7. Q'araq

Image: Disney

Attraction: Roaring Rapids
Park: Shanghai Disneyland

At Shanghai Disneyland's one-of-a-kind Adventure Isle, guests are invited to join the League of Adventurers to tackle the legendary Roaring Rapids. Their mission? Uncover the true origin of the distant roars emenating from behind Mount Apu Taku's waterfalls. The answer? A massive crocodilian river guardian that the local Arbori people call Q'araq. Meant to match the intensity of the face-to-maw encounter with the Lava Monster aboard Tokyo DisneySea's Modern Marvel: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Q'araq is indeed hiding deep in the mountain. And this massive Audio Animatronics figure is rigged to slink out of sight as rafts approach, dig its claws into the rock, and launch itself forward, leaping toward guests as its jaws snap. 

Q'araq was one of the most highly-anticipated features of the Shanghai park when it opened in 2016, so fans abroad were surprised to find that the first videos to surface of the ride showed that creature entirely frozen – a malfunction most would expect to trigger the ride's closure until fixed. Though Q'araq is now working, we hesitate to say it's in its full A-mode. Though the crocodile's head and jaws move, its full-body motion and its pouncing effect have never been caught on camera. 

8 and 9. The falling ceiling(s)

Image: Disney

Attraction: Indiana Jones Adventure
Park: Disneyland

One of the most well-known parts of Disneyland's Modern Marvels: Indiana Jones Adventure isn't the ride at all; it's the quarter-mile queue that leads to the remote, gigantic showbuilding built far outside of the park's protective berm. Faced with the challege of literally transporting guests into the Temple of the Forbidden Eye, designers used the trek through the collapsing ruins as an opportunity to tell a story. Not only does the walk to the ride slowly reveal the story of the lost god Mara and his Three Gifts; it also gets guests used to being the stars of their own adventure by avoiding booby traps.

Image: Disney

One of those famous booby traps is a room with a spiked ceiling. Luckily, Indiana Jones has already been through and deactivated the deadly traps – in this case, by wedging a bamboo stalk up against the ceiling to keep it from falling. In a fun bit of interactivity, yanking on that bamboo pole would cause the spikes to fall from above and make the ceiling descend to the sound of ancient rocks shifting. Naturally, the effect would halt at just the last second and reset a moment later. 

The effect was known for working inconsistantly and – in recent years – seems to have simply been turned off. It seems that with each annual refurbishment of the ride, designers re-set the finnicky effect (or at least a version of it, usually without the actual descent of the ceiling). Though rumors insist it's because the lowering ceiling doesn't leave adequate clearance, that sounds like "armchair Imagineering." The simpler answer is probably just that the effect was superfluous to the operations of the already-intensive ride, so when it breaks, it tends to stay broken until the next big clean-up.

Image: Disney

It's not the only falling ceiling in the Temple that's stopped working, though. On-board the ride, when guests first enter "The Big Room" before the crumbling face of Mara, their troop transports slam down an ancient set of stairs and jerk to the left, swaying riders out over the edge of a rocky cliff over the boiling lava pits below. A green beam from Mara's eye strikes the path, with a resulting fiery burst showing the power of Mara's gaze. Then, a second beam hits the ceiling just above riders... but nothing happens. Of course, it used to. To simulate the temple's actual collapse, a massive icemaker was installated in the ceiling, flash-creating large ice sheets that would be released in sync with the laser, crumbling toward the pit below where it would melt and be piped back up to be re-frozen.

As the story goes, the ice wasn't melting quickly enough, causing the machine to malfunction. Though Imagineer Tony Baxter suggested a simple heating element to quickly melt the backed-up ice, executives thought it simpler to just shut off the effect. After all, the $50 million had plenty to see even without the collapsing ceiling effect.

Plenty of Indiana Jones' high-tech special effects are known to flicker out for days, weeks, or months at a time, but in its 25 years, surprisingly few of its effects have been officially abandoned like the collapsing ceiling.

10. Murphy

Image: Disney

Attraction: Fantasmic
Park: Disneyland

Disney sure loves big Audio-Animatronics... but unfortunately, they don't always like Disney.

When Fantasmic opened at Disneyland in 1992, that climactic battle between Mickey and Maleficent wasn't quite as climactic as it is today. That's because – for most of the show's history – the role of the dragon was played by a relatively simple puppet: a puppeted head on the end of a cherry picker and two stick wings of sheer black material with simple lights strung throughout. (The same arrangement still used at Disney's Hollywood Studios.) In 2009, Imagineers constructed a full-body Audio Animatronic of the dragon to take its place. Standing 45 feet tall and weighing 18,000 pounds, this spectacular fire-breathing creature easily ranked among our Countdown: 25 Best Animatronics on Earth. 

Image: Disney

The new dragon, though, ended up being more of a monster than designers had hoped. Its debut was consistently delayed. When it finally made its debut in September 2009 (to thunderous applause, three months after scheduled), fans expected the wait to be over. But without fail, it failed. Almost every night, the dragon either didn't appear or – if it did – failed to breathe fire or froze entirely. Fans nicknamed the figure "Murphy" after the so-called Murphy's Law ("whatever can go wrong, will go wrong). Its problems came to a head in August 2010 when, during a performace, the dragon literally fell face-first. The 18,000 pound Audio-Animatronic was so stuck, it remained in its precarious position into the next day until it was literally dismantled to get it out of sight. 

THE FIX: Fast-forward to today, and Murphy – er, Maleficent – rarely misses a show, and for a 9-ton robot with a flamethrower built in, that's pretty impressive. When she does need a night-off, the press of a button launches the show's water screens to hide the malfunctioning figure and replace her appearance with an animation created for just that occasion without missing a beat.