Oh I'm not insulted, I love learning new things. But if you think my half-truth is an urban myth, you should read some of the whopper myths out there!
If you want to research a really interesting place that never came to fruition (within Disney
land anyway), look up Discovery Bay by Tony Baxter. Man that woulda been one cool replacement for the Tom Sawyer Island/ Rivers of America area. Of course I assume you know of Mr. Baxter, because he's the creator of Figment/Dreamcatcher...
and here's the story of how Figment came to life in tonys own words from this great interview at
http://pizarro.net/didier/_private/interviu/baxter.html :
Yes. I came up with the name and the idea. Steve Kirk, Andy Gaskill and X. Atencio gave him form. I was watching Magnum p.i. with Tom Selleck on TV. He was in the garden and the butler Higgins had all this plants and they were all uprooted. It was a mess. Magnum had been hiding a goat out there and the goat had eaten the plants. Higgins said, "Magnum ! Magnum ! Come out here ! Look at this ! Something has been eating all the plants in the garden." and Magnum says "Oh, it is just a figment of your imagination." And Higgins says: "Figments don't eat grass."
I thought, "There is this name, the word "figment" that in English means a sprightly little character. But no one has ever visualized it, no one had ever drawn what a figment is. So, here is great word that already has a great meaning to people, but no one has ever seen what one looks like." So we had a name that was just waiting for us to design the shape for it.
I came to work and said, "I have the answer for our show, it is going to be Figment." We had came out with "Dreamfinder" earlier. That was easy, he was a Santa Claus-type who is wise and older and knows all the great things, a great thinker. But we needed a child-like character that had like a one second attention span and was a little crazy.