Photograph courtesy Kings Island
Kings Island’s only indoor roller-coaster, Flight of Fear (originally The Outer Limits: Flight of Fear), has grown quite the cult following over the nearly 30 years it’s been open. Riders are immediately plunged into a sci-fi world when they enter the queue, which is designed as a military installation studying aliens from the room’s centerpiece—a giant flying saucer that also serves as the coaster’s loading area. “People were blown away when it opened because I don’t think they had seen that level of detail in the park before,” says Joe Leonard, the ride’s designer, currently professor of technical theater at Xavier. “This was the first kind of project we had done that had story and a scripted experience.”
Leonard’s journey to the project began when he was the set designer for the park’s live shows in the days when Kings Productions was still the owner. After the Paramount takeover, Leonard was moved to Charlotte and put on the company’s Design and Entertainment team. When the opportunity came around to design a ride for his home park in 1994, Leonard jumped at the opportunity to make a pitch—although the initial ride had a much different theme.
“Originally the design was slated to be a Star Trek experience,” says Leonard. “I had a whole presentation of that attraction being a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine experience. The idea was Quark [the character who owns the bar] is running something called ‘Quark Adventures,’ so people go out and can see the ship and then take a ride through the wormhole when it was stable. But when the wormhole wasn’t stable, there was no telling what would happen. So right as you were getting launched, alarms start going off and the gates would open, and they’d launch out into space.”
That pitch landed Leonard the job, but the entire thing had to be scrapped when Paramount decided they didn’t want to spend as much money and visibility on Deep Space Nine after it proved to be a less successful series than The Next Generation. All efforts to create an attraction for the franchise were centralized into Star Trek: The Experience which ran in Las Vegas from 1998 to 2008. Leonard also helped design that.
“We went back to the drawing board and brainstormed what’s a good fit. That’s when we came up with Outer Limits,” says Leonard. “That’s when we started to develop the storyline that this was an Area 51 type of experience. Then when you go inside, they look like they’re testing vehicles when all of a sudden, something happens, and the vehicle takes control of the situation.”
Despite the thematic pivot, Leonard and his team were more than up to the task, ready to utilize their theatrical and artistic experience to put together a visual story. “There was an actual script that was driving everything and that’s what a show designer does. They put the story together and figure out how to experientially tell that story.”
Out of all the intricate details that make up Flight of Fear’s queue, Leonard is proudest of the effect of making the flying saucer look bigger by lining the back wall with a mirror, inspired by the designs he’d seen done by Paramount. “I walked through the queue line and placed items in places where when you’re about to see yourself in the mirror, something blocks your view. I literally spent six weeks on that trying to make the illusion work.”
Leonard feels proud that the team’s dedication and creative experimentation influenced Kings Island’s direction for future rides like Backlot Stunt Coaster, Tomb Raider, and Mystic Timbers. “I think everybody finally saw the potential of telling the story for the guests as they went through. It was so cool just to be a part of doing this in my own hometown.”
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