The story of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril: the forgotten temple and its mine cart

The story is set in the 1940s. Henry Jones Jr., better known to everyone as Indiana Jones, is as much an archaeology professor as he is an adventurer. He leads an expedition into a thick jungle to track down a lost city, The Lost City.

As the dig goes on, his team never finds the city it was hoping for, but it does find something else: the remains of a temple forgotten for more than a thousand years. The find is so large that the expedition settles in for good. The crew digs into the hill, sets up camp, and builds a small network of rails to carry away whatever it unearths.

That’s where it all begins. Every bit of scenery you walk through captures that exact moment: a busy excavation site, frozen as if the archaeologists had only just left. For the practical details (line, height requirement, thrills), see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril.

The ruins the expedition dug up belong to a temple honoring Shiva, a major deity in Hindu mythology. A pair of giant stone cobras flanks the entrance staircase, one on the left and one on the right. In the tradition, this snake, called the Naga, goes hand in hand with Shiva, who is often pictured wearing it wrapped around his neck.

That’s exactly where the people who designed the ride hid an inside joke that fans can’t get enough of: on screen, Indy is terrified of snakes. Putting two enormous cobras in charge of the temple is the perfect little touch to link the setting with its hero. The most fearless adventurer around, face to face with his worst nightmare.

Here’s where the storytelling does its best work. The line isn’t a plain hallway to shuffle through: step by step, you’re walking around the expedition’s base camp. Every detail is there to convince you the team had to clear out in a rush, abandoning all their gear exactly as it was.

In the story, the work carts were used to haul the treasures out of the temple. The expedition left them on the tracks. You, the guest, become an adventurer in turn, hopping into these abandoned cars and racing through the ruins at high speed.

The mine cart ride isn’t a coincidence: it echoes Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the 1984 movie in which the heroes speed along the rails of a mine. If that scene rings a bell, it’s exactly the mood Disney set out to recreate here.

For what it’s like once you’re on board (the thrills, the loop, how it really feels) and all the practical info (line, height requirement), everything is covered on the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril page.

Now for the behind-the-scenes part, the real story of the ride. It opened in Adventureland on July 30, 1993, a little over a year after the park itself, and was officially dedicated on November 9, 1993, with George Lucas in attendance. And it was no ordinary roller coaster: it was the first coaster in a Disney park to include an inversion, in other words a loop.

Before this, flipping riders over was something Disney simply wouldn’t do. The Temple of Peril tore up that rulebook.

The ride was designed by the Imagineers at Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s in-house creative studio, under the lead of Tony Baxter, one of the big names behind the Paris park. The engineering side went to the Swiss manufacturer Intamin, with the company Giovanola handling the structure.

In Tony Baxter’s own simple words, the concept was a set of mine cars climbing and diving over the top of the temple, hauling off debris and returning the treasures to where they belong. In other words, the coaster is the excavation, told as a ride.

The original plan was far more ambitious. Disney dreamed of a full Indiana Jones land, an entire area devoted to the adventurer, with a much longer mine cart ride and indoor scenes inspired by the movies. But the park’s early years were a real financial struggle, and the plans had to be scaled back.

Out of that big project came a compact but carefully crafted coaster, set on a hill in Adventureland. The need was clear: to give guests a thrill ride while Space Mountain was still two or three years away. So the Temple of Peril filled that role, delivering the thrills until the rest arrived.

At one point, the coaster took a rather surprising turn. Hoping to win riders back, the park chose to send it backward. For just over four years, trains ran the exact same circuit in reverse, billed as "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril: Backwards!"

It wasn’t just a matter of flipping the direction. The car bodies had to be turned around on their chassis, two seats were added to each car, and above all, loads of scenery and lighting had to be moved so guests would never catch a glimpse of the technical backstage areas while facing the wrong way. Some sections of track were even reshaped for comfort.

Eventually, trains started running forward again, as they had on day one. Years after that, a big makeover rebuilt the whole structure using actual stone.

The scenery is packed with references to the Indiana Jones movies. These details are what make a Disney ride so much fun: you can fall in love with the story just by knowing where to look.

These details are only part of the scavenger hunt. The whole park is full of little nods: for the famous Hidden Mickeys as well as the other Disneyland Paris secrets, I’ve written dedicated articles that reveal every hiding spot.

Did you like this tale? Plenty of other rides in the park hide a backstory of their own, and the Disneyland Paris history hub gathers every one of them. For more of these behind-the-scenes stories, check out the Thunder Mesa saga, the story of Pirates of the Caribbean, Tower of Terror, Ratatouille, or Avengers Campus.

For all the practical details on the ride (height requirement, line, thrills), head to the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril page.