Though plenty of classic attractions remain, Disney parks have changed a great deal over the years and, inevitably, some rides have been lost forever in the process. Though a closed ride doesn’t necessarily indicate a ride is gone forever — Carousel of Progress closed at Disneyland only to reopen at Magic Kingdom while long-gone Captain EO reopened as Captain EO Tribute after Michael Jackson’s death — there are plenty of rides aren’t likely to be resurrected.
These former attractions can no longer be found in any Disney theme park, but they live on in our memories.
1. Rainbow Caverns Mine Train / Mine Train Through Nature’s Wonderland (Disneyland, closed in 1977)
Rainbow Ridge© Disney
Opened in 1956, the Rainbow Caverns Mine Train took up most of the original Frontierland with a leisurely train ride through the constructed wilderness of the Living Desert and the Rainbow Caverns. In 1960, the ride was expanded and renamed Mine Train Through Nature’s Wonderland, adding Bear Country and Beaver Valley.
Much like today’s Jungle Cruise, the ride was populated with animatronics — over 200 of them, including bears, beavers, bobcats, and more — that brought the ride scenes to life. Unlike today’s Jungle Cruise, however, the ride had a fixed (and not at all pun-filled) narration, so perhaps it’s best that the ride closed in 1977 to make way for the thrill ride Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
However, some small parts of Nature’s Wonderland remain in Disneyland today — the town of Rainbow Ridge where the Mine Train used to load is still part of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and across from Thunder Mountain’s exit you can still see a pond with animatronic jumping fish and a tunnel with track that used to be part of Bear Country, but now are just background decoration.
2. America Sings (Disneyland, closed in 1988)
America Sings© Disney
When the Carousel of Progress left Disneyland in 1973 (moving to Florida’s Magic Kingdom, where it opened in 1974), it made way for a new attraction: America Sings. This elaborate musical show took viewers on a trip through American musical history, featuring 115 animatronic animals singing 30 different songs and medleys.
Hosted by Sam the Eagle (not the muppet, though equally patriotic), the theater cycled through four acts, each featuring a different animatronic cast and focusing on a different musical era. The show was comparable to the Country Bear Jamboree — which then operated at Disneyland and still operates at Magic Kingdom and Tokyo Disneyland — but scaled way up with more than twice the number of animatronics. As you can imagine, this many animatronics meant a lot of variety — there’s a basset hound in a rocking chair singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” foxes in suits singing “Down by the Riverside,” a vulture duo singing “The End of Billy the Kid,” an old gray mare singing “The Old Gray Mare,” and storks singing “Twistin’ U.S.A.”
Closed in 1988, America Sings was mostly a victim of declining attendance at Disneyland at the time. Many of the attractions animatronics were used elsewhere — most added to Splash Mountain, which would open in 1989, but several of the show’s geese were moved to Star Tours. (The Star Tours geese remain part of the ride’s pre-show queue, and can sometimes even be heard singing a modified version of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” — if you spot a long-necked robot with triangular feet, you’re probably looking at an America Sings original!)
The America Sings building was used for office and storage space for a decade, reopening in 1998 as the rather less interesting Innoventions.
3. Skyway (Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, & Tokyo Disneyland, closed Starting in 1994)
Skyway over DisneylandVia Wikipedia
Once upon a time, you used to be able to sail over Disney’s classic castle parks on a Skyway, which in California, Florida, and Tokyo transported you from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland. The ride gave you a bird’s eye view of the park with a few thrills, too — at Disneyland, the ride passed through the Matterhorn Mountain, while Magic Kingdom’s version dipped close to the ground and took a sharp turn.
Operating starting at a Disneyland in 1956, Magic Kingdom in 1971, and Tokyo Disneyland in 1983, all versions of the Skyway are presently closed and unlikely to return. Despite the popularity of the ride — with frequent lines at both stations — the Skyway had several issues that may have forced its closing (though Disney’s official reason was that demand for the ride had fallen). The ride had a low rider capacity compared to other, newer rides — specifically, the closing at Disneyland happened when the park was preparing to open Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye, which entertained more guests per hour. And several notable accidents in which guests climbed out of the Skyway’s gondolas mid-flight probably didn’t help the ride’s lifespan, either.
The ride closed in Disneyland in 1994, Tokyo Disneyland in 1983, and Magic Kingdom in 1999. The space that once housed the Skyway stations has mostly been demolished or repurposed (in Tokyo, the Fantasyland Skyway station is now home to Pooh’s Hunny Hunt), though Disneyland’s Fantasyland Station remains in the park, hidden behind overgrown trees.
4. Horizons (Epcot, closed in 1999)
Horizons© Disney
A sequel to the Carousel of Progress, an animatronics show that looked into the past to see how far humanity has come, Horizons looked to the future to see where we’re going. Opened in 1983 as part of Epcot’s first anniversary celebration, Horizons took visitors into the far future of the 21st century — and, like much of Tomorrowland at other Disney parks, as that future date approached, the ride’s predictions seemed more off-base.
Still, Horizons was a fun trip, taking you through visions of the future as predicted by the past — from Jules Verne’s idea of space flight to the image of the robot butler above — and then showed 21st century humanity living in space, under the ocean, and terraforming the deserts. At the end of the ride, you even had the chance to choose where you wanted to visit, causing the ride to play a 30-second video clip depicting your trip back to base through a desert, ocean, or space scene. (Though these were only short clips, it took over a year for 30 Imagineers to build the futuristic models and shoot these sequences.)
Horizons actually closed twice over its lifetime, first shutting its doors in 1994 after General Electric stopped sponsoring the ride. It reopened in 1995 while two other major Epcot attraction (Universe of Energy and World of Motion) were being refurbished, but finally closed for good in 1999, just before the we entered the future that the ride was said to depict. The ride would need renovations to reopen and, without a sponsor, Disney decided to use the space for a new ride instead. In 2000 the Horizons building was demolished to make way for the Compaq-sponsored Mission: SPACE that remains there today.
5. ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter (Magic Kingdom, closed in 2003)
ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter© Disney
Despite the fame of the Haunted Mansion, Disney rides aren’t particularly scary — but the ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter definitely was. The attraction proposed to demonstrate a new teleportation technology from an alien company called X-S Tech, with an elaborate pre-show explaining the company’s background and a small scale teleportation system — in which an animatronic robot voiced by Tim Curry teleports alien Skippy from one side of the room to the other. This scene is fairly frightening in and of itself, with Skippy crying out in pain during the teleportation process as your robotic host explains brightly that it’s “practically painless.”
If that weren’t creepy enough, you’re then brought into a round theater with a large teleportation tube in the middle for a larger demonstration — but things quickly goes wrong when a massive alien is accidentally sent to the room instead. When the alien escapes, the theater is plunged into darkness, leaving you to hear the alien’s footsteps, feel its hot breath on the back of your neck, feel its tongue running over the back of your head, and even get sprayed by alien drool (or possibly the blood of a maintenance worker, depending on how your imagination read it). Yuck!
So why did ExtraTERRORestrial have to go? Though the ride was scary for Disney, it lived in the park for eight years before being replaced with Stitch’s Great Escape. The new ride has a lot in common with the old, but replaces the terrifying, carnivorous alien with the more friendly Stitch.
6. Body Wars and The Wonders of Life Pavilion (Epcot, closed in 2007)
Wonders of Life Pavilion© Disney
Before Star Tours made its debut in Florida (it opened at Disneyland in California in 1987, but it hadn’t yet hit the east coast), there was Body Wars, a motion simulator ride in the same vein that took you on an adventure inside the human body. Though you’re on a straightforward (and supposedly safe) mission to investigate the activity of white blood cells around a splinter, you wind up going on a high-speed ride through the heart, lungs, and brain. As the first real thrill ride in Epcot, Body Wars was popular… for a time. But the ride’s story didn’t have the same shine, and crowds faded — especially after Star Tours arrived later that year.
Located in the golden-domed Wonders of Life pavilion alongside a slate of life-themed attractions including Cranium Command, Sensory Funhouse, The Making of Me, Goofy About Health, and the AnaComical Players Theater, the ride was open from 1989 to 2007 — though from 2004 onward, the pavilion was only open seasonally, when the park was most crowded.
While all the attractions (plus the towering double-helix statue that marked the pavilion’s entrance) have been removed, the pavilion itself remains, now used as space for special events at Epcot — in the spring for the Flower & Garden Festival and the fall for the Food & Wine Festival. The building itself is much the same, though as former ride elements have been removed (or painted) over the years the space has become less recognizable for its former attractions. Visiting today, you wouldn’t know that it wasn’t meant to be an event space from the start.
