Disney Unbuilt: A Pocket Guide to the Disney Imagineering Graveyard

by Chris Ware

Mickey's Attic

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.

Genres: Nonfiction

194 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Chris Ware is an American cartoonist acclaimed for redefining the visual and narrative possibilities of the graphic novel, known especially for his long-running Acme Novelty Library series and major works including Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Building Stories, and Rusty Brown. His work is distinguished by its emotional depth, frequently exploring loneliness, memory, regret, and the quieter forms of pain that shape ordinary lives, rendered with extreme visual precision, intricate page designs, and a style that evokes early twentieth-century American illustration, advertising, and architecture. Raised in Omaha and later based in the Chicago area, Ware first attracted attention through his strips for The Daily Texan, where an invitation from Art Spiegelman to contribute to Raw helped encourage him toward an ambitious, self-publishing approach that would define his career. Acme Novelty Library disrupted conventions of comic book production in both format and tone, presenting characters such as Quimby the Mouse and later Rusty Brown in narratives that blend autobiography, satire, and psychological portraiture. Building Stories further expanded his formal experimentation, released as a boxed set of interconnected printed pieces that require the reader to assemble meaning from varied physical formats. Ware’s artistic influences range from early newspaper cartoonists like Winsor McCay and Frank King to the collage and narrative play of Joseph Cornell, and he has spoken about using typography-like logic in his drawing to mirror the fragmented, associative way memory works. His practice remains largely analog, relying on hand drawing and careful layout, though he uses computers for color preparation. Ware has also been active as an editor, designer, and curator, contributing to volumes reprinting historic comic strips, serving as editor of The Best American Comics 2007, and organizing exhibitions such as UnInked at the Phoenix Art Museum. His work has extended into multimedia collaborations, including illustrated documentary materials for This American Life and visual designs for film posters, book covers, and music projects. His later projects include The Last Saturday, serialized online for The Guardian, and Monograph, a retrospective volume combining autobiography with archival material. Widely recognized for his influence, Ware’s books have received numerous honors, including multiple Eisner and Harvey Awards, and Jimmy Corrigan became the first graphic novel to win the Guardian First Book Award. He has exhibited at major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and his contributions to the medium have led many peers and critics to regard him as one of the most significant cartoonists of his generation.

Reviews

[Manintheboat · Rating 1 out of 5]

This CANNOT be by Chris Ware the cartoonist. He can spell and form a complete sentence.

[Michael Hartnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagination Unbound
Disney Unbuilt by Chris Ware focuses on what might have been at the present Disney theme parks, not to mention what other Disney parks were envisioned. There was a Walt Disney’s Riverfront Square in St. Louis, Disneyland New York (on the World’s Fair grounds), Port Disney in Long Beach, California, and Disney’s America in Haymarket, Virginia. That last proposed theme park was to be a “wonderful way to introduce young people to the history of this great nation,” featuring recreations of Civil War forts, Ellis Island, Native American villages, and even a factory town, where “American ingenuity and work ethic would have been the theme here.”
For many of these parks, climate spelled doom (the parks needed year-round attendance) while local opposition and costs (especially if much of the park were indoors) were other major hurdles. Ultimately, many of the ideas for these parks were folded into the vast web of attractions at Walt Disney World and the more recent development of Disney’s California Adventure. Some ideas regularly return to Disney’s drawing boards like the Dark Kingdom, a theme park dedicated to Disney’s villains. This concept morphed into proposed villain lands and villain rides, an appealing idea that just has never been really executed.
Ware skillfully and engagingly takes the reader to these landscapes of the unrealized, the very names of which evoke whimsical visions: Lilliputian Land, Edison Square, Land of the Legends, and Tomorrowland 2055. While the proposed World Showcase pavilions at Epcot can read like a registry at the United Nations, some of the memorable possibilities include Denmark (with a Lego-theme boat-ride), Arab nations (with a magic carpet ride), and Israel (with a recreation of ancient Jerusalem). As Ware points out, most fascinating of them all was a Cold War proposal for a Soviet Union pavilion: “It was to be a pavilion about a communist country in one of the most capitalistic of all locations in the world.”
The book is filled with nuggets, such as the intimation that some of the Imagineers who designed the aborted Beastly Kingdom project jumped over to Universal to work on Dueling Dragons and its later incarnation, the Dragon Challenge. Typical of the tales Ware uncovers is a 1950s plan for a Confucius restaurant, featuring an animatronic Confucius that was way ahead its time. “The Imagineers liked the idea of using Confucius for a variety of reasons. First, he was old so he would not be expected to move much and could simply sit down. Second, he could wear baggy silk clothes which would not look out of place but would allow for more room for the mechanics inside.”
Other seemingly fine ideas that never saw the light of day include Mel Brooks’ funny Hollywood Horror Hotel and a Mount Fuji rollercoaster where riders would have been terrorized by Godzilla. But the most intriguing of them all was developed way back when Walt Disney was alive: the Museum of Weird, which was to be located near the beginning or the end of the Haunted Mansion attraction. “There would be a chair that could move and talk, a melting candle man, mushroom people, a Gypsy cart, and many other unusual things collected from around the world.”
As Ware eloquently points out the Museum of Weird, like so many other possibilities that fill Disney Unbuilt, became “a lost soul of an idea.” This fine book rekindles those possibilities at the very least in the reader’s imagination and with any luck sends an Imagineer back through Disney’s history to unearth inspired ideas too long buried.

[Christine Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the concept of this book. I did find it to be extremely repetitive as it neared the end.

[Alicia von Kugelgen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fairly juvenile, poorly written, and badly edited.

[Zachary Sokol · Rating 4 out of 5]

It had some strange grammar problems and a lot of the information was a bit lackluster. Though if you can look past that it is a super fun read.

[Mark Clarkson · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book about a lot of stuff that never made it past the planning stage

[Chelsea Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

Eh. This is one of those I would have rather not read. The proof reading was definitely not thorough, so if you get distracted or irritated by bad grammar/punctuation, turn back now.

[Peter J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

In all fairness, it does say right in the title and description that this a pocket guide not a more indepth look at projects that didn't make it. Even keeping that in mind, the book felt repetitive as the sections began to feel like the same paragraph with new attractions, hotels, etc as the noun the topic sentence.

This is the first Theme Park Press book in which I've been truly disappointed. This may because it's the first I've read that wasn't written by a park employee. There are many pages here that feel like internet rumor rather more than anything.

It is a fascinating topic that is worth more than this book was able to deliver.