The ABC Sound Studio

Disney’s Hollywood Studios has a fascinating history. It began as, principally, a functioning motion picture studio with sound stages, backlots, and an entire animation division. The park really only featured a handful of rides, the most important of which were studio tours of both the live action and animation production facilities.

But, the front side of the park did have a handful of smaller entertaining diversions, including a stage show honoring iconic television programs called Superstar Television. One show, located just next door, was called the Monster Sound Show — an interactive performance where guests would be invited on stage to help create the foley art for a monster movie. Its post-show area featured small booths demonstrating a new technology called 3D-sound, using stereo recording and audio playback to make you think actors are really surrounding you.

This diversion proved very popular. So, as Disney’s Hollywood Studios changed, the Monster Sound Show was replaced with a larger-scale 3D sound adventure film called Sounds Dangerous, featuring Drew Carey. It ran from 1999 to 2012, before eventually making way for the space to be used for a handful of small-scale film presentations.

There is still no full-time attraction calling the space home — at least, none with a scope that would make it seem like a real attraction. That’s a shame.

Discovery Island

Image: aloha75, Flickr (license)

No, not the main hub of Disney’s Animal Kingdom. This Discovery Island is much more famous as one of the first urban exploration destinations to go viral on the internet.

Originally opened in 1974, just a few years after Walt Disney World itself first opened, Discovery Island was the first place on the property to really show guests living exotic animals — a prototype for what would eventually become the Animal Kingdom park. It operated for nearly three decades as a hard-ticket attraction that could only be reached by boat from a Magic Kingdom resort hotel.

When Animal Kingdom finally opened just before the turn of the Millennium, Disney realized it didn’t need two zoological parks and moved to shut down Discovery Island — moving some of its animals to the new park while passing others to zoos around the country. It closed to the public officially on April 8, 1999 — 25 years to the day after it first opened.

And then ... it just sat there. Disney, rather famously, didn’t demolish any of its structures or even clean out the desks of the employees who’d since moved on. Intrepid urban explorers eventually realized that the island was close enough to the shores of Fort Wilderness that it would theoretically be possible to swim across undetected. Photos and videos of what they found, from abandoned buildings to creepy exhibits, were passed around Disney fan circles before eventually making their way online — giving Disney a reason to start more aggressively patrolling its waters and to think about actually demolishing some of those structures.

But, here we are, 20 years after Discovery Island closed to the public and ... there hasn’t yet been anything to replace it.