Journey to the Center of the Earth
| Journey to the Center of the Earth | |
|---|---|
| Park | Tokyo DisneySea |
| Land / area | Mysterious Island |
| Type | Slot car dark ride |
| Opened | September 4, 2001 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | 46 in (117 cm) |
| Status | Operating |
Journey to the Center of the Earth is a high-speed slot car dark ride in Mysterious Island at Tokyo DisneySea in Urayasu, Chiba, Japan. Loosely based on Jules Verne's 1864 novel, it takes guests from Captain Nemo's underground base deep below Mount Prometheus, the artificial volcano that serves as the park's icon, on an expedition that goes badly wrong. It opened with the park on September 4, 2001, and remains unique to Tokyo DisneySea.[1][2]
Mysterious Island is the park's smallest port of call, built inside Mount Prometheus and themed to Verne's stories and to Vulcania, the island base Captain Nemo maintains in that fictional world. Journey to the Center of the Earth shares the port with only one other ride, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and together the two attractions present Nemo's world from below the ground and below the waves respectively.
History
The idea of a ride based on Verne's journey underground predates Tokyo DisneySea by several years. A version had been planned as a free-fall attraction for Discovery Mountain, an unbuilt project once considered for Disneyland Paris in place of what became its Space Mountain. That project was never constructed, and the Verne concept later resurfaced in Japan in a very different mechanical form.[1]
What made the Tokyo version possible was a ride system developed for another park. The vehicles run on a high-speed slot car system first created for Test Track at Epcot, which had opened in 1999; a slot in the roadway guides cars that can travel slowly through show scenes and then accelerate sharply when the story demands it.[1] Walt Disney Imagineering adapted that technology for a mine vehicle that could crawl through caverns and then be flung out of a volcano. The ride's original music was written by Buddy Baker, the veteran Disney composer whose work also accompanied Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion.[1]
Journey to the Center of the Earth opened on September 4, 2001, as one of Tokyo DisneySea's opening-day attractions, and it has been one of the park's headline rides ever since.[1]
Experience
The queue winds through caverns cut into Mount Prometheus and past Captain Nemo's laboratories and workings, including a journal recording the discovery of a fossilised egg belonging to some enormous unknown arthropod. Guests then board lifts styled as Terravators, which appear to carry them to a base station half a mile underground. The station is a working piece of fictional engineering, with a huge steam-driven bellows supplying fresh air from the surface and massive spring-like supports intended to protect the cavern roof during earthquakes. Warnings of rising seismic activity are already sounding as guests arrive — and, in a running joke in the queue, the communications post that should be monitoring them is unattended because its operator has gone for a tea break.[1]
From the station, guests board six-person vehicles, three rows of two, presented as steam-powered mine cars following tunnels drilled in advance toward the centre of the Earth.[1] The early part of the ride is a slow dark ride: a cavern of brightly glowing crystals gives way to a mushroom forest inhabited by strange insect-like and amphibious creatures. An earthquake then blocks the planned tunnel with a cave-in, and the vehicle is diverted down a side passage lined with huge egg sacks, apparently excavated by a very large animal. Emerging beside an underground sea beneath electrically charged gas clouds, the vehicle is forced onward into an active volcanic chamber.
There it meets the creature responsible: a huge, centipede-like lava monster, one of the largest Audio-Animatronics figures in the park, guarding its nest in the heat. The escape that follows is the ride's signature moment — the vehicle is swept out of the mountain on the force of an eruption, briefly bursting outside the volcano at up to 47 mph (76 km/h) before dropping back inside and returning to the station.[1] The whole ride lasts about three minutes, and riders must be at least 46 inches (117 cm) tall.[1]