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The First Painted Maya Temple Sections Are Up on the Indiana Jones Ride Building at Animal Kingdom, and the Middle Is Still Bare Steel
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The First Painted Maya Temple Sections Are Up on the Indiana Jones Ride Building at Animal Kingdom, and the Middle Is Still Bare Steel

Michael Travels
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Published

The Indiana Jones temple at Disney's Animal Kingdom finally has a finished face on it. Two of them, in fact, with a stretch of naked steel in between.

Aerial photos from @bioreconstruct, published Friday by WDW News Today and WDWMagic, show the first decorative facade sections installed on the show building for Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent. These are not primer-gray mockups. They arrived carved, painted and done.

An oblique aerial view of the Indiana Jones show building. A tall finished temple section sits at the top, carved with turquoise scrollwork and deep red panels pierced by dark rectangular openings, its upper edge trailing off into pale tan crumbling rock. Below it stands an open gray structural steel frame with nothing on it. Beneath that sits a second finished section in the same red and turquoise, with a row of pale stone teeth along its edge. Gray wire mesh rockwork spreads out around the base and a yellow arrow points at the top of the upper section

The upper and lower sections are carved and painted. The gray frame between them is not. Image: @bioreconstruct via WDW News Today

Top and bottom, nothing in the middle

WDW News Today puts the state of play plainly: "Only the top and bottom third of the temple have received the new facade sections. The middle section is still just barebones structure."

The photos back that up. The finished pieces are red stone cut with scrollwork, the raised carving picked out in bright turquoise, and they bracket an open steel cage where the middle of the pyramid will eventually go. Around the base, the sloping pyramid steps are still at the wire mesh stage, the armature that rockwork gets sculpted onto later.

One of the aerials carries a yellow arrow marking the cables that were attached at the top of the facade pieces to lift them into place.

A wider aerial of the same construction site. A white Sims Crane and Equipment mobile crane stands at the left with its boom extended away from the temple, its hook block hanging over a sandy backstage service area beside a low beige building. The partly built pyramid rises at center with painted red and turquoise carved sections at its top and around its lower level, separated by exposed gray steel framing. Broad sloping pyramid steps below are covered in gray wire mesh marked with red and blue spray paint. Trees, sand and construction fencing surround the site

A crane sits alongside the temple. The pyramid steps below are still bare wire mesh. Image: @bioreconstruct via WDWMagic

Painted in a building down the road

The reason these panels showed up looking finished is that they were finished before they got there. WDWMagic describes the sequence as sculpting and painting backstage first, then bringing the pieces to the site for installation.

WDW News Today, relaying bioreconstruct, is more specific about where that happened. The work ran for several months, and it was done at the Imagineering offices Disney keeps close to Animal Kingdom.

WDWMagic notes why a builder would work this way, calling off-site prefabrication a technique that saves time on the main job site by letting finish work run in parallel with the structural build instead of waiting in line behind it. On a land due to open in 2027, that is not a small consideration.

There is also a tidy consistency check available. Disney showed a miniature model of the temple at D23 last month, and WDW News Today reports that the panels going up so far match that model's design.

Rock on the other side

The most quietly enjoyable detail is what these panels look like from behind. "While the front of the facade is covered in red and blue paint," WDW News Today writes, "the back of the facade is crumbling brown rock."

One of the aerials shows the structure from an angle where that rock dominates. It is not raw material. It is sculpted into stratified, crumbling ledges, the same ruin treatment that caps the painted sections in the closer photos. A faded red panel and turquoise carved bands still show in the middle of the frame, so this angle catches some of the finished face along with the rock.

An oblique aerial of the temple dominated by sculpted pale tan rock carved into stratified crumbling ledges. A faded red panel pierced by a grid of dark rectangular openings sits in the middle of the structure, with bright turquoise carved bands flanking it on both sides. A white Sims Crane and Equipment truck crane is parked at the left beside a green boom lift, and open gray steel framing and scaffolding stand exposed at the base of the structure

Another angle on the same structure, where the sculpted rock takes over and only part of the red and turquoise carving stays in view. Image: @bioreconstruct via WDWMagic

What is going inside

Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent is replacing DINOSAUR, and much of the old DinoLand, U.S.A. footprint around it has been excavated. WDW News Today describes dirt piles across the area and sections cordoned off behind orange construction webbing.

The ride sends guests into a Maya temple near an underground cave that was once filled with water. In the attraction's own legend, the passage below leads to the Maya Underworld and is guarded by the Tsukán. Riders get pulled through a portal into that Underworld and run into monstrous bats, giant scorpions and fire, with the serpent appearing several times. Disney has indicated the ride builds to a major confrontation with the Tsukán. Per WDW News Today, Disney Parks Blog has billed the completed serpent as an enormous Audio-Animatronic that will loom over guests when it appears.

Disney concept art of an interior ride scene. Indiana Jones stands on rubble at the left in a fedora and leather jacket, holding a flaming torch overhead. Beside him a tall Maya stone carving glows bright green and teal, throwing beams of light across a dark cavern hung with stalactites. A dark open-sided ride vehicle with round headlamps fills the right of the frame, with a passenger reaching out an arm. Small text in the corner reads Artist Concept Only

Concept art for an interior scene, not the exterior facade. Artist concept only. Image: Disney and Lucasfilm

The attraction is an original Indiana Jones story written for Animal Kingdom rather than an adaptation of a film, and Harrison Ford is the model for its Indiana Jones Audio-Animatronics figure.

Still 2027

Tropical Americas is due to open at Disney's Animal Kingdom in 2027, and neither outlet reports any change to that.

What has changed is how much of the land you can now judge by eye. Until now the Indiana Jones building has been steel and mesh, the kind of progress you have to take on faith. Two painted panels are the first piece of it that looks like the finished thing, and they also make the gap between them very easy to count.

Sources

Image credits: Aerial photography by @bioreconstruct, via WDW News Today and WDWMagic. Concept art copyright Disney and Lucasfilm Ltd.

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