Sentimental Paleontology: These Were Snowflakes

Once upon a time, Monsanto was the good guy. Hard as it may be to believe in an age where they are perhaps best known for inventing scary Frankenfood crops and then suing small family farms out of existence for the crime of happening to be located downwind of them, there was a time when they were mostly associated with neat stuff. Astroturf, for instance. “Space Age” fabrics. And, most dramatically of all, Disneyland attractions. Monsanto sponsored no fewer than four Tomorrowland attractions at various points during the park's first fifteen years.

Most fans have heard of the House of the Future, that marvelous 100% synthetic dwelling (located where Pixie Hollow is today) that had to be dismantled with blowtorches because the wrecking ball bounced right off it. Fewer have heard of Fashions and Fabrics Through the Ages, a much less ambitious exhibit that didn't last long. It was located right next to the Hall of Chemistry, which was actually the first Monsanto attraction, going right back to Opening Day. The two neighbors closed in September 1966—the chemical engineering giant had bigger and better plans for the building they occupied. On August 5, 1967, there debuted something special. Something amazing. An actual ride, this time, instead of the mere walk-throughs the company had sponsored before.

It was once my favorite ride. It was also the first ride I lost.

Adventure Thru Inner Space.

It can be hard to explain, to people too young to remember it, just how compelling this ride was. They've been spoiled by the extraordinary quality of Inner Space's surviving contemporaries (Pirates of the Caribbean opened earlier the same year, the Haunted Mansion two years later) and the fast-paced thrills of the coaster era that followed. Drifting slowly past increasingly large models of snowflakes and atoms doesn't strike them as terribly impressive. If they're familiar with the ride's soundtrack, they might snicker at the melodrama of Paul Frees's running narration (“Can I possibly survive?”) and the cornball cheeriness of the theme song, “Miracles From Molecules.” A simple blow-by-blow of the ride's “plot” and effects is unlikely to convince them. (If that's what you're after, others have done it before me.)

Maybe nothing will convince them. But it might help to think of Adventure Thru Inner Space not as that chintzy Monsanto snowflake ride, but as the Haunted Mansion—Tomorrowland style!

You enter the attraction building. It's dimly lit, but there are plenty of details to examine while you wait. An unseen narrator—the voice of Paul Frees—speaks to you, introducing you to the nature of the experience ahead without giving away too much. You approach the eggshell-shaped Omnimover ride vehicles, an endless line of them moving at slow but constant speed. A moving walkway allows you to match this speed and climb aboard. The front of the vehicle closes, holding you in place. Your conveyance moves into the darkness, with the disembodied narrator accompanying you. Eerie music plays in the background. The air acquires a chill as you pass by a succession of strange sights—mysterious lights and shapes and floating objects, their significance explained at the discretion of the narrator. Tension mounts. You may be in danger. Then you enter a spacious area with a glowing globe as its focal point. Your attention is riveted to it. After leaving this area, the ride takes on a different tone. The floating entities are more numerous and active now, but the sense of danger has lessened considerably. You enjoy lively music until the ride comes to an end.

Okay, I admit it. I cheated a little. The pacing of the two rides is entirely different. The Mansion's glowing globe—Madam Leota in her crystal ball—is placed at about at the midpoint of the ride, while Inner Space's atomic nucleus was near the end. But the similarities between the two rides are noteworthy. They shared not just a ride system* and a narrator, but a scene designer—Claude Coats, a true master of creepy atmospheres. He set the tone for the first half of the Haunted Mansion (before Leota sets free the ghosts) and the entirety of Inner Space. In both cases, his influence lessens after the pivotal scene with the glowing globe; it's just that in the case of Inner Space, the entire ride is over by that point, whereas the Mansion still has several more minutes to go, now dominated by comical Marc Davis characters.

And make no mistake—Adventure Thru Inner Space was creepy. For most of the ride, you were in near-darkness, haunted (I use that word deliberately) by images of ever-larger ice crystals, by tuneless music and clanging, reverberating chimes, by the increasing desperation of the narrator. Even the dénouement once you left the interior of the oxygen atom was unsettling, with liquid water molecules bouncing around randomly on all sides, and a colossal eye peering at you through a microscope eyepiece.

I was never frightened, as such, by any of it...but the eeriness left its impression on me. It made the whole thing more awe-inspiring. The set pieces were as fantastic as they were scientific. Those giant snowflakes, glittering under the dim bluish light, their branching crystalline spires pointing in every direction, were like something out of a fairy palace. The room with the huge water molecules gave an uncanny impression of being a limbo of pitch-black nothingness with just these few glowing structures covered with whipping electrons floating in it, absent any visible means of support. The rules were different in Inner Space. “The universe of the molecule” was indeed an altogether different universe.

I think, too, that the fact of it being snowflakes we were exploring contributed to the mystique. You might well ask: Why would Monsanto, a leading producer of synthetic chemicals, sponsor a ride centered around something as gloriously natural as snow/water? Some have noted the moderate resemblance of H₂O molecules to Mickey Mouse and suggested that as a motivation on Disney's part, and...okay, maybe. The likeness didn't escape my notice when I was six. I also suppose that maybe Monsanto didn't want one of their proprietary formulas shown off to the public in molecular detail. And it's certain that choosing a very simple compound made it much easier to build the thing than if we were being shot via Omnimover into, say, sugar crystals. Try to imagine rooms full of these:

(Plus, think of what it would do to the script: “Yes...these are sucrose molecules! C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁! Twenty-two hydrogen atoms bonded to a complex framework of twelve carbon atoms and eleven oxygen atoms...” Nowhere near as elegant.)

But there's another reason to choose snowflakes: Disneyland is in Southern California, and most of its guests are locals. Snow, to us, has a semi-mythic status already. It doesn't land in our backyards; at minimum, we have to make a special day trip into the mountains to experience it up close. Most of us never have to worry about shoveling sidewalks or scraping windshields. We see a lot of snow on TV around Christmas time, though. It's a source of pure magic to us—would the soapsuds “snow” sprayed after the holiday fireworks elicit such delight in a theme park located in South Dakota? I think not.

As of September 2 of this year, Adventure Thru Inner Space will have been closed for 30 years. I can't say the closure wasn't justified; by the time of its removal, the ride was usually a walk-on. The effects hadn't aged well and the sets were in poor repair. But no one can say it isn't sorely missed by the older generations of Disneyland fans. Any discussion of it on related message boards brings out nostalgia by the bucketful. Amateur Imagineers designing their own Disneyland often include a version of it whether they ever rode it or not. It even made a surprise appearance in Virtual Magic Kingdom, the MMORPG released for the 50^th Anniversary and targeted at children.** In the course of writing this, I've spent a lot of brainpower on the thought: If only I could ride it again...just once more...

Being three decades in the past makes Inner Space maddeningly inaccessible. To the best of my knowledge, unlike many other Disney attractions past and present, no high-quality video footage of the ride has survived. A few handfuls of decent photos have surfaced, but all the video making the rounds is mediocre at best. The darkness and use of projections inside the ride made it fiendishly difficult to capture on film without badly spoiling the effects, especially with the cameras and video recorders of the time. The audio dimension of the ride is readily available—Disneyland has released the soundtrack in various forms and, the Internet being what it is, the files get around—but the visual dimension is much harder to come by. Even the memories grow more dreamlike as time passes, exacerbated by the fact that the whole thing was pretty dreamlike to begin with.

Or maybe that's just me. See, here's the thing. If I am completely honest with myself, my literal, first-person memories of Adventure Thru Inner Space—as opposed to re-exposure long after the fact via things like the released soundtrack or published photos—are incomplete. Only a few phrases of the ride narration stuck with me throughout my life. Most of the ride scenes are in place and fairly accurate, but I somehow lost the climactic scene with the atomic nucleus and “galaxy” of electrons. I was only eight when it closed...if it had been allowed to hang on just a little longer, would I have a better first-hand mental picture of it? Circumstantial evidence suggests so: I vividly remember America Sings, which closed a scant few years later in 1988.

I feel deprived of Adventure Thru Inner Space in a way that doesn't apply to other beloved extinct attractions. It vanished just as I was really starting to get it. And what landed in that cushy spot just inside the Tomorrowland gates was...Star Tours. In this post, I listed my reasons, personal and otherwise, for being opposed to the “Star Wars Land” concept, but now I think I missed one: The presence of Star Wars in Disneyland serves as a constant reminder of the day my fascinating snowflakes and atoms were taken away from me.

But I don't want to end this post on such a sour note, so here's something good. No, not good...magnificent. It's fairly common knowledge at this point, but back in the early years of the 21^st Century, a terrific fan named Steve Wesson went the extra mile marathon and created a complete CG-animated ride-through of Adventure Thru Inner Space. It's not perfectly accurate, but it's astonishingly close, especially given the dearth of good reference images. When it first came out, I dropped twenty bucks on the DVD version, which included the ride-through itself as well as some nice bonus material. But you don't have to, because the ride-through, at least, has been posted to YouTube since 2011. And here it is, in all its glory:

Still not convinced? Well...a video, no matter how well made, will never quite capture the experience of really being there. Maybe you had to be there. Adventure Thru Inner Space was many things. It was simultaneously the last of the “old guard” of Tomorrowland science attractions—you know, that whole “Utopia awaits thanks to the largesse of our benevolent corporate overlords” message—and the first of the “new guard,” where scientific endeavors are fraught with peril. It seamlessly blended hard scientific knowledge with wild flights of fancy. It used the glories of nature as a platform for extolling human artifice, and of course it was itself a splendidly clever work of artifice. It made a colossal spectacle out of the infinitesimal, and in the process rendered the macroscopic quite irrelevant, at least for six minutes or so. All in all, in both style and substance it was inescapably a product of its time. We will not see its like again.

Links:

Steve Wesson's Adventure Thru Inner Space tribute website

Yesterland's entry on Adventure Thru Inner Space

Wikipedia page on the attraction

* In fact, I always noticed that the Atommobiles were identical to the Doom Buggies except for the color. It provided a sort of comforting cross-park continuity, as it were.

** For more information about VMK, see this post.