By Xavier Martinez, freelance writer for Theme Park Magazine
Ever since its opening on July 17, 1955, Disneyland has enchanted hundreds of millions of children and adults from all parts of the globe. Right off the bat, the park revealed itself to the world as a visionary wonder of finely crafted amusement amidst Anaheim’s sprawling groves of orange and walnut trees. As the first of the Walt Disney Company’s theme parks, Disneyland featured a series of rides and exhibits showcasing an inventiveness and a design brilliance that far surpassed anything else seen in the amusement parks of 1950s America.
Developed in large part by the newly created WED Enterprises, the initial version of today’s Walt Disney Imagineering, these brand-new experiences were first presented to the public on that fateful day in 1955. Despite the well-known events of “Black Sunday” – as Walt Disney notoriously called the park’s opening day due to its incredibly hectic atmosphere and numerous technical difficulties – these attractions immediately proved their appeal to visitors and served as the very first demonstration of Imagineering genius.
With Disneyland celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, it feels like a good time to take a trip across the past seven decades and revisit which of the opening day rides and attractions still remain at the park. Yet rediscovering the experiences that started it all for Disney theme parks is only half of our journey; it’s just as vital that we take a look at the history of upgrades applied to these attractions, wisely carried out over time so as to keep the rides fresh and exciting for park guests without sacrificing the childlike charm at their core.
Main Street, USA
Disneyland’s turn-of-the-20th-century-style gateway, leading visitors along its rows of small-town shops and eateries towards the Central Plaza and Sleeping Beauty Castle, was initially sketched by Harper Goff, one of Walt Disney’s most trusted designers. As Richard Snow documents in his book Disney’s Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World, Goff relied on his childhood memories in Fort Collins, Colorado to create a town hall, a bank building, stores and other small-town buildings that meshed well with Disney’s own memories of growing up in Marceline, Missouri. (Snow 61-62) These early 1900s buildings, with all their elaborate decoration, were actually built using forced perspective. The set designers hired by Disney constructed them so that they are 7/8 full size on the street floor, then 5/8 on the second stories, and finally 1/2 on the third stories, ingeniously resulting in the guest’s eye perceiving the buildings as being full-size but making them feel much smaller, as if the guest is revisiting a place of their own youth. (Snow 14-15)
Following the difficult opening of the park, among a myriad other repairs and improvements needed, Imagineer Bob Gurr was tasked with redesigning the few motorcars that were running along the horsecars on Main Street, so as to have what he called “authentic reproduction antiques” that could stand up to the day-to-day demands of the park. Gurr thus designed a turn-of-the-century exterior, which he then filled with easily maintained off-the-shelf parts. (Snow 306)
The quaint charm of Main Street, USA and its old-fashioned simplicity as the park’s gateway has allowed it to endure for the past 70 years. To this day the Main Street Cinema still offers a curated program of classic Disney animated shorts and the Main Street Vehicles still provide visitors a chance to sit back and enjoy the sounds and motions of horse-drawn streetcars, fire engines, horseless carriages and omnibuses.
Disneyland Railroad
Transporting guests in a full circumnavigation along the park’s berm, this classic railway offers visitors a vintage steam-powered train experience. The object used as a model for this attraction was none other than the Lilly Belle, the locomotive of the ridable miniature train that Disney famously had running in his own backyard. The new ones designed for the Disneyland Railroad were more than 2/3 full size and ran on a three-foot-gauge track, making them look and behave like real steam-powered locomotives and requiring the same paraphernalia of cranes, winches, signals, sidings, roundhouses and water tanks as a real railroad. (Snow 147-148) These locomotives did feature a slightly shifted placement of bell and steam domes and somewhat smaller driving wheels, and the passenger cars were patterned on a three-foot-gauge day coach that Disney had seen at Travel Town, a museum of Western railroad history at Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. (Snow 148-149) The top-notch crew Disney had assembled to build his train was later joined by Earl Vilmer, an experienced railroader who understood the thousands of interrelated parts that formed a railroad infrastructure beyond the locomotive. (Snow 150-151)
The attraction underwent a series of upgrades to its trains and infrastructure in the years since, including the addition in 1958 of the Grand Canyon Diorama inside a tunnel on the train’s route. As Michael Broggie describes in his book Walt Disney’s Railroad Story: The Small-Scale Fascination That Led to a Full-Scale Kingdom, the diorama features a foreground with several life-like animals, a background on canvas painted by scenic artist Delmer J. Yoakum and music from Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite. The Primeval World Diorama, which featured Audio-Animatronic dinosaurs created by Disney for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, was installed in 1966 adjacent to the Grand Canyon Diorama. (Broggie 241-243) The railroad then introduced a parlor car in 1974, which was converted out of a retired observation coach and named the Lilly Belle. Featuring varnished mahogany paneling, velour curtains and seats, a floral-patterned wool rug and Disney family pictures on the walls, the Lilly Belle can be seen to this day coupled on the ends of the railroad’s trains. (Broggie 223-224) The railroad later made headlines when, according to a 2009 article from The Orange County Register, it announced a shift to biodiesel incorporating recycled cooking oil. Following a temporary closure in 2016 to accommodate the construction of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the Disneyland Railroad reopened in 2017 with a new route along the northern edge of the Rivers of America, as reported by The Orange County Register, with the route featuring brand-new rock formations, waterfalls, a trestle bridge and the railroad’s only left-hand turn.
Jungle Cruise
The centerpiece of Adventureland, this fun riverboat ride came to epitomize the interactive and immersive nature of some of the Imagineers’ greatest attractions. Harper Goff, who had designed the Nautilus submarine for the 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, had been tasked by Disney to create his vision of an adventurous journey through the jungle. As explained in the first episode of the Disney+ docuseries The Imagineering Story, Goff did not draft blueprints. He instead dug trenches in a small sandbox that simulated the layout of Jungle Cruise, and then replicated the winding waterway in a station wagon while planning the scenes and timing the length of the ride.
Tasked with landscaping Adventureland – not to mention the rest of Disneyland – but limited in their budget, landscaper Morgan “Bill” Evans and his brother Jack went on many excursions around the Los Angeles metropolitan area looking for trees to add to Jungle Cruise. The brothers collected various specimens from contractors who were cutting down trees to build the Santa Monica, Pomona and Santa Ana Freeways. They also cruised through prosperous neighborhoods in the evenings, looking for particular trees that stood in people’s yards and offering to buy them or simply take them out. (Snow 130) Also, as author and historian Tim O’Day states in the “Jungle Cruise” episode of the Disney+ docuseries Behind the Attraction: “Some of the orange trees that they saved ended up in the Jungle Cruise. And they were planted upside down because the roots look like some kind of exotic tree, and they provided some of the shrubbery for the Jungle Cruise.” To encourage the growth of their jungle, the Evans brothers also drenched the harsh soil with fertilizer and planted it with a diverse array of flora from different tropical regions of the world, including palms, fern trees, philodendrons and bamboo, so as to provide more of an armchair traveler feel and draw guests into a jungle that was lush, vigorous and larger than life, with all sorts of textures and effects. (Snow 132)
Meanwhile, artists and engineers were busy creating life-like, life-size animals in studio workshops. After acknowledging the impracticality of featuring living animals on the ride, coming to terms with the fact that animals would spend most of the day sleeping far inland from the riverbanks and wouldn’t be reliable performers for boatloads of people, Disney went to sculptor Chris Mueller, who first carved the animals in clay and provided molds for fiberglass carapaces. Disney then went to Bob Mattey, who had helped construct the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – and would memorably build the shark in Jaws twenty years later – and tasked him with making the animals move convincingly. Mattey developed intricate machines, cams and rocker arms to have the hippos’ ears pivot, the crocodiles’ maws lift and the giraffes’ heads nod, although even movements as limited as these required closely knit arteries of rubber hosing and thickets of spring steel. (Snow 193-194) The “Jungle Cruise” episode of Behind the Attraction, aside from revealing the influence of the 1951 film The African Queen on Goff’s concepts for the ride, provides further insight into the creation of these mechanical animals. Notably, the technical limitations of the animals were concealed in part by placing some of them behind bushes and trees, and the water was also dyed a shade of murky green to hide the assortment of mechanics for the water-based animals, with the ride’s waterfalls ingeniously serving as a mixing station for the dye.
The boats for the ride were propelled by diesel power, which was seen as more tractable and less inflammable than gasoline, and built out of fiberglass, each measuring 27 feet and weighing two tons. Antiqued with mahogany-stained wood, bright brass work and black dummy stacks, the boats ran on a guide rail laid along the river bottom and were shaded by a striped canvas canopy that prevented guests from seeing how low the young fronds of the jungle actually were. The sound component of the ride was handled by the Ralke Company in Los Angeles, which mixed chirps, trills and growls so that the jungle sounded like a real jungle. To achieve this intricate audio interplay, they combined intermittent localized effects that came in on cue with continuous localized effects and continuous over-all effects that could be heard anywhere in the jungle, relying on a complex system of photocell beams, relays located in the mechanical animals, amplifiers, camouflaged loudspeakers, repeater units, self-reversing tape players and continuous automatic faders. (Snow 195-197)
Significant improvements were made to the ride in 1961 by animator Marc Davis, one of Disney’s famous Nine Old Men, who took on a second career as a character designer for theme park attractions. As Davis himself told in a 1985 interview featured in The Imagineering Story: “When I started working down there, there was nothing that was funny in any of the attractions that I can recollect. And this was a thing all the way through that I have tried to do, is to bring in humor. I did the redo of the jungle river ride, and I added the elephant pool and the trapped safari and that sort of thing to that. And I think the trapped safari was probably the first laugh that Disneyland had in an attraction.” The ride was further modified in 2021, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, in response to comments over the years on the negative tribal depictions that were featured in some of the scenes.
Mark Twain Riverboat
This 5/8-scale paddle steamer was conceived as one of Disneyland’s “visual magnets”, as animator and designer John Hench called the park’s signature visual cues, such as the Disneyland Railroad station at the entrance of the park, or Sleeping Beauty Castle beckoning the crowds towards Fantasyland. Disney knew from the start that what would pull the crowds in Frontierland was the tall stacks and lacy wooden scrollwork of a Mississippi River stern-wheeler. (Snow 123)
Overseeing the building of the Mark Twain Riverboat and the Rivers of America was former Rear Admiral Joseph W. Fowler, whom Disney had hired to supervise construction due to his experience in shipbuilding and naval supply. The hull of the boat, laid down at the Todd Shipyard in San Pedro, was 106 feet long and made of steel, whereas the rest of the boat was of mid-19th-century materials but built to the most rigorous 20th century specifications, with all castings and forgings meeting the standards of the American Bureau of Shipping. The boat had oil-fired boilers but was driven by steam, with the two big, slow-breathing horizontal engines taking shape in the shop of Roger Broggie, the head of Disney’s machine shop and in-house steam engine expert, while the doors, the banisters and the bar on the promenade deck were built in Sound Stage 3 of the Disney studio in Burbank. Every fitting on the boat was subject to this same search for historical accuracy, as century-old running lights had to be found and, for the first time in decades, craftsmen produced fire buckets with rounded bottoms to hang along the main deck of the ship. (Snow 124-127) The finished boat, weighing 150 tons, also required the installation of a dry dock for repairs and the occasional overhaul, which is charmingly known nowadays as Fowler’s Harbor. (Snow 153)
Today passengers can still embark the Mark Twain Riverboat for a 12-minute trip around the Rivers of America. Passengers are free to move about the three levels of the boat, which travels along an underwater guide rail and does not rely on any maneuvering from the pilot, who only has to look out for river traffic. And as The Disneyland Encyclopedia reveals, the Mark Twain Riverboat was the first functional steamboat to be built in the United States in over 50 years. (Strodder 311-312)
Golden Horseshoe Saloon
This restaurant and stage show venue, along with the Mark Twain Riverboat, helped set the distinct tone of Frontierland from the very first day Disneyland opened, long before Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad came to truly define this area of the park. Designed by Harper Goff, the building recreates a saloon from Gold Rush days but, unlike its rowdier predecessors from a century prior, and following the same rule as the rest of Disneyland, does not serve alcohol. (Snow 249) The saloon’s quaint pioneer charm and Old West theatrical feel may seem somewhat dated today, in a cultural environment where the western genre has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of the narratives being told and the revisionism of certain tropes, yet it’s still a charmingly old-fashioned show palace for visitors seeking a glimpse of what the western scene was all about in the 1950s.
Peter Pan’s Flight
(Photo: Walt inspecting Peter Pan’s Flight)
Carrying guests on a skyward trip from London to Never Land, the flying pirate ships of this rail-suspended dark ride moved along a mechanical layout created by the Cleveland Tram Rail Company. The seven-foot-long fiberglass galleons were lifted by their masts and carried along a single rail hung from the ceiling, which the sails of the ships efficiently concealed from guests, although the track initially made a deafening industrial clatter and had to be redesigned. (Snow 241-242) Oddly, the ride’s earliest incarnation did not include Peter Pan. Upon its opening in 1955, many guests were confused by the absence of almost all characters from the 1953 animated classic, with the exception of a captured Tiger Lily in the final scene. While the experience was meant to allow visitors to fly through the ride atop their soaring ships as if they were Peter Pan, it was still a rather elementary design, with simple backdrops seen from the aerial ships and little animation. The ride was completely upgraded in 1983 as part of a major remodeling of Fantasyland, featuring new Audio-Animatronic versions of the characters, new audio elements and more intricate backdrops. (Strodder 378-380)
The ride received a new series of improvements in 2015. As presented in the fifth episode of The Imagineering Story, this latest version includes a multiplication of stars in the nighttime sky using more fiber-optics, laser particles sprinkled by Tinkerbell, pixelated water flowing through LED panels and animation living on inside the clock tower. Imagineer Dave Crawford eloquently reiterated the group’s philosophy when talking about the 2015 upgrades to the ride: “Our job is not about technology, even though that’s what we work with almost every day. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the experience. We still use fiber-optics everywhere, smoke and mirrors, but our ability to re-invent the way it’s presented, by scaling it up, scaling it down, figuring out a way to trick guests into […] believing something they’ve seen before, to believe it again.”
King Arthur Carrousel
For this authentic carousel, Disney himself wanted a model where all the horses jumped out, instead of a more conventional merry-go-round that had a combination of stationary horses and leaping horses. Being familiar with the carousel at Griffith Park – where, according to the widely told Disneyland origin story, he had taken his daughters on a Saturday and had the idea for his park as he watched the two of them ride the merry-go-round – he asked Ross Davis, its owner, if he could help him find the right kind of carousel for his park. Davis came across the carousel at Sunnyside Amusement Park in Toronto, which was slated to be demolished and replaced by a new expressway. The Sunnyside carousel didn’t only have horses, it actually had a menagerie of cats, deer, rabbits, giraffes, even one or two chariots, and not all animals jumped. (Snow 218)
Yet Disney agreed to purchase it from the Canadian park and sent the carousel to the WED shops for some remodeling, where the standing animals were converted to jumpers by grafting on freshly carved legs and the menagerie was replaced with freshly repaired and repainted horses. Animator Bruce Bushman was tasked by Disney to design the canopy of the carousel (with Disney insisting on keeping the French double “r” spelling in the name) and eventually delivered a tall, sharp-peaked canopy that preserved the rounding board while drawing the eye from a distance to the plunging steeds beneath it. The canopy was made of aluminum and yet gave the proper feel of taut canvas. (Snow 218-219) The carousel received a new roof and paint job in 1983 and was modified considerably in 2003, including an entirely new turntable platform and a new computerized operating system. (Strodder 274)
Dumbo the Flying Elephant
This aerial carousel-style attraction, which allows children and their parents to fly atop a mechanical Dumbo for a few minutes, was briefly available to the public on opening day but was quickly closed due to flawed vehicles, reopening on August 16, 1955. (Strodder 169-170) Edward Morgan and Karl Bacon of the Arrow Development Company were commissioned to build the ride and had a very hard time getting the 700-pound elephants aloft. The hydraulic system they first tested turned out to malfunction badly, ejecting quarts of white goo – which Bacon described as “shaving cream” – and requiring constant cleaning and replenishment of the oil. Furthermore, each Dumbo had a system of gears in its head to move the ears, so that the elephant could fly by flapping its ears like in the 1941 film, but the machinery could not be ready in time for opening day. (Snow 199-200) The ride was rebuilt with a kinetic toymaker-like design in 1983 as part of the remodeling of Fantasyland. (Strodder 169-170)
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride
This dark ride, based on the 1949 animated anthology The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, was first conceived by Bruce Bushman. Bushman sketched the cars so as to allow the driver to become the car-infatuated Toad and pilot their automobile through Toad Hall and then into nighttime London, narrowly avoiding catastrophe at every turn. Bushman used a Model T Ford for inspiration. Morgan and Bacon were tasked by Disney to build a prototype of the car, for which they used sheet metal and aviation shears to create a raw metal model that nonetheless had the right proportions for a 1910s motor vehicle and the right amount of amusement in the headlamps that resembled a face and the cheerfully out-of-scale passenger seat. Disney approved the prototype and hired Arrow to design the ride’s vehicles and support system. (Snow 138-139) However, the team at WED tasked with building the ride itself soon faced an unexpected challenge. As described by animator and art director Ken Anderson, he and his team realized Arrow had installed a track for the ride that was a different size from the track WED had used for the full-scale mock-up in Burbank, meaning the ride had to be completely reconfigured to the new dimensions, which were smaller and tighter, so that the timing of the ride still worked. (Snow 241) The attraction received some improvements in 1961 including new gags, some three-dimensional sculpts and two-dimensional “flat” scene details that were more intricate than in the initial version. Later on, as part of the 1983 redesign of Fantasyland, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was upgraded with new fiber-optic and light effects, improved scenery and new story elements. (Strodder 343-344)
Casey Jr. Circus Train
This small railroad attraction, while revealed on the opening day of Disneyland, was actually closed soon after for safety testing and reopened on July 31, 1955. (Strodder 110-111) Arrow was hired to build the two-foot narrow-gauge railroad, based once again on sketches from Bruce Bushman. (Snow 139) To build the train, Arrow first did a mock-up of the engine, which was complex due to the many oddball shapes that Morgan and Bacon were unaccustomed to. Following a visit from Disney, the engine then had to be completely overhauled, with Morgan and Bacon making the boiler slightly bigger and tipping the steam chests just a little more per Disney’s instructions. (Snow 200)
Storybook Land Canal Boats
Much like Casey Jr. Circus Train, this Fantasyland attraction mainly caters to small children and their parents. Embarking on a casual boat ride through a winding canal, guests can take in the view of dioramas recreating scenes from Disney animated classics, although the miniature buildings and landscapes were not added until 1956. The initial version of the ride actually revolved around miniature recreations of some of the world’s greatest landmarks, under the name of Canal Boats of the World, but was severely hampered by time and budget limitations. The guest experience was also very poor, as the motors of the boats were noisy and prone to overheating and often had to be pulled by hand, and the muddy banks of the canal were essentially the ride’s only landscaping at this stage. The attraction closed after two months of operation and was fully redesigned as Storybook Land Canal Boats, opening in 1956. The new ride, per Disney’s wishes, showcased a landscape of miniature buildings from his films, all built to a one-inch-to-the-foot scale and featuring outstanding detailing, offering guests a calm ride on placid waters where all the sights revealed themselves with leisurely charm. (Snow 309-310) The dioramas do not include any characters from the film scenes that are recreated, but many feature audio recordings of songs from these films. Scenes from more recent films have been added over the years, including sequences from The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Frozen. (Strodder 460-461)
Mad Tea Party
This extravagant take on the spinning tea cup ride was once again manufactured by Arrow. While Disney was notoriously unhappy with 1951’s Alice in Wonderland, he saw the potential for a popular attraction that featured the scene of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. With three turntables revolving clockwise, each turntable holding six tea cups, set in a single and far larger turntable revolving in the opposite direction, the attraction was augmented by the addition of a center wheel in each tea cup, which the guests could turn if they wanted to spin themselves even faster. (Snow 219-220) Bob Gurr, however, was sent to repair Mad Tea Party after opening day, as the ride seemed to spin its cups loose from their moorings every day. He spent hours laying on his back underneath the ride, studying it when it was running, and ended up drafting plans for a new tea cup structure and wheel support system, which was then built and installed in early 1956. (Snow 305) The attraction was remodeled in 1983 as part of the redesign of Fantasyland, including new whimsical touches such as colorful lanterns. (Strodder 291-292)
Snow White’s Enchanted Wish
First known as Snow White and her Adventures until 1983, and then as Snow White’s Scary Adventures until 2021, the Snow White-themed attraction that currently welcomes guests at Disneyland shares very little resemblance with the original dark ride that visitors first saw in 1955. The prototype vehicle for the initial attraction was much simpler than the cars of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, consisting of a two-seat cart, presumably made by the Dwarfs for working in the mines, with a pair of wheels in the rear and a single wheel up front so it could snap around the tightest corners. (Snow 200) However, the three-wheel design of the cars was roughly put to the test once the vehicles were installed and tested at the park, revealing a design flaw in the form of a small ledge on the shell behind the back seat, on which operators would routinely jump on, thus derailing the carriages. The ride also showed problems revolving around the timing and the motion of the doors as guests rushed from one room to the next. (Snow 242)
The ride went through various upgrades in 1961 and 1983 before its closure in 2020 for a complete redesign, as reported by Theme Park Insider upon the new attraction’s opening in 2021. Now known to guests as Snow White’s Enchanted Wish, this new take on the attraction provides a completely different experience thanks to state-of-the-art audio and visual technology and a new narrative spin, yet the spirit of the original Snow White dark ride can surely still be felt somewhere in this newly immersive journey into the kingdom of the Evil Queen and the land of the Seven Dwarfs.
Autopia
The only opening day attraction still remaining in Tomorrowland, this dynamic railcar ride was the first showcase of Bob Gurr’s extraordinary skills in industrial design, a few years before the unveiling of the Disneyland Monorail and the Matterhorn Bobsleds further cemented his reputation among the fans of Imagineering. As Gurr himself explained in the first episode of The Imagineering Story: “Walt had in his mind he wasn’t going to buy a standard car for his park. He wanted to have his own car, his own design, and that’s where I came in. I went to North Hollywood High School. And, of course, post-war cars were just starting to come out. I eventually wanted to be a car designer, and by golly, I’m over at the studio and we’re going to design a body for the Autopia car.”
Autopia, back in 1955, was meant to represent a piece of America where tomorrow was already imposing itself on today and where citizens of the future would be driving on the freeways that civic planners would promise to install all over Southern California. Hence, from the very beginning, Tomorrowland had to feature the Autopia Freeway, a mile-long road with cloverleafs and overpasses where children could learn about life in the era of internal combustion engines behind the steering wheels of small sports cars. (Snow 203) Gurr was recruited by Dick Irvine, who had laid out the roadway of the attraction, and modeled his design for the Autopia body on what he believed was the closest contemporary example of the Car of the Future, namely Ferrari’s 166 Spyder Corsa. (Snow 205) Gurr, however, felt out of his depth when it came to mechanical engineering, seeing himself as a car stylist first and foremost. Luckily, he got to know a fellow employee at the WED workshops named Ed Lingenfelter, who introduced him to the realm of massive driving rods, sand domes and Johnson bars and began teaching him on the engineering of internal combustion engines. (Snow 206-207) From Lingenfelter, Gurr learned the essence of good design communication and how to draft the inner workings of a car as nicely as he rendered the stylish sheet metal covering it. The production molds led to the cars being made out of fiberglass and the bumpers being made out of aluminum, although the testing of the vehicles showed an urgent need to strengthen the bumpers and the fiberglass bodies of the cars. (Snow 208-209)
The Autopia cars encountered massive technical issues on the park’s opening day, such as vapor locking and stalling after idling in the heat for only a few minutes, and they turned out to be rather dangerous for children due to the absence of padded steering wheels and faulty speed governors. (Snow 289-290) Gurr, in the days and weeks following opening day, redesigned the bumpers and had the machine shop remake them out of steel, and also got a local company to add a foam rubber mold to the steering wheels. His problems did not end there, however, as these small improvements led to the necessity of completely overhauling the engineering of the cars, including major repairs to the engines, clutches, chain drive shafts and rear axle bearings. In the end, though, Gurr credited the experience as providing him with a very revealing education in mechanical design. (Snow 304-305)
Following significant upgrades in 2000 and 2016, Autopia made headlines in 2024 when the Walt Disney Company announced a transition to electric cars by the fall of 2026, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. The re-powering of this iconic attraction with fully electric drivetrains shows not only a sign of inclination from Disney towards steps for a clean energy transition, but also the Imagineers’ enduring commitment to continue upgrading Disney theme park attractions and keep ensuring a long-lasting legacy for each of the parks’ rides, including the original breakthroughs at Disneyland that have now been welcoming guests for the past 70 years.
Bibliography
Michael Broggie, Walt Disney’s Railroad Story: The Small-Scale Fascination That Led to a Full-Scale Kingdom (2nd edition), Virginia Beach: The Donning Company Publishers, 2006.
Eric Carpenter, “Disneyland Trains Running on Oil from Chicken and Fries,” The Orange County Register, 28 January 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20170119013411/http://www.ocregister.com/articles/trains-559526-disneyland-oil.html
Mark Eades, “Disneyland’s River Rides and Railroad Open to the Public with New Route,” The Orange County Register, 28 July 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170728235137/http://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/28/disneylands-river-rides-and-railroad-open-with-new-route-to-the-public/
Leslie Iwerks, dir., “Part 1: The Happiest Place on Earth,” The Imagineering Story, Los Angeles: Disney+, 2019.
Leslie Iwerks, dir., “Part 5: A Carousel of Progress,” The Imagineering Story, Los Angeles: Disney+, 2019.
Todd Martens, “Disneyland to make the Jungle Cruise more inclusive after years-long complaints of racism,” Los Angeles Times, 25 January 2021, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-01-25/disneyland-plotting-long-overdue-changes-to-the-jungle-cruise
Robert Niles, “Go Inside the Making of Disneyland’s New Snow White Ride,” Theme Park Insider, 27 April 2021, https://www.themeparkinsider.com/flume/202104/8163/
Sammy Roth, “Column: Disneyland just promised electric cars at Autopia. Gas will be gone by 2026,” Los Angeles Times, 18 April 2024, https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-04-18/column-disneyland-just-promised-electric-cars-at-autopia-by-2026
Richard Snow, Disney’s Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019.
Chris Strodder, The Disneyland Encyclopedia (3rd edition), Solana Beach: Santa Monica Press, 2017.
Brian Volk-Weiss, dir., “Jungle Cruise,” Behind the Attraction (season 1), Los Angeles: Disney+, 2021.
Explore More: Videos
Disneyland Opening Day News Report
Explore More: Resources
- Article: Interview with Themed Entertainment Artist David Borning (Theme Park Magazine)
- Article: 9 Reasons Disneyland Should Bring Back the People Mover (Theme Park Magazine)
- Article: Honoring Rolly Crump: Legendary Disney Designer and Imagineer (Theme Park Magazine)
- Quiz: Disneyland History Quiz – Part 1 (Theme Park Magazine)
The magic of themed experiences is meant to be shared, explored, and preserved. Theme Park Magazine is dedicated to doing just that, free from distractions and advertising. We rely on the passion of our readers to keep this mission alive. Your donation is a direct investment in the stories that inspire and transport us. Help us keep the focus on the wonder, not the ads. Support us directly via PayPal today. Your generosity fuels our passion. – Joe Tracy, Editor of Theme Park Magazine
Xavier Martinez is a writer and filmmaker based in Montreal, Canada. His writing has been published in Dragon Gems (Summer 2024), Offscreen, TheGamer and ZEAL; some of his latest work is set to appear in Ori Magazine, Retro Dodo and Borderline Tales. He manages the emerging film and video production company CanyonGem Productions S.E.N.C. with his brother Pablo and counts Star Tours as his all-time favorite theme park attraction.
