Not every creation’s a hit. Think about your favorite music artist. No matter how much you love them, you skip past a song or two to get to your jam. The same is true of actors and directors. You may adore most of their work, but there’s always a miss or two (or most of them lately if you’re Johnny Depp) on their IMDb page. Nobody’s perfect, and even legendary artists like Prince make a Batdance or two in their day.
Disney’s no exception in this regard. Even as the unquestioned masters in the art of theme park design, their Imagineers have had their fair share of clunkers. It’s an unavoidable fact of life that some great ideas don’t work out well in execution. Also, some less than great ideas work their way off the drawing board and into the theme parks for other reasons, most of which are budgetary.
With more than 60 years of park history and several facilities in operation, Disney’s performed major miracles simply by populating all their vacation destinations with quality attractions. Their hit-to-miss ratio is the gold standard, and nobody at Theme Park Tourist questions the talent of all the dedicated cast members involved with bringing rides into reality. Disney executives are nothing if not creative, and their willingness to think outside the box is exactly why they’ve earned a dominant position in the marketplace.
Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t poke a bit of fun at some of the more…unfortunate decisions. Our favorite company has built some genuinely odd entertainment options over the years. What follows is a list of some of the oddest attractions in the history of Disney. It’s not park-specific, which means that anything at any Disney park ever is fair game. And let me be the first to say that there are some real turkeys on the list. In fact, ACTUAL turkeys are on the list at one point. That should pique your curiosity more than enough and so without further ado, here are 12 of the worst attractions in the history of Disney. Amazingly, a couple of them still exist in some form, although the names have changed for what you’ll realize are obvious reasons.
The Wizard of Bras
Okay, I’m confident that I have your attention. You’re likely wondering exactly how a Disney ride involving a lady’s brassiere would work. Well, Imagineers are brilliant enough to make this happen, I’m sure, but they never needed to build a ride based on bras.
Instead, The Wizard of Bras was a store right on Main Street at Disneyland. As Walt Disney planned to open the famous park, he faced a financial shortfall. One of the best ways to guarantee that his venture excelled financially was to populate it with plenty of stores certain of selling lots of high-end merchandise. One of his quirkiest choices as a business partner was Hollywood-Maxwell Brassiere Co. of Los Angeles, a popular intimate apparel store.
In the mid-1950s, nobody had deduced any of Victoria’s secrets yet, and while Frederick was starting to make his mark in Hollywood, he wouldn’t become a power player in lingerie sales for a while to come. Hollywood-Maxwell ran the bra game back then, and Walt Disney felt they were a perfect business for the Happiest Place on Earth. Draw what conclusions you will from that.
The mechanics of the deal were simple. In exchange for sponsorship of Disneyland, which meant a donation check to Uncle Walt, Hollywood-Maxwell Brassiere Co. of Los Angeles opened a shop on the right side of Main Street at Disneyland. Even today, if you entered the park and immediately saw lingerie in store windows, you’d feel momentarily disoriented…and you live in the internet era where some truly disturbing stuff is only a click away.
Imagine how opening day guests felt when they entered the Happiest Place on Earth, only to see Victorian corsets in the window of one of the first shops. Suffice to say that the incongruity of the store proved unpopular with 1950s theme park tourists. The Wizard of Bras closed within a year. It still maintains a bit of historical significance, though. The porch where it once resided has remained unused during the 60+ years that followed.
Why was there ever a porch, you ask? Two divergent opinions exist. The first is that Disney worried about the adult nature of the store. To hide it from the curious eyes of children, they added the porch so that only people of a certain height could look inside. The other philosophy is that Uncle Walt felt that men wouldn’t want to enter the store with their wives. Female undergarments aren’t something to purchase in mixed company, after all! If this belief is true, the porch was simply a sitting area for bored men waiting for their wives to finish shopping. And that’s a feeling that’s just as relatable today.
Splashtacular
Don’t let the name confuse you. This wasn’t a water ride that ended with everybody happily soaked. Instead, it was a short-lived Epcot show based on another show at Tokyo Disneyland. The Japanese park hosted It’s Magical: Tokyo Disneyland 10th Anniversary Spectacular, and American park planners took inspiration from the idea. They chose to stick Mickey Mouse on a platform and choreograph a dancing water display at the Fountain of Nations as he led a musical procession.
The entire show is one of the cheesiest things I’ve ever seen, and I watched entire episodes of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe as a kid. The outfits in the exhibition are some odd combination of space-age Coneheads tribute with Mickey Mouse Balloons tethered to the chests of some of the performers. Presumably, the location of the event close to Future World caused the exhibition’s organizers to display a heavy science fiction influence with the outfits.
Image: Disney
Then again, one of the central faults of the show is its mixed themes. A dinosaur named TerrorsauX (although it’s really just a giant dinosaur head on a weirdly metallic exoskeleton too small for its own head) makes an appearance midway through the show. A dinosaur isn’t thematically symmetrical for Future World, the World Showcase, or anywhere at Walt Disney World other than Animal Kingdom.
That’s not even the worst incongruity, though. The villainess who tries to destroy Mickey Mouse in Splashtacular is named the Evil Alien Sorceress. In Japan, they pointedly selected Maleficent , but the American version dropped a Disney branded character in favor of the most generically named one imaginable. Oddly, they kept everything else about Maleficent including the sound effects for her voice.
Putting all the pieces together, Splashtacular was a show where Orchestra Leader and Master of Water Mickey Mouse fought against a Maleficent clone not named Maleficent who summoned a giant dinosaur head to stop him. How the dinonoggin could pull off such a feat is up for debate, as Mickey overcame his magical foe by harnessing the powers of music and dancing water.
As terrible as the show is – and you should watch the video above at least until the dancers sprout butterfly wings and/or steel stilts – that wasn’t even the worst flaw with Splashtacular. It also caused a midday bottleneck in the middle of the park. Perhaps the only shock here is that Splashtacular ever got made in the first place. Only seven months after its debut, everyone involved was ready to ditch Splashtacular. The only thing noteworthy about the entire exhibition is what followed. Disney added the Innoventions Water Ballet as a replacement, and a variation of it has stood the test of time. In your face, fake Malificent!
Bountiful Valley Farms
Do you want to spend valuable park time at Disneyland learning about agriculture? Do you want to examine multiple types of Caterpillar tractors? Does the idea of seeing fake instead of real cows appeal to you but you don’t want to visit Chick-fil-A? Would you love for your allergies to trigger while you’re already experiencing California heat? If you answered yes to many of these questions, Disney once had an attraction for you!
But they don’t anymore because nobody would want those things at a Disney attraction.
Bountiful Valley Farms was one of the many Disney California Adventure rides that debuted when the park opened its gates for the first time in 2001. While I hate to pick on a park I quite like, there’s simply no ignoring the fact that many of its earliest themed areas weren’t up to snuff by Disney standards. One of the worst offenders was the Golden State section, which attempted to sell Californians on California theming. Presumably, they wouldn’t have lived in the Golden State if they didn’t enjoy such sensibilities. What they wanted during a visit to the Happiest Place on Earth most assuredly wasn’t a history of agriculture. That’d be more of a Disney Iowa Adventure type of thing.
For whatever reason, otherwise brilliant Imagineers agreed that a Tractor Farm would sell people on their second gate at Disneyland. They also added Farmers Expo, a series of exhibits intended to educate guests on the complexities of agriculture. Think the early days of Epcot but with less exciting subject matter. Amusingly, one of the film exhibitions was for Crops That Flopped, which doubles as a metaphor for Bountiful Valley Farms itself. It was such an unpopular section that John Cougar Mellencamp would have needed to perform an entire Farm Aid to save it. Bountiful Valley Farms somehow lasted nine years, but that says more about the lack of viable options at Disney California Adventure than anything else.
Journey into Narnia
One of the most important moments in 21st century theme park history happened when Disney failed to finalize a deal for the rights to the Harry Potter franchise. Universal Studios capitalized on their miscalculation, and that’s why their theme parks are spiking in traffic over the past few years. Amusingly, Disney still offered an attraction based on a literary fantasy staple. It just wasn’t the right one.
In 2001, Warner Bros. released the first Harry Potter movie, and it instantly became one of the most popular global releases of all-time. Soon afterward, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring became the second literary adaptation of a fantasy novel to dominate at the box office. Disney’s movie division witnessed the potential for such productions and quickly moved to film their own. They chose the C. S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia franchise, which also had seven books. Disney dreamt of their own decade of box office hits, matching Potter every step of the way. That notion proved laughable, and the company cut ties with the film series after its second release.
Image: Disney
Since Disney is all about synergy, they weren’t about to miss a promotional opportunity for their upcoming release. They constructed Journey into Narnia as a trial run for a larger Narnia presence at that parks, not realizing at the time that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe would prove to be the only story consumers wanted to watch. Park designers appropriated some of the space from the disassembled Backstage Studio Tour at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Journey into Narnia’s attempt at theming involved its entrance. Guests walked through an actual wardrobe to the exhibition. There, the attraction itself was a glorified show. A “Frozen Forest” theme consisting of snow-filled trees on the sides of the room sold the idea that the Wardrobe transported visitors to Narnia. What Disney meant by “Narnia” was a giant 150-inch movie screen that added a wintery backdrop and showed a few key scenes from the movie.
The rest of the showroom consisted of set pieces from the film, and the grand moment from the attraction happened when The White Witch, the villainess, appeared. Basically, it was Universal’s Terminator 2 3-D premise modified to fit the Narnia universe. It was lazy by any standard but especially relative to the expectations theme park tourists have for Disney.
How well did this experiment work out for Disney? Let’s think about it in box office terms. The first Narnia movie earned $745 million worldwide. The second one only managed $420 million. Basically, the moment people reached Narnia and met the White Witch for the first time, they got bored. C.S. Lewis, a revered author, deserved a better adaptation, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe deserved a better attraction.
Indian War Canoes
Okay, the name alone…
A lot of Disney’s earliest ideas for attractions came down to a single issue: were they economical? As you’ll see again on this list, boats definitely fit the bill. Disneyland included a large body of water, and constructing canoes didn’t cost Uncle Walt and his team much. In fact, this particular ride cost only $100,000 to build in 1956, which is the equivalent of less than $900,000 today. You can’t shoot a movie scene for a Disney production for that little.
Of course, you also get what you pay for. When you think of Disney theme park attractions, low-rent canoe rides don’t spring to mind. In fact, the corporation founder eschewed such conventional fare as a rule. A masterful showman, he understood that he’d never maintain the Happiest Place on Earth unless the features at his place seemed dramatically superior to those of the lesser competitors in the amusement park industry. Despite that philosophy that drove the implementation phase of Disneyland, he still demonstrated pragmatism on occasion.
Indian War Canoes was such an instance. Extremely loosely based on the popular Davy Crockett television series, it provided park guests with the opportunity to take a boat trip around the waters of Frontierland. There was just one catch. The decidedly politically incorrect attraction was on the nose with its name. It was an actual canoe, not a machine-powered vehicle. Yes, that means this “ride” required the people on board to row, row, row the boat gently down the stream. Before park visitors boarded these racially cliché canoes, cast members handed out oars. Imagine how enjoyable the experience was during a California summer heat wave.
Image: Disney
Cultural sensitivity was also not a strong suit of this particular attraction. Burly Native Americans in stereotypical attire helmed the front and back of the boat. Their presence was requisite for three reasons. The first was that the canoes were oftentimes filled with lots of small children, and kids are not born with rowing expertise. Some of the muscle had to come from the cast members.
Also, since this ride wasn’t on rails and had no defined path, guides were necessary to avoid what my wife and I call Swan Boat Incidents. That’s when two people accidentally work at cross purposes while steering a water vessel. For the sake of our relationship, we had to eliminate Swan Boats as the romance of them gets lost in all the screaming about who’s going the wrong way. Without guides navigating the path, a few park guests might have wound up in the Pacific Ocean, which would have been amazing since we’re talking about man-made bodies of water that don’t connect to said ocean.
The final purpose of their presence ties into another attraction listed below. The waters of Disneyland were surprisingly populated with seafaring vessels. Without proper guidance, well, there’s a sinking boat story yet to come in this article, but more could have easily taken place.
The name that we now consider Washington Redskins-ish is a key reason why Indian War Canoes no longer exists in its original form. Fifteen years after its introduction, Disney officials started to appreciate that what they had was a blemish on the park’s reputation. So, they did something clever. They shut down the attraction permanently in 1971 when they shuttered a section of Frontierland called Indian Village.
That’s only half the story, though. By the summer of 1971, they had added more appropriate themed elements with Disney ties. From the ashes of Indian War Canoes, Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes arose. It’s still a ride that makes more sense for outdoor adrenaline junkies, but Disney likes the premise and, more important, the cost was low enough that they’ve replicated it at most of their parks.
Skull Rock
That’s not a name you’d expect to hear at the Happiest Place on Earth. Peter Pan fans recognize it as the lair of Captain Hook. It was, after all, the one place that pirates could call home in Neverland. The introduction of Skull Rock at Disneyland occurred due to a previous decision. Captain Hook’s Pirate Ship aka the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship (you were going to guess the Jolly Roger, weren’t you?) debuted with the opening of Disneyland in 1955.
A few years later, Disney decided to accentuate the rest area as a wonderful place for parents to sit and relax while their children played. As the shameless tuna sponsorship indicates, the ship portion was a restaurant. Imagineers constructed Skull Rock as a complementary play spot for kids. It included a suspension bridge and spelunking caves as well as a pirate lookout.
Little explorers could wander the darkened parts of the attraction, running behind waterfalls and battling in imaginary sword duels. In the early days, Skull Rock wasn’t terrible like some of the other attractions listed here. Sure, it was shamelessly commercial, but if that bothers you, Disney isn’t for you anyway. The problem Skull Rock faced was that it was a hastily constructed giant skull that quickly fell into disrepair. The way it looked in 1970 barely compared to its 1960 debut. By the time Disney retired it in 1983, Skull Rock wasn’t a place where you’d happily let your kids play. Instead, it resembled the actual pirate stronghold in terms of cleanliness, and pure authenticity isn’t what you want in a themed land.
More importantly, this attraction violated one of Uncle Walt’s core tenets. He stressed that Disneyland should never be finished, demanding that cast members always prioritize the plussing of attractions. With Skull Rock, they looked the other way as the tuna of the sea grew so unsanitary that even the other fish didn’t want to eat it.
Orange Stinger
Quick, what’s the best setting for an unforgettable theme park ride? If you’re about to answer “inside a peeled orange,” you are now my sworn enemy. You are also combating the inglorious history of one of Disney’s least successful attractions.
Determining where Disney went wrong isn’t difficult here. They built Disneyland on land previously used as orchard groves. It was literally a part of the heritage. The company rightfully wanted to celebrate the fruit that seeded the grounds of the Happiest Place on Earth. The way they chose to do it…wasn’t ideal.
Disney constructed a five-story tall Orange, hollowing out the interior. Inside, they added a swing ride, the kind that lift riders in the air then swivels them in a gentle circle. What this has to do with citrus fruit is up for debate.
Image: Joe Lewis, Flickr (license)
The reason why this project came into existence is that Michael Eisner wanted to expand Disneyland. His plan to do so involved California theming for the second gate. Lacking in good ideas, they explored cheap ones. An orange tin can with what was basically a carnival ride inside definitely fit the bill. Disney didn’t even waste time in thinking up names. They changed a letter from swinger to stinger and let it be.
Orange Stinger was a debacle from the start. Park planners fitted the ride carts thematically as “bumblebee seats.” Everyone HATED them. After only two days (!) in operation, cast members eliminated them in favor of more conventional swing chairs, ones that took the sting out of the attraction (sorry). It also included the same orange scent made famous by Soarin’. For whatever reason, guests disliked it on a swing ride, so Imagineers eliminated that as well.
While it stayed in operation for eight years, Orange Stinger exemplifies the low-rent perception that Disney California Adventure claimed during its early days. They expected much more from Disney than a cheap carnie ride stuck inside a giant orange.
Happiest Turkeys on Earth
Disney loves the holidays. The official government celebrations consistently rank among the most trafficked park days on the annual calendar. And the company does everything that they can to accentuate the festive events. That philosophy can lead to oddness when it’s not properly kept in check by park planners.
For example, consider the Happiest Turkeys on Earth. In 2005, the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, pardoned a pair of turkeys cruelly named Marshmallow and Yam. It’s the same premise as this scene from The West Wing. On the television show, one turkey earns the pardon, and someone finds out that the other one will wind up as dinner unless something is done. In real life, that’s exactly what happened with Yam. Marshmallow received the pardon, so Yam needed a bit of intervention to survive. Fortunately, the White House interceded and saved both turkeys from a late November dinner table carving.
Image: Disney
Rather than accept permanent residence at an ominous place called Frying Pan Park in Herndon, Virginia, Bush and his staff brokered a deal with The Walt Disney Company. Marshmallow and Yam would become the unlikely honorary grand marshals at Disneyland’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The birds were transported in first class on an airplane that I’m dead serious when I say was called Turkey One, at least for the day. Once they held such a lofty title, Disney executives couldn’t in good conscience turn around and serve them as giant drumsticks in the days that followed. That’s sad for the bellies of Disneyland guests the following week since Marshmallow and Yam weighed a hefty 72 pounds between them.
Rather than please families as the centerpiece of a meal, Marshmallow and Yam took up residence at Reindeer Round-Up at Big Thunder Ranch. They were a part of the country fair-ish holiday display that ran through the end of the year. They wouldn’t be the last, either. Turkeys with ridiculous names like Pumpkin, Fryer, and Flower would also take up residence at Reindeer Round-Up until 2011. At this point, Disney severed ties with pardoned turkeys. It wasn’t that the attraction was too absurd – although it was. Instead, a problem existed with California law. Why?
Here’s the explanation from the Orange County Register:
“Disney officials recently discovered a little-known federal rule, in the Animal Welfare Act, requiring a 6-foot-high fence around certain animals, including reindeer, in public displays.”
Yes, Disney was illegally stocking turkeys in conditions deemed unsafe by the federal government. The same people who originally provided the company with Marshmallow and Yam didn’t realize they were accidentally causing Disney legal issues. Oops. The other irony here is that the place they deemed unsafe was the sanctuary the turkeys had against Thanksgiving meal consumption.
The moral of the story is simple. Even Disney can’t save turkeys from their Thanksgiving fate forever. Meanwhile, Disney had to save the animal interactions for Walt Disney World.
Conestoga Wagons
During the early days of Disneyland, nothing mattered more to the planners of the themed lands than that they embody their concept. Frontierland, the Disney equivalent of the Old West, had to mirror the original as much as possible. What that meant for attraction creators was that their works had to foster feelings of empathy in guests for the plight of the people from that era. Sometimes, they took their assignment too literally.
The Conestoga Wagons were a blueprint example of what’s become one of the golden rules of theme park design. Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean that you should. This “attraction” mimicked the rides of the Old West. Guests boarded an open-air wagon pulled by a pair of horses. Then, they traveled a dirt road across Frontierland. Disney pointed to the theoretical highlight of this journey, which was watching other guests enjoy other, better rides in Frontierland. Meanwhile, the riders on Conestoga Wagons were still on a bumpy, smelly ride down a dirt road. All it did was remind people why mankind worked so hard to develop the automobile.
Image: Disney
After only four years, Disney officials accepted that their terrible idea had failed. They shuttered the Conestoga Wagons. In an odd bit of history, however, the wagon premise would make a return appearance at Disneyland. Roughly 40 years later, McDonald’s sponsored Conestoga Fries in the same location as the original attraction.
While that information seems innocuous on its own, the quirk was that the “restaurant” resided in a Conestoga wagon. Park guests ordered at a side window of the vehicle. This quirky pop-up eatery proved popular at first, but Disney ultimately killed it 10 years later, determining once and for all that Conestoga Wagon deserved to stay in the past.
Mike Fink Keel Boats
I’ve referenced the back story a couple of times before, but it bears repeating. Davy Crockett was the intellectual property that paid for Disneyland during the mid-1950s. A modest five-episode series, this Disney production had zero expectations when it debuted. An anonymous film actor named Fess Parker earned the titular lead while a Vaudevillian dancer named Buddy Ebsen, the man who later became Jed Clampett, portrayed his buddy, George Russel. The two became the most famous television stars of the 1950s due to the shocking popularity of this series.
Principal photography for Davy Crockett was similar to The Hunger Games. Nobody thought they were working on a special project right up until everybody went nuts for it. The first episode aired just before Christmas in 1954. By the end of 1955, Davy Crockett memorabilia had earned $300 million for Disney, the equivalent of $2.7 billion today. If you think Disney theme parks ran Frozen into the ground, you simply cannot imagine what the early days of Disneyland were like when it came to Davy Crockett merchandise.
One of the seminal moments during the Davy Crockett series was when the protagonists ran into Mike Fink. In real life, he had a reputation as the “King of the Keelboaters”, and in the Disney show, the character planned to sail from Kentucky to Louisiana. The boys wound up racing Fink down the river, pitting the “King of the River” against “The King of the Wild Frontier.” Crockett and Russel somehow managed to overcome the odds to arrive in New Orleans ahead of their foe, winning the battle that became an iconic part of 1950s folklore.
While history hasn’t been kind to the legacy of Disney villain, Mike Fink, he was the Hans Gruber of his day. Disney celebrated the character by building a previously unplanned attraction around him. The park itself opened in July of 1955. By December, the end of the television series, they’d already added free-floating Keel Boats that traveled around Tom Sawyer Island. It was the type of cheap knock-off that Disney’s competitors do exponentially more often than the company itself, but they chose to cash in on the stunning popularity of Davy Crockett as much as possible. It was the property that paid for many of the Disneyland attractions that came later that you know and love.
Mike Fink Keel Boats…well, it wasn’t very good. Guests entered the infamous Gullywhumper and had a seat for a trip around the lake. The experience was shockingly authentic in the early days since Disney used the actual boats from filming. Over time, they added larger capacity vehicles to the fleet, but this Frontierland attraction was never intended to last indefinitely.
Disney ceded to the popularity of the premise by leaving the ships in service too long, which led to one of the most embarrassing moments in theme park history. After temporarily shuttering the ride in 1995, the company once again opened Mike Fink Keel Boats in March of 1996 even though they knew the boats were barely functional by that point. Disney had rarely bothered with upkeep on the vesseIs (there were two of them, the Gullywhumper and the Bertha Mae). In May of 1997, the Gullywhumper capsized…with guests on board. Fortunately, the theme park tourists suffered only minor injuries. Still, Disney decided to retire what had always been one of their cheapest rides. And they made that decision when it was sunk at the bottom of the lake. The entire affair was a huge black eye for Disney. Before that happened, they did make a lot of money off an extremely cheap ride, though.
Flying Saucers
Autopia proved so popular at Disneyland that they operated three different versions of it during the early years. And everyone involved with planning attractions at the world’s first theme park knew that bumper cars were a staple of amusement parks everywhere. Imagineers tried to craft a combination of the two with a bit of Disney theming.
Their invention was the Flying Saucers attraction. It was a debacle. You can watch the video above to appreciate the weirdness of the experience as well as the dullness of it. Today, Gigacoasters populate parks across the country. Disney’s Flying Saucers is basically the antithesis of them. It’s a one of the slowest moving ride experiences in Disney history, and I include It’s a Small World in that.
Image: Disney
The premise of this attraction is that guests hover in the air akin to alien visitors flying over Earth for the first time. Think Kang and Kodos’ ship brought to life by Disney more than forty years prior to Universal Studios doing it…and in a more believable way. Imagineers built an air pressure technology akin to an entire adult-sized air hockey rink, and the guests entered single rider bubble cars that looked weird enough to come straight out of Tim Burton’s mind. Then, they pushed the vehicles off the ground, which sounds ingenious in theory.
In execution, Flying Saucers was a disaster. The weight of the ride directly determined how high off the ground they could get via the “alien levitation” process. In other words, Pooh-sized Disney fans didn’t have a lot of luck with what was functionally an immobile ride. Conversely, kids loved it, which is why Disney tried everything they could to save it. Unfortunately, the ride also had a tendency to break down, and it was expensive and complicated to fix. After only four years, Imagineers threw in the towel on the original Flying Saucers after just under five years of operation.
Luigi’s Flying Tires
Believe it or not, that wasn’t the end for the technology, though. In 2012, Disney unveiled their newest attractions as part of the Cars Land expansion. One of them was Luigi’s Flying Tires, and it employed the same technology as Flying Saucers, only updated with 21st century tech.
Even with 50 years of scientific advancements, the idea still proved too complex to maintain in a popular theme park. Disney shuttered their second attempt at Flying Saucers after less than three years, which means two different Disney attractions with the same premise lasted eight years in total. Appreciate air hockey, folks. It’s wizardry.
Image: Disney
So, there you have it. Here are many attractions and exhibitions that prove that even the 60+ year champion of the theme park industry isn’t above the occasional snafu. Whether it’s technology that doesn’t work well with plus-sized fans, water shows that make Captain Eo feel too measured and plausible by comparison, or culturally insensitive/boring celebrations of Old West lifestyles, Disney’s more than capable of a clunker here and there.
