YMMV / ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter

• Audience-Alienating Premise (no pun intended): A very dark horror ride in one of the most family-friendly parks in the world where you sit in total darkness with a menacing alien roaming around the small theater, tormenting you and your fellow audience members as you are held to your seat with no way out. With a premise like that, the cards were stacked against this ride when it came to general audiences who visit the Magic Kingdom each day.
• Cult Classic: This ride was never really that popular during its run,^note Then again, every ride that was housed in that building in Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland before or since never became popular to begin with. but it has plenty of Disney Parks fans who enjoyed it for its horror and Black Comedy.
• Fandom Rivalry: Against the Lilo & Stitch fandom for obvious reasons. In return, some of the American L&S fandom who are aware of SGE!'s negative reception find Alien Encounter's fans to be highly obnoxious for their unrelenting hatred towards SGE! and Stitch in general, especially since that they've never got much of the same Lilo & Stitch-related things that their non-American counterparts received.
• Franchise Original Sin: Alien Encounter was praised for using those uncomfortable shoulder restraints, loud noises, and periods of darkness to instill fear and feelings of helplessness among riders. Its successor re-used all these same effects, but it was criticized for them as it attempted to use them for comedy, resulting in massive Mood Dissonance and an attraction that most audiences didn't find either scary^note except to young kids, who found it too scary despite being one of that ride's target audiences or funny.
• Funny Moments:
  • "And this is my favorite, it can be suspended! In-DEF-initely."
  • "THE SPAN OF A UNIVERSE!"
  • Let's just say the entirety of the second pre-show and leave it at that.
  • How Dr. Femus gets rid of the alien: "Screaming now." Cue scream.
  • The show featured a bunch of gems in the form of pre-recorded screams from fake audience members:
    • "For sure! We're just screaming for the fun of it!"
    • "No, it's my mother-in-law!"
    • "MY MOUTH WAS OPEN!"
  • TOM reading the X-S manual in the 1994 pre-show.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The name of the robot in the pre-show is the same as an animator for Rick and Morty, as well as the Standard-issue Information Retrieval units.
  • The original pre-show had a robot named TOM. 5 years later...
  • Regarding the original idea of this being an attraction based on Alien, now not only does the Magic Kingdom feature an entire "land" based on another popular James Cameron movie, but since Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox's entertainment divisions, they now own the Alien franchise.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many went on this ride only for the pre-show.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • This ride was (and still is) often considered the scariest ride at any Disney park. Some bloggers even wrote that the ride was so scary that it actually should have been made for another theme park instead of family-friendly Disney, so closing it down and replacing it with a Lighter and Softer show was an admittedly reasonable decision on Disney's behalf (not to say that it wasn't an upsetting loss for older fans, but still).
  • Even the ride's promo video was scary, as anyone who watched it in The Walt Disney World Explorer can attest to.
• Nightmare Retardant: As with what's written on the YMMV page for Stitch's Great Escape! (considering that it reused this ride's technology), the shoulder restraints wouldn't press down to simulate the alien's weight if one were to either raise their shoulders so the restraints lock above them or if they squeeze by them and let them go down to the bottom, and the Jump Scare when the alien touches peoples' heads could be deterred by leaning forward before it happens. (Not that it would stop those who don't do this from screaming their heads off, but still.)
• Opinion Myopia: This ride wasn't all that popular when it was operating; most casual park guests didn't care for this ride and ignored it in favor of reliable classics in Tomorrowland like the Carousel of Progress, Astro Orbiter, and the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, as well as Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin when that ride opened in 1998 and quickly became very popular. And the less said to this ride's fans about Lilo & Stitch^note the film and the franchise, not Stitch's Great Escape! being way more popular than Alien Encounter ever was, the better.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Another possible reason why this attraction didn't work with Magic Kingdom's general audiences could be that its storyline was rather harsh and cynical compared to other scary Disney attractions such as The Haunted Mansion and The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, with its focus on a space-spanning MegaCorp who cares little about the safety of others and one of its employees shows people blatant cruelty to animals (S.I.R. towards Skippy) while demonstrating the company's product. Even the alien, as monstrous as it was, was just a wild animal that was (unintentionally) suddenly taken from whatever world it came from against its will and put into an unfamiliar place, causing it to run around scared even as it was scaring the guests. And while both it and the Haunted Mansion involve some level of Black Comedy, Haunted Mansion is at least more "in on the joke" without undermining its horror, whereas Alien Encounter was just too uncomfortable an experience for most to really enjoy.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The shoulder restraints. Even though they were a necessity to get the complete experience of the ride, they were very uncomfortable to have on people's shoulders, to the point that some found them intolerable, especially since they were for a stationary attraction instead of a moving thrill ride or a roller coaster. In fact, one of the biggest complaints about both this ride and Stitch's Great Escape! was the shoulder restraints.

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