For fans of park history, there’s nothing quite like seeing the story of Disney Parks play out. And for many of us, we’ve lived through a few very interesting changes in the parks…
Today, we’ve collected five rides that have made the very unusual move… of moving! Seriously, the rides below may be cemented in place, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t changed addresses. Did changing the context of these rides change the experience for you? Or does it even matter where they reside on paper? Let us know in the comments below!
1. Matterhorn Bobsleds
When the Matterhorn Bobsleds opened at Disneyland in 1959, the ride wasn’t just Disney’s first “mountain” and the first E-Ticket; it was the first modern steel roller coaster, period. Considering that it’s contained with a 147-foot tall artificial mountain, it may be suprising to hear that Disney “moved” the Matterhorn Bobsleds in 1972. But like all the rides on this list, it’s true! … Kind of.
When the ride opened (the same day as fellow O.G. E-Tickets, the Submarine Voyage and Disneyland Monorail), it was part of a massive expansion of the four-year-old Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. But in the 1970s, a multi-year upgrade to the mountain saw its once-hollow interior filled in so that the bobsled track slid through icy caverns and glacial grottos instead of echoing darkness. In 1972, Matterhorn officially went from blue to pink on the park map, being “absorbed” into Fantasyland.
It was probably a smart swap. With a new mountainside Swiss chalet station and the 1977 addition of the fabled Abominable Snowman inside the peak, the Matterhorn feels like a perfect compliment to the storybook European village of Fantasyland. Having now been an official Fantasyland offering for 50 years, it’s hard to believe the Matterhorn was ever a Tomorrowland ride to begin with… except that its two intertwining tracks are often called the “Fantasyland Track” and the “Tomorrowland Track” based on their proximity to each land.
2. Toy Story Mania
Toy Story Mania can be found at three Disney Parks, and in a different land at each. Both California Adventure and Tokyo DisneySea’s versions are stylized as ornate, turn-of-the-century seaside boardwalk dancehalls (as part of Pixar Pier and American Waterfront, respectively). The version at Disney’s Hollywood Studios wasn’t. Dropping “Midway” from the ride’s name, the Florida version was placed in some vacant soundstages that had formerly been part of the park’s real “studio” backlot. Red brick cladding turned the backlot into “Pixar Place,” loosely based on the aesthetic of Pixar’s real studio campus in Emeryville, California.
In 2018, Disney repurposed some of Hollywood Studios’ long-abandoned studio complex to build Toy Story Land. Like the other three versions of the land, Florida’s Toy Story Land was a “cheap and cheerful” way to quickly add family capacity to the underbuilt park. But unlike the other Toy Story Land’s, Disney World’s has an E-Ticket dark ride.
Toy Story Mania was absorbed into the new land in a very unusual way: by basically walling off its old entrance on Pixar Place, and building an entirely new one on the other side of the soundstage, facing Toy Story Land. Getting to the ride is easy enough since designers could just rearrange guests’ flow through the existing queue. But getting out of the ride is quite a hike, with a very, very long pathway returning guests to Toy Story Land.
And that’s just the beginning…
3. Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!
When Disney announced that the Lost Legend: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror would soon disappear from Disney California Adventure in favor of Marvel’s irreverent, rock ‘n’ roll superhero team, the move caught many fans off guard. In a park that just spent a billion dollars to add more rich, historic, Californian settings and stories, how could the Hollywood Tower Hotel be replaced by a “warehouse prison powerplant” blasting ’70s pop music? How could a Technicolor fortress decked out in satellite dishes and pipes make sense looming over a 1940s Hollywoodland?
Of course, the answer is, it didn’t! Though Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT! is a spectacular, laugh-out-loud E-Ticket, no one – not even Imagineers – bothered trying to explain its location. Instead, they merely countered that eventually, a larger Marvel presence in the park would add context to a building that clearly looks like an art deco Hollywood hotel that was grafted with space junk “based on the beauty of an oil rig.”
Mission: BREAKOUT! still looms over Hollywoodland (and really, the whole park), but at least on paper, it was absorbed into Avengers Campus when the land opened in 2021. Stylized as an old Stark Motors facility that’s been turned into a superhero recruitment compound by the Avengers Initiative, the land is a mix of red-brick and glass; ancient sanctums and Pym laboratories. Visually, the interstellar “Collector’s Warehouse” still doesn’t make much sense in Avengers Campus, but at least it’s not an awkward member of Hollywoodland anymore.
4. Barnstormer
In 1988, Magic Kingdom opened its first new land since its opening 17 years earlier: Mickey’s Birthdayland – a limited-time land meant to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Mickey Mouse’s Steamboat Willie debut. In many ways, Birthdayland was temporary, featuring circus tents and plywood cutouts meant to last only as long as the year-long promotion. In other ways, it wasn’t temporary at all. With the Mouse’s big celebration past, the land was renamed Mickey’s Starland in 1990, then Mickey’s Toyland in 1995.
Finally, the “temporary” land was made permanent in 1996 as Mickey’s Toontown Fair – a “rustic” counterpart to the much more built-out Toontown in Disneyland that could also excuse the circus tents. In addition to more permanent “Country Homes” for Mickey and Minnie, Toontown Fair added the Barnstormer – an off-the-shelf family coaster made fun by soaring over (and through) Goofy’s Wiseacre Farms.
Mickey’s Toontown Fair closed in 2011 to make way for a New Fantasyland. The “Storybook Circus” sub-area still uses the same “temporary” tents from 1988, but they’re now wrapped in a lot more texture and detail. The area looks like an ode to the heyday of the circus, when the “big top” and its exotic animals rolled into town on the railroad… and it manages to pay homage to Disney films like Dumbo and The Little Engine That Could along the way. The Barnstormer survived, too, even if Goofy’s Wiseacre Farm didn’t. Instead, Goofy is now “The Great Goofini,” and his propellor-propelled biplane recalls the great aerial acrobatics of the traveling fairs of yesteryear… a ride that “moved” to Fantasyland without actually going anywhere.
5. Flik’s Flyers
While all of the rides on this list have “moved” on paper, they haven’t really gone anywhere. But Flik’s Flyers really has. After the dismal opening of the original Disney’s California Adventure in 2001, word quickly spread that the new park was very short on rides, had practically nothing for families to do, and featured almost no Disney characters. As if by magic, the very next year “a bug’s land” opened. Absorbing the park’s existing copy of “It’s Tough to be a Bug,” the land added “Flik’s Fun Fair,” a collection of four mini flat rides and a splash park themed to the 1998 Disney-Pixar film A Bug’s Life.
A Bug’s Land may have been a “cheap and cheerful” addition itself, but it was admittedly pretty adorable… In some ways, it’s too bad that Toy Story Land became the de facto “shrunken” family land for Disney Parks, because arguably, “a bug’s land” was a much more enjoyable environment and scale.
Anyway, “a bug’s land” was squashed for Avengers Campus, closing in 2018. The land’s spinning flat ride, bumper cars, and the legendary Heimlich’s Chew Chew Train were apparently scrapped. But Flik’s Flyers – a mini yo-yo-swings style attraction – was given new life. The ride was reclad and repainted, swapping Pixar decor to become “Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind” on Pixar Pier in 2019. (How or why Disney avoided the million dollar name “Mood Swings,” we may never know.)
