Greg Maletic
Page 1 of 4

Greatest Disney Attraction...Ever?
Part One

I'm not the first to raise the question "what's the greatest Disney attraction ever?" It's no wonder it gets asked so often, because it's hard to answer: what's meant by "greatest?" Most popular? Most groundbreaking? Most influential? Is it even possible to pick a "greatest" attraction objectively?

Well, I've foolishly decided to try anyway. In an attempt to sort this all out, I decided to create several lists, each rating the best Disney attractions in a different category. By doing some sort of unscientific average of the attractions on the lists, it seemed possible, at least in theory, that a greatest attraction could be selected.

But what should the categories be? I came up with a lot of ideas, including "most entertaining," "most thrilling," "most unusual," even "most copied." A lot of these ideas had problems, however. "Most entertaining?" Too subjective. "Most thrilling?" Again, pretty subjective, and there are a lot of great attractions that wouldn't be considered thrilling. By removing duplicates and picking out only the most salient categories, I was able to condense the list down to the following four:

• Most Influential Within Disney
• Most Influential on the Industry/Outside World
• Most Groundbreaking
• Most Famous/Infamous

By evaluating attractions on these scales, it's my hypothesis--and hopefully you'll agree, even just a little--that it's possible to come up with one, single winner. After I pick that winner, I'll throw out any pretense of objectivity and name my personal "best" list.

In order to make my lists as fair as possible, I'm going to generally defer on including attractions I haven't been on. (The only case where I've included an attraction I haven't been on is Monsanto's House of the Future, because it was demolished many decades ago.) Unfortunately, that means I'm not going to include any attractions built at Tokyo Disneyland since I visited in 1995, disqualifying all of the great DisneySea attractions and Pooh's Hunny Hunt, even though I'm sure some of them deserve mention. C'est la vie. Hopefully I can correct this soon in an upcoming visit.

So, without further delay, here we go!

Most Influential Within Disney
Some attractions go over so well with the public that Disney builds them over and over again. Others may not appear in so many manifestations, but they clearly lead Disney into new directions. Here's a list of the attractions that have seemed most influential within Disney over the years.

1. Pirates of the Caribbean
I'll mention Pirates a lot more later in this column, so I'll keep it short here: since its premiere in 1967, Pirates defined what Disney attractions are supposed to be like. We see copies of it in every Disney location (Florida residents angrily demanded its installation when they realized it wasn't in their Disney World park at opening day), and we see echoes of it in The Haunted Mansion, Indiana Jones Adventure, and the Tower of Terror. Arguably, Disney has never matched it. Additionally, one of the most significant trends at Disney in the past twenty years is the highly-themed queuing area, and I believe it was Disney World's Pirates that pioneered that concept.

2. Adventure Thru Inner Space
This extinct Disneyland attraction deserves mention not for its content, but because of its introduction of "Omnimover" ride vehicles, variants of which have become a standard on Disney attractions. The Haunted Mansion, If You Had Wings, and almost every Epcot attraction use some descendant of this system. Going beyond simply moving guests through the attraction, the steady-moving, rotating vehicles enabled Disney to build its attractions as if they were movies, directing the riders to look at exactly what the attraction's designer wanted them to see. Looking at the direction the theme park industry is heading in today, it's arguable that Disney's ride vehicle innovations--and this was among the first--are more significant than even their achievements in Audio-Animatronics.

(c) Disney

3. Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln
Disney's success in creating a mostly convincing Abraham Lincoln led to the creation of Disney World's Hall of Presidents, Epcot's American Adventure, and even an entire theme park, Disney's America, which never materialized. The trend created by Mr. Lincoln is on the wane--Disney parks now seems less interested in realistic portrayals of both humans and American history--but it's clearly one of the most important technologies and attractions that the company developed.