Hello everyone and welcome to the second episode of Mincraft Disney World
the series in which I explore the virtual Disney World on the MCMagic.us servers here in the game of Minecraft
and talk a little bit about the real Disney World.
This week we're going to be taking a look at the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
Probably one of the most iconic rides at the Hollywood Studios and personally one of my favorites.
If you don't know anything about the Tower of Terror, let me say that if you've been to a theme park you've probably ridden it.
The Tower of Terror is basically a play on the free fall ride that you see at Six Flags and everywhere else
but of course, as with everything else Disney does, there's a flare for the story and the dramatics
which makes it better than any imitator.
So this ride opened in July of 1994 so it was a little bit after Hollywood Studios opened
at the time it was the MGM studios, and since then it's been so popular that there are versions in
Disneyland California and a couple of the Disney parks overseas.
The ride itself is set in the 1920s-1930s era of Hollywood and it's based, as the name implies
on the Twilight Zone.
So what we're going to do, is we're going to do a quick walk through of the ride in Minecraft
see how it's recreated, and while we do I'm going to talk about the ride, just a little bit.
So what you do, as you do with any ride, is you get in line and there's a queue that pulls you through the lobby
of the Hollywood Tower Hotel, and that's technically the name of the Hotel that you're going through
even though the ride's called the Tower of Terror. If you were to come in and look to the right
you don't see it here in Minecraft, because I don't think there'd be a way to recreate it
but this is actually a thirteen diamond award hotel by the AAA which is higher than any award they've ever given
they typically only go up to five, but because the whole theme of the thirteenth floor and unlucky thirteen
this one gets a thirteen diamond award.
You'd come through hearing some nice 30's music and you'd see what essentially looks like a luxury
resort hotel lobby that's been abandoned. You come through here and you see some of these elevators
are out of order and you go through the little library here. This is where the story of the ride is explained.
Now this room will be a lot of fun if you're a fan of the Twilight Zone because as I said the ride is based off
The Twilight Zone and the imagineers who actually worked on this ride ended up watching every single
episode at least twice, if not more. So this ride from beginning to end is really full of some really obvious
and some really minor references to Twilight Zone episodes, like the shelves up here would be lined with
replica props and maybe in some cases real props from actual episodes
But in any case, you'll come in here, everybody is sort of sent into this room and a television in the corner comes
on and that's where Rod Serling, the famous host of the Twilight Zone, starts to tell you the tale of the Hollywood
Tower Hotel. That tale is that many years ago in the prime of Hollywood, a group of guests and a bellhop get
into this elevator on a stormy night and just as they're hitting the 13th floor, BOOM, the elevator gets hit by
lighting. It's hard to tell from the video, I don't know if it falls fore sure, but I don't know if it also disappears or not.
Now here you are at the hotel on a very eerily similar night and you're going to ride on the only elevator
that works, a maintenance service elevator and you're going to discover the secrets of The Twilight Zone.
So, you're going to move then into the boiler room and this is a cool trick that Disney uses in that they can give
you the sense of transition without actually having the transition. You come in on the ground floor in this lobby
but what you've really been doing is climbing up a hill as you do so, and then you come out on the other end in
this boiler room, and so you would think you went down into a basement, but you didn't actually go down into a
basement. This is where you're gonna queue up for the ride
The ride itself, I should mention, is the second tallest ride in Walt Disney World. It's 199 feet. It is only bested
by Expedition Everest which is 199.5 feet. The reason that they're both specifically under 200 feet is because
due to regulations they would have to put a flashing light on top of anything over 200 feet because you need some light for
low flying airplanes and that would sort of ruin the mood a bit, so they just keep it under that for ambiance.
So you'll get in line and they'll line everybody up here and then you'll get into this elevator and this is actually a really
innovative ride system. In the real Disney World this is an elevator that will go up and down and forward and back
on wheels without a track. It is all computerized using a set of sensors in the floor so that it knows where it's going
and that's because unlike most typical free fall rides, you don't just go straight up and down, you
travel forward and back through the Twilight Zone.
So let me turn on my HUD for a second here we can get a cart out.
What they've done here in the Minecraft recreation is rather than, since they don't have parts that can move in
that way, you just have to have a mine cart ride, which is what we're gonna do right now.
And off we go.
As you can see they also have the voice over of Rod Serling recreated through text, which is really cool.
And they use a bunch of different effects here. We're kind of going through it a little quickly.
But you go through, like a very bizarre area, and then you drop! The elevator doors open, you get this amazing view
of Hollywood Studios and then you just drop. What's cool is in the original incarnation of this ride you
basically just went up and dropped. I think you might have done it a few times. But since then they've come
out with different versions of the ride in which they computerize the sequence, so now when you ride
the Twilight Zone, you never know how many times you're going to drop, when you're going to drop, when
it's going to be a false drop, when you'll shoot back up. It's different every time and that's really cool
because you could ride this literally a hundred times and have a different experience each time.
See here we are going through it quite a few times. Then you drop through and luckily you survive The Twilight Zone.
It puts you out in the end here, which like with most rides, you could buy a photo of you screaming your head off
at the top just before you drop, which cleverly, if you ever want to look for the photo, they hide it by
making it look like sparks going off on the Hollywood Tower sign, and one of those sparks is the flash of the photograph.
Then of course there's also a gift shop in which you can buy Tower of Terror t-shirts and mugs and all sorts of
things and to your dismay you'll notice they also sell bellhop bells, which anyone under the age of like 13
immediately runs over to and just starts tapping away at it. So you'll always be greeted to just like this
symphony of bells.
Then you're out and you just go loop back on it again.
Now what's interesting is for a free fall ride it's not actually a free fall ride.
Because they really want to make this sensation of dropping, there's actually a cable underneath the
the system that you drop in that PULLS you down, so you're actually falling faster than gravity would have you drop.
Which is really cool and really creates this very traumatic dropping experience.
And so that's the Hollywood Tower Hotel. They made a spin-off movie in 1996 I want to say, on the Disney channel
with Kristen Dunst, it was like a made for TV movie that'll give you a little more backstory.
Although you don't really need it. It's an interesting way of looking at how in the 90s, Michael Eisner (CEO)
was very big into synergy, this idea of cross promoting everything. Having a movie that ties into a ride, and now
you're seeing it, sort of, in reverse. Now you're seeing movies getting their own rides, which is interesting.
In any case this has been Minecraft Disney World. I want to thank you all sincerely for the really warm welcome
that I've gotten with this series. I'm so glad everyone's enjoying it. I do want to say that I did have these first
two episodes planned ahead of time, so now that they're done I'm going to be relying more heavily on viewer
feedback when it comes to what attraction I'm going to be covering next. I've already got a whole bunch of
people saying they want to see Adventure Land and Space Mountain and things like that.
So keep an eye out. Every week I'm going to pick a new attraction. I'm going to pick a new area of the park.
We're going to talk about it a little bit. We're going to see it in Minecraft, and we're going to get to enjoy Disney
together! So I hope you all have a great week, and I hope to see you all next time. Bye guys!