Post by LurkingManiac on Mar 1, 2022 6:28:09 GMT
In the old abandoned Imageworks upstairs at the Imagination Pavilion at EPCOT, there stood three stages arranged in a circle where guests would star in a small film. The films of choice were a western, a fantasy, and a sci-fi story. Guests would stand in front of a blue screen where they would be inserted over one of the mentioned prerecorded films, as the Dreamfinder instructs the guests on what actions to perform along the way, e.g. jumping, running in place, etc. There are a handful of potato captures featuring the School of Drama online, but no high-quality video clips of the films. However, the video below featuring Imagineer Tony Baxter in test footage of the western film being shown at D23 might suggest that Disney still has the raw versions of the clips.
There is one more School of Drama film that I'm going to mention because there is very, very sparse evidence pertaining to it. In the Defunctland episode concerning Journey into Imagination, while the narrator goes over the School of Drama, there is one brief clip that I've not seen in any of the potato captures on YouTube: an exterior shot of Figment detained inside a jail cell of a castle. Upon seeing this, I assumed that this was part of the fantasy film, but it wasn't in there. As far as I'm concerned, Figment never appeared once in the original three stories. I attempted to DM the creator of the show, Kevin Perjurer, about the footage, but got no response. One person on the LMW Discord server dug a bit deeper into the whole thing and found this old forum thread from 2002. The purpose of that thread was to act as a trivia game for other forum members where they'd email their answers to the OP. One of those questions stood out:
So now we've a slightly better idea of what this missing story was about, but unfortunately that's where the trail ends. The last one to post on the thread said that the trivia event must've ended but it wasn't announced anywhere else on the forums, which to me means that the answers were also never publicly unveiled, or if they were, then I didn't look hard at the OP's post history hard enough. Also, the OP had stopped posting by 2007.
My only theory about the Storybook Land film was that when the School of Drama switched from a three-stage format to only one stage late in its lifetime, a new film was made up for that one stage to replace the three films that played in the three-stage layout. Other than that, I don't think I have anything further else to add about it, so I'll just conclude by saying that it'd be pretty nice to see that missing film, or heck, even higher-quality versions of the other three films.
P.S. This isn't the only piece of obscure/lost media concerning Journey into Imagination. I might post more about those in the future.
What is the name of the creature who trapped Figment in a castle in Storybook Land?
So now we've a slightly better idea of what this missing story was about, but unfortunately that's where the trail ends. The last one to post on the thread said that the trivia event must've ended but it wasn't announced anywhere else on the forums, which to me means that the answers were also never publicly unveiled, or if they were, then I didn't look hard at the OP's post history hard enough. Also, the OP had stopped posting by 2007.
My only theory about the Storybook Land film was that when the School of Drama switched from a three-stage format to only one stage late in its lifetime, a new film was made up for that one stage to replace the three films that played in the three-stage layout. Other than that, I don't think I have anything further else to add about it, so I'll just conclude by saying that it'd be pretty nice to see that missing film, or heck, even higher-quality versions of the other three films.
P.S. This isn't the only piece of obscure/lost media concerning Journey into Imagination. I might post more about those in the future.
