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  Closed

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In adition though, we had the DAWN OF TIME dark ride. An attempt to educate Joe Public on how our world began and what life was like before... um... life.

The ride had loads of queue racks, needed when it first opened to managed the hoards of people who flocked to see the queue line video featuring - oh my gosh - Johnny Ball on Blackpool seafront, telling us all about dinosaurs and fossils, and how the earth was formed, and all that jazz.

Imagine a people-mover system ala Haunted Mansion / Spirit of London with independently rotating cars. Now allow those cars to move around the track of their own accord, sperate from each other, and that's what it was. The ride effects were a little dated to be honest, and the narration (not by Johnny Ball) rather boring. Of particular annoyance, was the fact that later in the rides life it was deemed necessary to add a "Please stay seated until the lap bar rises" announcement near the end. But rather then edit it in, it just cut over the narrator, mid-sentence! For a whole five years of operation, no rider ever heard the very end of the narration.

It was a ride of its time, and whilst being a draw near the start, people soon lost interest as did the tower management, who let it decay and rot to a point where it was more of an embarasment then an attraction.

In 2007, to very little fanfare, the ride shut up shop - and I was lucky enough to be on the last ever public ride. It is telling to know that this was in the middle of the summer season, and we waited while nobody rode it for 30 mins before we took the last ride.

However, something of the ride will live on - in its place is a "Jurassic Walk Through" that seems to utilise at least some of the animatronics and scenes of the ride.

So, how best to remember it? Almost certainly it was "The Ride That Time Forgot".