For instance, in Would You Eat a Blue Potato? dealing with how we react to colors there are brief segments from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1940), Pecos Bill (1948), Sleeping Beauty (1959), Jungle Book (1967) and the Silly Symphony Funny Little Bunnies (1934) to help illustrate the discussion of colors (eg. While there was newly created animation, often there were clips from classic Disney animation as well. Some of the writing was done by Jamie Simons. The live action was directed by Robin Allison Smalley who was a producer on the series along with Bill Scollon, Peter Sauers and Sallie Zemlin-Kisor. There was an episode featuring Alice who needed help getting back to Wonderland so only a young boy was involved in helping write a story that would allow her to do so and another with Peter Pan who was unable to read so only a young girl was included to help him find his way back to Neverland. One of Epcot Educational Media’s projects was a series of eleven fifteen-minute videos featuring an animated Figment interacting with real children on a variety of imaginative topics.įigment supposedly lived in the world of “Figonia” and each episode would include a boy and a girl who were different actors in each episode and from a variety of ethnicities whom Figment would help solve a problem. This department produced everything from comic books like “ Mickey and Goofy Explore the Universe of Energy” (1985), to books, filmstrips and videos that were meant primarily as supplements to be used in schools. But we needed a child-like character that had like a one second attention span and was a little crazy.”Īt the time, an offshoot of Disney Educational Media was created entitled Epcot Educational Media.

Imagineer Tony Baxter who helped create the characters recalled that “ was a Santa Claus-type who is wise and older and knows all the great things, a great thinker. When Epcot Center theme park opened in Florida, the Journey to Imagination pavilion featured two characters who captured the heart of audiences: Dreamfinder, a bearded character who was a combination of Santa Claus and the Wizard of Oz, and his little purple dragon companion, Figment who was a literal representation of the famous “figment of the imagination”.

Lady and the Tramp by Jamie Simons