Oookay, trying again. My memories of KAC.
First, I want to say I adored Questor back in the day. Given a time machine and the liberty to use it for fairly idiotic purposes, I wonder if I would still feel the same way upon going back to early-90s Busch Gardens and experiencing Questor again through 2017 eyes. Who knows. But I do think the organic and analog nature of the ride's video and overall "feel" -- a quest through a strange land's natural wonders and perils to collect a very important McGuffin -err, crystal, via an adventure dotted with practical effects -- would actually acquit itself decently. The mechanical-gadgetry aspect of the ride theming was extensive and solid, particularly given the leggy nature of the ride platform itself (for those who cared to know about such things). There was no enemy to be fought, aside from the geological challenge of flying, floating, bouncing, and drilling through the stony countryside in pursuit of that damned crystal, so there was no need to waste 30 seconds of ride time hastily establishing that some bad guy was indeed bad, only to see said bad guy vanquished a mere 3-4 minutes later. And Questor's sleeper strength was its pluckiness, which IMO worked due to a balance between serious plot and rollicking fun. It had heart.
Okay, so one year I went to BGW and the cool Questor marquee was gone, replaced by King Arthur's Challenge. The new marquee looked alright and the entrance tunnel was still there -- so far so good. That led to the pre-show room which, last year, hosted the video featuring a slightly too creepy-friendly headset guy planning our Europe in the
Eire Air tour. In those days it contained the
best part of the King Arthur's Challenge attraction, bar none: a really engaging visual effect in which the face of King Arthur appeared -- floating and narrating -- within a healthy medieval fire. That was a commendable first impression, and maybe even better than the Questor elf scientist hovering on the flying da Vinci style bike contraption. Kudos to the effects designers for that. It was a Joey-from-Blossom "Whoa!" moment and it really set the tone for a more serious ride theme.
And that's where all good things ended for King Arthur's Challenge.
Next up, a video informed us that the all-time legendary uber-wizard Merlin was going to assist us in our extremely perilous quest to retrieve Excalibur. Awesome! Buuuuuuut, oh... oh no. Oh boy. Okay, hold on. Just hold on for a moment here.
I really like Busch Gardens. Always have. And I want every new attraction to be as good as it can possibly be. My parents and grandparents brought me to the park in the 1980s and now I bring my kids. Four generations of family memories, which are as many generations as have even BEEN ALIVE during the time Busch Gardens Williamsburg has existed. Everyone has loved it. And throughout all that time, it has no doubt required Herculean efforts in quantities immeasurably copious to reliably craft vivid, emotionally engaging experiences for fungible schlubs who swipe their debit cards or peel off their sweaty cash for a day of blithely staring at random stuff and clogging up walkways and complaining that the cups are filled too low because 1/4" of paper brim is visible above the Mountain Dew meniscus wobbling inside their huge soda. And who want to be entertained, dammit.
Throw on tight deadlines, smaller-than-really-needed budgets, goofy contractors, myriad other issues, and it is astonishing that anything good gets built at all. I won't say park employees of all stripes are heroes, necessarily, except maybe for the paramedics. But they clearly give everything they have in the tank to produce entertainment in the name of (yes, profit but also) the human imagination and lifelong memory-crafting.
Having said that, I really need to tell you that this King Arthur's Challenge video featured the most bewildering, incredulity-stoking, pitiable excuse for a Merlin I absolutely have ever seen on a screen in my life. And no disrespect AT ALL to the perfectly valid-as-a-human guy who they hired and paid to stand there, festooned with what appeared to be a seasonal Halloween shop's $7 "generic wizard" costume, under deliberate direction to peer at the studio's camera in complete bafflement like Steve Carell in Anchorman. But this poor guy... they made him look like the production team had abducted a geriatric opioid addict from a Willy Nelson concert, dressed him for a high school play, and told him he could have some soup if he managed to mumble and stagger unrehearsed through a small collection of lines before lapsing out of consciousness and hitting the floor face-first as soon as his one take was done. Even the camera angle they chose to shoot him with was bizarre. It was inexplicable.
Attraction designer Gary Goddard has an entire story about the failed Six Flags Power Plant project. One thing he goes into is the homebuilt walkaround character costume which Six Flags management built for approximately zero dollars and shoved some high school kid into so he could wander Baltimore's Inner Harbor and drum up business. In his retelling it sounds like literally a cardboard-and-glue job topped with a store-bought mask someone spray painted. Merlin wasn't this bad, and demonstrates that BGW's floor is blessedly higher than SF's. But of course we already knew that, didn't we.
I'd like to point out that we have yet to actually enter the ride system in this narrative.
Right. A great ride video and coordinated platform motion may have saved this thing. None of that happened. I don't remember if the ride was 3D or 2D, but I definitely remember that this mid-90s era time period was the era when you could get CGI animation according to the "Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two" rule. BGW seemingly insisted on Cheap and clearly did not value Good on this ride, so I'm guessing they got Fast in the bargain. Nice and fast, and cheap, and... that was it. Like
Eiffel 65's Blue video of roughly the same era.
The ride video was a thoroughly disappointing computer-rendered tour of the inside of a dimly lit and scary dungeon/castle, with various menacing things happening in its various rooms. I remember very little about it other than the evident fact that corners were cut everywhere in its production. At one point there was a room featuring maces hung from the ceiling on chains. The goal, I recall, was to get through the spiky swinging balls without being impaled. But the swinging motion was so utterly bizarre and distracting that it was impossible to tell whether the animators lacked the knowledge, the desire, or the time/budget to get any of it right. These maces would "swing" in the same sense that a Chuck E Cheese animatronic "dances." Rigid, unsettling, jerky, and powerfully fake.
Speaking of jerky -- I believe there is not a single soul on this entire beautiful planet who could have successfully programmed the ride platform to convincingly tie in with that video. So yes, the motions were pretty awful, but it was probably impossible to achieve better with that source material.
At some point something good happened and you got the sword. Yaa
aaaaay. I don't remember anything about that part due to what preceded it. And that was it. Up on your feet and across the ramps to the exit hallway. Bye. Se ya never.
Was there a shiny Excalibur on display in the exit hallway, heroically restored to its rock perch? I don't recall. Maybe nobody does. It didn't matter at that point.
I think I rode this thing twice, and the second time was to convince myself that the first time actually happened.
Gotta be vague about this next bit: around that time I visited a shop that showed me some components they were fabbing for the NEXT iteration of BGW's simulator ride. I don't think KAC was any more than roughly 2 years old at that point. BGW knew, and they knew early.
