Disney Unbuilt: A Pocket Guide to the Disney Imagineering Graveyard

For all that Disney has built, there's so much more it hasn't built. Here's your nickel tour of the parks, lands, attractions, restaurants, and hotels that hatched from the fertile minds of the Disney Imagineers, from the 1950s to the present, but that you'll likely never see or experience.

Okay, mouse fans, time for some straight talk. This book is a pocket guide. You can't fit an encyclopedia in your pocket. If you're looking for definitive scholarship about Thunder Mesa and Beastly Kingdom and Muppet Studio and the many other well-known abandoned Disney projects, you won't find it here. Far from it!

What you will find, and what makes this book so unique, is that it's all here, every serious and every whimsical notion that Imagineering ever put in a blueprint, or on a napkin, in little digestible slices of Disney magic.

Did you know that Disney once planned:

• A "Tower of Terror" based on Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein—and then on the novels of Stephen King
• A brand-new theme park about the "history of America", with such things as a Civil War fort, a Dust Bowl farm, and a World War II airfield
• A new pavilion in Epcot all about the weather and sponsored by ... the Weather Channel
• An "Australia" section of Animal Kingdom to go along with the existing Africa and Asia sections

And I'm just getting started. The most obscure, the most truly forgotten Imagineering wishes and fancies are here in this sampler of might have been.