This awesome cake of V.I.N.CENT from Disney’s The Black Hole was made by CakeRush. V.I.N.CENT was made from vanilla sponge cake with chocolate ganache and covered in sugar paste. To give V.I.N.CENT the appearance of floating, Mike and Angela made a supporting base out of clear plastic.
I haven’t seen Disney’s The Black Hole in decades, so I watched a few clips featuring V.I.N.CENT to refresh my memory. Mike and Angela did a terrific job recreating this cute little robot.
V.I.N.CENT stands for Vital Information Necessary CENTralized.
Here are some close-ups of this cute cake:
Did you know that V.I.N.CENT makes a tiny cameo on the ride Star Tours. One of the many version of Star Tours, features a part of the queue where there is a droid scanning luggage. Most of the bags have something comical in them. One of the bags scanned contains V.I.N.CENT.
While looking up the Star Tours / Black Hole link, I found something really interesting.
If you look at Wikipedia or the Disney Wiki, they both tell a story about the origin of the ride Star Tours. The story goes something like this:
Disney had high hopes for the movie The Black Hole. At the time it was released, it was their first PG film and their most expensive film. Since they thought it was going to be popular, they began planning a Black Hole ride. The ride was going to be a space ship simulation. Riders would enter the space ship and sit in a seat. There was going to be a view port in front of them and their seats would move. Before the space ship took off, the riders would choose their course, therefore the ride wouldn’t always be the same.
Disney’s Black Hole wasn’t popular and the ride was going to be extremely expensive. How expensive? More than twice the cost of the movie!
According to the story, this concept would eventual be revised and become Star Tours.
It is a cool story, but I’m 99% certain that it isn’t true. Thankfully, the truth is just as interesting.
When I read the story, two things bothered me. First, every time I found this story it was too similar. If it was true, there should have been slightly different accounts of the story because over time people would remember things differently. Second, I couldn’t find anything from Disney or Disney Theme Park history sites about this.
I did some more digging and struck gold. I found two sketches of the Black Hole Ride. These come from Progress City, U.S.A. and are used with their permission. Progress City, U.S.A is a really neat Disney History site. Michael, who runs the site, just recently published a book – The Progress City Primer: Stories, Secrets, and Silliness from the Many Worlds of Walt Disney. If you visit one thing on the site, I highly recommend the article – Lost Disneylandia. It features artwork for rides which for one reason or another never came to be. In that post, you’ll find this artwork for the Black Hole ride.
That doesn’t look anything like Star Tour
s! But, it does look a lot like another classic ride – Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin.
To make sure, I wasn’t misunderstanding anything, I went to Twitter and checked with two Theme Park historians – Mike from Progress City, U.S.A. and Brad Abbott. I’ve already introduced Mike and his awesome website. When I have a question about Disney theme park history, Brad is the first person that comes to mind. Brad is working on a book about the history of the early sponsors/lessees of Disneyland and he regularly tweets vintage photos of Disneyland and related items. Almost all of them are things I’ve never seen before. If you are on Twitter, I recommend following both of these guys.
Neither Mike nor Brad had heard the story about Star Tours being based on a proposed Black Hole ride. They both agreed that the Black Hole ride was one of the inspirations for Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin. So the next time you go to infinity and beyond, watch out for those black holes!
