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Toy Story Midway Mania!
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Toy Story Midway Mania! (marketed as Toy Story Mania!) is an interactive theme park attraction at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida and Disney's California Adventure in California.
Designed by Walt Disney Imagineering and inspired by the Disney/Pixar films Toy Story and Toy Story 2, the Florida version opened officially on May 31, 2008 while the California version officially opened on June 17, 2008.
It was announced during a press conference at the Walt Disney World Resort on January 26, 2007.
Concept
Park guests wear 3-D glasses (Carnival Games Goggles) aboard spinning vehicles that travel through virtual environments based on classic carnival midway games. Ride vehicles seat up to four in back-to-back pairs.
The attraction features five mini-games after a practice round, each of which includes at least one "Easter egg" that can trigger additional targets or gameplay changes.
Mini-games
- Pie Throw Practice Booth (pie toss target practice game, a no points introduction)
- Hamm & Eggs (egg throw game)
- Bo Peep's Baaa-loon Pop (dart throw game)
- Green Army Men Shoot Camp (baseball throw / plate breaking game)
- Buzz Lightyear's Flying Tossers (ring toss game)
- Woody's Rootin' Tootin' Shootin' Gallery (suction cup shooting game)
Each guest's score is recorded by an onboard display screen as points are acquired with individual toy cannons firing simulated projectiles at virtual targets. Toy Story characters including Woody, Hamm, Buzz Lightyear and Bo Peep appear during the attraction's different games.
Similar technology has been used in Disney attractions such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for Buccaneer Gold at DisneyQuest and several Buzz Lightyear attractions. According to Disney, it is the first attraction created simultaneously by Walt Disney Imagineering for two theme parks.
The line at both parks features a large Mr. Potato Head Audio-Animatronics figure that interacts with guests through pre-recorded snippets of dialogue performed by comedian Don Rickles, who voiced the character in the Toy Story films. The sophisticated figure identifies people in the audience, sings and tells jokes.
Technology
Toy Story Midway Mania! is one of the most technologically sophisticated attractions yet developed by Walt Disney Imagineering, costing an estimated $80 million to design and build. It marks the company's first use of industrial ethernet for a ride's control system. Many of the parts for the attraction's control system came from two of Disney's corporate sponsors, Siemens AG and Hewlett-Packard.
The control system is divided into three components: one for the ride vehicles, one for the games and one more for the attraction's special effects. Programmable logic controllers in the vehicles alert the control system wirelessly via ProfiNET RT to the vehicle's speed and location. The central controller then sends its instructions back to the vehicles using a hard-wired network within the track. The one-way communications flow adds a factor of safety, even though the wireless network is protected against outside interference, such as a denial-of-service attack.
The attraction features more than 150 PCs, which includes one HP Windows XP PC for each of Midway Mania's 56 game screens, as well as others that control the special effects at each game. At the game screens, two tracking systems provide the game control system with the vehicle's exact location, making sure that gameplay is not affected by even minor differences in vehicle position. According to Jody Gerstner, executive director of show and ride controls, "The game doesn’t care if the car parks in the same spot every time. It just needs to know where each car has actually parked, and it can compensate." Additional sensors in the spring-action shooter provide information on its orientation, which is fine-tuned using data on the position of the ride vehicle at the screen and the rotation of the seats on the vehicle base.
All three sub-systems work together to handle any contingency. For example, if a delay or other vehicle stoppage is detected (such as might occur if the loading and unloading of the ride vehicles is taking longer than expected), the control system can command the affected game screens to launch a non-scoring practice round, so that guests may continue to shoot targets while they wait. Similarly, it can instruct the show control system to play an audio spiel telling guests about the delay.
Name Variation
The attraction is being referred to as both Toy Story Midway Mania! and Toy Story Mania!. While the attraction marquees and some in-park signage read the former, the latter has been used in press releases to the news media, used in both resorts' advertisements, and on the disneyland.com, disneyworld.com, and official promotional website for the attraction, along with attraction merchandise.
Disney has not explained the reason for the inconsistency in its public communications.
Music
Music for the queue area was arranged and recorded by Jennifer Hammond at Capitol Studios with a live orchestra. More than an hour of music was recorded, all based on the first two Toy Story scores composed by Randy Newman.
The article text above is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Toy Story Midway Mania".
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