Cora and Jasper Oakley aren’t characters from a movie. They didn’t pop out of a cartoon or video game. The twin scientists live in Wildwood Grove, an enchanted hollow within the Great Smoky Mountains with a large, gleaming tree at its center, that was discovered by their ancestor Albert almost 200 years ago. Their uncle, Ned, lives nearby, and is kind of obsessed with bears. Together, the twins spend their time experimenting with flying cars that also float on water and trying to figure out why all the plants around these parts glow. They aren’t real people, obviously, but real people play them in Dollywood, the theme park that created them, which just launched a $50 million ride about the two’s adventures.
When it comes to theme parks, two companies stand above the rest: Disney and Universal, who both draw tens of millions of visitors a year to parks spread around the globe. They’ve got the biggest budgets, the most immersive attractions, the best theming and design, and the most popular IP, and that keeps guests flooding in—despite both also dealing with a litany of controversies, from Universal still working closely with J.K. Rowling, to Disney’s shabby treatment of its employees.
A smaller regional park has stolen a lot of their spotlight over the last two decades, though, and without as much baggage. It racks up annual wins in Amusement Today’s Golden Ticket awards and USA Today’s Reader’s Choice polls, it balances a family-friendly image with a high-thrill ride line-up that coaster diehards salivate over, and, like its namesake, it even somehow threads the needle on the kind of “divisive” culture issues that stick to basically everything else in our society today. Yes, it’s Dollywood, the park in the mountains of East Tennessee that was partially owned and named after the legendary Dolly Parton, whose passing was announced on August 25. Theme park fans love Dollywood almost as much as the world loved Dolly herself, and that’s because it’s maybe the best park in America that isn’t operated by one of the industry’s two titans. And with a new ride that opened this month, Dollywood might be poised to close that gap just a little bit more.
Although it was only announced last year, NightFlight Expedition quickly developed a rep as a potential game-changer—the kind of defining, iconic attraction that can turn a theme park into a true global destination. Its unique combination of ride types promises to make it accessible to almost the whole family, while still packing enough excitement for the coaster faithful. And for everybody who really gets into the art and storytelling of theme park attractions, NightFlight has also been promoted as a story-focused experience that plays into the larger narrative of the park section that it’s located in.
NightFlight Expedition is the latest attraction in Wildwood Grove, a family-friendly part of Dollywood that opened in 2019. Wildwood Grove was conceived as an intentional effort to build a kids-friendly expansion that would still entertain the whole family; instead of off-the-rack carnival rides lightly themed to some licensed cartoon character like you’ll typically see in the kids’ sections of regional theme parks, Wildwood Grove has a strong original theme that’s rooted in the park’s region and that runs through every attraction. It gives the land an aesthetic as clearly defined and consistent as any at Disney World or Universal Studios, but with an original concept that isn’t from a popular movie. And although it’s not nearly as themed or designed as something like Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge or the lands at Universal’s Epic Universe, it’s still pretty great, and the kind of project more theme parks should attempt.
NightFlight is a big tangle of a number of ride systems; part motion sim, part coaster, part river rapids, part story-focused dark ride, jammed together inelegantly in a giant fake aircraft hangar that’s smartly themed as an actual aircraft hangar. You hover in the air, float downstream, rush through a very brief slice of a roller coaster, and then finally splash down into a lake with purple and blue bisexual lighting. As part of its folk leanings the sets have a flat, two-dimensional cut-out look, like a storybook blown up to oversized proportions, and that fairy-tale ambience makes it a perfect fit for Wildwood Grove, which could be called Alice’s Adventures in Appalachia.
Wildwood Grove already saw one major addition in 2023 with the opening of the roller coaster Big Bear Mountain, but to paraphrase Walt on Disneyland, these places are never completed. Big Bear was a curious addition; Dollywood was already full of roller coasters, including a few world-class bangers that younger or queasier guests have to steer clear of, like the Lightning Rod and the Thunderhead. Today it’s got 10 coasters in total—or maybe 11, depending on how you count NightFlight. What it’s short on is dark rides, the kind of all-ages-appropriate, story-focused rides that Disney mastered with Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. And that’s partially why NightFlight exists: to fill that hole.
Now, this isn’t a ride review. I’ve reviewed NightFlight Expedition elsewhere. I’ll just summarize real fast that, although it has some serious issues in a couple of scenes, NightFlight easily achieves its primary goals. It gives Dollywood a big new family ride unlike anything else in the park, and it fits seamlessly into Wildwood Grove, deepening the story that runs throughout it. It could be a better ride, but it’s absolutely a successful one, on more than one level.
Theme parks are about selling an illusion, with the separate lands within them each offering a different one. Frontierland is the wild west. World Showcase Pavilion at EPCOT feels like a world tour. Super Nintendo World is the Mushroom Kingdom and a real-life playable video game at once. What makes Wildwood Grove so ambitious—and NightFlight Expedition a successful addition, regardless of its ride experience—isn’t just that it’s not based on a popular IP. It’s that it isn’t even a simple, easily legible concept, like “the west” or “the future.” It’s constructing a mythology of the Smoky Mountains, an alternate history of this stretch of the Appalachians with its own legends and folklore—something rooted in the culture of the region, but amplified to mythic proportions. It’s a land of giant bears, secret lakes, and glowing trees teeming with butterflies, where you can ride a dragonfly like it’s a roller coaster, or float through the air in a giant acorn. It’s recognizable as the Smokies—you can’t miss the real-life mountains and forests that surround it—but it’s a heightened, abstracted version of them, like in a dream or children’s story book. It rules. And NightFlight Expedition, as imperfect as it is, makes it even better.
