Toy Story Mania: Freight Frenzy
Toy Story Freight Frenzy is an attraction concept based on the wildly popular Toy Story Mania ride at Disney parks around the world. This twist to the beloved ride of Toy Story Mania, a 4D shooting arcade game, keeps the ride mechanism intact, but augments the experience with more physically thrilling elements and imparts a new storyline.
Before I delve into the intricacies of the designs and architecture, allow me to first do a brief overview of the existing Toy Story Mania attractions.
Existing Toy Story Mania Rides
The premise behind Toy Story Mania is simple. Guests join Andy's toy in a series of mini-carnival styled games on a spinning ride vehicle. The vehicle moves from screen to screen, where guests, with 3D glasses and a blaster / gun can shoot objects on the screen. With convincing animations, sound and practical effects, the experience does feel very much like throwing physical objects at at a real carnival stall. See the POV video on the right to get a sense of the ride if you have not ride it before.
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6M5KMOgbrQ&w=640&h=480]
Toy Story Mania, due to it's success, has been replicated in three Disney Parks around the world. They all have basically the same ride, but the theme and architectural facade are different.
The Disney California Adventure version of Toy Story Mania is located in a Victorian pier setting. As such, it has adopted a seaside victorian architectural style. The Disney Hollywood Studios version in Florida is themed to a studio setting (for obvious reasons). The Tokyo Disney Sea edition, the newest amongst the three, has an alternative victorian style that is very much based on the architectural styles of the Coney Island Luna Park in New York.
The Concept
If toys are alive, their voyage across the oceans in a cargo container across the vast ocean must have been excruciatingly long. What if the toys throw a carnival party in the cargo containers to kill time? That must be pretty fun. And that is the genesis of this rendition of Toy Story Mania: Freight Frenzy. Given this backstory, the ride would take place and crisscross in a giant stack of cargo container. The obvious starting point of the design is the attraction facade.
The cargo container is very interesting from a design and architectural point of view. It is simply a plain metallic box that comes in a wide array of colours. You can stack them, tile them and rearrange them in whichever way you like. It's flexibility makes it somehow evocative of an adult version of Lego bricks, which, interestingly, is also a toy.
Just like Lego bricks, the cargo container enables infinitely many possible spatial combinations and arrangements. As such, as basic building blocks, cargo containers have very interesting architectural possibilities. Here are a few:
The style of the attraction facade is mainly a playful amalgamation of containers in mutually perpendicular orientations (except for one), whilst still keeping a rather industrial look that comes along with the metallic textures of the containers. A few of the cargo containers feature posters of the character from the Toy Story franchise such that one can readily identify the attraction from a distance.
I have placed a cargo container crane, a reference to one of the ending sequences in Toy Story 3, within the structure which is programmed to move back and forth intermittently. These motions, along with a few sections of exterior ride track as seen in the concept art above, add some visual kinetic energy to the overall architectural space.
Of course, the entire Toy Story Mania ride cannot possibly physically fit within these containers. As such, this is merely a facade for a much larger show building behind whose exterior is not themed, and is not visible to the guests.
The shape of the show building is rather arbitrary I must say. I have opted for this shape simply because it will fit nicely in an empty plot of land between Toy Story Land and Fantasyland in Hong Kong Disneyland, which, in my opinion, will greatly benefit from a Toy Story Mania ride due to the insane popularity of the Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters ride (soon to be re-themed to Ant-Man) amongst the Hong Kong audience.
The attraction will fit very nicely, both physically and thematically, between the rather odd and long pathway between Toy Story Land and Fantasyland in Hong Kong Disneyland. There has always been rumours from the original plan of Toy Story Land that, indeed, a Toy Story Mania ride was originally planned here.
The Ride Experience
As stated previously, the ride experience will be very much the same as all the other Toy Story Mania rides around the world. However, instead of spinning around and moving from screen to screen in a monolithic show building, the ride vehicles move from cargo container to the next. On top of that, the ride vehicle will also move vertically, thus introduces some (minor) drops, and thus more thrill to the ride, between carnival game screens.
In terms of the actual carnival games, the ones from existing attractions can be re-used. However, I envision a few fun additions. In particular, being in a cargo container, there must be lots of identical packaged toys stacked up together, much like the shopping aisle scene from Toy Story 2. Thus, one of the shooting game could be themed to a hide-and-seek to find the 'real' Buzz Light Year (or any other toys from the movies).
Last but not the least, I should mention, instead of riding on a carnival-themed vehicle, guests will be boarding a packaging 'paper' box.
What do you think about Toy Story Mania: Freight Frenzy? Do you have any ideas and suggestions as to what other new experiences / show scenes can be added to this twist on the classic Toy Story Mania Ride? Let me know in the comment section below.