The Second Sense: The Music of Tomorrowland

Quick! What's the first thing you think of in association with the phrase “Disneyland music”?

If you're like most people...uh...probably nothing, actually. Most people are not familiar enough with Disneyland to have an automatic response to that phrase. But if you're in the minority that are, then you probably instantly thought of “Yo Ho” or “It's a Small World (After All)” or “Grim Grinning Ghosts.” Or “In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Room.” Maybe “Baroque Hoedown,” which wasn't composed for Disneyland but is almost exclusively known as the Main Street Electrical Parade theme.

In any case, it probably won't be something from Tomorrowland that pops into your head. It's not that the area has no music to call its own—on the contrary, it has lots, both now and in the past. It's more that Tomorrowland's unique melodies have been progressively downplayed over the years as more IP has moved in, bringing its own accompanying soundtracks. It's been nearly fifteen years since any new compositions were created for Tomorrowland, but fortunately, there's a lot of good stuff to hear if you know where to listen!

(And a lot more to be found on Disneyland retrospective albums and in niche collections!)

First, The Classics

“Disneyland music” may not call up Tomorrowland tunes for most of us, but “Tomorrowland music” definitely has something to it. I think there are three tunes we fans associate with “classic” Tomorrowland, and all three originated with the 1967 “World on the Move” remodel. These are “There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” (the theme song for the Carousel of Progress, unofficially adopted as a general Tomorrowland anthem), “Miracles From Molecules” (the theme song for Adventure Thru Inner Space), and “Nation on Wheels,” which is colloquially known as “The Monorail Song” despite the fact that a) it's not a song (it's an instrumental piece) and b) it's not about the Disneyland Monorail as such.

No, the Nation on Monorail Wheels Song was used in various Disneyland TV episodes and specials to accompany footage of several transportation-themed rides. To make matters that much more confusing, another version of the piece was recorded in the Nineties as part of the “Tomorrowland 2055” concept, and this version might just have “The Monorail Song” as its official title. It's hard to say one way or another since “Monorail Song” is bandied about so often.

The “old Tomorrowland” piece I find myself listening to the most often, however, is “Mysteries of the Atom,” another instrumental that, as you might guess from the title, was also part of Inner Space. It played in the queue and did a lot to set the tone for the ride without being quite as eerie and tense as the ride music itself.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a handy link for my readers.

“Welcome to Tomorrowland” and Area Music

I don't think Tomorrowland had an area music loop prior to the 1998 refurbishment—at least, nothing claiming to be one has surfaced in all my years of collecting this stuff. It certainly has one now, though it can be hard to pick out over the crowd noise, especially in congested areas of the walkways. Here it is for your listening enjoyment:

You'll notice some familiar melodies in there—my records show six tracks which refer to various Tomorrowland attractions past, present, and/or in other parks, including the main three mentioned above—but the rest are entirely original compositions created just for this purpose. What's interesting to me is the track that's missing...missing from the loop, but not from the canon of Tomorrowland music. “Welcome to Tomorrowland” tends to be included on Disneyland Resort soundtrack albums even though it was never used in the park itself. I honestly have no idea why it's not part of the loop—it's not as if it had to be shortened for time considerations!

I like this loop and its exiled track, not just because of my fondness for music crafted specifically to be part of an area loop, but because I think it does an excellent job of summing up Tomorrowland as it has evolved over time. The synthetic instrumentation and mellow, vaguely New-Agey vibe of the original compositions sound generically futuristic, while the re-use of tunes from Tomorrowland's history pays tribute to the area's roots. The only reference to IP in the loop is “Strange Things,” which is from Toy Story, but isn't the song that became emblematic of the whole franchise and was put in the loop more to evoke a ride—Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin and its later Disneyland equivalent Buzz Lightyear's Astro-Blasters—than the Toy Story brand.

And on top of that, it's completely unique—no other Tomorrowland uses it, just Anaheim's. So yeah. Good stuff. Definitely worth adding to your Disneyland music collection even if you don't normally collect area loops.

“The Droid Rooms”

One of the many problems with the IP takeover of the theme parks is that we don't get original compositions for attractions anymore—the sound engineers just re-use movie soundtracks and call it a day. That may be starting to change—an all-new orchestral piece for Galaxy's Edge has been revealed—but then again, Galaxy's Edge is a Star Wars project, and there was already a precedent for Star Wars projects to offer new music all the way back in 1987. “The Droid Rooms” is a bouncy piece created for the queue of the original Star Tours, framed as something the G2 droids were listening to on the radio, although it oddly paralleled the happenings in the room itself as the droids were reprimanded via loudspeaker for slacking off and then de-powered in order to have their programming refreshed. It's been making the rounds on theme park soundtracks for ages, but since it was removed when the ride was retooled for Star Tours 2.0, not everyone might be familiar with it:

Space Mountain

First things first: A lot of what's going around labeled “Space Mountain Music” or “Space Mountain Theme” is actually from Walt Disney World, even if it says it's from Disneyland. Disneyland's Space Mountain didn't have any music until 1996, when sponsorship by Federal Express came packaged with a bangin' surf rock cover of Camille Saint-Saens's “Aquarium,” arranged by the late lamented Dick Dale:

I will never figure out why they decided this was the sound to go with for an outer space-themed roller coaster, but heck if it didn't work like gangbusters. Oddly enough, it lasted for less than a decade before the ride was extensively refurbed for the Fiftieth Anniversary and got a new soundtrack, this time by Michael Giacchino:

(If it sounds a little James Bond-esque, that's likely because Giacchino was fresh from his work on The Incredibles, which deliberately homaged the Bond films in its soundtrack.)

But Wait There's More! Space Mountain has an entire area loop associated with it, or rather with its immediate environs, the Space Mountain Concourse. This loop, also installed in 1996 and played up until a couple years ago when Hyperspace Mountain mucked up the theming, is sometimes referred to as “Tomorrowland 2055” after an unused concept for a Tomorrowland remodel, and consists of a mix of original compositions and re-used tracks from classic Tomorrowland attractions and also—oddly enough—pieces from the original entrance gate loop for EPCOT Center. This is, of course, entirely valid, since most of the pieces reference attractions in FutureWorld, and FutureWorld is just Tomorrowland writ large—even the names follow the same template of “Not-Yet Realm.”

The most interesting track in the loop has to be the orchestral version of “We Are Here to Change the World,” which was of course the big song in Captain EO. The weirdest? A ten-second rendition of a single verse of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” No, really.

“Magic Highways”

I'll close this post with a brief look at the last original song—not instrumental, but song, with lyrics—to be composed for Tomorrowland: “Magic Highways,” the theme song for the failed experiment known as Rocket Rods.

There's no doubt but that the Rocket Rods were a hack job—too cheaply constructed to last, constantly breaking down, scrapped after a mere two years of very spotty operation—but I kinda liked some of the stuff in the queue. They repurposed the CircleVision screens for a show about all the Zeerusty ways in which people have imagined what future transportation might be like. Another room contained several old Tomorrowland vehicles, displayed alongside their own construction plans and painted with neon orange lines so that they appeared to be the plans leaping into fully-formed reality.

And there was a song. It was more for atmosphere than message, but the repeating refrain of “In a world of creativity/There's no end to the possibilities” made it a clear spiritual successor to the likes of “There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” And let me tell you, there were points during that long, looooooooong wait where the darkness and abstracted imagery of the queue combined with the droning chords and wordless chorale bridge of the song to create a feeling of being sucked along a futuristic tunnel toward the exciting unknown.

And if that's not the sort of thing that Tomorrowland should be striving for, then I don't know what is. Say what you will about how disappointing the Rocket Rods turned out to be...at least it got that part exactly right and brought things full circle.