August 5 - Adventure Thru Inner Space

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On this day, in 1967, the Adventure Thru Inner Space ride welcomed its first guests in Tomorrowland of Disneyland. A decade earlier, Walt Disney had hinted at creating an atomic themed ride for his theme park on an episode of Disneyland titled “Our Friend the Atom.” It should be noted here that the theme was along the lines of chemistry and the science of atoms rather than atomic energy or weapons. Concepts were sporadically explored and work on the attraction meandered forward until the company’s contracts to build attractions for the 1964 World’s Fair basically put all other projects on hold. Once the fair was over, the atomic ride was dusted off and approved as part of the New Tomorrowland project.

Monsanto (the company that should be reviled for many reasons today but was slightly more innocent forty years ago) already sponsored a chemistry exhibit in Tomorrowland. When they agreed to sponsor the new attraction, their Hall of Chemistry and the adjoining 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Exhibit were slated for the chopping block with that area then becoming Adventure Thru Inner Space. The ride’s name comes from the idea that guests would be shrunk down to a size smaller than an atom and would then be able to travel in the space between atoms, the inner space of everything. The shrinking was accomplished at the beginning of the ride by Monsanto’s Mighty Microscope which then beamed guests into a snowflake. After shrinking to a size which made the nucleus of an oxygen atom seem room sized, guests began growing again until they were back to normal size by the end of the attraction. A post-show area housed an exhibit of Monsanto’s modern fabric and material products (and the cast member costumes for the ride were made from Monsanto fabrics).

Image courtesy duchessofdisneyland.com

While it might be hard for today’s guests to imagine how atoms and molecules would make a fun ride, people in the late Sixties seemed to enjoy themselves. That enjoyment was helped along by a narration from the Legendary Paul Frees (who was actually kind of doing an impersonation of Orson Welles) and a jaunty tune by the Sherman Brothers, Miracles from Molecules. It also helped that, unlike the rest of Disneyland, Adventure Thru Inner Space was a free attraction, meaning you didn’t have to spend one of the tickets in your ticket book to ride it, for the first five years it was open. In 1972, Adventure was finally designated a C ticket ride and remained at that level until the ticket system disappeared in the early Eighties.

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Another advantage Adventure Thru Inner Space had was that it was the first attraction in Disneyland to use the Omnimover ride system. The Omnimover was similar to the continuous conveyor system that had been used on the Ford’s Magic Skyway Disney built for the World’s Fair with one huge improvement: individual cars could be independently rotated (or vibrated or whatever) from every other car. Attractions could now be designed with specific viewing angles on things that didn’t require major manipulations in the vehicle tracks, just twists and turns of the cars themselves. Omnimover attractions are so commonplace today, that we can no longer see the novelty in them but imagine you’re on a ride and for the first time ever, the car in front of you turns around and you’re briefly looking at the front of another guest before turning around yourself. I’m sure it was a lot more thrilling when you weren’t jaded about it.

As time went on, Adventure Thru Inner Space, like most science based things, began to look more and more dated. Monsanto ended their sponsorship deal in 1977 and all mention of them was scrubbed from the ride (except an audio line at the very end). The attraction would limp along for over eighteen years, finally closing forever on September 2, 1985. But sharp eyed guests can still catch a glimpse of it, or at least a virtual part of it, even today. Adventure was replaced by Star Tours, which opened 1987. When your StarSpeeder on that ride was diverted into a maintenance bay after taking a wrong turn, you could see the Mighty Microscope in the corner of that area. Since 2011, when Star Tours: The Adventure Continues began, you can only see the Mighty Microscope on some of the randomized journeys.  If you happen to be escaping the still-under-construction Death Star floating above Geonosis, it’s been moved there, although for what nefarious purpose we can only imagine.