When Islands of Adventure opened twelve years ago some rides envisioned for the Jurassic Park Island were unfortunately cancelled. One of them was the Jeep Safari ride which would have been great as you will see on the renderings below from artist and former WDI Imagineer Scott Scherman.
The first artwork above shows a concept for the jeep vehicle of the ride. The next one below shows the jeeps entering a Jurassic Park camp before they move inside the land where the AA dinosaurs are.
On the next artwork things are becoming serious as the jeeps would have gone right under a giant Brontosaur. These artworks are unfortunately in low-res but if you enlarge them you can see that others animals would have appear like a long Apatosaur neck, from the lagoon. Before moving under the Brontosaur the jeep would have enter the land through the famous Jurassic Park gates and moving under a kind of giant net where probably others effects or animals would have await the guests.
On this last artwork - which was not the last part of the ride - you can see clearly a jeep being attacked by what seems to be Velociraptors. The arrows on the drawing indicate for sure other kind of effects and i wish i could tell which one, if i only knew... What i know is that others renderings exist and that in another scene a T-Rex would have "stepped on" the guests jeep and spun it in a way similar to the scene in the movie!
Apparently this ride was planned for the area behind Thunder Falls and was scrapped for its similarity to the River Adventure raft ride. Universal obviously favored the water based ride but who knows, may be they will build it one day - let's hope so!
Artwork by Scott Scherman : copyright Universal Studios
You'll notice that in the second ride overview image you have that toward the end the vehicle goes forward - meets some sort of dead end - and then reverses around a loop. At the end of the loop it goes off the "track" and subsequently smashes through an electric fence and falls down the ravine.
ReplyDeleteAt the bottom of the ravine there's two show scenes setup, but the vehicle only goes into one of them. This is a capacity control since the scene is stationary. Essentially the vehicle gets attacked by what appears to be raptors before managing to pull forward out of the scene.
Directly across from it is another scene where another vehicle could be doing the same thing in an overlapping manner.
This is amazing! Much better than the current water version of Jurassic Park at IOA.
ReplyDeleteIn the second overview, it looks more like a massive Brontosaur tail that knocks guests off the path than it does raptors.
ReplyDeleteIt seems the arrows on that last drawing, represent water or mud coming down the hill the jeep is trying to go up, therefore slowing down the jeep and mst probably splashing the guest wet.
ReplyDeleteI heard one reason they didn't build this is because it was never going to be as good as the movie.
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