Alternate Entrance: Disney's Animal Kingdom's Cancelled Attractions Part 5

Disney's Animal Kingdom's Cancelled Attractions

The entrance to Disney's Animal Kingdom, while perfect for the park, is nothing elaborate and is lightly themed beyond animal viewing locations. But it could have been very different. Many early pieces of concept art show a radically different entrance to the park.

Welcome to Disney's Animal Kingdom's Cancelled Attractions. If you missed any previous entries in this series be sure to go here.

The Oasis ended up becoming the entrance to Walt Disney World's fourth theme park. It created a slow reveal for the park's icon and hid all of the park's attractions from view as you entered the park with nothing that draws your attention until the Tree of Life comes into view.

But that was not always the plan. Initial plans called for some kind of weenie before the park's official entrance, pictured above as a Mickey fountain. This fountain was then surrounded by an elaborate garden, and that is all before you even get to the formal entrance of the actual theme park.

When you get in the park, the layout of the entrance is the same as the Oasis that would end up being built, but with a much more elaborate waterfall and rockwork structures throughout the land.

This was only one of the many proposals for the entrance, which tended to change more than any other major part of the park during early development. Others involved a more biblical entrance and an entrance that involved actual attractions. But eventually, the more animal-centric and less outwardly elaborate Oasis was chosen.

We never got to see a more specific look at this concept and there wasn't really anything that was saved from this concept and brought to the actual park.

The Mickey fountain was replaced with a much less obvious design of a tree on the ground that is still there to this day. The entrance itself retained the same layout but with much less decoration.

Thanks for reading and be sure to check out all the previous entries in this series here. Also if you liked this make sure to try out our Epcot Center's Cancelled Attractions series. Finally, be sure to come back next week for the next entry in this series, The Cancelled Dinosaur Tour.