Disney parks have a way of immersing guests into different worlds, and every detail for each ride, show and land is usually carefully considered. Horseshoe prints are embedded in the streets of Fantasyland, a biodegradable dye is used in the waters of the Jungle Cruise and RIvers of America to give them a more natural look and Nepalese Coca-Cola bottles can even be found outside Expedition Everest at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. But occasionally there are some details that are overlooked, and they can leave guests scratching their heads for years trying to figure them out. Here are a few burning questions we have about some popular Disney attractions. How many of them have you also wondered about before?
1. A Carousel of characters
Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress follows the members of a “typical” American family as they adjust to the invention of electricity and other advances in technology through the years. Well, it follows most of the family members. In the show’s first scene, there’s a little blond girl washing clothes with her mother. But in the following scene, the girl disappears, never to be seen again. So what happened to her? Did she run off to join the other children in It’s A Small World?
Another detail in this show that was missed involves her sister Patty’s hair. In the first scene, she’s a brunette and in the following scenes, she’s a blonde. Could she have dyed her hair as a tribute to her missing sister? One final question that plagues fans of this attraction: is the family dog immortal? Or does it just have a lot of identical relatives?
2. Universe of misinformation
Ellen’s Energy Adventure packs a lot of info in its 45(!)-minute-long ride, but unfortunately, much of it is inaccurate. First of all, when Bill Nye the Science Guy and “Just Ellen” go back to the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs, they encounter a wide variety of creatures that lived in very different time periods and wouldn’t have all existed at the same time. The ride also overestimates the time when dinosaurs became extinct.
Toward the end of the show, Bill tells Ellen that there’s only about 60 years’ worth of natural gas available, but today’s estimates range from 100 years’ to more than 200 years’ worth. It just makes you wonder if anyone fact-checked the Epcot ride’s script. Even accounting for advances in research pertaining to the availability of natural gas, why can’t the 20-year-old attraction just be updated?
3. Tales from the crypt
If you’ve ever walked past The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, you may have seen a bricked-up crypt in front of the ride with “1764” engraved in stone above it. But what’s the story behind this mysterious feature? Rumors have circulated about the crypt for years, with some people thinking it was meant to tie the ride to the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction and explain that the mansion’s owner was Jean Laffite (also spelled “Lafitte”), who was a pirate and privateer in the New Orleans area. (The year was supposedly determined by subtracting 200 years off the birth year of an Imagineer who worked on the project.)
But that’s not all — some eagle-eyed fans have seen many more Jean references in the park besides the “Laffite’s Landing” sign in Pirates and “Lafitte’s Anchor” artifact (shown above) in New Orleans Square, pointing perhaps to a “super theme” that crosses multiple areas of the park. Some props for each of the rides are even pretty similar, so you’re left wondering: Were all of these Lafitte mentions deliberate or were they coincidences? Lots more on this “lost imagineering” idea is pondered here at a blog called Long-Forgotten.
4. An even-spookier story?
The overall storyline of The Haunted Mansion is pretty straightforward (your ghost host takes you on a tour), but some fans have wondered if there might be even more to the story beyond its simplistic premise. According to one idea, you commit suicide (or are killed) and become a ghost at the end of the ride. Now how would anyone arrive at such a dark idea?
Consider the following: at the attraction’s beginning, your host says the only way to escape the mansion is by dying (as a hanged man dangles above), and during the initial two thirds of the ride, the ghosts only appear in the slightest of ways (thanks to the Pepper’s Ghost effect). However, two-thirds of the way into the ride, guests’ doom buggies turn backward and descend backwards into in the “graveyard” portion of the ride, where the ghosts are now easily visible, singing happily (“Grim Grinning Ghosts”) and inviting you to join them. Some believe that the backwards motion indicated a fall (or a jump) out of the window, and the now-visible ghosts appear clearer because you have actually joined them! Though Disney has never confirmed this version of the story, some fans can’t help but wonder if they’ve stumbled on this attraction’s dark secret.
Do you have your own theories on these burning questions? Or do you have your own Disney questions that have been bugging you for years? Leave us a comment below!
