ADVENTURELAND
2. Fire Mountain
Opened: 2001
Here in Possibility World, a brand new E-Ticket adventure has risen over the jungles of Adventureland. Its history is somewhat surprising. In the mid-90s, cost overruns from Disneyland Paris had shifted things at the Walt Disney Company so monumentally, the parks closed or canceled dozens of projects – including Magic Kingdom’s expensive-to-operate, low-capacity Lost Legends: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Then-CEO Michael Eisner, however, reportedly found himself between a rock and a hard place as Universal readied for its own new theme park in Orlando which, by most accounts, was going to make a serious play for Disney’s attendance and prestige. The new Islands of Adventure was a serious enough threat to warrant Eisner loosening the purse strings on a few anchor projects to keep Disney World on top.
Fire Mountain doesn’t just add to Magic Kingdom’s enviable mountain range; this steampunk peak continues the tradition of 20,000 Leagues by bringing Jules Verne back into the park, with the ride inside the mountain themed to his Journey to the Center of the Earth novel and a sub-land around the peak called Vulcania dedicated to Captain Nemo’s secret lair from the novel Mysterious Island. Just as in Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure, access to the steaming, bellowing volcano looming over the jungles of Adventureland is via a volcanic chasm path between the Jungle Cruise and the showbuilding for Pirates of the Caribbean.
With a steam-powered Volcania base camp located along the Walt Disney World Railroad, the looming volcano belches steam and flames, hinting at what may be inside… One of the most thrilling rides at Walt Disney World, Fire Mountain is a flying roller coaster, strapping guests into seats that eventually pivot to lay face-down, zooming through the molten innards of this perilous peak. (We’ve got the full story – and more artwork – in the Possibilityland: Never-Built Mountains feature.)
If you think about it, Fire Mountain is something that this park desperately needed, giving it a high-thrill equivalent to Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, or Animal Kingdom’s Expedition Everest. Michael Eisner’s quest throughout the 1990s was to revitalize Disney’s theme parks and transform them into high-energy, thrilling, cinematic places that everyone – even teenagers! – would want to visit. Fire Mountain remains evidence of that shift today (as do some other E-Tickets we’ll encounter here in Possibility World), and it’s sincerely hard to imagine there was ever time that Magic Kingdom was without this breathtaking thrill ride.
FRONTIERLAND
3. Thunder Mesa
Opened: 1975
Leaving the pulse-pounding thrills of Fire Mountain behind, our tour through Possibility World continues in Frontierland. And it looks a lot different than the land you may know. Remember how, throughout the 1960s, Disney’s designers had been working hard to determine what Magic Kingdom should copy from Disneyland and – just as importantly – what it shouldn’t? Back then, Imagineers made a pretty surprising omission. When Magic Kingdom opened in 1971, it was without Pirates of the Caribbean – Walt’s “magnum opus” attraction that had debuted to international acclaim at Disneyland just four years earlier – and designers had no plans to add it!
Think about it… Though New Orleans Square (home to Pirates and Haunted Mansion) had quickly become an icon of Disneyland, designers had done their due diligence and believed that Jazz Age New Orleans wouldn’t be a very captivating land at Magic Kingdom, given that the real New Orleans was just a day trip away.
It was replaced with a very different but complementary piece of the American story to share the Rivers of America… Liberty Square (especially a good fit approaching the country’s bicentennial). Though Pirates of the Caribbean probably could have fit in Adventureland, Imagineers believed that the real Caribbean was too close to Florida and too much a part of its history, architecture, and DNA to be fascinating or compelling to Floridian audiences.
So even though guests lined up at City Hall in the early 1970s to ask “Where’s the pirate ride?” and demand its inclusion in Possibility World, cooler heads prevailed and designers stuck to their original idea: to replace Pirates with an equally-ambitious, one-of-a-kind, Magic Kingdom exclusive project to transform Frontierland instead.
So today, Possibility World has its own magnificent desert mountain range to rival Cars Land. Thunder Mesa is an all-encompassing Western vista. And – predating the “pavilion” model of EPCOT Center – actually includes multiple rides and attractions sharing one astounding landscape.
Not only does the Walt Disney World Railroad exit Volcania and head straight through Thunder Mesa, but this land-within-a-land also includes a log flume passing through “nature’s wonderland” as it rides atop the mesa, and a runaway mine train (an emerging exercise in Disney’s use of the new steel roller coaster) that would dip and drop through the mountain’s exterior.
Even still, the real highlight of Thunder Mesa is the E-Ticket dark ride concealed within the mountain range…
4. The Western River Expedition
Opened: 1975
Once the Western River Expedition opened in the mid-1970s, all those demands for Pirates of the Caribbean were instantly quieted. Cleverly, Disney handed the project to one of the key designers of Disneyland’ss Pirates, noted animator and Disney Legend Marc Davis (best known for his character-heavy second-halves of Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion, as well as such character-driven attractions as Modern Marvels: Carousel of Progress, Country Bear Jamboree, and The Enchanted Tiki Room).
What he created matches (and in places, exceeds) Pirates in terms of ambient storytelling, placemaking, and fun. The Western River Expedition is every bit as grand as the old Western films that helped inspire it; a massive, all-encompassing dark ride through the red-hued West at perpetual sunset.
And naturally, this dark ride (re-using Pirates’ ride system) is filled with “cowboys and Indians,” Western towns at war from black-hat mauraders, great Western forests set ablaze, and magnificent showdowns with the bad guys.
The truth is that if you want to get a sense of just how magnificent this dark ride would’ve been, you’ll need to ride it yourself… or at least check out our Possibilityland: Western River Expedition ride-through that chronicles exactly what this would-be wonder was like… and why guests won’t find it today.
But at least here in Possibility World, we can enjoy our epic, 15-minute cruise through the West among the offerings of Thunder Mesa before continuing on to the next of this possible-park’s lands. Ready?