Grounded
For decades, the Skyways continued to operate at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World (up to and including, for example, the debut of Magic Kingdom’s New Tomorrowland, above. Yes, the Skyway co-existed with Lost Legends: Alien Encounter and The Timekeeper!).
Sure, they were remnants of another time in Disney Parks history. If the ride were built from scratch in the mid-90s, fans would decry its reality-shattering views of Fantasyland’s industrial rooftops; its story-breaking connection between a European village and a city of the future; its pastel buckets passing through a mountain…. Indeed, in the Eisner era of immersive, E-Ticket thrills, the Skyway wouldn’t pass muster. Could you really imagine its technicolor buckets floating over Wizarding-World style New Fantasyland?
But “grandfathered” in, they were a simple, joyful, passive, and beloved part of Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and Tokyo Disneyland.
Disneyland’s Skyway closed first, on November 9, 1994. Disney cited metal fatigue, noting that the Matterhorn’s support tower had developed cracks that would be unfixable without disassembling the mountain structure itself. More than 150 million guests had sailed over Disneyland aboard the Skyway in its lifetime of over 38 years.
Within weeks of its closure, the Skyway’s cables and supports were dismantled, and soon after, the Matterhorn’s holes were filled in. Imagineers today admit that – in the budget-conscious era after the financial pitfall of Disneyland Paris – executives considered the parks to be zero sum units, requiring that any new attraction be balanced by an older ride’s closure. For the Skyway, its counterbalance was the opening of the Modern Marvel: Indiana Jones Adventure, its Cast Members and operating budget being “transferred” to the much higher-capacity ride.
(In May 2015, the Matterhorn re-opened from an extensive reburbishment with brand new Audio-Animatronics of the dreaded Abominable Snowman, and a new fly-by scene of a snowy cavern filled with things that the mountain guardian had hoarded over the years. His treasure trove of memorobilia included a crashed Skyway gondola, as if the creature had ripped it off the cable and stashed it away decades earlier!)
Exactly five years to the day after the closure of Disneyland’s ride – on November 9, 1999 – Magic Kingdom’s Skyway closed as well, after an impressive 28 year life. Two days after its demise, an article in the Orlando Sentinel explained the reason:
“‘It’s part of our ongoing efforts to phase out some of the older attractions and introduce new things to keep our parks exciting for our new and repeat visitors,” Walt Disney World spokesman Diane Ledder said Tuesday. “It’s just something whose time has come.’”
Nonetheless, our friend Werner Weiss at Yesterland (an invaluable resource for Skyway photos and all Disney Parks history) notes that no “new things” came to Magic Kingdom until May 2001 when The Magic Carpets of Aladdin debuted. A more realistic reason? That – like the Lost Legend: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that it sailed over – the Skyway was simply too costly to operate relative to its low hourly capacity and admittedly-aging experience.
At both resorts, Disney was in no rush to demolish the Skyway’s stations in Fantasyland and Tomorrowland.
At Magic Kingdom, the Fantasyland Skyway station remained for more than a decade after the ride’s 1999 closure as a last Swiss sentinal standing just past It’s a Small World on the path to Liberty Square. The hilltop chalet was finally taken down in summer 2011, becoming the infamous Tangled restrooms. Rapunzel’s tower stands about where the station’s prominent clocktower once did. The Tomorrowland station had its second story demolished, but the ground floor structure remains to this day as the restrooms behind the Rockettower Plaza Stage between Space Mountain and the Carousel Theater.
Though the ride closed even earlier at Disneyland, the last vestiges of the ride lasted longer. Temporarily used as stroller parking, the Swiss chalet on a forested hill eventually became overgrown, visible only to those who knew to look for it. It was demolished in 2016 to make way for Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge construction.
Finally… full-circle!
It’s interesting to consider what became of the three transportation systems Walt Disney pioneered and tested at Disneyland.
The Peoplemover might never have achieved the widespread urban use that Disney had planned, but the transportation system was earmarked to make the jump from “ride” to actual applied infrastructure at EPCOT, Lake Buena Vista Village, and the Disneyland Resort (back in the days of Possibilityland: Westcot’s announcement).
The Monorail – while always inherently tied to Disney – was at least elevated from its mere “attraction in Tomorrowland” role at Disneyland to an authentic transportation system there when it extended to the Disneyland Hotel in 1961. And of course, the Monorail became the iconic backbone of Disney World’s transportation infrastructure, even if the system’s 1989 Mark VI rolling stock are overtaxed and overburdened in a system that’s regrettably underbuilt for the expanding resort, requiring an arsenal of buses to do most of the heavy lifting.
But that third system – the Skyway – just never made the jump to Disney World the way the other two did… Even with the chance to expand and grow to its larger tank in Florida, the Skyway remained a one-way aerial tram ride between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland until the day it closed after 28 years of service. Until….