Throwback Thursday - The Great Movie Ride

The Great Movie Ride was an opening day attraction at Disney MGM Studios park. Over the years, it would become a fan favorite. However, after nearly 28 years, Disney decided to close this attraction to transform it into the park's first ride centered on Mickey Mouse. It closed on August 13, 2017.

The Great Movie Ride is housed inside a replica of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. On the park's opening day, Mickey, Minnie and many other characters placed their handprints and footprints in cement in front of the theater in the style of Hollywood's Walk of Fame. Over time, many other celebrities would do the same. This attraction was originally planned to be the main attraction in a show business themed pavilion at EPCOT to be called "Great Moments at the Movies". However, Disney executives believed the idea was strong enough to lead an entire new theme park. This attraction became to inspiration for Disney's third gate, Disney MGM Studios.

The line wound through a recreation of the Chinese Theater lobby past glass display cases containing actual costumes, props, and set pieces from various films. The lobby also featured digital posters of various motion pictures. The line then took guests into a small pre-show theater where Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne provided insight and commentary about various motion pictures and film genres—such as musicals, adventure, science-fiction, westerns, romance, and gangster films— including those films that were featured within the ride. 

As guests reached the end of the queue, they entered a 1930s-era Hollywood sound stage where they were loaded by cast members into one of two pairs of open, theatre-style seating ride vehicles. The film set within the soundstage featured a large neon theatre marquee and a cyclorama of the 1930s-era Hollywood Hills complete with the original Hollywoodland sign.

The first genre of films introduced were musicals, which begins with a cake of starlets from By a Waterfall from Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade. The next musical scenes included audio-animatronic figures of Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) swinging from a lamp post from Singin' in the Rain, followed by Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) and Bert (Dick Van Dyke) singing on the rooftops of London from Mary Poppins.

The next scene was a tribute to gangster films. The ride vehicle passed through the dark and seedy backstreets of a 1930s Chicago and past an audio-animatronic Tom Powers (James Cagney) in a scene from The Public Enemy. When both pairs of ride vehicles were in use, the #1A ride vehicle continued on to the next show scene past a green traffic light above a tunnel entrance while the #2B ride vehicle was stopped when the traffic light changed to red. While stopped, a live gangster named Mugsy (Boy) or Mugsi (Girl) and their audio-animatronic companions Squid and Beans showed up and got involved in a shoot-out with rival mobsters (Brains, Legs, and Weasel) in a car on the opposite side of the street where the ride vehicle was stopped. During the shootout, the live gangster then chased away the tour guide and hijacked the ride vehicle.

Next, the ride vehicle entered into a tribute to the Western genre. Here, guests encountered audio-animatronics of the Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) standing outside of a saloon and Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) sitting atop his horse. The #2B ride vehicle (which was already being driven by the gangster) continued past a shootout between the town sheriff and an audio-animatronic bank robber named Snake. The gangster ignored the shootout and continued on to the next scene. However, the #1A ride vehicle (which was still being driven by the tour guide) stopped in front of the town bank while a bank robbery was in progress. Suddenly, a live bank robber named Kate Durango (Girl) or Kid Carson (Boy) appeared from inside the bank. After getting into a shoot-out with the town sheriff and chasing the tour guide into the bank, the bandit set the town bank ablaze with TNT and hijacked the ride vehicle. Following this scene, the remainder of the attraction was the same for both the #1A and #2B ride vehicles.

The ride vehicle next takes guests through a scene from the movie Alien. The gangster or the bandit became nervous and sped the ride vehicle through the ship, but not before the Alien appeared and attacked the guests, popping out from both the ceiling and the wall. The ride vehicle next entered a scene set in an ancient Egyptian tomb filled with snakes containing a Raiders of the Lost Ark scene.  A second room within the temple featured a large altar in the form of the ancient Egyptian god Anubis. Near the top of the altar, a large priceless jewel was being watched over by a cloaked temple guard. The gangster or the bandit saw the jewel, stopped the ride vehicle, and disembarked to take it. Before touching the jewel, the temple guard gave a warning that those who disturbed the treasure of the gods must pay with their life. Ignoring the warning, the gangster or the bandit reached to grab the jewel. Suddenly, a plume of fiery smoke shot from the ground engulfing the temple altar (as the temple guard left, undressing to reveal that the temple guard was the original tour guide while doing so before reappearing from the shadows). When the smoke cleared, the skeletal corpse of the Gangster or Bandit was revealed and the tour guide reboarded the ride vehicle and continued on with the show.

The ride vehicle then passes through multiple movie genre scenes with audio-animatronics. The final scene takes us through a Wizard of Oz scene where an audio-animatronic Wicked Witch of the West appears and has a brief interaction with the tour guide. 

For the grand finale, when both the #1A and #2B ride vehicles were in use, they both entered a dark theater where they lined up side by side and came to a stop in front of a large movie screen. There, the tour guide concluded the tour with a three-minute film montage of classic film moments. In 2014, as part of an exclusive programming deal with Disney, Turner Classic Movies agreed to become the sponsor of the attraction. The attraction underwent a refurbishment in 2015, with the addition of a new pre-show and post-show hosted by Robert Osborne, who also provided onboard narration to the ride.

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