1. Introduction
[1.1] When Covid-19 forced theme parks to shutter in spring 2020, many parks took to YouTube to console their locked-out, locked-down fans. Disney Parks uploaded twenty of the forty-one videos in its "Virtual Disney Rides" playlist—high-definition, point of-view (POV) ride-throughs of attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure and Radiator Springs Racer—in or after April 2020, though many had been previously recorded. In May, Universal Orlando offered fans a virtual trip through its parks, with Discover Universal managing editor Katie Schmidt (2020) embedding 360-degree ride-through videos of The Incredible Hulk Coaster and Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit in an official blog post where she sought to "imagine [her] perfect day exploring Universal…At Home."
[1.2] In offering parkgoers solace, Disney and Universal followed fans' leads. Their YouTube tours mirrored playlists like gaming site Polygon's (https://www.polygon.com/), whose April 2020 "visit to virtual Disneyland" featured an exhaustive compilation of forty-one 4K ride-through videos shot by fans in the California park. Polygon followed up with a thirty-six-video "virtual visit to the Magic Kingdom at Disney World" in June. The site pulled from an array of fan accounts for its virtual visits, including DarthVader92, ThemeParkHD, and Attractions 360, whose "Theme Park Enthusiast" brothers write on their YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/Attractions360/about) that they "bring the fun" to "those who can't make it out to the parks"—some 1.54 million subscribers to Disney Parks' 1.52 million, as of February 2022.
[1.3] Both the parks' and Polygon's consolations underscore the important role that ride-through videos play in theme park fandom by bridging the physical space of the theme park with the more general space of the home or home screen. The theme park ride-through video, sometimes known as the POV video, is a fan-shot, first-person, and largely continuous recording of a ride. Generally they run four to eight minutes long and offer viewers a near-uninterrupted record of an attraction, from queuing to disembarking. As Rebecca Williams (2020b) notes, "For theme park fans…it is the act of visiting the physical sites themselves that is central to their engagement," even while fans extend that engagement by "planning for these visits, recording photos and experiences, and discussing the parks online with others on message boards and social media sites" (138). But ride-through videos are like and unlike those other spaces where theme park fans converge—blogs, message boards, social media—because they simultaneously stand beside and stand in for the physical sites.
[1.4] If the ride-through video's here-and-there nature stresses what Williams (2020b) labels the "spatial element" of theme park fandom (138) by relocating parks from Orlando, Kaatsheuvel, or Tokyo to your home, it also stresses a different, distinctly temporal element of that fandom. Scott Lukas, noting the "dearth of time-focused and temporal analyses" of themed spaces, offers his own suggestion of how time operates in theme parks: through their "nostalgic" or "utopian" constructions of the past or future; through guests' present experience in parks or remembrances thereof; through what Lukas variously describes as the altered, perceived, affective, chronological, narrative, and cinematic time of the rides themselves; and through the "external time" of theme park encounters "at home, on the Internet, and through social media" (2016, 21–23). The ride-through video is both nostalgic and utopian, remembrance and projection, internal and external. In its there-and-here, then-and-now sweep, the ride-through video underscores theme parks' "sometimes complementary, sometimes competing" (220) time signatures. The ride-through video simultaneously points its viewer to several different moments in time: to the past experience of a ride or attraction as captured by the video; to the present experience of that ride or attraction in the video; and to the future experience of that ride or attraction as promised by the video, assuming the ride still exists. These different tenses position the theme park video as at the same time an archive, a live performance, and a promotion for some future performance, live or otherwise.
[1.5] These three ways of seeing the ride-through video split the difference between what Diana Taylor (2003) calls the archive and the repertoire. The archive survives in "documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs," whereas the repertoire "enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing…all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non reproducible" (19–20). If the theme park video documents an ephemeral ride-through, then its viewer also reenacts that ride-through in their first-person viewing; the theme park ride-through video is both a script and stage. Such videos challenge Taylor's assertion that "the live performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive," that "embodied memory because it is live exceeds the archive's ability to capture it" (20). More obviously than recorded theatrical performances, the theme park ride-through video offers viewers an embodied memory and an embodied experience. Nico Dicecco (2015), in his own tango with Taylor, reminds us that "working with archival materials…is live, a doing of access"—and the theme park video, in its first-person perspective and its liveness, emphasizes Dicecco's sense that "a video of a performance both actually is a performance and depends on performance for its value and meaning within the archive" (116–17). The theme park ride-through video, like the theme park ride itself, casts fans as actors in the park's repertory, or else it serves as a rehearsal for performances to come.
2. Theme park ride-through video as archive
[2.1] Whatever the ride-through video's present and future tenses, it most clearly points to the past, preserving a live experience for the sake of posterity or as a matter of record. In this respect, such videos share the same purpose as the videos housed in the New York Public Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/theatre-film-and-tape-archive), whose website explains that it "document[s] and preserve[s] Theatre history" in a collection of some five thousand professional recordings of live performances. Unlike those videos, however, ride-through videos are not professionally produced or cataloged; they are not formally archived on physical media; and they do not require a library card or an appointment to view. They are more like the fan-shot Broadway bootlegs on YouTube—more like what Abigail De Kosnik, in a parallel dance with Taylor (2003), calls a rogue archive: an amateur-run, always available, highly accessible repository with "content that can be streamed or downloaded in full, with…no required payment, and no regard for copyright restrictions" (2016, 2).
[2.2] Indeed, in their roguish nature, ride-through videos' most immediate archival antecedent is not the recorded theatrical performance but the home movie. Theme park attendees have long documented their experiences in private archives and libraries, in the specific form of what Jean-Pierre Meunier (1969) famously calls le film-souvenir. The practice was standard enough by 1976—a decade on from Kodak's introduction of the Super 8mm camera—for an official Walt Disney World (WDW) pamphlet, presented "compliments of" Great American Film (GAF), to offer several pointers on "bringing Walt Disney World and the rest of your vacation 'back home with you' in pictures" (17), including moving pictures: "Pan slowly," "Zoom Sparingly," and "Don't try to film the entire Jungle Cruise…on a few seconds of film," because "a minimum of five full seconds is normally required for any movie scene to be enjoyed and understood" (19). GAF promotes continuity and naturalism—principles that later ride-through videographers follow to an extreme.
Video 1. "Restored Home Movie," a twenty-minute 1976 home movie uploaded by RetroWDW (2020), a subsidiary of the nonprofit Buena Vista Historical Society.
[2.3] We can see these principles at work in video 1, RetroWDW's "Restored Home Movie: A Trip to WDW," a silent Super 8mm film dated 1976 but uploaded to YouTube in 2020. The movie begins with a twenty-five-second pan of WDW's Town Square and features scenes from Space Mountain (including a self-reflexive shot of an animatronic man holding a camcorder in RCA's Home of Future Living), the Tiki Room (including, in a move "unusual for the time," low-light footage of the attraction), and the Jungle Cruise (including several long takes of the attraction's splashing elephants). "Restored Home Movie" is just one of dozens of films from the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s uploaded to RetroWDW (a subsidiary of the Buena Vista Historical Society), and RetroWDW is just one of several channels devoted to older ride-throughs. KDGoldenYears, for instance, boasts on its YouTube "About" page that it brings back "so many lost, cherished memories" by "restoring the historic days of Kings Dominion! From decades far as the 70's, through the Paramount Era." True to its word, KDGoldenYears is where I came across a six-and-a-half-minute ride-through (video 2) of the Virginia park's Smurf Mountain—a ride I have many cherished memories of—dated August 19, 1988, its on-screen clock indicating the time as 2:10 p.m., the camera operator seated behind a woman wearing a red baseball hat.
Video 2. A late '80s trip through Smurf Mountain, courtesy of KDGoldenYears (2015).
[2.4] Kings Dominion replaced Smurf Mountain with Volcano: The Blast Coaster in 1998 (I have many memories of that ride too), but the roller coaster was torn down in 2019. Smurf Mountain's—and then Volcano's—erosion sediments the "threat of replacement and progress inherent in theme park space" (Williams 2020a, 28). This inherent threat renders all ride-through videos as potentially retrospective, whether they explicitly look to the past (as KDGoldenYears and WDW Retro do) or not. One thriving genre of contemporary ride-through videos offers fans the "last ride ever" on defunct attractions. Theme Park Review's "Last Ride Ever on Maelstrom" has some 670,000 views since it was uploaded in 2014; Theme Park Review's "Last Ride Ever on Jaws at Universal Studios Orlando" (video 3), uploaded on January 2, 2012—the day that Universal Orlando closed its Jaws attraction to make way for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter—has over 245 million views as of February 2022. Theme park ride-through videos do not just document ride-throughs; they also document the rides themselves. Just as MaryAnn Jones (2008) catalogs the archive that follows the "loss" of a live theatrical performance—"post-show discussions, reviews, playbills, and stills" (2)—Williams (2020a) examines how tweets and discussion forums figure into "archiving and saving materials to memorialize or commemorate" lost attractions like Epcot's long-running dark ride Maelstrom, closed in 2014 to make way for Frozen Ever After. Ride-through videos point to what was and will never be again. They are archives that track changes—sometimes literally, when the tracks change—as theme parks inevitably undergo updates and renovations.
Video 3. The most-watched "last ride ever" on Universal Studios Orlando's Jaws attraction, uploaded by Theme Park Review (2012).
[2.5] Ride-through videos in general, and last ride-throughs in particular, foment both restorative and reflective nostalgia, to recall Svetlana Boym's (2001) distinction between a nostalgia that "stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home" and a nostalgia that "thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately" (xviii). Inside the Magic's 2018 "Last Ride with Old 'Bride Auction' on Pirates of the Caribbean at Walt Disney World—Full Ride," which offers the last glimpse of the dark ride's infamous Redhead (video 4), finds commenters drifting between these two ports, with moviechic07 writing, "Yes, keeping a beloved ride as is is what makes Disney theme parks great. They are nostalgic. I get the feminist stance too. But I think showing an example of how women were treated long ago is important too." A raft of commenters join in moviechic07's call to keep Pirates great—commenters for whom Inside the Magic's video is more restorative than reflective. By contrast, the description accompanying Film Spaced's 2019 "Pirates of the Caribbean Original 1967 Version (Full Ride)" is more reflective than restorative: "This recreation is NOT meant to be a glorification of this original version of the attraction. The opening day version contains some awful stuff. And, yeah, that awfulness is accurate to the real pirates of history (as people are so keen to remind us) but that doesn't mean it belongs in a theme park for children!" While moviechic07 and company see Inside the Magic's video as a path back to a truer Pirates, Film Spaced recognizes their ride-through as "a historical document" that allows for "an educated discussion about the attraction's craft and how our society has become more evolved since 1967." Boym surmises that restorative nostalgia "protects the absolute truth," whereas reflective nostalgia "calls it into doubt" (2001, xviii). Ride-through videos do both, offering several "true" rides on an ever-changing attraction. In their archival bent, ride-through videos capture attractions at rest and in motion.
Video 4. A last ride with the old bride, courtesy of Inside the Magic (2018).
3. Theme park ride-through video as performance
[3.1] KDGoldenYears' claim that it "restor[es]" the days of yore implies that ride-through videos also operate in motion, in the present tense, as approximations or simulations of a previous experience. In the same way that the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive might allow a theatre scholar to write about Alan Cumming's famous turn as the Emcee in the 1998 Broadway revival of Cabaret, so too might ThemeParkHD's "Caravan Carousel in Arabian Coast DisneySea" allow theme park scholars to write about a ride they can't ride, or that they've ridden but can't remember. In an edited collection on performance in Disney theme parks, Victoria Pettersen Lantz (2019), for instance, uses ride-through videos from BigFatPanda, ResorTV1, and SharpProductions to quote dialogue from Epcot's American Adventure Show and WDW's Liberty Square Riverboat and Railroad. Lantz's interest lies not in the ride-through video but in the ride itself, which the ride-through video faithfully reproduces—or restores. Lantz's transcriptions sit alongside observations from her own firsthand explorations of the park, implying an equivalence between the two. The seeming transparency of ride-through videos, when considered as transcripts of rides rather than texts in their own right, may explain their neglect in theme park studies. Yet Lantz's equivalence suggests that the ride-through video is as at least as live a wire—at least as current—as the ride itself.
Video 5. CoasterForce's front-seat ride-through of Animal Kingdom's Expedition Everest.
[3.2] That current extends to the viewers themselves. De Kosnik (2016) sees repertoire as central to rogue archives, with fans "recording their physical bodies" while acting and singing, or puppeteering avatars and "marionettes" via "text, icons, screen grabs, GIFs, game play, animations or art" (9). Dennis Jansen (2020) goes further still, asking how De Kosnik herself experiences rogue archives "in a bodily fashion…how the archives themselves evoke certain responses or feelings in our bodies" (¶ 2.7). The theme park ride-through video makes a particularly strong case for attending to what Jansen calls the "affective, embodied relationships" in digital archives (¶ 2.8), as it joins the body of the videographer to the body of the spectator in a more dramatic act of ventriloquism than even De Kosnik describes. Not for nothing do the titles of more recent ride-through videos tout their 4K and/or HD quality; more so than their Super 8mm forebears, ride-through videos shot on memory- and resolution-rich smartphones and GoPros follow GAF's guidelines to a T, providing viewers ever-greater continuity and naturalism. "Wow! feels like I'm actually there," writes David the Percussionist under CoasterForce's front-seat, HD ride-through of Animal Kingdom's Expedition Everest (video 5). Other commenters describe a range of physical reactions: Nacre Angel's body "just feels light watching this," ViVeK "feel[s] dizzy while watching this!!," and Sonny 2299's stomach "is turning just looking at this footage"—punctuated by a green, nauseated emoji. For these and other viewers, the ride-through video feels real, unintentionally or otherwise: dread.pirate.forex advises visitors to "play [the video] at 1.5x speed for more realistic speed imo," while several commenters (hip hop listener, Wingless Wolf, ThemSinfulKids) suggest watching the video in virtual reality (VR). But even those viewers without an Oculus or PSVR headset can get in on the action. Local Guy jokes that to "make it more authentic," he "stood up in an imaginary line for nearly an hour before I watched this video." Even Carrie Thurmond's complaint that the Expedition Everest "looks sooooo much tamer on video than it actually feels like in real life" suggests that immersion is part of the ride-through video's raison d'être; viewers are more or less engaged in performing like a rider. Compare zod zod's criticism that the video's semitransparent logo watermark is "super distracting…it keeps you from getting immersed in the video." Just as RetroWDW and KDGoldenYears highlight ride-through videos' past tense, YouTube channel Rope Drop highlights its present, offering hours-long high-definition livestreams from Disney's parks, queues and all—a continuous, immersive experience I engaged in during many cold Maryland mornings in January 2021.
Video 6. Until Dawn: Rush of Blood (Supermassive Games, 2016) on the tracks.
[3.3] Play is the thing in these various commenters' (and my own) relationship to the ride-through video—an "affective, embodied" relationship, to return to Jansen (2020)—that makes viewers feel light or dizzy or queasy, or that simply makes those viewers move. Ride-through videos work like recorded performances and home movies but are more playful than both, sharing substance with theme park toys and games that ask audiences to perform—to push or pull or look. This push and pull might explain Ezio_7's observation that the Expedition Everest video "feels soo real yet soo 'videogamey' at the same time," since the ride-through resembles a first-person shooter as much as any home movie. The PlayStation VR game Until Dawn: Rush of Blood (Supermassive Games, 2016)—a first-person rail shooter set on literal rails at a haunted theme park—makes this parallel clear (video 6). VR theme parks, which also feature in Summer Funland (Monad Rock, 2018) and RollerCoaster Tycoon Joyride (Nvizzio Creations, 2018), literalize Lukas's (2008) sense that the whole point of going to a theme park is to "play in a virtual reality" (7).
[3.4] However, if the visual grammar of today's ride-through video stretches back to the 1960s and 1970s, so too does its virtual interactivity have decades-old precedents. GAF, the company behind the WDW pamphlet, also produced View-Master, the toy that allows users to see colorful 3-D pictures of, among other sets, Fantasyland and Adventureland in official tie-in reels; in 2015, new owner Mattel released a VR View-Master headset. In 1995, McDonald's celebrated Disneyland's fortieth anniversary with eight Happy Meal toys representing rides from the park: Mickey on a Space Mountain car, Brer Bear on a Splash Mountain log, King Louie on a Jungle Cruise boat, each featuring a small viewfinder through which you could see a photograph of the attraction itself. Like the View-Master, these toys combined simple kinetics (the click of the reel, the feeling of wheeling Mickey's car or Brer Bear's log along a table) with spectatorship. Later video games, like Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour (Crystal Dynamics, 2000), Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure (Nai'a Digital Works, 2001), Virtual Magic Kingdom (Sulake Corporation, 2005), and most prominently Kinect: Disneyland Adventures (Frontier Developments, 2011)—which made use of the Xbox 360's motion-sensing peripheral—would do the same, allowing players to interact with various iconic park attractions and locales. Even if the theme park ride-through video's interactivity is constrained—you can't move the camera where you want, after all—it remains playable. As Bobbi Rakus proposes under Theme Park Review's "Awesome 4K Ultra HD Resolution" ride-through of Nagashima Spaland's Steel Dragon 2000, "Move your phone with the ride, it's super cool, fun and entertaining!!!" Rakus's suggestion that viewers take the ride into their own hands reminds us that watching is never a static activity—a fact perhaps more obvious in the push and pull of first-person POV pornographic videos, with which ride-throughs also share their substance. Consider the fact that during the pandemic, many Disney fans recreated park rides and recipes at home (Williams 2020b, 139), drawing on a range of movements, sights, sounds, touches, tastes, and smells from the theme park repertoire.
4. Theme park ride-through video as promotion
[4.1] If the ride-through video offers fans a record of a lived experience while encouraging a live performance of that experience, then it also, and finally, points to future experiences, live and in person or otherwise. Below the Expedition Everest video, Carl H. writes that he "enjoyed…being reminded how fun things used to be and will be again"—one of many Covid-era comments that see the ride-through as promissory. But the video's promise is also promotional. To go back to the beginning of the line: whatever solace Disney and Universal's Covid-19 playlists offer their fans, the videos remain a part of the parks' marketing apparatus. Disney Parks' 2020 uploads, which averaged two minutes and thirty-six seconds—shorter than most POV videos—featured facts and trivia superimposed over many shots; Universal's playlist was part of broader "Universal at Home" campaign that included links to merchandise ("to Tide You Over"), downloadable coloring book pages and digital backgrounds ("Pretend You're Here"), park recipes ("No reservation required"), park playlists ("Stream the Sounds of the Parks on Spotify"), and plugs for on-demand entertainment from Universal affiliates like Peacock ("Universal at Home"). Theme Park Insider's Robert Niles (2010) speculates that ride-through videos' inherent promotion of the parks in which they are recorded may be what shields them from legal scrutiny. As of February 2022, Walt Disney World's "Resort Property Rules" (https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/park-rules/) and Disneyland's "Resort Rules" (https://disneyland.disney.go.com/park-rules/) only prohibit unapproved video recording for commercial purposes, echoing the rhetoric of fair use. Universal makes no mention of recording anywhere in its "Policies and Restrictions" (https://www.universalorlando.com/web/en/us/plan-your-visit/hours-information/policies-restrictions), and fans on a 2015 TripAdvisor thread about "Recording the rides" (https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g34515-i19-k7355594-Recording_the_rides-Orlando_Florida.html) report only sporadic censure, mostly for safety-related reasons. In this respect, ride-through videographers provide theme parks' corporate owners with "on ground labor," a phrase Philipp Dominik Keidl (2021, 408) uses in his study of unofficial fan museums. Revenue from YouTube ads aside, ride-through videographers avoid systemic crackdowns on copyright infringement by submitting, however unwittingly, to what Suzanne Scott (2019) calls "the surveillance and subsequent monetization of…fan labor" (109). Far from providing an Escape from Tomorrow—to borrow the title of Randy Moore's 2013 dark comedy, shot entirely and secretly inside WDW and Disneyland in defiance of copyright—ride-through videos build a bridge to future returns.
[4.2] Who gets to cross that bridge remains an open question. While Disney, Universal, and Polygon's playlists offered fans access to the parks in the midst of a global pandemic, they also underscored the widespread economic inequality that leaves many would-be fans outside the park gates altogether. These videos may represent the outermost limit of theme parks' "experiential enclosures," to use Carter Moulton's (2022) provocative phrase—enclosures that commodify and monitor fan experiences, through, for instance, fast lanes or in-park upgrades. Williams (2020a) writes, "Since visiting parks is expensive, many fans cannot attend often and instead draw on a range of strategies to continue their fandom" (29). Still, some fans cannot attend at all. For these fans, ride-through videos kick-start, rather than continue, their fandom. Many commenters on the Jaws video (video 3) express nostalgia not for the attraction but for the video itself: "I love watching this when i was a kid and then it pop again in my memory so im back to watch again" (Maryjoy Gritan); "I used to watch this when I was a kid" (Yeo kiat); "I remember when I used to watch this all the time along time ago skipper" (Jake Not fake); "This so so so nostalgic I watched this when I was so young" (Liz - Leo L.); "I remember watching this when I was 8 and I watched this multiple times I thought the shark was real too lmao" (Tiara Therese Bay). For these commenters, the ride-through video is more video than ride-through—more like the 1975 movie on which the attraction is based, maybe, than like the attraction itself. As Lukas (2016) avers, "More and more, theme park rides and the cinema are converging, suggesting that one of the most powerful future explorations of aesthetic time could result from the interesting admixture of these two forms" (36).
Video 7. Blog Mickey's 4K "Full Experience" of Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance.
[4.3] These commenters suggest that fans need not be this tall—need not be present at all—to ride. How do we account for those fans who never make it to the park in the first place, by circumstance or by choice? In one sense, we can see the ride-through video as an affordance, a way for cash-strapped fans to approximate an out-of-reach experience. In a related sense, however, we can see the ride-through video as an affront to the increasingly big business of theme parks, especially those in the Universal and Disney orbit; it's a way for fans to freely park hop. With that freedom, fans may do as the Jaws commenters do and approach theme park rides as they might the cheaper, more conventional media texts—books, movies—against which Victoria Godwin (2017) sets rides. That is, fans may watch theme parks just as they would watch a movie, or just as e-sports fans watch play-throughs of Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017) or Counter-Strike (Valve, 2000). The average parkgoer, after all, probably spends more time watching rides than they do on them during any given visit—and chances are those rides are themselves based on watchable media, like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 2 (2011), Jaws (1975), or Frozen (2013). Housebound theme park fans can pause rides as easily as they can freeze any movie; they can linger on rides, analyze them, loop them like GIFs—and they can do all this without standing in queues, without paying admission, and without buying into Universal or Disney at large. Indeed, streaming Blog Mickey's 4K ride-through of Hollywood Studio's Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance (video 7) becomes, in some sense, its own stand against a vast empire: rebel, rebel.