45 years ago today Mission to Mars opened at theMagic KingdominWalt Disney World. The attraction, which simulated the experience of blasting guests to the red planet, would having an oddly lasting effect on the company, inspiring a poorly received film that in turn would serve as the basis an equally mediocre attraction. And on and on it goes, like the rotation of some huge planet. For some reason (and for many years), its gravitational pull was too great.
In June, 1975, Mission to Mars was first launched. It featured many of the same animatronics and even some of the same footage in the pre-show and ride film, but new elements were made to the show itself, both in terms of effects (inflatable seats would be inflated or deflated, to simulate space travel) and story points (hello, hyperspace travel). In 1975 Mission to Mars was installed in Disneyland too. But by the early 1990s, it was starting to show its age. It lacked the visceral thrills and excitement that modern audiences demanded and much of the science and technology was outdated and creaky. It closed in 1992 in Disneyland and 1993 in Walt Disney World. The mission had come to an end.
Or had it?
Since the late 2000s, Disney had been noodling with the idea of turning some of its beloved theme park attractions into equally beloved big screen events. The test pilot wasTower of Terror, a 1997 horror comedy starringSteve GuttenbergandKirsten Dunstthat aired onWonderful World of Disneyand, more crucially, acted as an 89-minute commercial for The Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror, an innovative attraction that opened at what was then known as Disney-MGM Studios a few years earlier. (Part of the movie was actually filmed at the attraction in Florida. At the time MGM-Studios took pride in the fact that it was a fully operational production studio, even though hardly anything was ever shot there.) The movie was enough of a hit that several other projects inched through development, among them were big screen adaptations ofPirates of the CaribbeanandThe Haunted Mansion, along withDinosaur, an animated film that was using state-of-the-art technology and was being developed alongside an attraction set to open at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Ah, synergy.
But the film that would ultimately make it out of the gate first wasMission to Mars. Part of this had to do with an arms race Disney was having with Warner Bros, who was developing their own Mars-themed project calledRed Planet. (A couple of years earlier Disney had found itself in a similar situation as its ownArmageddonsquared off against Paramount and DreamWorks’Deep Impact.) And part of it had to do with the fact that the studio really didn’t publicize that it was based on the theme park attraction, which at the time had been shuttered for the better part of a decade. The movies-based-on-theme-park-attractions idea appealed to Disney chiefMichael Eisnerbut it still made him nervous. It was Eisner who made the last-minute decision to add the cumbersome subtitle toPirates of the Caribbeanin an effort to distance itself from the attraction. IfMission to Marswas a success, so be it. But the connections between the theme park attraction and the movie were not going to be explicitly drawn.
And, truth be told, the movie, directed byBrian De Palmafrom a screenplay officially credited toJimandJohn ThomasandGraham Yost, doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the original attraction. Sure, it’s about an expedition to Mars. But there aren’t any direct parallels to be drawn, save from that amazing long shot, set toVan Halen’s “Dance the Night Away,” which features a rotating circular centrifuge, that explicitly recalls a similar image on one of the screens in the Mission to Mars preshow. (It’s a deep cut, I know.) Where there could have been references, there are emphaticallynot. You’d think that some of the characters could have had the last name “Morrow” or “Johnson,” references to the audio-animatronic figure that gave you the rundown in the ride’s pre-show. But, alas, there is none. De Palma, whose experience on the film wasn’t particularly positive (“It was relentless,” he said in theDe Palmadocumentary), never mentioned the original attraction. It’s unclear if he even knew the film was an adaptation of a popular theme park attraction.
WhenMission to Marscame out in the spring of 2000 (happy 20th!), it lost money, making $111 million internationally from a budget of over $100 million. De Palma was so broken by the project that he left the United States. “The Hollywood system we work in does nothing but destroy you,” De Palma said in the documentary. “When I finished that movie, that’s when I got on a plane and went to Paris.Mission to Marswas the last movie I made in the United States.” (Mission to Marsdid get some strong notices from critics, particularly overseas. It was #4 on Cashiers du Cinema’s collective Top 10 that year, outrankingThe Virgin SuicidesandIn the Mood For Love.) But box office be damned,Mission to Marswas going to live on.
Disney enlistedGary Sinise, one of the stars ofMission to Mars, to host the preshow for the new attraction, now called Mission: Space. (Sinise essentially is playing the same character but his name is never spoken.) And the big, wheel-shaped room from the “Dance the Night Away” scene is actually a part of the attraction’s extended queue, along with several model spaceships from the film (much of the visual effects work for the movie was provided by Dream Quest Images, Disney’s in-house visual effects company, that was shuttered followingMission to Mars’ release). On a narrative level, this new attraction borrowed heavily from the Mission to Mars attraction, including the conceit that you are being trained to make the journey to outer space and the patina of pseudo-scientific education. But this time the emphasis was on thrills.
SoMission to Mars, a movie inspired by a Disney theme park attraction,inspiredanother Disney theme park attraction. Moving in a circle, just like the astronauts in the movie. Who has the Van Halen?
Sadly, some of theMission to Marshas been scrubbed off of Mission: Space in recent years. In 2017 it went down for a refurbishment. The ride film was redone, with updated graphics byIndustrial Light & Magic, and a new film was made for the cuddlier version of the attraction, this time a zoom above earth. Also, Sinise was replaced. It’s the same script and the same awkward staging, butGina Torresstepped in for Lt. Dan., welcoming guests aboard the attraction and explaining key safety information. But it wasn’t totally gone – the oversized props and sets are still in the queue. And the memory of the ouroboros of Mission to Mars still looms large in our memory. It’s positively planetary.
