Buzz Lightyear Planet Rescue
| Buzz Lightyear Planet Rescue | |
|---|---|
| Park | Shanghai Disneyland |
| Land / area | Tomorrowland |
| Type | Interactive shooting dark ride |
| Opened | June 16, 2016 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | None |
| Status | Operating |
Buzz Lightyear Planet Rescue is an interactive shooting dark ride in Tomorrowland at Shanghai Disneyland. Guests ride in two-person space cruisers, firing hand-held laser blasters at targets to help Buzz Lightyear stop the Evil Emperor Zurg from destroying the planet of the Little Green Men. It opened with the park on June 16, 2016, as the newest and most heavily revised version of the Buzz Lightyear shooting rides found in Disney parks around the world.[1]
History
The Buzz Lightyear ride family began at Magic Kingdom in 1998 and spread to Tokyo, California, Paris and Hong Kong, each version sending riders in rotating Omnimover vehicles past physical sets studded with lit targets of different shapes and point values. By the time Shanghai was planned, the format was nearly twenty years old, and Imagineering used the new park to rework its weakest element: the targets themselves.
Planet Rescue keeps the family's basic machinery — a continuous Omnimover system, a joystick that lets riders spin their cruiser through a full circle to aim, individual blasters and an on-board score display — but rebuilds the battle around it. The Dark Ride Database notes that it is the only installation in the series to feature mainly interactive video screens instead of real, physical targets.[2] Hits register on the screens and in the sets around them, Buzz himself appears within the action rather than only in the queue, and scores are shown on a screen in the vehicle rather than on the older versions' simple counter.[3]
Experience
The story is drawn more closely than earlier versions from the opening sequence of Toy Story 2 (1999), in which Buzz infiltrates Zurg's planet in a video game. Here, Zurg has built a crystal-powered super weapon on the Little Green Men's planet and intends to destroy it; Star Command recruits guests as rookie Space Rangers to stop him.
After a briefing in a queue themed as a space station, riders board their cruisers and take up their blasters — fitted, in this version, with a visible laser sight that makes aiming markedly easier than on the earlier rides.[4] The cruisers first cross the planet's surface, where waves of Zurg's robots — styled after the robots in the film — must be neutralised, with the Little Green Men helping along the way. The battle then moves inside Zurg's bunker, where the defence systems activate against the intruders, and Buzz joins the fight directly before Zurg's weapon is disabled.
At unload, each rider's score is converted into a Star Command rank, preserving the family's defining habit: the ride is ridden twice by many guests, the second time purely to beat the score of the first.
See also
- Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin
- Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters
- Shanghai Disneyland
- Toy Story Mania!