Superstar Limo

Opening Date: 2001

In 2001, Disneyland opened Disney’s California Adventure, a second theme park to accompany the first. It was, from the outset, a disaster. It was a theme park in California about California, which was both myopic and redundant. Too many of its rides and attractions were ‘off-the-rack’—uninspired carnival rides with minimal theming. And worst of all, it was all done on the cheap. When Disney decided to revamp and rededicate the park in 2007, they estimated it would cost $1.1 billion—nearly twice of what they spent to build the park in the first place.

But in terms of cheap, thoughtless rides, there was none more cheap and thoughtless than Superstar Limo. As originally conceived, the dark ride would have been a high speed chase from the pursuing paparazzi. But then, Princess Diana died in a car accident following a high-speed paparazzi chase, and the Imagineers significantly changed the ride, slowing it down to a crawl and including creepy, caricatured Audio-Animatronics of celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Chan, Drew Carey, Tim Allen, and Regis Philbin. It was dated from its opening day.

I went to Disneyland in 2001, the summer that California Adventure opened. And I remember that unlike all the other rides, the queue for Superstar Limo was nearly empty. Disney took the hint; the company closed the ride less than a year after it opened. Four years later, it reopened as Monsters, Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!, a dark ride that used the exact same track as Superstar Limo and repurposed most of the Audio-Animatronics.