Disney Rides That Were Broken From the Start

The Walt Disney Company owns and operates hundreds of theme park attractions around the world.

For the most part, Disney claims a staggering success rate with its attractions.

Alas, nobody’s perfect, not even the legends at Walt Disney Imagineering.

Here are five Disney rides that were broken from the start.

Expedition Everest

I referenced this one last year, and it remains true today because Disney cannot fix the problem.

Many Disney attractions include something called B-mode. It’s a backup state to keep a ride operational.

Attractions enter B-mode when a part isn’t working, but the rest is good enough to keep the whole thing open.

Infamous examples of B-mode exist at Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance and Na’vi River Journey.

On both rides, an Audio-Animatronic malfunctions often enough that Disney must work around the problem.

Whenever you watch videos of Kylo Ren or the Shaman of Songs rather than Audio-Animatronics, the ride is running in B-mode.

Expedition Everest operates in a semi-permanent B-mode because the Yeti doesn’t work right.

Guests who visited the attraction during its early days remember the beast angrily swiping at them.

Now, the “Disco Yeti” remains station and has a strobe light effect instead.

Imagineers pivoted to this option because they initially miscalculated the weight of the Yeti and the Forbidden Mountain.

Basically, should the Yeti swipe continuously at riders, it’d accidentally break the entire mountain down on their heads.

Disney has never confirmed the precise details here, although you can find detailed speculation online.

I presume some of this information comes from former Imagineers who worked with Joe Rohde.

The Disney Legend was in charge of the project, and he swears to this day that he’ll eventually fix the Yeti.

Alas, correcting a core flaw with a 25-foot-tall Audio-Animatronic is easier said than done.

Thankfully, Expedition Everest doesn’t really need the Yeti’s threatening motions.

This roller coaster is plenty thrilling enough on its own.

Luigi’s Flying Tires

I admire Disney’s optimism and ambition on this one, even though everyone could tell it was a bad idea.

Have you ever seen videos of this somehow immortal ride from the 1960s?

That’s footage of Flying Saucers, another short-lived Disney attraction that opened in 1961 and closed in 1966.

At the time, Imagineers envisioned an attraction akin to air hockey.

The puck in this game “floats” due to underlying air pressure. The ride employed the same concept, but it didn’t work right.

So, Disney mothballed it for nearly 50 years. Then, modern Imagineers tried again with Luigi’s Flying Tires.

I’ll preface this by stating that the new ride lasted only 40 percent as long as the original. That’s the whole story right there.

It turns out that some things in life are timeless…like the average waistline of American tourists.

Larger folks – and I weighed 213.6 pounds this morning – simply don’t do well with this particular technology.

The whole thing about air hockey is that the puck is light. Humans…not so much.

In many instances, tires would simply sit in place while guests tried but failed to maneuver them anywhere.

At the point, the very usage of the term “ride” came into question.

So, Disney admitted that this technology simply doesn’t work and pivoted to Luigi’s Rollickin’ Roadsters.

Mission: SPACE

I hate writing about this one because it bums me out.

Mission: SPACE represents another instance when Imagineers aimed too high, and it bit them.

I’d reference Icarus here, but that may be a bit too highbrow for all but the Greek mythology and Iron Maiden buffs.

The gist is that many Imagineers were also NASA fans at the time, which is probably still true to this day.

So, when Disney signed off on a realistic space travel simulation, the company liaised with legitimate astronauts.

We’re talking about people who had actually been to outer space. And that’s the problem.

Disney prioritized the opinions of people who wanted the most authentic experience possible.

Unfortunately, nobody in a position of power stopped to ask, “Wait, will tourists like that?”

Even worse, none of them wondered, “Can everyone’s body handle that sort of aggressive g-force?”

For those of you unfamiliar with the space program, competitive testing occurs to differentiate those with the strongest bodies.

Space travel isn’t for everyone, as EPCOT guests quickly learned.

When Mission: SPACE debuted, it proved faaaaaaaaaar too overwhelming to many guests.

The ride uses centrifuges to recreate the sensation of g-force overwhelming the rider as they escape the Earth’s atmosphere.

During the early days, the attraction was even more intense, which led to several injuries and even two tragic deaths.

Disney closed the ride and retooled it to make the whole thing less strenuous.

Also, the company added a non-intense version that doesn’t tax the body anywhere near as much. It’s like one percent.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I typically ride that one instead.

Rocket Rods

Have you ever accidentally stepped on something and totally crushed it?

Yeah, that’s a law of physics in action. Your mass overwhelms the mass of the object.

So, when you place the force of your weight on that thing, it gets obliterated.

When people design bridges, this is the sort of thing they must take into account.

How many cars can safely drive on said bridge simultaneously?

Generally, the architects build the bridge with a foundation strong enough to handle exponentially more weight than is physically possible.

That’s the smart design strategy. With Rocket Rods, Disney…went a different way.

I don’t mean to sound trite about it, as this sort of mistake is rare in the annals of Disney history.

We’re discussing the two primary instances today with Expedition Everest being the other.

Still, what happened here shouldn’t be brushed under the table because it’s that unforgivably bad.

During the 1990s, the Disney Decade, park officials sought to revitalize Tomorrowland.

The problem centered on the limited amount of space in this section of the park.

Disney couldn’t build anything new. So, someone got the bright idea to repurpose the WEDWay PeopleMover into Rocket Rods.

Apparently, nobody in power at the time considered the difference in mass, acceleration, and force between the two attractions.

The PeopleMover is something Dick Van Dyke can ride safely at his advanced age.

Rocket Rods was basically a mid-air drag race. While that concept sounds thrilling, it also defies physics.

Disney utilized the existing foundation and slapped a thrill ride on top of it.

In current terms, that’s like using Prince Charming’s Regal Carrousel as a rocket launch platform.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but someone should extensively test the feasibility rather than thinking, “Eh, it’s probably fine.”

Nobody at Disney did that, which led to Rocket Rods shaking the foundation of Tomorrowland.

That’s not a hyperbolic statement for effect. That’s literally what happened at Tomorrowland.

Rocket Rods proved so immediately threatening to the entirety of Tomorrowland that Disney temporarily closed it after six weeks.

For the next three months, park officials tried to mitigate the infrastructural problems.

Everybody already knew the deal, though. Rocket Rods was never going to last as it was simply too heavy.

Disney closed it after 30 months, leaving us all to spend the past quarter-century hoping for the return of the PeopleMover.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure

One of the underlying issues with many of these attractions is Disney’s bravado.

The company wants all its new theme park experiences to exemplify the cutting edge of Imagineering technology.

In many instances, Disney’s aspirations exceed its current abilities, something we witnessed with the new Tiana ride.

This thing is a visual masterpiece and one giant hug of a theme park attraction.

I’d never disparage Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, as it’s precisely the kind of ride I wish Disney would make.

Still, the new Audio-Animatronics and digital displays for Tiana proved unreliable at the start.

Disney hosted countless sneak previews for Tiana, and several of them ended in disaster.

Entire sections of the ride didn’t work during these sneaks. Sometimes, an animatronic just wouldn’t move.

Even worse, the digital displays sometimes malfunctioned, leaving parts of the attraction empty.

Thankfully, Disney quickly course-corrected on Tiana, and the issue was really only prevalent at Magic Kingdom anyway.

Still, a boat ride in darkness and dead silence is a memorable thing.

So, some folks will always remember their sneak previews of the empty Tiana ride.

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