Later, the ride was added to the Magic Kingdom park at Walt Disney World in Florida, and also Tokyo Disneyland. “We all dated each other, and some of us even married each other,” he said. During his time working Splash Mountain, Atkins said he and his fellow crew members grew close and stayed close over the years.
“I was in great shape that summer,” Atkins recalls. But he ultimately became part of the “test and adjust” crew that put 1,600 pounds of sandbags into the ride vehicles, to approximate the weight of eight adults, in and out of 30 logs. “One of the project managers saw me looking at the sign and encouraged me, so I put my name down,” Atkins said, adding that he didn’t think he had enough experience to get a ride operator job. He remembers seeing a sign in the cast member lounge looking for people to work the new attraction. He’s still working at Disneyland, 32 years after he started out as a Jungle Cruise skipper, now as senior stage manager of photo imaging. Dave Atkins, who was among the first workers, remembers the tough job of putting heavy sandbags into the boats and then removing them, so engineers could simulate human weights as they tested the ride boats. Recently, a group of Splash Mountain’s original cast members got together for a commemorative party. In those days, before the boats were redesigned, Pellman recalled that dating couples could sit on laps while they rode. Later, we would get in line and ride it over and over.” “We were deliriously happy with our first ride. “It was a highlight of my adolescence,” Pellman recalled. Pellman, author of “Cleaning the Kingdom: Night, Day, Past and Present,” about his custodial career at Disneyland, was among a group at the front of the line on the ride’s opening day. He watched with fascination, and even persuaded Tony Baxter once to allow him to go on a test ride. As a teenager, he and his friends hung relentlessly around the new Splash Mountain attraction under construction, which hadn’t even opened yet. That’s a date that Ken Pellman will never forget. Ultimately, Splash Mountain opened on July 17, 1989, which also happened to be the 34th anniversary of the park’s opening. We were almost six months later than we thought, because we had to rethink and redesign the boats to work with the water.” “It’s going to do whatever it’s going to do. “You can’t control water,” Baxter said his team learned.
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Altogether, some 100 animated creatures populate the ride.īaxter recalls one of the biggest construction challenges was learning how to use water to propel the boats through the ride, because none of the engineers had ever worked with it before. It ends with a rousing showboat chorus of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”, sung by animatronic creatures recycled from America Sings. During the ride, visitors are immersed in the story of Brer Rabbit and his troubles. The ride climaxes in a five-story-high waterfall drop that at the time was the longest in the world. It took more than four years to erect the structural steel framework, build the 87-foot-high mountain around it, design the special boats that look like hollowed out logs, fill the water reservoir and figure out how to to send the boats along on their journey through a backwoods bayou and swamp. “But there were something like 90 creatures in there that were beautifully designed.”īaxter remembers successfully pitching the ride to Michael Eisner - and his 14-year-son Breck - only a few days after Eisner took over the reins of the Walt Disney Company. “People had kind of had enough of it,” Baxter said. In those days, only 2 percent of park-goers ever made it there, which contained only the Country Bear Jamboree and a restaurant, according to legendary Disney designer Tony Baxter.īaxter remembers being stuck in rush hour traffic on the way to Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale when he first conceived the idea of reusing dozens of animatronic creatures from the aging America Sings! attraction that had been highlighted during the nation’s Bicentennial inside the former Carousel of Progress building but had since become tired and less popular. It’s impossible to say how many people have become wet on Disneyland’s Splash Mountain over the decades, but - as the ride turns 30 years old Wednesday, July 17 - it’s a safe bet that it’s many of the estimated 150 million who’ve ridden it over the years.Īs Disneyland’s first and only log flume ride, Splash Mountain was conceived as a way to attract more visitors to the area then called Bear Country (renamed Critter Country) that had opened in 1972.
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