The Top 10 Rides at Disneyland and California Adventure

In this week's episode, Jared highlights the top 10 rides at the Anaheim Disney Parks.

Transcript

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On this week's episode of a Dryer Dose of Disney, Jared ranks the top 10 rides at Disney land and California Adventure in Anaheim. Intro Music Welcome to this week's episode of a Dryer dose of Disney. I'm your host, Jared dryer. And today we are going out to Anaheim and we're going to be talking about the top 10 rides at Disneyland and California adventure together. And if you listen to our last week's episode, we talked about the top 10 rides at Disney world. We're continuing that series. That's going to be a four-part series where we're next going to go to the universal parks at Orlando and then Hollywood. But today we're an Anaheim and we're at Disney. And we're talking about what are the top 10 rides on your trip to Disney land that you must ride? These are the absolute must. Do. These are the best rides in the park. And I will preface it by saying this will be a very different list because three out of the top four rides at Disney world last week are not even available Disneyland or California adventure. So we're going to have a great time today taking you through this list. Now, again, it is all subjective. So of course these are our opinions. We did run a poll out on our Facebook page a while ago. So if you're not following us on Facebook, we do ask, please join us over on Facebook and follow us so you can see these polls or these cool things that come up. As we talk about the rides over at Disney and universal parks. But we're going to try to stay as true to that as we can. But at the same time, there is a little bit of our opinion in there, but I think we're pretty close to what the top 10 rides are over there in Anaheim. So we're going to be going through that now, before I dive into that, if you're listening to us on the podcast, you can hear my voice has a little bit different today. I got into a little bit of a time crunch. We went out of town a while ago to go visit family in South Dakota. When we got back, I got really sick for a while. I'm now much better in doing great. I feel great. But I have a little bit of a lingering cough, which has lowered my octaves just a little bit here. And I sound like I've got a little bit of a deeper voice than I normally do but know that I feel great now. Next week, physically next week. Not from when you're listening to this, but when I recorded this we're going to be going on our first Disney cruise out of port Canaveral in Orlando. So we're real excited about that. And I've got a lot of cool episodes coming about our cruise, but because of that and the timeline I had to get some episodes recorded in the meantime. So I went ahead and said, Hey, This week before I go on the cruise with my voice being a little bit crummy. And not perfect. I'm going to go ahead and still do these episodes. Going over the top rides at the four different parks and we're gonna have a great time doing it. So please bear with me. I apologize that it's probably not the same quality that I've been doing in the past, but we all get sick. And I just got into a little bit of a time crunch. I wanted to get these episodes out there for you. Now, before we dive in, I will ask wherever you're listening to this podcast, or if you're watching us on YouTube, find the pause button and then go and find the subscribe button and click subscribe. So that way you're going to get this content delivered into your inbox each and every single week. And we do have our biggest Disney tip or trick ever over on our Patreon site. So if you've not checked it out yet, you do want to go check that out and support the show over there to get access to that. Best Disney tip or trick ever. It will help you skip the lines. And I can tell you this at the end of the day, this is the best tip ever. And we weren't going, put it on our podcast, but we figured for our Patreon supporters at the top level. Let's go ahead and give it to them. So that way you guys can have it. So you're going to want to go check that out. So today, again, we're an Anaheim, we're going over the top 10 rides at the Anaheim parks. We are going to start in reverse order going from number 10 to number one. I am going to give an explanation as to why some of these landed on the list where they did a, there is a really good reason for most of them. And in fact, we had a lot of debate over some of the positioning on this list, but in the end, we came up with what we think is a really good list. And we think that these are the top 10 must ride attractions over at Disney land in Anaheim. Now. I will say just like our other list. And I didn't talk about this a lot. On the other episode, there are some height restrictions on this, of course. So please be mindful of that. If you're listening to this with your kids and you've got some little ones. They may not be able to ride all of these rides, but for the most part, they are going to be accessible to most of the audience out there. But these are the best rides at Disneyland or California adventure. And we're going to start at number 10. And in fact, this is what's odd is this is one of the newest rides. I think it is actually as of the day, we're recording this. This is the newest ride at all of Disney land in Anaheim. And that is web slingers at California adventure. Now, if you haven't been to the Marvel campus, it is a really cool campus. We absolutely loved it. It is relatively small when you compare it to some of the other campuses that are out there. But it's really cool that they did a dedicated themed land to the Marvel movies and the Marvel attractions out there in California. Now. If you've not researched this at all, there's actually a line drawn across the U S and it's up and down the Mississippi. Because universal has islands of adventure and they've got some Marvel rides down there Disney and them have had this negotiation going on for years. Where Disney out west. So in Anaheim, they're allowed to build Marvel based rides and have fun with it and do a great job with it. Out in Orlando, they are not allowed to use core Marvel characters. Meaning specifically Spiderman. They can't use that out in Orlando. Because they have a Spider-Man ride over at universal. We don't know how long that's gonna go on for. I anticipate someday Disney will buy the full rights and get them all. For Orlando as well and anticipate some really cool rides and lands when they do that. And who knows, maybe they do a whole park around marvel. That would be awesome. But web slingers is the only Spiderman ride for Disney and it's located out on the west coast, in the Anaheim. If you've not ridden this before, it is very, close. Too. If you've been to Lego land, they have the Ninjago ride there. Where you can shoot to us as stars from the ride cart, where you put your hands out and you throw stars at the enemies. This is a very similar formatted ride. So you're going to be riding. I believe it's four across in this ride. When you get in and it's going to take you through some led screens, and they're going to tell you a story and you've got spider bots on the loose and it's your job. To web them up and to contain them. So that way. Peter Parker can control the outbreak because the spider bots are multiplying. So this is a lot of fun on this ride. They do go through all the scoring. We have had a series of podcast episodes, where we talked about how to get high scores on all the rides. We have not done this one yet. We may do that in the future. So do stay tuned for that. But web slingers is a lot of fun. You do get more points for different robots in this game. It's very engaging.. It's just a great time. You can buy the web shooters at the store there in Marvel land. And those web shooters can give you a different experience on this ride. So it's a little bit of a pay to play, but there's a fun way to upgrade your experience on this ride. So we encourage you to check it out. It is a very high tech ride. We had a lot of fun on it. This did land at number 10 on our list of top rides in California. Going to number nine, we're going to hop over to Disney land. And actually this one made it a little bit higher on the last list out in Orlando, it's a little bit lower here, and there's a specific reason why, and that is because the other rides that are on this list are just a little bit better. But the pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. Is a very nostalgic ride. This is one of the first rides put into Disneyland. It was not there on opening day, but it did come very quickly after. And this one is a lot of fun. So obviously located over in new Orleans square. Outside of adventure land, you have pirates of the Caribbean. It is a boat based ride. It does have multiple little drops in this ride. As you go down the hill. You can get a little bit wet. Typically you don't get wet. But it is a really cool rendition of what the movies are now, as they have upgraded this to reflect the Johnny Depp movie. They've added Davey Jones. They've added black beard to this ride. They've done a lot of really cool things with it. Adding some special effects, but they take you through the treasure room. You actually, ironically do have a single, real human skull on this ride. It is on the bed frame on the headboard of the bed. In this ride in California. They do not have one out in Orlando, but here in California, you do have a real skull on the ride. They do have a lot of really cool elements to this ride, including them, the battle scene between the boats. You can get a little splash there, then they take you through the town at burns, and then they take you into the jail. With the iconic prisoners trying to get the keys from the dog. So it's a really great ride. If you've not heard about this, Johnny Depp has made a physical appearance there. In the past, I did have a friend who was there when that happened and he did get video and pictures of it. So we do have it confirmed that this has happened. That is not a rumor. It actually has happened. But it's a really cool ride. It's very nostalgic and it is one of the older rides at Disneyland. So pirates of the Caribbean is a great time. It's not scary. Your kids are gonna absolutely love it. So we encourage you to go check that out. Number eight is over at Disneyland as well. And that is haunted mansion. And if you listen to our last episode in Orlando, haunted mansion actually scored lower than Pirates of the Caribbean here. We're going to bump it up a little bit. And the reason is We have during the Halloween and Christmas time, the nightmare before Christmas rendition of haunted mansion. So it does change themes for about a quarter of the year. It is a lot of fun. They do add some extra smells and some extra things. That are going to impact you there on that ride. It is a lot more colorful during that time of the year with nightmare before Christmas. And it's just a lot of fun. Now I prefer between the two. I do prefer the old nostalgic view of it. But at the end of the day, I know a lot of people that love the nightmare before Christmas version, and it does give it a very unique spin. So we encourage you if you've not been during the Halloween Christmas time. You definitely want to go check it out and definitely ride nightmare before Christmas version, but I'd also say come at a different time. During the year we can ride the original version. Now the reason this makes the top 10 lists is because of not only the historical nostalgia factor, but because of the Disney magic that is on this ride. And what I mean by Disney magic is like the ballroom scene. And we talked about this a little bit on the last episode, but there are some really cool magic tricks that they deployed on this ride that make it look like these ghosts are real and dancing and doing all kinds of stuff. And you can't see how they actually did it. And it's actually puzzling how they did it. So we love that imagination factor of this ride. And the Imagineers and what they did with it. And because of that, it does make our top 10 list. Next let's go to number seven. This one's also a Disney land and this is space, mountain. Now a lot of you are probably curious if you listened to our Disney world episode. Why is space, mountain, not on the list at Disney world. And all in all, we will say that at Disney world, there are better rides than space mountain. And in fact, this space mountain in Orlando is the bobsled versions. So very similar to matterhorn out there, Disneyland. And if you've ridden the matterhorn it's a little bit of a rougher ride. It's a little more jerky and we don't love that. At the space mountain in Orlando. So is space mountain in Anaheim is side-by-side it's your traditional rollercoaster. This one operates much smoother and it's a much better ride. And then sometimes during the year they do the hyperspace mountain. Where they convert it to star wars and you get all the cool X-Wing fighters, a millennium Falcons, and tie fighters flying all over the top of the ceiling and shooting at each other. And that makes it even 10 times better. So my preferred version of space mountain is hyperspace mountain. I am a big star wars fan. You guys can see that over my shoulder, if you're watching us on video. And I absolutely love it. But here in Disney land in Anaheim, it does make the top 10 list. It is a top 10 ride. It is number seven on our list and we encourage you to go ride it. Now, this one doesn't have any crazy drops. It doesn't have anything that's gonna make you too sick. It is in the dark. So you may feel a little bit ill just because you don't get to see where you're going and it may move you around a little. A bit, but for the most part, people come off space, mountain feeling just fine. So we absolutely love space mountain. Number six also at Disneyland is big thunder mountain railroad. And a lot of people don't love big thunder mountain, more than space mountain, but I do. And the reason why over here at Disneyland is about a handful of years ago. And I can't say how many exactly. So I'm not going to throw a number out there. That's not true. They upgraded this ride. What they did is they redid a lot of the special effects on this ride. They did make the last mountain explode. You can see the fuses for the dynamite go up the side of the mountain as you're going up the trains moving back and forth as you're going up the last hill. And they really did a great job. So out of all the Disney parks in the world, the one at Disney land has the most upgraded, big thunder mountain railroad. And we think that they did a really great job with. Taking an old classic ride and upgrading it with some cool new technology and not losing that nostalgic factor of what the ride used to be, but only enhancing it. So because of that is why it edged out space, mountain. At Disneyland on this list, we absolutely love it. We encourage you to go check it out, out there in frontier land. It is a great ride. It is a lot of fun. And like I said, they did a really great job with upgrading this ride without taking anything away from it. Going to number five, this one, actually, I would have liked to have scored it higher on this list, but the top four rights are all really good. I may have bumped it up one or two. But when we talked to other people and through the poll, this one landed at number five. And it's a fair number five. I definitely get it. It's just one of my favorite characters. And that is at Disneyland, Indiana Jones, adventure. I absolutely love Indiana Jones. If you did not know that about me. I've talked about him on some of my other episodes. I have an Indiana Jones shirt that I absolutely love, and he's just one of my favorite characters that I grew up with. Keep in mind. I was born in the late seventies. I'm a gen X-er. And so to be raised with movies like Raiders of the lost Ark, temple of doom, last crusade, I absolutely fell in love with Indiana Jones as a kid and thought he is such a cool hero with his whip and he gets to do all kinds of cool fun stuff and exploring. And I've really liked Indiana Jones. So because of that, the relation to the ride of Indiana Jones. Adventure is even that much more heightened for me and I just really, love it. So the ride over there at Disney land, it's a lot of fun. It uses the same. Car style. If you've not written it before. But you've been to Orlando. If you've been on the dinosaur ride, uses the exact same car format. It is a multiple rows of four across the Jeep in the buggy. And you can call it either one. Can move independently on it, suspensions from the tires but it takes you through this ride and basically you wind up in the temple of, it's almost the temple of doom. They call it the temple, the forbidden eye on this ride. But they bring in a lot of the elements from the Raiders lost Ark and the temple of doom movies. And it's just a lot of fun. So they've got the arrows that get shot by the statues as you trip all the booby traps. They've got the big bridge. That you drive across and it feels like it's going to collapse. They've got snakes, they've got spiders, they've got all kinds of really fun things and they have the Boulder at the end. So I absolutely love Indiana Jones, adventure fingers crossed. I did read something that said they are going to be bringing this to Orlando, to animal kingdom in the dinosaur land, which makes perfect sense since they already have the ride there and it uses the exact same format. But that is one of my top rides over at Disney land. And it should be one of yours. Now, this one does have one of the highest height restrictions. So we do encourage you to go check that out before you take your kids on it. And then I can remember when we took my nephews on it when they were younger and by younger, I mean about somewhere between eight and 10 years old they were a little intimidated by the ride. They thought it was a little bit intense and scary. Because it's in the dark and you do have snakes and spiders and arrows being shot at you and stuff. But once they rode it a couple of times, they absolutely loved it and they enjoyed the ride from then on. But the first time they were a little intimidated. My daughter, when she wrote it. Zero intimidation. She kept her eyes open and watched the whole thing and was real excited. Each kid's going to be a little bit different, but I will say out of all of our rides here, this one's probably up there on the intensity levels far as scares or fear. And so do you know that before you go into it, but it is a number five on our list and it's one of my all time favorites and especially the character. I love him. Number four, I'm going to. I'm going to get heat on number four. Number four, a lot of people would have probably put in the top two. But I definitely believe that the top three rides above this deserve to be top three, especially with the upgrades on two of them. But the number four ride, we think it Disney land in Anaheim is actually over a California adventure. And that is radiator Springs racers. This is one of the marquee rides over there at California adventures. This one does have the longest line. Usually I do encourage you if you are a single rider or you're okay. Breaking up your family, you do want to do single rider over there. Radiator Springs Raceway. But it is a ton of fun and obviously starts being a dark ride. They take you through the cars. Land and it's very immersive and you get to meet Mader. You get to meet all the different people, and then they get you all cleaned up and ready to go on a race against another car. And then it takes you on a high speed race around the track. There. For the radiator Springs. So it's a lot of fun. It's a fast ride. It is comparable to Orlando's test track. The radiator Springs racers is 10 times better than test track and test track. Didn't make her top 10 list over there in Orlando. A lot of people are big fans of cars and they do think that this would be a top two, I will tell you that there are three rides that we believe are better than this one. But radiator Springs racers is not a bad ride by any means. And it is number four on our list. Again, your little kids are going to love it, especially if they love cars. And so we encourage you definitely take them on it and I would encourage you. You may want to rope drop. Radiator Springs racers. This may be the one you want to rope drop at the beginning of the day. And we do have a episode back there in time on rope drop strategy for California adventure. So we encourage you to go check that one out as well. Number three on my list would have probably been about eight or nine. A couple of years ago, but they redid it and they upgraded it. And it's a lot better of a ride now. And this is also over at California adventure and this is the Incredicoaster. It used to be the Mickey based rollercoaster out there on the pier. And it just seems to be a basic rollercoaster now that they themed it with the Incredibles. They've added a lot of different sounds. They've added a lot of different elements to this ride. They are trying to catch Jack and they're trying to give him a cookie, which they also have the cookies right outside the ride. And those are awesome as well. Go listen to our food episode there and we'll talk about those. But they did a really good job adding some sound elements and some visual elements to this ride and they smooth it all out. So in the end we think the in credit coaster is amazing. It does start with a ground launch, which I absolutely love and prefer. I, because I'm afraid of Heights. And we talked about that on the last episode. I'm, very afraid of Heights. I do not like going up a rollercoaster richest tick, tick tick, tick, all the way to the top. Just because I can't stand it. And I feel like I'm getting up there too high. We have an episode where we talked about SeaWorld in Orlando and I wrote the Mako and that is a 200 foot coaster. And we were in the front row with my feet dangling. And I didn't enjoy it. I, it scared me to death, but I had a great time on it. So I don't love roller coasters that go up real high. Having a ground launch where they jet you off. And you go right up the first hill and keep going is 10 times better for me. And I absolutely love it. And the Incredicoaster does that. And they did really well. With using flash to get the coaster going. It's a ton of fun. Because of the upgrades. This one did get bumped up on the list to number three. So we highly encourage you to ride it again. This one, also a single rider. So if you have that opportunity to go to a single rider Incredicoaster, a great, one to do it on. Number two on our list is a one that some people have debated with me. And it's just because they don't like the format of the ride. They think it's not the greatest ride out there, but I will tell you again, with the upgrades that this ride received a few years ago, it is definitely the number two slot at Anaheim by far. And that is guardians of the galaxy mission breakout. So again, over a California adventure, this is formerly the tower of terror, which on our Disney world list, that one was towards the bottom of the top 10. It is a drop, ride it is the only drop type ride. Out there now they do have the jumping jellyfish and they do have the swings that go up a little higher and whatnot, but as for an actual drop thrill ride this is the only drop thrill ride there. But what I absolutely loved about guardians of the galaxy mission breakout is they take you through a great story. Where you're going to the collector and the guardians have been captured except for rocket. They do a great pre-show. The pre-show is one of the best pre shows I've seen. Where a rocket is escaped and he's going to use your elevator to free the rest of the guardians and get them out. And then of course, in traditional guardians of the galaxy format when you get on the ride, rocket takes over and he gets some music going. And they have a rotation of songs there. And the music makes it amazing now. If you've ridden tower of terror, you know that this can go up so high and it goes up and down. It's totally random. What's going to happen on the ride as to whether you're going to go up or down or how much you're going to go up or down. And that is still true on a mission breakout. However, what's different now is as you go up and down, it will stop periodically on floors. And you're going to get to watch a movie, a thing, play out where you see the guardians now fighting back against the collector or some of the other things that have been collected there. And in fact, they even do a Halloween scary version that we rode. And on that one they're saving baby Groot. And I can tell you that one's not that scary, so it's not super intense. They, it has a dragon and it's a little bit darker. But I would tell you that most kids are going to be totally fine on it. My daughter was but we love mission breakout and it's because of the music. And it's because of the theming that they did with this. So it is much, much better than tower of terror since we talked to earlier in the episode about the Mississippi river and Marvel having rights are universal having rights to Marvel. East of that and Disney having it to the west. They were able to do guardians of the galaxy cosmic rewind in Orlando. I would love to see them retheme the tower of terror Hollywood studios to mission breakout as well. However, that would take away that the nostalgic factor of tower of terror being Twilight zone. So I'm torn on that, but I will say the guardians of the galaxy version is so much better and it's just a lot of fun with the music. So this is the number two ride and Anaheim. Which now leads me to number one. And I don't think that there's much debate over number one. I think most people unanimously across the world would agree. The number one ride at the Anaheim parks in Disney land is the one you're going to rope drop. And it's the one you should run to every single time. And that is rise of the resistance. And star wars land at the black Spire outpost out at Galaxy's edge. And it is so super immersive from our star wars perspective, especially if you're a big star wars fan, which I am as well. You guys can see that over my shoulder here. And we talked about that with space mountain a few minutes ago. But rise of the resistance is like having three rides in one with an immersive experience in the middle. So we absolutely love it. We think that this is a Imagineering. At its very best for being totally immersive. And we absolutely love this ride. Ironically, it finished number two in Orlando. So if you haven't listened to that episode, go back, it's already live, go check that out and find out which ride beat rise of the resistance out there in Orlando, but here in Anaheim, hands down, this is the absolute best, ride you do not want to miss it for anything. So definitely you're going to want to rope, drop that and get over there to the star wars, galaxy edge land. With that, we've got two more episodes coming in the series where we're going to be talking next about universal Orlando rides the top 10 there, and then we're going to go to universal Hollywood. and we're only going to do the top five because there's only 10 rides in the entire park. And so we'd have to list all 10. So we're only going to do the top five over there and share those with you. So tune in on a future week again, subscribe we wish you a magical week as you're planning your next vacation. And we'll talk to you guys next time. Bye. Bye. End Credits Music