Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure
| Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure | |
|---|---|
| Park | Shanghai Disneyland |
| Land / area | Treasure Cove |
| Type | Boat dark ride |
| Opened | June 16, 2016 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | None |
| Status | Operating |
Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure is a boat dark ride in Treasure Cove at Shanghai Disneyland. Unlike the classic Pirates of the Caribbean rides in the other Disney parks, it is not a tour past singing pirates and a burning town. It is a single, film-based story in which guests join Captain Jack Sparrow on a raid for sunken treasure guarded by Davy Jones. It opened with the park on June 16, 2016, as the centrepiece of Treasure Cove, the first land in any Disney park devoted entirely to pirates.[1]
History
When Imagineering planned Shanghai Disneyland, the Pirates films were enormously popular in China, and the team decided to build the new park's Pirates attraction around the films rather than around the 1967 Disneyland original. That decision freed the designers from the familiar sequence of grottos, bombardments and auction scenes. Treasure Cove was created as a Spanish-influenced harbour town supposedly taken over by Jack Sparrow and his crew, and the ride was placed at its heart as the land's major attraction.
The scale matched the ambition. The show building is among the largest in the park, and the ride combines large physical sets, Audio-Animatronic figures and very large projection surfaces, including underwater sequences in which the boat appears to sink to the ocean floor and rise again. The industry noticed quickly: the Themed Entertainment Association gave the attraction a Thea Award for Outstanding Achievement – Attraction, presented at the 23rd Thea Awards gala on April 22, 2017, and the Visual Effects Society honoured it for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project.[2]
Experience
Guests board in a harbour cavern and set out through the Caves of Misfortune. A skeleton at the helm of a wrecked ship transforms, in an effect that still startles first-time riders, into a living Jack Sparrow, who recruits the boat for his scheme: to steal the sunken treasure of Davy Jones from the Graveyard of the Lost Ships.
The boat then appears to plunge beneath the sea. Riders pass through Jones's undersea domain, encounter his crew and his monstrous defences, and surface in the middle of a naval battle, caught in the crossfire between Sparrow and Jones as ships exchange broadsides around them. A final drop and a confrontation over the treasure itself close the story, before the boats return to the harbour.
Much of that freedom of movement comes from a new ride system developed for the attraction. The boats are not simply carried along by flowing water as on the classic ride. D23, Disney's official fan publication, describes a system in which the boats can spin, travel sideways and move backwards, so that the vehicle can be turned toward the action, held for a scene, or swept out of it.[3] Contemporary reporting on the Disney patent behind the system described boats carried on front and rear bogies on a submerged track, driven by magnetic linear motors, with the two bogies able to run on divided track sections so the boat can rotate to a chosen orientation.[4] In practice, riders rarely notice the machinery; what registers is that the boat behaves like part of the cast rather than a conveyor passing the show.