The Walt Disney Company rightfully gets all the credit for its seamless implementation of Disney theme parks around the world. Generally, every new park, themed land, and attraction opens almost perfectly. Sure, a glitch happens here and there, but extensive internal quality assurance has helped the company avoid most major snafus. It’s how a complex themed land like Pandora – The World of Avatar or a revolutionary park like Shanghai Disneyland garners such instant and total acclaim. Still, some occasional snafus are inevitable. Here are five Disney attractions that had almost immediate problems.
Expedition Everest
Image: DisneyMath errors. We all make them. Sure, everyone remembers a moment of pride here or there when they scored 100 on the big math test, but incorrect calculations are a part of life. Maybe you’ll expect your groceries to cost less or you’ll spend more on your theme park vacation than you projected. A misplaced comma here or there is enough to mess up any mathematical computation.
Imagine if you worked at a Disney theme park and messed up your math! Think about the potential ramifications that would cascade from this single mistake. Sadly, some (group of?) Imagineer(s) somewhere lives with this frustration every day. They made a miscalculation that will live on in theme park infamy for years to come.
Back in the planning phase of Expedition Everest, Disney knew that the Yeti would highlight the attraction. They also understood that it would be one of the largest audio-animatronics ever. To secure it in the attraction, Imagineers built it into the base of the structure…but there was a problem. They incorrectly calculated the amount of weight that the base could support. The pressure from the Yeti exceeded that weight.
Yes, the Yeti’s movements risked fracturing the foundation of the adjoining mountain. And it was all because of a math error. Today, the creature nicknamed the Disco Yeti only performs a fraction of his possible movements lest he collapse the mountain at his feet.
Frozen Ever After
Image: Disney“Disney World’s New Ride Has an Old Problem.” – The Motley Fool
That was a headline on a major business website only five days after the debut of Frozen Ever After. While audiences quickly agreed that the Maelstrom attraction at the Norway Pavilion was worthy of its pre-opening hype, the opening week was kind of a debacle. Disney tried to control the heavily anticipated debut with a poor park strategy, and then the technology failed them, too.
One problem was temporary. Disney prioritized FastPass holders on opening day. Due to ride outages, many of the people standing in the regular line never got the opportunity to try Frozen Ever After. One little girl near and dear to my heart stood in line virtually the entire day, only to be turned away before getting to ride it. That’s a rare black eye for Disney customer service.
Image: DisneyThe technical glitches were a much larger long-term problem, one that the Motley Fool accurately summarized. The audio-animatronic advances in Frozen Ever After are significant, but they also come with more pieces that can break. Similarly, the changes to the path of the boat ride from Maelstrom to Frozen Ever After led to a larger number of potential breaking points, spots that would trigger 101 codes that immediately shut down the attraction. Combined with the dramatic traffic demands for Frozen Ever After, it was the most likely Walt Disney World to break down for a period of almost two years. Disney has since alleviated a lot of the issues, but Frozen Ever After started poorly and struggled to right the ship for an extended period.
Kali River Rapids
Image: DisneyOn paper, this is one of the simplest rides Disney ever attempted to build. After early plans for an ambitious attraction fell by the wayside, park planners dumped the concept of an aquatic safari for a basic rafting ride. By Disney standards, it wasn’t just a compromise. It was a shortchanging of the company brand. Imagineers don’t make ordinary attractions as a rule. They reinvent and repurpose ideas to perfect the core concepts.
With Kali River Rapids, the shame of an ordinary rafting attraction wasn’t the deepest humiliation. The original version of this ride featured mist, smoke, fire, and fog. How many of those elements did you witness during your last journey down the Kali River? The answer depends on when that ride took place and how fortunate you were.
The elements have torn so frequently over the years that Disney leaves them offline as often as not. Sometimes, the rafts get stuck, too. I happened to have a FastPass when that happened. Nothing ruins your Disney day like seeing firefighters helping guests off a ride. Kali River Rapids is a failure of imagination AND implementation.
Luigi’s Flying Tires
I almost hate listing Luigi’s Flying Tires. Imagineers had their hearts in the right place when they built this attraction. Alas, history has a tendency to repeat itself.
During the early 1960s, Imagineers constructed a revolutionary ride system for an attraction called Flying Saucers. The concept is akin to air hockey in that guests would “float” in the air thanks pressured system beneath each ride cart. There was just one little problem. The individual carts were a one size fits all solution to a kind of ride that required nuance. Some riders were too small to move their carts while the *ahem* girth of others slowed down the potential motion of the Flying Saucers. In addition, the attraction had terrible throughput and frequent malfunctions. After a few years, Disney mothballed the concept.
Fast forward to the advent of Cars Land at Disney California Adventure. Since Luigi’s Tires is a crucial and fun element of the Cars movie franchise, Disney wanted a ride based on that premise. After some research, they determined that the Flying Saucers premise was viable using modern technology. They…were wrong.
Even before Luigi’s Flying Tires opened, park officials knew it was a bust. They tried tinkering with it some, but their biggest change, a multi-person ride cart, didn’t solve the underlying issues with pressurized air distribution. The “flying tires” were slow to the point of immobile. Disney tried to jazz up the proceedings by adding beach balls, part of the blue sky phase for Flying Saucers way back when. All that did was get them sued by people struck by beach balls. Seriously.
Less than three years after its arrival, Luigi’s Flying Tires closed, giving it a certain sort of symmetry with Flying Saucers. Maybe Disney will break out the concept again in the 2060s.
Mission: Space
Image: DisneyThis ride is the most chronicled struggle Disney has faced during the 2000s, at least among rides still in operation. From early on, Imagineers intended to simulate space travel with their daring new attraction. To accomplish their dream, they’d need to construct a multi-arm centrifuge. This device would spin the ride carts at certain angles to create the illusions of thrust, g-force, and weightlessness.
While Imagineers understandably had concerns about causing motion sickness, they employed subtle tricks to lessen the ideas of it transpiring. For example, the airflow in each ride cart is intended to relax the body and thereby steady the nerves. Unfortunately, something that sounds good in theory can fail completely in execution. That’s precisely what happened with Mission: Space.
During the early days of the attraction’s opening, park officials quickly realized that the g-force simulations were too stressful for many guests. The modest steps that Imagineers had taken to lessen the possibility of motion sickness were woefully inadequate. Many guests who rode Mission: Space regretted, well, everything and exited the ride feeling sick and rather angry. Some became physically ill and…the story gets much sadder from there in a couple of instances.
Mission: Space failed so completely during its first iteration that Disney had to add a second option. They removed the centrifuge’s high-gravity elements, creating a gentler ride experience. A few years later, Disney differentiated the two rides beyond “centrifuge and no-centrifuge” options. The more violent iteration of the ride still travels to Mars while the calmer one orbits the Earth. These changes work much better, but Mission: Space will always be known as the ill-fated Disney attraction that tragically includes a body count.
