Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Ride

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Ride
The entrance to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Ride.
Alton Towers
Area	Cloud Cuckoo Land
Status	Removed
Cost	£8 million
Opening date	1 April 2006
Closing date	8 November 2015
Replaced	Toyland Tours
Replaced by	The Alton Towers Dungeon
Ride statistics
Attraction type	Dark boat ride, Elevator
Manufacturers	Mack Rides Rexroth Bosch Group
Designer	Willy Studios
Theme	Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Capacity	1000 riders per hour
Vehicle type	fatty , Elevator
Vehicles	10 boats, 2 elevators
Riders per vehicle	2
Duration	11 minutes
Construction	JJ Cavanagh Construction (started mid-2005)
Projection	Electrosonic Bose
Elevator show	Falcon's Treehouse nWave Digital

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Ride was a dark ride located in the Cloud Cuckoo Land area of Alton Towers theme park, Staffordshire, England. It was based upon the famous 1964 Roald Dahl book of the same name, and took its thematic inspiration from the illustrations of Quentin Blake. The ride closed at the end of the 2015 season and was replaced by the Alton Towers Dungeon in 2019.

History

The building originally housed Around the World in 80 Days and later Toyland Tours, though the original layout was shortened when redeveloped into Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Mack Rides, who had engineered the original ride hardware in 1981, returned to add a new offload point towards the end of the ride, allowing guests to move into the new simulator ending.

The attraction was closed at the end of 2015. The building and associated boat ride were re-themed into The Alton Towers Dungeon, which opened in 2019.

Various theming object from the ride were put on sale at auction on 13 February 2019 to raise money for Merlin's Magic Wand.

Ride

The ride was split into two segments, the first being a boat ride along the chocolate river inside Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Passengers encountered all the characters from the book (going from Augustus Gloop to Veruca Salt) as either simple animatronics or CGI projections. After disembarking the boats the second segment began with a short pre-show video (involving Mike Teavee). The video was presented in a way that made it look like as if the viewers were actually trapped within the TV set. The ride continued inside one of the two "Great Glass Elevators" which simulated passengers taking an airborne trip through the rest of the factory. Each elevator was a static room with semi-translucent walls and ceiling on which CGI animations were projected from the outside, and only the floor slightly trembled to give the impression of movement.

References

External links

• Charlie And The Chocolate Factory: The Ride at TowersStreet Archived 23 September 2012 at the Wayback Machine
• Charlie And The Chocolate Factory: The Ride at TowersTimes
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Ride at Towers Nerd
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Ride at Alton Towers Almanac
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Ride at darkrides.co.uk
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Ride at ThemeParks-UK