Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is a dark ride at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California. It is loosely based on Disney's adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of two segments comprising the animated package film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). The ride is one of the few remaining attractions operational since the park's opening in July 1955, although the current iteration of the ride opened in 1983. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is located in Fantasyland, a variation of the attraction also existed as an opening day attraction at Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World from 1971 until 1998. In all versions of the attraction, guests have assumed the role of the titular Mr. Toad, recklessly careening through the English countryside and streets of London in a period motorcar before ultimately meeting demise in a railway tunnel and ending up in a tongue-in-cheek depiction of hell. The attraction, unlike other Fantasyland dark rides, is not a direct retelling of the film that it was based on. Its ending in particular is an original scene that has no basis in either the 1949 film or the original novel by Kenneth Grahame. Originally envisioned as a roller coaster, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride was realized as a dark ride because Walt Disney felt as though a roller coaster might not have been appropriate for young children and the elderly. 1955 version (Disneyland) The very first iteration of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride was the least complex out of all three. Designed by Imagineers Bill Martin, Ken Anderson, Claude Coats, and Robert A. Mattey, the version of the attraction that opened to the public along with the rest of Disneyland in July 1955 contained the simplest gags, the fewest setpieces and characters, and, with a duration of 98 seconds, was the shortest in length. One notable quality of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride that was especially prevalent during its earliest years is the liberal use of painted plywood "flats" in its interior sets. Whereas its contemporary opening-day Fantasyland dark rides Snow White and her Adventures and Peter Pan's Flight employed three-dimensional figures and sculpts for either the majority or at least a significant quantity of their interior scenery and characters, the various scenes of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride were rendered predominantly by means of two-dimensional flats, with only a scarce presence of three-dimensional sculpts.