Journey Into Imagination

Journey Into Imagination (Now part of The Imagination Pavilion as of 1999) is an attraction at the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World and opened on March 3, 1983. It has been through three incarnations over the years being replaced by Journey Into Your Imagination and the current Journey Into Imagination With Figment, though the original is considered the best of them. All three of them featuring Figment, a small purple dragon, as a character. The ride also uses the Omnimover ride system and features the song "One Little Spark" lyrically or instrumentally, with it being the basis of the score in the original and current.

Development


Journey into Imagination and the rest of the Epcot pavilion were late additions to the plans for Epcot. When Tony Baxter's ideas for The Land pavilion were turned down, he turned his attention to Kodak's pavilion. Requesting a pavilion based around the Imagination, Tony and his team went through a six-month process of figuring out how best to tell a story about the creative process, settling on the basic three steps of gathering, storing and recombining ideas, which would provide the attraction's structure.

The characters they would create would be derived from the cancelled Discovery Bay project for Disneyland. One of the attractions, Professor Marvel's House of Illusions, featured a bearded scientist who had a hobby of breeding dragons, which would evolve into Dreamfinder and Figment. The inspiration for Figment would also come from Tony Baxter watching Magnum P.I.

"“I was watching Magnum PI […] on TV. He was in the garden and the butler, Higgins, had all these plants and they were all uprooted. It was a mess. Magnum had been hiding a goat out there and the goat had eaten the plants. Higgins said, ‘Magnum! Magnum! Come out here! Look at this! Something has been eating all the plants in the garden.’ And Magnum says, ‘Oh, it’s just a figment of your imagination.’ And Higgins said, ‘Figments don’t eat grass!’ I thought, ‘There is this name, the word ‘figment’ that in English means a sprightly little character. But no one has ever visualized it, no one had ever drawn what a figment is. So, here is a great word that already has a great meaning to people, but no one has ever seen what one looks like.’ So we had the name that was just waiting for us to design the shape for it.”"

- Tony Baxter

The attraction's most unique feature, the turntable that allowed for a "stationary" scene on an Omnimover attraction, would be one of the most difficult parts of the attraction to develop and the first thing to go when the attraction was replaced. The vehicles would lock into place on one of five identical scenes like cogs and then unlock to go onto the track containing the rest of the attraction.

Summary
The attraction begins with the ride vehicles “floating” in the clouds and seeing the silhouette of a strange blimp mixed with a vacuum cleaner and hearing the humming and singing of its pilot. In the next scene we come right next to this vessel and the pilot, an old man with a red beard dressed in a blue suit and top hat, introduces himself as the Dreamfinder and saying that he uses his vehicle, called the Dream Mobile or Dream Catcher by some fans, to collect dreams and ideas to create all sorts of new things. Soon he creates a figment of his imagination who comes up from a door near the back of the Dream Mobile. This figment is, appropriately, named Figment and he proceeds to come up with enough ideas to fill the Dream Mobile’s idea bag, all of which show up later in the ride. Dreamfinder then tells Figment that before we create something, we have to go back to the Dreamport which he says is never far away when you use your imagination.

We then leave the side of the Dream Mobile and enter the Dreamport’s storage room, which includes a massive washing machine like device for sorting ideas. Also in the room there are numerous objects including boxed applause, a plasma ball, and a birdcage of musical notes. After leaving the storage room, you would go through several rooms based off of Art, Literature, the Performing Arts and Science.

The Art room was mostly white colored, probably to represent a massive canvas, and had a large painting Dreamfinder was making using a large fiber optic paint brush, a carousel with giant origami animals, and a pot of rainbows held by Figment.

The Literature room was mostly focused on suspenseful tales and had Dreamfinder playing a massive organ with words coming out of it, words that turned into their meanings, a massive book featuring the raven from Edgar Allen Poe’s story cawing menacingly, and books of horrible monsters Figment tried to keep closed. The performing arts had Figment trying on costumes backstage while Dreamfinder was conducting a laser light show similarly to an orchestra conductor.

The last of the rooms, Science, featured a large machine that Dreamfinder was operating that took a closer look at the workings of nature such as the growth of plants, the formation of crystals from minerals and looking into space. At the end, Dreamfinder tells Figment and the audience that Imagination is our key to unlock the hidden wonders of our world. We then enter the final show scene as our picture is taken as we see Figment surrounded by several movie screens of him being a scientist, a mountain climber, a pirate, a superhero, a tap dancer, a ship captain, a cowboy, and a athlete. Dreamfinder, who is behind a movie camera gives us one last inspiring message and tells us to use our newly found sparks of imagination in the ImageWorks and the on-ride photo is shown to us on a screen next to the camera. The ride closed on October 10th, 1998 to the dismay of numerous fans.