With the new Dueling Dragons-themed Horror Nights house this year, I was digging back through some old theme park history and kept bumping into this same story again and again. The story goes that Disney Imagineers working at Animal Kingdom designed Beastly Kingdom as one of the headlining lands for the new park, but once Eisner realized that the budget wasn't large enough, he cut the Beastly Kingdom land to instead prioritize the much cheaper Dinoland U.S.A.. Some retellings specifically note the film Dinosaur as a reason. The Imagineers, scorned by the costcutting of the latter Disney Decade, jumped ship to work on Universal's Islands of Adventure, where they were able to finally fulfill some semblance of the original plan for Beastly Kingdom through The Lost Continent, Merlinwood, and Dueling Dragons.
I've heard this story for over a decade now, but where did it come from? Does anyone have a primary source for this? A book, interview, podcast, old forum posts or discussion from insiders? or was it just hearsay from early theme park fandom? I'm legitimately curious if anyone has any knowledge on the origins of this story, which seems to me almost like theme park legend at this point.