"Momentum vs." Explained!

The Origin of "Momentum vs."
I was never really apart of Momentum. A lot of my friends were in Momentum and I actually stuck around for one year, but I never had a real connection. Yet something about Momentum influenced me, made me think "yep, everything about this is perfect haunted house material".

It was always the plan to have a half-comedic, half-scary maze solely about Momentum and its members fighting off a zombie apocalypse; and as a cherry-on-top, a whole scarezone dedicated. Back in Senior Year, I'd planned to only write about a singular year of Sato Land Scarefest. In that point of time (and for the longest time), I had the name of the Momentum maze as "Momentum Mori" -- and even though I thought the play-on-words was pretty clever ("Memento Mori", a trendy Christian phrase that translates from Latin as "Remember you must die"), the name always sounded dumb to me. Plus, I guarantee you no one would get the gist of that maze if I'd stuck with that.

...And so I dumbed down the name! "Momentum vs. The Apocalypse". Kind of has a ring to it, don't ya think?

What I'd never planned to do was go beyond writing about a single year of Sato Land Scarefest and expanding the mythology/storyline of "Momentum vs. The Apocalypse". Once it occurred to me that I wanted to tell more stories about these characters and this world that they live in, it suddenly became easy for me to brainstorm ideas and let my creativity explode. Everything about the costumes, the music, the lighting, the sets; they all seemed like they fit into place perfectly without losing the touch that its original source had, which is ultimately the most satisfying thing a person with an extreme imaginary capacity can feel.

Year I: "Momentum vs. The Apocalypse" & "Apocalypse 4999"
It started with a simple idea: "Momentum Robotics faces off against zombies". It was corny, but it worked.

Inspirations
I took a lot of inspiration from horror-comedy films like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and This is the End (2013); even real-life mazes like ZombieGeddon (HHN Orlando 2010), Stranger Things (HHN Orlando 2018), and The Purge: Gauntlet of Fear (HHN Hollywood 2015). I never got to experience ZombieGeddon, there were a lot of factors that I carried into my own ideas: the walkthrough experience had scares that were both supposed to make you scream or laugh, they had a video projected on the side of a building that basically broke down the plot of the maze for you while also immersing you into the experience before you've even stepped foot in the maze, and there was a scarezone (Zombie Gras) that directly connected with the story of the maze (in our case, it's Apocalypse 4999).

An unlikely inspiration, however, was actually the Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout! ride at Disneyland California Adventure -- which was fairly new at the time. I knew I didn't just want "Momentum vs. The Apocalypse" to just be a horror-comedy maze, I also wanted it to have style. Say what you want about Mission Breakout (I mean, let's be real, Tower of Terror was the goat), but that ride -- just like the movie -- has style, and a lot of it has to do with its soundtrack. I quickly assembled a Spotify playlist of early 2000s era songs and used the lyrics and titles of the songs to build my story (which, shamefully, is how most of my stories come to fruition).

Characters
My twist on the character of Pandora is that when she opened the box, the Evil chained her soul to the box as her vessel; now she's punished exist for all eternity as the box's guardian, forced to give in to the Evil that she released all those centuries ago -- and though she may look like this dangerous phantom, the good that she had when she was alive still exists within her. I wanted Pandora to look like an ancient Greek statue, while also having this intimidating, powerful, ghostly figure.

Something that still bothers me is this weird subplot I created for the maze where Jose's character is constantly trying to hit on Pandora throughout the experience. Don't get me wrong, I love it and it doesn't take away from the whole tone of the maze, it's just... ''what? What part of my brain was like "oh yeah, his whole arc is that he's fancies this ancient apparition and then he marries her in the end" ''and thought it made perfect sense as a maze experience? If I worked as a creative director at HHN and pitched this to the executives at Universal, I'd get fired immediately. I constantly imagined a mannequin of Jose's character doing the Say Anything (1989) boombox thing in Hades's Dimension (which actually ended up in my final idea) whenever I thought about the fact that Pandora's in this maze. I truly believe that if this was real, Jose's character -- next to Brendan's character -- would be the most beloved scareactor with a cult following and tons of fan-art (it's not too far from reality, the HHN Orlando community already does this with a lot of their own scareactors).

Year IV: "Momentum: The Ultimate Showdown"
I distinctly remember Calvin Vu, a member of Momentum 4999, mumbling The Ultimate Showdown at random moments (little did he know, I had more lyrics memorized than him).