The History Desk Dispatch
What Old WDW Vacation Brochures Reveal About a Resort That No Longer Exists
A look through archived 1970s and '80s Walt Disney World brochures, and the resorts, pools and one whole park they document that have since disappeared or changed names.
Before there was an app for planning a Walt Disney World trip, there was a stack of paper. Families requested vacation guides by mail, or grabbed them at the Florida Welcome Center off I-95, the ones with the free orange juice samples, and read them cover to cover on the long drive down. Collectors who kept those brochures are sitting on a surprisingly good record of a resort that, in several specific ways, no longer exists.
Worth knowing: Walt Disney World issued paper Resort ID cards to registered guests for decades before the MagicBand existed. Archived cards from the resort’s first decade still turn up in collectors’ hands today.
One property that shows up in mid-1970s guides has effectively vanished under three different names. The Golf Resort opened near the Magic Kingdom’s golf courses in 1973, was rebranded as The Disney Inn in 1986, and became Shades of Green in 1994, an Armed Forces Recreation Center hotel that still operates today, leased to the U.S. military and run independently of Disney’s own resort system. Guests staying at Disney’s other resorts rarely realize it’s there at all, since it doesn’t appear in the regular room-booking system.
The Treehouse Villas tell a similar story. The originals opened in 1975, near what’s now Disney’s Saratoga Springs Resort & Spa, and housed guests for close to three decades before closing in 2002. They didn’t reopen as-is. Disney demolished the aging units and rebuilt new treehouse-style villas on the same footprint, reopening in 2009 as part of Saratoga Springs, where they still book today as some of the more distinctive rooms in Walt Disney World’s Deluxe Villa lineup.
A brochure from 1976 shows off the garden pool at what the guide calls the Polynesian Village Resort, years before the resort’s now-signature volcano pool, Nanea, existed. The name itself has had its own back-and-forth: Disney trimmed it to “Disney’s Polynesian Resort” for a stretch before restoring the “Village” name in 2014. As of mid-2026, Disney’s official site still lists it as Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort, though the resort’s Great Ceremonial House lobby is currently under refurbishment and some areas are temporarily closed to guests.
The most historically loaded item in any batch of old WDW paperwork tends to be a brochure introducing EPCOT Center, which opened October 1, 1982, as the resort’s second theme park and, at the time, its most expensive single expansion. Reading the original marketing copy next to what EPCOT actually became (multiple rebrands, a shortened name, an entirely different identity twice over) is a decent reminder that even Disney’s biggest bets get revised.
None of this is retrievable by visiting the parks today. The physical brochures, the resort ID cards, the fold-out property maps, none of it survives in an app-driven planning process, which is exactly why the paper record matters to anyone tracking how this resort actually got built out over fifty-plus years.