The stories behind the creation of Disneyland’s beloved theme park attractions weave a history of artists overcoming challenges and building the impossible. Just as fascinating are the tales of attractions that never made it to the parks, concepts that were planned but canceled somewhere along the way.
We’re diving into rides that Walt Disney Imagineers almost built at Disneyland, but didn’t. Some of these attractions represent early versions of ideas that evolved into a different approach, and others were scrapped altogether. Among them are encounters with Disney Villains, Milo Thatch, and even Dorothy Gale. Mickey Visit brings you the latest Disney news and planning resources, including the overlooked best part of Disneyland and the new Disneyland President’s picks for the best food at the resort.
READ MORE – Hidden Details on Disneyland Rides That You Will Completely Miss if You Don’t Know Where to Look
Doctor Strange Tower of Terror
In the mid-2010s, Imagineers were tasked with repurposing The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney California Adventure into a revamped experience that would retain the elevator-drop ride system, but remove The Twilight Zone branding in favor of Marvel IP. Imagineers had a say in which Marvel superheroes the new version of the ride would focus on, but the overhaul had to be Marvel-related.
Disney Ride Closure ALERTS, Major Changes, Secrets Revealed
Get alerts on closures, park changes, exclusive discounts, and free printables. Trusted by 100,000+ Disney fans & planners.
The ride eventually became Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission – BREAKOUT! in May 2017, but Imagineer Joe Rohde first pitched a story starring Doctor Strange. He writes about the ride’s transformation in the 2026 book Floating Mountains: The Art of Imagining the Impossible.
For the sake of the project’s very tight schedule, Rohde surmised that “Doctor Strange has these Sanctum Sanctorum places hidden all over, and the tower could easily pass for one.”
However, at the time the ride was in development, Doctor Strange’s movie hadn’t been released yet, and executives weren’t confident enough to approve a ride starring the somewhat unknown character. They suggested Spider-Man, but Rohde pushed back, saying, “Spider-Man needs room to swing. We only go up and down. There’s nowhere for Spider-Man to be!”
On the other side of the globe, both Doctor Strange and Spider-Man are now getting their chance, as Imagineers are currently creating a new drop tower ride at Hong Kong Disneyland featuring those two characters, along with Black Panther and Thor. The elevators will appear to travel through portals with their vertical movement.
Candy Mountain
Storybook Land Canal Boats and Casey Jr. Circus Train have been Disneyland favorites since 1955. A few years after the park opened, Imagineers considered plussing those rides by building Candy Mountain, which would serve as an architectural centerpiece that the train would travel around and the boats would travel through.
Imagineers built a scale model out of real licorice, peanut brittle, fudge, and taffy in 1959.
Inside Candy Mountain, guests would have been transported to Oz! Former Imagineer Jason Surrell describes Candy Mountain in the 2007 book The Disney Mountains: Imagineering at Its Peak.
“Guests would find themselves in the Land of Oz,” Surrell writes, “where a birthday party for Dorothy Gale was underway.” The Cowardly Lion and the Wicked Witch of the West would also be part of the proceedings. This is truly wild to imagine happening today.
Candy Mountain and its Oz interior were developed in tandem with a proposed movie based on several Oz books Walt had purchased the rights to in 1954.
Dorothy, the Lion, and the Witch, along with the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, would eventually make their Disney theme park debut, based on their likenesses from MGM’s classic 1939 film, when The Great Movie Ride opened at Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney’s Hollywood Studios) at Walt Disney World in Florida in 1989. The attraction closed in 2017.
Villains Funhouse Roller Coaster
Paradise Pier, complete with its upside-down roller coaster, has been part of Disney California Adventure since the park opened in 2001. Originally, the area was void of Disney characters, and the coaster was called California Screamin’. Today, we know this section of the park as Pixar Pier, and the roller coaster as Incredicoaster.
However, Imagineers were considering retheming California Screamin’ as a Disney Villains ride back in 2006, as shown in an Imagineering document purchased by Cabel Sasser from Van Eaton Galleries and verified by former Imagineers.
As Incredicoaster would later do, Villains Funhouse would have retained the basic structure of California Screamin’, but added a layer of ornamentation, sets, and props, in this case, though, based around Disney bad guys. Mimicking the style of a carnival funhouse, the style would be loud and in-your-face.
For example, the front of the coaster trains would have been molded in the shape of Hades’s head. At different points in the ride, the coaster would pass through tunnels resembling Jafar in his snake form and Chernabog, the devil from the Night on Bald Mountain segment of Fantasia. One piece of concept art shows what seems to be an Audio-Animatronics figure of the old hag from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Disney Villains are finally getting their due, albeit with much less kitsch, in Villains Land, currently under construction at Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. The project includes a roller coaster through Maleficent’s fortress.
Saturn Racer
Today, Disneyland guests ride Astro Orbitor, the Dumbo-like hub-and-spoke flight, outdoors. It’s located just off the park’s central plaza, at the entrance to Tomorrowland. In its first few decades, the ride was located on top of the now-defunct PeopleMover loading area, like its Florida counterpart still is today at Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. In all of its Disneyland forms, though, Astro Orbitor has always been outside.
Imagineers were considering, though, an indoor version of the attraction, as seen in concept art in the 2003 book Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show by John Hench and Peggy Van Pelt.
Hench and Van Pelt’s caption for the artwork calls it the “Tomorrowland Space Ride indoor attraction,” though signage visible in the art displays the name “Saturn Racer,” appropriate considering the rockets are flying around a model of Saturn.
The background of the artwork is nothing but dark space. I wonder if whatever indoor facility this was being planned for would have only hosted Astro Orbitor and nothing else, or if the ride’s placement here was to be one part of a larger, multi-attraction complex.
Imagineers are currently in the early stages of a major overhaul for Tomorrowland.
READ MORE – 10 Secrets Of Disney’s Peter Pan’s Flight Ride That Will Change the Way You Look at It
Discovery Bay
In 2019, Disney opened Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge north of Disneyland’s Rivers of America, expanding the park further beyond its railroad track perimeter. This may have seemed like an unconventional approach at the time, but Disney had been considering a project of this scope for over 30 years.
1974 concept art by former Imagineer Tony Baxter depicts a concept known as Discovery Bay, a new land to be located where Galaxy’s Edge now resides.
Discovery Bay would have been “a turn-of-the-century scientific outpost in the style of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast,” according to the 1996 book Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real by Kevin Rafferty and Bruce Gordon.
Baxter’s artwork shows a charming but bustling seaside town, complete with a large hangar storing a blimp. You can even see the Disneyland Railroad chugging along through the center of the action.
The Nautilus submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is in the artwork, too. I wonder if Disney would have relocated that Tomorrowland attraction to Discovery Bay, or if the Nautilus’s inclusion would have simply been for decoration.
Discovery Bay was inspired by stories and stylings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Though Discovery Bay was never built in California, some of its concepts evolved into Discoveryland at Disneyland Paris years later.
Carland
Guests today at Disney California Adventure visit Cars Land and probably can’t imagine the highly detailed recreation of Radiator Springs from Pixar’s Cars any other way. Before Cars Land, though, there was Carland.
“Carland was sort of a blend of different Disney-based car stories,” Imagineer Kathy Mangum recalls in the 2022 book The Imagineering Story: The Official Biography of Walt Disney Imagineering by Leslie Iwerks.
Carland still would have had a version of Radiator Springs Racers featuring Pixar’s Cars characters, but it also would have included unrelated entities, like a ride about Goofy learning to drive and a version of Disney World’s Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant.
“It didn’t have that cohesive storyline,” Mangum says, “beyond that it was about cars in California. Then Cars the movie hit big, and the characters were so loved that it became really natural, or sort of obvious, to take the Carland and turn it into Cars Land.”
Disney announced Cars Land in October 2007.
Undoubtedly, an additional factor in this equation was the pressure upon Disney to build a 360-degree land based singularly on one popular IP, a challenge to match the new industry standard set by Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which had been announced in May 2007.
The concept of Goofy behind the wheel of a moving vehicle eventually became the basis of Goofy’s Sky School, the renamed version of the former Mulholland Madness roller coaster on the other side of Disney California Adventure.
Alternate Version of Little Mermaid Ride
The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel’s Undersea Adventure opened at Disney California Adventure in 2011 as a family-friendly, indoor journey through the story of the classic animated film.
However, Disney originally developed a concept for a Little Mermaid ride to be located in Fantasyland at Disneyland Park in the 1990s. Former Imagineer Tony Baxter shared insight behind the first version of the project in a bonus feature on The Little Mermaid Platinum Edition DVD in 2006.
The Fantasyland version of the ride still would have told the same general story of Ariel the mermaid wanting to be a human, but it would contain a few key differences from the Disney California Adventure version that was eventually built. The biggest difference would have been the ride vehicles hanging from an overhead track, like the pirate ship vehicles in Peter Pan’s Flight.
The virtual ride-through of the attraction on the 2006 DVD shows a particularly impressive, multi-level set for the “Kiss the Girl” song sequence that riders would have seen first from down below, and then from eye-level.
A Ferris Wheel in Fantasyland
This next idea was an abandoned concept for Disneyland’s opening day lineup. A piece of concept artwork dated 1954, a year before the park opened, depicts a Ferris wheel in Fantasyland based on The Old Mill, a 1937 short film in Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony series.
The main tower of the Ferris wheel would have recreated the titular mill from the short, and the ride’s arms would have stood in for the mill’s blades. The sketch is shown in the 1996 book Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real by Kevin Rafferty and Bruce Gordon.
While there was no Ferris wheel to be found in Fantasyland on opening day, Imagineers repurposed the concept for Disneyland Paris in the ’90s. That ride has since closed.
A Ferris wheel wouldn’t open at Disneyland until Disney California Adventure debuted in 2001 with the Sun Wheel, today called the Pixar Pal-A-Round.
Atlantis Submarines
Disneyland’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine ride unfortunately sat neglected for years before being transformed into Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, which opened in 2007 and still operates today.
Before Finding Nemo, though, Imagineers considered a different story to relaunch the submarines. “We had hoped Atlantis: The Lost Empire was going to do good,” former Imagineer Tony Baxter says in the 2022 book The Imagineering Story: The Official Biography of Walt Disney Imagineering by Leslie Iwerks.
Imagineers thought that the story material of Disney’s 2001 animated feature Atlantis: The Lost Empire would pair well with Disneyland’s submarine ride, but the movie wasn’t a hit. Finding Nemo debuted in theaters in 2003 and proved to be the commercial success Disney needed to greenlight a theme park adaptation.
The Wonderful World of Color
A walkthrough and/or indoor theater attraction of some nature based on The Wonderful World of Color television series, Walt Disney’s weekly primetime program, was planned for Disneyland in the park’s early years.
A concept sketch by John Hench, included in his aforementioned Designing Disney book with Peggy Van Pelt, depicts a building with the RCA logo and an NBC peacock on the walls of its entrance corridor. It looks like guests may have sat down in a theater for some sort of presentation, but the exact nature of the experience is unclear.
“Commonly understood images and shared experience provide us with a rich resource of ideas for three-dimensional storytelling,” Hench writes. “I relied heavily upon guests’ associations with the television show Wonderful World of Color for immediate identification of this attraction.”
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color was the second iteration of the weekly Disney TV program, and debuted in 1961 on NBC following the 1954-to-1961 run of the Disneyland program on ABC. Hench’s concept sketch may have been from the ’60s or shortly thereafter to still be valid for his “immediate identification” description.
Though the attraction was never built, the vintage television show inspired World of Color at Disney California Adventure decades later. The nighttime water fountain spectacular debuted in 2010, though as more of a nostalgic throwback than an “immediate identification” for modern audiences.
Don’t Miss the Latest Disney News
Don’t miss the latest Disneyland and Disney World news from Mickey Visit. Join the FREE Mickey Visit newsletter that over 100k readers receive every single week. Mickey Visit is here to help you save money and experience more during your Disney and Universal vacation. See the Mickey Visit guide to Disneyland and the Mickey Visit guide to Disney World for tips.
