Condor Flattened
In 2007 – just six years after California Adventure first opened its gates – Disney announced something unprecedented: a complete transformation and rebuilding of the park. So much more than piecemeal additions, the park would receive an intentional, foundational shift that would turn back the clock on its themed lands and redesign them as idealized, romantic, historic visions like the lands at Disneyland.
We told the story of the park’s landmark rebirth in Declassified Disasters: Disney California Adventure – Part II, but relevant to today’s story is what happened to Condor Flats. The answer? Not much. When Disney California Adventure “officially” re-opened on June 15, 2012 after a single day’s closure, three of the Golden State’s six mini-districts had been granted full-land status, elevating Condor Flats on paper to a standalone land.
Still, the little land was frustratingly modern, and given that this “high desert” airfield was nestled up against the forested slopes of the now-1950s-themed Grizzly Peak National Park, it would never actually feel arid, expansive, or desert. And it took a few years, but in 2015, Disney proved they were willing to invest in California Adventure in the long haul.
In a surprise move by Imaginees, Condor Flats was flattened and the area around Soarin’ Over California was enveloped into nearby Grizzly Peak, taking on its 1950s National Park theming. Now, it makes absolute sense that the craftsman-style Grand Californian Hotel serves as the land’s backdrop – it’s the National Park’s lodge! And the towering, grizzly-shaped peak looming to the south is an icon of the land. Disney did the transformation right and designated the new area Grizzly Peak Airfield.
In all ways more believable than Condor Flats, the new Airfield is an extension of the National Park theming nearby, with towering pines, limitless details, the inclusion of Walt’s long-lost 1950s character Humphrey the Bear, and authentic and instantly-recognizable National Parks signage that hearken to the days when families would pack up the Rambler and hit the great outdoors.
And most importantly, it’s packed with the details that set Disney apart – the kind of intimate, reverent, historic, and idealized time and place storytelling the original Disney’s California Adventure lacked, and that simply couldn’t have called the cold, sterile Condor Flats home.
Suddenly, the rusted rocket jet positioned outside Soarin’s hangar showbuilding became a Fire Lookout Tower. The punny Taste Pilot’s Grill quick service restaurant became the detail-packed Smokejumpers Grill with its own mythos. The changes were stunning, as documented in Yesterland’s Then & Now: Grizzly Peak Airfield and in a fascinating interview on the change with Executive Creative Director at Imagineering, Ray Spencer.
Finally absorbed into the new narrative that powered a reborn Disney California Adventure, Soarin’ Over California seemed poised to soar over the horizon as a classic for generations to come. But that’s not what happened… Soarin’ Over California is a Lost Legend, after all…
Going global
The beginning of the end for Soarin’ Over California can probably be chalked up to the ride’s own global nature. After all, good ideas never die at Disney, and that meant that Soarin’ Over California (and its stellar technology) was destined to expand across the Disney Parks chain.
1. Soarin’ in Epcot’s The Land (2005)
By the early 2000s, Walt Disney World’s Epcot was in an unusual state. Self-serious educational dark rides from the 1980s co-mingled with character-infused attractions and one-off thrills that only tangentially related to the park’s original purpose.
Disney knew the park needed new life, and Imagineers concocted a plan to make it happen. We chronicled the full rebirth in a standard feature – Possibilityland – Epcot’s Project: GEMINI – but here’s what you need to know: while most of Project: GEMINI never came to pass, a few pieces did. Among them was duplicating California Adventure’s single hit.
Nestlé – the sponsor of Epcot’s The Land pavilion – was in the midst of a contractual refurbishment to freshen up their exhibits at Epcot, and a version of California’s hang-gliding adventure would be the perfect headliner, sending guests soaring over the ecosystems of the world.
On May 5, 2005 – about four years after California Adventure’s opening – Soarin’ opened inside The Land pavilion at Epcot. Replacing the pavilion’s animatronic “dinner” shows and fellow Lost Legends: Kitchen Kabaret and Food Rocks, the ride’s queue was designed as a minimalist, glowing futuristic terminal to usher guests out to a showbuilding constructed behind the Imagination pavilion.
The ride itself was an exact duplicate of Soarin’ Over California, which is particularly interesting when you consider that California’s habitats are so varied and diverse that the Californian ride film could reasonably stand in for the rest of the country and few people would bother to notice that only one state is represented! And indeed, even if Soarin’ at Epcot earned an eye-roll from Disney Parks fans who knew it was nothing but the Californian original in disguise, it quickly became one of Epcot’s most popular rides often earning multi-hour waits.
That meant that the ride was an instant hit at Epcot. So much so that more than a decade after its opening, the ride was closed for a refurbishment and re-opened on May 27, 2016 with a third ride theater, Concourse 3, to help handle the multi-hour waits that plague the E-Ticket in a park with far fewer rides than California Adventure. Put simply, Soarin’ at Epcot is now irrevocably tied to the park and to The Land pavilion and Walt Disney World visitors have embraced it with tremendous fervor.
2. Soaring Over The Horizon at Shanghai Disneyland (2016)
On June 16, 2016, the highly anticipated Shanghai Disneyland opened in Mainland China. Most every attraction and land at the Chinese park was custom-designed to be one-of-a-kind. In place of Disney’s classic Adventureland, Shanghai is home to Adventure Isle, which comes complete with its own pulp-adventure setting (a lost tropic isle in the 1930s, home to the ancient Arbori people who live in harmony with the recently arrived League of Adventurers).
Unsurprisingly, the headliner for the Chinese is Soaring Over The Horizon. Cast as part of Adventure Isle, the ride invites guests to take a spiritual pilgrimage through the mountains of Adventure Isle, trekking to the ancient Observatory of the Arbori where a mystical shaman connects the island to the world.
The queue winds through an otherworldly temple with the endless night sky above, where guests commune with the ancient powers to obtain the power of the Condor (eh hem… Condor Flats?). The result is a new ride film sending guests from the savannahs of Africa to Sydney Harbor; from the pyramids of Egypt to the Lau Islands in Fiji. The international tour represented the first Soarin’ ride to not feature the original Californian ride film.
3. Soaring: Fantastic Flight at Tokyo DisneySea (2019)
On April 27, 2016 – just before the opening of Florida’s Gate C – officials with the Tokyo Disney Resort announced that a version of Soarin’ would soon come to the world-renowned Tokyo DisneySea.
DisneySea is a veritable Mecca for Disney Parks fans, seemingly built without a budgetary restriction in sight. Most of the park’s attractions and lands are stunning, groundbreaking, sought-after originals that top fans’ bucket lists. When the park does borrow from stateside originals, it tends to improve dramatically upon them. Altogether, DisneySea’s Soaring arguably does by way of its sensational setting in the park’s Mediterranean Harbor and by connecting the Museo del Volo to S.E.A: The Society of Explorers and Adventurers.
That said, Tokyo DisneySea’s version of the ride probably doesn’t go as far as most Imagineering fans hoped, especially after concept up modified the transitional gliders to more closely resemble a Da Vinci-esque flying machine. While many had imagined Tokyo’s ride being a completely original tour of the ancient wonders of the world, it turned out to use approximately the same international ride film as Shanghai.
So what do those three other Soarin’ rides have to do with the death of California’s? Turns out the allure of an upgrade was too great for Imagineers to pass up… Read on as we wrap up the story of this California classic.