Join us as we drop in for a visit to the Hollywood Tower Hotel at Hollywood Studios Florida Walt Disney World
#disney #disneyworld #disneyparks
The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, or simply Tower of Terror, is a series of similar accelerated drop tower dark rides located at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Tokyo DisneySea, Walt Disney Studios Park, and formerly located at Disney California Adventure. The attraction is inspired by Rod Serling’s anthology television series, The Twilight Zone, and takes place in the fictional Hollywood Tower Hotel in Hollywood, California. The Tokyo version features an original storyline not related to The Twilight Zone and takes place in the fictional Hotel Hightower. All versions of the attraction place riders in a seemingly ordinary hotel elevator, and present a fictional backstory in which people have mysteriously disappeared from the elevator under the influence of a supernatural element many years previously.
The original version of the attraction opened at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, then named Disney-MGM Studios, at Walt Disney World in July 1994. A decade later, Disney began plans to add similar versions of the attraction to their newest parks at the Disneyland Resort in California, Tokyo Disney Resort in Japan, and Disneyland Paris. In California and Paris, Disney sought to use the popular attraction to boost attendance at the respective resorts’ struggling new theme parks. The California and Tokyo versions of Tower of Terror opened in 2004[8] and 2006,[9] respectively, while financial problems delayed the opening of the Paris version until 2007.[10] The California version closed in January 2017[3] and was replaced by Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout!, which was later incorporated into Avengers Campus in 2021.
The Tower of Terror buildings are among the tallest structures found at their respective Disney resorts. At 199 feet (60.7 m), the Florida version is the second tallest attraction at the Walt Disney World Resort, with only Expedition Everest at Disney’s Animal Kingdom being taller by 0.5 feet (0.2 m). After its retheme, the 199-foot (60.7 m) structure at the Disneyland Resort is still the tallest building on the property, as well as one of the tallest buildings in Anaheim.[11] At Disneyland Paris, it is the second tallest attraction.
Queue and preshow
The lobby of the Hollywood Tower Hotel at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, May 2010
In the American and European versions of the attraction, guests make their way to the dilapidated Hollywood Tower Hotel through the front gate to enter the queue through overgrown gardens and then enter the hotel lobby. Once in the lobby, guests are ushered to the hotel library, which houses the hotel’s collection of books and antiques. With a crash of thunder and lightning, the power in the library goes out, except for a television set which crackles into life and plays the opening sequence from the fourth and fifth seasons of The Twilight Zone, hosted by Rod Serling. The episode depicts the events of a stormy night in Hollywood 1939, where a lightning bolt strikes the tower and causes five people—an actor, a singer, a child star, her nanny, and a hotel bellhop—to vanish from the elevator, along with an entire wing of the building. Serling then tells guests that they’ll be stepping in a maintenance service elevator to become the stars of an episode of The Twilight Zone. The television then turns off and then guests are directed through to the boiler room to board the elevator.
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Still gotta get on this haha