Failures don’t happen every day at Disney Imagineering or Universal Creative, and when a million dollar attraction only lasts a few weeks or months, you’ve got to wonder why.

That’s why today, we’re touring a number of unbelievably short-lived attractions at Disney and Universal parks. From frazzled ride technology that fell apart to mis-marketed masterclasses in poor decision-making, these astounding flops and failures may only have been around for a few years or even months, but for those who experienced them, they won’t be soon forgotten…

Disney might prefer that we forget these failures happened… but trust us – we haven’t. And if you were “lucky” enough to snag one of these ultra-ride ride credits in person, we want to hear your memories! Were these short-lived failures as bad as the Internet makes them out to be? Or did you enjoy your experience and wish the ride would’ve lasted? Let us know in the comments below or when you share this feature on social media!

1. Rocket Rods

Lifetime: May 1998 – September 2000 (intermittently) (2.25 years)

Certainly among the famous “flubbed” attractions in theme park history, we dedicated an entire Declassified Disasters: Rocket Rods feature to this infamous Tomorrowland failure.

Long story short: in the ’90s, Disney set out to modernize its Tomorrowlands, which were largely still stylized as mid-century, white utopias born of the Space Age. The bad news for Disneyland visitors was that in the wake of Disneyland Paris’ opening and its poor financial results, the money set aside for a land-wide redesign wasn’t enough to do much.

Aside from painting the land bronze, copper, and green, most of the “New Tomorrowland” budget was funneled into a high-risk experiment: transforming the aerial highways of the Lost Legend: The PeopleMover into an adrenaline-packed thrill ride. The idea was that riders would blast across the land at high speeds, racing in and out of buildings and accelerating through the elevated tracks that wind through the forests outside the land. The Rocket Rods were meant to complete in three minutes the course that had taken the PeopleMover sixteen.

Guests waited hours for the relatively low-capacity ride. Unfortunately, most reported that the ride wasn’t worth the wait. The land’s low budget infamously meant that the old PeopleMover tracks weren’t banked to accommodate the new high-speed ride. As a result, it had to slow down for every turn in the meandering track, wearing out tires, frazzling computer systems, leading to continuous breakdowns, and leaving riders to wonder why they’d waited several hours.

After operating on-and-off for about two years, the Rocket Rods closed in September 2000. Signage indicated that the ride would return sometime in 2001, but it never did. The empty PeopleMover tracks still criss-cross through Disneyland’s Tomorrowland to this day.

2. Luigi’s Flying Tires

Lifetime: June 2012 – February 2015 (2.75 years)

In the 1960s, Disneyland’s Tomorrowland featured a ride called the Flying Saucers. Guests climbed aboard small, individual, circular “saucers” that basically behaved like pucks on an air hockey table, “floating” on a thin curtain of air supplied by thousands of embedded air nozzles below. Guests could lean to and fro to change the direction of their saucers, bumping into one another like chaotic, air-powered bumper cars. Unfortunately, the saucers were low capacity, difficult to operate, and expensive to maintain, lasting only five years.

Fifty years later, the concept was reborn as Luigi’s Flying Tires – part of the brand new Cars Land at Disney California Adventure. Reportedly a pet project of then-Chief Creative Officer (and big Disneyland nostalgia fan) John Lasseter, the Cars-themed homage was meant to fix the failings of the original with double-rider “tires,” an intensive grouping and boarding process, and on-board levers for riders to change the tires’ direction.

It turned out that the levers were entirely ineffective. (They were removed before the ride even opened.) Instead, guests were instructed to lean in the direction they wanted to float. But the double-sized, double-passenger tires made travel difficult to coordinate, and the increased weight meant that the tires moved very, very slowly. To make the ride both more fun to ride and to watch, large, inflatable beach balls in the colors of the Italian flag were added, but of course, those brought about their own issues.

Unfortunately, the Flying Tires didn’t even last as long as the Saucers had. They closed in 2015 – less than three years after opening. The space instead became Luigi’s Rollickin’ Roadsters, using trackless, LPS-guided ride vehicles that “dance” to Luigi’s songs in coordinated maneuvers. Ultimately, it’s more fun to watch, more fun to ride, higher capacity, and much easier to operate than the Flying Tires were.

3. The Original Poseidon’s Fury

Lifetime: June 1999 – May 2001 (23 months)

Theme park aficionados across the world came together to mourn Universal’s long-inevitable announcement that Poseidon’s Fury would close forever in May 2023. A quirky, odd, cult classic and fan favorite, the mysterious attraction wasn’t a ride at all, but a walkthrough show that saw guests trapped in an ancient temple with a nervous archaeologist who accidentally awakens an evil high priest and sets into motion an epic special effects battle with the heroic god of the seas, Poseidon.

“So bad it’s good,” the weirdo walkthrough had the distinct status of being the last original, IP-free attraction at Universal Orlando, and the final remnant of the Lost Legend: The Lost Continent – a mythological land otherwise pulverized by Potter. Altogether, fans weren’t exactly shocked by the closure of Poseidon’s Fury so much as by the fact that it lasted as long as it did – a hidden gem and underdog.

But of course, the truth is that the Poseidon’s Fury we knew was actually the second version of the attraction. When the park opened in 1999, the same rooms and effects were used to tell a different story altogether. The original Poseidon’s Fury cast the god of the sea as the villain (above, voiced memorably by Jeremy Irons, the voice of Scar in The Lion King), opposite Zeus as the hero. Instead of a young archaeologist, the tour was led by an old man named “The Keeper.” And several of the show’s most notable effects and moments were staged very differently.

Ultimately, Universal’s evaluation suggested that rather than being an anchor of the new park the way they’d anticipated, the original Poseidon’s Fury scored poorly with guests who found it difficult to follow, anti-climactic, and even boring. The quick-fix restaged version that played from 2002 to 2023 fixed many of the original’s issues (while creating plenty more). Still, rosy hindsight leads many Universal fans to insist that the original version was superior to the long-running “V2.” We dove deep into both versions of the attraction in our much-read Lost Legends: Poseidon’s Fury feature, so make the jump there to make the decision for yourself…

But a few more short-lived theme park failures await on page 2. If you managed to experience one of them, let us know… Read on…