FANTASYLAND
5. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella dark rides
Opened: 1971
Another question that Disney’s designers encountered in their construction of Magic Kingdom was how to reinvent the classic, blacklight dark rides of Disneyland for this new park’s Fantasyland. Keep in mind that – in the 1970s – Disneyland hadn’t yet received its 1983 “New Fantasyland” makeover, so by and large the dark rides it included (Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Peter Pan’s Flight, Alice in Wonderland, and Snow White’s Adventures) were surprisingly simple, still using flat cut-outs rather than dimensional figures and each looking quite a bit different than it does today.
6. Bald Mountain
Opened: 2000
Back when Imagineers drafted the idea for Fire Mountain as an Adventureland replacement for 20,000 Leagues, another group of designers came up with Bald Mountain – a perfect fit for the sub ride’s vacated spot in Fantasyland. Based on the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from Fantasia (featuring the demonic Chernabog), the idea for this peak was so beloved by Michael Eisner, he green-lit both peaks for the park. (So, with Fire, Big Thunder, Splash, Space, and Bald, Magic Kingdom would be the most-mountainous park in the Disney Parks family).
As for what’s inside the craggily peak rising over Fantasyland? This dark, twisted, frightening mountain is the domain of Disney’s popular Villains franchise. Mysterious and looming, the mountain contains a flume ride (Splash Mountain style) through the innards of the mountain where Hades is calling Disney’s Villains together to see who is the baddest. Each Villain, in turn, gets his or her own scene conjuring up their personal brand of evil. It’s a musical, maniacal journey through Ursula’s Lair, the Chernabog’s cavern, the Evil Witch’s castle, Jafar’s hideout, and to the Mistress of Evil herself – Maleficent.
Featuring light, sound, fire, fountains, projections, and more, Bald Mountain is a spectacular and mysterious adventure ride looming over the otherwise storybook-styled Fantasyland. Speaking of which…
7. New Fantasyland
Opened: 2012
It’s probably no surprise to any Disney Parks fan that 2010 was an industry-changing year, and for what was happening outside of Disney World’s gates. That’s because the opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal’s Islands of Adventure re-set the standards for theme parks going forward, shifting projects from standalone attractions to immersive, cinematic lands based on popular intellectual properties. Most importantly, these new lands needed to be scaled recreations of actual worlds that people had seen on screen; worlds they wanted to inhabit, stocked with the “real” food, “real” drink,” and “real” shops that the “real” characters from those worlds would expect. Even in the decade since, you can see that formula at work in “living lands” like Hogsmeade, Radiator Springs, Pandora, Arendelle, Diagon Alley, Springfield, and more.
In 2009 – just as the finishing touches went into the Wizarding World and a proverbial fire seemed to light under Disney after a decade or so of stagnation in Orlando – the announcement was made.
New Fantasyland would soon arrive, at last ridding Magic Kingdom’s storybook center of the rather cheap “Medieval faire,” “tournament tent” facades that Walt had always disliked, and that had been removed from Disneyland back in 1983. The eastern half of Fantasyland would now be resculpted in “Wizarding World” style, albeit by creating mini-lands dedicated to classic Disney features.
Though the expansion would add a dark ride themed to The Little Mermaid (cloned from Disney California Adventure), double the park’s Dumbo spinner, and build a restaurant inside the epic ballroom from Beauty and the Beast, the real selling point of this New Fantasyland was what Disney called “play and greet” experiences with characters from the popular and high-revenue Disney Princess line.
So step into this New Fantasyland and you’ll find – towering just behind her castle – Cinderella’s Chateau. Much more than a meet-and-greet, guests here get to pass through the story of Cinderella and – upon meeting her, actually watch as her Fairy Godmother magically conjures her dress.
Just nextdoor in the enchanted forest is Aurora’s Cottage, where guests first create birthday cards for Aurora and watch as the three Fairy Godmothers cause havoc in the cottage’s living room…
… and then present those cards to the princess in a “play and greet” merging storytelling, theater, and character meet-and-greets into a mini-attraction in its own right.
Of course, you know the land’s other play-and-greet, Enchanted Tales with Belle, similarly re-casting a simple character encounter as a storytelling, small-audience, live-theater interaction that simply ends with a few quick photo opportunities. You can meet Ariel from The Little Mermaid in Ariel’s Grotto nestled alongside Journey of the Little Mermaid – the Omnimover dark ride retelling her tale (and the only new ride in the reborn land).
The last bit of the land to change? The old Lost Legend: Mickey’s Toontown Fair has packed up and left town. Though the Barnstormer roller coaster remains (now paired with a relocated and expanded Dumbo the Flying Elephant), the rest of Toontown has become Pixie Hollow, an entire sub-area dedicated not to Peter Pan proper, but to Disney’s Pixies brand, centered around – you guessed it – a “play and greet” with Tinker Bell in the novel setting of having been “miniaturized.”
If you followed online Disney fan pages back when New Fantasyland was announced, you’d see that fans had quite a bit of vocal pushback on the plans for New Fantasyland, claiming it was too focused on Princesses and that it wasn’t going to win anyone back from the new Wizarding World. But here in Possibility World, this gentle, Princess-focsed Fantasyland is actually a perfect balance to the hyper-intense, thrilling, and downright scary attractions that were added to this park in the ’90s like Fire Mountain and our last E-Ticket…
TOMORROWLAND
8. Nostromo
Opened: 1994
A steaming, hissing, flashing industrial spacecraft has crash-landed in Tomorrowland… and you’re headed in.
Michael Eisner’s request to inject more thrills, more stars, and more teens into Disney Parks in the ’90s was a fruitful endeavor. First, it’s what paired Disney up with famed filmmaker George Lucas and fueling the opening of both the Lost Legends: STAR TOURS and Captain EO, plus the Modern Marvel: Indiana Jones Adventure. One by one, each redefined what Disneyland should be (and who it should be for).
But things really changed when – in the 1990s – Eisner decried that Tomorrowlands across the globe should get a facelift. The optimistic, populuxe, Googie retrofutures envisioned in the ’60s at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom were both looking downright naive in the era that sci-fi turned dystopian and desolate. Put simply, Eisner believed that by using that change in pop culture as an excuse to strip Tomorrowlands of their science and rebuild them as science-fiction, they would become timeless and never need another expensive facelift ever again.
And given that movies like Blade Runner, Alien, and even Star Wars had shifted the public’s view of the future from a world of gleaming, white space stations to a gritty, rusted, junkyard-influenced future of claxons and hissing steam, it made sense to bring them to Tomorrowland. That’s why a group of young Imagineers were tasked with developing NOSTROMO, a dark ride through the steaming interior of the crashed ship of the same name from 20th Century Fox’s R-rated Alien franchise.
On board, guests slowly ride through the ship’s crashed hull passing cinematic scenes on par with Indiana Jones Adventure… physical sets of breathtaking realism and depth. The only thing interrupting the otherwise awe-inspiring journey? Continuous attacks by the film’s iconic Xenomorph (here in unimaginable Audio Animatronics form, hissing, spraying, jumping toward guests) and – perhaps even worse – the grotesque, eyeless “Facehuggers” leaping from the shadows, intent on burying alien embryos inside of you by adhering to your face.
Though the story goes that a group of older, more traditional Imagineers was horrified by the very idea of this E-Ticket, they lost. And apparently, those older Imagineers were practically putting in their two-weeks notices when they learned that guests should be armed with guns to fight off the alien threat! But of course, Disney wouldn’t send us into this hostile, gray world defenseless, so there are guns for everyone.
At Magic Kingdom, we might imagine that NOSTROMO wouldn’t last long, earning the scorn of horrified parents. But it’s equally likely that NOSTROMO wouldn’t be a standalone, “PG-13” ride here in Possibility World, since it would be paired with Fire Mountain and Bald Mountain, adding a better balance to the park (which Disneyland achieves with Indiana Jones and Star Wars).
But really…
Okay, so our tour through Possibility World’s Magic Kingdom looks just a little different from the park you and I can visit today… The real story of these “could-be classics” is a little different, considering none of them ever got built… At least, not in the way they were expected to be. So on the last page, we’ll take one last look at the real stories behind what happened to these possibilities…