Disneyland trips cannot have been easy on my mother. It was what we had instead of a true vacation—we lived in Altadena, California, about forty miles away. So we’d get up early, drive over at the beginning of the day, and spend the day. Usually in August. Sometimes until closing. And then drive home the forty miles. Once a year, pretty much every year. And when Dad died, we were two, six, and eight, so most of those years, we were young enough to be a real pain to wrangle. There were a couple of things Mom did that were probably just to get a break, and prominent among them were the PeopleMover and the Skyway.
My fondness is actually stronger for the PeopleMover, the more staid ride. Even on the handful of occasions I went without family, I would go on the PeopleMover to just sit for a little bit. It was a “grand circle tour of Tomorrowland.” You’d go up a moving ramp onto a revolving platform, and you’d be helped by a cast member into one of the moderately comfortable open-air compartments. You would then go for a tour of Tomorrowland. That’s it. Seven miles per hour, probably about twenty feet above Tomorrowland. With a brief detour through what I to this day refer to as “the futuristic world of Tron.”
More notorious was the Skyway. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t doomed by visitor death; while someone had been killed on the Skyway, a bigger problem was apparently metal fatigue on the supports. Still, it was a nice way to travel between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. Not necessarily faster, you understand, because there was almost always a line and sometimes a surprisingly long one. Still, it was some sixty feet above the park and an interesting way of seeing it.
Apparently, one of the reasons they took out the PeopleMover was that people were just using it for somewhere to sit down for fifteen minutes. I personally don’t have a problem with having a few things like that around the park—while I happen to quite like Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, let’s face it, that’s a quiet, air conditioned place to sit down for twenty minutes. After a full day on your feet, a nice, quiet place to sit down for fifteen minutes has it advantages, and so much the better if it lets you see the inside of Space Mountain.
Actually, the only person injured at the Disneyland version of the Skyway was a guy who jumped out, presumably so he could sue. In Florida, one employee was severely injured and another killed in two separate incidents more than fifteen years apart, and it sounds from a brief reading of the details as though neither should have happened. But they’d have to rip open the Matterhorn to fix the supports, and so instead they just closed the ride and have since demolished the line areas.
I’ll never not be nostalgic for these rides, even though the days are long gone when I’d visit Disneyland on any kind of regular basis. There are several aspects of the Disneyland of my childhood that I think were superior—can you believe they’ve covered up that Mary Blair mural mosaic mural?—but I almost think the removal of the PeopleMover is symptomatic of a bigger problem at Disneyland. It’s really not as though Disney needs the money, but I’ve read that one of the reasons the ride was closed was Eisner’s decision that it was too expensive to maintain just for somewhere for people to sit down for fifteen minutes.. A phrase I keep repeating, but man, was that important, even for me, even when I was nine.
