Ask just about anyone if they have a favorite theme park ride or attraction they are sure to give you several answers. Everyone has favorite rides that they love right now. But chances are that the person you ask will also have some fond memories of a past ride too. It is the very nature of the theme park business model to constantly grow, change and evolve. However, since space is also finite, sometimes older attractions have to go to make way for new ones.
Time also plays into the reasons why a park may need to retire or put in place some upgrades to an older ride. Ageing attractions can often require costly repairs to deal with troublesome maintenance issues, especially if the parts needed become rare or scarce. A park’s ROI (Return On Investment) will always play a factor in cases when the costs build up. Yet guest popularity can also weigh heavily as a decision-maker for many theme parks and attractions.
Ride upgrades and replacements at Disney
The Walt Disney Company knows this well. Any time an attraction in a Disney theme park is facing retirement, there are countless fans who are vocal opponents to the loss of a ride, or even any major changes. Sometimes operators make changes in an attempt to improve things. Or, sometimes it just makes sense to install a modern solution to replace an older method that is less effective.
Disney has also been known to update some of its older attractions by leaving a ride system intact, and simply replacing the entire theming of an attraction. The company will often retire an older IP with a newer IP. Especially if they feel that guests might respond better to the new one.
Disney Imagineers have perhaps more experience with this than anyone else, having rethemed so many different attraction concepts from the past. Imagineering has been making headlines lately for its latest attraction update. The operator announced the project during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The intention to close the Splash Mountain flume rides at Disneyland and Walt Disney World caused immediate controversy amongst the Disney faithful.
A change for Splash Mountain
Right from the start, Splash Mountain has always been one of Disney’s most popular attractions. So, the immediate outrage boiled over quickly, even though this isn’t a total loss of the attraction itself. The ride system for Splash Mountain will remain as the two attractions are simply undergoing a change of IP. They will be dropping the more controversial Song of the South IP in favor of The Princess and The Frog.
Work has already begun in Florida, and the original Splash Mountain at Disneyland will close forever on 31 May 2023. It will then be transformed into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. The change is sure to be exciting. However, we can expect a lot of controversy to follow during the rebuilding process. There are likely to be a lot of pent-up feelings on both sides bubbling to the surface, especially on social media.
In the end, we will have to wait to see how the general public takes to these ride upgrades. Will they pine for the old Splash Mountain days now gone forever? Or, will they embrace the new adventure that lies ahead?
The final outcome may surprise us all. After all, even the most odd-ball-sounding concepts can gain a huge following if done well. It wasn’t that long ago that Disney California Adventure announced that it would be closing that park’s version of the Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror attraction. This was in order to turn it into Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout! in 2017.
Guardians is one of several successful ride upgrades at Disneyland
The changeover was to be rapid. Disney purists slammed the move as a quick and cheap attempt to bring in a Marvel Comics-themed attraction to one of Disney’s North American theme parks. While the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise (now with Vol. 3 smashing box office numbers in the theaters) is now a much-beloved part of the overall modern Marvel Cinematic Universe, this was not always the case.
Even by comic book standards, the Guardians of the Galaxy was a quirky concept. It was one that most assumed would fail miserably to translate to the big screen. After all, a spacefaring superhero team led by a single human, surrounded by strange aliens, including a talking Racoon with a fondness for weaponry and a talking tree that could only utter the words, “I Am Groot” sure didn’t seem like a recipe for success.
Thanks to director James Gunn, we couldn’t have been more wrong. Gunn’s vision for the Guardians was as a group of misfits who bonded as a family and then managed to save the universe. They did this not only in their 2014, 2017 and 2023 trilogy instalments but they also played a major role in the Avengers Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019) films.
Due to great timing and Gunn’s assistance, the cast was able to film footage for Disney’s new Mission: Breakout! attraction. They also filmed additional footage for an alternate version of the attraction, Monsters After Dark. This is used during the Halloween season as a sort of sequel to the events of the Mission: Breakout! story. The loss of the Twilight Zone theming has been quickly forgotten. Park guests have fallen in love with the new Guardians of the Galaxy-themed attraction in its place.
The evolution of Epcot
The popularity of the Guardians characters also led to the creation of an all-new coaster in Walt Disney World, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind. This new ride opened last year to high praise and was a replacement for Epcot’s former Universe of Energy attraction. The structure was simply repurposed as the queue, station and maintenance area for the new attraction. The majority of the attraction takes place in a large new adjacent building created just for that purpose.
Disney’s Epcot Park is also home to yet another one of the operator’s ride upgrades. The park’s former Maelstrom flume ride, located in the Norway pavilion section of the park, became Frozen Ever After in 2016. This move was in order to quickly take advantage of Disney’s smash-hit animated musical film, Frozen.
The move was once again seen with skepticism by Disney fans. They not only saw it as a quick attempt to cash in on the film’s popularity, but some also felt it was an invasion of sorts, by adding Disney’s fantasy and animated creations into Epcot, a park that had always had a more grounded and real-world theme.
Ride upgrades for Epcot include IP from Finding Nemo and Ratatouille
This was not the first time that Disney had brought in an animated IP to update and modernize a struggling Epcot pavilion. The operator updated the Living Seas attraction to include a new dark ride, theming and characters from Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo film in early 2007 with great success.
Later that same year Disney updated the El Rio del Tiempo flume ride in the Mexico pavilion. This became the Gran Fiesta Tour Starring The Three Caballeros.
In many ways, this evolution in 2007 has led the way for the current direction that Disney is now taking with Epcot. Following the addition of Frozen in 2016, Disney then began work to add the Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure dark ride as an expansion to the France pavilion. This opened in 2021, followed by the Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind in 2022.
A new walk-through attraction called the Journey of Water, inspired by Disney’s Moana film, is now under construction. This is expected to open by the end of the year.
More changes to come
Despite the success of the Guardian’s transformation, Disney’s move to change Maelstrom into Frozen Ever After will have a more global impact on the company’s theme parks.
Currently, the finishing touches on a whole Frozen-themed land are being set into place at Hong Kong Disneyland. The new land will feature a new roller coaster ride as well as a custom-built updated version of the Frozen Ever After attraction concept when it opens at the end of 2023.
This isn’t the end, however. A second Frozen-themed land is also under construction at the Tokyo DisneySea theme park expected to open in 2024. Plus, construction has just begun on yet another Frozen-themed land coming to the Walt Disney Studios Paris theme park. This is expected to open in late 2025.
It is fascinating to watch how a small transformation in one location can turn into such a global movement in the years that follow. The Disney theme park history books are full of such stories and ride upgrades, as one attraction makes way for another.
The collection of Disney’s Buzz Lightyear-themed interactive dark rides is another excellent example of this. Previously a small dark ride in the Magic Kingdom theme park, it was always used as a sort of corporate sponsorship attraction over the years with Eastern and later Delta Airlines. It was transformed into the first Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin concept in late 1998.
When the airline sponsorship deal came to an end, Disney creatively came up with a new concept. This could be overlaid onto a modified version of the existing ride system. Over the years that followed, new Buzz Lightyear attractions arrived at Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, Hong Kong Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland and Shanghai Disneyland.
Mourning great rides of the past
Not every story has a happy ending though. Some attractions are lost completely, demolished to make way for new concepts that just fail to catch on.
For every success story like Test Track (which replaced World of Motion), there are guests who still pine for the loss of attractions like Horizons (removed for Mission: Space), or Mr Toad’s Wild Ride (removed for The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh), or Snow White’s Scary Adventures (removed for Princess Fairytale Hall).
In some cases, a lost attraction like The Great Movie Ride is still greatly missed even while the replacement attraction, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, is loved as well.
Time catches up with us all eventually, and progress marches on as creativity inspires new adventures to come. If only there was a way to preserve those lost attractions forever…but that’s a story for another time.
