Rebuilding an old attraction?

[horizons82]

I know this is mostly theoretical and that WDW would never do this as any old attraction would feel outdated. However, I have been wondering how possible it would be for WDW to rebuild an old attraction from start to finish.

Let's say they wanted to rebuild Horizons...I'm not talking about just updating the ride, I'm talking about an exact replication of the original ride with all of the exact same scenes, exact same animatronics (and the exact same clothes or outfits they wore), the exact same everything from the exterior structure to the same orange smell in the orange grove scene.

I guess one thing that they couldn't exactly replicate would be the narration in this case, but they could always use the original tracks. Which I guess brings me to the real point of this question...does WDW keep enough old blueprints, specs, audio tracks and notes that they could completely re-build an old attraction to the exact original specs?

 

[kap91]

My guess is that everything or nearly everything is archived. Way too many resources are put into an attraction to discard all that investment. I guess it's POSSIBLE that blueprints, designs, might be discarded after an attraction has been gone for a long while - but likely not as they provide reference material to how to things if they ever want to do something similar again. They're essentially R&D. While the ride is open they would need to keep it all for mAintenance, modifications, etc.

Although supposedly a lot of recordings in one of the audio vaults were accidentally destroyed a while back so if something that was needed was in there there'd be a problem. Even then though if it was music they keep all the sheet music and could rerecord even using similar recoding techniques to the time period.

The only real probl you'd have is thing that weren't documented ahead of being built. It's conceivable that some art (load murals, background cycs)wouldn't have been heavily designed ahead of time - particularly in older attractions. They might have to be recreated based on photos

There also the problem of building codes. Naturally the older the ride the less likely an exact replica would meet today's various standards (ADA accessibility for instance)