Progress City, U.S.A.

One of Imagineer Tim Delaney’s famous renderings for EPCOT’s The Living Seas pavilion

The last time we spoke of Imagineer Tim Delaney was last year, when he departed Walt Disney Imagineering after thirty-three years with the company. Fans mourned his loss to WDI, as Delaney was a well-known name who had worked on a number of prominent and well-received projects throughout his career. I was glad to discover, then, that Delaney had landed on his feet and founded his own design studio. His website, which debuted a few months ago, provides a nice summary of his career to date and – even better – gives us lots of his fantastic conceptual art to view!

So before you drop in to check out his portfolio, here are a few of his pieces that I found most interesting. Delaney’s “break-through” came in the late 1970s with his well known conceptual renderings for EPCOT’s The Living Seas.

Conceptual art for The Living Seas

This rendering shows elements from the show and attraction originally conceived for the pavilion; this spectacular attraction was sadly abandoned when sponsorship problems forced Disney to cut the budget. Delaney’s rendering for Seas were so evocative and exciting, that the actual pavilion wound up being something of a disappointment when it actually debuted in 1986. An engineering triumph, to be sure, but nowhere near as expansive as Delaney’s original imaginative concepts. But that’s not all that he worked on for EPCOT.

Rendering of Future World for EPCOT Center, circa 1978

This exciting rendering shows the Future World section of EPCOT Center as it was envisioned in 1978. I love the energy in that piece. Delaney also did some conceptual work for EPCOT’s never-built but long-lamented Space pavilion.

Rendering of the main simulator attraction for the unbuilt EPCOT Space pavilion

Other key projects that Delaney worked on at WDI included Discoveryland at Disneyland Paris and Tomorrowland at Hong Kong Disneyland. He developed concepts large and small, including the much-lauded Disney Parks and Resorts exhibit for last year’s D23 Expo.

Rendering of Disney Parks & Resorts Exhibit for the D23 Expo

But you know what we’re really interested in – the attractions that never made it off the drawing boards. The blue sky concepts. The sneak peeks of possible future attractions. Here are some of my favorites from Delaney’s site. First, the projects that never came to be. Delaney worked on several of these, including resort hotels…

Rendering of Disney’s White Mountains Lodge

This resort, which I believe is one of the various Disney regional resorts that had been considered, is called the White Mountains Lodge. According to Google, there are White Mountains in both Arizona and New Hampshire; the New England setting better fits the summer and wintertime views that Delaney envisions.

One of the most prominent projects that Delaney worked on before he left Disney was the famous pirate-themed expansion for Hong Kong Disneyland. This vast area would have been a “mini-land” addition to Adventureland, with several rides deriving their themes from Pirates of the Caribbean. The area would have possibly included a variation of the Haunted Mansion, and of course a new iteration of the famous Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. This version of Pirates would have been more thrilling than previous incarnations, though; with no plans to bring Splash Mountain to Hong Kong, the new version of Pirates would have incorporated elements of that flume attraction and ended with a massive drop. And I think it would have gone a little something like this…

Guests plunge from Skull Rock in this concept for Hong Kong’s flume-based Pirates of the Caribbean attraction

Sadly, Hong Kong officials nixed this expansion. It would have been nice…

Concept art for Hong Kong Disneyland pirate village, 2006

But Delaney’s site also gives us a glimpse of what the future might hold, with concept art from 2008 for Shanghai Disneyland – some of the first development art we’ve seen for the park. Here, Delaney shows a few of his concept for the park’s Main Street area:

Concepts for Shanghai Disneyland’s Main Street by Tim Delaney

While these concepts probably differ greatly from what we’ll actually see when the new park (codenamed “Project Bueno”) opens later this decade, they at least give us an idea of what is being considered. For one thing, many have questioned if the new park will be a traditional “kingdom” style design. While these designs are certainly different from previous Main Street areas, they do indicate that the park will have a somewhat similar layout with a town square, Main Street, and Center Street.

The top sketch shows a Hollywood-themed Main Street, with the various traditional Main Street amenities themed to appropriate Hollywood landmarks. The arch over Center Street indicates that it leads to the “Walt Disney Studios.”

The center sketch shows Main Street as a “Forest Village”, with a fantasy-based enchanted forest feel. The bottom sketch depicts a “Whimsy” Main Street, with various far-out designs more reminiscent of Downtown Disney. Interestingly, Center Street in this design provides a “view to Hyperion Theater.”

One of my favorite designs is this imposing suggestion for a new Space Mountain, from 2008:

Rendering of a new Space Mountain, possibly for Shanghai Disneyland

That’s just a taste of what Delaney has on his site; head over and check out the rest, including more fantastic work on projects both built and unbuilt. And a few things that are mysterious but simply very cool…

I’ve no idea if this design for a “new Nautilus” was for any specific project, but wouldn’t it have looked cool in Hong Kong’s unbuilt Glacier Bay?

Good luck to Tim in all his future projects!

Someone posted this chestnut from 1990 on a message board today, and I thought it was good for a chuckle or two. Or, you know, tears. Lots of tears.

Counting generously, I have them at zero-for-seven on those announcements. That’s a hitting percentage of… .000. Nice. Although I guess you could be super generous, and say that Harry actually meant that the park would be getting an entirely different The Little Mermaid ride, but just in 2011 and in the parking lot.

I have no explanation for the music cue from Back to the Future.

Artist’s rendering of Thunder Mesa, circa 1969

No, this isn’t a big article about Western River Expedition. I’m not yet ready to make that rite of passage that every Disney blog eventually must face. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do since day one, but I just haven’t had that breakthrough of research yet to make it any more than a rewrite of articles posted elsewhere.

Instead, I was going through some documents and cleaning up some artwork and just came across this rendering – an image very familiar to most retro Disney fans. Thunder Mesa and the Western River Expedition has become, over the years, something both legendary and symbolic for fans. It’s the one that got away – the magnum opus of several legendary imagineers that would pick up where Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion left off. And, as of about 1973, there was little to no chance that we’d ever see it become a reality.

But looking at this image filling my monitor, I forgot about the attraction as a bit of history or a mystery to be researched, and just thought of what it would really be like if it were real. Go ahead – click and open up the large image, let it fill your screen, and think… that could be real. Like, really real. Let it fill your field of view. It’s a vista just as if you were standing on the Rivers of America. It could be real, regardless of what later naysayers and revisionists (coughMartySklarcough) would tell you. Sure, it’s huge – but so is Mount Prometheus in Tokyo.

So forget all the baggage, and just look at that picture. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Have you ever looked at a picture that you’ve seen a million times before, only to note something random that you have to have seen before but had never noticed? Check out this picture from 1980 of Imagineer John Hench, and see if you notice anything:

John Hench with an Imagineering model of EPCOT Center’s France Pavilion, 1980

By the time this picture was taken, EPCOT was already under construction but far from completion. And, as the model behind Hench shows, some elements had yet to take their final shape. As I said, I’ve seen this picture many times, but for the first time it actually occurred to me that the shape of the theater for Impressions de France in this picture is, well, round. Round in a way that the actual show building isn’t. In fact, one might say that the building as pictures is a circle.

The France pavilion today, as seen in Google Earth

As you can see, the actual Impressions de France theater is not round. So this raises the question – was the film attraction in the French pavilion originally supposed to be in CircleVision 360, like the films in China and Canada? At this time, China wasn’t locked in as part of the opening-day pavilion lineup. Perhaps Disney wanted to bank on having two CircleVision films; perhaps this is just one of a million random iterations of the always-changing EPCOT model. But it does seem that the circular theater indicated that in 1980 Imagineers were planning something different for this pavilion.

If you look closely at the model, you might notice another way in which it differs from the actual building:

Around the top of the circular theater, there’s a small facade that seems to create an extra skyline for the French pavilion. This could be the same extra layer of detail that can be seen in this picture, from Richard Beard’s 1982 book, Walt Disney’s EPCOT: Creating the New World of Tomorrow:

Imagineering model of EPCOT Center’s France pavilion

Above the entrance to Impressions de France, but before the forced-perspective Eiffel Tower, you’ll note an extra layer of detail that doesn’t exist in the final pavilion. Most notable is the spinning windmill of Paris’s Moulin Rouge, which would eventually appear as a lighting effect in the original Illuminations show. As Beard’s text states:

With the best will in the world, there was still not complete agreement among the EPCOT team during the planning of the France pavilion. One of the first concept sketches was of the Place du Tertre, the artists’ colony up near the catherdral of Sacré-Coeur. Then the Moulin Rouge and the Place Pigalle were considered, but the French advisers thought that was “tacky.” (It is; but tourists still love it.)

Sacré-Coeur itself, when they tried to build it to scale, looked rather Muscovite to a lot of people, with its onion-type domes. But the Eiffel Tower is unmistakable; it is one of a kind.

Detail of the Imagineering model, with the Moulin Rouge clearly showing above the theater entrance

So, out went the Moulin Rouge. So, also, did “a cancan show typical of the Folies Bergère or the Lido.” And somewhere along the line the building went from its mysterious circular form, to the final rectangular design that would open in 1982. But aside from the differing abandoned concepts for the pavilion, there was one small element that was promised but left out. Again, from Beard, a discussion of was intended for the Les Halles area of the pavilion:

Envisioned for a future time is an animated map of France: by pushing a button, you will be able to learn what’s going on in various regions – the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, the skiing areas, the Riviera, the wine country.

So, what do you say France – time to plus the pavilion?

UPDATE:

From the great Martin Smith comes this better view of the pavilion model which, quite clearly, shows the circular show building.

When the announcement was made that Merlin Entertainments had purchased Florida’s fabled yet troubled Cypress Gardens to convert it into LEGOland Florida – exciting news for those of us who share a love of LEGO and an interest in preserving as much of ol’ Cypress Gardens as possible – my mind immediately went elsewhere. A trip down memory lane through the last several decades reveals a long, mostly unconsummated, flirtation between Disney and LEGO.

Like two stars orbiting each other in a gravitational embrace, the two companies have been intertwined for ages. But instead of drawing closer, it appears that at last they’ve catapulted each other into interstellar space.

Allow me to explain my tortured metaphor.

One of the most vigorous and undying Disney rumors in the early days of the internet was that the fifth gate at Walt Disney World would be a LEGO park. I’ve no idea how realistic these rumors actually were, but there were several legitimate attempts to bring LEGO into the existing Disney parks. Most prominently, these involved efforts to bring a Denmark pavilion to EPCOT Center. The Denmark pavilion has popped up here in the past; it’s one of those rare unrealized ideas, much like the Spain pavilion, that have been hinted at publicly at certain intervals since well before EPCOT’s opening in 1982 to almost the modern day. While many of those iterations probably didn’t involve LEGO, some did. Let’s take a look back, starting in 1983…

John Sullivan, the president of Lego’s American subsidiary, said in an interview here that shipments were up in 1982 but not as much as the company had expected. Overall, the toy industry was hurt by the economic downturn, and Lego fared reasonably well compared to other companies, Sullivan said. But, particularly in the United States, video games are a major new long-term factor in an industry already crowded with products. In only a few years, electronic toys have garnered 32 percent of the market, and their attraction is increasing as prices go down, he said.

…

Lego is an unusual international company because it is so closely held by the founding family and because it operates from this remote corner of Scandinavia. It was once written of Billund that it was a “god-forsaken railway stopping point where nothing could thrive.” The railway is gone, the surrounding flatlands still offer an uninviting vista, but Billund appears to be flourishing as the home of one of Denmark’s leading companies and largest exporters. Although no sales figures are published, one informal estimate puts total turnover at about $250 million annually.

The local airport is among the country’s busiest, although the population remains only a few thousand. Many of the travelers are among the 900,000 people who each year visit Legoland, the amusement park where almost everything is built of Lego pieces. It has become Denmark’s second most popular tourist attraction after Tivoli, the famous gardens in Copenhagen, according to company officials.

Lego is negotiating for a niche at the new Disneyworld Epcot Center in Florida, where it would feature more of the amazing giant-size Lego creations, Sullivan said.

- “Lego’s Market ‘Clutch Power’; Electronic Games Pose New Challenge”, The Washington Post, March 31st, 1983

Obviously, that didn’t happen. The Denmark pavilion begat the Scandinavia pavilion which begat today’s Norway pavilion. So, take two…

LOOKING FOR a good Danish? If you’re not too hungry to wait, try Walt Disney World, where the next country represented in Epcot’s World Showcase is likely to be Denmark. Disney is close to signing a contract with the northern European kingdom, says Walt Disney Attractions President Judson Green. Now, with Norway already in place, Epcot need collect only Sweden to have the complete Scandinavian set.

- The Orlando Sentinel, December 20, 1993

Disney chairman Michael Eisner announced that Denmark would build the 12th foreign pavilion at Florida’s Epcot Center.

- “Disney meet upbeat”, Daily Variety, February 23rd, 1994

That’s from the annual shareholders’ meeting! You can’t get much more definitive an announcement than that. And yet…

Finally, despite CEO Michael Eisner’s announcement at February’s annual meeting, Expansion Plans with Copenhagen Only Tentative.

Eisner told shareholders that the deal to add Denmark to World Showcase was all but signed, but talks continue six months later.

”Both parties are re-evaluating,” Warren said. ”It still may happen, but it also may not.”

- “EPCOT: Expect Park Changes Over Time”, The Orlando Sentinel, August 15th, 1994

Uh oh…

Q. Whatever happened to Walt Disney World’s plans to add a Denmark pavilion to World Showcase at Epcot ‘95?

A. The addition seems a lot less likely than it did a year ago, when Disney officials were saying they were close to signing a contract with Denmark on the project.

Pam Brandon, a spokeswoman for Epcot , said the idea hasn’t been dropped altogether, but there is no timetable for moving ahead with it.

“Denmark is definitely on hold,” Brandon said. “The thought at Epcot right now is that we’re doing more media in entertainment rather than building big buildings.

“Right now, especially in World Showcase, we’re looking more at entertainment that’s outside and giving it more a sense of place.”

Word of Walt Disney World’s interest in bringing Denmark to its World Showcase got out in late 1993. It would have been the 12th country to be featured at the park.

- The Orlando Sentinel, February 3rd, 1995

Swing and a miss.

So, let’s fast-forward then, to early 2001 – before that year’s recession, attendance downturn, and terrorism-induced attendance collapse:

Contrary to Internet speculation, Lego probably won’t open a new theme park at Walt Disney World.

But the Danish construction-toy maker might have a presence on World Showcase Lagoon.

Lego officials said last year the company was talking to Disney, Universal and SeaWorld officials about possible sites for a proposed 125-acre theme park. The privately owned company already operates parks in Billund, Denmark; Windsor, England; and Carlsbad, Calif.

Instead, the toy maker has talked to Disney officials about opening a new Lego-themed attraction and store in Epcot, said a source familiar with the project.

The attraction would display various landmarks, such as the Pyramids, made out of Legos.

The two companies already have strong ties. Lego operates a store in Downtown Disney in Orlando and just opened a similar store in Anaheim as part of the new California Adventure theme park. Lego also produces a line of toys for Disney.

Disney would not comment on the project. A Lego spokesman said the company has no immediate plans for an attraction at Epcot, but wouldn’t rule out the possibility.

- “EPCOT, LEGO ARE IN TALKS”, The Orlando Sentinel, February 19th, 2001

Strike three?

So now LEGO is coming to Cypress Gardens, after thirty years of flirting with central Florida. EPCOT, of course, hasn’t seen a new World Showcase pavilion in twenty-one years. But hey, you can’t say they didn’t try.

You might notice the sad lack of images in this story, and as with most stories on the internet This Story Is Useless Without Pictures. But there has been a surprising lack of artwork from this project released or leaked over the years. Of course, if anyone wants to drop me a line with some info…