Le Visionarium
| Le Visionarium | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disneyland Park (Paris) |
| Land / area | Discoveryland |
| Type | Circle-Vision 360° film theatre |
| Opened | April 12, 1992 |
| Closed | September 5, 2004 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering
|
| Status | Closed |
Le Visionarium was a Circle-Vision 360° film attraction in Discoveryland at Disneyland Park (Paris) in Disneyland Paris, France. Its film, Un Voyage à Travers le Temps — known in English as The Timekeeper — surrounded a standing audience with nine synchronised screens while a robot inventor sent his camera-droid through history. It opened with the park, then called Euro Disneyland, on April 12, 1992, and was presented as a showcase attraction for Discoveryland, the land that reimagined the future through the eyes of European visionaries such as Jules Verne.[1]
History
Earlier Circle-Vision films had mostly been travelogues: handsome landscapes arranged in a circle, with no story holding them together. For Paris, the Imagineers set out to do something the format had never attempted — tell a plotted, light-hearted story, and use Audio-Animatronics alongside the film for the first time in a Circle-Vision show.[1] The device that made the plot possible was 9-Eye, a flying robot fitted with nine cameras, one for each screen. Whatever she saw on her travels was, in the fiction, exactly what the audience saw around them.[1]
The attraction was sponsored by Renault from 1992 until 2002, and its pre-show leaned into that partnership as well as into Discoveryland's literary theming.[1] Versions of the film followed at the other parks: Tokyo Disneyland opened its Visionarium in 1993, and the Magic Kingdom version, renamed The Timekeeper, opened on November 21, 1994, with Robin Williams voicing the Timekeeper in English.[1]
Le Visionarium closed on September 5, 2004.[1] Its theatre was then rebuilt as Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast, the interactive Toy Story shooting ride that opened on the site in 2006.[2] The Tokyo version had already closed in 2002 and was likewise replaced by a Buzz Lightyear ride, while the Magic Kingdom version lasted until February 26, 2006, the last of the three to close.[1]
Experience
Guests first entered a dim, library-like pre-show chamber filled with models and artefacts of invention, among them Verne's Nautilus and Albatross and a flying machine in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci. There the Timekeeper, an Audio-Animatronic robot, introduced his time machine and despatched 9-Eye as its test traveller.[1]
In the main theatre guests stood at lean rails while the film played all around them. 9-Eye's journey lurched from the age of the dinosaurs and an ice age to Leonardo's workshop in 1503, where the artist paused from the Mona Lisa to sketch the strange machine in front of him, and on to a young Mozart performing in 1763.[1] Stuck briefly on fast-forward past the Paris exhibitions of 1878 and 1889, she came to rest in 1900, in time for a meeting between H. G. Wells, played by Jeremy Irons, and Jules Verne, played by Michel Piccoli.[1]
The joke of the film was that Verne, having just dismissed time travel as impossible, was accidentally carried back with 9-Eye to the present. Given a hurried tour of the modern world he had only imagined — fast trains, motor racing, flight and space travel — he was returned to 1900 in time to deliver his speech, having seen his fictions made real.[1]
See also
- Disneyland Park (Paris)
- Discoveryland
- Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast
- Space Mountain (Disneyland Paris)
- List of Disneyland Park (Paris) attractions