If You Had Wings, Disney Imagineering, Plus More DVD

This DVD is approximately a little over 1 hour long and inlcudes the complete ride through of IF you had Wings as well as a featurette on Walt Disney's Imagineering.

It includes a ride through of If You Could Fly. As well as a dubbed version of If You Had Wings.This was a two-person Omnimover dark ride in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. It was sponsored by Eastern Air Lines. The ride featured images of some of Eastern's tourist destinations, including Mexico City, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and New Orleans. The ride had a memorable theme song with music by Buddy Baker and lyrics by X Atencio.

In the days when most rides required the expenditure of prepaid tickets, this attraction was complimentary. Little publicized and little known, waiting lines for this attraction (located across from Mission to Mars) were nonexistent or short even when the park was crowded.

If You Had Wings was an undisguised promotion for the then-giant Eastern Air Lines, whose slogan at the time was "The Wings of Man." Eastern's investment in the ride was reportedly $10M.[2] A four-and-a-half-minute dark ride based on Disney's Omnimover ride system, it conveyed seated passengers slowly, steadily, and smoothly through a series of rooms. It was structurally similar to the Disneyland attraction Adventure Thru Inner Space, which might be considered its spiritual predecessor; both were designed by Claude Coats. The experience began with a vaguely-simulated "takeoff" in which the ride ascended a slope, while projections of animated silhouettes of seagulls and airplanes swept past on the walls, enhancing the feeling of motion and gently suggesting flight.

Riders observed various theater-like sets embedding small screens showing rear-projected filmed scenes. Thirty-eight 16mm projectors, were used in the attraction. The rooms illustrated various Eastern destinations and presented tourist experiences such as straw-hat markets, fishermen, limbo dancers, and steel drum bands. The omnipresent music featured singers tunefully chanting, "If you had wings, if you had wings, if you had wings, had wings, had wings, had wings." The music did not succeed in masking the sound of the hidden projectors, which were audible throughout most of the ride.

Viewers passed through a sequence of colorful scenes corresponding to the following locations: Mexico, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas (where a traffic cop directed a flock of flamingos as well as pedestrians and vehicles), Jamaica (where a pod of bathing-suit-clad young people clambered up the rocks at Dunn's River Falls), Trinidad, and New Orleans (where shadows of blowing jazzmen flickered on the wall). Eastern Air Lines had, uncoincidentally, a vested interest in travel to all of these places. Many of the scenes had their own sound effects that mixed with the ceaseless music.

Having passed through this sequence of site sets, riders entered the "speed room", an ellipsoid onto the interior of which were projected snippets of first-person movies of an airplane taking off, a train, waterskies, motorcycles, airboats, and a few other scenes. The clips were projected on the walls by a 70 mm projector. The ovoid screen encompassed the viewers' peripheral vision. Furthermore, the vehicle reclined in the speed room, and a breeze was blown on riders. The wraparound images, in combination with the motion and reclining angle of the vehicle and a blast of air, arguably constituted an early attempt at virtual reality. The images were to some extent blurry and distorted, unlike Disney's sharper Circle-Vision 360 technology; it rather resembled the fuzzy Cinema 180 shows featured in many contemporary amusement parks. Nevertheless, the projection effect combined with the motion of the ride produced a genuinely exhilarating sense of speed, and the long, egg-like shape of the room allowed plenty of time to experience the effect. The speed room was followed by the "mirror room", where two more 70mm projectors produced images of snow-covered mountains appearing on large screens and were reflected in enormous floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and the music changed to a wordless symphonic swell of harmonies.

The ride "descended" after the mirror room, and a buttery baritone voice of Orson Wells gave riders the following soothing assurance:

You do have wings.

You can do all these things.

You can widen your world.

Eastern. We'll be your wings.

(In the earlier years of this attraction, the voice's closing words ended with the phrase, "Eastern: the Wings of Man.") Subsequent to hearing this message, riders disembarked to an area containing an Eastern Air Lines reservation desk. Agents stood ready to assist riders, presumably inspired by what they had just experienced, with travel arrangements. Few seemed to take advantage of this opportunity.

In 1987, Eastern withdrew its sponsorship and the attraction closed on June 1 of that year. Although remembered affectionately by many, a fan website devoted to the attraction notes, "If you can't remember the public uproar surrounding the closing... one possible reason is that there was none."

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