Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Mental Floss.com.
Welcome to Mental Floss video and did you know that Jackie Chan, Whoopi
Goldberg and Cher were once featured in a Disney ride? It sounds fun but
Superstar Limo was widely disliked and didn't even make it a single year at
California Adventure in the early 2000s. It was a slow ride through Los Angeles
featuring audio-animatronics of those celebrities and others. Maybe it would
have been more successful as one of the later ideas for the ride:
Miss Piggy's Limo Service. And that's just the first of many defunct Disney
park rides and lands that I'm going to share with you today.
Walt Disney World once had an attraction inspired by the movie Alien. I'm not
talking about The Great Movie Ride, but we'll get there.
During ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter, guests were terrorized in the dark by an
escaped alien. It was frightening enough that only people over the age of 12 were
recommended to experience the encounter. While the attraction was in early stages
it was going to be called Alien Encounter and featured a xenomorph from
the Alien movies, but the parks Imagineers objected to building a ride
around R-rated fare in Tomorrowland, which was meant to have an optimistic
vision of the future. So the creature ended up just becoming a generic, but
still very scary, alien. It did have another cool Hollywood connection, though:
George Lucas was one of the designers. ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter lived
in the Magic Kingdom from 1995 to 2003, to be replaced the Lilo and Stitch
attraction, but rumor has it that that too has disappeared. Another scary
attraction was the Cinderella Castle Mystery Tour in Tokyo Disneyland which
opened in 1986 and was operational for 20 years. A tour guide took groups on a
journey involving confrontations with Disney villains from Snow White, Sleeping
Beauty, Fantasia and Pinocchio. These were done the way that Disney does best: a
combination of video and animatronics. The big finale featured the Horned King
from the film the Black Cauldron. It involved him basically saying that the
guests were now trapped and would be sacrificed to the cauldron. One person
who was given a sword earlier on the tour pointed it at the Horned King and
destroyed him. (There was a flash of light and then he disappeared.) For almost 40
years Disneyland maintained the Submarine Voyage ride. Riders would enter
a submarine that was on a track. The submarine then looked like it was being
submerged in water and proceeded to move slowly past various creatures like
turtles, fish and mermaids. When the ride opened in 1959 the submarines were gray
and named after actual US Navy submarines. In the 80s they were painted
yellow and given exploration related names like Explorer and Seeker. In 2007
the ride reopened at Disneyland with a Finding Nemo theme. A Walt Disney World
version similar to the original lasted from 1971 through 1994. Two of the
earliest rides at Disneyland were the Rainbow Mountain Stagecoach ride and the
Rainbow Caverns Mine Train, which were part of Frontierland, of course. The
stagecoach ride had actual stagecoaches led by actual horses going through a
desert. It opened in the mid 50's and closed in 1959. The mine train journeyed
through illuminated caverns and would later turn into Mine
Train through Nature's Wonderland, In 1979 Big Thunder Mountain Railroad took
over the spot, but if you ride that rollercoaster you can still see evidence
of the mine train. In the queue for Big Thunder Mountain there are pieces from a
town that were part of the old rid. The same queue leads you through a
ventilation service room where there's a map with a section labeled Rainbow
Caverns. The flying saucers existed for five years in the early 1960s at
Disneyland. they looked like bumper cars but they were slightly lifted above the
ground thanks to air vents beneath the ride- like air hockey, but with flying
saucers. According to the site Yesterland, the flying saucers used technology that
was developed and patented especially for the ride. When it opened the Los
Angeles Times reported, quote, "The flying saucer ride cost four hundred thousand
dollars to build. Each saucer is blown eight inches off the ground and is
under constant control of its pilot," AKA a park guest who moved to the saucer by
shifting their body in the direction they wanted to go. Part of the problem
was that only people within a specific weight range could do that effectively.
Flying Saucers ultimately closed for a redesign of Tomorrowland. It turns out
that Disney is really into flying. Between 1972 and 1987 Walt Disney World
had a ride sponsored by Eastern Airlines called If You Had Wings. Passengers got
on an omnimover, that line of cars that you can, in theory, board without them
ever stopping, which flew them around the world- the world being animatronic scenes
of places like Mexic, Bermuda and Puerto Rico.
Then it briefly became known as If You Could Fly, and in 1989 turned into Delta
Dreamflight- that's right, a new sponsor. The idea was similar but
it was now an homage to airplanes. Passengers got a glimpse of aviation's
history and potential future. Buzz Lightyear's Space Rangers Spin is now
where If You Had Wings and Delta Dreamflight once were. From the mid-1980s
through the late 90s Horizons was a hugely popular ride at Epcot. Guests rode
through 24 animatronic futuristic sets. According to Disney the future holds
robot butlers, robot chefs and domesticated seals. At the end of the
ride the car would let you vote on how you wanted to return home- through a
space, desert or ocean scene. Nowadays Mission Space sits in Horizons' place.
Around eight months after Horizons closed Rocket Rods opened at Disneyland.
This one only lasted about three years. It was a high-speed thrill ride that
used an old track that belonged to the much slower people-mover
ride, which ended up being its demise. The coaster broke down too often and
permanently closed in 2001. Starting in 1967, for almost two decades, Disneyland
guests could experience what it was like to be microscopic while riding Adventure
Through Inner Space. People waiting in line would watch as passengers sat in
pods, went through a 37 foot-long microscope and were shrunk (AKA they were
replaced by eight inch tall replicas on screen). While on the ride they'd go through
scenes of becoming smaller than a snowflake, mostly by watching videos.
Similarly, on Body Wars, which was located at Epcot'sWonders of Life Pavilion and
operated from 1989 until January 1st 2007, 40 riders took a journey through
the human body. They were jostled around, causing motion sickness for many, as they
watched a video of their dramatic chase. Fun fact: the video was directed by Spock
himself, Leonard Nimoy. Even funner fact: the other famous Wonders of Life
Pavilion attraction was The Making of Me, where Martin Short learned how he was
conceived. Apparently they had a disclaimer about all the sexy stuff at
the entrance to the attraction.
Maelstrom lasted a bit longer at Epcot, between 1988 and 2014, before it was
replaced by a Frozen ride. It was a boat journey through the history of Norway,
though that history involved some embellishment like an animatronic
three-headed troll. "Let it go, let it go!" Please don't put that in there. For an
even more recent closure we have the Great Movie Ride, which was at Walt Disney
World's Hollywood studios from 1989 through 2017. Guests entered a building
that looked like Grauman's, now TCL, Chinese Theatre, boarded a car and
traveled through scenes from 12 movies, including Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien,
Singing in the Rain and The Wizard of Oz, as well as a montage of a bunch more
classic films. Drama ensued when a live actor hijacked the ride. In 1955
Disneyland had a simulation called Rocket to the Moon that showed patrons
would it would be like to, well, travel to the moon. It closed in 1966 and a year
later was replaced by Flight to the Moon, which became way less exciting when
Apollo 11 actually landed on the moon in 1969, so the area became Mission to Mars
In 1975. That ride closed in 1993. Later the space became extraTERRORestrial. Let's
finish up with a couple of defunct lands like Holidayland, part of Disneyland
between 1957 and 1961. Well, actually the nine acre area was
just outside of Disneyland. It was less ride oriented and instead contained
picnic spots, sports fields and a large tent for performances. In the early days
of Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park the company wanted to include a Beastly
Kingdom in homage to fake creatures like dragons and unicorns. While prepping for
that, camp Minnie Mickey went up in 1998, intended to be a temporary placeholder
until beastly Kingdom was ready to be built. Well now we don't have either.
Beastly Kingdom never came to be and the camp-themed section closed in 2014.
Finally, one land that never became a land: Lilliputian Land. We know that Walt
Disney wanted part of Disneyland to be based on a section of the book
Gulliver's Travels, thanks to a map drawn in 1953. With everything in that area
made to look tiny, guests would feel like giants. It's thought that some of the DNA
of Lilliputian Land can still be seen on the Storybookland Canal Boats. Thanks
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