It was supposed to be an easy
internet search.
I knew that Guardians of the Galaxy
Mission Breakout and Monsters After Dark played some kind of “alien radio broadcast”
hosted by The Collector’s Assistant in its outdoor queue switchbacks, and that
it supposedly contained a snippet of Tower of Terror’s music as one of Mission
Breakout’s exhausting amounts of Easter Eggs.
And, as far as I knew, it had been that way since 2017. It finally occurred to me that I should
probably update my record of Disney’s California Adventure Tower to include
what was left of the ride, especially
since Disney themselves acknowledged it again with a Twilight Zone themed Pixar truck in one of The Collector’s offices
during the Pixar fest event.
“It should be no problem,” I
thought. “I’ll just search up a post of
the queue audio loop, confirm the Tower music sample, and be done with
it.” After all, it’s 2024, and the ride
has been operating since 2017. I can
already find complete soundscapes of Tron Lightcycle Run and Guardians of the
Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, despite those being open for much shorter periods of
time. Disney fans are supposed to be
dedicated like that, keeping record of a beloved ride’s ambience and posting
it. And, from what I could tell, Mission
Breakout is, despite my own feelings,
a popular and beloved ride. It always commands long wait times, and on Reddit
at least is often held up as an example of “changes Disney fans were skeptical
of, but realized were actually better.” (Clearly, as this blog’s existence
shows, I never came around to that “realization.”)
And yet, when I searched… nothing.
Actually, it was a bit worse than nothing. Everywhere from soundsofdisneyland.com to
YouTube not only lacked the queue loop I was looking for, but had an entirely incorrect loop in its
place! Rather than the radio-show-like
loop I remembered from my own experiences with the ride, the posts featured a
basic playlist of vintage music, in the vein of Star Lord’s “Awesome Mix”
cassettes from the films. While I do
believe this vintage music loop plays elsewhere at Mission
Breakout—specifically, I think it is the gift shop’s loop and the exit hallway
loop for default non-Halloween Breakout—it is NOT the queue audio. Perhaps it was very early in the ride’s existence, but by the time I got to it
in September 2017 all I could recall was the now-mysterious “radio loop.”
It got stranger the further I
looked. Okay, so nobody had a dedicated
sound post… Maybe it’d be featured in a “complete POV” video of the ride on
YouTube. Nope, even supposedly
“complete” POVs would cut the outdoor switchbacks. I mean, it makes sense, you wouldn’t expect a lot of lore and detail there,
but in this case there is! The most I
could find was two YouTube Shorts (Shorts!
Not even full videos!) featuring small bits of ambient music that I
recognized from the missing loop as the videographers went past the outdoor
queue.
Since the Breakout fandom seemed to
be on Reddit, I took my question there, posting to both the Disneyland and
HelpMeFind subreddits asking if anyone had any information about the queue
audio loop. Neither post received any
responses, even after weeks. As of this posting, there are STILL no responses.
Slowly, it dawned on me what I
would have to not only confirm one of the final Tower Easter Eggs, but prove
this loop existed at all.
To quote Thanos from the first
Guardians of the Galaxy film:
This realization happened
simultaneously with my decision to not renew my Disneyland annual pass. The 2023-2024 Disneyland season was a pretty
abysmal experience for me, for a number of reasons. It was expensive, yet Disney seemed unable to
maintain their rides properly or keep enough of them open to handle the massive crowds flooding the park even on
random weekdays. Getting on the rides
that were open was an exercise in frustration and leg endurance as wait times
ballooned well in excess of an hour. Food prices had risen so much that I had to
make sure I brought all my food from home.
Parking was so expensive that I could only go to the parks when someone
could drop me off at the gate. Disney
seemed to have removed a great deal of benches and rest areas, making the parks
more physically punishing than in the past.
Workers seemed more overworked and underpaid than ever, and guests
seemed to be increasingly agitated by the crowds and increased prices. Yes, those ever-increasing ticket
prices. Ever since I was a child, there
had always been an affordable way for locals to go to Disneyland, but now even
the local deals were a thing of the past.
It was beyond just being unable to afford to go anymore, though. I had little reason to go, when the present state of the park was so unpleasant. Staying at home was legitimately more fun at
that point. It’s hard to even just sit
around and enjoy the atmosphere of the park when it’s that crowded and there are so few places to rest. Disney’s future announcements at D23 didn’t
give me any reason to want to visit in the future either, as they were
underwhelming for my tastes—assuming they ever get built at all (anyone else
remember that Anaheim was supposed to get Rock n’ Roller Coaster decades ago?).
So, there I was, about to let my
pass just run out with two reservations left, when the realization hit that I
was going to have to get this loop myself.
I had no experience in doing this type of preservation, and had never edited
audio or video before. I didn’t even
know if I would be able to capture the sound with my phone’s audio recorder,
and had no time to order or test anything else.
But still, it gave me a goal to wring one last use out of that
overpriced and under-delivering Magic Key.
And to do that, I was going to have
to ride Mission Breakout a LOT.
Well, initially, that wasn’t my
plan. I knew from the preservation work
of other fans, like Fox Nolte of Passport2Dreams and “Hoot and Chief” of
Horizons-fandom fame, that preserving sound loops often involved sticking a
recording device by a speaker and letting it run for a few hours. Since I had to use my phone rather than a
more “expendable” device, I couldn’t drop it in the bushes and leave it, but I
still hoped there would be some ground-level speaker that I could just sit by
for a while to capture the loop as cleanly as possible.
I wasn’t quite so lucky. As it turns
out, the loop in question only plays from a set of overhead speakers in the outdoor queue, and relatively small ones
at that. While the loop could be heard
fairly well from the benches near the gift shop exit (and indeed some
recordings from that area made it into my published version of the loop), my
phone could not capture that as well as I would like, and there was also a lot
of interfering noise from other sound loops converging in that area. So, the only way to get a clearer capture
would be to be in the queue.
Thankfully, it was October! Which meant that, after 3pm, it would be
Monsters After Dark, and not Mission Breakout!
Despite its objective quality issues, I actually un-ironically love
Monsters After Dark. B- objectively, A+
in my heart. It appeals to the time my
14-year-old self thought the Tower of Terror would be cooler with blasting
electric guitar music and more airtime on the drop profile (maybe a monkey’s
paw curled somewhere that day…). It has
possibly the best drop profile of any Tower version I’ve ridden (So. Much.
Airtime.) and has a very fun custom-made electric guitar-driven score that
matches and enhances those drops. It
also FINALLY restores some proper spookiness to architecture designed to be spooky, and recycles a
ton of Tower’s effects. Yeah, I was definitely up for marathoning Monsters
After Dark. Heck, at this point it’s
probably my favorite E-ticket left at the park (Haunted
Mansion was in Holiday mode and stuck on a sold-out virtual queue, while
Incredicoaster/California Screamin had aged so roughly and horribly it was sad
to ride).
So, there was my solution. Ride Monsters After Dark, over, and over, and
over. Even as lines ballooned to 90+
minute waits. Hoping that my phone was
actually picking up what I wanted to record.
You’d think that the longer waits
would be to my advantage for this particular purpose, but unfortunately they
weren’t. Because the loop only played in
such a limited area, even on those 90+ minute waits I spent at MOST 20 minutes
in that section. I just had to hope I
got a different 20 minutes of the soundtrack than I had on the last run.
Furthermore, while being in the
queue meant the music was louder, it also meant that the people around me were louder.
Rather than sitting in a relatively quiet bench area, I was in the midst
of a whole switchback pen of people all having their own conversations. I had to discard several clips because either
the crowd noise completely drowned out whatever was playing, or because
peoples’ individual conversations were too distinctly audible and I didn’t feel
it would be ethical to post those clips.
There weren’t any particularly juicy conversations from what I could
tell, but even posting a random set of friends talking about Labyrinth felt like an invasion of their
privacy.
Since the park in general was so
loud everywhere, I only knew I was even successfully capturing audio at all by
holding the phone up to my hear and listening to a few seconds of playback. It was a MASSIVE relief the next day, when I
was finally able to upload the myriad of disjointed clips to my computer, and
hear that I had successfully gotten
significant audible segments of music under the crowd chatter.
Having successfully obtained the
recordings, it was then time to figure out what
I had. How long was this loop? How much of it had I gotten? Could I piece it together?
Step one was to just listen to
every recording I’d made, taking notes along the way. I noted time stamps for when segments began
and ended, and wrote down what The Collector’s Assistant said to introduce each
piece. Early on in this process, the
horror dawned on me that this might not
be a loop at all, but instead some kind of shuffled playlist. This is the 21st century after
all, there’s no guarantee Disney would stick to its classic style of soundtrack
construction for a modern ride, especially for a franchise basically built around playlists. Thankfully, I eventually came upon another
recorded segment that had the same Assistant chatter and music in the same
order as another recorded segment. While
it was annoying to have nearly identical pieces, it was a relief to have
confirmation that I was in fact dealing with a fixed soundtrack, and not a
shuffled playlist.
(As an aside…speaking of The
Assistant’s chatter, I do wish I had clearer recordings of her voice lines
specifically. Unlike the songs, they are
definitely unavailable anywhere else,
and they appear to make some very specific fun references to the Marvel
Universe. The “orloni” she mentions in
one line are the rat-lizard things that show up in both the ride and the GOTG
films. I can’t discern some of the other
species names she says, but I can only assume they’re canon creatures as well.)
Step two was fitting those
recordings together. Once I realized the
audio was in a fixed order, I was able to use “overlaps” between different
recordings to figure out how they fit together.
The Assistant’s spoken lines were very helpful for this, as they were
more easily recognizable than individual music pieces. If I heard her say a certain line near the end
of one recording, and at the beginning of another, I knew where those two
segments lined up relative to each other in the loop.
I had initially planned to try and
clean up the audio and remove the crowd noise, but soon realized that such a
task was far beyond the scope of a
beginner like myself. In fact, given
that’s what Peter Jackson had to get new cutting-edge software for in his
Beatles Get Back series, it seems
that kind of audio editing is for full-on top-tier experts. Thus, I resigned myself to editing the audio
together in its noisy state. It’s not
perfect, but it is proof of what the real loop is.
To compensate for the poor audio
quality, I decided to add a visual component.
I knew I was going to post this to YouTube anyways so that fans could
easily find it, but initially thought I could just get away with a picture of
Breakout as the “video.” I decided to
take advantage of the visual component by making “visual notes” for the entire
video—I’d display on-screen what The Assistant said, and the title/album/artist
of the music where applicable. That way,
it’d make any Easter Eggs even clearer to any viewers.
Here’s where clear “steps” sort of
fell apart and became a mess of “whatever worked.” As I was piecing together the audio clips in
sequence, I was simultaneously making graphics of The Assistant’s captions and
attempting to identify and make visual notecards for the music. And hoo boy, was it a TASK to identify that
music.
Aside from the definite Easter Eggs
I’d heard while waiting in line (“Now is the Time” from the Carousel of
Progress, Tower of Terror’s exit hallway music) I had no idea if what was
played was custom-composed for the ride, other Easter Eggs that I just didn’t
recognize immediately, or licensed music.
Since I had nowhere better to start, I started by trying Shazam and
Google’s audio search function on musical segments to see if anything matched. To my shock, this actually turned up
results! It didn’t do so very
consistently, due to the poor recording quality and how obscure some of the
material presumably is, but it provided a place to start.
One of the first artists this
method led me to was Chuck Jonkey, who seems to be a prolific and very eclectic
and eccentric musician—albeit perhaps a bit obscure. Some of the Breakout loop songs’ official
postings on YouTube have view counts in the dozens. Per his official website, which itself seems
straight out of the 1990s, he worked on the Adventureland music for Disneyland
Shanghai, but makes no mention of his work being featured at Mission
Breakout. At first, I suspected that the
entire loop, specific Disney references aside, might be his work. After all, a quick glance at his catalog of
over 100 albums shows enough variance and oddity to easily compose an entire
space-radio soundtrack. It ranges from
unique foreign instruments to sci-fi synthesizers to relaxing meditative
chimes. Plus, it seems like it might be
easier and/or cheaper for Disney to license work from just one artist, and
easier/cheaper could easily be the motto for the entire Mission Breakout
experience.
Well, my initial Shazam/Google pass
soon debunked my hypothesis. It
identified snippets of work by Isao Tomita, Wendy Carlos, and various historical/cultural
music recording collections. I had to
confirm the apps’ analysis of these, and then figure out how to search for what
the app couldn’t “hear” under the crowd noise but I could still decently discern.
As it turned out, even confirming
the identifications the apps made was tougher than I’d thought. I figured that if it was an identifiable
artist, I’d just be able to pull up the song on YouTube and confirm it
matched. Nope. Despite sounding futuristic, the Tomita and
Carlos albums were old. Like, "high quality postings didn’t exist
online" old. While the Internet Archive had a
decent-enough quality recording of a few of Tomita’s vinyl records to confirm
the piece by him, I ran into a very different problem with the works of Wendy
Carlos.
Prior to this, I’d known Wendy
Carlos as “the lady who did the Tron
soundtrack.” As it turns out, she did way more than that. She pioneered synthesizer music and breathed
new life into the classical genre with her hit record Switched on Bach, and also was one of the first openly transgender
celebrities. And, unfortunately, she
apparently does not want her music to be currently available. Her music isn’t available on any current
streaming service and is out of print on CD and Vinyl (and any other physical
media). Her website was last updated in
the late 2000s, other than a brief post in 2020 to debunk a newly released
biography as “fiction.” Searching around
the internet revealed that her fans believe she became disillusioned with the
music industry and the direction of synthesizer music, and thus purposely does
not want her music to remain available.
Her team is very quick to take down any posts of her work online, and as
I mentioned even physical prints are not available. I tried searching at local thrift stores to
find used copies to try and verify the songs from the Guardians loop, but alas
they didn’t have her records.
Luckily, @dirtyriver on Tumblr saw my post
about the issue and thankfully let me listen to their(?) Wendy Carlos Bach box
set. This let me not only verify the one
song that Shazam had noticed, but confirm another by recognizing it myself.
Brute-force searching for songs
became my method for trying to identify the rest of the loop. I knew which collections and artists Disney
had already licensed for this soundtrack, so it stood to reason that I might
find more by listening to the rest of the albums and trying to match them up with
some of the “mystery tracks.” I actually
did manage to identify several more songs this way, although it was a
painstaking process of listening and going “wow, wait, those 5 seconds sounded
really familiar,” and then flipping back and forth between 5 second clips and
hoping my brain wasn’t just “forcing” them to match so I could claim another
solved song. This process was so
exhausting, and some of the artists’ catalogs so extensive, that eventually I
decided to let several tracks just stay “Unidentified Ambient Space Music
#[insert number here]” for the time being.
My hope is that perhaps a viewer will recognize it and help this process
along.
An amusing difficulty I ran into
was also falling asleep while attempting
to edit. As it turns out, ambient
space music tracks are very relaxing when listening to nothing else for hours
on end, removed from the high-energy environment of a theme park. I do wonder a bit why this soundscape was
chosen for Mission Breakout. Breakout
tries its hardest—perhaps a bit too hard—to be a high-energy “party” ride. You’re supposed to be rocking out with a
bunch of space party-animal types while escaping from a museum-prison combination. It’s supposed to be “young” and “hip.” Meanwhile this loop…this loop is old school.
I think I’ve witnessed Disney
transition between old and new ways of designing rides. Gone are the days of carefully crafted
artistic atmosphere, and in are the days of the World’s Most Marketable
Intellectual Properties. It doesn’t
matter to the design team anymore that Mission Breakout clashes with any themes
or sight lines, it’s marketable, it’s a trendy IP, it’s gonna make them money for
a quick and cheap re-theme.
So it was very striking, to me, to
deep-dive the Mission Breakout Queue Loop like this. This isn’t a quick, low-effort, “quirky, young,
and hip” marketable playlist, even though that would actually thematically
match the IP in this case. They could’ve
just used an “Awesome Mix: Breakout Edition” playlist like the gift shop does,
or like all the other postings assumed, and called it a day. But no, here instead is a curated soundscape
in the vein of the 1970s Tomorrowland or Fronteirland loops that
Passport2Dreams researched and preserved.
Obscure yet licensed atmospheric playlists, specifically placed in an
hour-ish long loop, with the addition of lore-specific narration that adds
depth to the world of the ride. It’s a
weird little last gasp of that classic Disney design, of that time when
Imagineers were allowed to care about details that wouldn’t just push the most
money-making current franchise.
I suppose it is fitting, then, that
Mission Breakout’s fans, the fans of the “new school” Disney, apparently missed
its existence. Instead, in perhaps my
last ever interaction with the Disney park that I grew up with, I spent my day
with that last little bit of classic Disney magic, that last gasp of the “old
school,” that type of design that had made me see theme parks as art pieces to appreciate. I feel like I left Disneyland behind twice: first when I physically left the exit, and again when I finally hit "post" on the finished video. It was done.
I took my last ride on Monsters
After Dark just as Disney’s California Adventure closed for the night. Thanks to the Halloween season, the building was lit up
purple and blue. Lightning effects
crackled across its façade as I turned back, pausing for a moment
before finally following the crowds out. Thanks for the memories, DCA. Even if they weren’t so great.
