Designing Disney Parks - Armchair Editions

We all love to be armchair Imagineers, designing in our minds and sometimes on paper and/or the computer additions to the Disney parks. Sometimes, we go further, redesigning entire parks. Or we design entirely "new" Disney parks in new locations, using some of the attractions (maybe tweaked a bit) from existing parks, and maybe adding a few new ones from our own ideas.

One website that Future Guy at Futureprobe noted months ago was this one: Peter F. Schaab - Design and Visualization for All the Places We Gather To Be Entertained and Enlightened. This particular section of the site has a comprehensive redesign plan for EPCOT Center, which he did as a hobby project. It's pretty well done, with illustrations, 3D modeling, and even animations. Some really interesting, original thinking went into this redesign.

Another site is this one: Theme Park Conceptual Site Plans written by Randy Savage. This site mainly uses Disney themes to either reconceptualize existing parks or create new ones. The author does apply his imagination to Universal parks as well.

I recently discovered this site: Imagineering by Grumpyfan. The author imagines improvements to many Disney attractions, and also conceptualizes totally new experiences from time to time. It's a fun, interesting blog with tons of good ideas.

Another site, My Park, My Rides, is a fun site that combines the author's armchair imagineering efforts with commentary on the Disney parks (mostly), reimagining various rides and offering ideas for new things to entertain guests at the parks.

The last site I am making note of is Amateur Imagineer. This blog has "gone dark" so to speak, the last post being in May of 2009. But there were a bunch of entries before that, and some were pretty interesting (and still are). It's worth reading the back posts on this (apparently) now-defunct blog.

I've also seen some pretty incredible artwork on some MiceChat threads where contributors there post their own artwork, obviously mostly related to Disney parks and attractions. I don't have specific posts, however. I just remember being bowled over by the level of skill some of them had.

I only wish I could draw like that. I think that if I had some of the talent that these people do, I'd be in business designing my own concepts for parks and resorts and hotels and restaurants. At this point in my life, I don't have much interest in enriching Disney any more than I already do with my patronage, but I do have interest in designing my own project, as I've noted in several other posts. I'd be applying this imagination and these skills to conceptualizing a park in my part of the country.

I envy them. At the same time, I think they should dream even bigger!

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