Crush's Coaster
| Crush's Coaster | |
|---|---|
| Park | Walt Disney Studios Park |
| Land / area | Toon Studio (now Worlds of Pixar) |
| Type | Steel spinning roller coaster, enclosed |
| Opened | June 9, 2007 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering / Maurer AG |
| Height req. | 1.07 m (42 in) |
| Status | Operating |
Crush's Coaster is an enclosed spinning roller coaster at Walt Disney Studios Park at Disneyland Paris, themed to the 2003 Pixar film Finding Nemo and named for Crush, the laid-back sea turtle who rides the East Australian Current in the film. It opened on June 9, 2007, as the headline attraction of the Toon Studio placemaking project, which reworked the park's Animation Courtyard area around Pixar stories.[1]
History
The Studios park had opened in 2002 with few rides, and Toon Studio was its first substantial remedy. Announced as part of the park's fifth-anniversary expansion, Crush's Coaster opened alongside Cars Race Rallye (later Cars Quatre Roues Rallye). It was the first collaboration between Walt Disney Imagineering and the German coaster builder Maurer, and only Disney's second spinning coaster, after Primeval Whirl at Disney's Animal Kingdom. It remains the only attraction at Disneyland Paris themed to Finding Nemo.
The ride was an immediate hit — too much of one. Its four-person cars give it a low hourly capacity by Disney standards, and from its first season it could not cope with demand, generating some of the longest queues at the resort. A trial of the park's Fastpass system in 2008 was quickly abandoned as unworkable on so capacity-limited a ride. After years of temporary queue arrangements spilling across the land, a closure in spring 2014 added a permanent single-rider line — which fills otherwise empty seats and can approach the ride's full capacity — together with an enlarged standby queue.[2] The single-rider queue remains one of the most useful at the resort, though on busy days it too can build a substantial wait.
Experience
The queue and station are themed as a film set of Sydney Harbour on the Toon Studio backlot, complete with a beached submarine, rockwork and two seagull figures. Guests board turtle-shell vehicles seating four, in two back-to-back pairs, which can spin freely during the coaster portion of the ride.
The first part is a slow dark ride: the shells glide through coral-reef scenes where digital projection places Nemo and Squirt, Crush's son, among physical sets — a projection technique developed for this attraction. The shells then climb, meet Crush and Bruce the shark, and are swept into the East Australian Current, at which point the ride becomes a fast, twisting coaster in near-darkness, the shells spinning as they drop and turn. Because the spinning is free rather than programmed, no two rides are quite alike. After the current subsides, the vehicles return to Sydney Harbour and the station.