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Unbuilt
Would have been
Space later became:
Remnants:
Influences evident in:
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Consider that the adapted blueprint image above doesn't even cover the peripheral mountain trails and railroad loading area, just the roof over the WRE. This approach made Thunder Mesa an immense undertaking. Its size and scope would have made it by far the largest and most dense single component of the Magic Kingdom. This is why WED decided to hold off on its construction at first, slating it for realization toward the end of WDW "Phase One" i.e., the first five years after opening. It made sense, as it would provide WED and the construction crews an opportunity to get the Kingdom's other attractions up and running before tackling this behemoth. If the park was the success they hoped for, operating revenues would help offset Thunder Mesa's construction costs. Plus it would be something that the company could promote extensively to entice visitors back to WDW after their initial visits. It seemed like a great plan, and certainly one with which the company intended to follow through. The aerial construction photo above, shot in early 1971 shows the Thunder Mesa site in the lower center. Ground was cleared in the acreage that the attraction would have occupied. A similar scenario happened for the Asian Resort, where a square site for the hotel was reserved on the western shore of the Seven Seas Lagoon. Both were WDW Phase One elements deemed imminent, just slightly delayed, along with Space Mountain, the Persian Resort and the Venetian Resort. Back at WED, all the homework and scripting for the WRE was complete. Davis and longtime Disney collaborator Mary Blair had produced a large number of paintings and illustrations that told the ride's story. What follows is a synopsis drawn from that artwork, other written accounts of the ride and interviews with those both involved in and familiar with the project. |
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The trip began with an introduction to the ride's "star," a recurring audio-animatronic owl named Hoot Gibson* , as the boats are hoisted up a waterfall and channeled into a canal for a (momentarily) low-key cruise down a frontier river. Oversized dime novels, their covers depicting western icons such as Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody and Davy Crockett, gave way to dioramas of bears cavorting on the banks, bison sniffing prairie dogs and a cowboy strumming a guitar and singing the WRE's signature song ... along with a chorus of longhorn steer. The ride's musical theme was introduced early and would carry on throughout the remainder of the experience. Desert animals such as owls, even cactus, picked up and carried the tune. Things got more interesting as the boats passed a group of bandits holding up a stagecoach on a wooden bridge. Both the thieves and their horses wore bandanas across their faces. The lead villain, virtually hidden beneath his dark sombrero, sang to guests as they passed and suggested they would meet again further down the river.
Then the boats entered a western town called Dry Gulch. It's Saturday night and the streets are filled with revelry. Dance hall girls are singing and performing can-can feats as cowboys cheer them on. Wranglers on horseback are firing their six-shooters into the air - one has even managed to get his horse onto the roof of a saloon's front porch. Some townspeople look on in shock or disapproval, but it has no effect on the wild behavior. In fact, things only ratchet up from there. Around the bend there is a raging exchange of gunfire between a group of bank robbers and the law. A sheriff on his horse fails to detect underground tunneling trailing below him from the nearby jailhouse. Fearsome ruffians in dark hats shoot Colt 45s from behind troughs and a purloined bank's safe while congenial deputies in white hats answer back from the windows of a bathhouse. Seemingly everyone is caught up in the action, save for a smiling mortician sizing up his prospects for timely business. Guests narrowly avoid injury in the crossfire as they drift through the chaos. The sound of bullets is soon replaced by that of tribal drumming and chanting. Along the banks is a diorama of the painted desert, in which a gathering of Indians are enacting a full-blown rain dance ceremony. On a tabletop rock, a storm is already washing down on a circle of braves, over the sides of the plateau and into an adobe homestead. Five maidens sit in a row, swaying in time with the music. A trio of coyotes howls in front of a bonfire while medicine men shake gourds. Lightning from the gathering rainstorm sparks a forest fire and guests cruise through a mass of flames. The once-peaceful river yields to rapids and things start to get rough. To make things worse, the bandits from the stagecoach scene have caught up with the boat and demand the passengers' valuables at the headwaters of a raging waterfall. Before guests have a second chance to consider their predicament, their craft tips over the falls and plunges them down a passage that leads out of Thunder Mesa and along a channel hugging the Rivers of America, similar to the main drop on Splash Mountain. Then the boat re-enters the mountain and arrives at the Unload dock, where guests disembark and return to Frontierland. It was an ambitious project to say the least, and the company seemed to be sharpening its teeth in order to bite into it completely: - A sprawling scale model of the ride (1" to the foot) was built at WED, just as one had been built for Pirates a few years earlier, for purposes of finalizing the spatial relationships of visual elements. Ken O'Brien sculpted an army of figures to populate the miniature show scenes. Those who saw the model in its entirety, such as Bill Cotter, say it was phenomenal to behold, with multiple animated features and beautiful lighting effects. Thunder Mesa had also been sculpted in its entirety as part of a 1/100th model of the entire Magic Kingdom. - Buddy Baker, the mastermind behind countless Disney film scores and park tracks (including If You Had Wings), reportedly began writing theme music for the attraction in a variety of different styles such as an introductory ballad, a double-time saloon style and an Epic Western style evocative of films like The Big Country and The Magnificent Seven. - Full-size animated figures were being sculpted. In a 1972 interview with Orlando-Land magazine editor Edward L. Prizer, then-Walt Disney Productions Chairman Donn Tatum said the WRE would contain approximately 150 animatronics. That would be an increase of 30 figures over Disneyland's Pirates ride. According to Imagineer Belinda Winn, in the October/November 1996 issue of WDEye (Imagineering's in-house newsmagazine) animated WRE figures actually went into production.** |
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So now there was a problem, and we all know how it was "solved." While Imagineering still felt that building the Pirates-like WRE and promoting it on its own considerable merits was the appropriate route, there was no doubt that this would be a more costly and more risky option than simply repeating Pirates, especially when Pirates was a sure-fire success with great word-of-mouth. That's certainly how Walt Disney Productions' management saw it, specifically Walt Disney Productions President Card Walker. He insisted the Pirates be added to the Florida park post haste, which it was - in an abbreviated form built for a rumored half of the WRE's projected $60 million price tag. It opened to the public in December 1973. The decision to build Pirates was made in early 1972, at which time the future of Thunder Mesa and the WRE was immediately up in the air. With Pirates on its way to the park, the urgency to build another major attraction on its west side (especially considering that Tom Sawyer Island was also slated to open in 1973) was massively diminished. If the key component of Thunder Mesa hadn't been a boat ride, placed so close to Pirates, there may have still been a compelling argument to proceed. There were still the various peripheral attractions like the train ride and the mules to consider, but in the eyes of management there were enough factors to table the project in its entirety.
What's interesting - if you find ANY of this
interesting - is that it didn't get axed outright. In this
capacity Thunder Mesa and the WRE hold a unique position for the amount of
notoriety they maintained well past the point where most unbuilt attractions
would have fallen off the radar. Page 10 of the company's 1972 annual report painted
(what is in retrospect) a
strange
picture of the unfolding saga. Pirates of the Caribbean was accurately slated
for its 1973 debut, the expansion of Tomorrowland, including a new thrill-ride
concept called "The Space Mountain" was previewed, and a "new" attraction was being introduced for Frontierland in 1974...the Big Thunder Railway. According
to Jim Hill's WRE article, Imagineer Tony Baxter's concept, in the form of a
model, for an adaptation of Thunder Mesa's mine train component that would spread across the whole of Thunder Mesa's Florida real estate, sat in WED's model room and
was known only by WED staff until Card Walker first saw it in Spring of 1974.
But the 1972 annual report, which was published in early 1973,
demonstrates via a concept painting (below left) that the Big Thunder Railway
attraction was fleshed out thoroughly, almost exactly as it would be built
(under the name Big Thunder Mountain Railroad) in 1979 for a 1980 opening***.
And even though it was billed as a "step toward the completion of Thunder Mesa,"
anyone familiar with that attraction's scope would rightly wonder how the rest
of Thunder Mesa would figure into the arrangement. The train ride was
supposed to have sat OVER the WRE; certainly no one was going to slide a boat
ride underneath a series of stone bluffs built at ground level. But what a wick this thing had. Not only had the ride been promoted in WDW pre-opening literature dating back to 1969, but four years later, in spite of all the maneuvering associated with Pirates and Big Thunder, the WRE became the centerpiece of the Walt Disney Story's post-show on Main Street. A section of the WRE model - depicting the scene with the dance hall girls and the cowpoke whose horse jumped atop the saloon's porch - was displayed in its own private hallway.**** In an adjacent alcove, the electronic version of a feathered Hoot Gibson could be found snoring away on a tree branch. When guests pushed a button the owl came to life and introduced himself as "the star of a brand new Western show being made for Walt Disney World." He then gave a brief run-down on the process behind audio-animatronic technology. At the conclusion of this tutorial he urged guests to come back and visit him "at the Western River Expedition." This was, by any measure, extensive publicity for a ride still being developed - let alone a ride whose prospects for realization had been largely doused before this display opened in April 1973.
Unfortunately, this was the last bright spot in the ride's history. From 1973 onward, Marc Davis dealt with an increasingly frustrating series of disappointments regarding the WRE. One thing he had to contend with was entirely of his own doing: the smattering of American Indian stereotypes throughout the attraction. Davis had worked in pretty much every potentially insulting sight gag for what he surely intended as maximum comic effect - big noses, drunkenness, the war hoop, dancing around wildly in circles, sitting "Indian-style," you name it. That Walt Disney Productions perpetrated these stereotypes (in films like Peter Pan and The Saga of Windwagon Smith) into the 1960s was lamentable. To have carried the tradition forward as part of a 1970s attraction, one which surely would have lasted into the 21st century, would have been egregious. Davis actually had a respect for indigenous cultures in North America and around the globe; he studied them thoroughly when attempting authentic depictions - such as the New Guinea warriors in his works of fine art. But he saw nothing wrong with taking the opposite road for a laugh, and that's where things got thorny. In a
1999 interview, Davis denied that his Indian renderings were a source of
contention between him and management. There is, however, some evidence to
the contrary. Below is a comparison of a rendering Davis created for the
WRE in 1968, Doc Cogwheel's Magic Elixir wagon, to an alternate version
that he produced in 1974. It's essentially the same scene save for A) the
cat and dog in the foreground were switched out for pigs and B) the Indians were
replaced by caucasians. It actually makes more sense with the muscle man
helping the charlatan demonstrate the "effects" of his tonic than it does with an
Indian chief standing there stone-faced (maybe he was going to break into some
kind of dance), but seeing the other two Indians playing the banjo and the
trumpet is funnier to me than just seeing a white man and woman doing the same
things. It's funnier because it's less expected. But if the
suggestion is that these were two savages who only became capable of playing the
white man's civilized instruments after consuming the elixir - and I'm not
saying that IS the proper inference - then it's only funny in the sense that a
lot of offensive things crack me up. I would not, however, think it was
the right material for a family audience in a Disney ride. Another obstacle confronting the WRE was its projected cost; management simply could not see the inherent benefit to spending tens of millions on an attraction that wasn't called Space Mountain. By the end of 1973, the expansion of Tomorrowland was going full-tilt. It not only included a major thrill ride (and by this time the company was becoming very focused on rides that could be built for less money than Pirates or the Haunted Mansion and heavily promoted on the simple principle of people moving fast on Disney versions of roller coasters patterned after the very popular Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland), but also the Starjets, WEDway Peoplemover and a revamped Carousel of Progress that was returning to the East Coast from a six-year, post-World's Fair run in California. Tons of money, a list of other attractions that had recently debuted in other parts of the park (Tom Sawyer Island, Plaza Swan Boats, the Walt Disney Story, Pirates itself) and major work taking place in the resort areas. There was a tremendous push toward achieving higher capacity throughout WDW, and the WRE was sitting on the sidelines.
Nonetheless, management at least appeared to be receptive to finding ways of
making it happen. Marc Davis was approached with a proposal to reduce the
cost of the WRE by recycling molds cast for Pirates in order to
create a large number of the ride's animated figures.
As first
published in Bruce Gordon and David Mumford's
Disneyland: The Nickel Tour, Davis wasn't keen on the idea.
Inflexible, to be exact. Had he sensed how tenuous his negotiating
position was at that time (didn't he see Walker having lunch with John Hench?), he probably would have agreed to this compromise and found
a way to get problems with the ride fixed later on. But it must not have
seemed feasible that management would pull the plug on the WRE over something
like that. And they didn't. They did nothing. And they kept
doing nothing with the WRE up through...what year is it? |
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In May
of 1974, Card Walker announced that WDW Phase One would be complete by year's
end, paving the way for the company to concentrate more heavily on the
development of EPCOT Center. That didn't bode well
for Phase One projects that had yet to see groundbreaking, and it's when plans for the WRE in Florida were essentially -
if not formally - over. The model in the Walt Disney Story
post-show remained visible until walled up in 1981 for an EPCOT Center
preview (the model was "rediscovered" in 1994 with lights
still burning). Hoot Gibson got dressed up as a tour guide and
spoke of another theme park with Spaceship Earth serving as a backdrop; he never uttered another word about the old west. |
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* All I knew of Hoot Gibson as a kid was his name. For those who may not recognize even that, Gibson was a movie star famous primarily for his roles as a cowboy in silent films of the 1920s. This made the selection of Junius Matthews as the voice of the animated owl named for the cowboy star more palatable than, say, naming a robotic bluebird Mae West and giving it the voice of Sally Struthers. Then you'd just be asking for trouble.
** Among the figures Winn said had been built for the WRE were bison and prairie dogs, who in 1982 had found a home in EPCOT Center's Living With The Land ride. This might seem like conjecture, but one must consider that it was printed in Imagineering's own periodical. Which is not to say that Imagineers are never wrong (see: Tiki Room under New Management), but it's true that all of the other animatronics (crocodiles, monkey, a goat, chickens, a dog, etc.) in Living with the Land could be traced to previous home attractions. This increases the likelihood of the bison being formally linked to the WRE. But Jim Hill's WRE article states that WED personnel working on EPCOT Center made the bison and prairie dogs made specifically for The Land as an homage to Davis and the WRE. Damn it! This is, incidentally, the only paragraph on the internet that weaves Jim Hill, a goat and a monkey into a single narrative.
*** The same painting even adorned BTMR's "Coming Soon" sign in 1979.
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