Featured Attractions

Friday, April 28, 2017

It Didn't Work Out Week! The Indiana Jones Adventure


DISNEYLAND's Indiana Jones Adventure has been a huge favorite of guests for over twenty years. The impressive technology used in the attraction was initially capable of even more impressive feats. Walt Disney Imagineering had programmed each of the vehicles to have hundreds of thousands of ride variations.

 

The attraction was supposed to surprise guests by beginning its journey through the temple in one of three different doors. Repeat riders would instantly notice the difference. It was all meant to be very impressive.

 

Unfortunately, the extremely popular attraction faced many stumbling blocks in its first year of operation. Guests were not heeding the warnings of holding onto hats and bags. Ride sensors meant to halt operations if a person fell out of the vehicles were stopping the attraction every time a careless guest dropped a hat or bag. To make matters worse the attraction's ride system, faced with a nearly infinite number of attraction possibilities, would only choose six of them. The three doors of Wisdom only led to one location. 

Walt Disney Imagineering would lower the sensitivity of the ride sensors, install netting to give guests a place to secure their belongings, but couldn't quite get a grip on resolving the problem of the attraction not choosing from the multiple possibilities. Sometimes they had to prop open the middle door to make the attraction get through the day. 

Imagineering desperately wanted time to fix the attraction and felt that it should be shut down if the three doors weren't working correctly. Park operations, faced with thousands of guests who most likely didn't notice anything amiss, won out- the attraction would only close for safety reasons. Imagineering would eventually get various opportunities to try to fix some of these issues over the years, but the attraction would never work entirely as originally conceived.