The Lost Peoplemover: Epcot Center's Cancelled Attractions Part 25

Epcot Center's Cancelled Attractions

Progress City Peoplemover Concept Art

Welcome to the last entry in Epcot Center's Cancelled Attractions. It has been a ride, with our initially planned 10 entry miniseries over doubling in length, becoming the most popular non-news related series here at TPE. Be sure to go here for any previous entries you missed. Also check out more explorations of canceled Disney attractions on our Attractions From Neverland page.

For our final entry, we are going to talk about something I haven't ever seen discussed in any serious way, the lost Peoplemover attraction that was planned but never built for Future World.

It is a well-established fact that at some point there was a Peoplemover planned for Future World, but there are two questions regarding this project that we are going to explore. First, would this have been a ride or a transportation system? Second, how late in the planning of Epcot Center was this attraction canceled?

This ride is pictured in the little concept art we have for it in multiple lands with buildings that look like they could be stations. It appears to cover almost as much land as the monorail loop, even being seen with the monorail in a few of them.

We have no concrete proof, but it appears this would have been more of a practical use of the peoplemover system when compared to the former Disneyland and the current Magic Kingdom versions of the attraction. With the amount of space it would have traveled, it would not make sense for it not to stop.

So now the question remains of how late into designing/ building Epcot Center's Future World this attraction was canceled.

Honestly, I think it was still planned throughout the entire construction process, just relegated to a Phase 2 project that would eventually end up never being built, similar to numerous World Showcase countries.

Here's why.

Progress City Peoplemover Concept Art

Even though the only concept art we have from this is really from the original World Showcase proposal we discussed in an earlier entry in this series it still points at it making it into later plans. Much of the plans for the Communicore/ Innoventions buildings were taken from this original plan for the World Showcase and there are indications that the buildings were built with both expansion and a future Peoplemover in mind.

The first clue is that they were built way taller than they needed to be, and there were only a few select locations with a second floor in the buildings. It would have been easy to add in tracks above what was already there without any massive changes to the exhibits.

The other clue is that several of the walls were built out of glass to allow for easier expansion in the future. Some propose that it could have been built all the way to the monorail tracks although that may be a bit extreme. But where this also signals the possibility of a peoplemover is on the ends of the building.

The easiest place to see these easily replaceable walls was in the old Communicore hallway removed earlier this year, and viewable in the above video. As you can clearly see the end of the hallway also had the easily removable glass walls as well that according to the rumored expansion plans should have only been on the side of the Monorail tracks.

This easily points towards the idea that this wall was planned for removal as well, probably for a peoplemover traveling across Future World to the other Communicore building, near where Mouse Gear is currently located.

An anonymous source claiming to be an Imagineer who worked on this project confirmed this theory and claimed it was canceled due to complications with height clearance for fire trucks in the plaza between the two Communicore buildings.

The lost Epcot Peoplemover is something that until very recently had several obvious references to it throughout Future World. Entire buildings were built with the intention of it someday making an appearance in the park. With the demolition of one of these buildings, any chance of that happening, however slim, has now ended.

We can appreciate however how much care was taken in an attempt to make this attraction happen someday in the construction of Epcot. Even though the budget wasn't there, they found a way to ensure that should the opportunity ever arise, the ability to restore the original vision for the pavilion was there and as easy as possible to accomplish.

Thank you for coming on this journey exploring some of the many canceled attractions of Epcot Center. We have just tapped the surface of canceled attractions, exploring only the ones that some information about had gone public, but there are surely many more that never leaked out of the walls of Imagineering. Even though this is the last article, it is not the end of Epcot Center's Cancelled Attractions. Should more attractions be canceled and made public we will gladly return to this series.

For now please go here for all of the entries of this series. And be sure to come back next week. This was just the first part of a much larger series, Attractions From Neverland, where we explore the canceled attractions of all the Disney Parks. The next part of the series, Disney's Animal Kingdom's Cancelled Attractions launches next week exploring Tiger River Rapids.

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Thank you for making this series a success.