Space Mountain light-years from its original design
Initial plans for Space Mountain by Walt Disney and his Imagineers in the early 1960s conceived of a spaceport in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland with four separate roller coaster tracks weaving inside and outside a towering, futuristic peak with a much less majestic name.
“Walt and the team had an idea to do a spaceport within Tomorrowland,” Disney Imagineer Owen Yoshino says in a new Disney+ show. “The featured anchor attraction would be Space Voyage.”
Walt Disney Imagineering takes a behind-the-scenes look at Disneyland’s Space Mountain ride in the 10-episode series, “Behind the Attraction.”
The first five episodes focus on Space Mountain, Jungle Cruise, Star Tours, Haunted Mansion and Twilight Zone Tower of Terror/ Guardians of the Galaxy — Mission: Breakout! Future episodes will feature It’s a Small World, Hall of Presidents/Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, Disneyland Hotel, Disney theme park castles and Disney trains and monorails.
The successful debut of Matterhorn Bobsleds in 1959 at Disneyland prompted Disney to ask his creative team to dream up a spacethemed roller coaster for Tomorrowland that would be more technologically advanced and twice as big.
Disney Legend John Hench — known as Walt’s “expert at everything” — created the first Space
Voyage conceptual sketches. The original concept for what would become Space Mountain had four tracks weaving in and out of each other and through a large mountain similar to the Matterhorn track layout.
The big technological advance — a computer-controlled brake blocking system to keep coaster trains from colliding — was way ahead of its time. The project was ultimately put on hold, but it was soon resurrected.
A Disneyland map from 1968 showed an unnamed “future attraction” in Tomorrowland that looked a lot like Space Mountain, with coaster tracks encircling the futuristic peak.
But by that time another project was occupying the attention of Imagineering — the new Magic Kingdom theme park that would open in Florida in 1971.
Competition in the burgeoning amusement park industry pushed the Imagineering team to shift plans for Space Mountain from Disneyland to the Magic Kingdom — where the space-themed indoor roller coaster debuted in 1975.
The Magic Kingdom’s Space Mountain ride ended up with two tracks instead of four — both of them indoors. The Florida version of the ride was essentially Disneyland’s Matterhorn track layout inside a fully enclosed mountain.
The instant success of Space Mountain at Walt Disney World prompted Imagineering to fasttrack a version of the ride for Disneyland that debuted in 1977. The Anaheim mountain would be 200 feet in diameter — significantly smaller than the 300 feet of the Florida mountain.
Surf guitarist Dick Dale added a sci-fi soundtrack to Disneyland’s Space Mountain in 1996. A 2005 renovation brought a new score by “Incredibles” composer Michael Giacchino along with a new coaster track. Big rig flatbeds were trucked into Space Mountain to remove and replace the coaster track that was built atop a dirt floor, according to Yoshino.
“It’s like a ship in a bottle,” Yoshino says in the Disney+ episode. “Parts by parts, they had to get the track out.”
Through the years, Halloweenthemed Ghost Galaxy and “Star Wars”-themed Hyperspace Mountain seasonal overlays have been added to Space Mountain.
The “Behind the Attraction” episode ends by making a connection between the Space Mountain ride initially dreamed up for Disneyland and the 2016 Tron Lightcycle motorbike coaster built in Tomorrowland at Shanghai Disneyland.
Another Tron coaster under construction next to the original Space Mountain in the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland is expected to debut in 2022. A Tron coaster would be an obvious choice if Imagineering ever decides to once again update Tomorrowland at Disneyland.
The DisneylandForward plan includes concept art of the Tron Lightcycle coaster at Shanghai Disneyland intended to provide a “flavor” of what expansion could look like over the next couple decades under a reimagined long-term vision for the Anaheim theme park resort district.