Page 82 - CelebrationsSpring2020

Each Disney mountain deserves special attention — tubular steel coaster, providing a much smoother ride than
from the retro-futurism of Space Mountain to Grizzly Peak roaring into the golden California sky to Tokyo DisneySea’s mysterious Mount Prometheus half a world away — but here are four of our favorites that trace this concept’s evolution over the decades:
Matterhorn Bobsleds
Disneyland opened in 1955 without a single mountain in sight. Well, almost. What the park did have was a twenty- foot-tall mound of construction dirt unceremoniously dumped between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. This soil, excavated from Sleeping Beauty Castle’s moat and adorned with trees, was whimsically named Holiday Hill. But, to Walt and the storytellers of WED Enterprises, this was akin to putting lipstick on a pig. Holiday Hill stuck out like a sore thumb in the otherwise immaculately-themed Anaheim park.
To make matters even worse, a central support pylon for the Disneyland Skyway was erected there in 1956. Now, there was no hiding Holiday Hill. Walt and his team began brainstorming possible ride concepts for the area, but nothing took hold until an unrelated working vacation in Switzerland two years later provided a jolt of inspiration.
On location in the Alps for the filming of Third Man on the Mountain, Walt fell in love with the small town of Zermatt, which sat in the shadow of the Matterhorn. So captivated by its beauty, he decided then and there to bring a little slice of Swiss life back to Disneyland. Walt began mailing postcards of alpine scenes back to the studio, subtly nudging WED to kickstart plans for what would eventually become Matterhorn Bobsleds.
The unlikeliest hero of the Matterhorn project was Bob Gurr. Not because he lacked creativity or engineering knowhow — the Disney Legend obviously had all of that in spades — but for a far more understandable reason. “When Walt returned from making Third Man on the Mountain in Europe, he tells me that we are going to put in a Matterhorn with not just one, but two roller coasters inside, and that I’m to design the bobsled cars and design the track for the roller coaster,” Gurr told D23. “Fact of the matter is — I hate roller coasters!”
But Gurr set aside his fears and worked closely with Arrow Development to bring Matterhorn Bobsleds to life. Arrow previously helped design several ride systems for other Disneyland faves and, as such, earned Walt’s trust for this more ambitious project. This would be the world’s first
its wooden contemporaries.
“We had a year from start to the opening day,” Gurr
continued. “We built the fastest way out of necessity: we bent the track pipe and used wheels to speed up or slow down the bobsleds. This had never been done before. My son and I were the first riders on the Matterhorn. We had hay bales around the track and sandbags in a little test car that was ugly. Walt was there and said, ‘You designed it, you ride it.’ After we survived the first few runs, all the executives rode.”
When complete, Disney’s Matterhorn stood 147 feet tall — exactly 1/100th scale of the actual peak in Switzerland. To create the illusion of snowfall on the mountain’s upper reaches, designers carefully applied over 800 gallons of paint to the exterior surface of man-made rock. In fact, glass beads were even mixed in to give the appearance of snow glistening in the sun.
Splash Mountain
In a sense, Splash Mountain was born out of desperation. Disneyland’s Bear Country — home to the Country Bear Jamboree and not much else — struggled to attract Guests to its forgotten corner of the park. Imagineering needed something big to boost interest to keep Bear Country viable — and open.
Legend goes that Imagineer Tony Baxter hit upon the solution while stuck in the notoriously-slow Los Angeles rush hour one day in 1983. A log flume ride, featuring characters and stories from Song of the South, might be just the ticket to combine Disney storytelling and thrill-ride adrenaline. But, while Baxter admits that his long hours in stop-and-go traffic on the Santa Ana Freeway played a major role in fleshing out the ride’s concept, the Splash Mountain story actually began years earlier.
The popularity of log flume rides in the 1960s and 1970s put Disney in a tough spot. Should WED acquiesce to public demand and build a similar attraction at Disneyland — even if it failed to offer anything new or outstanding? Or should they stand strong and wait for the perfect moment to do the ride justice the Disney way?
Therein lay the beauty of Baxter’s idea: supplementing the log flume ride system with an elaborate story (and the catchy “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”). “We had combed the archives and settled on Song of the South as the one remaining traditional Disney thing that had theme park qualities,” Baxter told Theme Park Insider. “It went to incredible places, it had great characters, and it had great music.”
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