Roller Coaster of Wub

Rockin' Space Mountain sets you up for liftoff to a background of crowd noise, and an announcer indicating that you are off to attend a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, presumably on some space station, or possibly an asteroid, in deepest space. You can hear sounds of the band warming up on their instruments as you approach the ascent into the eye of God (or whatever that is at the top of the first hill). As you enter the ride proper, the song kicks in, and it is "Catholic School Girls Rule." I mean, "Higher Ground." The Stevie Wonder cover.

By the way, I have a long-standing question regarding that song: Based on the actual lyrics, shouldn't it really be called "Highest Ground"? I'm just wondering. Come to think of it, for that matter, shouldn't "Superstition" really, by rights, be called "Superstitious"?

Anyway, so the song is shortened, omitting many lyrics. But the real story here is not the musical changes they've made to the ride, but the visual ones. The ride has been lit slightly, so you can see stuff. You can see the tracks. You can see the walls. After years of riding Space Mountain in slightly glittering, mostly pitch darkness, believing I could possibly be bounding through space — this was a mixed revelation. The spirals and crisscrosses and ups and downs of those tracks, all coiled in a fairly tight space, are a riot of tangled metal — seemingly too tangled to be safe. It's easy to start picturing impressive decapitations as you shoot helplessly through this mess; then again, that's part of the thrill. In any case, I was so taken with this roller-coaster revelation, this breaking of a decades-long illusion, I didn't focus too much on the images flashing around us: dancing silhouettes, a guitar, "rock & roll" crap like that. Cute stuff, though. And then the Rock Concert was over. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It was, overall, a failed attempt to marry Disney with rock — which is exactly what you want from Disney, in the end. I can get my punk rock thrills elsewhere. Disney makes an art of inauthenticity.

California Screamin' is what you'd call a Quality Coaster. It's just really, really good. In fact, California Screamin' and the park in which it resides are, possibly, SoCal's best-kept entertainment secret. If you go to California Adventure on a Wednesday, nobody's there but the very friendly staff, and you can ride one of the best coasters in the country as long as you'd like. This ride, which features an upside-down loop (take that, Knott's Berry Farm!), was not changed at all for Rockin' Both Parks, but merely given a Chili Peppers soundtrack. I had hoped they would use the Chili Peppers' cover of "Love Rollercoaster." I mean, it stood to reason. (And hey! Shouldn't thatsong really be called "Rollercoaster of Love"? What's going on?)

Instead, they used "Around the World," one of their latter-day radio hits. It was fine. I don't blame the song for my wicked nausea post-coaster. It could have been the drugs.

Rockin' Both Parks ends April 26.