Pinocchio's Daring Journey
| Pinocchio's Daring Journey | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disneyland Park |
| Land / area | Fantasyland |
| Type | Dark ride |
| Opened | May 23, 1983 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | None |
| Status | Operating |
Pinocchio's Daring Journey is a dark ride in Fantasyland at Disneyland Park in the Disneyland Resort, California. Opened on May 23, 1983, it retells Disney's 1940 animated film Pinocchio, the studio's second animated feature, following the wooden puppet through Stromboli's theatre, Pleasure Island and the jaws of Monstro the whale. It was built as part of the New Fantasyland project, the wholesale reconstruction of the land that also rebuilt Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Snow White's Enchanted Wish and Peter Pan's Flight.
History
A Pinocchio ride had been considered as early as 1976, when Imagineers proposed replacing the Mickey Mouse Club Theater with a dark ride whose vehicles would be styled as Geppetto's carved toys. The plan was shelved, then revived for the opening of Tokyo Disneyland, where Pinocchio's Daring Journey debuted on April 15, 1983, as an opening-day attraction. The Disneyland version followed six weeks later on the same site the theatre had occupied. It was the first of the Fantasyland dark rides to end with its story's happy conclusion rather than an abrupt final scare, and the first Disney attraction to make use of holographic material, used in the mirror gag in which boys on Pleasure Island see themselves transformed into donkeys.
Experience
Guests board wooden cars carved with figures of characters such as Figaro the cat and Cleo the goldfish. Jiminy Cricket narrates and appears throughout as a guide. The ride opens at Stromboli's marionette show, where Pinocchio performs on strings to Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee, then darkens: Pinocchio is found locked in a cage as Stromboli threatens him, and Jiminy urges an escape. From there the route passes the Coachman's trap and enters Pleasure Island, a midway of carnival booths, a pool hall and boys mid-transformation into donkeys, including Lampwick, whose change is shown in shadow. The vehicle then plunges toward Monstro, whose open mouth fills a scene as the ride passes along the shore, before reaching Geppetto's workshop, where the Blue Fairy appears, vanishes in a shower of light, and leaves Pinocchio restored as a real boy among Geppetto's toys and clocks. The ride takes about three minutes.
Other versions
Near-identical versions operate at Tokyo Disneyland, where the ride opened first, and at Disneyland Park in Paris, where it opened with that park in 1992 under the name Les Voyages de Pinocchio. No version was built at the Magic Kingdom in Florida, whose Fantasyland instead received an expanded set of dark rides based on other films.