Well, it sure has been a ride. Welcome to the second to last Epcot Center's Cancelled Attraction article here at Theme Parks and Entertainment. When we started this series six months ago it was planned to be a 10 article miniseries. Its popularity got us to expand it to 25 articles, the last of which will be released next week, and its the longest and most in-depth yet.
For the second to last article, I thought we would do kind of a retrospective look at all of Epcot's canceled attractions, including things that we haven't touched on yet, and little details of projects we did touch on. We are also going to talk about the nature of canceled attractions, and why I think it is important we still continue to discuss them, despite the fact that we will never get a chance to actually enjoy them.
Epcot may have the most canceled attractions of any park outside of the original Disneyland, and that's really only because it's been around longer. There were more abandoned ideas, lost sponsors, and ideas that there simply wasn't the budget or technology for than really any other Disney Park in the world before or since.
Epcot still has reminders of attractions it never received. The Meet the World show building still stands tall over Japan, a mural marks the lost entrance to the lost Rhine River Cruise, and Norway's bathrooms remind us of the Denmark pavilion that never was. These serve as subtle reminders and tributes for anyone who knows why they are there.
Now we have discussed rides that never got built due to sponsorship problems like the Mt. Fuji roller coaster, and rides that got cut for unrelated budgetary issues like pretty much all of the Discoveryland proposal.
But all of these rides had hard work put into them by countless Imagineers who wanted them to see the light of day, but unfortunately many ideas just never get off the ground. But if we continue to look back at these lost attractions than their work doesn't get forgotten.
Now as the saying goes no good idea ever dies and that is true at Disney with some of the canceled attractions we have talked about. Meet the World would get built exactly as it was planned for Epcot in Tokyo Disneyland, albeit translated in a new language. Blueprints of Nature would serve as the inspiration for the original Journey Into Imagination with Dreamfinder and Figment, a lost attraction still beloved to this day. Great Moments at the Movies would inspire an entire theme park. The list goes on.
Even now, attractions aren't making it to the construction phase. All you need to do is look at the Epcot concept art from D23 2017 and compare it with the concept art from D23 2019 to see how many ideas were abandoned to bring us the new Epcot we are getting now. In fact, in the future, we may revisit this series in another article discussing that very issue. But for now, it just serves as a reminder that for every new ride Disney announces, there's another that doesn't ever get to invite guests in to enjoy it.
We hope you have enjoyed coming on this journey with us at Theme Parks and Entertainment, exploring the Cancelled Attractions of Epcot, and we hope you will come back next week for our last entry in this series, The Lost Peoplemover of Epcot. Check here for all of the entries in this series.
Also, we hope that you continue visiting Theme Parks and Entertainment, as starting in two weeks, a new series will be replacing Epcot's Cancelled Attractions every Tuesday, The Lost Attractions of Disney's Animal Kingdom. We will be starting off with a great entry, Tiger River Rapids.
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