My family and I used to live in Florida when I was a kid, and I remember that we would visit Walt Disney World almost semi-annually when I was a kid. I recall going for my 7th Birthday in 2000, and when I rode the 1999 edition of this ride, I barely remembered it. I saw a video of the ride "Journey Into YOUR Imagination" on YouTube, which stars Eric Idle from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" as Dr. Nigel Channing. In the ride, he takes you through five different labs of the Imagination Institute, by name "Sound", "Illusion", "Color", "Dimension", and "Gravity". Before and after you go through the labs, the professor has a scanner called the Imagination Scanner, which he uses to measure how much imagination the riders have. At the end, the five experiments succeed, and the scanner explodes to reveal a light show. I liked that version of the ride, when I saw it on YouTube. Sadly, though, it closed in 2001 after only two years, due to guests not really enjoying the attraction much.
The ride that is at the Imagination Pavilion at EPCOT now is nothing like what I remember from my childhood. The current attraction is called "Journey Into Imagination With Figment", which brings back Figment the purple dragon and a song called "One Little Spark". Neither were in the 1999 ride, but before that there was a ride called "Journey Into Imagination" from 1983 to 1998, featuring a character called the Dreamfinder who creates a "Figment of his imagination".
In the version that has been in Florida since 2002, Dr. Nigel Channing returns and is played by Eric Idle again. This time, he plans an Open House at the Imagination Institute where the labs are based around the five human senses: Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch and Taste. His goal is to demonstrate how to capture riders' imagination. Unfortunately, in this version, Figment is seen as a distraction during the Open House when Dr. Channing says he couldn't join him for the event. Figment hijacks all the little experiments that are planned for each lab, by interrupting a hearing test in the sound lab, messing up with the eye chart in the sight lab and starting a sing along to a verse of "One Little Spark" written by the Sherman Brothers, and finally turning into a skunk in the smell lab and spraying the lab with an awful coffee smell. It causes Channing to abandon the Open House, so Figment takes riders to his Open House which is all upside down. In the end, we learn that Channing learns how imagination works better when it is set free, than when it is captured, as Figment tells him. The explosion sound this time is louder than it was in the 1999 ride, as it is not foreshadowed in the beginning of the 2002 edition.
I have ridden the current ride four times in my life, and I must say that I do not like it at all. It has probably been my least favorite movie I have ever seen in the whole world, and I am ready for the ride to be replaced by something better. I feel good in life with compromising with my family, and my parents about other things I might not want to do, just so that I would not have to ride the current Figment attraction the next time I visit Disney when my siblings have kids.
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