Beastly Kingdom: Disney's Animal Kingdom's Cancelled Attractions Part 14


Beastly Kingdom Concept Art Never Built Disney World

Disney's Animal Kingdom was supposed to open based on three major things. Animals of the past. Animals of the present. Animals of make-believe. Yet when it opened it only featured the first two. Beastly Kingdom, the center of the make-believe part of the park's theme didn't end up in the park.

Welcome to Disney's Cancelled Attractions, where we discuss the lost rides and lands from Disney's Animal Kingdom. Be sure to go here for the rest of the series. This week we are exploring what happened to Beastly Kingdom that kept it from being built.

Beastly Kingdom was supposed to include three main attractions, a dragon roller coaster, a unicorn maze, and a boat ride based on the classic Disney film Fantasia. It was set to be one of the most immersive in the park. But no one would ever get to enter this land.

Disney was going through some financial troubles at the end of the 1990s as Disney's Animal Kingdom was being designed and built. Euro Disneyland was an early financial failure and the Disney Renaissance was beginning to slow down. It was becoming apparent that the plans for Disney's Animal Kingdom were just too ambitious for Disney's current wallet and something had to be cut.

If reports are to be believed then it came down to either Beastly Kingdom or Dinoland getting cut. Now Dinoland as we partially discussed before in articles about The Excavator and the originally planned version of Dinosaur, was originally supposed to be a lot more elaborate.

When it came between the two lands, the Imagineers behind Dinoland were apparently willing to make more concessions to make their land cheaper, and its less expensive version would get built over Beastly Kingdom.


We would never see Beastly Kingdom, but animals of make-believe would later come to the park, first with Expedition Everest and eventually with Pandora World of Avatar.

Thank you for coming along with us and be sure to come back next week for the last entry of this series, Pandora's Lost Attraction. But you can read all previous entries of the series here right now.

Also, returning for a revived run the week after, our most popular series ever, Epcot Center's Cancelled Attractions is coming back to TPE every Tuesday at 10AM. Be sure not to miss any of the new entries starting with an exploration with Posidens The Living Seas.

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