Or, as one theme park scholar put it: such rides “affect a pleasurable and enticing assault on the bodies and minds” of riders. The forced perspective that makes me believe I’m seeing a life-sized ship in the Pirates of the Caribbean’s salt-scented waters is the same forced perspective that your brain needs to see it too. They have the freedom, in other words, to decide exactly what you can and can’t see. In industry parlance, Space Mountain is a “dark ride”: the building that houses it blocks out all traces of natural light and allows designers (Imagineers, if they work for Disney) to conjure their scenes using only black light for illumination. I was also inside a dome in central Florida, on a ridelikely operated by someone making, maybe, minimum wage. ![]() ![]() I was surrounded by white dwarfs and meteor showers, and I was seeing, feeling, what no one on earth had ever seen before. It made me feel, pretty much, like I was hurtling through space, severed from the mothership, lost forever and not really minding it, not yet. I had loved the Enchanted Tiki Room and It’s a Small World, and now Space Mountain: a rollercoaster that plunged me into the darkness, past the stars. I was riding Space Mountain, and I had been thinking about how my favorite rides at Disney-sorry, my favorite attractions at Disney-were the simple ones, the ones that had grown, conceptually, a little dated, a little frayed around the edges: childhood dreams of another era. ![]() This is what I told myself the first time I visited Disney World as an adult, and in that moment, I believed it.
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