COTERIES of lively cave dwellers, herds of gigantic prehistoric animals, a fiery volcano, magic tunnels that erase time and space, a splendorous Space City – these are the special ingredients in the Magic Skyway, the major entertainment attraction at the Ford Wonder Rotunda at the New York fair. Guests ride in a fleet of 160 new Ford Motor Company convertible automobiles that move continuously on two parallel tracks, transporting visitors first through transparent tunnels circling the rotunda about 25 feet above the fairgrounds. Then the cars enter the vast, flared exhibit building through unique "time tunnels" that create an exciting illusion of breaking the barriers of sound and time as they travel into a Disney-designed fantasyland of the past, present, and future. The convertibles move, unguided by human hands, through an ingenious system of approximately 1250 individual electric propulsion wheels installed in the ride track. An estimated 50,000 visitors will take, the ride each day.
Walt Disney and his imagineering organization-WED Enterprises, Inc.--spent 3 years creating the show at the Ford pavilion. In the prehistoric section of the "time tunnel," guests have the novel experience of viewing-while cradled in modern automobile comfort-such wonders of creation as dinosaurs that crane their necks and eat strange vegetation, now-extinct reptiles that fly, and cavemen who make fire with sticks, paint on rock walls, and speak caveman language. Sixty-eight of the figures, such as a 2-story-tall Tyrannosaurus rex, spring to life through Audio-Animatronics.
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