Earzup! | The History of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

[00:00:00] It's time for the show that brings the magic right to your speakers.

[00:00:10] Ears up!

[00:00:12] Hey what's going on everybody?

[00:00:14] Ears up!

[00:00:15] We are back and let me tell you the week that I've had in this studio is like I thought

[00:00:21] my audio problems were done and you know I turn it on and you couldn't even get your in-depth show for a while. So. That's terrifying. I mean, once you got it back on, yeah, that trust is just dead. Yeah, and the people that rode, they're in Australia, I think, so you get one email from them at eight o'clock at night and that's it. You don't get a second email a day. I mean, you could stay up later.

[00:01:41] I did.

[00:01:42] Oh. And I was like,

[00:01:43] hey, is there any way that I can like get on a live chat?

[00:01:46] Cause I have three shows to record this week. Thomas, who's in Australia, is offering to be your middleman. If you want to, Thomas, yes, dude. But yeah, I don't know. He also had the great idea that we should have one of these companies sponsor the show. Oh, sure. Yeah. Then we can just get it free, but then we have to talk about how great it is.

[00:03:00] And that's going to be the hard part.

[00:03:02] Sure.

[00:03:03] Well, mainly you have to share our listener numbers.

[00:03:06] Sennheiser or Behringer isn't going to touch us. I think Toads is a great ride. And a lot of people poopoo it, and I don't understand why. I really don't, I don't get it. I'm delighted every time because I come from a Walt Disney World background where it was the greatest ride ever created, in my opinion. And at least I get a taste of it. I'm sorry, you still have an inferior Toad at Disneyland.

[00:04:23] I shouldn't call it inferior.

[00:04:25] It exists.

[00:04:26] Right, it's better than what you, you just pay the money. I would go, yes. Are you gonna charge me for that opportunity? And they would say, no, I would say then double yes.

[00:05:40] And that's the same thing as concierge.

[00:05:42] They don't charge extra for it.

[00:05:44] They don't charge any extra to help you plan your vacation.

[00:05:46] But if you want, or you can leave a voicemail on the, on the John on the what is it called? Website? Yeah.

[00:07:01] You go to our website, your podcast.com. Yeah. And leave a voicemail if you want.

[00:07:06] And I want talking on, on in-depth and I had put this to the, to the discord a couple of days ago, but I had a thought experiment for everybody and I want to run it by you guys. I want to get your opinion on this. My thought is, so Hall of Presidents in Disney world, let's pretend they used to do it because watching the Muppets do American history outside in Liberty Square, I remember I was so excited to see it and we walked through and one was starting and I turned around, my wife said,

[00:09:40] why are you crying?

[00:09:41] Like it's so good, it's so good.

[00:09:45] Yeah.

[00:10:42] we have a

[00:10:43] Blinken, right? So you want to replace it with something similar to that like where it's a it's a it's an animatronic

[00:10:50] human

[00:10:52] Historical figure sure do you because I think so go to that

[00:10:57] Yeah, that is true for like me and Dan. I don't know that's true

[00:11:02] I go to it because I like being in there, but I, I don't know. I don't know. I'm putting it out there. You know what? We can we can come back to it if you guys want. We can we can mothball the very elaborate statues of presidents and that's like putting

[00:12:23] cartoon characters. I've heard of that. Sometimes I leave before I finish the pot and then I have to make more coffee at work. That's basically it. When did you get a to-go cup? Or a thermos is what it's also called. No, no, no, I bring a thermos of coffee to work, but I have coffee at home and then I fill my thermos and there's usually enough coffee left

[00:13:41] to make this particular drink.

[00:13:43] Okay. Well, hey, look, man.

[00:13:44] It's very precise.

[00:13:46] It sounds really precise

[00:13:47] and that's what I really appreciate. was part of that original Wed group with names like Harper Goff, Bill Cottrell around him. They had offices above the Main Street City Hall when the park opened, which kind of makes more sense as to why Walt's apartment was located on the other side of that building. This I didn't know there were there were Wed office buildings above City Hall.

[00:15:01] That's the dream. That's the dream is not I don't know what's up there now. I should ask what's up there now, but probably storage. No one wigs. It's the wig department. Can you imagine being the dude who has the office and say, how long it's my office now? It's like, everyone would be so mad at you. Oh yeah.

[00:16:20] But anyway, I thought that was fascinating.

[00:16:21] I didn't know that.

[00:16:22] I had no idea that there were offices right there. Saloon and whatever. And you can hear all those things. That was Bill's bill worked on that. Bill did the layout for the Pirates of the Caribbean and haunted mansion tracks. Both of those he laid out. Bill contributed to bear countries. Somehow. I'm not really entirely sure on that. He did the layout for the submarine ride for the motorboat ride for the monorail.

[00:17:40] He was responsible for weaving the monorail through the Autopia area,

[00:17:44] doing that whole layout.

[00:17:46] He was responsible for the Matterhorn layout. No, I mean, I'll tell you, but I just didn't know. Well, yeah, yeah. It's some sort of optical effect inside a building and. Dating back to at least the 1600s, camera obscuras are basically a pinhole camera that you would use to view a solar eclipse without burning your retinas out. The name comes from the Latin words for dark,

[00:19:01] which is obscura and room, which is camera.

[00:19:04] In the 1700s and 1800s,

[00:19:06] the camera obscura. Under the blanket, it's because you need dark and room to get the light just right. You need too much light will kill your view and it'll just, it'll ruin the image. Okay. This ties in perfectly with the window that I'm not allowed to talk about tonight.

[00:20:22] George K. Whitney, I'm sorry.

[00:20:24] Literally, there's a camera obsc degree view around the building. Light enters the building via an angled mirror and the metal hood. It then passes through a lens and is projected onto a parabolic white table in a black room. So this camera would be constantly rotating atop the castle, showing folks down at the bottom in a dark room, basically an aerial view of the park.

[00:21:41] Wow.

[00:21:43] Okay. Right. I'm going of long quotes from Bill here, so bear with me. He says, quote, we were walking back to the animation building from Bob Matley's, and Matley was a special effects guy at Disneyland, so maybe his office or something. And Walt says to me, you know, Evan Earl thinks that the castle turrets

[00:23:00] should be different colors,

[00:23:01] orange and black and pink and red and purple and yellow.

[00:23:04] What do you think about that?

[00:23:06] I said that they should all be blue like Slate. The guy was gone. Walt didn't know. Walt didn't like that hard sell kind of talk. Walt appreciated flexibility from his people, and he usually knew in the back of his mind what he wanted. If you can't do it this way, brother, I don't know how it's going to get done. Peace gone. Wow. Yep. I wonder who that was and where they went to, because what a good story.

[00:24:23] I got fired from Walt Disney for trying to hard sell my ideas.

[00:24:26] Yeah. No. and all the Disney characters went running out into the hub. I was back there inside the castle off camera. We had quite a scare at the beginning. I think it was the day before. There was a small gas leak somewhere under the castle and there were a few little blue flames along the base of the structure in the courtyard opposite Merlin's Magic Shop.

[00:25:40] You know, the park was built so fast

[00:25:42] that they laid down a lot of cable and pipes without records. things, planting trees, you know, doing landscaping stuff, which is what he was doing. Busts a gas main. There's blue flames shooting at the outside of the castle. They're trying to fix it. Here comes Bill Martin just smoking a pipe going, what's up, boy? Wow. Oh no. That was great, man. What a good story. As bad as things were on opening day,

[00:27:02] it could have been worse. It could have not happened. Yeah. Yeah. You burned down the point of interest is that when Toads opened, it had the team sort of created this vibe. Now we think of dark rides as having black lights. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Guests waiting in line were treated to the confusing lyrics

[00:29:40] of the Marilee song and the enthusiastic voice

[00:29:43] of Mr. Toad himself provided by Eric Blore,

[00:29:47] the voice actor't work well.

[00:31:01] I mean, look at the Snow White ride.

[00:31:03] I think Pinocchio's Journey did that too. So probably talking about U-turn. Yeah. However, according to Bill, going through the devil's mouth into hell was just fine by Walt. Right, so that's perfectly fine for children and the elderly. Yeah, hey, this is where you're gonna be in about five years, gramps. Don't worry about it. You're used to it now. Which is funny because, you know, there's a lot of people online going like, oh, I don't know, Walt, you're going through hell?

[00:32:22] What kind of ride is this for Disneyland?

[00:32:24] Whatever.

[00:32:25] Walt said that was great.

[00:32:27] He thought it was awesome.

[00:32:28] Loved it. that's buy them and bring them in. Yeah. The original Fantasyland featured canvas tent facades attached to the outside of each of the buildings and Toads was no exception. So you look at these older pictures, you know, up until 83 and just the look like a medieval jousting tent. Yeah. They look weird, honestly, but I guess it kind of fits,

[00:33:42] you know, the vibe of the time or whatever.

[00:33:44] I guess, yeah.

[00:33:45] Yeah.

[00:33:46] And it's cheap and easy to do.

[00:33:47] Right.

[00:33:48] Yeah, I mean, there can be, pieces of information to work with in designing this track layout. So they're going, okay, we're going with arrow. This is what you have to work with. Design me a ride before you have all the information. Here's what he had. He had the minimum turning radius of the cars, which was four feet. And he had the overall length of ride time, which was a minute, 38

[00:35:00] seconds. And he had the overall building square Wow. Yeah, wow. It took a long time. I don't know. You know what I mean?

[00:36:20] 11 seconds?

[00:36:21] Yeah, 11 seconds.

[00:36:23] So you have 11 seconds to like load the car,

[00:36:25] into the car, load the car, and then shoot it out.

[00:36:27] I don't know.

[00:36:28] Doesn't it sound like a long time? backwards slightly in order to help that crazy feeling of the ride by shifting your perspective a bit while on it. Okay. This also allows that small guide wheel in the front to ride a single rail on the floor. Each vehicle has a one quarter horsepower electric motor drawing power from the rail beneath its wheels.

[00:37:41] The cars are all named individually as Mr. Toad, right? Yeah, for sure. And they added a lot of the stuff they were able to because they knew way more about what they were doing and how to build a ride that was exciting at this point before they didn't really know what they were doing. But now it's like, oh, we could add this and that would be a good gag. And now that everything's here, I think it's settled in and then now we know what we're working with. Like the cops in the ride, they were put in there

[00:39:01] to add a little bit of level of excitement.

[00:39:03] Like you're fleeing the police, right?

[00:39:05] Since we're supposed to have broken out of prison.

[00:39:07] So we should be probably being chased somehow in Orlando, Florida in 1971, a new version of the ride debuted with dual tracks offering slightly different experiences, but still the same core experience. Friend of the show, Rolly Crump was asked to design this ride and it was his idea to not only split the rides and have two running at the same time to eat more people, but it was his idea to make each one of them different. So you never knew which one you were going to get.

[00:40:24] That's cool. Yeah. News of the Disney World Ride's potential closure

[00:41:42] first leaked in 1997, when inside sources revealed

[00:41:46] to the Orlando Resort's Halloween episode

[00:43:01] and heard about the story of Jeff Moscott, like the main guy behind all of these efforts.

[00:43:07] You need to go there. pre-addressed to the company were made available to download. Fans, how progressive for 1997. Yeah. Download this postcard, man. Fans could order t-shirts depicting a dead J. Thaddeus Toad on the front and message on the back reading. Ask me why Mickey is killing Mr. Toad. Wow. The online campaign eventually spilled into the real world.

[00:44:21] In May 1998, a plane flew over Disney World, dragging a banner that said,

[00:44:25] save Mr. Toad's wild ride next pleading postcards and letters mailed to Disney officials, Mr. Toad appears to be roadkill. A year long internet and mail campaign to persuade Walt Disney World to keep Mr. Toad while ride apparently wasn't enough, or so say Mr. Toad's champions, who claimed the ride will be closed forever, September 8th and replaced with a Winnie the Pooh attraction.

[00:45:43] The Save the Toad campaign is a strange twist

[00:45:46] on a David versus Goliath fight found a toad hall similar to the full-size toad hall at Disneyland, but this wasn't a ride. It was and still is a counter service restaurant. In keeping with Mr. Toad's setting in England, the restaurant features English fish and chips. And that's basically it. But back to the ending of the ride, after you're found guilty of having motor mania or whatever, and you presumably escape

[00:47:01] jail, you're racing around, you're hit by a train. You get distracted,, you broke some barrels like geez, man. Well, all I can tell you is I distinctly remember the first time I rode this ride. I still remember. Being in that car with my sister and heading toward that train and screaming, and it was it left.

[00:48:21] This is that Walt Disney World, and it, she brings up toad. Then they decided to go to Disneyland.

[00:49:41] And this little girl's like, Oh my God, we can ride toad now.

[00:49:44] This is going to be amazing. way in hell that Alice would ever be able to go on this ride. She would freak out. Didn't we take her when we went when she was like two? I haven't been on that ride in so long. No, no. Yeah, I mean, it's it's a lot. It's a lot. It's it's a lot. But Walt's worried about the the elderly, you know. Yeah. But like, I think that's interesting.

[00:51:02] Yeah. And I mean, we everybody. That was a wild ride. Like I said, there's not a ton of information because it's basically since 1983, it's sort of just been the same. Yeah. But that's all you need. And even before that, they didn't even change it much. Yeah, I mean, they added like new gags and then like some figures, but I think that's what lends to the charm. Yeah. Those plywood flats, you know,

[00:52:20] just like the poo ride kind of in Greta country

[00:52:24] for the most part.

[00:52:25] That's why I like that ride.

[00:52:26] Well, it's not complicated.

[00:52:27] It's do that. We'll come back. We'll do the window. We'll get out of here and then we'll jump over to the secret show. Do some news. So hang on, everyone. It's ears up. We'll be right back. And now back to the show that ignites your dream wish of imaginations

[00:53:43] and magical color.

[00:53:44] Wonderment of forever.

[00:53:46] You're thanks for sticking around, everybody. and year round favorites like hell or high watermelon, hell or high mango, back in black if you can find it, which is a black IPA, which is probably the only, one of the only black IPAs that I like. I haven't seen very many at all lately other than that. Yeah, no, it went away. And even back in black went seasonal because it's just not really like in demand anymore,

[00:55:00] which is fine because a lot of people, it's okay.

[00:55:04] Here we go, soapbox.

[00:55:05] Beer rant Hell yeah. Looking forward to it and you can too. So anyway, check them out 21st amendment. Ask wherever you find good craft beer. Ask for the 2-1A if you haven't tried to eat in it yet and it'll do you right. All right, Eric, what window do you got? We've got George K. Whitney Jr. this time.

[00:56:20] George was born in 1922.

[00:56:23] He was the son of one of the Whitney brothers.

[00:56:26] Oh, sure.

[00:56:27] Yeah.

[00:56:28] Yeah, you know the Whitney brothers. of revolutionary things, they moved back to America and opened up Playland at the beach along Ocean Beach, which is apparently the name of a well-known beach in the San Francisco area. That's right. It is. Very cold in Ocean Beach. Yes, it's not like the beach that you think about.

[00:57:41] Yeah, it's a northern beach. Basically, yeah.

[00:58:43] It is said bingo origins can be traced back to 1530. Yeah.

[00:58:44] As low, low Guijo del Lotto d'Italia, which is the Italian lotto, the original name of

[00:58:52] bingo.

[00:58:53] Wow.

[00:58:54] Oh, that's great.

[00:58:56] So now, now I hate bingo.

[00:58:58] Well, look, everybody's gotta gotta pretend like they invented something.

[00:59:02] Yeah.

[00:59:03] And the early twenties, for sure. Excellent.

[01:00:20] Well, I basically wrote that these people will know what I'm talking about.

[01:00:24] Yes.

[01:00:25] They'll fill in the blanks. He was the only member of Disney's original team who had practical amusement park experience. Wow. Famously, Walt Disney didn't want to make an amusement park. He hated amusement parks apparently. But he needed somebody who actually knew how to make like lines and things that people

[01:01:40] would walk to.

[01:01:41] Yeah, it's like he knew that he could make a better amusement park.

[01:01:46] But just by making it look like a movie set.

[01:01:48] Right. to 1958 as the theme parks director of ride operations. After he left Disney, he took some Disneyland ideas back to the Whitney Parks. So he went back to the family business. There you go. He changed some old dark rides to new dark rides

[01:03:00] and basically worked for the company for years

[01:03:04] as the company kind of devolved.

[01:03:07] He and his sister ended up inheriting So the World's Fair in Seattle as Century 21's Concessions and Amusement Division Director. This is a World's Fair that Walt went up to visit in the 60s to kind of see what they were doing. He was impressed at how many visitors the World's Fairs would pull through. And he, Walt described the fair as pretty nice, but too small.

[01:04:21] Sure.

[01:04:22] Okay.

[01:04:23] Yeah, why not?

[01:04:24] All right. Children. Now, George's window on Main Street is right above the market house. And it reads George Whitney, George, abbreviated GEO period. George Whitney guns. Guns. OK. It's been there since the park opened. But why guns?

[01:05:41] Been there since the park opened.

[01:05:43] What was he the first window?

[01:05:45] He was one of the first windows. The Golden Gate NRA is a national recreation area, a beautiful and protected national park, spanning 82,000 acres. No, it's because he was an armament specialist in World War II, and they probably joked around about guns. I don't really know. The man was in charge of guns in World War II. What a child-like fascination with things that go bang.

[01:07:03] I can write literally anything, probably, on this window.

[01:07:06] Nobody would ever know. Like right before he died. Let's see. So September 6th 2002 is when they did the interview and he died. I already lost it September 25th Wow before he died these totally killed him. Yes, they killed him with a three-hour interview Geez, I almost did that's Josh freeze

[01:09:22] and the Cliff's houses and yeah. It's so weird doing these shows

[01:09:24] and like really trying to pull out good information

[01:09:28] because you sort of go down rabbit holes.

[01:09:31] And one of the ones that I just remembered now,

[01:09:34] I posted in Discord when I was doing research for my show

[01:09:37] about the prefabricated building and the Soleil or whatever.

[01:09:44] It led me down this path to find out That was very, very interesting. Yeah. All right, we are gonna get out of here, everybody. We're gonna have a, we're gonna pop over to the secret show. If you are listening live right now, that link is in Patreon already. If you're not listening live, you can go to Patreon and watch the video if you want, but you can just, you know, get the podcast or whatever too. That'll be up, you know, soon, whenever.

[01:11:00] Sure.

[01:11:01] Free things to do now.

[01:11:01] Free pod to edit.

[01:11:02] But anyways, that's beside the point.

[01:11:04] Thank you everybody for tuning in.

[01:11:06] I appreciate it.

[01:11:07] Thank you to Sully at the 21st Amendment