The Evolution of Space Mountain

Space Mountain today is one of the more classic rides at the Magic Kingdom first opening back in 1975 it was one of the park's earliest attractions and actually its first ever roller coaster even more interesting is that despite its age the ride is still very similar to its original incarnation as most of the noticeable changes and updates the attraction seen over the years have been to its theming and not really the ride itself so in this video I wanted to talk a bit about how the idea of Space Mountain has changed since it first opened as well as how the initial concept managed to evolve during its development so to do that let's take the story all the way back to its beginning around the early 1960s over at Disneyland by that time the park had been operating for close to a decade and while normally a span of 10 years isn't really that long in the life of a theme park there was one area that was beginning to show its age that being Tomorrowland the original Tomorrowland was infamous for being one of the weakest areas in the park when it was opened strict budget cuts and a heavy reliance on corporate sponsors left Tomorrowland less a vision of the future and more real life commercial for companies like Monsanto and American Motors fast forward about five years from there and Disneyland was much more established as a theme park prompting them to reduce some of the more messy areas of the original park from there planning began on a complete Tomorrowland overhaul appropriately named new Tomorrowland very creative this renovation would bring about a total redesign of land and also give it a few of its more famous extinct attractions like the People Mover and adventures through inner space but before either of those two ideas came to fruition Imagineers had another idea for a completely different attraction one that would prove to be even more futuristic and innovative than they had probably imagined before breaking new ground with things like the introduction of audio animatronics in the mid 60's Disney was experimenting with things like ride systems one of which being roller coasters in partnership with the Aero development company they ended up creating Disneyland's first thrill ride in 1959 the Matterhorn bobsleds which was a real milestone at the time in term of attraction technology essentially redefining what a roller coaster could be with its unprecedented level of theming because of that the attraction was quite clearly successful and given that success Disney was now looking for a way to introduce a similar ride somewhere else in the park and now at the proposed Tomorrowland overhaul project they had the perfect place for a brand new e ticket attraction so development began on a space-themed Matterhorn esque steel coaster initially dubbed the spaceport some of the earliest concepts for the ride can be traced back to 1965 in drawings done by Imagineer John hench here you can see an idea for the attractions exterior the tall almost circus tent like building with multiple spires coming out of the top over the next year or so as the concepts were refined amongst other Imagineers the idea was now to have four separate tracks that would weave in and out of the building the same way the Matterhorn did with its Mountain the building itself now also looks somewhat different going off that new concept models began to be assembled by wet artist mute sue Natsume in partnership once again with the arrow development company early versions of these models followed the original four tracks idea had those same tracks going outside the building on both sides and on top of it as well while the concept was interesting and definitely would have one up the Matterhorn said of only two tracks this version was ultimately rejected by Walt not only because the cost of such a massive ride would obviously be way beyond whatever budget they had but he also thought that the immersion that a space themed attraction would really be broken if it went outdoors instead he wanted to treat it more like a dark ride where the simulated experience of space travel could be precisely controlled with effects like lighting and projections and with that the idea of Space Mountain as we know it today was born however it would still be more than nine years before the final attraction would open and this was largely due to technical problems they faced during its development one of the main reasons Disney even considered this attraction to be a good fit for their Tomorrowland was because the ride system itself would have been innovative well in many ways it was very comparable to the Matterhorn the track rule was now dubbed space voyage was undergoing a completely different development process as some of you might know John hench the imaginary who drew up the first concept for the attraction was very much a futurist with a particular fascination for computers the same fascination that would of course later lead to the heavily computer focused nature of Epcot Center years later in the 1980s but back in the mid 60s computers were still a very new thing more in the realm of science fiction rather than fact wanting to utilize the new technology at Disneyland and also make space voyage unique from the Matterhorn hen she wanted the ride to be run entirely by computers resulting in an almost completely automated ride system the first of its kind for any Disney park but of course if you want attraction to be operated by computers the track you're building for it will need to be rendered by computers so that way the system knows what things like the ride vehicles are supposed to be doing and can shut down if anything goes wrong there was only one small problem that being the fact that computers back in 1966 just didn't have the rendering capability Disney needed to map out the nearly 3,000 feet worth of track their concepts called for hitting that major technological roadblock was only something time could fix and considering the processing power of computers was almost doubling on a yearly basis back then henshin the Imagineers opted to wait for technology to catch up to their ideas rather than scrapping the idea are looking for a workaround as they waited the building's exterior evolved a bit more as well at first into some really bizarre and futuristic directions before becoming a more simple conical shape thought up by George McGinnis this idea later became even more simplified when redrawn by hench who replaced most of these smaller details with just a few dishes scattered around but the time rendering the attractions track with a computer was more of a possibility in the late 60s imaginary were now faced with another issue because of the fact Marlon had been updated with so many other new attractions over the last five years there was hardly any room left for space voyage as you can see the original plans called for a lot of empty space something they just didn't have enough of now a few new concepts were drawn up on how they could still potentially squeeze the ride in but amid the growing number of technical issues along side things like the passing of Walt Disney and opening of Disney World just around the corner the company was already swamped and the space voyage concept was shelved but as was the case with many of Disneyland's unused ideas it would unexpectedly resurface later but this time for Disney World out of all the Disneyland attractions to be cloned and sent over to the East Coast you'd be surprised to know that some of the newest and most popular ones from that park were left out of the plans for Magic Kingdom one of which being the Matterhorn early on Disney plan to bring the attraction over sometime after the park had opened since it would have been one of the more costly attractions to recreate but with their 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride taking up most of fantasy lands available space they weren't gonna be able to put it there and given the attractions distinct Mountain theming there weren't too many other places in the park to put it so Imagineers decided to scrap the idea and instead bring back the space voyage concept which would still be the same kind of thrill ride the Matterhorn was but now they could put it in Tomorrowland one of the few areas with enough room for an attraction of that scale at this point its development most of the ideas for the actual ride were already thought up and drawn out for example the rides opening light speed tunnel had already been sketched out by George McGinnis a few years earlier what's actually interesting about that tunnel is that it was originally just a way to make the rides track fit at Disneyland back when they were still trying to squeeze the attraction in over there they needed a way to send the ride vehicles away from the loading area so they could loop them back around to go up the lift Hill all while fitting inside the building's cone shape the idea for having the lights and making it more of an actual ride scene didn't come until later and it's thought to be at least somewhat inspired by a couple of the scenes from 2001 a space odyssey McGinnis was also responsible for the designs on and around the lift Hill in this very early piece of concept art you can see that the rides still had more than two tracks and also some different set pieces in the area but those were eventually switched out with the upside down astronauts we ended up getting in the final version another big debate with an Imagineering around this time was over the rides exterior while it was generally decided by 1972 that the final design would resemble henshin mcginnises cone shape Disney also considered just a flat-out dome instead asking here in a rendering from artist Klehm Hall this was mainly because a simple dome would be more cost-effective and easier to construct but eventually hench's idea won out just now with no satellites on it with everything from the rides building to its track and even set pieces decided on this is the only had one thing left to do secure a corporate sponsor building an attraction of this scale was not gonna be cheap and considering the amount of money they had already put into just designing it they wanted to offset as much of that construction cost as possible so Imagineers presented the idea of always now officially called Space Mountain to RCA who agreed to sponsor it as long as they could also use it as a way to advertise Disney agreed and RCA put up around 10 million dollars towards construction as imaginaries planned out how they could use the rides cue and post-show to promote the company but we'll get more into that in a second construction on Space Mountain officially began in early 1972 it took about two and a half years to fully complete building the attraction also brought on some first for the company for starters it was the first roller coaster they ever built fully in-house not partnering with the Aero development company like they did on other rides additionally it was also the first attraction to be built outside the parks berm meaning that to actually get on the attraction you need to go beyond the parks perimeter marked by the train track so you go underneath in the queue the mountain was also the biggest building Disney had constructed since Cinderella's castle which actually led them to put some of its base underground as to not overshadow what was supposed to be the parks main icon this is also why the mountain is only 153 feet tall which is still about 30 feet shorter than the castle as for the ride itself that did some new things as well Space Mountain was the first fully indoor coaster which also allowed it to be the first one to take place in total darkness and this ended up being really beneficial in the long run most people today don't know the rides still only has a max speed of 35 miles per hour but because you can't tell where you're going it feels a lot faster even the drops aren't as intense as they feel when you suddenly go down them just that one element of darkness has been a crucial part of the ride experience for years now it is one of the main reasons you can't tell you're on a really old outdated roller coaster and finally Space Mountain was the first coaster to be created and operated by computers using a first-of-its-kind system developed specifically for it the ride can dispatch cars at the perfect interval there's virtually no risk of them hitting each other plus they can immediately shut the attraction down if even one of them is out of place minimizing the human error element of ride operations and effectively making the whole thing safer a practice that's carried over for every thrill ride Disney's made since now since the actual ride portion of Space Mountain really hasn't changed at all since it opened we'll be spending the rest of this video talking about the changes made to it steaming more specifically the stuff you'd see and it's cue and post-show most of the changes are related whoever was sponsoring the attraction at the time so let's start with the rides original sponsor RCA as I said earlier the company was originally incentivized to fund Space Mountain with the promise that they could use it to advertise and seeing as how it's pretty hard to advertise and the pitch black void of space you would instead see all their stuff before and after the ride and this really had a big impact on the attractions overall theme when you would enter into the building you'd be greeted by one of the first requests RCA ever made that being the inclusion of their mascot nipper who's the dog sitting inside a flying saucer and listening to a phonograph this was originally inside the first room you go into or you walk down a short ramp and loop back around nipper was eventually removed sometime in the 90s when Disney added a second ramp beside their original for people using the new fast pass system past that you'd enter into what was called the Starr corridor but instead of hearing the mysterious sounding background music we have in that area today you would hear RCA's here's to the Future theme an upbeat retro sounding song that really feels like it's straight out of 1950s Tomorrowland along the sides of that corridor you can see different scenes of spacecraft and astronauts through these warped convex windows that would give the illusion of movement as you walked by those same windows still exist today just now with only stars to look at and no other figures further up in the tunnel some signs advertising different destinations in space but originally these were used to display various RCA products and services that would be switched out periodically to showcase their newer stuff beyond that these sloped floors would level out and you'd be in the zig zag corridor with more of those convex windows on your right now displaying different planets after that you'll find yourself in the main load again all the switchbacks you go through before boarding after experiencing the ride you would exit out through the home of future living which was a series of different scenes featuring audio-animatronic characters in a house filled with futuristic devices that RCA would no doubt make someday you'd basically ride past each of these scenes on a moving walkway or speed ramp until you got back to where the rides entrance was and Tomorrowland obviously this whole portion is very reminiscent of the yet-to-be-built Horizons attraction that could be found at Epcot Center in the early 80s and that was because the masterminds of Space Mountain hench and McGinnis were also responsible for a good chunk of scenes in that ride as well this same post show remained largely the same up until a refurb in 1985 which replaced most of the home scenes with something called ry c a1 that focused more on the space travel aspect of the ride 1989 also brought a big overhaul to the ride system itself in the form of new ride vehicles with three individual seats and three individual lap bars for each of them as opposed to the original two-seat vehicles where you could lapse it with somebody else and use a seat belt this change was also reflected on the attractions sign which originally featured four astronauts in the ride vehicle but now only showed three with the exception of a quick rerouting of the post-show exit in 1992 through a gift shop the attraction didn't see another major update until RC had discontinued their sponsorship in 1993 and Federal Express took their place a year later with the new sponsor Disney added a new sign redesigned the entrance removed any mentions of RCA throughout the queue added a few Federal Express references and redid the post show by replacing a couple of the old scenes with ones where packages were being shipped across the galaxy via beams of light not exactly realistic but it did fit with science-fiction theming of 90s Tomorrowland eventually FedEx is sponsorship lapsed as well in 2004 Disney removed all of their logos but kept the old post show scenes things stayed like that until a major renovation in 2009 that turned some of the FedEx additions into references for the now-defunct horizons so it all came full circle they also redesigned a lot of the queue added some interactive games that they just got rid of in 2018 created some new music and put an on-ride camera at the end of the Lightspeed tunnel now I'm not too sure but I also think this is when Disney blacked out the roof above the cue and just made it a permanent view of space previously it was just a window between you and the rest of the mountain so if you looked up you'd be able to see the track of course since the ride was in darkness you wouldn't see the actual track just the lights on the ride vehicles going by unless for whatever reason the work lights wrong like they were in this video finally the most recent update in 2018 removed the moving walkway at the end of the ride with just a regular carpeted ramp because of the fact that the new walkway doesn't transport you like the speed ramp did and you have to walk up at yourself Disney decrease the incline to be less steep and put a new set of ramps on the other end that are very similar to the ones you go down in the first room of the queue this whole new space is where the old Tomorrowland arcade used to be that connected to the gift shop and was closed in 2015 despite all the changes Space Mountain has undergone the ride still has a very distinct vintage feel to it which really just helps it feel that much more unique for a Disney attraction while it's impossible to say for sure I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that the ride will see another major renovation within the next 10 years maybe something akin to the overall Disneyland's version saw in the mid-2000s which gave it a whole new track and ride vehicles I don't think too many Florida Space Mountain riders would disagree if you said the ride could be a little bit smoother and considering another a ticket attraction is gonna be opening up right next to Space Mountain soon that might finally give the ride the break it needs to modernize and feel more like a contemporary attraction whether or not a change like that is actually a good thing I'll leave up to you guys really I just hope Space Mountain sticks around in some form or another if not for being a good ride than just for the fact that it's a big part of Disney history an attraction that broke a lot of the pre-established rules of rollercoasters and became one of the most innovative and influential ones that Disney's ever made [Music] core says we all know the best way to experience Space Mountain is to strap on one of the rockets for yourselves all right hit it Cosmo let's go you know you can take your helmet off now Dino [Music]

Channel: Theme Parks Shouldn't Exist

Views: 442,758

Keywords: park, ride, history, park ride history, history of, evolution, evolution of, of, space, mountain, space mountain, disney, world, disney world, magic, kingdom, magic kingdom, 1975, changes, home of future living, post show, rca, fedex

Id: HdxfG_X7qlE

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 11 2019