Knott’s Bear-y Tales delivers fast and furious game play in fun tribute to 1970s ride – Orange County Register
The new Knott’s Bear-y Tales attraction takes the old dark ride from the 1970s and adds a modern digital twist to the original story with Boysenberry Blasters that fire jam at pie-thieving coyotes during the fast and furious game play that unfolds on a series of massive screens.
Knott’s Berry Farm hosted a media preview of the new Knott’s Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair 4-D interactive dark ride on Tuesday, April 27 at the Buena Park theme park.
The Knott’s Bear-y Tales ride will debut on May 6 when the park reopens to season passholders with rides and attractions after a yearlong coronavirus closure. Knott’s reopens to the general public on May 21. The park hosted a series of food festivals without rides or attractions during the COVID-19 pandemic closure.
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The new Knott’s Bear-y Tales replaces the Voyage to the Iron Reef 4-D interactive dark ride that debuted at the park in 2015. Voyage to the Iron Reef closed in January 2020 in anticipation of Bear-y Tales’ summer 2020 debut — which was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic that shuttered Knott’s for more than a year.
The digital remake of Bear-y Tales once again pairs Knott’s with Triotech, the Montreal-based ride maker behind the Voyage to the Iron Reef interactive dark ride.
The new Bear-y Tales dark ride pays tribute to the original one-of-a-kind attraction from the 1970s and ’80s that could only be found at Knott’s Berry Farm.
Just like in the original attraction, Bear-y Tales riders once again follow Boysen Bear and Girlsen Bear as they travel to the Country Fair in hopes of winning a blue ribbon for their boysenberry pie. Crafty Coyote and his mischievous pups are back with their eyes on the pies and thievery on their minds. New digitally rendered scenes recreate the Boysenberry Pie Factory, Frog Forest, Fortune Teller Camp, Thunder Cave and Weird Woods from the original dark ride.
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The indoor queue area does a nice job of setting up the backstory for Bear-y Tales 2.0 — which closely follows the original dark ride tale. Riders meet the bear family and the coyote thieves in the queue as well as learn about the pie factory.
Some of the steampunk props from the old Voyage of the Iron Reef have been repurposed into pie factory equipment in the Bear-y Tales queue. The Coyote Repellent used by Knott’s doesn’t seem to be working though — as purple coyote tracks lead into the factory. Trouble awaits ahead.
High-touch 3D glasses are a problem for all theme parks in the coronavirus era. Knott’s employees clean all the 3D glasses between each use and hand them out in the ride loading area to keep riders from reaching for the glasses themselves.
During the attraction, riders travel through a series of scenes projected on curving screens while armed with Boysenberry Blasters that squirt jelly at thieving coyotes stealing boysenberry pies from the factory. The blasters look like jam jars with boysenberries at the end of a pull cord.
The basic idea is simple: Shoot as many pie-stealing coyote pups as possible. Actually, you can shoot anything on the screen and rack up points — including pies, factory machinery, signs, frogs, elixir bottles and even the friendly bears. If you start to ask yourself, “I wonder if I can shoot …” the answer is an emphatic “Yes you can.” The jelly hits the screen with a satisfying splat and the targets react in playful ways when they get hit.
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There are a few clever practical sets at the beginning of the ride, but the attraction quickly turns into a screen-based shoot-em-up adventure. The curving screens are massive and the game play happens at a larger-than-life scale that pushes the practical set pieces to the periphery.
There are some fun visual gags that play out on the digital screens, but they do little to advance the story or develop the characters. A shadow play scene on three carnival tents is clever and the piles of pies disappear in humorous ways as riders fire their blasters at them. A cute bathtub scene produces digital bubbles filled with pies and coyote pups that pop when shot by the berry blasters.
You can even shoot the bear brass band and watch the musicians react like they’ve been hit with a whipped cream pie in the face. The game designers employed some wonderful purple pie mega-splats as transitions between scenes that come at riders like a comic book zap, wham or ka-boom.
But mostly the ride boils down to so much coyote chaos that absorbing much of the story becomes next to impossible. By its nature, the game play is designed for high action and low storytelling.
I rode the attraction four times during the media preview — twice with my Boysenberry Blaster in hand and twice with the gun in its holster. It’s virtually impossible for me to ride attractions like Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters and Toy Story Midway Mania without trying to get the high score in my car. It’s hard for me to focus on anything other than targets that deliver high score rewards. And that makes the storytelling a lower priority on most of the latest generation of shoot-em-up dark rides.
That’s certainly the case with the new Knott’s Bear-y Tales ride. The game play takes over and the storytelling gets lost. Even when you’re looking for the storytelling, the manic game play unfolding on the screens gets in the way.
The tale is there in Bear-y Tales — you’ll just have to look hard for it. Which will take multiple rides — the sign of a good dark ride. In your quest, you’ll have to fight your way through a never-ending army of coyotes to get to that story.
With some work, it’s possible. But more than likely, the impulse to pick up your berry blaster and start firing away will overtake your interest in the tale at the heart of Bear-y Tales. The constant chaos makes it hard to follow the story line and appreciate the scenes. The story largely plays out in the background as coyote pups overrun the foreground.
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The only break in the action takes place in the mid-ride Thunder Cave. It’s a nice throwback to older dark rides with some inventive lightning effects and glowing black light spiders and webs. But mostly what you will use the Thunder Cave for is to rest your wrist from all the tugging on the blaster cord before plunging back into the next set of mega-screen battles with those pie-thieving coyote pups. Like a zombie horde, they never stop.
If you’re like me, you’ll be shaking your wrist from blaster fatigue and all the repetitive cord-tugging action after you get off the ride. More than likely you’ll want to hop in line again to best your top score — or try to beat your friend or family’s higher score. My highest tally was 180,000 points.
The game action on Bear-y Tales is fun and the blaster works well and seems accurate. The mandatory masks tend to fog up your 3-D glasses — but think of it as a higher difficulty level. The masks also make it difficult to catch the Boysenberry scent pumped into the ride.
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The new shoot-em-up dark ride occupies a location that was once home to Voyage to the Iron Reef, the original Knott’s Bear-y Tales and Kingdom of the Dinosaurs attractions.
The original Knott’s Bear-y Tales dark ride was commissioned by the Knott family and created by Disney Imagineer Rolly Crump, who worked on the Enchanted Tiki Room, Haunted Mansion and It’s a Small World at Disneyland.
The ride opened in 1975 as the marquee attraction in the newly re-themed Roaring ’20s section of the park. The original Bear-y Tales dark ride journey followed the bear family of Raz, Boysen, Girlsen, Elder and Flapper as they traveled to the annual Country Fair to sell their pies. A berry smell filled the bakery scene.
