Tower of Terror

I was on vacation in Disney World a few weeks ago, visited all four of its parks during the trip. Second day I was at the Hollywood Studios park (formerly MGM) and went to ride the Tower of Terror and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster. The Aerosmith ride line was kind of long so I instead kept going through the Tower of Terror, with a much shorter and faster moving line. (Also helped that going to Disney World in November is like the best time since there are significantly fewer people than other times of the year!)

Tower of Terror is basically your average 12-story drop ride. But it’s like a spooky hotel and a haunted elevator, made out to be like a Twilight Zone episode. Pretty cool.

Sure enough, though, something had to piss me off. Not the ride itself. It was many dumbass parents of small children on the ride. I have no problem with small children, hell no. But many of the small children had a problem with the ride.

Must have been a handful of them during the course of the day, different times I got in line to ride it again and again. The little kid, probably around four years old, kept telling his parents over and over “I don’t want to ride this! I’m scared!” But of course his parents ignored him. We all get into the elevator thing and sit down, and the kid is still begging to get off the ride. Parents continue to ignore him. The ride starts, it goes through the spooky images and stuff of the “hotel” and then gets to the two or three drops before the ride ends. Sure enough, when the ride is over, the kid is now all freaked out and crying. 🙁

And the dumbass parents are like “durr, what’s wrong?” :irked:

And, like I said, didn’t just happen once. Several different families bringing their pre-kindergarten little ones onto this ride against their will, only for the little ones to be screaming and terrified afterward. Hell, one little girl grabbed onto a bar at the entrance of the elevator to keep from being brought into it!

What is wrong with these people? Do they care that little about anything their little son or daughter is saying? I’m a total stranger and can understand what the kid is saying, so I really doubt the parents are having any issue with that. Do they think the kid will enjoy the ride and that his protests are just playing around? The screaming and being freaked out after the ride is kind of a mark against that theory. Not to mention being a smaller person, he may feel the effects of the drop a lot more severely.

I mean, if you’re going there with a small child, it’s kind of a given that you can’t do all the same things as if you were there without him. If instead of going alone I had taken my 4-year-old brother with me, I know there’s a lot of rides I wouldn’t be able to do because he’s either not tall enough or he’d be terrified. With little ones, stick to the slow moving rides, or at least to rides they aren’t refusing to go on. I mean, I did see some little ones on Tower of Terror who had no problem with it. That’s fine. But if they’re scared of either the spookiness or the darkness or the speed, go do something that won’t scare them. Go to Magic Kingdom and do the Snow White ride or Winnie the Pooh. Or, hell, if you want spooky, do Haunted Mansion, which, unlike Tower, is spooky in a happy sort of way. Or if you want absolutely terrifying to the point of killing yourself, do It’s a Small World.

Of course, this thing of little kids wanting off the Tower of Terror is interesting in one aspect. Before the ride, you’re gathered into this little room to watch a Twilight Zone clip to set the setting for the ride, where it shows a group of people getting on the elevator. In that group is an old woman and a little girl. Right before the elevator is going to close, you see the little girl suddenly try to run out of the elevator, but the old woman grabs her and pulls her back. And sure enough, right afterwards, all the spooky stuff happens to them and the elevator plummets and all that jazz. You see, if the little girl had escaped she’d have lived.