SSE has soft-opened

[mousermerf]

Around 8pm tonight Spaceship Earth began admitting regular guests onto the ride.

The ride has begun soft openings. Times for admission for the ride are unscheduled, and the ride could close at any time for any reason for any length of time.

 

[CPM]

Did you go on it?

 

[cornjob]

wow - that's great news. now if we could get some info on the changes....?

 

[minnie61650]

Thanks for the info.
I am anxiously waiting for some reviews from guests who are lucky enough to ride SSE in the next couple of weeks.
I can hardly wait for our September trip to WDW.
September seems so far away.....

 

[crystalcml]

I agree. We missed going on it in Sept because it was closed for the renovations. We love SSE and I am really excited to see the updates. I hope someone will post their review soon!

 

[CPM]

well, I'll be around there this weekend, but not planning on spending much time at Epcot. Hopefully we'll get to see it.

 

[safetymom]

We tried last night and it was closed.

 

[crazy4wdw]

We tried last night and it was closed.

Yep, same here. The CM's said they were having problems with the electrical system. Hopefully it will be back open tongiht as I'm heading home tomorrow.

 

[Micca]

Is there still a wall around the entrance?

 

[safetymom]

Yes the walls are still up.

 

[fan of the TTA]

ah....nice to see it open again. it seemed like forever while it was shut, love SSE!

 

[mrp4352]

I got to ride during Saturday afternoon's soft opening!!

Spoilers ahead!!!



Don't peek unless you want to know...




The ascent was fantastic! The new script flows better (I think) and it's more conversation than lecture. Most of the scenes were just "plussed" - the old slide pictures of the mammoth hunters are gone, there are some new props in Egypt, the Greek actors are gone and replaced with a scene of a school, new music underneath the Sistene Chapel - that kind of thing.

The real changes start with the family watching TV - they've got a new living room suite and their watching the lunar landing. Then it's off to the creation of the personal computer. The scene at the top is still spectacular, then once you start downwards, well, things start to go downhill (IMHO).

The touch screen comes to life and starts asking a bunch of questions, then puts together a short animated video of what the future would look like, based on your selections. (evidently one of the characters was supposed to be an animated version of me based on a picture taken at the beginning of the ride - but I only picked up on that after reading a review of the ride on another website). I glanced around and did see that everyone was watching different videos. But there is nothing left to see the rest of the way down outside of the screen. Just black walls and ceiling. Which, if the video had lasted the whole way down, probably would have been ok. But because they were testing, I rode down the whole way backwards at the wheelchair loading speed - which meant my video only lasted halfway down. Then I just got a static screen saver to view.

All in all, a very mixed review. Parts are fantastic, but some parts really still don't work quite as well.

 

[yitbos96bb]

So the lights on the ceiling on the descent are gone now? No voice or anything after the video?

I got to ride during Saturday afternoon's soft opening!!

Spoilers ahead!!!



Don't peek unless you want to know...




The ascent was fantastic! The new script flows better (I think) and it's more conversation than lecture. Most of the scenes were just "plussed" - the old slide pictures of the mammoth hunters are gone, there are some new props in Egypt, the Greek actors are gone and replaced with a scene of a school, new music underneath the Sistene Chapel - that kind of thing.

The real changes start with the family watching TV - they've got a new living room suite and their watching the lunar landing. Then it's off to the creation of the personal computer. The scene at the top is still spectacular, then once you start downwards, well, things start to go downhill (IMHO).

The touch screen comes to life and starts asking a bunch of questions, then puts together a short animated video of what the future would look like, based on your selections. (evidently one of the characters was supposed to be an animated version of me based on a picture taken at the beginning of the ride - but I only picked up on that after reading a review of the ride on another website). I glanced around and did see that everyone was watching different videos. But there is nothing left to see the rest of the way down outside of the screen. Just black walls and ceiling. Which, if the video had lasted the whole way down, probably would have been ok. But because they were testing, I rode down the whole way backwards at the wheelchair loading speed - which meant my video only lasted halfway down. Then I just got a static screen saver to view.

All in all, a very mixed review. Parts are fantastic, but some parts really still don't work quite as well.

 

[mrp4352]

So the lights on the ceiling on the descent are gone now? No voice or anything after the video?

Right. I think there was some soft background music playing was all. It may have been more noticable for me because of how slowly we descended, though. I wonder if I would have noticed that had the video lasted until we were at the bottom...

 

[Condorman]

I was able to ride it on 12/12 @ 7:30 pm. They open a portion of the still-erected wall (not the door) on the right-hand side across from the gift shop, not the photo place. If you see a lot of SSE employees standing around doing nothing and the wall is closed, they will soft-open it at some point during the day. They will not tell anyone until a few moments before they do.

The ride itself is mostly unchanged. You would have to be a die-hard fanatic to notice the differences, most of which come at the end. They did not install new cars but rather retrofitted LCDs between the headrests of the old, fiberglass, aquamarine cars they've always had. The big changes, as mentioned, come near the end. Rather than the kids talking to each other from the US and Japan, and rather than that fiber-optic spectrum shooting over your head into a futuristic city, they have installed three new displays. One deals with Steve Jobs or Wozniak - whichever one it was - who started Apple. They have a Gremlin car sitting out front and the guy in his garage toiling with the first home computer. It made me laugh. Another sequence shows an entire room in the late 60s outfitted with a massive computer equal to today's calculator. But the blinking lights and the outfit on the girl made me laugh as well. There are still a few bugs in the show, i.e. some voids and gaps - black spots - which should have had at least some set dressing. Judi Dench's voice was also a little too loud. The interactive LCD at the end must have a glitch or too because the choices I made were not correctly reflected in the computer's response. Still, they have three more months to iron these things out. One last note, that initial screen you see of the caveman and the Wooly Mammoth - which I believe was always there in some form - is now spectacular. It looks like a projection but also like a hologram and totally blew me away. I could have stared at that for an hour. After six days in WDW, this was the last ride I went on as I was walking out. It made my year.

 

[Smooshdog]

I got to do the soft opening on the 6th and was very unimpressed. The first screen did give me great hopes as it was just fantastic, but the ride really is no better now than it was before it closed, and thanks to that computer ending I would say the ride is actually worse now than before. I was with four other people when we did the soft opening and all of us gave it the same review, no better than before.

 

[CPM]

I also did it Monday. I didn't think it was anything great, but it was refreshed. Good to see some of the old things gone. Not sure how you can make it much more exciting. It's a trip through history. The end was kind of goofy.

 

[mickeyfantroy]

I got to ride it yesterday and was both impressed and disapointed. I was impressed with the animatronics that had much better movement. But was disapointed in the long boring ride downhill and with the supposedly interactive computer that only half worked. I've been told there are some other scenes that aren't finished yet and sincerely hope so. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt since this is a soft opening and hope the second half of the ride is as good as the first once it opens.

 

[fan of the TTA]

I got to ride it yesterday and was both impressed and disapointed. I was impressed with the animatronics that had much better movement. But was disapointed in the long boring ride downhill and with the supposedly interactive computer that only half worked. I've been told there are some other scenes that aren't finished yet and sincerely hope so. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt since this is a soft opening and hope the second half of the ride is as good as the first once it opens.

what have they got left to install?. hope it's going to be good

 

[meghanet]

My husband and I had friends down this month and we knew about the soft openings so we decided to take our friends on SSE. My husband and I were fans of the old one and our friends had never been on it, so we got two different viewpoints.

What I don't understand is that the complaint with the old SSE was that it was no longer projecting into the future at the end. I can remember riding it as a kid and getting to the end and thinking, "No way, life will never be like that." Well, now it is. We have the internet that has made interactive online classrooms a reality and all the stuff that SSE projected for the future happened. So it seems like the complaint I always heard was that SSE wasn't giving us a glimpse into what the future could be anymore. So the answer is...to have it end in the 1970's? I don't think the little consumer survey at the end can count as looking towards the future. Since when is the Jetsons (which aired in 1962) our view of the future?

Moving on, why is the newspaper boy facing away from the cars? Also, everyone in my party thought the narration sounded too forced, like we have this ride already in place, how do we make people make the jump from the ride to thinking about the types of products that Siemens sells? I thought the past narrations were absolutely inspiring, this one makes me feel like a 3rd grader at a lame school with a teacher that doesn't really know what she's teaching and is just reading a script.

The ride also doesn't seem complete. It's almost like the imagineers said, "Let's not be innovative because we might get it wrong or if we play it safe and look to the future conservatively then we'll just have to redo the ride again in five to ten years." The solution? Let's not look to the future at all. But wait, we've ended at the 70's and there is still more ride left, what should we do? Let's give them a consumer survey thinly disguised as a video to do with the future. But what should the video be? The Jetsons! No one really expects the future to be an episode of the Jetsons and it aired in 1962 anyways so we're safe! Plus we'll save money and precious creative brain cells on having to do the end of the ride, it's a win-win!

Walt was all about looking to the future, innovation, and imagination. The new SSE doesn't embrace any of that. It's just a history lesson and demographics survey now. The old ride looked at the past to show us how far we'd come and how it was the impossible ideas of past thinkers that shaped our current reality and how there are crazy impossible ideas still out there waiting to be made a reality. I think Walt would be very disappointed with the new SSE. There was a chance here for the imagineers to go wild and really show where they think this "Spaceship Earth" is headed. And if they had missed the mark at least they would have been aiming for something high. Instead they cowered in a corner and decided to play it safe by just rehashing more history and trying to convince us that touch screen LCDs are a really cool ending to a ride.

Plus, I thought the whole interactive ending was going to be more like the ending to Horizons.

All in all everyone in my party absolutely abhorred this ride. I think it is absolutely horrid compared to the old one. I was so excited to see what the imagineers had in store for us, but I was incredibly disappointed. I used to ride it every trip to WDW but I really don't think I'll ever ride it again. Our friends who had never ridden it thought it was lame, the narration was bad, and the movie at the end was dumb.

In a perfect world without the restraints of money Disney could close it back up and do it right, but I'm thinking the chances of that happening are non-existent. Pretty soon there won't be any traces of Walt's innovention, imagination, and forward looking thought left at "Walt" Disney World.