Journey Into Imagination Vintage Photos
This Figment topiary long ago disappeared from the Magic Garden. Behind the topiary, you’ll notice a camera shop, which featured, unsurprisingly, Kodak products.
Many EPCOT Center attractions featured gorgeous hand-painted murals in their queues. Journey into Imagination was one such attraction.
In this 1984 photo, a sign displaying the time until the next Magic Journeys show is visible in the upstairs ImageWorks.
Notice the Figment Topiary in the elevated flower bed above the Captain EO sign? Any idea why that’s there?
That concludes this set of Vintage EPCOT Center photos! Hopefully this set of photos was a nice stroll down memory lane or, if you never experienced the original Journey into Imagination, a nice glimpse of what all the fanfare is about. Journey into Imagination was truly an amazing attraction. Much like many other EPCOT Center attractions of the era, it was an attraction with which people connected on an emotional level, and its quality and legacy have left many fans with strong bonds and feelings toward the original EPCOT Center.
Please share your favorite Journey into Imagination stories and memories in the comments, and be sure to share this with your friends via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.!
Great pictures! 😀 All of them should be saved and cherished for years to come.
I thought you might appreciate this – my mother recently gave me several boxes of my “stuff” that she has kept packed away over the years. While most of it ended up going to Goodwill or the dump, I did come across one piece of treasure – an Epcot Center autograph book from our family trip in 1992. The cover includes both Mickey and Figment dressed in spacesuits on the moon! We are planning our first Christmas trip to Disney this year, and my boys are looking forward to using it for their own autographs.
(Here is an image of the cover, except that mine is still in mint condition! http://lostcot.tumblr.com/post/98782534289/rememberingdisney-disney-epcot-center-1982)
Rainbow Corridor was my 2-year-old son’s absolute favorite thing in all of WDW on his first trip. He literally spent hours in there and had to visit it multiple times. It is my favorite memory from that trip, and I was so sad when it went away.
I was on the security detail as they took down Journey into Imagination. It made me sad as I walked through it night after night. More and more was gone. The last night of the detail the building super gave me items to keep.
That would be a pretty sad job, especially for someone who was a fan of the attraction. Cool that you got some “souvenirs” from it, though!
It was awesome seeing all those pics! I wish I still had that Figment stuffed animal in that photo!
This was an absolutely fantastic post, thank you so much for sharing! I never got to see the original version of Journey Into Imagination, but having seen the photos and videos of the place, I really fell in love with it. I love both Figment and the Dreamfinder. If they come back in the future (Dreamfinder and Figment in its original form), I’ll be incredibly happy!
It broke my heart when I returned to EPCOT as an adult and Journey Into Imagination had changed so drastically. Imageworks was definitely a highlight for me and my family and I was excited to share with my own children and relive memories from my childhood. It’s truly a shame that they cannot use some or most of the “Future Playground” items. With today’s technology, they should be able to create activities 100 times cooler than they did in the 1980’s!
Journey into Imagination 1.0 closed a few months before my first trip to Disney World so I never experienced it unfortunately. Looking at these photos the ride looks so… imaginative! So unlike the pavilion nowadays… such a shame! But thanks for posting this, I am really going to enjoy this series!