Why three of Disney’s fascinating lands ended up being canceled

Imagine this: You’re making your way to Indiana Jones Adventure, but you can’t just walk into the ride queue. There are trials you must survive first. You take a deep breath and step into a complicated maze, gargantuan stacks of stones rising up in front of you. But as soon as you’re on the path, you realize things aren’t what they seem. The way forward isn’t as clear as it was just a second ago. And are the walls … closing in? 

If Imagineer Tony Baxter had his way, they definitely would have been. But there also would have been a lot more to Disneyland’s Indiana Jones-themed entertainment, too. The new season of “Behind the Attraction” on Disney+ reveals what the scrapped Indiana Jones land would have been like, as well as other ambitious and costly projects, like a Wild West-themed land that was ultimately reduced to just Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. 

Leaked concept art reveals what Indiana Jones and the Lost Expedition would have looked like, but in the “Indiana Jones Adventure” episode of Season 2 of the show, which premieres on Disney+ on Nov. 1, the Imagineers who worked on the land reveal what they really would have built if money were no object. 

According to Baxter, who was the lead designer on groundbreaking attractions like Star Tours and the Disneyland Fantasyland redesign, the “Indiana Jones” movies inspired him so much that he had too many ideas to choose from. “I feel like George [Lucas] almost planted a ready-made ride in every one of those adventures,” he explained. 

The Indiana Jones land would have incorporated significantly altered versions of Jungle Cruise and the Disneyland Railroad, and would have had a runaway mine train ride, a jeep ride and, yes, moving walls you needed to circumvent to get to all of it. 

“We also wanted an interactive maze and it would be programmable to make it hard or easy,” Baxter says on the show. “The walls would move so you couldn’t memorize it.” 

But Euro Disney was flailing in Paris, and the Walt Disney Company didn’t have the cash for the ambitious project. “There’s always a push and pull as to what your investment level should be … but if you look just at the dollar, you might go in the wrong direction,” Imagineer Charita Carter says in the episode. “So you look at: What is the impact it’ll have on the guest, what is the impact on the future of the parks and the organization as a whole?”

Disney settled on making one ride instead of redoing all of Adventureland, and Indiana Jones Adventure opened in 1995 to rave reviews. 

Ahead of Walt Disney World’s 1971 opening, Imagineers envisioned a park that would be distinctly different from Disneyland. One of the main differences: The Florida resort wouldn’t have a Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Revered Disney Imagineer Marc Davis, who had designed the California attraction that opened in 1967, felt that it was redundant to have a pirate attraction in a state adjacent to the Caribbean itself. 

“Why take pirates to Florida when they’ve been promoting pirates for several hundred years down there?” Davis said in footage on the “Behind the Attraction” episode on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. 

Instead, Davis planned to offer Florida something it didn’t already have: the Wild West. 

He envisioned an enormous land called Thunder Mesa, which would have three rides, including Western River, a Pirates of the Caribbean-inspired boat ride that would have cowboys instead of pirates. 

“The idea was to take the cowboys to Florida and give them a similar show in the opposite way,” Baxter explained in the episode. “The only thing I can describe that would be that big in today’s Disney knowledge would be the Cars land or Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.”

Thunder Mesa, which was slated for Phase II development after Magic Kingdom’s initial opening, would have taken up a huge portion of Frontierland. According to Baxter, who worked under Davis developing many park rides, Western River “was absolutely stunning.”

But Davis was a victim of his own success. Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean was only a few years old at that point, and had been so well-received that it got major media attention, such as a feature spread in Life Magazine. People who went to Walt Disney World were disappointed to arrive and not find the attraction there. 

“The public was starting to become very vocal about, ‘If you’re going to a Disney park, go to California because the new ride they opened out there, Pirates, is way beyond anything they have at Walt Disney World,’” Baxter explained. “And there was no plan for making Pirates of the Caribbean so … panic. They knew they had to build a pirate ride, which would be a ton of money, and they had to do it really fast.”

So all of the funds and real estate designated for Thunder Mesa vanished — or, you might say, were plundered by swashbuckling privateers. The entire land that Davis developed was shelved indefinitely, never to be built. But Baxter saw something in Davis’ renderings that he thought might be a fix for the languishing, outdated Mine Train through Nature’s Wonderland at Disneyland. 

“On the front of his attraction he had the appearance of a mine train ride,” Baxter said. “It wasn’t developed enough to know whether it would be fun and thrilling. I was very inspired by that.” What came out of that inspiration: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, which opened at Disneyland in 1979 and was such an immediate hit that it opened just a year later at Walt Disney World. Thunder Mesa did eventually get built, as the area where Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is in Disneyland Paris, but not to the extent Davis envisioned. 

A flash-in-the-pan attraction at Disneyland, Videopolis wasn’t a land so much as it was a way to bolster the park’s foundering teen market. It did actually exist for a few years in the 1980s — but the attraction was short lived. 

Where the Fantasyland Theatre is today once stood an attraction specifically aimed at entertaining teenagers at a time when there weren’t many thrill rides in the park. In 1985, Star Tours and Splash Mountain were still years away from completion, and then-new Disney CEO Michael Eisner and President Frank Wells wanted something implemented quickly to reignite teen attendance. According to Baxter, Eisner and Wells reportedly “wanted to show the world that Disney was waking up, that it was different.” 

Baxter reportedly described, “So, what he did in the short term was he put in Videopolis, which gave us a teen dance club of the John Travolta 1980s.” The space, which utilized staging from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, went up in only 105 days, directly across from It’s a Small World. It had music, dancing and purely 1980s stacked televisions. Disney denied opening it to rival Knott’s Berry Farm’s teen club Studio K, but the competition was obvious.  

“We were looking to take an unused part of our land and do something with it,” James Lowman, a former food and beverage manager for Disneyland, said on the “Food” episode of “Behind the Attraction.” 

Videopolis opened in July 1985 to rave reviews from local teens, especially since the park was offering a $40 Videopolis Pass that allowed entry after 5 p.m. throughout the summer. “I love coming here as often as I can,” 18-year-old Lisa Grube told The Los Angeles Times in 1985. “This really outdoes Studio K and I think it’s going to pull in a lot of people this summer. If they get some good bands in here it will be a good place for concerts.”

Videopolis even inspired a Disney Channel music show that lasted for two seasons, but the attraction was short-lived. According to YouTube series Defunctland, parents complained that Videopolis attracted a “rowdier element,” especially since the club was in Fantasyland, the area with the most attractions for young kids.

The area closed in 1989, according to fan site Laughing Place, partly because of teen fights breaking out in the parking lot that they traced back to Videopolis.

There have been lasting effects of the teen nightclub on the park, though, especially when it comes to snacks. 

At Videopolis, Lowman said, they had a food area called Yumz, which served the standard Disneyland snacks of popcorn and Mickey pretzels. But he wanted more. “We were looking for something else that could be a hit,” he described. Eventually, at a car racing event in Long Beach, he stumbled on a snack he had never seen before: a churro. Lowman took the concept and made it Disney-sized, extending the treat into the 14-inch churro that’s at the park today. It was immediately so popular that it sold out on the first day. According to fan site DisneyDiary.com, more than 4 million churros are sold at Disneyland every year — and it was all because the park was trying to entertain teenagers. 

Videopolis isn’t completely lost. The concept still exists today, as there’s a Videopolis in the Discoveryland section of Disneyland Paris. For the Disneyland After Dark: ’80s Nite event, Disneyland revived Videopolis, but just for the separate ticketed event.