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We spoke to Triotech’s Ernest Yale and Nol van Genuchten about Knott’s Berry Farm’s iconic Bear-y Tales dark ride, which has been reimagined for a brand new audience more than three decades later
Tom Anstey | Planet Attractions | 15 Jul 2021
Ernest Yale (left) and Nol van Genuchten (right) worked together on the creation of Knott’s Berry Farm’s Knott’s Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair Credit: Triotech
After what seemed like the longest year in living memory for most of the world, the lifting of restrictions in California meant that Knott’s Berry Farm was able to open its doors for the first time in well over a year.
Making its long-awaited return on May 21, the iconic theme park was able to celebrate the occasion with the debut of a brand new 4D interactive dark ride steeped in Knott’s history.
Originally set to open in Summer 2020 but delayed as a result of the global pandemic, Knott’s Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair - takes inspiration from the similarly titled Knott's Bear-y Tales, a ride that operated in the same space from 1975 to 1986.
Developed to celebrate 100 years of Knott’s, the story is not a retelling of the original dark ride, rather a sequel. The experience takes place 34 years after the first adventure, with the modern edition taking riders on a journey through scenes reminiscent of the original.
Through the experience, riders will follow Boysen Bear and Girlsen Bear as they travel to the Country Fair to earn the blue ribbon prize for their famous boysenberry pies. Things go awry however when Crafty Coyote returns, with the character intent on stealing the pies for himself and his cubs. Guests will be equipped with “jelly blasters”, with their goal to try and recover the stolen boysenberry pies as they travel through nostalgic environments while competing for the high score.
Dark ride specialists Triotech are behind the ride’s development, with the company working on attraction design, scenic theming, animation and the gaming system, which is highly interactive and features 4D effects. The ride replaces the also Triotech-designed Voyage to the Iron Reef.
Planet Attractions spoke to Ernest Yale, president, CEO and founder of Triotech, as well as Nol van Genuchten, head of creative at Triotech about the landmark project.
“We started working with Cedar Fair in 2012. They asked us if we could do an interactive dark ride rollercoaster at Canada's Wonderland. We’d never done something like this before but because of how advanced our technology was, we won the 2014 contract for Wonder Mountain's Guardian. This attraction won both a Brass Ring and an Impact Award from IAAPA.
Following that, we did Voyage to the Iron Reef for Knott’s, which was replacing a dinosaur-based dark ride, which in-turn had replaced the original Knott’s Bear-y Tales, which ran from 1975-1986.
We’ve developed that partnership over the years. Cedar Fair is a very innovative company and so are we. In terms of our DNA we were very aligned and very honoured to do our first interactive dark coaster with them. Since then we’ve done more than 30 interactive dark rides around the world for companies including the likes of Cedar Fair, Merlin, OCT Group, and others.
When the time came to do the 100th anniversary attraction for Knott’s, they actually did a lot of talking to their customer base - people who have been coming to the park for years and years. Some of them were teenagers and now they’re in their 40s and 50s. The ride, which was most asked for, was to bring back Knott’s Bear-y Tales, which was an iconic ride.
It was a really close collaboration with the original creator of the ride and the Knott’s, Cedar Fair and Triotech teams. We really worked together to create this attraction.”
The original Bear-y tales ride closed in 1986 CREDIT: ORANGE COUNTY ARCHIVES
“When you get teenagers coming in, they were not born in 1986. In addition to the nostalgia factor, this attraction had to be able to stand out as an exceptional attraction on its own.
Knott’s is a few kilometres from Disneyland and is in the same Metropolitan area as Universal Studios. These operators are juggernauts when it comes to the attractions industry. You can’t outgun Disney or Universal, so you need to do an original ride, which in itself is different and unique.
Where we can really play is in terms of the gameplay and the fun aspect. Fun doesn't have a price. You can have a one-dollar Rubik's Cube or play a Tetris game with simple graphics and it could be more entertaining for you than a video game that costs a hundred million dollars to design. We had to be very humble in that spirit. We're a small company and we need to do something original and fun.”
“As a company, we're very well known for our technology. I founded Triotech and started programming games when I was 12. We always came with that background of making things interactive and amazing graphics, but when Nol came on board, we were able to make Knott's Bear-y Tales our most story-based attraction ever.
We've never invested so much money and time to tell the story of an attraction. We've established ourselves as a leader in terms of technology and now with bringing Nol and his team on board four years ago, we want to also be known as the company that also creates great stories. Our kids are going to remember this ride in 20 years and bring their own kids. So that's very important.”
Voyage to the Iron Reef was an underwater-themed dark ride also created by Triotech
“We kept the same vehicles from Iron Reef and upgraded them with the new technology, the latest computers and the look of the vehicle.
We really changed the look of the ride completely. All of the theming was new and the projection system was brought up to the current level.
In terms of the technology, it's exponential, in five, six years, technology has evolved a lot. For computing power, we're talking about a tenfold increase.”
“When the pandemic happened, we were one month from opening day. We had commissioning teams from Canada and Germany working on the ride vehicles. The Germans, because of the rules in Europe, had to go back home because of insurance issues. For our Canadian guys, if they came back to Canada, they would have been prevented from going back to the US, so they opted to stay on site.
It was all very complicated. We really cannot stress enough how we are thankful for what our team did. They stayed for months, basically going just from the park to the hotel and with video, they were talking to the German team and they were actually commissioning the vehicles remotely. It was the same thing for installation and the software with the rest of our team in Canada.
The ride was ultimately delayed for more than a year. It's something that in the life of the company, 20 years plus, we've never experienced before.”
“I’ve met people who rode the original ride in the 80s. One gentleman, for instance, rode it every week when he was a kid. He was telling us that back then, you had to pay for every ride, so the family was always arguing, which ride to do and Knott's Bear-y Tales was the only ride that everybody could agree on. I think it cost 25 cents and the kids were saving up their allowance to do this ride every week because they were living in the neighbourhood.
Ultimately, this gentleman would go on to work for Disney and other companies, so he's seen everything out there. When he rode the new version of the attraction, he really, really enjoyed the ride, telling us that this is one of the best interactive rides that he's ever experienced. He also said that it really reminded him of the original.
Overwhelmingly, people have told us it's our best ride so far in terms of storyline and interactivity. It's one of the only interactive rides that came out of 2021, with the other being Spider-Man at Disneyland. Obviously, Spider-Man is a great attraction, but we are honoured that we've been compared to that attraction. For many aspects, people have said that we're as good or better with a fraction of the budget. So I'm very happy.”
Cedar Fair operates 12 different theme parks across the US, including Knott’s
“Because of that relationship, it started off with them bringing the question to us before we really got started.
They said they were looking for an anchor attraction for their 100 year anniversary and that the polling would suggest that bringing back Knott’s Bear-y Tales would be a really good choice.
They asked us what we thought - it really started off as a dialogue. From there on, we worked with them and their entire team to develop the vision of the new attraction.”
“It certainly makes it a super inspiration, because one thing became quite clear in those early conversations with Knott’s. This past attraction had a really special place in the history of the park. It cemented Knott’s in their evolution from being an amusement park to becoming a full-fledged theme park. It still had a large following on the internet with fans of this old attraction and as such, there was a lot of information available to us.
It was quite clear from the beginning that we were dealing with something special, with really strong sort of forces because of its history and the nostalgia that comes with that. Then you have to ask, how do you take these strong emotions and bring them into this new age so many years later?
Those feelings became a guide. We always had to look back and straddle that conversation between what people are expecting and how we can surprise them by taking it somewhere new. We want to bring the guests back to familiar places in new and exciting ways.”
CREDIT: ORANGE COUNTY ARCHIVES
“We had to bring this attraction into the 21st century and we did that with our technology, our media and our interactivity.
There was a storyline to work with. The original ride was a journey to the fair through all of these familiar environments, so we followed that same sort of storyline. We came to the original setting, but 30 years later. Characters that people might have known from the previous ride have now grown up. Beary is now the elder bear with new offspring and the crafty coyote now has all of his little pups.
The story sort of mirrors the journey that hopefully the guests of Knott's are living, where families and parents who used to love this attraction are now taking their children - the next generation - to see this attraction and experience it together.
We had a treasure trove of information that we could dive into. We really focused on our media graphics, really good interactivity, really pushing the limits there in terms of what we used to do. Ultimately, we focused on it being a fun experience that people can enjoy in multiple ways, whether that is being nostalgic and looking to the past or living a completely new experience now for a new generation in a new way that is appropriate for this time.”
CREDIT: ORANGE COUNTY ARCHIVES
“The original Bear-y Tales was a passive journey through themed environments. Using modern technology meant that we could use media content and a very panoramic scale to create environments and merge those with good front area theming, so that the line between physicality and media content goes away and becomes one experience. Layered on top of that is the interactivity factor.
The interactivity within this attraction is also, for us, a whole new leap. Where we would typically be having guests aim for a target to collect points, we have now pushed it in a way where the guests can interact with any component in the media content.
It's not just the targets you're looking for. If you happen to hit a tree by accident, then leaves fall down. If you happen to hit the mushrooms, they all of a sudden start singing in tune with the rest of the audio track. You can even shoot for the stars. We really layered a combination of creating a fully-immersive experience by being very panoramic in our streams and blending those with theming, with a good story anchoring all of that.
Aside from collecting points, you can go on an adventure of exploration and figure out what other whimsical Easter eggs you can uncover. There's lots of ways in which people can enjoy this experience and ultimately can get lost in this journey.”
“We developed a completely new targeting device with a new trigger method. In Bear-y Tales, it looks a lot less like your typical gun-type targeting device. You hold it differently and the trigger mechanism is different because it's got a pull rope on it. It's something that works ergonomically for both children and adults because of its weight and because of its shape.
It’s also a much more pleasurable experience because it holds better and it makes you a lot less tired compared to when you're repeatedly hitting the trigger. The reaction so far has been really positive.”
“For the original attraction in the 70s, about six weeks before opening night, there was a fire at the building and three quarters of the attraction burned down.
Here I am trying to do a new version of an old attraction and a big part of my philosophy was recreating the way we do design within the creative teams and with the vendors, the same looseness and the same sort of conditions that the original team were going through in the 1970’s, because I thought it was very important to get to a certain result.
Then here, a month before we're supposed to deliver this attraction, all of a sudden the pandemic halts everything. In a sense, I should have seen it coming. Like the original team for Bear-y Tales, we got our own baptism by fire.
That being said, our team really stepped up to the plate. We were forced to come up with new ways of commissioning remotely by installing 360 degree cameras for instance. Our team was really willing to figure out new tools and technologies to do this while we had people in Germany, people in Montreal and people present in Los Angeles.
We also created this dynamic with Knott's and with some of our local talent in Los Angeles that became our saviours. It really became a team effort working towards a communal goal of delivering this attraction.
We handed the attraction over to Knott’s not all that much later than originally planned, but it gave them the license to really make it theirs. Through the rest of the year, leading up to the official opening, they continued on embellishing it and adding things to it, in communication with us, so that by the time the attraction opened in May, it was a stronger and better and more complete attraction than we all could have imagined.
Ultimately, the end result was a much stronger attraction because of the circumstances behind its creation.”
“Other than the ride system manufacturer, which is ART engineering, all of the design, engineering and fabrication was done in-house by Triotech.
We brought in a theming consultant who was local to Los Angeles. He worked with us to find a network of local fabricators, shops, printing shops and scenic painters to put together a tribe that could help us put this attraction together.
The vision and all the technology and the media content was driven by us. The theming also.
We worked with a pocket of artists locally in Los Angeles. We found some amazing scenic painters that have a long history all the way back to the 60s on all of the big film lots doing painting big backdrops. They helped us paint a really big mural and paint up on the rolling and loading docks.
We knew we had to get to a very specific look and feel that had a certain looseness and a whimsical mystery because the original work is almost psychedelic in a certain way.
Ultimately, it was all driven by us as we were responsible for the attraction, but we were in touch with the Knott’s team of course. And then we brought the right pieces of art and talent onto the team to help us execute it.”
“We have tons of attractions which are already installed but don't have the permission to open because of the pandemic. For instance, we've installed one of our biggest dark rides and the first interactive dark ride in Vietnam, but we're waiting for permission to open it to the public.
There are a number of attractions which we’re installing in China, in South Korea. In the US, we have major attractions where work was stopped for more than a year. But now we're restarting.
We're opening another Ninjago attraction at Legoland New York. Ninjago The Ride, which is the eighth of its kind, has been received as the most popular attraction in all the Legolands that it's been installed in.
We've announced a dark ride installation with OCT Group in China, which is a space pirate attraction, which is representative of where I think attractions are going. It's a 15 to 20 minute experience with three different attractions, which combine to create one complete experience.
In terms of projects, Triotech is back at 100% of what we were before the pandemic right now.”
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