Conceived: mid-1970s, under Imagineer Tony Baxter. Intended location: Disneyland, in the northern reach of Frontierland toward what was then Bear Country, the site Big Thunder Ranch later occupied and where Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge stands today. Status: never built; shelved by the late 1970s after the box-office failure of Disney’s film The Island at the Top of the World soured management on Jules Verne-style properties, with Imagineering’s money and attention shifting to EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland.
Discovery Bay was never a Walt Disney World project, but its fingerprints are all over how this resort’s history gets told. It was a Disneyland land that existed only on paper: a 19th-century harbor town built around a single premise, that Jules Verne’s science fiction was real and had washed ashore in a California gold rush port. An airship bound for the Arctic, a walk-through submarine with a restaurant inside it, and an inventor with a pet dragon. None of it was built as its own land, but the people who designed it carried its ideas into projects that did get built, at Disneyland and at EPCOT Center.
A gold rush harbor with a Jules Verne problem
The premise Baxter and his team worked from was a specific collision: a late-1800s West Coast harbor town, the kind of clapboard-and-brick waterfront Frontierland already gestured at, retrofitted with the fantastical machinery of a Victorian science fiction that drew on both Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Brass, rivets, steam boilers, and impossible contraptions built by inventors who had clearly read too much popular science fiction. The land was planned for the northern end of Frontierland, bridging toward the area then called Bear Country, connected to Fantasyland only by a proposed aerial balloon ride rather than sitting adjacent to it. That ground went on to host Big Thunder Ranch, a petting zoo and barbecue restaurant that opened in 1986 and operated for roughly three decades before closing in January 2016 to make way for Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, which opened in 2019.
What made the concept distinctive wasn’t the individual attractions so much as the whole land committing to a visual language decades before “steampunk” existed as a word for it. Disney had already built one Jules Verne attraction, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’s submarine voyage, first at Disneyland and then at Magic Kingdom, but that was a single ride bolted onto Tomorrowland and Fantasyland respectively. Discovery Bay was the idea of building an entire district around that same sensibility, gold rush harbor infrastructure playing host to technology that had no business existing in 1880.
The Hyperion airship
The centerpiece attraction wasn’t a scenic flight over the bay. It was the Hyperion, a colorful dirigible with an enclosed gondola drawn directly from Disney’s 1974 film The Island at the Top of the World, which had put an airship of the same name at the center of an Arctic expedition story. The proposed ride was an E-ticket simulator that put guests aboard the Hyperion for a voyage through aurora borealis, polar bears, whales, and a violent storm en route to a lost polar city called Astragard, populated by mythical creatures, with narration originally recorded by voice actor Peter Renaday. It was Discovery Bay’s most ambitious set piece, built to recreate a movie experience rather than simply offer a view of the land below. A separate, smaller aerial element, a proposed balloon ride connecting Discovery Bay to a planned Dumbo’s Circus area in Fantasyland, would have handled the job of moving guests between the two lands.
A walk through the Nautilus, and dinner with Captain Nemo
Discovery Bay’s second marquee element wasn’t a ride at all. It was a 200-foot walkthrough version of the Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, that guests would explore on foot, passing a scene built around a menacing giant squid along the way. The walkthrough led into the Nautilus’s real destination: a full-service Grand Salon restaurant, decorated in wrought iron, velvet, and rivets, where diners would eat surrounded by a view of an “underwater world” and, in the pitch, the sound of Nemo’s own pipe organ. Rather than duplicating Disneyland’s existing submarine voyage, the concept treated the Nautilus as a place to walk through and sit down in, a second, complementary way into the same Verne-era coastline the park’s actual submarines already cruised.
Professor Marvel and his pet dragon
Discovery Bay’s dragon wasn’t a monster lurking in the harbor. It belonged to Professor Marvel, a bearded, eccentric inventor with a sideline in dragon breeding, whose proposed walkthrough attraction, a Gallery of Illusion (also referred to in some pitch material as a Gallery of Wonders), would have let guests wander his collection of oddities with a small green dragon perched on his shoulder throughout the presentation. It was a lighter, character-driven counterpart to the Hyperion and the Nautilus rather than a third attempt at a thrill ride, the land’s sense of humor standing next to its two more spectacle-driven set pieces.
Why it never got built
Discovery Bay’s fate was tied to a movie. Tony Baxter built the Hyperion airship attraction around The Island at the Top of the World, and when that film underperformed critically and financially, Disney executives drew the wrong lesson from it. Baxter later recalled management concluding that people simply weren’t interested in Jules Verne, rather than that the film itself hadn’t been very good. That verdict left a land built around Verne-style science fiction without a sponsor inside the company at the exact moment Imagineering’s money and attention were shifting to EPCOT Center, the far larger and more expensive Florida project that opened in 1982, and to Tokyo Disneyland, which opened in 1983. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, which Baxter also designed, was never a rival for that budget. It opened at Disneyland in 1979 as planned, intended in Imagineering’s internal story as the gateway attraction that would introduce guests to Discovery Bay. Discovery Bay was simply the land that never got its turn.
The ground earmarked for it did not sit empty forever. Big Thunder Ranch, a Western-themed petting zoo and barbecue restaurant, occupied the site for roughly three decades before closing in January 2016. Disneyland then built Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge there, opening the 14-acre land in 2019 with entrances from Frontierland, Fantasyland, and the area now called Bayou Country (renamed from Critter Country in 2024, after 16 years as Bear Country before that).
Where the ideas actually went
Discovery Bay’s most direct link to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad isn’t a design choice, it’s a piece of backstory Imagineering invented to tie the two projects together. In the internal mythology Baxter’s team developed, a young inventor named Jason Chandler survives the 1849 mine disaster that Big Thunder Mountain Railroad depicts, disappears from the historical record, and resurfaces on the California coast to found Discovery Bay, using gold-mine money to bankroll inventors whose ideas had been rejected everywhere else. Decades later, Disney folded that backstory into the modern Society of Explorers and Adventurers lore that now runs through several parks, making Chandler a founding figure and giving Discovery Bay a second life as a piece of continuity rather than as a built land.
The clearer and better-documented afterlife is at EPCOT. When Discovery Bay was scrapped, Baxter carried its Professor Marvel character and his pet dragon into a new project: EPCOT Center’s Journey Into Imagination pavilion. Professor Marvel became Dreamfinder, and the small dragon that had perched on his shoulder in Discovery Bay’s Gallery of Illusion became Figment, the purple dragon who is still one of the most recognizable characters to come out of Epcot’s Future World.
The name Discovery Island, the animal conservation island that operated on Bay Lake at Walt Disney World from 1974 until 1999, invites the same comparison for an obvious reason: the shared word. The chronology is closer than it first looks, though not clean enough to call a deliberate echo. The island opened in 1974 as Treasure Island and wasn’t renamed Discovery Island until 1978, around the same years Baxter’s team was actively developing the Discovery Bay concept at Disneyland. No documented source ties the two names together, so this reads as coincidence rather than an intentional callback, but it isn’t the tidy case of one clearly predating the other.
What stands there now
The ground Discovery Bay would have occupied, the northern edge of Frontierland toward what is now Bayou Country, is Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge today, a 14-acre land built around an entirely different franchise. Nothing at Disneyland carries the Discovery Bay name or its Verne-and-gold-rush premise. What survives is scattered elsewhere: a Society of Explorers and Adventurers backstory linking it to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and Figment, the small dragon who outlived the land he was designed for by moving to Epcot.
Little-known fact: every documented account of Discovery Bay ties it to Disneyland alone, with no record of a Walt Disney World version being pitched, even though Magic Kingdom had its own Jules Verne attraction running in the same era, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which closed in 1994 without ever getting the wider Verne-themed neighborhood Discovery Bay would have given it.