When you enter Disneyland, there are so many new and exciting experiences that await,
you can’t help but feel drawn toward every ride or show; every sight, sound and smell.
This is often how Mr. Toad feels when it comes to his mechanical mania. Mr. Toad’s Wild
Ride in Fantasyland is based on the Walt Disney short film: The Wind in the Willows, based
off Kenneth Grahame’s children’s novel.
The story goes that J. Thaddeus Toad suffers
from an overwhelming mania every time he sees a new mechanical wonder, and in this case,
he becomes obsessed with an automobile and drives it recklessly across the countryside.
Early plans for Fantasyland included a dark ride featuring Mr. Toad. As the show building
was being constructed in fantasyland, Imagineer Bill Martin began planning out the ride path.
While the building itself was identical to the size of the other buildings housing Peter
Pan’s Flight, and Snow White’s Adventures, the Mr. Toad ride layout had the disadvantage
of sharing a maintenance room with Peter Pan’s Flight and also lending some of its floor
space to the former Mad Hatter Shop. The Mr. Toad ride system and track were adapted
from an off-the-shelf design that was sold by Arrow Development, all that had to be done
was to customize the look of the vehicles. A test track was setup at the Disney studios;
the minimum turn radius of the ride system was four feet, making for fast and wild turns!
Imagineer Bruce Bushman designed the look of the ride vehicles, Bob Gurr designed the
chassis and lap bar functions, then Arrow Development fabricated the vehicles.
There were twelve cars in total, a maximum of 9 on the track while 3 sat in the maintenance
bay on reserve. In total the ride had a duration of 98 seconds and had a capacity of 700 riders per hour.
Guests began their wild ride by bursting into
the doors of Toad Hall, past the fireplace and through the library, then they found themselves
passing Ratty’s house and heading into the cobblestone streets of London, nearly colliding
with a police officer and his vehicle. Your car swerved towards the docks, where it narrowly
avoided going off the wharf, but then has to zigzag its way through crates and barrels.
You then turn to the backroads of the countryside and find yourself entering a railroad tunnel
where you collide with a locomotive. Now you pass through the jaws of hell where you are
given a very warm welcome as flights of devils giggle and bounce around. After a final crash
through a wall you wind up back at the loading area of the ride.
In the ride, several rooms and passages were separated by automatic doors designed to open
as the vehicle approached, although sometimes they malfunctioned or didn’t open in time,
and the ride vehicle would slam into them, forcing them open.
The attraction proved to be successful and received upgrades in 1961, specifically a
fix to the malfunctioning automatic doors and barriers, and also making some of the
flat-board characters 3-dimentional. But over the decades since, the attraction would receive
other refreshes that added more details to the scenery and special effects.
Ultimately, the ride remained relatively the same, even into the late seventies, Bob Gurr had instructed
maintenance crews not to touch the inner workings of the ride vehicles because they were still
operating off of the same materials since 1955 and he wanted to keep it that way.
When Fantasyland closed for its complete remodel of 1983, a lot of attention was given to Mr.
Toad’s Wild Ride. They built a new location for the Mad Hatter shop in order to free up
space within the building to add scenes and lengthen the experience a bit. They also replaced
all the ride vehicles with slightly larger ones that had stronger electric motors.
The first major change to the ride that you notice is actually the exterior, they re-created
Toad Hall as Walt had originally intended for the ride building to look.
Once you are inside, you can see that the loading area was expanded by removing part of the wall
so you can see the doors to the library and the crackling fireplace next to it.
Ride vehicles then go zooming down a hallway, smashing through the Atrium. You swerve to avoid hitting
a policeman, getting a glimpse of the town square beyond him, then gliding past Ratty’s
house, before narrowly avoiding a collision into oncoming traffic.
Your car then breaks through a barrier, taking you out into the countryside where a farmer
warns you not to go this way, you turn away and head towards the wharf, once again, just
barely avoiding careening off the end of the pier. The vehicle then crashes through a room
with barrels of explosives, bursting through a brick wall as they explode behind you.
Now you’re in town, swerving away from an oncoming vehicle and passing through Winkie’s tavern
and heading out into the town square where you see a fountain featuring Mr. Toad and his horse, Cyril.
You break into the courthouse where the judge sentences you to jail, but
after breaking out of jail you wind up on the railroad tracks where you collide with
a train. Alas you are now in hell, passing beyond the new mouth of the devil and running
into the judge in devil form. As you wind your way through the maze of fire, brimstone,
and little devils, you end the ride by passing under a green dragon and bursting through
the wall back into Toad Hall.
This attraction may look simple and un-amusing,
but what makes’ Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride a fun experience is the whimsical environments
you explore. The ride’s sets and structure has always been a somewhat tight maze which
might be claustrophobic to some but I find it rather intimate. While the other Fantasyland
dark rides each bring their own magic to the table, Mr. Toad’s is the only one that makes
me feel like I truly am in the middle of a Disney cartoon. By adding steel plates to
the floor at designated areas, you get the sense that you are driving over cobblestones,
or rickety wooden slats on a pier, or even going over the wooden ties on a railroad.
Now of course I can’t talk about this ride without mentioning the elephant in the room…the
fact that at the end of the ride you die and go to hell. Although many people might wish
this fate on someone they know, there actually is a defined reason behind this.
You see, in Disney’s movie, the Wind in the Willows, Mr. Toad atones for his recklessness and carefree
joyride by being sent to jail and having to get the deed to his home back from Winkie
and the Weasels, but since there really wasn’t room to play the whole storyline out on a
98 second ride, they still had to make the reckless drivers atone for their actions in
a way that gets the point across in a laughable way. So you die and get sent to hell, whatever
your thoughts are on this, its important to remember that this is merely meant to be a
whimsical feature of the ride, designed to make you laugh at the absurdity of it all.
An interesting fact about the hell scene is that the room is always kept hot,
unlike the rest of the ride which is air-conditioned.
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is still a very popular
attraction, its lines sometimes extend thirty to 45 minutes on busy days…which is surprising
considering how few people of my generation have even seen the Wind in the Willows or
the Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. I can only surmise that the ride’s popularity
comes from people’s enjoyment of it. Proof that this attraction is still a success not
because it’s an IP or because it’s a thrilling experience,
but because people consider it a classic.
We can rest assured that Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride will continue taking people
merrily, merrily, merrily, on their way to nowhere in particular.