[KentB3]

Disneyland Paris original castle drawing from 1986
I found a GREAT of the original architectural drawing for Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland Paris on page 91 in the book Designing Disney's Theme Parks (the yellow one, with Cinderella's Castle on the front), which was dated March 12, 1986. Here is the pic, in case anyone has never seen this drawing before:

http://photoalbums.wdwmagic.com/show...hp?photo=13237

The original design was basically an overgrown version of Disneyland's castle. If you look closely and very carefully at the drawing, a to-scale size-comparison of the then-proposed Euro Disneyland (the then-proposed theme park's name at the time) castle to Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle and Cinderella's Castle at WDW's Magic Kingdom and Tokyo Disneyland. Disneyland's castle is represented by a red line drawing over the arcitect's drawing (same shape as the artciect's EDL castle drawing, only smaller!), and Cinderella's Castle (WDW & Tokyo DL) is represented by a black line drawing completely shaded in!

I caculated the height of the castle to be about 110 feet tall, compared to Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle at 77 feet, and approximately 180 feet for Cinderella's Castle at WDW's Magic Kingdom and Tokyo Disneyland.

However, this dseign for Sleeping Beauty Castle never was used, perhaps due to the fact that France has literally hundreds of castles within a 100 mile radius of Paris, so another design was needed-- to look more fairytale-ish and unreal! This gave Disneyland Paris perhaps the most colorful and awe-inspiring of castles from Disney's theme parks around the world!

[bumble]

Thanks for sharing Kent. It is interesting to see where they started, and then where they eneded up design wise.