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Simpsons Did It... (continued)
In the cartoon, we see Bob escape jail, then club over the head a drunk
Barney, who is dressed as a rubberhead Itchy. Amusingly, he uses a stick from a
dumpster labeled "yesterday's churros," which are apparently hard enough to
cause real damage!
Krusty selects the Simpsons and one other family – us – to ride his new
Thrilltacular roller coaster. With that, we're off to our individual rooms for
more preshow. In these small rooms, a slideshow plays with the same ironic wit
("number of writers who made this list: 20." "number of people reading this
list: zero").
This room only holds a
couple of families at a time.
In this smaller room, we get more of the preshow. The Simpsons are led to a
room that features radioactivity, where we learn that entering could disfigure
anyone, such as make Maggie 50 feet tall. The Simpsons go off to ride their
coaster, but Grandpa can't come, and neither can Maggie. He falls asleep, she
enters the nuclear room, and seems to grow.
Grandpa can't ride. He might
have a heart attack. Or a stroke!
Cut back to the Simpsons. Sideshow Bob has found them and wants them to ride
the coaster, at gunpoint. But first, he subjects them to a safety spiel! Itchy and
Scratchy provide the safety video. Does it look familiar? It
should. Several shots are animated reproductions of what we saw in the Back to
the Future days, when crash test dummies (how very 1990s of them) were used to
show too much luggage, or bonking heads, etc.
Ouch, another tribute!
At last we are let in to the vehicle, which is dressed up as a cartoon
coaster vehicle rather than a DeLorean, but there are still similarities.
Even the gull-wing design is
familiar.
On screen, the pimply yokel teenager tells us he'll start the ride soon, but
he needs to study his algebra book first (which is hilariously upside down).
It's a nice way to let this part drag on as much as needed, until the other
vehicles are ready to go and they can start the movie for everyone.
In the movie/ride itself, we ascend a lift hill and quickly encounter
Sideshow Bob, who is commanding a wrecking ball and intending to kill the
Simpsons (and us). We travel along the coaster, there are near misses, and
eventually the wrecking ball demolishes enough of the track that we are
propelled to another coaster, briefly, before landing in a kid's ride. Homer and
Marge are in another coaster car right in front of us. Almost immediately,
Sideshow Bob bounces in, strapped to an oversized panda robot that he's
obviously made evil.
Our car is bounced backward, through a wall, where we land in a boat ride.
It's the Captain Dinosaur's Pirate Rip Off, a clear rip off (see the irony?) of
Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean. We pass through a mist waterfall of Bob, then
see a city being pillaged that reminds of the Disney ride in almost every
respect. Homer, in a boat ahead of us, declares that he hates chain reactions,
which is funny, because everything in the ride till this point has in fact been a
chain reaction. This boat ride is no different, and soon enough a wall is blown
out and we are sucked into an aquatic amphitheater.
Here Universal moves from Disney to Busch, and mocks the killer whale show.
We get attached via rope to a frantic orca, and travel around the arena while
dodging projectiles, until we end up on the grandstands themselves. Bob tries to
kill us with "the unkindest cut of all" (menacing blades from his panda robot),
but suddenly a giant Maggie appears behind him to stop him. We end up hurtling
toward a hellish fire pit below (it appears to be Hell itself), when Prof. Fink
flies a contraption following up down the tunnel, and proclaims "do not fear, a
nerd is here!) and attaches a rope via suction cup to us, and hauls us upward.
We needed a picture right here to break up the
text a little. You like?
We pass out of Krustyland and see that Bob now controls giant Maggie, saying
he'll give her the pacifier back if she'll destroy the town. Fink flies us
through some famous parts of Springfield, and there's a wink in there every so
often (watch for the giant donut we fly through, which is not a wink to Rock 'n
Roller Coaster, but the original Randy's Donuts in Inglewood).
Right after the donut, we fly around Maggie herself. Pay careful attention to
the left side of the screen. See anything familiar? We're in the famous square
where City Hall and the Clock Tower from Hill Valley, the city in Back to the
Future! Yet another tribute to the ride which preceded this one. The geek in me
loved that there were so many tributes to the past here.
And, amazingly, the tributes weren't over with! For what should Maggie do except
grab our vehicle and put it in her mouth, treating it like a pacifier. Those who
rode the Back to the Future ride a lot will remember the tyrannosaurus rex who
swallowed our vehicle -- this is an obvious tribute. Maggie spits us out (watch for
a water effect on your ride vehicle at this
point), and we crash into a billboard that urges us to send money to Universal
Studios. I don't know if that billboard crashing is meant as a tribute (the
previous ride had something like it), but it's possible.
After that, we land at
the Simpsons' house, and see the usual couch gag. But it's an illusion. The
house falls away, and we see we're in space, near Kang and Kodos, those
tentacled aliens on the Simpsons TV show. The Simpsons are strapped to a
free-fall kind of ride called Death Drop. The aliens taunt us "Foolish
Earthlings, don't you know that all rides must end in a gift shop?" and down we
go. We land outside a roller coaster, bouncing a few times. Bob is right there in
front of us, but he is quickly defeated from behind, and the ride is over.
There's one other tribute to mention. The photo spots near the former ride
were the DeLorean and the time-traveling locomotive, and both have been moved to
the road just east of the New York Streets. You can still take your photo with
these life-sized props!
The props aren't close, but
at least they are still available.
So to sum up, I should reiterate that the ride is still just a simulator, and
it's not ground-breaking technology. The Simpsons arguably hit their creative
peak some years ago, so opening a ride now may seem a bit odd, perhaps even
desperate. But the jokes are funny, and the ride has more relevance now than it
did as Back to the Future (as much as I love that series of movies!)
In the end analysis, this is one of those times where you realize as a park-goer that the world must move on (and indeed already has moved on), and it's
best to make the effort to stay current. It helps that the new offering is in
some ways an old offering, since the Simpsons have been around for so long.
It's fun and worth your
time!
I, for one, can't wait to ride again. The gauntlet has been thrown. Let's see
what Disney's got.
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