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Ice Age Adventure
Ice Age Adventure was a dark boat ride at the amusement park Movie Park Germany at in Bottrop, Germany. The ride opened on 15 March 2005 as a replacement for the defunct Looney Tunes Adventure ride, and closed for good on 1 November 2016 before being replaced by Movie Park Studio Tour in 2021.[1][2] HistoryOn 30 June 1996, Warner Bros. Movie World Germany opened with a dark ride named Looney Tunes Adventure, modelled after the Australian Warner Bros. Movie World's Looney Tunes River Ride.[3][4] On 3 April 2004, Warner Bros. Movie World Germany was acquired by StarParks. This acquisition resulted in various Warner Bros.-licensed properties being removed from the park including DC Comics and Looney Tunes. The following year, Movie Park Germany opened with Looney Tunes Adventure being rethemed to Ice Age Adventure.[5] In later years, Ice Age Adventure was not received well by visitors to the park. Many of the ride's animatronics were broken and the special effects were not operating anymore.[1] In 2012, Movie Park Germany promised that a major refurbishment in 2013 would be planned, with characters (like Crash, Eddie, Ellie, Peaches and Buck) and scenes from Ice Age, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Ice Age: Continental Drift.[6] However, the refurbishment was cancelled since the ride did not quite fit the theme of Nickland.[1][7] On 1 November 2016, Ice Age Adventure performed its last run, and a wreath was laid down at the ride. On 6 December 2016, it was announced that Ice Age Adventure would not reopen in 2017, because Movie Park Germany's 10-year licensing of the ride had expired. The ride's closure was also due to the cancellation of its refurbishment, and it resulted in the retirement of the Scrat, Sid, Diego and Scratte walk-around characters in the park.[1] Despite the ride's closure, the show building that enclosed Ice Age Adventure did not remain unused. The ride's queue area was converted into a picnic area, and the souvenir shop still exists, albeit used for used for Excalibur - Secrets of the Dark Forest.[1][8][9] The boats used in the ride are used as additional boats for Bermuda Triangle: Alien Encounter,[10] and Ice Age 4-D: No Time for Nuts continued being shown at the Roxy 4D-Kino until 2018. One of Ice Age Adventure's Diego animatronics could be found in the Roxy 4D-Kino's entrance lobby, and another Diego animatronic and a Manny animatronic could be found as circus animals in Circus of Freaks during the Halloween Horror Festival.[11][12] From 6 October 2018 to 2019, the ride was used for the Halloween Horror Festival as Wrong Turn.[13][14] Five years after Ice Age Adventure's closure, Movie Park Studio Tour, an Intamin Multi Dimension Coaster, opened on 5 July 2021 in the same building as the former ride. The coaster contains various callbacks to the park's defunct rides and attractions, including Ice Age Adventure;[2] Sid's tree trunk is seen in a storage room of film props, labelled as having been originally used in the fictional 2005 film The Crazy Sloth.[15] Ride experienceThe ride began with guests queuing outside a show building and entering a room with drawings of Scrat, Sid, Manny and Diego on its walls. They would slowly be introduced to the ancient times, and find themselves in a cave with a campfire and two televisions displaying paintings that come to life and introduce the characters on their screens; sometimes there would be a cast member who would tell the ride's story to the guests (when the ride first opened, there was a video projection screen displaying the cave paintings coming to life and telling the characters' backstories; this was later replaced with the campfire and televisions[16][17][18][19]). After the guests left the cave, the path would lead into the freezing cold, directly into a huge iceberg, which led to the loading station.[20] Guests would get on 4 boats, each with 4 rows of 4 seats each, and they would see the Human Tribe's village (complete with saber-toothed tiger pelts) on their left before being taken through the ride. They go past a scene where Scrat is desperately trying to bury an acorn in his collection and accidentally causes a crack that runs throughout the ride as a trail of red LED lights (the crack could also be found in the pattern on the path from the exit from Adventure Lagoon to Nickland). They then meet Sid, who is sleeping and hanging from a tree trunk. Sid slips off the trunk in his sleep, wakes up, sees the guests and greets them.[21] He then notices the crack, and as the guests approach Sid, he makes way for them by climbing back onto the trunk. Guests then go past a scene where Sid has missed his flock and joins Manny and Diego to escape the oncoming ice age,[20] followed by another scene with the trio, in which Sid pushes a tree. The tree falls down above the guests and covers up a hole filled with lava.[22] Meanwhile, Scrat attempts to stop the crack by using a boulder, but to no avail, while a snow flurry occurs from above. Guests then go past a scene with the Dodo Birds fighting for the last watermelon, while Sid watches and points out that this the strangest thing that he has ever seen.[21] After that, guests meet Scrat, who is in a somewhat unfortunate situation, and go past a third scene with Sid, Manny and Diego, where Sid is finally no longer sure about the right path.[21][20] The crack ends, and suddenly, two fissure eruptions occur, scaring Sid, Manny and Diego and sending them into a panic (the fissure eruptions were achieved with erupting steam geysers and red lights from under the water).[20] This also causes lava from an active volcano behind the trio to flow down. Guests then go past a scene where the lava burns Scrat's butt three times, causing him to pop out screaming (when the ride first opened, one of the Tweety animatronics from Looney Tunes Adventure could be found above Scrat during the third time that he got burned[23]), and a light shines on Sid, who tries to get Manny through a hole.[21] After that, Sid, Manny and Diego run up three hills, and the guests' boats are then lifted up a bridge leading to an ice palace (actually the castle from Looney Tunes Adventure, albeit remodelled) with the trio atop it. Sid pulls Manny by the trunk, and Diego pushes him from behind. As the guests approach the entrance of the palace, its color goes from ice-colored to lava-colored (the palace's color change was achieved with lighting effects) and steam erupts from both sides of the bridge. The guests enter the palace and their boats turn to the left, and a surprising drop occurs. After the drop, the guests go past a scene where Sid, Manny and Diego have safely arrived at a tropical island on the Southern Ocean. The boats stop at the unloading station where Scrat is frozen in a block of ice, and the guests are unloaded. After the ride, guests entered a souvenir shop (which Ice Age Adventure used to share with Mystery River) to buy various Ice Age merchandise, as well as on-ride photographs taken during the scene where Sid, Manny and Diego have arrived at the island.[21] Voice cast
Ride designThinkwell Group was contacted by StarParks because of its expertise in creating intellectual property-based attractions. The company brokered the relationship between 20th Century Fox and StarParks to bring Ice Age to Movie Park Germany. StarParks was worried about the cost of licensing a blockbuster intellectual property, but Thinkwell convinced them that it would not cost as much as they feared. The project was less than nine months from start to finish, which was about a third of the amount of time it would typically take to complete such an attraction. Thinkwell kept the existing ride system and reworked much of the existing theming from Looney Tunes Adventure to work with the new intellectual property. Unbeknownst to Thinkwell, its storyline was very similar to what Blue Sky Studios was developing for Ice Age's sequel, Ice Age: The Meltdown. Thinkwell worked closely with Fox and Blue Sky to develop the story, got their approvals quickly and went to work completing the design and fabrication to make opening day for the new season as Movie Park Germany.[19] Blue Sky helpfully provided its 3D computer models of the characters to Thinkwell. This allowed Thinkwell to do CNC carvings for the audio-animatronics rather than traditional hand sculpting, which saved weeks, if not months, in production.[19] 50 animatronics were designed for the ride.[20][24] Craig Hanna, Thinkwell's Chief Creative Officer and co-founder, flew to New York and met with Lori Forte, John C. Donkin, Chris Meledandri and Chris Wedge, the producers and director of the films, and got to meet the animators and understand the essence of the intellectual property. Later, Thinkwell's designers worked with Blue Sky's animators to pose the characters from the film for the ride. In the beginning, to save time, Thinkwell sent a team to Movie Park Germany, where they worked on-site in temporary offices that they provided for Thinkwell. They quickly developed the initial concept and full presentation to executive management, complete with layout, storyboards, scene descriptions and script in one week. On the night before opening, the last shipment of animatronics arrived from the United States, and Thinkwell were in waders walking through the filled trough carrying animatronics through the ride to get them loaded in, installed and wired in place of the animatronics featured in Looney Tunes Adventure in time for Movie Park Germany's opening on 19 March 2005.[19] Garner Holt Productions also participated in the ride's design.[26][27] The cost to license the soundtrack from Ice Age was prohibitive, so Thinkwell hired Jean-Francois Cote, a composer from Cirque du Soleil, and created their own that was reminiscent of the film's theme song, but was actually a whole new piece.[20] They also had to hire German voice actors to do the voices of the characters in the ride. The voice actors from the German release of Ice Age, such as Otto Waalkes, who voiced Sid, were too expensive, so Thinkwell hired other sound-alike voice actors. Those actors were famous German comedians that were more popular than the people who did the voices from the film.[19] The ride had a multitude of immersive special effects, including a real snow flurry, explosive steam geysers, smoldering fissure eruptions, and intense blasts of heat and cold.[28] The audio, special effects and lighting system vendors were project managed by Thinkwell's European Technical Director, Philip Hartley, who was working alongside Philip Hartley Associates' technical co-ordinator Annika Oetken. It was announced at the 12th Annual Thea Awards, at IAAPA 2005, that Ice Age Adventure had won the Outstanding Achievement Award in the category of "Limited Budget/Refurbishment". The award's presentation to Thinkwell was made at the Thea Awards Gala on 18 March 2006.[29][1] See also
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