Tag Archives: Cars Land

The Walt Disney Company has been quickly working on a replacement for the ill-fated Luigi’s Flying Tires attraction which opened with Cars Land at Disney California Adventure in 2012, and closed permanently in February this year. It doesn’t happen too terribly often, but once in a while, Disney does have a misfire with attractions for any number of reasons. We saw it happen with Rocket Rods in Tomorrowland (May 1998 – September 2000), and before that, the predecessor of Luigi’s Flying Tires – the Flying Saucers (August 1961 – August 1966).

As curious as it may be (and yeah – there’s always been a lot of head scratching over this one), Walt Disney Imagineering pushed forward with the Flying Tires concept – a charge reportedly led internally by John Lasseter, Principal Creative Advisor for WDI – regardless of the fact that arguably the finest Imagineers of all time couldn’t get the smaller, earlier version of the attraction to ever operate adequately in the ’60s. Typically, you duplicate and plus successful attractions – however, the story goes that John had very fond memories of the Flying Saucers at Disneyland as a child and so, he insisted on a bigger, bulkier (heavier) design for Cars Land. As predicted, the bigger, slower brother of Disneyland’s Flying Saucers attraction opened and closed with little fanfare at Disney California Adventure – the minute we took our first lackluster ride when Cars Land opened, we knew without a doubt that the clock was ticking for Luigi’s Flying Tires; the writing was on the wall.