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This article is all too short, but it left me wanting to know more about this opening day where so many things went wrong. My favorite bit: "Nearly all of the
by Stratoscope 7y ago
This article is all too short, but it left me wanting to know more about this opening day where so many things went wrong.
My favorite bit: "Nearly all of the 36 cars on the Autopia, which Disney envisioned as a utopian miniature freeway on which children would learn respectful rules of the road, were wrecked by aggressive drivers who crashed into other vehicles."
We've never seen this happen anywhere else, have we?
- hodgesrm 7y ago> "The stagecoach ride in Frontierland was discontinued after it proved too top-heavy and prone to flipping over." This one caught my fancy. Did they discover the behavior by trial and error?
- Animats 7y agoScaling. Classic stagecoach designs are extremely stable; I've seen someone drift them at a rodeo. Disney's original stagecoaches were undersized and with full sized people the center of gravity was too high. There's a mention of this in "The Hollywood Posse", by Diana Serra Cary, which is about cowboy stunt riders.
- joezydeco 7y agoBob Gurr was the Disney engineer responsible for Autopia. He chronicled a bunch of amazing stories about the history of his work on an old Disney blog, but it looks like it was collected into a book and the blog articles were pulled down. https://www.yesterland.com/bobgurr.html https://www.yesterland.com/bobgurr.html