From abandoned rides to overlooked Easter eggs, these Disney World secrets can change how fans see the parks.
I thought I knew Walt Disney World.
A new book, “The Lost History of Walt Disney World,” made me realize how much I had forgotten or didn’t know at all.
Despite decades of visits, I had no idea that Disney Legend Joe Rohde, the longtime Imagineer who shaped Disney’s Animal Kingdom, voiced one of the audio-animatronics in EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth.
And while I vividly remember 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea at Magic Kingdom, I don’t remember the Winnie the Pooh play area built in the same vicinity before New Fantasyland opened. I also didn’t know a Nautilus submarine Easter egg lives on a tree in the queue of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
“There is kind of this lost Disney history that’s kind of hiding in plain sight that you can still interact with,” the book’s co-author Ian Wilson told USA TODAY.
At a time of significant change for the parks – including the construction of new lands in Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom and Disney’s Hollywood Studios – his latest book with his sister-in-law Danielle Kelly guides nostalgic fans to the kind of touchstones and lore they love.
Kelly is a Disney historian and former cast member known as The Dapper Danielle on social media. Her own love of Disney lore began as a child on her family’s many park visits and grew when she worked at the Florida resort for about a decade.
“In every role that I worked in, I found those cast members that (were) with the company for, oh gosh, even longer than I had been,” she told USA TODAY. “I would ask them, ‘OK, tell me your entire life story while we’re there in the break room.’ And I just loved finding out about it.”
Nowadays she shares “random Disney things in the middle of the night that you probably don’t care about that I’m going to tell you anyway” online and on her podcast The Dapper Danielle Show, which she co-hosts with Wilson and her brother Clarence Kelly.
Wilson is married to Kelly’s sister and said he too grew up going to the parks, but developed a newfound appreciation as an adult, visiting with his wife and their daughter. He was fascinated by questions like “What makes this place tick? How do we kind of put words to the feelings that people have at the end of the night when they’re watching the Happily Ever After fireworks show go off?”
He and Kelly found the words for their first two books, “I Love Disney’s Magic Kingdom” and “I Love EPCOT,” but they still had more to say.
“I was writing so many pages on like just one topic and then Ian was coming in after me and being like, ‘Danielle, you can’t just keep talking about one building in the France pavilion. We got to cut this down,’” Kelly joked.
The idea for their latest book was born out of things they wished they could’ve included in the others, as well as a desire to connect readers with something they could connect with in real life.
“Can we create a point in the park where guests could go and see something connected to this lost history, kind of in the flesh?” Wilson asked. “Where guests could walk up to a certain location in the park or see a reference or there’s a character or something that ties to this kind of history that no longer exists or was planned.”
“The Lost History of Disney World” begins with a brief history of the resort, then delves into each of its four theme parks before sharing stories of other places beyond park gates.
Each vignette ends with a brief section called Find It or Imagine It Here. As the names suggest, Imagine It Here invites readers to envision what could have been if past plans came to fruition, whereas Find It directs readers to tangible places where vestiges still stand.
For instance, the book notes that the last surviving ticket booth from Magic Kingdom’s early days of requiring paper tickets for attractions can be found in Tomorrowland, where it’s now a Disney Vacation Club kiosk. “Look at the main base of the booth,” the book reads. “Three prominent sides have indentations and windows that were once the ticket windows.”
As readers notice the details, Wilson and Kelly hope they’ll develop a deeper appreciation for all the people who created them.
In her research, Kelly said she got in touch with former Imagineers who were sometimes surprised by the interest in their work.
“They said, ‘Oh, you actually, you know what that is? You pay attention to the tiling work outside of the bathroom? Oh, that’s like really nice, because that took me like 3 weeks to be able to do the research on that,’” she shared as an example. ”I want (readers) to ask more questions. I want them to be like, ‘Oh, I never thought about it that way.’”
Wilson noted that sometimes guests can approach park visits as checklists, rushing from ride to ride, but “Just by sitting on a bench or being curious about the park and trying to kind of understand more of the details, you will learn some really, really cool facts and really appreciate the characters and the stories that you love so much more in being able to be in their world.”
I’ll be taking the book along and keeping a lookout on my next Disney trip.