20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Of all the lost attractions in the Magic Kingdom, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea may be the one guests still mourn the loudest. This post preserves the complete ride audio of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo’s narration, the helmsman’s calls, the organ-haunted score of the deep — the full voyage as it sounded from a porthole seat between 1971 and 1994. Twenty minutes aboard the Nautilus, through the graveyard of lost ships and under the polar ice cap, ending in a fight with a giant squid. It opened late, ran twenty-three years, and closed “temporarily” forever.
A Fleet of Nautiluses
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea opened on October 14, 1971 — two weeks after the Magic Kingdom itself, the lagoon and its submarines having missed opening day. The ride was Florida’s answer to Disneyland’s Submarine Voyage, but where California’s boats were grey Cold War submarines, Florida’s twelve vessels were patterned on Harper Goff’s Nautilus from Disney’s 1954 film, their riveted hulls and saw-toothed spines adapted for the park by Imagineer George McGinnis. The lagoon they cruised held some eleven and a half million gallons of water and took up nearly a quarter of Fantasyland, dressed as Nemo’s secret island base of Vulcania.
A Nautilus underway in the lagoon in 1979, a second submarine waiting by the waterfall. Photo: Alex Reinhart, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
The submarines never actually submerged — they ran on a track in water shallow enough to stand in, and the dive was sold by torrents of bubbles streaming past the portholes as the boat sank, in story, fathoms deep. Each guest sat at a small porthole seat, and through a speaker at the top of the window recess came the voice of Captain Nemo, performed by Peter Renaday in a deliberate impression of James Mason’s film portrayal. Renaday’s voice is the spine of this recording, guiding the voyage from the ruins of Atlantis to the squid’s attack, over an eerie organ arrangement of the film’s main theme that looped beneath everything.
The Voyage on This Recording
Listen for the shape of the trip, because the audio of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea follows it faithfully: the departure and the dive, the sea life gathering at the portholes, mermaids on the rocks, the graveyard of lost ships where sharks guard sunken treasure, the abyss, the red-lit terror under the polar ice, and finally the giant squid — the ride’s famous finale, in which a full-scale squid grappled the boat ahead of yours (a second, prop submarine existed for exactly this scene) while yours escaped in the storm. It was a complete little film you sat inside, and its reputation only grew as the years passed.
A Nautilus moored at the lagoon’s edge in 1994, the attraction’s final year, with the bow of another boat in the foreground. Photo: WaterlessCloud, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The Closing of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The ride was expensive to run — a fleet of aging submarines, a lagoon to drain and repaint, capacity that never matched its lines — and on September 5, 1994, it closed for what was announced as a refurbishment. It never reopened; not until 1996 did Disney confirm the closure was permanent, and the lagoon sat empty behind walls for a decade before being filled in. The site is unrecognizable now: the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, which opened on May 28, 2014, burrows through the old lagoon’s footprint, and Ariel’s lagoon-side world sits next door. California’s submarines eventually sailed again as Finding Nemo’s; Florida’s never got their second life, and most of the fleet ended its days buried or scrapped. What remains of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is what you’re holding: twenty minutes of bubbles, organ and Peter Renaday, bound for Vulcania. All aboard, as the helmsman says — stand by to dive.