Some great desktop goodies from 2719 Hyperion. There are some very clever designs for Disney's unrealized projects like the Mineral King ski resort. I would like to see designs for the Hollywood Terror Hotel and Celebrity Lanes.

Celebrity Lanes

If he [Walt Disney] had lost interest in developing Smoke Tree, he hadn't lost his fervor for creating some kind of bowling-recreation complex under the Disney aegis, and he invested in a sports center outside Denver that included not only eighty bowling lanes but a swimming pool and restaurant- a model for a new kind of Disney franchise. Once again, though, the project dragged on, and by the time Celebrity Lanes opened in September 1960, Walt had resigned from the board. Walt Disney Productions filled the breach, purchasing a $277,000 stock interest and floating a $650,000 loan within the year to take control of the center. Walt and Lillian attended the center's second anniversary, and the company kept it operating even as it drained money. Roy later admitted the entire project had been ill-conceived. "We wasted a million dollars there by putting in a deluxe dining room and a swimming pool," he told one interviewer. "We had 80 lanes, of the biggest bowling alleys in the country...But who want to bowl in a wet bathing suit and what bowler wears the kind of clothes that are necessary for a deluxe dining room?"

- Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

Labels: disney