#perspective and car and armor and guns and multiple characters like it's a lot for me

[gammaraydeath]

positively ITCHING to finish this damn drawing but it's more technical than i'm used to doing which is on one hand good practice but on the other i'm having a really hard time sitting down and just doing it. i keep getting distracted. i think i'm yearning for the part where i'm done with it and not enjoying the process very much :'T

[whole-dip]

The Amazing Adventurers of Spider-Man

As a third entry in my series analyzing theme park rides I wanted to take a step back in time and talk about one of my favorite rides ever made, The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man at Universal’s Islands of Adventure. This ride opened with the park in 1999 and is considered one of the best rides there, and until late last year was one of the most complex and well executed rides in Orlando. The ride to top it? Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. Here’s the thing, both rides’ development was headed by Scott Trowbridge. While I won’t be specifically comparing the two in this piece, while riding the similarities are apparent. I still maintain though that Rise of the Resistance is closer to the Haunted Mansion’s DNA than Spidey’s. 

We begin in Marvel Superhero Island, an area themed to a very 90s comics version of New York City. We see massive cutouts of various heroes and villains, some of them even parading around on ATVs. The gigantic Hulk coaster soars above us and we hear the roars coming from the gamma experiments gone awry. Heavy bass and electric guitar wails are heard all around as. This is not a realistic take on Marvel comics, from the bright colors to the ginormous character cutouts, this is not Marvel come to life but rather, you standing inside a comic book. Think less MCU and more Dick Tracy. Despite how much this goes against the ideas of theme park immersion nowadays, it still works. Likely because this specific era of Marvel is exactly what I fell in love with as a kid, but still, it feels like all the X-treme glory of 90s comics, without any of the overly long and exhausting story arcs nobody cares for. 

The experience starts when you enter the headquarters of the Daily Bugle and make your way through the offices. You see the desks of all our favorite employees like Betty Brant and Ben Urich, the darkroom of the Bugle’s now in-house photographer Peter Parker, and of course the giant portrait of the paper’s editor in chief, J. Jonah Jameson. As you walk you’ll notice that all the phones are ringing off the hook and faxes are coming in. The TVs are all tuned to the news where the biggest theft in New York history is unfolding live. The Sinister Syndicate has been assembled by Doctor Octopus with the villains Hobgoblin, Electro, Hydroman, and Scream, and they’re wreaking absolute havoc on the city! Not only that, Doc Ock’s anti gravity gun has allowed him to steal the Statue of Liberty herself! On a night as crazy as this the Daily Bugle needs as many reporters as it can get so you’ve been recruited to go on the scene in a state of the art armored vehicle to get report from the frontline on the villains and what Spider-Man is doing to stop them. After getting briefed you exit into the alley behind the office building, board your vehicle, don your 3D glasses, and set out to get the story. 

This queue experience informs you of a LOT of things in a very short amount of time. During this time you’re learning who Spider-Man is, who the sinister syndicate is, who the members are, what each of their powers are, and what crimes they’ve committed. It’s all done incredibly efficiently because it’s delivered to you via the news report story mechanic. It’s a great excuse for characters to talk directly at you and explain exactly what you need to know. Further, everything is given in segments so you’re never taking in more than one point at a time. You’ll see a reporter talking about Hydroman, Hydroman attacking, and then it’ll cut to the same style of video for Electro, then Scream, and so on. For the theft of the statue of liberty, you actually see as Doc Ock steals it with his antigravity gun and the reporters immediately will comment wondering where in the city he could be hiding it. All of these segments are ended with Spider-Man stopping the attack, but the villains getting away. Teaching these things are super important because the ride is heavily depended on you having a clear understanding of the story and everything going on. Similarly, Rise of the Resistance is also a heavily story dependent ride, one that is even more complex because it contains multiple twists at the very beginning.

Your vehicle then takes off into the city, above you the shadow of Spider-Man swinging by can be seen, accompanied by the spider signal. Jameson orders you via radio to get a winning report and then suddenly Spider-Man himself jumps on to the hood of your car (with an accompanying lurch forward to account for his landing)! He warns you that this could be the most dangerous night of his life, and yours, and then swings away. Pressured by Jameson again, you pursue. After dodging an oncoming garbage truck and escaping into a seemingly abandoned warehouse, you find the deconstructed statue of liberty, and the sinister syndicate continuing their plans! Unfortunately for you, you’re caught and they each try to take you down. 

The ride system used here is a cool one. The actual vehicle you’re in is a multi axis motion simulator, it can move you forward, backward, left, right, rotate, and probably more that I’m not aware of. Not only that, it’s on a track and moves through the show building as would any other dark ride. The building itself is adorned with practical set pieces like walls, crates, statue of liberty pieces as well as screens. These screens are where characters appear and work together with practical effects to create full experience. For example, the garbage truck that your vehicle nearly crashes into is a real effect of an object coming towards you, but the driver window featuring a Stan Lee cameo is a screen. When Spider-Man lands on your vehicle your simply very close to a giant screen and your car moves perfectly in sync. Not only that, but each ride film does a process of “squinching” in which the perspective of the shot is perfectly synced with the movements of your ride vehicle to always have high amounts of depth, otherwise it would look like a flat video instead of the the 3D effect. This ride is constantly playing with perspective, I’ll explain more further on.

Each villain tries to personally stop you, Electro shocks your vehicle making it vibrate wildly, Scream nearly pounces on your car, Doc Ock attempts to shoot you with his anti gravity gun, Hydroman almost drowns you, and Hobgoblin tries to bomb you from the air. Luckily, Spider-Man is on the scene to prevent any harm as you make it out of the maze-like warehouse and back on to the street. 

Again, this section perfectly shows the ways the ride system, the screens, and the effects work in tandem. When Hobgoblin tosses a bomb at you and Spider-Man webs it away, you are looking at a screen, moving underneath a physical bridge, and the explosion is accompanied by a real fireball effect. Each villain gets their own separate moment to show off their powers and personally attack you. This further drives home exactly who they are and what they can do. That knowledge is crucial and will come into play soon.

Once out on the street, Doc Ock decides to go around Spider-Man and take your vehicle hostage. He uses his anti gravity gun to lift you up towards the rooftops of Manhattan while Spider-Man pursues in an attempt to rescue you. Right when Spidey webs your vehicle he’s snatched in the air by Hobgoblin on his glider and all of you are now flown through the urban canyons at incredible speed. The entire syndicate has now tied up Spider-Man to a rooftop and your vehicle is hanging by a thread as all the villains slowly encroach to take you down together. Suddenly, Spider-Man bursts from behind and uses the villains' powers against them. He webs Electro into Hydroman where the two of them shock each other and crash into Hobgoblin whose pumpkin bombs all explode at once, allowing Spider-Man to then take out Scream and Doc Ock. Just when everything seemed over, Doctor Octopus uses reverse his anti gravity gun to send your vehicle falling down from the skyscrapers and into ground! As your hurtle down and see the asphalt of your doom getting closer and closer, Spidey webs up a net as fast as he can spin it and your fall is safely cushioned just in time.

This sequence sequence is the most involved scene, perfect for the climax of the ride. Now that you know every character’s powers and personality, you’ve got all you need to know to understand how they work together without it being a pure mess. Not only that, the ride is comfortable playing with perspective as well to make you feel as though your altitude on the ride is changing too. When your vehicle is lifted up to the rooftops you’ll see a screen in front of you showing the ride film but on both sides are practical canvas backdrops like you’d find on movie sets depicting the windows of a New York high rise. Both backdrops are designed to roll at rapid speed giving the illusion of your vehicle flying upwards. The same effect works when your perspective is shited to that of hanging off the side of the building and looking up, as well as when you’re facing down towards the ground. In reality, the ride vehicle only ever moves six inches above the ground during the entire ride. This effect was revisited in Rise of the Resistance but significantly different. On that attraction your vehicle really does lift up roughly thirty feet above ground level before dropping back down later in the ride. 

Finally, back on the slightly safer streets of New York, Spider-Man hangs upside down in front of you, the sinister syndicate tightly wound up behind him and lady liberty being returned to her island. He congratulates you on your efforts before swinging away to turn over the bad guys, as your vehicle drives back you’ll hear Stan Lee instruct you on how to safely disembark and see that Spider-Man left the anti gravity gun pointed straight at Jameson in his office, the “raise” he’d been wanting for so long! The day is saved and Spider-Man couldn’t have done it without you.

The ride is perfectly bookended with the classic story of you helping out one of your favorite characters on what may seem like a crazy day for you but is just a typical one for them. This story was repeated in Rise of the Resistance, but it’s been a staple seen in attractions like Star Tours, Harry Potter and the Escape From Gringotts, Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout, and countless others. I will say though, it is almost exclusive to attractions based on film properties and is not very common on attractions with original stories and characters. Makes sense because it’s arguably the best way to create story in which large groups of people would be meeting and interacting with characters, but it makes one wonder if a different type of story might be introduced at some point. 

So there you have it, a brief overview of The Amazing Adventurers of Spider-Man at Universal Orlando’s Islands of Adventure. While I approached this one from the perspective of it being a precursor to Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, there’s another attraction at Universal Studios next door that is structured almost like a response to one of the most classic Disney rides of all time. But I’ll leave that one for another time.