Walt Disney once said that Disneyland would never be completed. The idea was that the park would continue to grow and evolve, as new ideas and new technologies created new attractions which replaced old ones. That feeling has continued through every one of the Disney Parks since then. Professional inventor Lanny Smoot has worked for Walt Disney Imagineering for over 25 years, so he’s been the one who has created a lot of that technology, and has also seen it replaced. Closed Disney World attractions are part of the cycle that creates new Disney World attractions, after all.
I had the opportunity to speak with Lanny Smoot recently, to discuss his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, an honor that he now shares with Walt Disney himself. I asked him if there were any attractions he helped develop that he misses seeing in the park because they’ve since been replaced. He brought up an attraction from Epcot’s old Innoventions area that I had nearly forgotten about called Where’s the Fire?, with Smoot saying…
