After-Action Report: Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

Here's how you can tell when a Disney theme park ride is really successful: It outlives its source material in the public's esteem. This can only occur under specific circumstances. Firstly, the source material has to become obscure despite a) having been well-regarded enough at one point to be adapted into a ride and b) having the ride around to reinforce it for millions of vacationers each year. Secondly, the ride has to be good enough to draw queues despite losing the power of brand name recognition.

As you can imagine, it doesn't happen very often. You can probably count the genuine instances on one hand. Splash Mountain is the big one, due to being a unique thrill ride based on a movie that is not just obscure by mainstream standards but actually banned. But let's not overlook Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, whose inspiring movie is hardly any more known these days. I mean, when was the last time you watched it?* As for how it survives despite its source material falling off the radar, the ride concept—joyriding around various parts of old-timey England in an old-timey horseless carriage—pretty much speaks for itself.

But I think there's more to it than that. I have been known, in passing, to use the word “transgressive” in regard to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, without going into any details. But how else to describe it? I can't think of another Fantasyland-style dark ride that breaks the mold the way this one does. The usual methodology for plotting out one of these things is to take scenes from the movie and rebuild them physically so guests can ride through. They don't always get the perspective right, but as a rule, you can hop on a dark ride and see events you remember from the movie.

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride...does not do that. It kind of does the opposite, in fact. It focuses on events that drive the plot of the movie** but actually occurred off-screen.*** The ride has been around forever and we take it for granted, but it's pretty bizarre when you think about it. We must consider that when Disneyland opened, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad was only six years old, well remembered by the public. Did it seem at all weird to 1950s guests that the other Fantasyland dark rides were fairly straightforward recreations and then this one was...well...fanfiction?

The term didn't exist yet in the Fifties, but that's exactly what this ride is. It's fanfiction. Official fanfiction, so to speak. Now, fanfiction tends to get a bad rap in the mainstream, what with consisting of 90% utter drek written by hormone-addled adolescents who have little no grasp of plot or characterization or sometimes even spelling. But it's not uniformly horrible. There's nothing stopping someone with a decent story sense and the ability to string sentences together from posting to the same websites as the hacks, and yes...one of the uses for fanfiction is filling in a gap left in the original work.

Even there, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride takes liberties. We can be pretty certain he did not, in the context of the film, joyride through his own manor house with his friends present, or they would not have been so shocked to learn of his arrest afterward. This goes beyond the restructuring of events that is common in dark rides in order to bring across a dominant mood. This is more of a what-if scenario—what if the wild ride had encompassed this much geography? We get to explore Toad's world while inhabiting Toad's devil-may-care mindset.

“Say, Dilettante,” I hear you interject, “speaking of devils, are you ever going to get to...?”

Okay. You've been good.

All of the above is not, of course, what makes this ride really transgressive. Not by a long shot. It sends you to Hell, people. It may not be intended as a literal event, but there's nothing figurative about the portrayal—it's a stereotypical, fire-and-brimstone, demons-with-pitchforks Hell.

Yikes...in isolation, this is actually pretty terrifying.

This scene is a straight-up fabrication, nothing to do with anything in the movie. So why is it there? To end the ride with a bang? Some sort of Hays Code insistence on making sure wrongdoers are seen to be punished? To see how far they could push the envelope, content-wise? In any case, the sheer audacity of its infernal finale (infernale?) is surely a factor in the ride's success.

It also distinguishes the ride utterly from the movie that inspired it. The idea that attractions based on movies must be distinct from their source material in order to justify their existence as attractions, is one of my firmest Imagineering Theory beliefs, and it doesn't get much more distinct than making up scenes out of whole cloth, completely unique to the ride. The interesting thing in this case, of course, is that few people remember the movie well enough to realize how much the ride departs from it.

What else does Mr. Toad's Wild Ride do differently? Well, there's the way it begins. Most dark rides have a stark visual separation between the load area and the ride proper, so that nothing is spoiled ahead of time for those in the queue. Pinocchio's Daring Journey gives you a brief glimpse of the first show scene every time a car heads off—

—but I can't think of another ride, besides Toad, that whisks its cars out of sight and then brings them back into view of the queue for a moment before sending them off again.

Even better, the fireplace you're supposedly crashing through isn't visible from the ride vehicle. That entire image—the car bursting out from behind the hearth, right through the flames, scattering embers across the floor—is for the benefit of the people still waiting in line. Now that's how to get people excited for something whose tie-in IP they may never even have heard of.

So what's my point? What is the thesis of this post? I guess it's simply that Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is a very good ride, unique in many ways, and that if Disney is considering ripping it out on the grounds that nobody knows who Mr. Toad is anymore, they should cut that crap out right now, and not just because they don't even have the excuse of needing someplace to put their Winnie The Pooh ride.**** What could you replace Toad with? I don't mean that in the sentimental sense but in a wholly practical one—is there even enough space to build a different ride in that footprint under current OSHA regulations? How much renovation could you do to that part of that building without jeopardizing parts of the Alice in Wonderland track?

Besides. As I mentioned at the start of this post, creating a ride that outlives its source material is a rare feat. Don't throw this one away just because it doesn't have Splash Mountain's level of popularity.

* And no, sitting through the Headless Horseman bit at Halloween doesn't count.

** Well, half a movie.

*** Which, come to think of it, is a mark against the film. Seriously, the meat of the plot is kicked off by Toad's joyride, and we don't even get to witness it? No wonder nobody watches this thing anymore.

**** Shout-out to the Orlando crowd: Even years later, I am truly sorry for you.