© Steven Liebman |
The ride itself is a quick (about 5 minute) re-telling of the movie "The Little Mermaid." Once you enter your "clamshell" vehicle, Scuttle the seagull greets you, playing an accordion, to regale you with the tale of Ariel who tells us (spoiler alert) she wants more out of life, falls in love, make a deal with the sea witch, gets her legs, loses her voice, loses the Prince, gets the Prince back and marries the Prince.
Yes, this is all done in about 5 minutes, complete with movie's musical score and singing by Ursula and a great Busby Berkeley-style choreography of Sebastian's hit "Under the Sea," featuring 50 spinning starfish.
© Steven Liebman |
- Nearly 200 Audio-Animatronic figures perform in the attraction.
- Ursula is the largest Audio-Animatronic figure in the show at 7½-feet tall and 12-feet wide. Flexible materials allow her to bounce along with the music.
- The attraction features an Omnimover ride system pioneered by Walt Disney Imagineers in the 1960s and used for the “Doom Buggies” of the Haunted Mansion. This allows the "clamshell" you ride in to rotate 180 degrees so you can go backwards as you slowly descend "under water."
- Imagineers working on the attraction consulted with Ariel’s animator in the film, Glen Keane, who recommended that her hair be treated as a character all its own.
- Each scene of the attraction was first built as a one-quarter-inch scale model first for the Disneyland ride and then as a one‑inch scale model, so Imagineers could “ride” through the attraction scene-by-scene before full construction began.
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