The Vexing, Thrilling Legacy of the ‘Indiana Jones Adventure’
An overworked generator whirs, straining to provide power across miles of hastily-strung lighting. Nearby, a radio plays easy listening tunes, but its tinny output weakens every time the generator suffers a hitch in its uneven motion. The songs are occasionally interrupted by news updates, informing attentive listeners to the exploits of adventurer and archeologist Indiana Jones, here in the jungles of the Lost Delta. I am about to come face-to-face with Dr. Jones in an adventure of my own, but first, I’ll need to brave this line of tourists that looks like it could last an hour.
It is 1995.
It is 2023.
It is 1935.
Indiana Jones Adventure (or Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye, if you’re feeling thematic) was a landmark attraction when it opened at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, in March 1995. Nearly 30 years later, it continues to regularly post some of the longest lines in the park. It enjoys a fervent following among park enthusiasts, despite having existed for years in an inarguably diminished state. It is an intricate machine, an engineering marvel, and it has been worn down with age and constant use.
Upon its debut, however, it was a gesture towards the future of entertainment. When Michael Eisner became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 1984, he embarked on a campaign of modernization at Disneyland that was all about injecting a dose of adrenaline and high-tech excitement at a park he believed too many people regarded as dated and aimed exclusively at young children.
Under the direction of celebrated Imagineer Tony Baxter, the Eisner-era initiative led to Disneyland’s first water flume, Splash Mountain (1989) and the Disney-Lucasfilm collaboration Star Tours (1987), which brought much-needed relevance to the park’s Tomorrowland district. Baxter and Eisner’s next big Lucas collab for the park would combine that ride’s motion-simulator thrills with the practical charms of the dark ride format Disney was famous for, at a scale unmatched by anything else.
The world of Indiana Jones was a perfect fit for Disneyland: a movie series whose inner logic already operated by the rules of a thrill ride. The mine cart sequence in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, shot like a roller coaster, feels like Spielberg and Lucas’ pitch reel for one.
Furthermore, the Indiana Jones franchise is about going to a time and a place rooted in the details of history, yet viewed through a stylized, fantastical prism of recognizable genre elements. The new ride was a chance to give Adventureland a unified vision. The district became a 1930s expeditionary outpost, with the Indiana Jones E-Ticket serving as its centerpiece.
At a cost of $100 million, Indiana Jones Adventure would be an all-in gamble for Disney’s parks division. Euro Disney (now Disneyland Paris) had opened in 1992 to a negative reception and poor attendance, and the 1994 death of Eisner’s business partner Frank Wells shook his vision. It was an era of flops that would lead to Eisner’s ouster in 2005. Indiana Jones Adventure, on the other hand, was everything the company (and Eisner) could’ve hoped for. It was an instant fan-favorite and, nearly three decades later, stands alongside atmosphere-driven classics like The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean.
In ways critical to its operation, however, Indy is not like those slow-moving, traditional dark rides. A malfunctioning turntable or robot in Haunted Mansion can be sent back to the shop for repairs without affecting much of the rest of the ride, but Indy’s interconnected gremlins tend to cascade into show-stopping bugs. In recent years, it’s not been uncommon for the show’s entire climax to be neutered by absent audio cues, 15 seconds of dead air while you stare up at a lifeless Dr. Jones animatronic, and a “thrilling” encounter with a static boulder that isn’t in the mood to roll.
Indiana Jones Adventure, more complex than those other classic E-ticket rides, has been prone to operational failure and general weirdness from Day One. It’s also just much rougher on its own mechanical components.
Every day this attraction runs, it is corroding, wearing down its bearings, spilling lubricant, and generally trying to destroy itself at a pace and an expense that must eclipse that of its vintage siblings. Its critical systems are a complex assemblage of hydraulics, chemical reactions, and electronics orchestrated and synchronized by a once-groundbreaking computer system which grows more ancient with each passing year. At least one of the ride’s most novel effects ceased working within a few months of operation. Another major effect went permanently off-line in 2013.
By the time the Covid-19 pandemic shut down Disneyland in 2020, the attraction had become a shadow of itself, a (nevertheless beloved) jalopy. In the age of YouTube, theme park attractions face a crowdsourced scrutiny they never have before. It’s easy to view old footage captured on-ride to see what’s missing, when it went missing, and to ask: if they could do it thirty years ago, why can’t they do it now?
I had hoped the park’s pandemic closure in 2020 would provide an opportunity for a genuine deep refurbishment to restore the Adventure to its former glory, as management had pulled permits with the city of Anaheim the year before to do maintenance on some critical infrastructure. However, when Disneyland reopened in 2021, it became clear the anticipated work had not been performed. This was, after all, the Bob Chapek era, a period of belt-tightening, layoffs, and — in the broader world — supply chain disruptions and short-staffing. It wouldn’t be until January 2023 that the Anaheim attraction would at long last get a multi-month closure and refresh, ahead of the summer theatrical release of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
The week of its March 17th reopening, I trekked down to Adventureland’s Lost Delta to find out for myself: Is Temple of the Forbidden Eye finally back to its one-time “fortune and glory”? Or does the Fountain of Youth elude everything, even theme park rides backed by the largesse of a multi-billion-dollar corporation? Why has the cult of Indy persisted, even after the bloom fell well off its rose?
Temple of the Forbidden Eye’s immersion kicks in well before you ever see a loading station. Under Tony Baxter’s direction, Disney attractions in the 1980s and ’90s evolved the art form of the queue, designing for the psychology of guests not only to minimize the pain of long wait times, but to establish setting, mood, and story.
Due to the sprawling footprint demanded by such an ambitious attraction, and because Disneyland was running out of real estate, the decision was made early on to place Indy’s show building beyond “the berm,” Disneyland’s perimeter, requiring the sacrifice of one of the resort’s parking lots.
That meant guests would be walking a full half-mile from the attraction’s entrance in Adventureland before reaching their ride vehicles. (Every time you ride, you’re round-tripping an entire mile on foot!) Imagineers made the most of this awkward arrangement, crafting a truly immersive, marvelously detailed queue designed to pull guests into the world of Indiana Jones. The queue, crucially, feels like it’s a live archaeological dig, and our starring adventurer’s presence can be felt all over: A screen-used truck that carried the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark’s famous chase sequence has been redressed as an expeditionary vehicle.
Once you enter the excavated temple, you wind your way through a procession of deep, dank halls and bat caverns, which are augmented with moody lighting and eerie audio effects. An invented ancient script adorns the walls. When the ride opened, guests were handed decoder cards branded on the reverse side by original ride sponsor AT&T, to decipher the messages of temple deity Mara, a way to pass the time before you had a phone in your pocket. These days, you can access the glyphs in the Disney Play app, although I doubt many people bother to. With the introduction of FastPass lanes in 1999, an operational change had to be made to queue management. Now the FastPass and standby lanes merge before you reach the temple interior, meaning you spend a greater proportion of your time in line outside, and are whisked through the temple interior more quickly than originally intended.
The lack of time spent lingering inside the temple these days also means visitors might breeze past some other fun baubles, like traps guests can trigger while waiting in line, or a well rope you can pull (Marked, naturally, “Do Not Pull”) that results in a cranky unseen archaeologist yelling at you.
On this most recent expedition, I gave the bamboo pole holding up the spike trap wall a good yank. To my surprise, the gag was functioning, causing the pole to “bend” under pressure and a hidden speaker to let out a thunderous stone-on-stone grinding sound. A little kid in the party behind me immediately began to cry.
I gave my friend who was with me a grimace — Oops. I was reminded of a formative memory of mine:
I hadn’t been much older than that kid the first time I rode Indy in its inaugural summer. My parents wanted to see what the hype was about, but I didn’t quite measure up the the minimum height requirement posted outside the gate. So my dad pulled me aside and started stuffing my shoes with napkins to put me over the minimum. I was deeply confused about why my parents were trying to lie and break a rule, and why they were making me a co-conspirator in this act — wasn’t the height rule there for a reason? What if I slipped out of the ride vehicle and end up one of the ride’s lost souls? We made it past the gatekeeping cast members, ultimately, although I kept my eyes shut through the whole attraction like Indy and Marion at the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Deeper inside the ruins, a period-appropriate office is full of maps and communiqués, which may clue in a guest motivated enough to pore over the details of the attraction’s backstory— why Dr. Jones is here, why we’re here, and what he’s looking for beyond the temple gates.
The vast majority of visitors ride without ever forming a cogent understanding of the backstory, and that’s okay. Imagineers clearly put work into developing the attraction’s story, but the point is not to load riders down with unnecessary plot or exposition. On the contrary, it’s to develop a scenario with an inner logic and the feeling of an authentic Indiana Jones adventure, so that even if it goes right over your head, it feels consistent and whole on a subliminal level. Theme parks don’t need plot, but they should have story.
In fact, Indiana Jones Adventure achieves a better balance of narrative and free-form atmospherics than its equivalent high-profile rides that have opened in the 2010s and beyond. The current era of attraction design is one in which overthink has bogged down popular IP-based E-tickets. It’s so common for newer attractions to feature movie stars on pre-show screens, contractually obligated to deliver the corniest dialog of their careers, info-dumping MacGuffins and contrivances to vacationers who are either on their phones, unable to hear or understand the dialog, or both. If Indy had been developed in the last decade, the pre-show might wheel out a bored-looking Harrison Ford to direct-address the camera and tell you why you need to find an ancient artifact for him. Who cares?!
This contemporary push for highlighting plot in rides, and to center the rider as the protagonist, basically never works. It’s impossible for the guest to meaningfully impact a predefined narrative while strapped into a moving vehicle they are not in control of. Theme park rides are not video games, they’re not virtual reality, and almost every stab at interactivity ends up feeling like a bolt-on or a distracting gimmick. Centering us only makes the fourth wall more brittle, makes tugging on the yellow safety strap before departure feel even sillier.
What Indy does instead is embed its mandatory safety video into a simulated film reel hosted by Indy’s sidekick Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), who’s running a literal tourist trap. At one point, Sallah proudly points out the ingenuity of the seat belt — this is supposed to be 1935, after all. In order to avoid the curse of the temple god Mara, Sallah says, we should all avoid looking into any depictions of the deity’s open eyes. We will be taking on the role of an ugly tourist, one that, let’s face it, comes a lot more naturally to anyone about to ride; Dr. Jones will hide none of his contempt for us throughout our encounters with him.
I miss the “Eye on the Globe” newsreels that acted as bumpers for the safety reel for many years. They provided a lot of color and additional stage-setting for the attraction, but post-Covid, these were removed as further operational changes saw cast members limiting the number of guests inside the temple at any one time. Combined with the changes made to accommodate FastPass (now Lightning Lane), you don’t get to spend as much time in the projector room, and the reel was shortened only to a very tight essential loop — although management has at least restored the full Sallah portion of the original video loop as of this writing. While I’m all in favor of measures to keep guests and cast members safe, let’s not kid ourselves — we’re spending all day at a theme park, in a whole lot of indoor spaces. By the exposure calculus of 2023, it’s fine to let guests soak in a few more minutes’ worth of the detailed pre-show, instead of keeping people in the boring exterior overflow pen for longer.
It may seem overly-precious to lament changes to a legally-mandated informational video, or strange to agitate for spending more time in line, but everything from the moment you enter Indiana Jones Adventure’s queue to when you walk off the ride has been designed with attentive consideration and purpose. It adds story, charm, and tone, and puts the guest in a certain headspace. It’s all a part of the show. And dropping these details weakens the whole experience, bit by bit.
Here in 2023, as we reach the loading bay at last, I’m struck by a familiar smell. It’s a melange of hydraulic fluid, recycled air, and burning ozone, something distinct to this ride system and etched into my hippocampus.
It’s a cliche that scent is the sense most strongly tied to memory, but that notion goes a long way towards explaining why some locals form such a strong attachment to these experiences. If you’re from Southern California, there’s a good chance the first time you turn an air conditioner on at the start of every summer and the system cycles out a blast of pungent, musty cool air, you recall riding down the simulated bayou of Pirates of the Carribean. Something alchemical is at work here.
A word about those jeeps, the true MVP of this attraction. They’re known in Imagineering parlance as Enhanced Motion Vehicles, and they are one of the most ingenious ride systems ever developed. They’re like a bucking mechanical bull welded to an electric skateboard on smooth Neoprene tires, allowing engineers to program and calibrate every move the riders feel, or to introduce an element of randomness to the experience. Even when at a complete stop, the cars continue to simulate the idle of an old motor, and each EMV has been given a rickety uncertainty that is part of the show.
Compare Indy to the similarly ambitious, but ultimately less exciting attraction Rise of the Resistance at the Star Wars-themed Galaxy’s Edge district, and the contribution of the EMV becomes apparent. Rise features some great moments and illusions, but its smooth-ride trackless people-movers don’t exactly deliver on thrills — they feel more like Fantasyland’s spinning teacups, or sitting atop a big Roomba.
At this point, as a cast member takes us through a final safety check, I look up at the depiction of Mara on the archway before us. The eyes have been bandaged over for our safety, although Mara’s cursed power is bleeding through. It’s a nice touch, maybe inspired by the Ark of the Covenant burning through a swastika on its cargo crate in Raiders, and another bit of wordless environmental storytelling.
At we pass under that threshold, our EMV is at last out of the motor pool, and we’re off to the races. Which is to say, we’re put right into one of the most infamously missing effects from Temple of the Forbidden Eye as originally exhibited.
In its heyday, guests would drive towards a mirror that reflected the vehicle ahead of them going into into one of three doorways: the “Observatory of the Future,” the “Chamber of Earthly Riches,” or the “Fountain of Eternal Youth.” Then the mirror would swing back as your vehicle turned the corner, and you’d find your own jeep going towards one of the other doors, giving the impression there’s three different tracks and three different chambers. In truth, this was a clever illusion involving five doors, dummy tracks, selective lighting, and a well-timed move of an entire shell room surrounding riders. These elements worked in concert such that one track and one chamber appeared to be three seperate ones:
The Chamber of Destiny illusion hasn’t operated for a decade. Absent official explanations from corporate, fans online are left to piece together what’s up from self-identified “CMs” (“cast members”) and (usually former) Imagineers, evolving a patchwork quilt of lore around Indy’s funkiness. The consensus explanation for the missing trick here is some combination of A) the mechanism to rotate the room broke and the company that made it is no longer in business, and/or B) the mechanism was slowly destroying the foundation of the attraction (an explanation which feels cribbed from the disused giant Yeti animatronic at Animal Kingdom’s Everest roller coaster).
These days, although your ride vehicle always goes down the center door, the randomized gift of Mara is achieved by way of some admittedly effective projection mapping, the industry term for projecting motion onto a static three-dimensional surface to create a hallucinatory effect.
After entering whichever hall Mara has chosen for you, you come face-to-face with his enormous visage, and of course someone in your car looks into his eyes, invoking his wrath. Voiced by James Earl Jones, Mara is an effectively booming presence. Projection mapping effects have been added to Mara over the years, one of the few ways in which the ride has actually been improved with time. If you’ve been gifted eternal youth, for example, Mara’s face begins to crack and bleed as he rescinds his gift, flower petals around him wither, and his eyes turn black.
I’ve been on the version of this ride in Tokyo, which is re-themed to a South American temple and crystal skulls. Its puny, silent crystal skull on a podium is a poor replacement for Mara. (That ride opened at Tokyo DisneySea in 2001, years before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and is creatively unrelated to the movie. The franchise has tried the concept twice now. Maybe a skull made of crystal is just not that inherently exciting?)
Your vehicle is lifted up by Mara’s supernatural force (with the aid of the EMV’s motion simulator base) and dragged into a crumbling temple tunnel. The effect of your jeep “floating” has never been very clear, not even when the ride was new. But the idea is that we’re being sucked towards the Gates of Doom, where we have our first encounter with Dr. Jones. He closes the Gates, cutting off Mara’s tractor beam. Our jeep then slams to the ground, and he barks at us to take the path to our left — it’s the only way out!
Our jeep lurches up the tunnel’s ancient stairs and around a bend, and into the ride’s first big showstopper moment: we see the “Big Room,” the multi-story life-sized playset that’s the centerpiece of the attraction. On the other side of us is a 45-foot-tall stone depiction of Mara that has decayed and now looks like a skull, with flames dancing up from its eye socket. A frayed rope bridge stands between us, and fifty feet below that, a gurgling pit of lava:
This room is what remains of the original “blue sky” concept that inspired Temple of the Forbidden Eye. Years earlier, Imagineers had cooked up the idea for an entire enclosed Indiana Jones land called the Lost Expedition, with both a jeep ride and a mine cart roller coaster, so large it would have had both the Disneyland Railroad and the Jungle Cruise going through it. Each would have new stops within the complex, so riders could disembark and get in line for either of the Indy attractions. Take a look at this thing, it’s insane:
This proposal was probably never seriously on the table, but it was an important thought-starter, and the sense of creepy awe it projects is certainly what Temple of the Forbidden Eye, as realized, is going for.
It’s time to talk about the other factor that breathes so much life into this ride besides the EMVs: the music. The Indiana Jones films, of course, were scored by John Williams, and there could be no Indiana Jones ride without John Williams. But while Williams provided the source text, the duty of arranging and conducting the music riders hear fell to Richard Bellis, who had previously arranged Williams’ work on the Star Wars series for Star Tours. One big difference between Star Tours and Indiana Jones Adventure, though, is that Star Tours is a film playing inside a motion simulator, not a practical dark ride. It could be scored essentially like a traditional film, with confidence that every note would be correctly and reliably synchronized to picture, every time.
Traditional dark rides like it’s a small world feature musical motifs in each show room which follow a constant and unbroken musical pattern, so that as riders drift from one room to another the overlapping music doesn’t clash. That wouldn’t work for a thrill ride like Indy. And how to arrange John Williams’ music, which has always been painstakingly attentive to the rhythm of the action on-screen, in a live environment where guests are experiencing everything at a slightly different pace every time? (Indy’s EMV traffic flow is managed by a computerized dispatch system. If a car ahead of you is slow to unload due to a wheelchair transfer, or if an upcoming scene need a few extra moments to reset, your car can “stall” in a dark cave for a few seconds.)
By Bellis’ recollection, he rode at least 22 times with two colleagues, trying to identify the basic timing of every bounce, bump, and bang, before coming off of “the most violent spotting session” of his life. Each isolated segment of his arrangement, when recorded, would be played back in all of the five stereo pairs built into each EMV, so every car would get a computer-synchronized soundtrack (in theory) perfectly timed to their experience. If the ride needs to buy a few extra seconds, one musical segment can fade down naturally and the sound of the idling jeep engine can come forward in the mix. This reactive, dynamic mixing is something modern video games do all the time, but in 1995, I’m not sure it had ever been attempted before.
Maybe you can guess where this is going: as the ride has aged, the LCU (Local Control Unit) which governs its dynamic audio has been out of whack. Music sometimes plays several seconds out of step with the action, sound effects fail to trigger, or newer projection map effects don’t trigger at the right time. Although some of these issues have been fixed or adjusted for, others remain to this day. Perhaps no other attraction besides Rise of the Resistance has so much stuff going on, and it’s a wonder it works as well as it does when it does.
Anyway, as that enormous Mara head enters our field of vision, we get a big dose of Williams’ haunting choral Ark theme from Raiders. It’s still one of the most frisson-inducing moments on any theme park ride, but when Indy opened in 1995, it was accompanied by another now-dead effect: the falling rocks.
I’ve seen this home video clip featured in enough YouTube videos about the ride that it’s become a kind of theme park Zapruder film. Mara’s eye shoots a green laser at you, causing nearby rocks to fall as the cavern begins to crumble. It’s an awesome effect, one achieved by brown-dyed ice falling from the ceiling. But Indy lore has it that it took so long to reset that it only worked for every fourth ride vehicle that passed by, that the ice maker never liked to work anyway, and that the whole thing was rusted over within a year, and so it was abandoned. (As someone who struggles weekly to get his ice maker to play nice, I find this easy to believe.) Nowadays, the effect has been replaced with an unimpressive spurt of fog juice.
Our jeep picks up speed and passes a corridor of skeletons while swamp coolers blast 60mph wind in our faces. Ride-through videos, of course, can’t capture the feeling of getting tossed around in a wind tunnel, so you really have to experience it for yourself to appreciate it. Everything here is pretty goofy in a blacklight mini golf way, but I find it charming. This ride is an ode to the Indiana Jones movies, of course, but it’s also the grandest carnival dark ride ever built. At times, it leans hard into the black light campiness of screaming skeletons in the same way that the Indy movies would occasionally break their own reality to send minor bad guys careening over an obviously painted canyon that shouldn’t exist in the middle of the desert— there’s a parallel embrace of cinematic corniness in the movies with some of the Coney Island chills in this ride that makes sense.
After a brief detour into a dark tunnel, where our headlights illuminate bugs crawling along the wall, we reach the rope bridge teased earlier in the ride. The EMV lurches forward onto the bridge, and we’re allowed a momentary pause to get a closer look at the Mara skull that’s still shooting beams of green energy at us.
Earlier in the ride’s life, we could peer out the side of our car at the lava pit below, and see only a blanket of white mist, with patches of fiery red and yellow light shining up through it. It’s an incredibly atmospheric effect, creating the feeling of a bottomless pit. The ropes on the edge of the bridge sway and sound effects suggests the bridge will not hold much longer. One of Mara’s beams causes a live fireball to erupt near us, and we can feel the heat of it against our skin.
By 2023, however, this moment has been blunted. Despite the 2019 permit filings with Anaheim for repair work on the bridge effect, it still does not appear to sway. There is no real fireball, but another puff of simulated flame. Looking down, there is no mist below, and you can see the light fixtures that once made the pit so eerie: now they’re given a derogatory label, the “hot coals.”
Read enough YouTube comments and you’ll encounter explanations that assert the reasons for both the static bridge and the missing fog are employee safety concerns. OSHA doesn’t want maintenance workers to make the repairs to the bridge necessary to get it working again while suspended so many feet off the ground, and the fog was causing uncontrollable mold growth. I don’t know how true either of these are, but they sound plausible enough.
Still, it seems like if the Imagineers were given a suitable budget and a mandate to bubble a little brain juice on these problems, they could come up with appropriate solutions. It would be worth it.
(9/24/23 edit: Since originally publishing this piece in March, the fog has returned!)
As our driver gathers their courage and guns it across the rope bridge, we turn into a corridor where we face down one of the icons of the attraction, an enormous hissing king cobra. We hear Indy’s disembodied voice, as if in our heads: “Snakes…you’re on your own!”
This has always been a head-scratcher to me. The movies have snakes in them, but not cartoonish snake monsters. Perhaps Mara’s curse has transformed one of the giant snake statues into this menace that now slithers before us? At any rate, the snake seems to be one of the most iconic and popular parts of the ride, albeit one that stopped working several years ago. The audio-animatronic that lunges at guests was replaced with a static figure for several years as a temporary fix. One of this refurb’s most notable highlights is that a new cobra robot once again menaces riders. I think it looks kind of cute.
Our jeep seems to recoil from the scaly monster, and dives to the lower levels of the Big Room. In one of my favorite beats of the whole show, we slalom through the Mara skull, the interior of which is filled with reliquary skulls and melting candles, all set to the sledding music from Temple of Doom. Here we get a few of the remaining authentic pyrotechnic blasts as we pass the hot coals. The spirit of Mara howls and appears overhead, courtesy a freshly-repainted, old-school blacklight scrim.
Then we’re plunged into a dark cavern which, pre-refurb, housed an illusion in which we crashed through a hologram of a branch with rats scurrying across it. It never worked very well, so it’s been replaced with a new, more effective sequence involving orbs of Mara’s energy, which whiz past us and cause a newly-added temple set to collapse as our driver floors it.
We buck around the corner and can catch our breath as our jeep seems to do the same. We’re staring down a hall with murals of skeletal warriors on either side. Our driver once again steels their nerves and bucks forward, haltingly, and it occurs to me that one of the benefits of the EMV motion base is that our jeep seems to have a personality: it’s as if it’s afraid of triggering the darts, and is gingerly attempting to drive through this corridor. Of course, it cannot help but set off the ancient trap, and we hear the programmed spacial audio of darts whizzing by our heads. A few moments later, a bit out of sync, we hear the real sound of compressed air cannons firing to simulate the darts nearly missing us, whipping the ‘dos of longer-haired guests. Somehow unscathed, we make a sharp turn and reach the show’s grand finale:
Dr. Jones hangs over us, dangling from his whip. He shouts down at us to “Back up!” and all our senses tell us the EMV is suddenly thrown into reverse gear and our driver is giving it the beans. Then, from out of the darkness, an enormous boulder barrels towards us and Jones. We race forward, on a collision course with the boulder, but plunge through a hole that’s opened up before us, narrowly avoiding certain death.
In actuality, the EMV doesn’t even have a reverse gear, and the boulder only ever moves forward a few feet. The whole thing is a convincing but simple effect operating on the same principle as that disorienting feeling you get when standing next to a moving train on a station platform, tricking yourself into perceiving that the train is standing still and you are the object in motion. The entire room slides back and forth around your stationary vehicle, with the EMV’s motion simulator base doing the rest of the work:
When it works, it’s a flawless effect. When it works. Which, hopefully, will be a lot more regularly now.
Post-refurb, is Indiana Jones Adventure everything it once was? No, and it likely never will be. But it remains a thrilling, incredibly richly-realized attraction, one of the best of its kind in the world.
Disneyland’s immersive experiences sometimes get compared to cinema. But a beloved movie can be purchased and stored away on a shelf, safe and sound. Digital files can be duplicated and archived bit-for-bit. Film preservation is (relatively) trivial for a moneyed concern like Disney that wants to protect its intellectual property. In fact, it’s often possible for older titles to get restored to a higher fidelity to their original camera negative than the release prints with which they were originally exhibited.
A ride just isn’t like that. A warehouse-sized, computerized cuckoo clock with pyro effects and mechanical components whose manufacturers may no longer be in business is an entirely different proposition. If you don’t run it on a daily basis, it will seize up and decay. If you do run it, it will wear down and erode. Complete preservation is impossible. Cinema isn’t the right comparison; live theater comes closer. E-Tickets like Indy are akin to a long-running Broadway show with a cult following. And those of us whose brains have been hard-wired through regular dopamine hits to know every twist and turn of said clockwork mechanism can tell when things aren’t being run right. Change is inevitable, but what’s reasonable to agitate for is the maintenance of a certain standard of detail and fidelity to vision.
When I stepped off the refurbished Indiana Jones Adventure, I was laughing with excitement and relief. The last few times I’d been on it, I almost regretted tainting my memories of it with its sorry state — more than the missing effects or the frozen snake, absent audio cues and delays during my ride had sapped the thrill and just made for “bad show.” Those concerns seem to have been (mostly) resolved. I don’t know if operational changes, like limiting the number of cars on the track at once, have been implemented to reduce the occurrence of show-stopping traffic jams and problems with effects resetting in time, but I suspect they may have. Management, I hope, understands the importance of letting this thing shine, particularly after just spending three months getting it back into shape.
But Indy was a temperamental beast from the start, and it will always be temperamental. Maybe that’s in keeping with the spirit of Indiana Jones. After all, he said it best:
If you enjoyed reading this, check out some of my other articles here on Medium, including this piece which ponders the death of futurism through the lens of Tomorrowland: On the Death of the Future
