Greg Maletic: Book Review - The Disneylands That Never Were
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The Disneylands That Never Were
A Book Review
By Greg Maletic
The Disneylands That Never Were, a new book by MickeyNews.com columnist Shaun Finnie, (available from Lulu.com, 248 pages) has at its core a great idea. What Disney fan wouldn't love to spend a few hours learning about all of the thrilling Imagineering projects that never got off the ground? And what self-styled Disney historian wouldn't love cataloguing them?
Since most of the people who read this column are Disney die-hards, my next request won't seem like much of a stretch: imagine that you yourself are trying to write this book. It shouldn't take long to realize that you've picked quite a challenge for yourself. Though Disney Imagineering frequently leaks like a sieve, officially, it's tight-lipped. Any book dealing with the topic of unrealized (and potentially to-be-built-in-the-future) ideas will have a hard time getting the official stamp of Disney approval. And without that, your book will be missing out on quite a lot. No Disney drawings or illustrations. No interviews with Imagineers; at least, no on-the-record ones. No rifling through the Disney Archives for long-forgotten project proposals. In short, no access to almost everything you'd want in order to write the definitive book on the subject.
Then thank god, you'll say to yourself, for the Internet. A treasure-trove of information on discarded Imagineering projects, it wouldn't be hard to fashion a book from all of those web postings on Westcot, Disney's America, and Edison Square. The downside, of course, being that you'll end up with a book filled with stories and details easily obtained by anyone through just a few Google searches.
Yet even that doesn't necessarily have to spell doom for the project. Where the book could succeed is by weaving all of those disconnected Internet vignettes into a coherent story, to provide the "big picture" on these unrealized Disney monstrosities. But how to sum up a topic that is, as its heart, a disconnected one: the most outrageous, unbuildable ideas that Disney Imagineering has come up with? This is a story about outliers, and as such, it's not easy collecting them into a narrative.
It might be at about this time that you'd give up on the project. Fortunately for Disney fans Mr. Finnie didn't, though. The Disneylands That Never Were does in fact suffer from all of the problems already discussed. Mr. Finnie recognizes this in a disclosure in the book's epilogue that probably should have appeared in its introduction:
"Within these pages there are descriptions of many entire theme parks, individual attractions, rides and hotels take from the pens, brushes and keyboards of the Imagineers. What you won't find in most cases however are reasons for these new developments' non-appearance. Sometimes the reasons were financial, sometimes political. Others were simply the victims of poor timing. The reasons are usually many and varied. But that's not what this book is about: it's about simply informing you, the reader, of what might have been."
So if the book is essentially a catalog of stories that can be found elsewhere, does it have any value? I think it does, though it depends on the reader. If you're an avid follower of Disney Imagineering history, there may not be a lot in this book that you didn't already know. But if you're relatively new to Disney, this book may be just the thing you're looking for. (Finding these stories via Google implies that you know that they exist, and without a primer like this one that may never happen.) The ideal audience for The Disneylands That Never Were would seem to be the individual who, having recently experienced his or her first Disneyland trip and being enthralled with the experience, wants to jump further into Imagineering lore. It's a good starting place, a much broader review of Imagineering concepts (though not necessarily deeper) than Disney's own Imagineering: A Behind The Dreams Look.
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