Imagine if you could park your very own Time Rover inside of Animal Kingdom’s Countdown to Extinction attraction in 1998. Fast-forwarding through the years, you’d see the ride “convert” to DINOSAUR in 2000, then you’d watch in fast-motion as its effects degraded and its animatronics became stiffer and stiffer… but beyond its showbuilding in Dinoland, you’d witness an even greater shift across Walt Disney World and the Disney Parks.
For a time-traveler from 1998, it would shocking to awaken to a Walt Disney Company of the 2020s that owns The Muppets, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, National Geographic, and 20th Century Fox; a company caught up in the “culture wars” of right wing rage; a company (briefly, if irreparably) centered around streaming…
And from there, to understand the ramifications in the theme parks – now elevated as one of the company’s strongest revenue-generators, and in the midst of a half-decade, post-pandemic effort to extract every cent possible from a nostalgic, vacation-starved populace no matter the longterm cost.
Imagine explaining to a ’90s Imagineer who’d time-traveled to today that the Wizarding World of Harry Potter had forever altered the industry, and that billion-dollar, multi-attraction, immersive, plucked-from-the-screen lands recreating to-scale locales from movies were the new norm and de facto standard. Indeed, we call this the age of the Disney+ Park, when it’s neither a secret nor a point of shame for executives that Disney Parks haven’t had an IP-free headlining ride in decades.
It’s the world we reside in – and one that’s frankly quite at odds with Disney’s Animal Kingdom, one of the few theme parks in Disney’s portfolio that still has any meaning at all, and a fairly high bar to entry when it comes to cross-collaboration with the studios. Not that something as ethereal as a theme could keep the IP infusions at bay for long…
Extinction event(s)
Disney’s semi-annual D23 Expo has long been a day that looms large over Disney Parks fans. For the brand-allegiant, it’s a chance to get first looks at what awaits across Disney’s multi-tentacled international media efforts – from television to movies to Marvel to streaming to Star Wars to products to archives to theme parks. Of course, for the park-loyal, it’s a nail-biting endeavor defined by the hopes and fears of a shifting divisional priority. For many of us, D23 is filled not just with announcements of what’s to come, but what’s to go to make room for the latest effort to leverage Disney’s character catalogue.
Such was the case at the D23 Expo in 2022. Already a year delayed (given the 2020 pandemic), the September event had a lot riding on it. After years of downsizing, delaying, and outright deleting announced projects from the docket, it was hoped that the 2022 event would officially provide Disney with a post-pandemic direction and a slate of projects that would power the Parks’ revival for a decade or more.
Instead, the first (and last) D23 presided over by infamous cheapskate and now-exited CEO Bob Chapek offered fans something not even Disney’s biggest cynics had predicted: nothing. Over the course of the multi-hour Panel, Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro offered a handful of half-hearted updates around the few projects that had survived the pandemic, highlighted lots of low cost, cheap-and-cheerful entertainment shifts, and then – in the space where big announcements would usually fit – he brought Disney Animation Studios Chief Creative Officer Jennifer Lee on stage to talk about the future of Disney Parks. (Gulp.) Or at least, a version of it?
Fitting for the era of the “Multiverse” that defined that year’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, D’Amaro and Lee quickly told the assembled crowd of super-fans that while they weren’t quite ready to make any firm announcements, they did have some “Blue Sky” ideas to give fans a peek into the creative process occurring between Imagineering and Animation. For example, the two waxed poetic on what if Coco was “beyond Big Thunder Mountain”? I mean, it wouldn’t be, but y’know, what if it were?
The strange “pep rally” of “just ideas” seemed engineered to engage fans in a real time cheering contest to figure out exactly which ideas Disney’s most loyal brand-consumers would be interested in them actually pursuing. (Instead, it largely backfired, creating a culture of yet more distrust among fans who’d already seen countless official plans cancelled throughout the pandemic and thus had little taste for “just ideas” that Disney wasn’t even pretending to commit to. D’Amaro returned to the stage in 2024 explicitly promising to thunderous applause, “This isn’t Blue Sky. […] I just want to be clear about this: We are doing everything you’re going to hear tonight.”)
The oddest moment, though, must’ve been when D’Amaro and Lee tag-teamed another not-quite-an-announcement, specifically acknowledging that they know fans don’t really like Dinoland, so Disney was working on a plan to replace it. It was an uncharacteristically frank thing to say about a specific space in the parks, especially given that it wasn’t really an announcement that Dinoland was really going anywhere?
Anyway, the two proudly unveiled a very odd piece of concept art that seemed to suggest that Dinoland’s Boneyard and Dinorama carnival would become themed to Moana while Dinosaur (or at least, the space it then-occupied) would become the neon animal city from the 2016 Disney Animation Studios film Zootopia.
The schism between the “brand-loyal” and the “park-loyal” became a veritable brand canyon as fans took to the Internet to debate any aspect of the artwork. At least you could kinda sorta square that Moana could maybe represent the continent of “Oceania” (making sense alongside Animal Kingdom’s Asia and Africa, maybe?) even if the explicit and all-encompassing character tie-in felt like a really inelegant and perhaps even insensitive way to represent a real, geographical and culture region in a park otherwise defined by authenticity.
But many – including this author – could hardly stomach the insertion of Zootopia. Clearly, Disney’s incentive here was to copy-and-paste at least portions of the Zootopia land they’d developed for Shanghai Disneyland, either porting elements of its E-Ticket to the layout of Dinosaur or even demolishing Dinosaur altogether to build a copy of the trackless Chinese dark ride.
If so, that would’ve likely converted the Time Rovers into police cruisers, sending guests on a patrol-turned-rescue mission to track down a kidnapped pop singer and return her to her concert downtown, somewhat self-evidently demonstrating the problem with the whole conceit: Zootopia might have animals, but it’s not about animals. Would Frozen fit in Animal Kingdom if its characters had been rendered as foxes instead of people?
Anyway, the months of online commentary around the soon-to-be Moana / Zootopia land and the year of fan debate that followed turned out to be useless. In a major change at Imagineering, outgoing WDI President Barbara Bouza (who’d been plucked externally from an engineering firm) gave way to the return of Imagineering alumnus Bruce Vaughn. It was allegedly Vaughn who convinced Walt Disney World executives to abandon the Zootopia route and instead bring back an idea floated on message boards for decades… The unthinkable would become real…
Tropical Americas
At the semi-annual, Orlando-set “Destination D23” fan event (occurring on odd-numbered years between the Anaheim-set Expos), D’Amaro was back on stage with a correction. While it was now official that Dinoland would go extinct in the coming years, a neon cartoon city of animal cops was no longer on the docket. Instead, under Vaughn’s leadership, Dinoland would give way to a space themed to the Tropical Americas – roughly the equatorial region stretching from northern Central America to central South America. (Phew!)
Just like Africa incarnate as the pan-continental village of Harambe, or Asia’s embodiment as the grounded-but-fantastical Anadapur, the Tropical Americas would come to life as the village of Pueblo Esperanza – a colorful, festive, and vibrant town of artisans, explorers, and musicians deep in the tropical rainforest. Luckily, it’s not such a stretch to turn the swampy structures of Florida into a town that could fit anywhere from southern Mexico to Brazil.
Certainly, a major output of the Tropical Americas project will be a dark ride for the park centered on Disney’s 2021 Colombia-set animated musical film Encanto. (Box office wise, the pandemic-era movie reportedly lost about $40 million for Disney, but its second life on Disney+ turned it into a substantial hit on the back of its Lin-Manuel Miranda soundtrack.) The dark ride will replace the Dino-Rama carnival that provided both fans and guests with so much consternation and confusion over the years.
As for Dinosaur? The once-unimaginable would become real…
Like taking early-2000s discussion board posts and asking an Imagineering artist to make them real, the scholarly Dino Institute will soon become an ancient Mayan temple, hidden away in the jungles outside of Pueblo Esperanza and home to a new Indiana Jones Adventure – yes, in the year of our lord twenty-twenty-seven. (In today’s Disney, there’s no way to pretend that the change of plans wasn’t spurred by the first Disney-produced entry in the Indiana Jones canon, 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. But to Disney’s credit, the film vastly underperformed expectations and yet the ride’s development continued, demonstrating the company’s uncharacteristic trust in the IP beyond its box office.)
The details of what will await inside are still largely concealed. What we do know – thanks to the Disney Parks Blog – is that Animal Kingdom’s ride “will be different from any other Indiana Jones experience around the world.” It’s fairly obvious that they wouldn’t use the India-set “Temple of the Forbidden Eye” story developed for Disneyland, but the comment also makes it clear that they won’t use the “Temple of the Crystal Skull” tale in use at Tokyo DisneySea’s version of the ride, which is set in South America and would’ve been a fairly easy narrative copy-paste.
Instead, Imagineers even promise that this version of the ride will deeply connect to Animal Kingdom’s themes, hinting that it’ll be centered not on the escape from an ancient culture’s booby traps, but on seeking out a “mythical creature” said to reside in the temple – perhaps the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl, for example.
Even so, this Indiana Jones Adventure will have some serious work to do to conform to the requirements of modern Imagineering storytelling. Disneyland’s version of the ride is almost certainly somewhere on Disney’s short list of rides that need swept through to remove harmful depictions and stereotypes – a task perhaps at odds with Indy’s foundation as a pulpy ’30s global hero whose filmography is literally made possible by cultural appropriation and exaggeration. It’s hard to imagine an Indiana Jones story that doesn’t involve vengeful gods, curses, racially-insensitive stereotypical stock characters, and quests for otherworldly totems. Even Indy’s de facto catch-phrase – that artifacts of ancient peoples “belong in a museum!” – is… y’know… Bleh.
Perhaps to combat that, Imagineers have already communicated that tremendous effort has gone into getting the archaeological and cultural details right for this new, custom ride – as chronicled by Len Testa (of Touring Plans) attending an Imagineering-centered session at an archaeology conference – and that yesteryear’s style of appropriating or even “spoofing” real historic cultures won’t be the norm now.
In any case, it’s clear that an Indiana Jones Adventure at Animal Kingdom will be narratively different from any other, and it’s likely to be structurally different, too. After all, despite the notion that Dinosaur and Disneyland’s Indy have nearly identical layouts, they are – by definition – not identical. In other words, a smart gambler wouldn’t bet on seeing the “Big Room” in Florida’s ride given that it would require extensive relocation of support beams and structural walls. It’s much more likely that Florida’s Indy ride will use what Dinosaur left behind than to magically reverse engineer the ride to the grandeur of Anaheim’s or Tokyo’s.
Which, for now at least, brings us to the last chapter of Dinosaur’s story.
We already know that Dinoland’s pieces and parts will go behind construction walls in phases. (The first phase saw Dino-Rama shutter in early 2025.) Disney appears to be in no rush to close Dinosaur, which makes sense. Despite expansions here and there, Animal Kingdom has the fewest rides of any Disney Park – just seven. By the numbers, closing one ride at Animal Kingdom is the proportional equivalent of closing four rides at Magic Kingdom. And for all its pomp and circumstance, the Tropical Americas area won’t actually improve that. (Instead, quantitatively, its three rides will merely replace the three rides Dinoland had at its height, returning Animal Kingdom’s peak of nine rides.)
While we don’t yet have a firm end date for Dinosaur, Disney has announced that the ride will operate throughout 2025, meaning it’ll close sometime in 2026. That at least provides fans with the time they need to book one last trip to Dinoland… and time for us to reflect on the closure of this would-be E-Ticket one last time…
Legacies
When we started our in-depth exploration into Countdown to Extinction and DINOSAUR, we asked whether the ride was a Lost Legend, a Modern Marvel, or a Declassified Disaster – a question we’ve never before had to ask! And now, as the ride’s remaining lifetime can likely be counted in months, then weeks, then days, it’s at least worth using the opportunity to reflect on the question. What will be the legacy of Animal Kingdom’s DINOSAUR?
Here we have a ride with E-Ticket technology that was thrilling, wild, and even scary in a way Disney touched only in the ’90s… It’s – for all practical purposes – “original,” not relying on an existing intellectual property or already-beloved characters. And at least for some of us, Dinosaur created (dare we say it?) fascinating lore – a wholly original world, original characters, and in so many words, even original creatures who’ve gone on to be part of countless memories. Generations of guests will forever remember being pursued through a score-less primeval jungle by a Day-glo red dinosaur that scared the daylights out of them, and you just don’t see that sort of thing from Disney anymore, do you?
In so many words, Dinosaur was a mess – an uneven off-roading adventure that couldn’t quite find the balance between humor and terror, unsure of who, exactly, it existed for. Criticism of the film held that Disney had gone to great expense to create lifelike creatures, then to even greater expense undermining their own illusion. Can’t that be said of the ride, too? One can practically imagine one set of designers meticulously creating believable in-universe lighting out of fallen astroid fragments while another set concocts a ham-fisted script of shout-along puns and one-liners. Likewise, we see here some of Disney’s best Audio-Animatronics, but uncared for and littered among abandoned effects, painted flats, and the half-baked ideas.
And yet for all those reasons and more, Dinosaur was also a triumph; a weirdly ambitious, deeply fun, and downright weird experiment tucked away in an unassuming corner of Dinoland. Maybe it didn’t quite put Animal Kingdom “on the map” as intended, but imagine a Disney today that would have the gall to open a park like Animal Kingdom at all, much less to say “Let’s use the blueprints from Indiana Jones Adventure, but for something totally original.” It simply wouldn’t happen! Dinosaur could only have been born in the microcosm of a mid-’90s Disney, and it could only be replaced by a Disney of today – obsessed with leveraging its owned and acquired characters.
It’s safe to say that when DINOSAUR is officially extinct, Animal Kingdom will never quite be the same… for better or worse. The Indiana Jones Adventure that comes next will almost certainly be more polished and professional… but at least in part, it’ll be that way by eschewing creative risks and resting on the inherent laurels of a tried-and-true IP. There’s no shame in that… but there is loss. So even if Indy re-elevates the ride system to the starring role of a crowd-pleasing, beautifully-scored, must-see E-Ticket it was always meant to be, make no mistake – DINOSAUR was special. A mess and a triumph that lived up to its motto – “It’s fast. It’s a blast. It’s in the past.”
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Re Quest of the unicorn — that sounds an awful lot like a (now-defunct) attraction called ‘Adventure’ at COSI in Columbus, Ohio. Which sounds a bit crazy, except that – if I recall correctly – Adventure was designed by a firm that was created by Imagineers who were let go after AK’s opening. (Our zoo also benefitted from this experience; there are sections built in the early 2000s that are Disney-quality, reportedly due to being designed by ex-Imagineers who had worked on AK.)
Adventure began with a pre-show explaining the premise (which, incidentally, felt very much like Indiana Jones’ in Disneyland – almost uncannily so, now that I think back on it). Upon exiting the pre-show, visitors entered an enormous set with plenty of opportunities to explore. The exhibit was essentially divided into four areas (a maze, a cavern, a gravel pit, etc.), with a “locked” central ‘observatory’. The objective was to obtain a four-piece “code”, which in turn would unlock the observatory. In each area, visitors located several ‘animal symbols’ (indicated by small bronze statues), as well as a larger “stone” statue. When visitors typed the three animals into the keypad, the (audio-animatronic) statue would “come to life”, since a little song, and display a “piece of the code”. After gathering all four pieces, visitors then went to the observatory, put the code in, and were granted entry. (This then led to a ‘second level’, far more complex than the first — almost like a predecessor to modern-day escape rooms.)
Unfortunately, it closed a few years ago, but it was one of my favorite activities in the city and immediately sprung to mind upon reading your description of Quest of the Unicorn.
Happy to provide any add’l information as I’m able — it’s been a few years since my last visit (when the space closed), but I spent enough time in there that I should have decent recollection!
Carrie! You are talking about one of my favorite things that’s ever existed – and the subject of an upcoming deep dive here. Adventure was genuinely the attraction that made me who I am. I was lucky to experience it as a kid, and then to work at COSI for about a decade after college. I’m so glad you brought up this relationship, because Quest for the Unicorn always felt like a high-capacity “twist” on Adventure, perfectly appropriate for Animal Kingdom. But wow, please stay tuned because I am worried no one’s gonna “get” my Adventure piece, so I’m glad to know that you will. Haha. Thank you!
It was always one of my fave ride at animal Kingdom
Brilliant article. I would classify this ride as a classic. Mainly because of its original concept. There might have been a plan for a future IP tie in, but this ride is original nightmare fuel. I’d say celebrate the Genious of the rides first iteration as a lost legend.