Recent Oscar nominee Kerry Condon reprises her MCU role as Iron Man’s latest digital assistant Friday, so you have two characters who only speak English and a third who only speaks French-clearly a practical decision for a theme park with a large English-speaking customer base, but also the kind of weird narrative choice that will keep you puzzled long after the ride is done. Brie Larson appears via screen as the cosmos-spanning Captain Marvel, explaining in English the details of the attack to Iron Man (who exclusively speaks French). This joyless walk is worth it when you get to its end and are briefed by an impressive Iron Man audio-animatronic (helmet on, of course). Instead of stumbling upon the band goofing around in a studio with the ever-silent Marino and their no-nonsense manager Illeana Douglas, you now just walk through another one of Disney’s bland technocratic Avengers headquarters, a silver and blue expanse that might as well be a hospital waiting room. The new preshow dumps all remnants of the Aerosmith ride, of course. It’s not much as far as a story goes, but it’s no less impactful than trying to get to an Aerosmith concert in time. The roller coaster trains are actually space rockets outfitted with some kind of heat sink that will draw the missiles away from the planet, you see, while the superheroes harmlessly blow them up in the vacuum of space. Those two Marvel heroes are the stars of Flight Force, as they team up with park guests to keep a barrage of Kree missiles from destroying Earth. (Melodramatic Diane Warren ballads don’t really scream “thrill ride,” you know?) It was a baffling relationship from day one, and that’s why a retheme has been anticipated by many Disney fans for almost as long as the ride has been around.Įven if Disney hadn’t fully assimilated Marvel Comics into its corporate sprawl long ago, Iron Man and Captain Marvel would be a better fit for a Disney park than the band whose two most famous members were nicknamed the Toxic Twins because of all the chemicals they hoovered up back in the ‘70s. The band didn’t even have much of a Disney connection they were never on the company’s in-house record label, Hollywood Records, and the one major hit they had from a Disney-released movie, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” from 1998’s Armageddon, isn’t one of the songs featured on the coaster. A roller coaster featuring one of the most notoriously libidinous and drugged-up bands of the ‘70s and ‘80s never made sense, no matter how sober and family friendly Aerosmith had become by the time the ride opened in 1998. It all comes down to what feels right at a Disney park. Last week I rode that version of the coaster, now named Avengers Assemble: Flight Force, and unsurprisingly the retheme is a slight improvement on the original. It closed that year to undergo a retheme into an Avengers ride, as part of the construction of a European outpost of Avengers Campus. Walt Disney Studios Park, the younger of the two theme parks there, had a version of the Aerosmith coaster from 2002 to 2019. I feel comfortable saying that after a recent trip to Disneyland Paris. The Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith at Disney’s Hollywood Studios has long been the most peculiar and out of place ride at any Disney theme park, and those are the only three things I’ll miss about it whenever it’s inevitably rethemed. Beyond the coaster itself, there are really only three things I love about Disney’s Aerosmith coaster: Ken Marino’s wordless cameo in the preshow, the old Velvet Underground and MC5 show posters in the queue, and the very specific weirdness of somebody’s grandmother screaming “DUDE LOOKS LIKE A LADY” out of tune and out of time directly into your ear while you’re blasting through a couple of loops.
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