The legacy of If You Had Wings, from
Widen Your World:
Although If You Had Wings evolved from Adventure Thru Inner Space, it did retain the distinction of having passed along a few new things to some other Disney attractions. Unfortunately most of those attractions have already gone the way of If You Had Wings.
The first thing If You Had Wings loaned out was the Speed Room / Super Speed Tunnel idea, which landed on the second floor of Disneyland's America Sings in 1977 as an addition to the Peoplemover (which ran through the Carousel Theater building's second floor). This application went on to feature scenes from the company's 1982 film, TRON. The Peoplemover closed in 1995, however, and its replacement, the also-now-closed Rocket Rods, did not make use of the Speed Room.
When Epcot opened in 1982 (as EPCOT Center), many of its attractions could be likened to If You Had Wings in terms of their ride systems, pacing and sponsorship agreements. But two rides at Epcot Center borrowed directly and unapologetically from If You Had Wings - General Motors' World of Motion and Mexico's El Rio del Tiempo.
World of Motion began in a manner very similar to If You Had Wings: a large, open holding area leading to a load platform where guests boarded blue Omnimover cars that slowly approached a dark, semi-foreboding portal. World of Motion also had not one, not two, but THREE Speed Rooms near the end of the ride. The first was almost identical to If You Had Wings' version in that its films were extremely similar. For example, one World of Motion scene was of bobsleds shooting down an icy run. Another was a fast-paced underwater jaunt. The second Speed Room featured swirling light effects and a fiery inferno, the third was footage from TRON, just as in Disneyland's Peoplemover. If only Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin used some TRON images as a tribute to early computer-generated imagery, the circle would be complete.
World of Motion closed in January 1996 and its replacement, GM's Test Track, does not have the Speed Room components. Nor does it have the Omnimover cars. Or the great animatronics. Or a fun theme song. But it does have crash-test dummies and, let's be fair, a better ending.
The other Epcot attraction that pulled from If You Had Wings was the Mexico Pavilion's boat ride, El Rio del Tiempo, which operated in its original form until January 2007. It reopened in April 2007 as the Gran Fiesta Tour, which introduced the title characters from Disney The Three Cabelleros film to the ride. The ties to If You Had Wings here were more numerous before the ride's reinvention but several echoes remain. First, the boat ride incorporates a large early Mexican pyramid, as did If You Had Wings. Secondly, the floating gardens of Lake Xochilmilco are kind of recreated in El Rio del Tiempo, albeit somewhat distinctly from the If You Had Wings version (in that there's some real water in the boat ride). Both rides contain depictions of downtown Mexico City. And they both rely heavily on the use of projected images to achieve motion. Another strong connection was that If You Had Wings and El Rio del Tiempo both had infectious theme songs created for the rides that could easily echo in vistor's heads for hours after exiting. Gran Fiesta now uses the Three Caballeros theme to a similar effect.
What really tied the two rides together, though, were some of the original filmed scenes. Mexico's attraction had footage of people cavorting on beaches just as If You Had Wings did. Mexico had street merchants trying to pass off handcrafted wares to guests passing by, just as If You Had Wings had merchants pushing goods in the Caribbean Straw Market. And If You Had Wings had a projection of cliff divers plunging in Acapulco, just as Gran Fiesta still does in a modified form. The merchant footage in El Rio del Tiempo was removed when Gran Fiesta came in and the beach depictions are significantly changed. Because the ride is still operating, however, there still exists the opportunity for WDW visitors to get a small taste of what If You Had Wings was all about. That's a good thing.
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