figured since i was going off in the comments i might as well actually put it in the post. this is likely incomplete but here's a rough summary of everything we know about the Animal Kingdom Dinosaur Indiana-Jones-retheme:
they released this art a couple of years ago when they first or soon after they first announced it—
it's strictly a reskin of the existing ride system (same ride vehicle/track layout as Temple of the Forbidden Eye at Disneyland) and the whole dinosaur land will be rethemed to "Tropical Americas".
So this week we got a some updates:
It reportedly takes place "in the 1950s before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and we are going to a cenote that is an entrance to the underworld, where we will meet Tsukán, a water snake god.
Harrison Ford announced he's going to be the model for the Indy animatronic in the ride, which Disney bloggers keep misconstruing as "the first time he's going to be part of the Indy rides!", which is incorrect. I don't even know what's in Tokyo or Paris but for DL, they absolutely did have rights to his image (see: the Drew Struzan poster) but they couldn't get him in for voice work or filming iirc, which I can't remember if it was because of costs or some shit with his agent (?) or scheduling conflicts or something else. The Temple of the Forbidden Eye IJ animatronics have always, however, been kind of sad and lackluster*, so I'm interested to see where the AAs land in the final execution as to whether that quality bears out. (The hat in the 3d model looks good (an improvement on that initial art, which looks craptastic), but that doesn't necessarily mean it will bear out in fabrication. Actually wait. Do you just glue a hat on an action AA like that? Maybe snaps? What would be funniest is if they stapled it...)
*to be fair you go by pretty quickly. It's not really a thing you notice unless you're an obsessive weirdo.
Here is my assumption of what the ride experience is going to look like: you queue up outside the Mayan temple to Tsukán and head into its ruins. As you get deeper you get into the caves of the cenote where Indy's dig site is. WELCOME MY FRIENDS There is a safety spiel video (with Harrison Ford? with some "dig site assistant" actor/CM?) (if it's not HF, presumably because they'd have to de-age him or work around Crystal Skull material**, I do hope we get some kind of cameo). You descend further into the cave and load into the EMV.
**as photoshopped above in the concept art
The EMVs take off and you maybe immediately encounter Indy as seen in the initial concept art where he opens up a portal to the underworld. Apparently. I'm not actually sure Tsukán has anything to do with The Underworld, conceptually? IDK, they did the research allegedly, not me. (I'll stop here to note that I think "The Myth of the Jade Serpent" is a strong but not exceptional name concept; it's got the animal for AK and calls out that we're entering into fantasy territory. Either way it's still stronger than "Dial of Destiny" which absolutely fails to roll off the tongue every single goddamned time.) (Also they're using the old classic Indiana Jones logo again here! And the Jade Serpent font is fun.) (Unrelatedly I don't think we're getting any fantasy glyphs out of this one but I'm keeping my eye out for whatever they do show with regard to Maya glyphs.) I don't think there's a macguffin as such so it's maybe actually a site exploration, conceptually. A breakthrough on the dig site.
ANYWAY you ascend (lol) up the warp tunnel (formerly the time warp tunnel) and drive around this maze/jungle with lots of darkness and vines and... idk... animals? Spooky underworld things? The queue murals seem to lean heavily on plants and animals so. Jungle, babey
I mean I guess we're in the Underworld, so... undead... animals? Animal spirits as the various gods/forces of nature, etc.? This is entirely speculation, to be clear
I am imagining there are some scene moments where we get a glimpse of a flying serpent (on a projection screen) seemingly in the distance and we go "wtf?" If Imagineering is clever and funny*** they'll make Tsukán do a vine bit a la the ToD elephant trunk/KotCS rope.
***unlikely but remains to be seen
There's lots of jolting around... stuff... maybe we're running from Tsukán? They have been pretty mum on the middle part, presumably. [A Bunch Of Stuff Happens.] It's a pretty fast/rough ride system so there's only really room for shorter gags for the most part, and AK's ride layout I don't believe has the large room/bridge space that Disneyland and Tokyo have, so it will lack that central/feature element. Maybe there are some additional vignettes with Indy; since this is a smaller space the ride does have some opportunities to build scenes to feature the character rather than huge architectural set pieces. We would also get a little more "story" mileage out of it if that's the case.
UNTIL Tsukán catches up with us and we suddenly get struck at by the giant snake (see animatronic maquette). That thing is 30-50% bigger than the Disneyland snake so it's 1) definitely the climax feature but 2) idk why Imagineering would necessarily give away the ride climax? So maybe there are at least two. The arm on the back points to it being a head on an arm, and the Imagineers on the panel made a joke about it being jaw-dropping (?) so I think it's pretty literally the same giant-snake-striking action, just larger, and maybe a little bit of a longer scene. It's a god so maybe it talks to us? Though the ride vehicle/layout doesn't really have time for much, if anything. I imagine that arm is on a rotating plate that follows the EMV through the scene/around a curve. (Like the Universal King Kong giant animatronic, if you've seen that one.) It having one big arm means you just have to move the arm back and forward in a simple movement, and if you have a soft skin on the body it doesn't really have to move or do anything except react to the arm movement; the head will probably have pitch movement and open/close jaw; I really hope they don't do the stupid fang animation like they have on Disneyland's. Anyway, so: yaw on the plate, forward/backward movement on the arm "spine", and pitch movement and jaw action on the head. You'll go by fast enough that that is all you need, really.
Indy (or Tsukán?) tells us to get the fuck out or to get him out of there or something, we start driving like crazy to escape the Underworld and (because I don't think they would actually show us the story climax in a fucking D23 pavilion a few years too early) there's probably another (maybe even bigger? That thing is already Fucking Humongous) Tuskán head that comes at us like the final Carnotaurus/the boulder does and we drop (lol****) into the portal back to the cave/unload.
****it's too bad they can't relocate the load/unload lol. i realize they are stuck with what they already have but the ludonarrative action! ugh!
I'm impressed with the Tsukán AA stuff that we've seen but Disney has been so cynicisim-inducingly bad about parks stuff the past few years that I'm mostly just keeping my expectations exceptionally low. Even the consideration that there are multiple Indy AAs, a possibility which I entirely made up just as a consequence of the scene/building structure, seems excessive by Disney's recent standards. And cynically I think the Big Fuckoff Huge Snake AA is supposed to probably make up for that. Then again, this isn't Pirates or Haunted Mansion so tons of AAs isn't exactly realistic in that sort of regard! (That being said, if I can interject on my own interjection, Dinosaur *does* have more smaller scenes with more figures. So.) And they've told us nothing about the on-ride story! So who the fuck knows! I'm just being grumpy! (We definitely aren't getting any exciting magic scenes like the triple-door effect Disneyland used to have; that's been dead for 16 years and they will never fix it. They went all-in on projection mapping and they will continue to lean on it to the detriment of their history of theme park practical effects. Big Fuckoff Huge Snake is going to be The Effect.)
wait, this is a cenote and their Tsukán concept art looks like he's transforming out of a wave of water? So maybe there's a huge projection effect when he's maybe chasing us or us being chased out of the Underworld by a wall of water/flooding the caves/something of that nature. again I am pulling shit out of my ass while looking at all the concept art, here
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