Giant Squids & Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Ride.

My sister went to Disneyland last weekend and confirmed what I’d heard for years and never wanted to believe. And no, it’s not that Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is much scarier when you’re six. I’ll get back to this point.

Listen – don’t you just love it when they catch the giant squids? Last week off the coast of British Colombia, a salmon fisherman named Goody Gudmundseth netted a 20kg, 1.5 metre long Humbolt Squid. Also known as the Jumbo Flying Squid. Flying squids? Oh, Goody! Eventually Gudmundseth turned it over to the Royal B.C. museum for study, but said that he’d almost decided to “use the squid for bait or to eat it as calamari”. I don’t know what he was thinking about when he gave it to science. I mean just look at that delicious grey thing. Can you also jar up the squid juice out of the tub so I can pour it over my mashed potatoes tomorrow?:

But in 2002 a giant squid was caught off the coast of Tasmania that makes Goodie’s look like a malnourished Sea Monkey. Actually, it just washed up dead on the beach. Which is a good thing – they would have needed Captain Nemo, seaQuest DSV, Das Boot and Red October to catch this monster. The friggin’ thing was 60 feet long and weighed over 550 pounds! Add that to the fact that it reeked like a hundred dead carps in the sun, and you can understand why I was so excited.

As you can see by now, I’m a bit of a giant squid afficianado (form a line to the left, ladies) and so I found myself recently reminded of my favorite Disney movie, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. The nutshell: Captain Nemo rescues Peter Lorrie and Kirk Douglas after he sinks their ship. He shows them his ultra-modern submarine – The Nautilus – holds them captive and then gets killed by a big giant squid at the end. That was really only half a nutshell. But I love the film and even had the LP when I was a kid which I listened to on a Mickey Mouse record player to no end like a good little Disney zombie. So I guess that’s where the whole squid fascination thing comes from. There are worse things to be fascinated by. Like shiny keychains or Kreskin, for example.

So I was understandably psyched when my parents took me to Disneyland for the first time in the late 70’s – because I knew full well there was a big, glorious 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Ride waiting there for me. The nutshell: You’d force your parents to wait in line in the hot Florida sun for 2 hours because there were only 2 subs going around on a track which each probably held about 10 people. You’d get in and listen to Captain Nemo take you on a tour of the lagoon, during which you’d see sunken ships, mermaids, Atlantis and yep – you guessed it – a giant squid. It was, in all fairness, a pretty cool ride for 1971. And I always found it incredibly eerie (I made three trips to Disneyland and rode it at least 5 times, the last hurrah being in 1991.)

You can still take a tour of the old ride on a site made by a similarly disgruntled fan here. And this is a page full of horrifying photos a Disney employee made during the old lagoon’s final destruction just this past July. And I have to give full credit to this guy, who has assembled an amazing collection of videos he was sent in by folks who’d taped the ride pre it’s 1994 demise and some great footage from a former Disney employee who worked on ride maintenance (no small feat) for a decade.

So the first thing I asked Janet when she got back from Disneyland Monday was “Is it true that they closed the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Ride?!” To which she looked at me like she’d just caught me dressing up like Captain Kirk and acting out scenes with imaginary Romulans or whatever they’re called. Which she hasn’t yet, by the way. And then replied simply, “Yes.”

Incidentally, that bastard Eisner has closed Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, too.