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.
