Big Thunder Mountain Railroad

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is the first roller coaster I ever went on. I don’t know why Dad took us. I’ve come to believe it’s likely because our 1982 visit would’ve been our first after Disney abolished the ticket system, and my parents didn’t have to balance Dad’s taking us with him—my mother may well have never ridden a roller coaster in her life—against using the tickets for something we’d enjoy as a family. I can categorically say that we did not enjoy it as a family, though I do like it as an adult. It’s just, you know, I was five at the time, probably.

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was Disney’s third coaster. Its first was the Matterhorn, the only one built during Walt’s lifetime. He had a vague idea of Space Mountain (shockingly, I haven’t written about it yet), but there was no room and then he died and what with one thing and another, it had only been open for a couple of years by the point at which Big Thunder opened. While Disney World’s Space Mountain predates Disneyland’s, Disneyland’s Big Thunder opened a year before Disney World’s, on the location that had previously been the Mine Trail Through Nature’s Wonderland. (No, I haven’t done that, either.)

The concept, which you don’t have to know, is that a mining town was built on sacred Native land. We’ll go with the Disneyland version; all four parks with a Big Thunder have slightly different stories. But at Disneyland, it was the town of Rainbow Ridge, a callback to the site’s previous attraction. And when the mountain was desecrated, the town was destroyed by earthquake. Never mind that a lot of mining towns were and came back; in this case, take the curse that finished the job as read. It probably doesn’t help that you are riding a ghost train.

Disney Imagineer Marc Davis had been working on a concept for a Western River Expedition pavilion for Disney World. This was deemed to expensive, but the roller coaster developed for it by Tony Baxter and Bill Watkins was I guess deemed worth it. It became one of the first computer-aided designs in a Disney park. The ride was designed to look as though it was actually built on a mountain instead of having a mountain built around the tracks, though what the mountain itself looks like depends on where you are, with that being another thing that varies from park to park. Disneyland looks more like Bryce Canyon, whereas the other four look more like Monument Valley.

The Disney roller coasters are generally more sedate than the ones you’d find sixty miles away and across a county and a half at Magic Mountain. Or even just up the road at Knott’s Berry Farm. There are no loops here. No gimmicks at all, really; Space Mountain, being inside and all, is more gimmicky than Big Thunder. This is a ride that’s as much about ambiance, if that’s not too weird to say about a coaster. It’s fast, but it’s not just about giving you the biggest thrill possible.

All of which gives you time to admire several ways in which it pays tribute to its predecessor. Disney isn’t always great about their own history; some of it, they ignore, and some of it, they hide. Articles in which I mention this are too numerous to link to here. So it’s nice that the town of Rainbow Ridge, which for years overlooked Nature’s Wonderland, has for long decades continued to overlook Big Thunder Mountain in the same place. There are animatronics, call-outs, and indeed the very name of the attraction itself. Big Thunder was a large waterfall in Nature’s Wonderland, almost as far back as when the park opened. It’s a nice bit of continuity.