Imagineers left a piece of the building’s own history on the desk inside the new Animator’s Office at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and almost nobody is going to spot it.
Tucked on a shelf at the animator’s desk in The Magic of Disney Animation is a toy speeder bike, sitting in a cluster of die cast motorcycles and other memorabilia. A Sorcerer Mickey figure from Fantasia stands in front of it, which is most of the reason it disappears. Guests looking at the desk see the Mickey, not what is behind him.
The Toy Is Standing Where The Real One Stood
The placement is not random. This exact room used to hold a screen used speeder bike from Return of the Jedi, loaned to Disney by the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and displayed against a forest backdrop with concept art alongside it, back when the building operated as Star Wars Launch Bay. The new animator’s desk sits roughly where that display once stood.
Star Wars Launch Bay closed permanently on September 25, 2025, after nearly a decade in what was then Animation Courtyard. The original Magic of Disney Animation occupied the space until July 2015, Launch Bay moved in a few months later, and the animation theme returned this month.
The Busiest Room In The Attraction
The Animator’s Office is the densest room in the building. The conceit is that the artist has just stepped away and the characters have taken over in the meantime. Stitch spins in the desk chair. Mushu is playing an arcade game. Pascal has made a mess. Hei Hei turns up as well. Movie posters for Lilo and Stitch and for Back to Neverland, the short that played in this building when the original attraction opened in 1989, hang on the wall behind the desk.
The props are not set dressing in the usual sense either. Imagineering has said the room is furnished with real artifacts rather than manufactured ones, including a desk saved from the original Animation Academy, a Moana crew hat, a Hercules production jacket, a copy of Rabbit Rabbit, the weekly magazine handed out to animators who worked in this building, and a book of caricatures that animators drew of each other.
Every other object on that desk points at animation history. The speeder bike points at the ten years the room belonged to a different franchise, reduced to a child’s toy half hidden behind a Mickey figure.
Disney has not said anything publicly about the easter egg. The attraction opens officially on September 14 and soft opened to guests on September 11, so anyone visiting this weekend can go looking.
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