I Can’t Be the Only Disney Adult Who Thinks About This Abandoned Ride in the Middle of the Night

As Disneyland celebrates its 70th birthday, Walt Disney’s original park remains a jewel in the company’s theme park crown. It’s full of classic rides and attractions, some of which have been making guests smile since the park opened in 1955.

All of which makes it even more surprising that the rotting husk of a once-iconic Disneyland attraction has been wasting away in the middle of the park for a quarter century.

To understand how we got here, we first have to go back six decades, to the mid-1960s. During this period, Walt Disney was dealing with two issues. The first dealt with a subject that many thought was beyond someone from the entertainment industry: planning a city of the future.

During this period, Walt– who had embraced futurism– began planning the initial concept of EPCOT (The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). One of Walt’s major goals with the project was to revolutionize transportation, mostly eliminating cars and replacing them with monorails and a constantly-moving, smaller-scale transportation system known internally as the PeopleMover.

At the same time, Walt and his Imagineers were dealing with an issue closer to “home.” They were running into the first instance of the “Tomorrowland Problem” as the land that had appeared futuristic in 1955 was dated a decade later. So, plans were put into motion to completely rebuild the majority of the land from the ground up.

This led to a metaphorical peanut butter & jelly moment, as it was decided to integrate the PeopleMover concept into the new Tomorrowland as an attraction, using Disneyland to display the new technological innovation and entice cities and municipalities to incorporate it into their infrastructure.

While Walt Disney did not live long enough to see the New Tomorrowland project open in 1967, his PeopleMover was a massive hit. The perpetually-moving vehicle system ran on a track on the land’s second level, with each vehicle pushed by rotating tires embedded in the track once every nine feet, each of which had its own electric motor. The constantly moving videos added a ton of kinetic energy to the land, furthering its futuristic “world on the move” theme.

The PeopleMover, a version of which made its way to Walt Disney World in 1975, remained a staple in Anaheim until 1995, when it closed as part of a larger Tomorrowland reboot. Unfortunately, things would not go as planned.

In 1998, a new attraction opened up on the PeopleMover tracks: The Rocket Rods. The ride was touted as a high-speed thrill ride that would use technology that had been developed for the then-upcoming Test Track at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT. However, upon opening the ride immediately ran into issues.

See, stemming from the initial financial failure of EuroDisney, projects were cut across the board at Imagineering, with those that weren’t canceled seeing severe budget cuts. When it came to Rocket Rods, Disney chose not to add banked turns to the original PeopleMover track, a necessity for the ride’s proposed higher speeds. In practice, this meant that the ride would accelerate on straight sections of track and abruptly slow down as the vehicles approached flat-grade turns.

This stop-start nature led to numerous issues. Neither the track structure nor the vehicle’s tires were designed for this, leading to mechanical issues on both ends, often closing the ride for significant periods. During the rare times when Rocket Rods was running, the stop-start nature and lack of promised speed left guests — many of whom had waited in queues over an hour or more — unhappy. After two years of heavily interrupted operation, Rocket Rods closed for refurbishment in September 2000. The following April, Disney confirmed that the ride would never reopen.

In the 25 years since, the abandoned PeopleMover/Rocket Rods tracks have hovered abandoned above Tomorrowland. According to most reports, Disney has been stuck in a rock-and-a-hard-place. They can’t simply reinstall the PeopleMover, as the track would need to be heavily retrofitted to meet new OSHA standards, and to remove the track — which is integrated into several Tomorrowland buildings — would require a prolonged closure of the land and a massive rebuilding project.

In other words, until Disney commits to a MASSIVE teardown of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, the tracks are likely to remain an abandoned monument to Disneyland’s past. Stay tuned to AllEars for more deep dives on Disney history.

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Do you miss the PeopleMover at Disneyland? Let us know in the comments below!

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