Saturday, April 21, 2007

Lost Imagineering: Switzerland


The next stop on our tour of the World Showcase that never was is Switzerland. The 1991 EPCOT Outreach fact sheet provided the following description of a proposed Swiss pavilion:

Matterhorn Mountain and Bobsled Ride; Inspired by Europe's tenth most famous mountain, this imposing landmark will be built on the shores of the World Showcase Lagoon beside a charming Swiss village. Bobsleds will race up, down, around, and through a chilling ice-covered adventure. It will be the centerpiece of a picturesque Switzerland showcase.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I love the work that you and Lou are doing on the WDW Radio Podcast. Especially the segments about the Epcot that "Could of Been."

I still think that World Showcase needs more thrill rides and more non-water related kid friendly rides.

Anonymous said...

Love the "Lost Imagineering" posts!

A lot of people still say they would love to see the Switzerland pavilion added with the Matterhorn ride...well, it would be nice, but I've never thought the Matterhorn was a really great look at Swiss culture (and I'm not crazy about the thought of a mountain poking out of World Showcase...the skyline should stick to architecture). But agree that World Showcase could use some new rides, if not a whole new pavilion. Time to give South America some representation! Brazil, anyone?

Brian said...

Hi Jeff - I love the Lost Imagineering Posts, too!

I'm putting a link to your blog on my new pet project, "FixEpcot.com" - it lies somewhere between the unbridled optimism of your site and the Epcot Central (epcot82) site.

In it, I'm trying to list reasonable, thoughtful improvements that can be made to the existing Epcot to preserve some of the original core ideas while planning & expanding for the future. I'm going to do some analysis of how I think Epcot ended up in the state its in (which isn't necessarily all bad, though some really bad decisions were made in the late 90s) and how I think Disney can recover, should a passing Disney executive happen to be dropping by...

Some of the stuff I've listed sounds like some of the articles you've posted over the past few months, actually... must be the fact that we've run into each other a few times at EPCOT Central :)