12/31/2023 0 Comments Journey to atlantisImage: Jeremy Thompson, Flickr ( license ) It needed to be addressed.Īnd here’s the part you won’t believe. SeaWorld's sunken city wasn't going to fix itself. After decades with nothing more than routine refurbishments, the cracks were beginning to show. Given the company's "school of hard knocks" realization that Disney-level detail wouldn't be their forte, they more or less left Journey to Atlantis to wither as, years after year, special effects flickered out, lights dimmed, and audio tracks came unsynched. It seemed that SeaWorld had learned its lesson and backed away from any detail-heavy dark rides.īut just because they'd eliminated dark ride elements from later installations didn't help the confusing – and increasingly poorly-maintained – Orlando ride. Instead, it’s a traditional shoot-the-chutes splashdown boat ride, albeit with two turntables that rotate the boat for a backwards camelback drop between the lift and the main splashdown. You can watch a video of SeaWorld San Antonio's Journey to Atlantis here. But in Texas, the ride lacks even a single show element. In 2007, the third SeaWorld in San Antonio opened a Journey to Atlantis, too. Image: Joel Rogers, (Used with permission) You can watch a video of SeaWorld San Diego's Journey to Atlantis here. Mostly an unabashed – if nicely decorated – water coaster, the ride contains a single "dark ride" style element: a concealed elevator lift hidden in a blue-domed, sandstone tower. In 2004, SeaWorld San Diego opened their own, though any pretense of creating a Disney-quality ride was gone (above). To see what SeaWorld's executives thought of Orlando's Journey to Atlantis, one needs only to examine the two Journeys to Atlantis that followed. Still, Busch Entertainment and Mack (the ride’s engineer) were contracted, so two more Journeys to Atlantis were built for each of SeaWorld's remaining parks. New management did attempt to go the dark ride route again with 2013’s Antarctica: Empire of the Penguin (part of a mini-land meant to follow the new “land” craze kicked off by Universal’s Wizarding World), but it, too, fell flat and probably deserves its own Declassified Disaster entry. Manta (2009) and Mako (2016) became the park's other must-sees, giving SeaWorld a trio of steel coasters as its headliners (and each tying in a complementary animal exhibit in what's become the new de facto model for the park). Kraken is beautiful, slithering and slaloming through subterranean caverns and beneath ornate, Atlantean marble plazas burst upward from the sea monster's rage, and even casual observers would note that the added scenery and detailed queue (sending guests past the watery, translucent eggs of the creature) elevate the experience above a traditional amusement park. Journey to Atlantis' follow-up was Kraken, a sincerely stellar steel coaster built right next door to the dark ride in 2000. Image: Joel Rogers, (Used with permission) Busch quickly diverted any future funds for the park not into dark rides, but roller coasters. Without the intellectual properties, in-house talent, and big corporate budgets of Orlando's other parks, SeaWorld couldn't keep up in an escalating arms race. It was clear that even if SeaWorld could become a theme park, it wouldn’t be a good enough one to take on Disney and Universal. Ultimately, the failings of Journey to Atlantis must’ve been obvious. The building’s exterior told a better story than the interior could – a design crime coincidentally committed by both SeaWorld's Atlantis ride and Universal's Atlantean companion Declassified Disaster: Poseidon's Fury. Image: Jeremy Thompson, Flickr ( license) Disconnected scenes feel as if they were designed by entirely different production companies, with wild variation in style, substance, lighting, and sound from scene-to-scene, and practically no apparent upkeep after opening. Though the ride designers had concocted a compelling story (our guardian seahorse protecting us against a siren’s song), they failed to tell the story in a comprehensible way.Ĭlearly meant to tell a nautical fable using Splash Mountain’s medium, Journey to Atlantis instead felt like an incoherent mess, with any semblance of story difficult to discern at best. Frazzled effects were the least of its problems. Could SeaWorld transform itself from an animal park into a theme park? Maybe, but Journey to Atlantis wasn’t the way to do it.
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