Rarely does a trip to Disneyland’s Tomorrowland pass without hearing someone wonder out loud about how the old gas-guzzling Tomorrowland Autopia (1955) engines of the 1950s are supposed to represent the future.
In the mid-20th century, the Interstate Highway System was new and was connecting the nation in a way we’d never dreamed of before and the Autopia spoke to a kind of optimism. In the 2020s, it just smells bad. The Tomorrowland Autopia — the first of the three Disneyland Autopias: Tomorrowland, the Junior Autopia, and the Midget Autopia — is a noisy, noxious, space-hog of an attraction that a lot of kids really love. (And who am I to say they’re wrong? I loved it as a kid, too.)
Disneyland has announced, this week, that they will be converting the engines to run on electricity to, once again, squarely face the future.
“Since opening with Disneyland park in 1955, Autopia has remained a guest-favorite most popular with young kids experiencing driving for the first time. As the industry moves toward alternative fuel sources, we have developed a roadmap to electrify this attraction and are evaluating technology that will enable us to convert from gas engines in the next few years.” Spokesperson Jessica Good
It’s a welcome change and, hopefully, bodes a positive direction for the park’s oft-neglected land of the future.
This is not, however, the first time that the Disney Company has utilized a vehicle that resembled a car with an internal combustion engine to introduce a way to reduce the use of that very technology. That honor goes to the Ford Magic Skyway (1964) which Walt Disney and his Imagineers built for the Ford Motor Company to show off their new cars at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
We often talk about the attractions that were built for that Fair and how they were leveraged to modernize Disneyland. It’s a Small World and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln were transferred and/or recreated (Mr. Lincoln has a long and fascinating story that we go into on our new podcast, The Lowdown on the Plus-Up, this week) at the Anaheim park. The dinosaurs from the Magic Skyway were moved into what was to become the Grand Canyon Diorama (1965) along the route of the Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad (1955).
Ford’s disinterest in sponsoring their Magic Skyway attraction after the Fair stopped it from being moved and that, as we usually tell this story, was that.
Except that it wasn’t.
In many ways, the technology that was developed for the Ford Magic Skyway was the most revolutionary that Imagineering had come up with in the 1960s — at least as far as Walt’s newest dreams were concerned. Imagineer John Hench told the story of Walt seeing an iron ingot being moved along an assembly line and wondering if a vehicle couldn’t be moved the same way, with the motive force being supplied by the surface rather than the vehicle.
Thus was one of the most fundamental components of Walt Disney’s “City of Tomorrow”, EPCOT, devised: the WEDway Propulsion System. It originally pushed those Ford roadsters along a track (and through time) and then, later back at Disneyland, pushed these babies:
The WEDway PeopleMover was the piece of the puzzle that seemed to sew all of the EPCOT idea together for Walt. Monorails would be used as radial travel across the diameter of EPCOT’s circular districts, but it was less suited to the kind of short-distance commuter traffic that residents would need to travel the rings of the city from neighborhood to neighborhood. For those distances, Walt planned to use the WEDway PeopleMover technology.
Cars, trucks, and other gas-powered vehicles were to be relegated to tunnels underneath the living spaces.
It is really no wonder that Ford decided not to sponsor the evolved attraction as, at some point, they must have realized that Walt had pulled a fast one: he had used their cash to develop a major step towards rendering gas-powered cars obsolete.
Goodyear Tires, who became the sponsors of the Disneyland PeopleMover, couldn’t have been more thrilled as their tires were embedded into the track and integral to its function.
While I can see how traditionalists might miss the funky smell of the cars and the roar of those unmuffled engines, this feels like a step that is in line with Walt Disney’s vision of tomorrow. It’s a vision worth considering from time to time. I think about it a lot.
“It’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow… “
For an in-depth discussion of attractions that began at the 1964 New York World’s Fair (as well as an explanation of the reasons why it wasn’t actually a World’s Fair) join us on the first episode of our new podcast, The Lowdown on the Plus-Up where we discuss Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts — iTunes, Spotify, Google, Podcast Addict, wherever — or download it directly at
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
