Kiddie ride
Kiddie rides are commonly available in amusement parks, arcades, malls, hotel game rooms, outside supermarkets, and large department stores.
Less commonly, they may also appear in other venues such as restaurants, food courts, grocery shops, and auto dealerships.
Commercial kiddie rides are often colorful with an animal, vehicle, or popular cartoon character theme, which appeals to young children.
They are usually driven by a heavy-duty electric motor, which is usually disguised inside or underneath the metal, fiberglass, or vacuum formed plastic body of the ride.
The rides would be manufactured at Hahs Machine Works in Sikeston, and they were recognized as the most original invention of the year in 1932.
Developed around the same time, the Link Trainer was initially intended for use as a coin-operated entertainment device as well as a tool for training pilots.
These have evolved in the sense that the earliest musically-enabled rides played back only a single monophonic melody repetitively.
In contrast, later ones played multiple polyphonic melodies, sometimes including short sound or speech samples.
A Thomas the Tank Engine carousel ride is known to exist, as is one from a British television show for children called Play School.
Carousel rides featuring the characters from The Wiggles, Bob the Builder, Sesame Street and Hi-5 have also been documented.
Recent developments have included the "Pony Express" ride, first manufactured by Italian company Cogan.
These feature a complicated mechanism that alternates between galloping and trotting motions during the ride, mimicking the movements of a real-life horse.
This type has been adapted by both the Spanish manufacturer Falgas for their own version of the "Pony Express" and Memo Park, another Italian-based company, for their own type of Western-style horse; Falgas adds horse sounds to the soundtrack whilst on the Memo Park version is the use of rider interactivity, in where if the rider pulls back on the reins, the horse stops for a few seconds before continuing to either gallop or trot, depending on what pace it is travelling at when the reins are pulled.
These rides should not be mistaken for simulators, which reproduce the action of a video game without offering further interactivity.
In many cases, kiddie rides in the likes of well-known copyrighted characters or objects from films or television shows can also be found, usually at bigger shopping malls that can afford them due to the higher purchasing costs.
Another example would be a Superman kiddie ride featuring the Man of Steel "stopping" the train you're in (meant to look like it's emerging from a tunnel into a rockfall).
When in motion, it plays the Superman: The Animated Series theme (in a lower pitch, the PAL version) and has four buttons: "Look!
This SpongeBob-themed ride also includes a screen displaying the lyrics to the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song.
Knockoff rides that feature figures that look like those of famous cartoon characters exist.
They are not licensed, and in certain areas with high intellectual property rights recognition, purchasers of knockoff rides can get themselves entangled in legal complications.
While kiddie rides are primarily used to garner extra income for commercial areas like shopping malls, supermarkets and amusement centers, they are also common in homes in many developed countries.
This is being led by Denver-based Kiddie Rides USA and has received coverage in many magazines, including Time, Fortune, United Airlines' Hemispheres, and CNBC.
[24][25] Many of the rides are ex-location units which have been written off by the original owner, usually to make way for newer games or rides, and bought for a fraction of what they would cost brand new, either directly from the previous owner or on online auction sites like eBay.
