The Golden Age of Radio: Armchair Imagineering
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 12:44PM By: Kevin Quigley
For a long time, I've been tinkering with the idea of making a Radio-themed attraction at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Back in 1989, the park embraced radio nearly as much as it did movies and TV. The Radio Disney Building was a working radio studio in a building attached to the Monster Sound Show (now, intermittently, Sounds Dangerous). It broadcast children’s music first under the name Radio AAHS, then Radio Disney, but when Radio Disney moved its headquarters to Dallas, TX in 2005, the broadcasts from Hollywood Studios all but stopped. I think radio still has a place in Hollywood studios, and not necessarily the kind of radio represented (very well, it must be said) by the Rock & Rollercoaster starring Aerosmith. I’m talking classic radio, the kind that ruled broadcasting from the early 1920s until the mid-1950s. The way I see it, a full-on pavilion, old Epcot style, would fill a need for this type of thing in the Studios - a facet and an era I feel they're really lacking.
The problem with any radio is that it’s an audio-only medium, and the problem with old-time radio is that most modern people simply aren’t used to the type of focused listening that folks in radio’s boom years took for granted. The trick to making a pavilion like this successful is to make this bygone era seem not only interesting but thrilling, an experience that rewards those interested in a layered, nuanced Disney experience … but that also provides excitement for casual theme-park goers.
The pavilion would be called The Golden Age of Radio, and be laid out a bit like the Wonders of Life Pavilion in Epcot. It would feature four distinct sections:
1. The Vox Pop Stop - Set up like a classic 1920s/1930s soda fountain offering quick-service comfort food like grilled cheese, burgers, sandwiches, and patty melts. Their highlight would be the soda fountain beverages and milkshakes. The cool thing here is that while it would LOOK like an old-fashioned soda fountain, it would feature the technology to "make your own soda" using Freestyle machines. Each booth would come with a table-side jukebox, and would play music and commercials from the early days of radio.
2. The WDW Radio Playhouse - Here's the education part, where an audience watches cast members create a radio show, and invites audience members to come up and help make sound effects with them. The show can be funny, spooky, soapy, or spooky, depending on where they take it that time. After, the lights go dim and the audience hears their own newly-recorded show played back. The whole experience takes about 25 minutes.
3. See It With Your Ears! - An interactive area in which kids and adults use touchscreens to mix and match radio sounds. Like the shark area in The Seas with Nemo and Friends, there are a few trivia games. You're invited to hear a sound effect and try to guess which "thing" made it. There's a smaller "One Man's Dream" type of museum dedicated to the history of radio, featuring actual radios, props, etc. In this area is the Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air, a small theater that plays 20 episodes of the radio show of the same name.
4. Lights Out! - the E-ticket attraction. It's a coaster-type ride based on the momentum of Splash Mountain. You get on board and it bustles past a series of scenes featuring AAs recording real, classic radio shows - the spooky ones. There are several lift hills. The on-board audio plays snippets of classic thriller shows like The Inner Sanctum, Suspense!, and Lights Out!, building momentum. Soon, you come to what looks like a tunnel and you see a projection at the top: someone in a radio booth recording a particularly unsettling horror show involving a chase. Then the image fades and you're left in pitch black. The coaster takes off like in Rock N Rollercoaster, but remains ABSOLUTELY in the dark. The radio show keeps playing, narrating the chase in the dark. Off-board sound effects like in Space Mountain come out of nowhere, helping to disorient you. At the end of the ride, you have survived. The last words are: "And now a word from our sponsor." And of course, the gift shop is called "A Word From Our Sponsor."
Radio has been an important part of Disney history, and it would be a shame to let this legacy go to waste. As Hollywood Studios has done with the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror (referencing both the “reality” of Hollywood in the 1930s as well as the original television show broadcasts of the 1950s), the Sci-Fi Dine-In, and the 50s Prime Time Lounge, it can bring an idealized version of radio days to the present.
Let’s hope Disney is listening.
Reader Comments (1)
These are awesome ideas. I especially love the freestyle machines. Those things are really nifty and are totally Disneyesque. Also the gift shop called "A Word from Our Sponsors" is pretty genius.