📰Quite a bit happened in Walt Disney World last week, paying homage to one of Walt's best quotes: "Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world." While we're in Florida for these updates, it's evident WDW holds this as a core belief in the sunshine state.

🎢 Hollywood Studios led the attraction headlines with the long-awaited opening of Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring The Muppets. The former Aerosmith coaster — which debuted in 1999 and ran for more than twenty years — closed in early March 2026 to make way for the retheme, with the Muppets version officially opening on May 26, 2026. The track layout and high-speed thrills remain identical, but the ride's new storyline follows Dr. Teeth, Animal, Floyd, Janice, Zoot, and Lips of the Electric Mayhem as they race to headline their biggest Hollywood concert ever, while G-Force Records — now under new management by The Muppets with a little help from Scooter's uncle, real estate tycoon J.P. Grosse — offers guests a VIP tour of the recording studio. Even the most devoted Aerosmith fans will tip their caps to the new Scooter animatronic — this marks the first time Scooter has ever been imagined as an audio-animatronic figure — and he's not alone. The beloved Statler and Waldorf animatronics from the now-closed Muppet*Vision 3D have been repurposed for the attraction as well, giving those iconic hecklers a fitting new home down Sunset Boulevard (see here for an awesome look).

✨ Further north in Galaxy's Edge, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run received a major new mission. Beginning May 22, 2026, guests can experience an all-new adventure featuring the Mandalorian and Grogu alongside the returning Hondo Ohnaka, who is recruiting crews to track down two ex-Imperial officers in exchange for any cargo collected along the way. In addition to the familiar stops at Tatooine, Bespin, and Endor, guests can now pilot the Millennium Falcon to the city-planet of Coruscant. The technological leap is also worth noting: Walt Disney Imagineering developed the attraction in collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic, leveraging Unreal Engine 5 — the same tools used in the Disney+ series — to create a more dynamic and responsive experience than ever before. The timing was no accident either. For the first time in parks history, a major ride update and a theatrical film debuted concurrently, with Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu hitting theaters the very same day.

🥇Finally, we received news on an attraction close to the heart of every Disney purist. Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress will close on July 6, 2026, for its most significant overhaul in decades, ahead of a planned 2027 reopening. The four new acts will move the timeline forward considerably, depicting the 1960s, the 1980s, the New Millennium, and a Possible Future — a meaningful shift from the attraction's current turn-of-the-century framing. Most notably, the new opening scene will feature an audio-animatronic figure of Walt Disney himself — his first in Florida — appearing dressed in the blue cardigan and slacks he wore on his 1964 Wonderful World of Color television episode about the World's Fair. And fans can breathe easy on one front: Disney confirmed the Sherman Brothers' beloved theme song "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" isn't going anywhere. As one of the few attractions directly shaped by Walt's own hand — he personally reviewed scenes, refined jokes, and even insisted the family dog Rover appear in every act — it's deeply encouraging to see Magic Kingdom commit to this attraction's future for many more great, big, beautiful tomorrows.

As 2026 flies by, the targeted 2027 launch for the new Tropical Americas land at Animal Kingdom inches closer. With Encanto and Indiana Jones attractions planned, all generations are set to enjoy the newest WDW land in seven years — assuming construction completes on schedule. We'll save Indiana Jones for another issue and focus on what may be the more emotionally layered story of the two: the first-ever Encanto ride-through attraction, and everything that went into building it.

But before we look forward, it's worth a moment to look back.

🦕 DinoLand U.S.A. opened alongside Disney's Animal Kingdom on April 22, 1998, making it one of the park's foundational lands. For 28 years, the area transported guests to a quirky roadside-attraction version of a paleontological dig site, complete with midway games, spinning rides, and one of Walt Disney World's most intense dark rides. The anchor attraction — DINOSAUR — originally opened under the name "Countdown to Extinction" before being renamed in 2000 to tie in with the Disney animated film, though the ride itself remained exactly the same. It wasn't a flawless land by any stretch, but it had genuine character and a devoted fanbase. DinoLand U.S.A. permanently closed on February 2, 2026, ending that 28-year run. Twenty-eight years. For context, that's longer than Epcot's entire first decade, Splash Mountain's entire lifespan, and most of your childhoods!

What replaces it is something the Imagineers have quietly dreamed about for a very long time. Imagineers have long envisioned adding a land inspired by the Tropical Americas region to Animal Kingdom — it was floated as far back as the park's earliest development phases in the 1990s.

At the heart of it all is the Encanto attraction — and the level of research and intentionality behind its development is worth pausing on. To ensure authenticity, Disney Imagineering visited the same areas of Colombia that inspired the original Encanto filmmakers, gathering first-hand experience to ensure Pueblo Esperanza feels like a real, lived-in town — from the colors and materials of town plazas, to the hues of haciendas in varying light, to the way buildings respond to climate and terrain. A separate research trip took the team to Honduras, where they worked with Maya artists and explored the historic site of Copán. This is Imagineering at its most earnest — the kind of field work that separates a genuinely immersive land from a themed backdrop.

📖 The storyline takes place the day after young Antonio Madrigal receives his magical gift — the ability to converse with animals. Guests step inside an animated, shifting recreation of the Casita, watching the house tiles dance and the stairs slide as they follow Antonio on a wild, musical journey through his oversized, rainforest-themed bedroom. You never know which member of the Madrigal family you might bump into along the way. Setting the adventure in Antonio's gift-giving moment was a smart narrative choice — it's the film's most kinetic, joyful sequence, and it naturally justifies the wonder and chaos of a theme park ride without requiring guests to have memorized the movie's plot.

🤖On the technology side, the attraction is expected to feature state-of-the-art Audio-Animatronics figures, and given the quality of the new figures recently installed in Frozen Ever After at EPCOT, expectations are running high. The ride system remains officially unconfirmed, though credible industry sources have speculated it could be an Omnimover system — think the flowing, continuously moving vehicles of Haunted Mansion — which would suit the sweeping, scene-to-scene nature of the Casita's magical rooms.

Walt's EPCOT: The City That Never Was

When most people hear "EPCOT," they picture the giant golf ball, the World Showcase lagoon, maybe a funnel cake from France. What almost no one pictures is a city of 20,000 people living, working, and commuting underground.

That was Walt's actual plan.

🎥In 1966, just weeks before his death, Walt Disney sat in front of a scale model and recorded what would become one of the most fascinating documents in American urban planning history. In the film, he walks viewers through every detail of his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — not a theme park, not a tourist attraction, but a fully functioning city. Climate-controlled pedestrian streets at the surface level. Cars and delivery trucks routed through tunnels underneath. A radial design with a commercial and civic core at the center, residential neighborhoods fanning out from it, all connected by monorail and a network of "WEDways" — what we'd now call people movers. The whole thing would be built on 11 square miles of central Florida swampland that Disney had quietly assembled under a web of dummy corporations so no one would drive up the price.

Walt had been developing the concept privately for years before that film was made. The seeds were planted in the late 1950s, when he began growing deeply frustrated with what American cities were becoming — the postwar suburban sprawl eating up the landscape, the deterioration of downtown cores, the way the automobile had essentially been handed the keys to urban life. Disneyland, which had opened in 1955, gave him an unexpected proof of concept. Here was a place where people moved on foot, where the environment was controlled and intentional, where the experience of simply being somewhere felt genuinely pleasant. Walt started asking why cities couldn't work the same way.

🗒️By the early 1960s, he was sketching ideas seriously. He assembled a team inside WED Enterprises — the Imagineering arm of Disney, named after his own initials — and tasked them with thinking through what a real city built on those principles might look like. The radial plan that emerged was influenced, perhaps unknowingly, by the same mid-century current of utopian urban thinking that had produced Le Corbusier's Radiant City and the grand civic redevelopment projects reshaping American downtowns in the postwar years. The idea that you could design your way out of urban dysfunction was very much in the air, and Walt was breathing it deeply.

What made his vision distinct was the emphasis on technology as a living system rather than a backdrop. EPCOT wasn't meant to showcase the future the way a world's fair does — put it on a pedestal, let people look, send them home. Walt wanted the city itself to be the experiment. New transit systems, new building materials, new approaches to waste and energy and pedestrian movement would be tested in real conditions, with real residents, and then shared with cities across America. He described it explicitly as a working laboratory. The "prototype" in the name was not decorative.

There was just one problem he never quite solved — and it's a big one.

People who live somewhere have rights. They vote. They can organize, push back, elect local officials who don't answer to the company that built their streets. Walt's vision of EPCOT depended on Disney maintaining total control over how the city operated and evolved. His answer to the governance question was essentially a company town — an arrangement that was already fading from American life by the time he was pitching it. He never publicly wrestled with this contradiction, and we'll never know how he intended to resolve it, because he died in December 1966, just months after that film was recorded.

Without Walt, the company didn't know what to do with the idea. The residential city plan was quietly shelved through the late 1960s and 1970s. What eventually opened on October 1, 1982 was something genuinely impressive — but something else entirely. EPCOT Center was a permanent world's fair, a place you visit rather than a place you live. The "E," "P," "C," and "T" were still in the name, but the concept underneath had been hollowed out.

🎆Disney did make one more attempt at the real thing. In 1994, they opened Celebration, Florida — a master-planned town just a few miles from the parks, with sidewalks and a downtown and a genuine residential population. It borrowed Walt's aesthetic instincts: front porches, walkable streets, a sense of civic design. But it had none of the technological ambition, none of the utopian edge. And in 2004, Disney sold it. The company town experiment, such as it was, quietly ended.

What remains is one of the great "what ifs" in American history — not just Disney history. A man who had already built the happiest place on earth was convinced he could build the best-run city on earth too. He had the land, the resources, the public goodwill, and an Imagineering team that had never once told him something couldn't be done. The only thing that stopped him was time.

🏗️The EPCOT you can visit today is worth your trip. But every now and then, standing at the base of Spaceship Earth, it's worth looking around and wondering what might have been right beneath your feet.

The Mediterranean Resort

🚝If you've ever ridden the monorail past the stretch of cleared land sitting quietly between the Transportation and Ticket Center and the Contemporary Resort, you've passed the site of one of Walt Disney World's greatest unrealized dreams. No resort was ever built there. No guests have ever checked in. And yet, that patch of Seven Seas Lagoon shoreline has been promised not one, not two, but three different luxury hotels across five decades — each one more ambitious than the last, and each one killed before a single guest room was ever finished.

This is the story of Disney's Mediterranean Resort. And to tell it properly, you have to start much earlier than most people realize.

⛵The Original Dream: A Ring of Seas

When Walt Disney and his team began secretly assembling land in central Florida in the early 1960s, the resort vision was staggering in its ambition. The plan wasn't just a theme park with a couple of hotels — it was an entire vacation kingdom, with a ring of luxury resorts surrounding Seven Seas Lagoon, each one connected to Magic Kingdom by monorail and boat, each one themed to a different corner of the world. Originally, four hotels were planned around the Seven Seas Lagoon: the Asian Resort, the Contemporary Resort, the Venetian Resort, and the Polynesian Resort. The idea was to give the lagoon a genuine sense of "seven seas" — every glance across the water landing on a different culture, a different world.

The Asian Resort was designed in the 1960s with the rest of phase one of Walt Disney World, planned to have 500 to 600 heavily themed rooms built to mimic Thai architecture, with a 160-foot-tall central tower topped by a restaurant. The Persian Resort would have brought domes and minarets to the Florida shoreline. The Venetian Resort called for a 500-room facility built around a series of canals, with gondolas providing transportation for guests throughout the property. Disney even went so far as to cut an access road to the Venetian site — it was named Asian Way, a ghost street that still technically exists to this day.

🛢️Then came 1973, and with it, the oil crisis. By 1974, all three original unbuilt deluxe resorts were shelved as the United States entered the oil crisis, triggering an economic downturn and sharply reducing travel and tourism. Disney made a strategic decision to pause all non-essential expansion. The Asian and Persian resorts were quietly buried and never revisited. But that prime stretch of Seven Seas Lagoon waterfront — the site originally reserved for the Venetian — refused to stay empty on the planning maps. Disney kept coming back to it.

Enter Alan Lapidus

In 1979, the Walt Disney Company was about to start planning a new 800-room theme hotel at Disney World in Orlando. The Venetian concept had been shelved, but the site was still there, still cleared, still carrying enormous potential. Disney brought in architect Alan Lapidus to reimagine what could be built on it — the son of architecture legend Morris Lapidus, who designed the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. It was a serious hire for a serious project.

What Lapidus designed was a departure from everything else on property. The resort would have featured a series of streets with multicolored waterfront houses — actually rows of hotel rooms of various heights — evoking the sun-bleached, tumbling architecture of a Greek coastal village cascading down toward the water. The effect, at least in the concept models, was extraordinary: not a single grand hotel building but an entire village, with guests wandering cobblestone lanes, stepping out onto private terraces overlooking the lagoon, discovering courtyards and fountains tucked between the buildings. Lapidus finished his design in seven months and Disney approved it.

While Lapidus was working on the Mediterranean Resort and Village, he noticed Disney Imagineers designing a companion hotel on the same lagoon. He later wrote that it was just as large and looked great — called the Grand Floridian, it was quite a bit more elaborate, with architectural references to the Addison Mizner style that defined classic 1920s Palm Beach design. Two landmark luxury resorts were being designed simultaneously, meant to anchor opposite ends of the monorail loop as the twin jewels of Walt Disney World's hotel offering.

Only one of them would ever be built.

The Eisner Era and the Indefinite Delay

💼After Michael Eisner took over as CEO in 1984, Lapidus was told that Eisner had decided to delay the Mediterranean Village until the Grand Floridian was up and running and had a year or so to demonstrate whether it would be a success. It was a reasonable business decision on the surface — open one flagship luxury resort, prove the market, then build the next. The Grand Floridian opened in 1988 and was an immediate hit, cementing Disney's position at the top of the Orlando luxury market.

But the Mediterranean never followed. The delay became an indefinite pause. Lapidus's design was shelved, the site sat dormant, and Disney moved on to other expansion priorities through the late 1980s and into the 1990s.

The Second Attempt: Grande Venezia

By the early 1990s, Disney tried again. After the wild success of the Grand Floridian, Disney dusted off the blueprints and, with the help of the architects responsible for the Grand Floridian, began work on what would have become Disney's Grande Venezia Resort. This was a grander, more polished version of the old Venetian concept — intricately designed buildings with terra cotta roofs, canals with functioning gondolas, lighted fountains, a masquerade-themed pool, a conference center, and a wedding chapel. The same firm that had helped design the Grand Floridian was brought in, signaling that Disney was serious about making this the most luxurious property on the property.

It died again. And this time, the Mediterranean concept replaced it entirely.

🌴The Final Version: A Five-Star Greek Island

Near the end of the twentieth century, Walt Disney World Resort was growing again, and to feed this expansion, the island of Greece would take the place of Venice on a much grander scale. Since the Grand Floridian Resort and Spa was only a four-star hotel, Disney hoped to turn the Mediterranean Resort into a crown jeweled, five-star destination. This was an extraordinary ambition — Disney had never operated a true five-star property, and the Mediterranean was being designed to be something categorically different from anything else on property.

Plans called for numerous features including archways, beaches, and even a 45,000-square-foot meeting area. The resort would sit on the monorail loop, giving guests direct access to both Magic Kingdom and EPCOT. Architect Antoine Predock — known internationally for his bold, site-sensitive designs — was reportedly brought in to develop plans and models for this later version. The concept art that survives shows something genuinely breathtaking: whitewashed walls, blue domes, terraced gardens spilling toward the lagoon, the kind of imagery that makes you feel the Mediterranean sun even looking at it in a drawing.

Land was cleared. The site was prepared. And then the ground told them no.

🐊Meet the Swamp…

Due to very swampy and poor ground samples, the resort was never able to be built. The soil beneath that stretch of Seven Seas Lagoon shoreline was simply too unstable to support the kind of deep foundation a large luxury resort required without extraordinary — and extraordinarily expensive — engineering intervention. Disney ran the numbers and walked away. To this day, only an empty plot of cleared land holds its ground where the majestic Mediterranean Resort was once planned to prevail.

It is one of the stranger footnotes in Walt Disney World history: a site that defeated Disney not through corporate indecision or changing market conditions, but through the simple, stubborn reality of Florida geology.

💭What Might Have Been

Stand at the Transportation and Ticket Center today and look to your right, toward the Contemporary. That gap in the skyline — that stretch of shoreline without a resort — is where it would have been. On the monorail loop. On the lagoon. A five-star Greek island village steps from Magic Kingdom, visible from the ferry, glowing at night.

The Grand Floridian is magnificent. But somewhere in the Disney archives, there are models and drawings of a resort that might have been its equal - A place unlike anything Disney has ever actually built.