Disney’s Imagineers are constantly looking to “plus” the company’s theme parks across the globe, adding new rides and attractions. Sometimes, they’ll even add an entire new themed land, such as the recently-opened Cars Land at Disney California Adventure.
For every new land that becomes a reality, though, many more never make it past the concept stage. Some progress a little further, with detailed artwork and plans being produced before the plug is pulled for creative or budgetary reasons. All that it left is artwork for fans to gaze at and wonder what might have been.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but let’s take a look at 10 incredible Disney theme park lands that were never built!
10. Sci-Fi City (Tokyo Disneyland)
Disney’s Tomorrowlands are difficult to maintain, as they are designed to depict an ever-changing future. At Tokyo Disneyland, the park’s owners (the Oriental Land Company) considered replacing the entire area with Sci-Fi City, a “city of the future” that would draw upon diverse influences ranging from Japanese anime to Buck Rogers.
All of Tomorrowland’s attractions were in for an upgrade, with Space Mountain, for example, becoming HyperSpace Mountain. Most intriguingly, an all-new attraction dubbed Sci-Fi Zoo would host a variety of audio-animatronic critters form outer space, and guests would be “abducted by aliens” on the UFO Encounter ride. With funds being focused on the construction of Tokyo DisneySea, though, the project didn’t go ahead.
9. International Street (Disneyland)
International Street was designed to occupy the space at the north-east corner of Disneyland’s Main Street USA, which had been left open for an expansion to connect to the Town Square area. When Disneyland opened, concept art for what was to occupy this space was on show – and it depicted International Street, an area that would celebrate different cultures from around the world.
The street would have hosted a variety of architectural styles, such as an English pub and a Danish Toy Shop. However, it was delayed and ultimately cancelled due to a lack of funds, with Disney instead focusing on finishing off Tomorrowland. The idea, of course, inspired the World Showcase area at Epcot.
8. Big Town USA (Disneyland)
In the 1970s, Disney drew up a long-term masterplan for Disneyland. One of the proposals was to build Big Town USA, a recreation of turn-of-the-century New York City. This would have occupied the site that eventually became home to Mickey’s Toontown.
The area would have hosted a variety of shops and restaurants, as well as 3,000-seat theater. Despite Walt Disney’s dislike of traditional, unclean amusement parks, it would also have included a Victorian-style funfair complete with a ferris wheel and a roller coaster. The plans were dropped, but the designs for the Paradise Pier area of Disney California Adventure clear drew upon them.
7. Discovery Bay (Disneyland)
Another 1970s proposal for Disneyland was the ambitious Discovery Bay. Designed by legendary Imagineer Tony Baxter, this would have taken over a large section of Frontierland. The area would have been themed around a San Francisco-style harbor, but with fantasy elements such as the Nautilus submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the Hyperion airship from The Island at the Top of the World.
As many as three attractions would be housed in the Nautilus, including a walkthrough, a “undersea” restaurant and a simulator ride. Elsewhere, a roller coaster would wind around a Tesla Coil, and a Chinatown area would host fast food outlets and a shooting gallery. The headliner, though, was a “balloon ascent” attraction themed around The Island at the Top of the World. When that movie bombed at the box office, Discovery Bay was parked.
6. Beastly Kingdom (Disney’s Animal Kingdom)
The original design of Disney’s Animal Kingdom featured an entire land dedicated to mythical creatures, known as Beastly Kingdom. This would be split into two sub-areas. One of these would be a medieval village, complete with cold stone pubs and thatch-roofed markets, all lit by flaming torches. At its heart would be the Dragon’s Tower, which would host a major dark ride-cum-roller coaster that would be Animal Kingdom’s main thrill ride. As well as featuring an enormous animatronic dragon, this would be Disney’s first inverted roller coaster – with the trains riding underneath the track, instead of on top of it.
The second sub-land would be themed around Greek temples, hosting a dark ride themed around the 1940 animated movie Fantasia. Behind this would be Quest for the Unicorn, an interactive walkthrough hedge maze that challenged guests to find and awaken five golden idols scattered through the maze.
As the costs of building its animal park spiraled, Disney bumped Beastly Kingdom into a “phase 2” expansion of Animal Kingdom. In its place would stand a low cost, hastily thrown-together alternative dubbed Camp Minnie-Mickey, intended to be ripped out when the expansion was given the green light. However, when Disney’s Animal Kingdom finally opened in 1998, it immediately began to cannibalize attendance at Walt Disney World’s other theme parks. Spending money on boosting the performance of those parks became the priority, and when the debut of Islands of Adventure failed to significantly impact on Animal Kingdom’s attendance, Disney CEO Michael Eisner put the plans for Beastly Kingdom on hold indefinitely.
5. Pirateland (Hong Kong Disneyland)
Hong Kong Disneyland was the first Magic Kingdom-style park not to feature a Frontierland area, with the space that it would have occupied instead being left open for a future expansion. One of the concepts considered for this area was Pirateland, which would have built on the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
The headline attraction would, of course, have been Pirates of the Caribbean. However, this would not recreate the Disneyland original, but instead be a thrill ride in the style of Splash Mountain. In the end, Hong Kong Disneyland opted to build Grizzly Gulch, Mystic Point and Toy Story Land as its expansion lands instead.
4. Muppet Studios (Disney’s Hollywood Studios)
Back in the early 1990s, Disney-MGM Studios (now renamed as Disney’s Hollywood Studios) was locked in a battle with Universal Studios Florida for the title of “best movie studio theme park in Orlando”. Universal’s park had suffered a disastrous debut in 1990, but began its turnaround with the opening of Back to the Future: The Ride in 1991. Disney’s park, meanwhile, had been criticized for its lack of attractions, after CEO Michael Eisner had insisted that it be designed as a “half-day park”. Expansion plans were quickly put in place.
Part of the expansion was to be an entire new land based on Jim Henson’s Muppets, dubbed The Muppet Studios. This would include the Muppet*Vision 3-D movie theater, a stage show and a parade. The star attraction, though, would be The Great Muppet Movie Ride. This would complement the existing Great Movie Ride, one of the park’s original E-Ticket attractions, and would have been a lavish comedy tour of the movie-making process.
Disney was keen to buy the Muppets outright from Jim Henson. However, following his sudden death in May 1990, the company continue to push forward with its plans for Muppet Studios. This angered his children, who cancelled the deal. Instead, they agreed to license the Muppets characters for individual attractions, with the 3-D movie, stage show and parade going ahead but the Great Muppet Movie Ride being dropped.
3. Indiana Jones and the Lost Expedition (Disneyland)
After the immense success of Disney’s first collaboration with filmmaker Geroge Lucas (which included 1986’s Captain EO and 1987’s Star Tours), the company was keen to work with him again. It set its Imagineers to work on a groundbreaking attraction based on the wildly successful Indiana Jones series. The resulting plans called for a major transformation of Disneyland’s Adventureland, creating an entire sub-land dedicated to the explorer.
Collectively called Indiana Jones and the Lost Expedition, this mega-attraction would have contained two massive rides centered around a crumbling “River Temple” perched on the edge of the Jungle Cruise’s waters. The first ride, labeled only as “Ore Car Attraction” on leaked site plans, would likely have been a roller coaster (of the family variety, based on overhead designs) placing riders into the exhilarating finale of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where rickety, rusted mine carts whiz along volcanic chasms.
The second attraction was a “Jeep Attraction” dark ride through the perils of Indy’s most famous escapades, including his close encounter with a menacing rolling boulder. It’s unclear if Disney would or could have developed its EMV technology (the jeeps-on-a-motion-base configuration used on Disney’s current Indiana Jones Adventure ride) if development had gone ahead in the late 1980s.
On top of the two new attractions, the Jungle Cruise ride would have been re-themed and re-routed through the attraction’s massive show building, skimming along the lava-themed waters of the ride’s volcanic chasm for a peak of the attraction’s interior before exiting through a rocky gorge. Meanwhile, the Disneyland Railroad that circumvents the park would have chugged across a groaning wooden bridge through the complex on its round-trip circuit around the park.
Ultimately, Indiana Jones and the Lost Expedition stayed lost. Instead, then-CEO Michael Eisner allegedly fell head over heels for an expansion aimed at the northwest end of the park by a competing team of Imagineers: “Zip-A-Dee River Run” (of course, he’d later insist that the attraction advertise the company’s 1984 movie Splash, creating the now-admired Splash Mountain).
2. World Holiday Land (Disneyland)
In 1982, Disney drew up another development plan for Disneyland. EPCOT Center opened that year at Walt Disney World, and the company hoped to reuse some of that investment by creating a land similar to World Showcase at its original theme park, this time dubbed World Holiday Land.
Situated just beyond New Orleans Square, this would have created a miniature version of Europe complete with a German skiing ride, an English medieval jousting ride, a Scandinavian dark ride and a clone of the Impressions de France movie. The ideas were dropped when Michael Eisner took over at Disney’s CEO.
1. Western River Expedition / Thunder Mesa (Magic Kingdom)
The legendary Western River Expedition was conceived by renowned Imagineer Marc Davis, which built upon a previous concept designed for a never-built indoor Disney theme park in St Louis. It was designed to occupy a new sub-land in the Magic Kingdom’s Frontierland, Thunder Mesa, along with a mine train-themed roller coaster. The attraction would have been hosted in an enormous Thunder Mesa show building, with guests entering a nighttime scene in a giant canyon. They would then board Pirates of the Caribbean-style boats before going on a cruise around recreated scenes of the Wild West.
The Western River Expedition was due to be added to the Magic Kingdom as its first expansion project. However, when the park opened, guests demanded a version of Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean. This was built instead, although Big Thunder Mountain Railroad did eventually emerge as the mine train roller coaster featured in the Thunder Mesa plans.
Learn more about Disney’s unbuilt attractions
I’ll soon be releasing my third book, Possibilityland: The Disney Theme Parks That Could Have Been. This will include detailed descriptions of many Disney parks and attractions that were designed but never built. It will place these in the context of the overall story of Disney’s theme park business, so that you can learn why they were proposed in the first place, why the projects didn’t go ahead and how they influenced subsequent attractions that really did see the light of day. If you’d like to be notified when the book is released, sign up for the special newsletter.
