Hollywood and the theme park business have been inextricably linked ever since Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955. The park’s early choices included sights synergistically impressed by Disney movies, together with a 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea exhibit and rides primarily based on Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. Within the a long time the adopted, whole theme parks devoted to films opened, like Common Studios in Hollywood and Orlando, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
When Hollywood Studios first opened in 1989 it was referred to as Disney-MGM Studios, named after the enduring movie and TV manufacturing firm based in 1924. Nowadays, MGM is owned by Amazon however again within the Nineteen Eighties it was nonetheless owned by billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who first purchased MGM within the late Nineteen Sixties, and went on to affix “MGM” branding to a sequence of upscale Las Vegas resorts. When Kerkorian launched the MGM Grand in 1993, it included an amusement park of its personal, MGM Grand Adventures.
The park had a short and comparatively undistinguished historical past; it opened in 1993 and closed lower than a decade later, after the lodge repeatedly shrunk the park’s already restricted footprint to make room for extra profitable tasks like a pool complicated and set of condominium towers. Regardless of its title, MGM Grand Adventures bore no resemblance to Disney-MGM Studios, and contained no rides impressed by movies from the MGM library.
Nevertheless it nearly did.
As chronicled on a latest episode of Podcast: The Trip, the early improvement of the park included a minimum of one trip primarily based on a film. Now, given MGM’s storied historical past, there are lots of family-friendly titles they may have tried to flip into rides, together with The Wizard of Oz, Conflict of the Titans, or Forbidden Planet. However the trip that was tried was primarily based on, of all issues, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam Warfare Epic, Apocalypse Now.
The hosts of Podcast: The Trip obtained their palms on a doc titled “Apocalypse Now: MGM Grand Theme Park Trip Idea Storyline” dated from October 22, 1991, about two years earlier than MGM Grand Adventures. They don’t reveal all of its contents, however they do describe some actually weird concepts. Together with this one, for the theming within the trip’s queue:
Coming into the queue line dock constructing, the friends are surrounded by numerous video screens. An edited model of Hearts of Darkness is enjoying, which additionally contains Mr. Coppola welcoming riders to the MGM Studio Theme Park and the Apocalypse Now trip.
The notion of displaying behind-the-scenes footage whereas riders waited for an attraction primarily based on a film was not outlandish in and of itself. Many sights at Common Studios employed the identical method for many years — like their Tornado … Trip It Out! present, which was launched with an impressive IDGAF efficiency by Invoice Paxton explaining a number of the particular results used within the Tornado film.
However Apocalypse Now was no unusual movie manufacturing. Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about its creation that MGM’s designers proposed be proven within the Apocalypse Now trip queue, begins with Francis Ford Coppola evaluating the movie’s shoot to the trauma and chaos of an precise battle. (“My movie isn’t about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It is what it was actually like. It was loopy. And the best way we made it was very very like the best way the Individuals have been in Vietnam. We have been within the jungle. There have been too many people. We had entry to an excessive amount of cash, an excessive amount of gear, and little by little, we went insane.”) Hearts of Darkness doesn’t a lot reveal how you can make films because it affords a really clear blueprint of how not to make films, a minimum of in the event you intend to take action on schedule and below price range.
READ MORE: Rides Primarily based on Extraordinarily Outdated Films That Are Nonetheless In Operation
That was simply the queue space; the Apocalypse Now trip itself wasn’t any extra wise in design. Titled “Apocalypse Now River Tour,” it could have put friends on a small boat that may have taken them on a trip by way of a man-made stream, in a lot the identical manner that Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard journeys upriver to find Marlon Brando’s lacking Colonel Kurtz within the movie. In actual fact, the plans referred to as for Sheen to star within the attraction — as himself and in character as Captain Willard. (Sheen was scripted to welcome friends with pre-recorded guarantees he would “present you ways results from that movie and others are used to create film magic,” then transition to Willard, barking orders to the vacationers like “You higher get again right here in a single piece!” by way of their boat’s radio.)
I like films, and I utterly perceive the will to need step inside one via a theme park attraction. When that phantasm works — on issues like Common’s Again to the Future: The Trip or Disney’s Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance — it’s an exhilarating, immersive expertise. However Harry Potter and Star Wars are escapist fantasies. Apocalypse Now is a disturbing cautionary story about how troopers are pushed insane by the brutality of battle. Who desires to step inside that film? That’s an expertise individuals spend hundreds of {dollars} attempting to course of by way of remedy, not hundreds of {dollars} flying to Las Vegas to pattern it for themselves.
So it’s not totally surprising, then, that MGM ultimately pivoted away from making an Apocalypse Now trip the centerpiece of their new theme park. However in accordance with an interview with Rick Bastrup, a accomplice within the trip design firm that labored on MGM Grand Adventures, the attraction wasn’t deserted as a result of it was a nightmarish thought. As an alternative, Bastrup defined in 2011, his firm “labored with Francis Ford Coppola for awhile on this however he didn’t come to an association with the Lodge.”
In actual fact, when Coppola and MGM couldn’t come to a deal, Grand Adventures didn’t ditch the idea totally. As an alternative, they eliminated all of the Apocalypse Now branding and as a substitute made a extra a generic boat trip about moviemaking that also included a sequence the place guests get to expertise the horrors of the Vietnam Warfare.
The ultimate attraction was dubbed the “Backlot River Tour,” despite the fact that the MGM Grand lodge didn’t have a working backlot, and actual working backlots have a tendency to not be navigated by river boat. In idea, Backlot River Tour was like Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise — if the Jungle Cruise tried (and utterly failed) to persuade you that they have been really filming Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt’s Jungle Cruise film in the course of your Anaheim trip.
Indicators that lined the queue for the attraction promised it could reveal “The Magic Behind the Digicam!” despite the fact that, once more, no precise cameras have been concerned as a result of no precise films have been made at MGM Grand Adventures. Friends boarded boats that then floated by way of by way of the phony backlot, the place a wide range of upcoming films with titles like “River Dealer,” “Swamp Creature,” and the inventively named “Temple of Gloom” have been supposedly in manufacturing.
The Backlot River Tour’s show-stopping climax was a repurposed sequence from the proposed Apocalypse Now trip. Friends are introduced by way of boat to the “scorching set” of a movie referred to as “Jungle Storm.” A fairly impressive-looking helicopter rose from behind a rocky facade, after which an animatronic gunner would begin blasting a prop machine gun mounted to the chopper’s skids within the route of the trip car. The concept of a army helicopter trying to homicide friends is … in all probability not an idea that may be accepted at a company degree in 2023..
However this was in 1993. You possibly can see this unhinged second for your self within the YouTube video beneath, which paperwork the complete Backlot River Tour. When you already know what to search for, the Apocalypse Now components are blatantly apparent. (That a part of the video begins across the 8:00 minute mark.)
The Backlot River Tour closed years earlier than MGM Grand Adventures lastly shut down for good in 2002. Till it was featured on Podcast: The Trip, I by no means knew concerning the theme park, a lot much less its fake backlot tour and pseudo-Apocalypse Now attraction. I can solely factor of 1 phrase to sum up my emotions about lacking my likelihood to trip it: “The horror. The horror.”
