A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster at Disney’s Hollywood Studios

By Dave Shute

Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians and author of Jim’s Gems in The easy Guide, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

ROCK ‘N’ ROLLER COASTER

By Jim Korkis

“When you’ve toured the world as much as we have, it’s a real thrill to find a new audience,” said lead singer of the band Aerosmith Steve Tyler in July 1999. “Coming up with a soundtrack for this Disney ride really brought the kid out in all of us and has given us the opportunity to play audio gymnastics with our music.”

Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster with Aerosmith opened at Disney’s Hollywood Studios July 29, 1999. The attraction is a steel roller coaster created by the Vekoma Rides Manufacturing company that begins with powerful linear synchronous motors (LSM) that catapult the super stretch limo vehicle inspired by the design of a 1962 Cadillac from 0 to 57 miles per hour in just 2.8 seconds into a giant cobra roll and later a corkscrew inversion.

“The idea behind the ride is that guests just stepped into a recording studio where Aerosmith is rehearsing for an awards show. Suddenly, the group’s harried manager (actress Illeana Douglas) rushes in and announces that the band is running late. The members refuse to go to the show unless their loyal fans get to go as well.

“So, 24 guests at a time,” stated lead designer Jim Shull, “we pile you, the fans, into an enormous stretch limo – and you’re off.”

To justify having such an attraction in an area themed to 1940s Hollywood, the Imagineers came up with an interesting storyline that neither the guests nor the cast ever adopted and has been largely ignored and forgotten.

The queue line is themed to G-Force records, a fictional record company that was supposedly started in the 1930s. (The intercom calls for people are the names of Imagineers who worked on the attraction.) G-Force was known for attracting the best of the best in recording artists and became a growing force in the industry.

Things however took a turn for the worse on Halloween night 1939. While throwing a party at the neighboring Hollywood Tower Hotel (Twilight Zone Tower of Terror), a strange incident occurred where lightning struck the building and five hotel guests mysteriously disappeared. The hotel was closed and the public felt that somehow G-Force was responsible and their record sales plummeted.

Over time G-Force as a business began to re-emerge and rebuilt the existing studio, adding a giant forty-foot Stratocaster as its icon. Today at G-Force many of the top recording stars can be found using the state of the art facilities.

G-Force (with the “g” from “gravitational”) is a measurement of type of acceleration that causes weight like during a rocket launch. The guests on the attraction experience 4.5 Gs, more than an astronaut does on a space shuttle launch.

Aerosmith band members Steve Tyler and Joe Perry rode the attraction twelve times in a row and made several changes primarily to the recording studio pre-show to make it more realistic including the location of the guitars.

The vehicles have a built-in audio system that includes 125 speakers, 24 sub-woofers (one under each seat) and more than 32k watts of audio amplifier output.

Each vehicle features a different Aerosmith song or medley. Tracks are: “Nine Lives”; “Sweet Emotion”; a “Back in the Saddle”/”Dude Looks Like a Lady” medley; a “Love in an Elevator”/”Walk This Way” medley; and a “Young Lust”/”F.I.N.E.”/”Love in an Elevator” medley. Tyler and Perry were involved in the re-recording of the songs including changing the lyrics so that it is now “Love in a Roller Coaster”.

Aerosmith was chosen for the attraction because they had supplied two songs (“I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” and “What Kind of Love Are You On”) for the soundtrack album of the 1998 Touchstone Pictures film Armageddon so they were already connected with Disney. It was rumored that Disney first approached the Rolling Stones, but logistic and financial issues like paying for the rights to their songs derailed that deal.

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Thanks, Jim! And come back next Friday for even more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew, which reprints much material first written for this site, and The Vault of Walt: Volume 4, and his contributions to The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, all published by Theme Park Press.

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