Animal Kingdom Badge – Harambe

The final badge! Last in the series of 20th Anniversary Disney Animal Kingdom badges: Harambe. The Harambe Wildlife Reserve is the setting for Kilimanjaro Safaris, an attraction so large it could fit the whole of the Magic Kingdom inside.

I love that the lands, attractions, and parks that Disney creates all have backstories. You may never actually witness them, but the narrative helps define and shape details you wouldn't otherwise get. It took a long time to track down the animal from the official HWR emblem (the sable antelope) and I had to do some digging to see when it was fictionally founded. The closest I could find was in an Imagineering Field Guide that listed it as "sometime in the 1970s," so I selected 1971, the year that Walt Disney World originally opened.

As always, thanks to Joe Rhode and the many, many Imagineers over the years who’ve designed, sculpted, and engineered something incredible.

Thanks for following along this week! This project was a ton of fun and I might need to revisit it and make some more badges at some point.