Blackt.net

By Patrick Cosmos

Yesterday, Epcot Center re-opened a ride which had contributed to a woman’s death on Wednesday. The woman reportedly felt ill after riding; she wound up in a hospital and then she died. Disney re-opened the ride after it was determined that nothing had malfunctioned.

The woman is actually the ride’s second casualty; in June, a four-year-old kid with an “undiagnosed heart condition” died after going on the ride. The article also says that 10 other people reported serious illnesses after riding since the ride opened in 2003.

The situation is completely ludicrous. I have, hands-down, never been on a ride with more warnings than Mission: Space. Then again, I have also never been on another ride that had Gary Sinise tell me how to fasten my seatbelt, so there’s that.

However, the news stories aren’t telling you the whole story. For instance, they aren’t telling you about how Mission: Space is completely awesome.

They are not telling you about how this ride is replete with technology.

Here’s the deal. Throughout the entire waiting period, you see one million warnings about how this ride will punch you right in the epilepsy and probably rip your heart out with its bare hands. The ride is in a big-assed dark building and you are like “what is going on? Does it go upside down? Does it go fast?” Disney is a master of this. On the same park visit, they tricked me into waiting for over an hour to essentially watch a movie and swing in a chair. They don’t like telling you what their rides do until you are firmly trapped in them.

Then Gary Sinise tells you about the seatbelts and stuff.

So you get into this staging area and you find out that each rider has a responsibility. This responsibility consists of hitting a flashing button when it’s your turn, except it doesn’t matter because your trip through space winds up being successful anyways. No matter. Awesome.

The ride itself traps you in a little claustrophobic thing with all these buttons and lights and shit and it’s really something else. Then you virtually blast off into space.

Here’s where the deaths happen. So, the ride is basically one of those VR ride dealies where the fact that the seats are tilting is combined with a screen to create a sense of motion. However, there’s really not a lot of lateral motion. You’re in a space ship. The big deal is that this ride fucks with the gravity/G-forces, and there’s a real easy way to manipulate this: all of these enclosed seats are on a big ring that spins like a centrifuge, generating the G-forces to stick you to your seat or whatever.

So basically, these people are getting sick because this ride is fundamentally the Gravitron from the fair, except that you’d never even know unless you 1.) snuck a good look while you were boarding and 2.) had the wherewithall to put the pieces together. Luckily, I’m great and I did that / have that.

You cats remember the Cajun Cliffhanger at Great America? It was the same principle, albeit less sophisticated: you poor people stand at the edges of this fucking drum and it’ll spin one million miles a fucking hour and then the floor will fall out. They kept a bucket at the exit to that ride. That bucket was for puking into. It turns out that centrifugal force (which is a myth, it’s actually the inverse [centripetal] force combined with the specific motion vectors of a circle [which basically is constantly accelerating your body ‘inwards,’ I can explain this better in person]) gets a body mighty sick. You know what gets you sicker, though? When they do this shit to you and you have no point of reference to see that it is happening to you.
Incidentally, you cats know why that ride is gone? It ran too slow, somebody (probably somebody fat) slid down, and the moving floor ate their fucking foot. Somewhere, some yokel has to explain to all of his friends how I am too fat for gravity is the reason why my foot is gone. Life is hard.

Anyways, I just wanted to dole out a ruthless dose of context for everyone. And also endorse this killing machine of a ride because it’s pretty cool.

And point out that I guess they are fleshing out the storyline on the Haunted Mansion.

And warn everyone away from the Imagination ride, because instead of Figment the dragon and some doddering tippler professor, Eric Idle sits there hiding his smug little hard dick and singing some dumb updated version of the imagination song while Figment causes chaos and then in the end everything is okay. They actually remodeled this ride after the last remodel (Eric Idle, next to no dragon, lack of fun) turned out the be the ride equivalent of a kick in the face.
And remind everyone that despite his acquittal and previous settlement, Michael Jackson’s Captain EO is still gone.

So buckle your safety belts and keep your head all the goddamned way back.

…

I wrote this post with the musical help of Mike Doughty.