the closure of Universal’s Jaws rides a few years ago. Again, while this rumor does not seem to be accurate, the fact that people perpetuate it speaks to the fact that guests want to know why this opening day attraction from Universal Studios Florida remains open even though it looks very dated and was never all that great to begin with.The ride itself is something of a knockoff of Disney’s superior Peter Pan attraction, with guests mounting “flying” bicycles to aid E.T.’s return to his home planet. Then an animatronic E.T. awkwardly pronounces everyone’s names before sending them on their way. Given that E.T. Adventure is based on a property that hasn’t gotten a new installment in 40 years, it is fair to wonder just what is keeping this “adventure” going.
Fast & Furious: Supercharged
With its outlandish, high-speed action, Fast & Furious seems tailor-made for a thrilling theme-park attraction. Instead it’s the subject of the abysmal Fast & Furious: Supercharged, which is both a standalone ride at Universal Studios Florida (using a lot of the existing infrastructure from Universal’s old Earthquake ride), and an element in the long-running Studio Tour ride at Universal Studios Hollywood. In both versions guests enter a long screened tunnel, which is then filled with extremely unrealistic images of various cars, trucks, bikes, helicopters, and tanks engaging in a cartoonish chase. None of it looks convincing, and never for one second do you believe your are in the middle of an actual battle. How bad is this thing? One longtime Universal theme park designer said publicly that not stopping the company from bringing Supercharged from Hollywood to Florida was the biggest mistake in his career.
Haunted Mansion Holiday
The Haunted Mansion is among Disney’s best attractions. After decades of service, it’s still terrific; spooky, funny, atmospheric, and filled with terrific special effects. But every fall, the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland is given an overhaul to turn it into “Haunted Mansion Holiday,” inspired by The Nightmare Before Christmas, which isn’t as spooky or funny or atmospheric. Even worse, DIsney seems to keep Haunted Mansion Holiday up longer and and longer every single year, meaning the O.G. Mansion is open less and less often. It’s an update but not an upgrade.
Luigi’s Flying Tires
Disney California Adventure’s Radiator Springs Racers, combining impressive animatronics and an exciting high-speed “race,” is one of the very best theme park attractions based on a movie. At the opposite end of the spectrum, but just a few feet down the road, once stood something called Luigi’s Flying Tires, a twist on bumper cars that combined the “Flying Saucer” technology from a Disneyland ride that had been closed for more than 30 years with … beach balls for some reason? Good or bad, Disney’s attractions almost never look this cheap. Disney closed the ride after just three years, and replaced it with a more sophisticated trackless spinning ride, Luigi’s Rollicking Roadsters.
Na’vi River Journey
Similarly, the Avatar-themed area at Disney’s Animal Kingdom park features one truly impressive attraction, Avatar Flight of Passage, and an underwhelming one, Na’vi River Journey, a placid and uneventful dark ride through a neon-lit Pandora. After a couple minutes floating down a lazy river, you encounter an impressive Na’vi Shaman animatronic figure, and then the experience is over. It feels like the sleepy prelude to an exciting ride you never actually get to experience.
Stitch’s Great Escape!
Like Dragon Challenge, like Fast & Furious: Supercharged, like Haunted Mansion Holiday, Stitch’s Great Escape! was an attempt to update an old ride with characters from a popular new property. (Sensing a pattern?) In this case, Disney replaced Tomorrowland’s Extraterrorestrial Alien Encounter, which was deemed too scary for the family-friendly confines of the Magic Kingdom, with a similar experience where instead of a slobbering alien like the xenomorph from the Alien series they encountered the adorably chaotic alien from the Lilo & Stitch franchise. On the plus side, the Stitch version inspired fewer horrific nightmares in children. On the downside, it was boring and gross. (Stitch belched in guests’ faces, with the attraction piping in a chili dog aroma to sell the effect.) While Stitch’s Great Escape lasted in its Tomorrowland building almost twice as long as Extraterrorestrial Alien Encounter did, it closed for good in 2018.
The Right Stuff: Mach 1 Adventure
With simulator rides all the rage at Disney theme parks in the late 1980s, Six Flags made one of their own. The Right Stuff: Mach 1 Adventure at Six Flags Great Adventure was loosely (and I mean very loosely) based on the famous biopic about pioneering American aviators and astronauts. But instead of entering your own space ship (like in Disney’s Star Tours) or a DeLorean car (as in Back to the Future: The Ride), The Right Stuff was projected in a movie theater, with guests seated in rows of moving two-seaters themed to look like they sort of belonged in a jet fighter cockpit. The illusion was not nearly as convincing as in other simulator rides, and within a few years Six Flags had begun playing other ride films in The Right Stuff theater, including one starring Elvira and another featuring SpongeBob SquarePants. These films did not have the right stuff either; and the attraction closed for good in 2010.
Twister … Ride It Out
After the original Twister became one of Universal’s biggest blockbusters of the 1990s, the company was understandably eager to create a Twister attraction in their theme parks. Using a space previously occupied by a Ghostbusters stage show, they created a special effects showcase that simulated one of the film’s natural disaster set pieces in a confined space. The problem? Most of Twister’s twisters were made with computers, meaning the practical version would inevitable pale in comparison with the film. The disappointing nature of the ride was written all over the late, great Bill Paxton’s face in the introduction he filmed for Twister … Ride It Out. An analog dinosaur in an increasingly digital world, the attraction closed in 2015 and was replaced by a motion simulator starring Jimmy Fallon.
