Disney’s Imagineers are constantly dreaming up concepts for new attractions. Naturally, many of these will never see the light of day, for practical or budgetary reasons. For every new ride that does eventually get built, dozens of alternative suggestions are dropped. Some of those dropped attractions are pretty unremarkable, or variations on attractions that didactually go ahead. But some of the others are truly off-the-wall – so inventive and insane that we can’t help but wish that they had actually been constructed. Here are 10 great examples of Imagineering concepts that would have been very different to anything Disney has actually built to date!
10. The Gyroball PeopleMover
Some of the most memorable scenes in Pixar’s The Incredibles involve the spherical forcefields that the family’s daughter, Violet, is able to generate. These can be pushed and rolled along, in much the same style as the Atlaspheres that used to features in the Gladiators TV shows. Could they have been inspiration for this mythical Disneyland attraction? According to those familiar with the plans, the Gyroball PeopleMover was to replace the defunct Rocket Rods at Disneyland, which closed just two-and-a-half years after taking over the former PeopleMover circuit above Tomorrowland. The fast-paced Rocket Rods were simply not reliable enough, and the attempt to bolt the new attraction onto the existing PeopleMover infrastructure proved to be catastrophic. 
The PeopleMover/Rocket Rods track still stands empty, but the proposed gyroball-based replacement (put forward several years ago) would have seen riders being enclosed in a transparent sphere-shaped vehicle, which would have turned and flipped them around as it travelled along the track. It sounds like a recipe for motion sickness – but it’s just crazy enough that it might have worked.
9. The Airplane! airport
Back in the early 1990s, Disney-MGM Studios was facing criticism from the press and some visitors. The park had debuted in 1989 to huge crowds, but only offered a handful of attractions. This was by design – Disney CEO Michael Eisner had deliberately opted to make it a “half-day park”, keeping the cost low but still encouraging Walt Disney World guests to stay for an extra day. By 1991, rival Universal Studios Florida was firing on all cylinders after its disastrous debut a year earlier. Attendance at the park would eventually surpass that at Disney-MGM Studios, and Disney put into place rapid expansion plans. This included the addition of a Muppets-themed area and several smaller attractions. But Disney was also looking for a major, headline attraction. 
One of the first ideas to be considered was an enormous recreation of the airport seen in 1980s smash-hit disaster movie spoof Airplane. Little is known about this truly unusual concept, but it was eventually dropped when the projected costs spiralled out of control. Instead, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror was eventually installed.
8. The Shark Dive
Following the success of Walt Disney World, Disney was keen to transform Disneyland into a similar multi-day destination resort. The problem, though, was land – it didn’t have much of it to work with close to Disneyland. Instead, it proposed building a new theme park in Long Beach, which it dubbed DisneySea and announced in 1991. It was to be the most ambitious Disney theme park ever, sprawling across 225 acres. Similar to a SeaWorld park (but with much heavier theming), DisneySea would have combined live animal exhibits with high-tech theme park attractions. It was to feature lands themed around a Grecian village, an Asian water market and a Caribbean lagoon. Each was to be themed around a real or fictional port. 
Perhaps the most bizarre attraction, though, would have been located in the Adventure Reef area. This would have seen guests lowered in a steel cage into a tank full of live sharks. And we’re not talking about sharks of the tiny variety such as those seen in Shark Reefat Disney’s Typhoon Lagoon – but instead the full-sized, man-eating variety.
7. The Space-Age Castle
Legendary Imagineer Tim Delaney played a huge role in creating the stunning, steampunk-themed Discoveyland at Disneyland Paris. He also put forward an intriguing idea. At most Magic Kingdom-style Disney parks, there’s a fairytale castle at their heart, which doubles as the entrance to Fantasyland. What if Disneyland Paris broke the mould, instead making the castle a part of Discoveryland and giving it a unique, space-age look? Of course, Disney’s marketing department was never likely to allow this plan to go ahead. But we still have the impressive artwork above to allow us to imagine what might have been.
6. Stephen King’s Tower of Terror
OK, let’s be upfront about this. There’s very little we’d change about the amazing Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. But we do think that one of the early ideas for the ride could be revisited in the form of a temporary Halloween makeover. 
What was it? A version of the ride based on the works of horror author Stephen King, which could have included the likes of the creepy Pennywise the Dancing Clown from It, or perhaps a recreation of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. In the end, The Twilight Zone was seen as offering a broader range of elements that could be incorporated into a ride. It was not the last time that King’s works would be overlooked by a major theme park player – Universal Orlando also once developed a plan for a ride based on his novels.
5. Oceana
The most ambitious element of the proposed DisneySea theme park in Long Beach was Oceana, a stunning, multi-domed structure that would have been the world’s largest aquarium. This would have featured tidal exchange with actual ocean, so as the tide changed, the levels of water in the outside display tanks would rise and fall. 
The aquarium would have held a ridiculous 10 to 12 milliongallons of water, making it double the size of the one at Epcot’s Living Seas pavilion (itself the world’s largest when it opened). Oceana would also have hosted a real, working research center, bringing together scientists from around the world. Unfortunately, the disastrous opening of Disneyland Paris and alternative plans for a new park next door to Disneyland meant that Oceana was never built, even as part of Tokyo DisneySea (which borrowed some concepts from the California proposals).
4. Dick Tracy’s Crimestoppers
Disney has produced several interactive rides, most of them based on the Toy Story franchise. The likes of Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin and Toy Story Midway Mania see guests blasting away at relatively innocent targets such as Zurg’s toy minions, balloons and smashable plates. 
The laser gun technology employed by the Buzz Lightyear ride could have been put to a very different use had a plan to base an attraction on Warren Beatty’s 1990 movie Dick Tracy gone ahead. This would have seen guests shooting at audio-animatronic HUMAN adversaries, as they raced through the streets of Chicago blasting bad-guys. In the end, Dick Tracywas not quite the success that Disney had anticipated. Plans to install the ride at Disney-MGM Studios and Disneyland were dropped, along with plans to bring a version of the ride to Disney-MGM Studios Europe, a second park that was originally planned for the EuroDisney resort.
3. WestCOT’s World Cruise
WestCOT was conceived as a West Coast version of EPCOT Center in the late 1980s, and was to be the second theme park at the Disneyland Resort. Unlike EPCOT Center’s World Showcase, WestCOT’s version would not have featured pavilions inspired by individual countries. Instead, they were to be themed around regions, and would have hosted both rides and restaurants. Passing through all of the pavilions would have been an enormous boat ride, the World Cruise. This would have featured five stops, with animated scenes between each station. Emerging in the exterior waterways of each pavilion, the ride would have had an incredible running time of some 45 minutes. When the EuroDisney resort descended into financial disaster, Disney reigned back its plans in Southern California. WestCOT was never built, with Disney California Adventure eventually being constructed in its place.
2. The Island at the Top of the World
Designed by legendary Imagineer Tony Baxter for Disneyland in 1970s, Discovery Bay 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. It would have been quite a spectacle. But when the movie bombed at the box office, The Island at the Top of the World ride – along with the rest of Discovery Bay – was parked for good.
1. Fire Mountain
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Disney’s Imagineers worked on many concepts to ease guests’ disappointment about the shuttering of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Submarine Voyage at the Magic Kingdom. One of these was Fire Mountain, which was to headline a new sub-land in Adventureland to be known as Volcania. It was to be a roller coaster based around a mock mountain – hardly an original concept for Disney. However, the actual ride system was to be truly revolutionary. Riders would start in a traditional steel coaster, sitting in a car with the track beneath them. Suddenly, halfway through, the ride would transform into a “flying” coaster, with the track above the rider’s heads and “lava” burning beneath their feet. By the time they reached the end of the attraction, the track would have switched once again, so that waiting riders would have no idea what to expect. Ultimately, the costs of achieving this trick were deemed to be too high, and Fire Mountain was reimagined as a simple flying coaster. But it never got the green light, with Walt Disney World’s management focusing on revitalising Fantasyland instead.
