Walt Disney Studios - 18/19th of July 2023

[Gazza]

I visited France back in June and visited a few parks over the course of 3 weeks.

Might as well get one of the easier ones out of the way, with Walt Disney Studios.

https://www.parkz.com.au/attraction/walt-disney-studios

I had a two day pass which was the right amount of time for Disneyland Park / Walt Disney studios.
But for the purposes of this TR I'll just go attraction by attraction rather than a recount of both days.

Getting to the park is easy, about 40 mins from Central Paris on the RER, then through the security checkpoint into Disney Village and the two parks.

When you arrive, the main street is actually a sound stage, with plywood sets forming the shops and restaurants.

Crush's Coaster
Recommended to start on this one since it draws long queues. I frequently saw it reaching 120 minutes. It was broken down when I arrived, so I hung around for 20 mins and got on as soon as it opened. 
Really good! An indoor marina themed station (complete with seagulls chanting "mine") leads into a short lift hill, a couple of turns outdoors before heading back into the building. From there are a few dark ride scenes where you are going with the sea turtles to ride the east coast current, a jellyfish field, and finally a lift hill in the hull of a ship with sharks chanting "fish are friends not food".
From there it's into a very dark show building with the standard Maurer SC2000 layout, with a few scrims with projected flowing bubbles to simulate riding the current. Much darker inside than scooby. The coaster is zippy and good fun.
My only criticisim would be that too many coasters at Disney Paris rely on being in a big dark room with a few effects. Avengers, Crush's and Space Mountain all rely on it, so thats half the coasters.
A tip, the single rider queue time lies. I saw it advertised as 50 mins, walked in and there were 3 people waiting, so it was more like 5 mins! Worth using since there is nothing worth seeing in the standby queue.

RC  Racer
Similar comments to the one in HK. I really like these compared to the spinning halfpipes because the beyond vertical spike creates this great sensation where you are floating, but also being forced forward in your seat (much like the beyond vertical drops on GL/Abyss), combined with the launches picking up speed. Again the single rider queue is the way to go.

 

Slinky Dog Zigzag Spin
Missed the one in HK so did this because it has a short queue. Most gentle matterhorn ride ever lol, but the theming looks great. Not sure who makes it, but I suspect Intamin because it looked like the cars actually run on Intamin track. The theming is great, with a pile of dog toys on a bowl as a centerpiece.

Ratatouille 
Hmmm, a bit underwhelmed by this one sadly.
I love trackless and 3D dark rides, so was really looking foward to this, but it falls a bit flat. The vehicles can spin, but cannot do the full range of motion like you get on rides like Spiderman or Planet of the Apes or the Justice Leauges at Six Flags.
You ride in large rat shaped cars that seat 6, and scurry around through the kitchen, being chased by angry kitchen staff, with a mixture of oversized sets (including going under a stove, into a fridge, through the wall cavities), interspersed by scenes in front of giant screens. For some reason I thought that despite the reduced range of motion the vehicles would still maybe scoot around a tiny bit on the spot or rotate  a bit from side to side in front of the screens to give a little feeling , but nah you're just parked there in front of a giant screen for 30 seconds watching a giant movie, with things popping off but it feels strange and muted without any movement. The best part probably is the giant sets. A nice touch is when you are under a giant waiters trolley, and as you roll fowards the castors either side of you rotate as well.

In this area they had a food festival going, with very permanent looking stands selling food from different regions of France. I tried this cheese and potato thing but it was a bit pungent!

Spider-man WEB Adventure
Ok, so it wasn't until shortly before I went on this trip I found out they built an Avengers campus at WDS (For some reason I thought it was just Rock n Roller coaster being re themed with other stuff coming later)....Cool, means I don't feel guilty about skipping DCA!
This is another 3D dark ride, with vehicles that track the movements of your hands and allow you to shoot webs. Can tell you ahead of time there is nothing special enough to see in the standby queue, so by all means do this with single rider...You still get to see the preshow either way . The ride is themed like an old brick warehouse that used to be "Stark Motors" that has now been taken over by a tech startup called the "World Engineering Brigade" .
The preshow is set in a research workhop and uses a few layers of scrims, and has Peter Parker showing you his new spiderbot . The spiderbot is able to mine materials and 3D print it's own replicas, which sounds cool until they start cutting holes in the walls and replicating out of control. That's where you come in to start hunting them down before they replicate into the millions, by blasting them with webs just like spiderman.
The ride reminded me of a long lost relative of toy story mania, with large back to back vehicles travelling in front of game screens. The bits in between were probably better themed, and in this case yes they did take advangage of the spinning of the vehicle to get a bit of wild movement between scenes. 
I've heard this ride bagged out a bit, but I had a great time. The graphics and the gesture tracking was super crisp, and each scene had heaps of ways you could interact with it, eg shoot webs at the spiderbots, or you could fling a web at an oil drum, then sweep your hand a across and cause it to fling across the room and cause a massive explosion.

Avengers Flight Force
This was a rethemed of Rock n Rollercoaster, with a snazzy, but perhaps sterile queue set in Avengers HQ. Think lots of stainless steel and chamfered panels, like an Apple store without the wood. Simple storyline, some missiles have been sent towards earth by the bad guys, all the other avengers are busy with other missions, so its up to you to help Captain Marvel and Iron Man by flying in a manner that draws the missiles away from earth. There's a really good Iron Man animatronic in the preshow. Another touch I liked is the pulsating lighting tubes throughout the queue that all go haywire from the power surge when the ride launches.
The coaster, again, excellent, with flashing red lights on the launch, followed by 3 inversions taken smoothly in the dark, with the odd curved screen with the two heroes shooting beams etc in the battle. The finale is a huge panoramic screen where you see the baddies missiles blown up in a spectacular green explosion, coupled with a cresendo in the music, all at full speed, before finally hitting the brakes.

Pym Test Kitchen
Forked out for Sit Down Meal for a change. This restaurant was a buffet with novelty food items that were either bigger than smaller than normal. The theming reflected this.
Eg for burgers, you could get sliders, or get a slice from a burger the size of a hubcap.
There was a bit of scientific mixed in too, eg blue coloured salad dressing, things in test tubes, this really nice lemon dessert that had an crystaline atomic structre pattern on the top etc.
49 EUR, ouch!

Tower of Terror
This thing is wild. I've done other TOTs in Cali, Florida and Japan but this one has the best most intense ride cycle and its not even close! Right from the first pushback, you are rocketing to the top forcefully. No slow lifting floor by floor, just several sustained ups and downs, all the while a creepy girl at each floor tells you "not to scream, it will only make it worse".
I get the feeling Europeans are a bit tougher in terms of thrills,  so they get a better cycle as a result.
The queue is the same as the others. Gorgeous.

Cars Road Trip

Urrrgh. This is unashamedly a filler while they build the Frozen area.
It was the studio tour, it has been cut short due to construction work in the park, and they kept the catasrophe canyon bit, and stuck it in with this utterly rubbish road trip thing where you look at 3D props of roadside landmarks. Think lame stuff like a giant spanner, billboards, the Tyre-ful Tower.
But then the catastrophe canyon bit is ham fisted too becasuse they took the tanker that blows up and put a cars face on it, so you're literally watching a setient tanker getting burned alive with a look of mild concern.
Walk on queue said it all.

Tapis Volants
You know, out of all the Disney rides I've never done one of these Dumbo/Orbiter type things, time to rectify that.
It's themed as if Alladin is being filmed as a live action movie.
You can move the carpet up and down with a little lever in front of your seat. Supposedly the other lever makes you tilt back and forth, but despite reaching back and trying it did nothing?
The viewing area was nice too.

Cars Quatres Roues Rallye. 
Same sort of ride as Patricks Jellyfish Frenzy, a figure 8 motion demolition derby, but with Cars theming. The queue predates cars land, so it's like a mini mish mash of Radiator springs.
Despite having two of the rides installed side by side it still must get long queues.

Final thoughts

The park is pretty good, though a lot smaller than every other Disney Park. The offering is about 1/3 of Disneyland next door.

I did appreciate the thrill rides here, probably the most 'intense' lineup of any Disney park.

Perhaps what it lacked was strong themed zones. The whole front of the park is this open bitumen area with a lot of plain looking studios and food trucks. The bits around Avengers Campus, Ratatouille and Toy Story felt immersive, but then the rest of the park is a bit mish mash. Perhaps once frozen is finished it will feel a bit more consolidated. At the moment, even the orignal DCA is better!

The park seemed popular, with crowds and 30-60 min waits all day.

 

As always, photos are here.

https://www.parkz.com.au/search/photos/location/walt-disney-studios

 

Edited August 25, 2023 by Gazza

[djmcbell]

Looks like it's changed a lot. We went back in 2014, before Ratatouille. Crush was down for maintenance. We flew from the UK I to Charles de Gaulle and got a TGV to the park entrance (hint - the TGVs are very fast). Had just carry-on luggage so dumped it at the Disney luggage drop place for us to pick up later (we were staying in nearby Val d'Europe) and straight into the parks.

Did Studios first, which included Aerosmith, Tower of Terror, Studio Tour and RC Racer. We were done in 2 hours and spent the rest of the day at DLP. At the time there just wasn't enough there.

[Dean Barnett]

Top tip for ToT - you can actually get them to run the ride with english dialog .. just ask :)

[djmcbell]

I find it pretty cool there that some rides have multiple language options. I think the steamboat at DLP has two narrators who narrate as if having a conversation, but one speaks French and the other English. I've never come across any other park that actually is bilingual.

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

Hong Kong Disneyland makes an effort. Not quite as fully catered as it sounds like DLP is, but HK offers Jungle Cruise in three languages. The golden mickeys presentation was done in Mandarin with english subtitles, but the rest of the park's offering was in english, with many on-screen elements subtitled in mandarin \ cantonese.

It sounds like DLP is a great non-US option for english speaking disney fans.

[Gazza]

ManyDLP rides followed a format where there was a mixture of French and English, sometimes in that conversational style.

Eg 

 

So you could still get enough to understand the stories.

I wondered how it would sound to someone who could speak both languages though.

Edited August 31, 2023 by Gazza

[New display name]

6 minutes ago, Gazza said:

I wondered how it would sound to someone who could speak both languages though.

It would sound French and English.🤣

[Gazza]

What I mean is it going to sound like one of those radio ads where two people mindlessly yabber to each other?

Edited August 31, 2023 by Gazza

[joz]

Probably sounds similar to watching a TV show on DVD where they randomly restate the plot as if you've missed the prior third/ two thirds of the show. Like you notice, but it doesn't ruin your day

[djmcbell]

22 hours ago, DaptoFunlandGuy said:

It sounds like DLP is a great non-US option for english speaking disney fans.

It is. I wasn't keen on the Studios park, but this was nine years ago, but the main park itself was great. I think I preferred Big Thunder Mesa, Pirates, and Phantom Manor over their Floridian counterparts. Space Mountain was just too different, and had lots of inverting elements, compared to the Florida one.

[Whombex]

On 25/08/2023 at 1:21 PM, Gazza said:

Ok, so it wasn't until shortly before I went on this trip I found out they built an Avengers campus at WDS (For some reason I thought it was just Rock n Roller coaster being re themed with other stuff coming later)....Cool, means I don't feel guilty about skipping DCA!

My November '22 trip report mentioned this 

 

Good to see you had a good time - I quite enjoyed Ratatouille, but haven't done any of the 'better' trackless darkies than this. The scenes under the trolley, the oven and the mop were standouts for me, bringing in smells worked well too..
I regret not waiting out the line for Crush's Coaster based on your description.