When the ride in Norway had a 90 minute wait, Body Wars a 75 minute wait, and The Land a 60 minute wait, Horizons was still a walk on. It was that way for years.
Wait ... you mean that during the time that Body Wars and Maelstrom was on every inch of WDW advertising (including the cover of the park maps given out to each guest as they passed through the turnstyles) they had longer waits than Horizons? I can't believe it.
You know what else they had longer waits than? Every other ride in the park. The truth is (and always has been regarding Future World) that the Omnimover attractions (Spaceship Earth, Journey Into Imagination, World of Motion and Horizons) all had almost identical line lengths when they were all in operation simultaneously. At noon in the Summer of 1984, it took you two hours to get on any of them. On a random Tuesday morning in October? You could walk on any of them (that's why they call them "people eaters"). The line lengths were almost always static in their relation to each other.
The notion that somehow Horizons and WoM had significantly less lines than SSE and Imagination (or Listen to the Land, or UoE, or the Sea Cabs), at any point in their runs, is a canard.
Disney shuttered them because they were too cheap to maintain their own parks. No sponsor = closed attraction. No sponsor = no refurb. When they got the sponsor (old or new) to pony up money ... they were more than happy to do whatever the sponsor wanted to their park's detriment. Although I can't prove it, I know in my heart that some in WDI were more than happy to tear something down just to have the opportunity to build
their design. Purely selfish in a Jeff Goldblum style "you were so busy asking if you could do something that you never thought to ask if you should" style. On one hand I understand - the 70s+80s WDI got hundreds of millions to spend, while the 90s and 00s WDI got told "nice design, but we have no money." They'd rip down Pirates and Space Mountain if they thought they'd get a chance to build something they created (*cough* Mr Toad *cough*).
But regardless, management had sponsors saying they wanted something new. They had WDI saying they'd make something better. And they had a park that was the #3 theme park in the world, but wasn't getting the ticket sales of their park a mile down the road. So something needed to be the scapegoat and Horizons and WoM took the blame.
Management at this time was arguably the worst of any time in the company's history and it shows; not just in Future World but all over WDW and DLR. But that doesn't make perpetuating a myth (that somehow Horizons and WoM were underperforming in comparison to the other attractions) somehow valuable to the current conversation.
EDIT: There was never a time when Listen to the Land was having longer waits than Horizons/WoM over the course of an entire day. Everyone knows in the mornings the Land, Living Seas, and Imagination had longer waits than Energy, Horizons, and WoM ... but that's just because everyone's natural instinct is to walk to their right whenever they reach a fork in the road. It's the same reason why you always pick the left line at WDW (it's going to be shorter). But the reverse was always true in the afternoon, the three east-side attractions would see more traffic as people exited WS, while the west-side pavilions would seem barren. Over the course of a day, it would even out.
At one point in my life, I have waited over an hour and a half for every original attraction in Future World. And, in the same breath, I've walked on (at noon) every one of those same attractions, at some point, also. I spent a ridiculous amount of time in Future World in my youth - the lines were almost always the same across the entire "land" (FW, not the singular pavilion).
