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While most big-ticket theme park rides are inspired by blockbuster movies, some of the very best Disney and Universal attractions are instead inspired by television shows, likeWalt Disney Worlds Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Universals The Simpsons Ride and the underrated Dudley Do-Rights Ripsaw Falls at Islands of Adventure.This article is not about any of those rides.Instead, the 15 attractions below are examples of attractions that adapted television shows to theme parks with less success, either because they brought little to nothing fromtheir source material to the ride experience, or because they just flat-out werent any fun. They hail from parks all over the country and while most have long since closed, a few are still in operation, disappointing people every day of the year. Next time, just ride the Tower of Terror or The Simpsons Ride instead.The American Idol ExperienceDisney-MGM Studios park wasdesigned to operate as a tourist attraction and a functioning film and TV studio. But within a few years of its opening in 1989, the actual productions at the facilityhad dwindled to next to nothing. Disney promised tourists a trip to a working studio, and with less evidence of that all the time, they began adding attractions that mimicked the look of popular TV shows, including aWho Wants to Be a Millionaire?show and anAmerican Idolexperience, where tourists participated in a staged recreation of the popular reality competition show, complete with judgeswho acted like Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Simon Cowell. Guests could audition for a spot on a performance, and then compete against other tourists; the winner of each days American Idol Experience finale got a Dream Ticket which allowed them to skip the line at an actualIdolTV audition.But that came at a cost; namely you had to be willing tosacrifice up to six hours of your day ata pricy theme park to keep showing up to auditions and performances. If thats what you wanted and if by some small chance, you actually won then it all worked out. If youdidntwin, well, you spent a lot of moneyso a fake Simon Cowell tell youhow much you suckedinstead of riding Toy Story Mania.The Battle of GalacticaWith sci-fi spectacles hot properties in the late 1970s thanks toStar Wars, Universal followed suit withBattlestar Galactica, a glossy TV series about the battle between human space colonists and a race of robots known as Cylons. The show was one of the more expensive television productions of its day so expensive, in fact, that it wound up getting canceled after only 24 episodes. DuringGalacticas short-lived initial run, Universal added it to its Studio Tour in Hollywood, in a short animatronic and visual effects setpiece known as The Battle of Galactica. Tourists were captured by the Cylons, brought into a show building, and then, after a brief skirmish, freed by a human actor dressed as an outer space warrior. The area where the Battle of Galactica once stood was demolished in the early 90s to make room for Back to the Future: The Ride, which is now The Simpsons Ride. Still 12+ years is actually a pretty good run for a laser battle inspired by a long-canceled TV show.READ MORE: 15 Beloved Disney Rides That No Longer ExistChip n Dale GadgetcoasterThe final episode ofChip n Dale: Rescue Rangerswas already three years old by the time Disney added a junior roller coaster loosely inspired by the show to Disneyland. Known as Gadgets Go Coaster for most of its history, the now 30+ year old ride was recently named the Chip n Dale Gadgetcoaster. The ride itself has remained basically the same and itstill holds the dubious distinction of being the shortest rideat the Happiest Place on Earth. A trip on the Gadgetcoasterlasts just 45 seconds. If you wait for any appreciable amount of time for this extremely underwhelming experience you will surely want to (gadget) go somewhere else with your children afterwards.Doug Live!The animated TV seriesDougendured all through the1990s, first on Nickelodeon and then on ABC. Disney even releasedDougs 1st Movie in 1999. That same year, they also added a stage show to Disney-MGM Studios called Doug Live! While a lot of 90s kids would have been delighted to see the characters fromDougin person, you need to remember that the cartoon featured highly-stylized animation and Doug Live!mostly involved live-action performers dressed to look like Doug Funnie and his pals (including his dog Porkchop). The bizarre stars of this musicalare nothing less than undiluted nightmaresmade flesh. Doug Live! played from the spring of 1999 into the summer of 2001. Honestly, when you see what Roger looked like in this show, youll be amazed it lasted that long.The Funtastic World of Hanna-BarberaThe left side ofUniversal Studios Floridasmain thoroughfare has housed a series of big simulator rides throughout the parks history. The very first was called The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera, and it featured a variety of characters from the Hanna-Barbera catalogue trying to rescue a kidnapped Elroy Jenson from the villainous Dick Dastardly. It was essentially a tamer and less technology sophisticated version of Back to the Future: The Ride geared toward younger kids. As a result, the illusion that you were zooming around in your own personal flying car was a lot less convincing than BTTF:TR. No surprise, then, that Universal replaced it with another TV-inspired simulator, Jimmy Neutrons Nicktoon Blast, after about a decade of operation.Garfields NightmareThis notoriously low-rent amusement park ride at Pennsylvanias Kennywood park slapped some vaguely spooky theming and a bunch of blacklight images of the popular comic strip and cartoon cat Garfield atop an ancient Old Mill attractionthat first openedway back in 1901. The venerableride was given a variety of overlaps and updated themes through the years; in 2004, it was transformed into Garfields Nightmare. As detailed in a Very Local history of the attraction, the rides designers initially had big plans that involved 3 effects and CGI and animatronics. But because the Old Mill was, well, old, with limited rider capacity, the creative team recalled being explicitly told by management We cant make it too great because too many people would want to ride it. As it turns out, this is not a creative strategy that results in a good theme park attraction.Hercules and Xena: Warriors of the ScreenUniversal Studios Floridas opening overlapped with the heyday of syndicated television programming,none of it bigger than the two-headed adventure show hydra ofHercules: The Legendary JourneysandXena: Warrior Princess.When the previous subject of Universals attraction all about TV production, Murder, She Wrote,was canceled in 1996, they re-themed the show to be based around the two popular series. But thenHerculeswas canceledin 1999 too. Wizards of the Screen was performed for the final time in early 2000, meaning itoperated for less than five years, making it one of theless successful attractions in Universal history. When you watch clips of the show, its not hard to see why.Mike Fink Keel BoatsBelieve it or not, in the mid-1950s, Disneylaunched a full-blown pop-culture phenomenon with a series of episodes of theirDisneylandanthology television series about famous American pioneer Davy Crockett. One was called Davy Crocketts Keel Boat Race, and saw Crockett square off with another famous historical figure, boatman Mike Fink. According to legend, Walt Disney had the idea for a Mike Fink Keel Boats attraction during production of the film; the original Disneyland attractionrepurposedthe two actual boats from the production of Davy Crocketts Keel Boat Race.Which is both an interesting bit of trivia and a not especially thrilling attraction, as the small boats simply took guests on a leisurely tour of the parks Rivers of America. Disney added Keel Boats to the Magic Kingdom and then toDisneyland Paris (in the early 1990s!), but all were gradually phased out by the end of the 2000s afterone of the boats capsized at Disneyland. Mike Fink and his boats might be gone, but Davy Crockett remains; you can still ride his Explorer Canoes around Frontierland.Motor Boat Cruise to Gummi GlenFrom the late 1950s to the early 1990s, the eastern edge of Disneyland was home to something called Motor Boat Cruise, which was essentially the watery equivalent of the parksAutopia. Only instead of miniature cars zooming around a racetrack, guests piloted small boats as they glided through a man-made waterway. Like Autopia, guests controlled their crafts speed and direction but only to a point. A hidden rail under the water kept the boats from straying too far off course.As the attraction aged, Disney tried to reinvigorate it byre-theming it tothe then-popular Disney cartoonAdventures of the Gummi Bears. Enter ...Motor Boat Cruise to Gummi Glen. But instead of the typical level of Disney magic (and high-tech animatronics), the new ride amounted to little more than some plywood illustrations of the Gummi Bear characters around the same boats and track. Bouncing here and there and everywhere? Not these Gummi Bears! Plywood dont bounce. The updated Motor Boats were sent to dry dock by 1993.Nickelodeon Slime StreakThe American Dream mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey, boasts its own indoor theme park, Nickelodeon Universe, whereevery ride is inspired by television series ranging fromPaw Patrol toSpongeBob SquarePantsto multiple Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles roller coasters. And then there is Nickelodeon Slime Streak, a tame coaster with zero loopsthat runs a single brief circuit around the park in a little over one minute. What does this have to do with Nickelodeon orits famous slime? Uh ... the track is orange like the Nickelodeon logo? And the sign at the entrance is green? Think of all the incredible theme park attraction that could be inspired by Nickelodeon remember Nickelodeon Studios? and then compare it to this video of a coaster gliding through a mall for 75 seconds.The Outer Limits: Flight of FearOnce upon a time, Viacom tried to compete withfellow media conglomerates like Disney and Universal by forming its own theme park division, which acquired several popular theme parks around the United States and added Paramount and Viacom branding to their attractions. Thats how Virginias Kings Dominion and Ohios Kings Island both wound up with a roller coaster named afterThe Outer Limits, the famous 1960s sci-fi anthology show that was then in the midst of a revival on Showtime.Flight of Fearis a launching indoor coaster that supposedlybrings guests into a restricted military hangar to view arecovered UFO. After Paramount sold their parks to Cedar Fair, the ride continued on as just Flight of Fear, with all references toThe Outer Limitsremoved. In other words: As a coaster, this was totally fine. As anOuter Limits ride ... uh ... I guess you could say that the track layout meant they controlled the vertical and the horizontal? Look, Im trying here...Superstar LimoThere may not be a more infamous attraction in the history of all of Disneys theme parks than Superstar Limo. In the words of one Disney executive, it was initially imagined as apaparazzi ride and you're catching celebrities. There was just one problem. (Technically there weremany problems, but there was one catastrophic problem.) During the rides development, Princess Diana was killed in a car crash whileher vehicle was trying to sneak way from a pack of paparazzi.It was too late to cancel the ride outright, so Disney had to completely reconfigure it.Now guests were celebrities themselves, arriving in Hollywood for the first time and then taking a slow-moving dark ride through sparsely decorated show scenes filled with stiff animatronics of other celebs. Although not linked to any one specific television show, the ridesanimatronic stars were mostly ABC (and therefore Disney) talentsof the time like Tim Allen, Regis Philbin, and Drew Carey. Superstar Limo opened with Disney California Adventure in the winter of 2001 and closed less than a year later. The track and vehicles were re-themed toMonsters Inc.and dubbed Monsters Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue, a ride that has, somewhat improbably, survived at California Adventure to the present day.The Swamp Thing SetThese days, nobody goes to Universal Studios Florida expecting to watch theproduction of a TV show. But when the park first opened, they not only expected it, they practically demanded it. In the parks early years you could watch a TV taping at Nickelodeon Studios, or take the parks tram tour through its backlot. One part of the parkwas home tothe standing sets from theSwamp Thingtelevision show that airedon USA Network from 1990 to 1993. You can probablyguess where this is headed; when the show was canceled, the sets were worthless. Nobody wanted to seewhere a middling TV seriesusedto get made. Afterthe sets were torn down, Universal used the area as the home to itsMen in Black shooting gallery ride.The Walking Dead: A Walk Through AttractionUniversal has carved out avery successful niche in the theme park world with their annual Halloween Horror Nights events andtheir elaborately themed haunted houses. Attempts to translate that success into a year-round attraction have proven to be a bit trickier. Oneexample is a sort of permanent HHN-style house that appeared at Universal Studios Hollywoodin 2016, inspiredby the long-runningWalking Dead TV franchise.Halloween Horror Nights caters to an older fanbase, but the rest of the year, Universal is mostly a place for families with kids. So the Walking Dead attraction (which, yes, you literally walked through, encountering actors in makeup designed by the same team that created the shows zombies) had to satisfy horror enthusiasts without beingtoo scary for a general audience. Thats a tough needle to thread, and the results wound up frustrating members of both camps, who either found it too tame or too disturbing. The attraction shuffled its last visitors through in early 2020.Woody Woodpeckers Nuthouse CoasterIts just a rule: Any upscale theme parkthat catersto families needs at least one extremely underwhelming and only vaguely themed roller coaster inspired by a nonthreatening and widely recognizable animated character. Disneyland has its Chip n Dale Gadgetcoaster, and foralmost a quarter of a century, Universal Studios Florida had Woody Woodpeckers Nuthouse Coaster, a similar (and, at 45 seconds in length, similarly short) thrill ride for small children. And what did it have to do with Woody Woodpecker? So little that a few years ago Universal was able torepaint the track, refurbish the trains, and rename it the Trolls Trollercoaster after the popular film series. [insertmanic Woody Woodpecker laugh here]Get our free mobile appAmazing Theme Park Rides Based on Movies That Were Never Built
