Disney's Animal Kingdom: A True-Life Adventure (Part Three)
Posted 04-22-2009 at 02:43 PM by mark
The Animal Kingdom team continued to grow as the models and paintings took more and more space in Imagineering’s offices. The group’s hard work and brilliant design paid off. After five years of effort, the plans and funding were approved. The park was announced to the public in June of 1995 with the expected Disney fanfare. The official opening day would be April 22, 1998- Earth Day, an intentional choice that strongly communicated this was a Walt Disney World park designed for a young and conservation-minded fan.
With the mention of live animals, activist groups were quick to jump on the news, denouncing Disney’s plans as evil, long before any of them had enough information to realize great care had been taken. Disney had chosen to work with the foremost experts of the animal care field in developing environments and programs before unseen in the zoological community. (In actuality, few protesters arrived on opening day, much to the relief of the company and its press agents. My personal hunch is that many of these same folks are now among the park’s biggest fans!)
Disney’s Animal Kingdom is as vast and overwhelming a project as EPCOT Center...
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If you can to read the rest of the article, you can go to my Insights blog. Lots of concept art and photos from the period.
BY THE WAY- Look for posts starting on May 1 celebrating 20 years of the largest expansion at WDW ever- starting with Disney-MGM Studios. An entire week's worth, in fact!
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