A tribute to all deleted and forgotten Disney/Pixar characters with the addition of Lost Disney park attractions, Lost Disney films and deleted songs.
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Journey Into Imagination: Disney World Lost Disney World attractions
March 3, 1983-October 10, 1998
"One little spark, of inspiration Is at the heart, of all creation Right at the start, of everything that's new One little spark, lights up for you"
Journey into Imagination was an attraction at the Epcot in Walt Disney World which opened on March 3, 1983.
It has been through three incarnations over the years, being replaced by Journey Into Your Imagination in 1999 and the current Journey Into Imagination With Figment in 2002, though the original is considered the best of them. All three of them have featured Figment, a small purple dragon, as a character.
During development, Journey into Imagination and the rest of the Epcot pavilion were late additions to the plans for Epcot. When Tony Baxter's ideas for The Land pavilion were turned down, he turned his attention to Kodak's pavilion. Requesting a pavilion based around the Imagination, Tony and his team went through a six-month process of figuring out how best to tell a story about the creative process, settling on the basic three steps of gathering, storing and recombining ideas, which would provide the attraction's structure.
The characters they would create would be derived from the cancelled Discovery Bay project for Disneyland. One of the attractions, Professor Marvel's House of Illusions, featured a bearded scientist who had a hobby of breeding dragons, which would evolve into Dreamfinder and Figment. The inspiration for Figment would also come from Tony Baxter watching Magnum P.I.
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The attraction's most unique feature, the turntable that allowed for a "stationary" scene on an Omnimover attraction, would be one of the most difficult parts of the attraction to develop and the first thing to go when the attraction was replaced. The vehicles would lock into place on one of five identical scenes like cogs and then unlock to go onto the track containing the rest of the attraction.
The attraction began with the ride vehicles "floating" in the clouds and seeing the silhouette of a strange blimp mixed with a vacuum cleaner and hearing the humming and singing of its pilot. In the next scene, the guests came right next to this vessel and the pilot, an old man with a red beard dressed in a blue suit and top hat, introduces himself as the Dreamfinder and saying that he uses his vehicle (called the Dream Mobile or Dream-Catcher by some fans) to collect dreams and ideas to create all sorts of new things. Soon, he created a figment of his imagination who came up from a pot near the back of the Dream Mobile. This figment was, appropriately, named Figment--he then proceeded to come up with enough ideas to fill the Dream Mobile's idea bag, all of which would show up later in the ride. Dreamfinder then told Figment that before they could create something, they had to go back to the Dreamport, which he said was never far away when you used your imagination.
