Designer Times
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21. Flying Saucer and Duck Bumps
Walt would always ask his Disneyland designers and artists to explore various new ideas for potential Disneyland rides. When it came to mechanical ideas, especially wheeled vehicles, I got a crack at it. But not all the new ride ideas had wheels. Sometimes a ride idea was being looked at by the art directors and also by the purchasing department. Since Disneyland was now world famous, being five years old by 1960, every inventor tried to get Walt Disney to look at their great idea. Some of these inventors were introduced to Roger Broggie, my boss in the Studio Machine Shop. Roger was good at evaluating anything technical for Walt.
Roger would involve me in some of the inventor discussions, so I got a chance to meet a lot of crackpots in those early days. One such guy showed up with a flying saucer during a time when I was working on a new Duck Bump ride. Now a Duck Bump was (and still is) a popular and simple ride used in many amusement parks all over the world. A modern variation of the old Duck Bump was designed in a fanciful new version now in use at the new Tokyo DisneySea park.
A Duck Bump is sort of like a Dodgem Car ride where riders try to ram one another. You get a big hit with a Dodgem Car, but a very soft "whump" with a Duck Bump, which is just a big motorized inner tube floating in a water pond. I had figured out much of the production details on the new 1960 Disneyland Duck Bump Ride when the flying saucer guy showed up at the Walt Disney Studio.
The guy called it a flying saucer, but it was just another one of those home-brew one-person motorized air-cushion vehicles that were popular at the time. He unloaded it in a sound stage and showed it to Walt and anyone else interested. He flew it around a bit to show how it worked. Roger told me to give it a good testing. Yahoo!.....I'm a flying saucer pilot!
Well, did I ever make an impression. This round red thing had a very loud gasoline engine powering an even louder horizontal fan. It would raise up an inch or so off the ground and would move in any direction that you leaned towards. I drove out of the sound stage onto the back lot where the studio workers were furious as I blew clouds of dust onto everyone's movie set, to say nothing of the horrendous racket I was making. I had been known back in early 1955 as Broggie's troublemaker when Michael Broggie and I would race around the back lot testing the early Disneyland Autopia Car. So the flying saucer test ride was just one more backlot disturbance.
I reported to Roger just how dangerous this thing would be in the hands of Disneyland guests. I didn't even want to think about how to make the big lifting fan safe. The specter of flying fan blades around little children was too much. But the idea of a Flying Saucer Ride was terrific.
At about that same time Ed Morgan and Carl Bacon of Arrow Development had dreamed up the cleverest way to fly an unpowered saucer using a big ride platform filled with pressurized air. The heart of this system was the invention of a trick valve, thousands of which were to be installed in the platform deck. The development of the Disneyland Flying Saucer Ride is a fascinating story told in both the E-Ticket Magazine and a book about Arrow Development.
I abandoned my design for the Duck Bumps and in August 1960 designed a Disney spacecraft themed Flying Saucer car to fit on Arrow's test car shape. Later on, the United States Patent Office granted me a patent for the design. I was now recognized by the United States Government as "a flying saucer inventor", a title which placed me in good company with all the other flying saucer crackpots of the time.
Just how the Flying Saucer worked is a long complicated technical tale too long to tell here. But it was a captivating ride, very challenging for riders to master. It was a ride that was before it's time. The system to control the air delivery thru the many valves to the Saucer required controls that hadn't been invented yet.....like computerized control and fast acting giant servo flow controls.
oOo
Next month: Monorail Tractor No. 2
Discuss It
Related Links
- E-Ticket Magazine
- Roller
Coasters, Flumes and Flying Saucers
The history of Arrow Development - List of all Designer Times columns
-- Bob Gurr
Bob Gurr began working with Disney in 1954. He retired in 1981 but occassionally consults for the Company. Since Disney he's worked on the sinking ship at Las Vegas' Treasure Island, Universal Studios' King Kong, Godzilla for the film by the same name and much more. Among his proudest accomplishments he lists "making Walt tickled pink that some of the things he wanted to build actually worked. You could tell how proud he was when he would show off things to his friends and the press. Lincoln and the Monorail were two big ones for him."
Designer Times is normally posted the second Wednesday of each month.
The opinions expressed by Bob Gurr, and all of our columnists, do not necessarily represent the feelings of LaughingPlace.com or any of its employees or advertisers. All speculation and rumors about the future of Disneyland and the Walt Disney Company are just that - speculation and rumors - and should be treated as such.
-- Posted January 9, 2002
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