She'll Grow Back: Silly Sundays - Monster Mansion!

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Silly Sundays - Monster Mansion!

Back in 1981, Six Flags Over Georgia hired a former Disney Imagineer to put together a new dark ride, one that couldn't be found anywhere else in the world. That ride became known as Monster Plantation. Last month, the ride reopened as a new, refurbished version of the original, with a new name and a lot of new effects. (If any of those A J-C links want you to register, don't forget bugmenot.)

One thing that didn't change was the theme song (though it sounds better now, thanks to advances in speaker design during the intervening decades, and a new instrumental version plays near the queue area). Here is the original theme song, played in several different instrumentations, all of which can still be heard in the new version of the ride.

I hadn't been to Six Flags in years and years, but when I heard they were refurbing this ride, I bought a season pass. I also wrote this, in an email to my friends:

The first audio-animatronic robots I ever saw were at Six Flags Over Georgia, in The Monster Plantation. I remember almost every part of it, and if it hadn't been as good as it was, I'd probably care less about robots, and dark rides, and Disney parks (and their themed brethren).

Those of you who aren't near Atlanta can see the difference between the old and new versions of the ride on YouTube, but of course watching a dark-ride video is pretty unsatisfying. Anyway, enough talk. This song is insanely catchy, so I don't recommend listening more than twice in any given week.

Monster Plantation/Mansion Theme
mirror 1 -- mirror 2

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