Disney has long milked its vast army of characters for all their worth, but there’s one they’ve barely done anything with since his creation almost 40 years ago: Figment. He’s the friendly, inquisitive, big-eyed, purple animatronic dragon who can still be seen lurking in what is now called the “Imagination!” pavilion at EPOCT Center in Walt Disney World. (That’s the one that’s a pyramid of glass.) He’s really cute. And yet Disney has never given him his own TV show, put him in a movie, or done anything with him outside of EPOCT apart from a couple handfuls of educational short and cameos in Inside Out and Toy Story 4. Well, that snub ends now (or soon).
As per Deadline, Figment is finally getting his own movie, thanks to Seth Rogen’s production company Point Grey, with Pokémon Detective Pikachu writers Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit handling the script. No other details — is it animated? a hybrid? will Figgie get a human companion or is he flying solo? — are currently known, but the project joins all the many other ones announced earlier this month at the D23 Expo.
Figment bowed in 1983, and in his debut dark ride, called “Journey into Imagination,” he joined a wizard-scientist on a journey into limits (or lack thereof) of the mind. The ride has been revamped multiple times, and since 1999 has featured him bopping around with Eric Idle as a scientist. Figment’s name, of course, refers to the phrase “figments of one’s imagination,” a name that reportedly came to creator Tony Baxter while watching an episode of Magnum, P.I. Anyway, welcome to the big screen, Figment.
(Via Deadline)
