The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
| The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disney's Hollywood Studios |
| Land / area | Sunset Boulevard |
| Type | Drop tower dark ride |
| Opened | July 22, 1994 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | 40 in (102 cm) |
| Status | Operating |
The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is a drop tower dark ride on Sunset Boulevard at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World, Florida. Opened on July 22, 1994, when the park was still called Disney-MGM Studios, it is set in the fictional Hollywood Tower Hotel and framed by Rod Serling's anthology series The Twilight Zone. At 199 feet (61 m) the tower is among the tallest structures at Walt Disney World, a height chosen to sit just below the 200-foot threshold at which aviation rules would have required a red warning beacon on top.
History
The attraction anchored the new Sunset Boulevard area, built to give the young studio park a major thrill ride. Imagineers studied the original television series closely during development, and the pre-show film was assembled to look like a lost episode, with Serling's narration drawn from his original recordings and a soundalike performance completing the script. Versions followed at Disney California Adventure in 2004, where the ride later closed and was rebuilt as a Guardians of the Galaxy attraction, and at Walt Disney Studios Park in Paris in 2008. The Florida original, with its more elaborate ride system, is now the only version in the United States.
The drop profile has been reprogrammed several times. Since 2003 a computer has selected the sequence at random for each ride, so the pattern of rises and falls is not fixed in advance.
Experience
The story is set on Halloween night, 1939. As the pre-show film explains, five people — a film star, a child star, her nanny, a matinee idol and a bellhop — boarded the hotel's main elevator during a storm and vanished when lightning struck the building, scarring its facade. Guests walk through the hotel's overgrown gardens, a lobby frozen under decades of dust and cobwebs, and a library, where the pre-show plays on a television that switches itself on.
From the library, guests descend to the boiler room and board a maintenance elevator carrying 21 riders. The car rises through scenes in which the five missing guests appear as ghostly figures in a corridor and then in a starfield, before the vehicle moves forward horizontally out of its shaft — the ride's signature mechanical trick — and locks into a separate drop shaft. There the random drop sequence begins: the car is pulled downward faster than gravity alone would carry it, falls and rises over a total drop of about 130 feet (40 m) at speeds up to 39 mph (63 km/h), and at one point the shaft doors open high above the park, giving riders a brief view out before the next fall.
Design
The ride vehicles, developed with the Otis Elevator Company, are self-propelled cars that drive themselves into the vertical motion cabs rather than being fixed in one shaft, which is what makes the forward move through the "fifth dimension" scene possible. The hotel's architecture draws on several real southern California buildings of the 1910s and 1920s, and its forced-perspective upper storeys make the tower read as taller still from Sunset Boulevard.