Anaheim, California - Finally, 22 years after the original Little Mermaid move was released in 1989, the dark ride based on the movie, which has been in the making and on the Imagineering concept boards ever since, has finally opened. Last Friday, June 3, the Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure was opened to the public at Disney’s California Adventure. By 10:30 am that morning, the line already stretched through Paradise Park, past Grizzly River Run and Soarin’ toward the park’s entrance, a line several hours long.

Senior show producer for the Imagineers, Lisa Girolami, told the LA Times that the reason it’s been so long in the making is “we just needed to wait until the technology was able to catch up and really deliver the ride we wanted.” Despite initial concepts which featured an overhead ride system similar to Peter Pan’s Flight, the company chose to go with a Haunted Mansion style rotating buggy.

The ride is approximately six minutes long, following the key highlights and stories of the Little Mermaid. Obviously, some scenes and songs from the movie had to be cut out, and the ride perhaps focuses more prominently on the opening scenes than the end (which seem very rushed in comparison), but all the key elements and favorite songs (i.e. “Under the Sea) are still prominently featured. Scuttle the seagull provides a brief prologue and epilogue for the ride, which is otherwise almost exclusively narrated by the ride’s award winning soundtrack.

The dark ride also features hundreds and hundreds of animatronic creatures and moving objects, all choreographed to lights, sounds, and music. When touching on the animatronics, Imagineers went as far as to make Ariel’s hands and even fingers move, which meant “technicians had to run animatronic wiring through her waif-like wrist.” They also told the LA Times “she’s probably the most complicated audio-animatronic character we’ve ever done…you don’t have a lot of room with her.”

A nearly identical version of the ride is expected to be opened at the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida in 2013, as part of the Fantasyland “Princess” expansion; this version will be called Under the Sea: Journey of the Little Mermaid.