// KOTAKU — GAMING
Dolly Parton’s Tennessee Theme Park Is Creating A New Mountain Mythology
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