The NextGen Aversion Rationale

As the Fantasyland expansion project at Florida’s Magic Kingdom inches toward completion, you’d think that it would be the main topic of conversation in the online Disney fan community. And you would be wrong. Fantasyland is already old news. No, the big topic of conversation these days is the NextGen initiative, which encompasses things like interactive attraction queues and parkwide games like the new Sorcerers Of The Magic Kingdom and is moving implacably toward a new system called XPass.

I’m not going to talk much about XPass here because most of what we think we know about it comes from one source and there’s been no official information released as of yet.

I am, however, going to talk about the parts of NextGen that we do have today: interactive queues and (briefly) Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom. This little Groucho Marx ditty nicely sums up my feelings about them:

Now I know what you’re probably thinking: I’m a curmudgeonly fanboy who hates change and wishes Disney World would stay forever frozen in the year 1989. But that’s not it. Nor do I object to the implementation of new technology. Heck, I love new technology. But here’s the main reason why I have a problem with NextGen:

The company is spending over a billion dollars on it while existing attractions and facilities are deliberately allowed to fall apart or stand empty.

A perfect example of this is Peter Pan’s Flight. It’s a very popular attraction, kids love it, and it always has a long line. It’s also basically the same ride that opened at Disneyland in the ‘50s, and as maintenance at Walt Disney World has fallen by the wayside, it’s begun to look rather musty and dilapidated. A few new effects, maybe a modern Animatronic or two, and some general TLC would go a long way toward making the attraction fresh and new again. So that is not what Disney is doing. Instead, they’re going to be putting in an interactive queue, presumably with touchscreen video games for people to play while they’re waiting. That’s a bit like getting an expensive paint job for a rusted-out car. And while interactive queues are great for rides like Soarin’ that are not continuously loading, all they do for rides like Peter Pan or Space Mountain is slow things down.

What about interactive games, like the new Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom? From what I’ve heard, it certainly seems to be popular with kids. But it also seems to be causing traffic problems by causing lines to form where none were ever intended to be.

After the NextGen project has blown through its alleged billion-dollar budget, what will we have to show for it? The Monorails will still be falling apart. Various aging and ill-maintained Magic Kingdom attractions will still need the improvements that have been vetoed by park VP and world-class idiot Phil Holmes. Over at EPCOT, the Imagination pavilion will still be a pathetic shell of its former self, the Wonders of Life pavilion will still be empty, and Universe of Energy’s show will still resemble an overlong episode of I Love The 90s. The Backlot Tour at the Studios will still be a joke, and Animal Kingdom will still have, well, all the problems that Animal Kingdom has. Also, Downtown Disney will still be a complete waste of time.

If all four parks on the Florida property had reached ideal buildout, every attraction was well-maintained and the infrastructure was in good shape, then I could see this NextGen thing as a good idea. But as things currently stand, it’s just a shiny object dangling in the face of clueless senior management, distracting them from the real improvements the resort needs.

And that’s why I’m against it.

The WDW Mass Transit Conundrum

One of the defining characteristics of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow that Walt Disney hoped to build in Florida was its forward-thinking transportation system. A key part of this system was the idea that cars entering the city would park near a central transportation hub, where visitors could ride the PeopleMover to an in-city destination or jump on the Monorail to travel to the Magic Kingdom, the industrial park, or some other destination outside the city. Pedestrians, automobiles, and the property’s dedicated vehicles would all move in their own dedicated spaces. Therefore, a pedestrian would be in no more danger of being hit by a car than being hit by a Monorail, and since neither pedestrians nor the property’s mass transit systems would utilize the automobile roadways, traffic would flow much more smoothly than was possible in a large city like New York or Chicago.

Although Walt’s EPCOT city was never built, many of its guiding principles could be seen in the design and operation of the Walt Disney World resort, especially with regards to its transportation system. Indeed, transportation between the resorts and the theme park was no mere afterthought; the Magic Kingdom resort area and its Monorail system were actually designed around each other. At one time, up to five resort hotels were planned for the Seven Seas Lagoon/Bay Lake area, each with its own stop on the Monorail line. Only two of those hotels were actually built (if not for the OPEC embargo in the late 1970s there likely would have been more) but the system was clearly designed for expansion. Of course, an EPCOT Center line was added during the construction of that park, and in the mid-to-late 1970s there were plans in the works to extend it all the way out to Lake Buena Vista as part of the residential/recreational community that was supposed to sit where the vastly inferior Downtown Disney is today. And like Walt’s EPCOT city, the Buena Vista community would have had a PeopleMover system for intra-community travel. How cool is that?

Even though the Lake Buena Vista community never materialized, during the first couple years of EPCOT Center’s operation there was reason for optimism that any future expansion of the Walt Disney World resort would include a concurrent expansion to the property’s futuristic transportation system. But then, in 1984 Disney CEO E. Cardon “I Love Golf” Walker was replaced by the guy who thought Star Trek: The Motion Picture would be as exciting as Star Wars.

^{“Trust me, I know what I’m doing!”}

To be fair, Michael Eisner did do a lot of positive things for the Walt Disney Company, especially during his first decade as CEO, and current executives could learn a lot from his early focus on the quality of the theme parks. One reason for his success was that, unlike some of the company’s old guard, he did what he thought best without being paralyzed by worry about what Walt would or would not have done. This approach yielded a mixed bag of results. Yes, it led to the company ballooning into a multimedia behemoth, a run of successful animated films that have become modern classics, and an unprecedented expansion of the theme parks. Unfortunately, it also drove the final nail into the coffin for Walt’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

Under Eisner’s regime, the demand for more hotel rooms on the Florida property was met by the construction of several new resorts. Additionally, the property gained two new theme parks: Disney/MGM Studios and Animal Kingdom. However, since Michael Eisner felt no particular allegiance to the tenets of Walt’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, there was no concurrent expansion of the Monorail system, and no addition of a PeopleMover system to link those areas that were separated by shorter distances. Thus, the only way to travel to or from many destinations on property was to use the existing roadways. And this called for a fleet of buses to move people between the various resorts and parks. Of course, an increase in roadway traffic around the property led to stoplights and traffic jams and all those problems of big cities that Walt Disney had wanted his Prototype Community to solve or avoid.

Now, probably 99.999% of the vacationers on Walt Disney World property at any given time do not know or care about this, but it drives us hardcore Disney futurist nerds nuts. We’re fond of saying that the transportation system needs to be fixed, and we’re not just talking about giving the Monorail fleet some much-needed maintenance (or maybe a complete replacement, seeing as how the current fleet is entering its third decade of service) We want to get rid of the buses, and replace them with Monorails or PeopleMovers or even a light rail system. Sadly, that ship has long since sailed.

The original Magic Kingdom-area resorts were built around a Monorail-and-boat transportation system. Future expansions on the property were supposed to follow a coherent long-range plan. Since that kind of long-range thinking was largely abandoned during Eisner’s tenure and expansions were done on a case-by-case basis with no overarching long-term plan in place it would be pretty much impossible to just plug an elegantly efficient transportation system into the property as it’s currently configured.

Unfortunately for we futurists, the buses are here to stay. But who knows? Maybe one day the property will get a fleet of those elevated superbuses the Chinese are working on:

^{Imagine this thing covered with DVC advertisements and Princess-themed festoonery}

Wishful thinking? Probably. But who knows?

The Magnificent Desolation of World Drive

Not too long ago I was browsing through the Pictures library on my computer and I came across this:

I don’t remember where I found this photo, who took it, or when it was taken. However, it reminded me of an often-overlooked aspect of my early trips to Walt Disney World in the prehistoric mists of the early 1980s: the transition from the humdrum real world to the fantastical world of the Magic Kingdom.

Back then my family lived in St. Augustine, and once a year we’d drive down to Disney World for the day. Today, I know that we took US-1 to I-95 South, then turned west on I-4 and took that to the US-192 exit where we’d merge onto World Drive. As a kid, though, I was completely ignorant of all this. We might as well have been traveling the Trans-Siberian Expressway. All I knew is that I had to coexist with my sister in the back seat for three whole hours (which is an eternity to anyone under age 10) as we drove down a succession of identical-looking four-lane highways that somehow dead-ended into the Magic Kingdom parking lot. In those days, of course, Disney’s Florida property was probably 90% vacant. Most of the Vacation Kingdom was concentrated at the property’s northern end, near the Magic Kingdom. There was an oasis of civilization at the center of the property (EPCOT Center) and the unassuming Walt Disney World Village was clustered around Lake Buena Vista, but absolutely none of these things were visible from World Drive. In fact, to kids like me World Drive was indistinguishable any of the other four-lane highways that crisscross the Florida peninsula. For three hours, I’d stare out the window and see nothing but palmettos and pine trees and pavement. And then, after an interminable wait, my mom or dad would remark “We’re getting close!”

Excited, I would look out the window and see: palmettos and palm trees and pavement. But as I kept looking, something unusual would materialize out of the Florida foliage:

The Monorail track! Tangible proof that Disney World wasn’t far away!

Within minutes we’d be pulling into a parking space, and not long after that we’d be on the Monorail heading toward the Magic Kingdom while the classic Jack Wagner spiel warbled through the overhead speakers, and the boredom of the long trip from St. Augustine was a rapidly receding memory.

Of course, it wasn’t reasonable to expect Disney never to build anything on all those unused acres of land. As soon as you turn on to World Drive these days, you see Disney-fied road signs directing you to the various parks and resorts. And even though a kid might not notice those, there’s no way to miss The Arch:

Far from the low-key brown road sign of my childhood, now we have a large, road spanning arch telling you that you are now in Walt Disney World Where Dreams Come True Whether You Like It Or Not. Of course, other structures like the Earful Tower and the Swan and Dolphin resorts are also visible from the road, so the transition from the Real World to Disney World starts a little sooner than it used to.

Is that a good thing? A bad thing? I don’t know. I’m sure today’s kids will look back fondly on the times when, after hours of driving down identical-looking highways they looked up to see the Mickey-and-Minnie-flanked archway rising up in the distance, and knew that they were almost to Disney World.

For me, though, I’ll look back fondly on the times when a simple elevated concrete railway alongside the magnificent desolation of World Drive was your only indication that your were about to be plunged headfirst into a world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.

Just a Spoonful of Truthiness

Over the past week two pillars of the Disney blogging community, Michael Crawford of Progress City USA and FoxxFur of Passport to Dreams Old and New, have posted their year-in-review articles in which they make the shocking suggestion that there's something wrong with the way Walt Disney World is managed.

As expected, the Blame-Disney-First crowd on the Twitters has jumped on the bandwagon. They’ve been especially critical of Magic Kingdom VP Phil Holmes, and not just because he looks like an evil robot sent from the future to destroy us all.

No, these Internet crybabies are upset because Phil put the kibosh on some unnecessary expenditures, things like a thorough Space Mountain upgrade and a new parade and fireworks show. Well, I’m here to say that these complainers just don’t get it. And they come from a long line of non-it-getters. But not Phil. No, Phil understands a very important fact: the Magic Kingdom is the number one most-visited theme park in the world.

Actually, I should rephrase that: Magic Kingdom Park at the Walt Disney World Resort is the number one most-visited theme park in the world. It’s important to phrase things properly, otherwise people might think that Walt Disney World is another planet, not a resort, and that the Magic Kingdom is an actual kingdom instead of a park. You’ve got to keep the public informed.

But I digress. My point is that its status as the world’s number-one theme park means that Magic Kingdom Park is perfect. And you can’t improve on perfection. Phil Holmes knows this, which is why he’s vetoed all these misguided efforts to “improve” the park. Also, he’s a Vice-President, a title that’s also been held by prominent statesmen like Dan Quayle. Who are we to question his decisions? But let me take things a little further. Since Magic Kingdom Park is a part of the larger Walt Disney World Resort, I believe that its perfection rubs off on the entire property. Really, all of Walt Disney World is perfect, and therefore has no need of improvement. Excepting, of course, those empty parcels of land that are ripe for having DVC resorts built on them.

Still, it galls me that there are those Debbie Downers and Negative Norms who refuse to yield to this flawless logic. One of them, Michael Crawford, goes so far as to compare Walt Disney World’s organizational structure to a gaggle of feuding fiefdoms, and even equates it to Europe during the Middle Ages. And he says that like it’s a bad thing! Doesn’t he know that many of Disney’s most beloved stories like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are set in the Middle Ages? It was a time of fantasy and magic! Therefore, what the Internet naysayers see as organizational paralysis is just Disney’s way of making the magic come to life! Just like Walt would have wanted!

Speaking of Walt, I’m tired of hearing people complain that Walt never would have approved of whatever it is that’s burning their britches. The fact is that Walt approves of everything the Walt Disney Company does. For all you naysayers who think that’s impossible because of the tiny reason that Walt died in 1966, consider this: according to U.S. law, corporations are people. Therefore, in legal terms the Walt Disney Corporation is Walt Disney, and any discussion of what Walt would or wouldn’t do is moot. Of course, since corporations are genderless, it’s really not appropriate to refer to Walt with the pronoun “he.” He’s more of an “it” now. Also, his/her name has changed from “Walter Elias Disney” to “Walt Disney Corporation”. But other than that he’s still the same guy gal genderless entity.

Finally, I want to talk about the one thing that Walt Disney World has that no other collection of theme parks, including Universal’s, can match: magic. Walt Disney World is a magical place where dreams come true. I know this because their advertising tells me so. Part of the magic that Disney offers at its parks is a return to the innocence of childhood, when anything seemed possible. For example, most kids believe in Santa Claus. Why? Because parental authority figures like their parents or grandparents told them he’s real, and part of the innocence of childhood is believing whatever parental authority figures tell you, no matter now illogical or ridiculous it is. And outside our families, what parental authority figure is more beloved than our kindly old uncle/aunt, Walt Disney Corporation?

So, if Disney tells us that their parks are magical places where dreams come true, we must accept it without question. If we don’t we’re ruining the magic. Is that what you want to be, a magic-ruiner who makes little kids cry? I didn’t think so.

So, to recap: since it contains the most-visited theme park in the world, the Walt Disney World Resort is a perfect place with no need of improvement and everything that happens there is a magical dream come true. So if a rough ride on Space Mountain turns your internal organs to jelly thanks to a track that hasn’t been replaced since the Nixon Administration, it’s a magical dream come true. Vomiting into a trash can after a ride on Mission:Space? Also a magical dream come true. If you believe otherwise, you’re a cynical, un-magical hater of childlike innocence.

And that’s a spoonful of truthiness.

NOTE FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE READ THIS FAR: The preceding was obviously a work of satire. If you post angry comments to “refute” the clearly satirical and ridiculous claims made above, I will mock you viciously here and on Twitter. You’ve been warned.

The Enterprise-EPCOT Signage Similarity

When the USS Enterprise was reimagined with a motion-picture budget during the making of the first Star Trek film, the production’s artists and set decorators had the opportunity to add a level of realism to the ship that had been impossible for their counterparts on the TV show a decade earlier. One of the more subtle touches they added to make the Enterprise feel like a “real” spaceship was to render all the ship’s signage in a standard font. They also created a series of easy-to-understand logos for the various shipboard departments and functions.

For example, just about all the doors on the Enterprise looked the same. How would a new crewmember be able to know if they were about to stroll into a turbolift or a transporter room? Well, each had their unique logos:

                        

. . . and most doors were marked with a sign that incorporated the logo. Any verbal or numeric indication was rendered in the standard shipboard font. You can see what I’m talking about in this screencap:

The film’s artists also took the time to create a format for directional signage. For example, how would you know where Turbolift 1 or Docking Port 3 were? A bulkhead labeling system that incorporated the departmental logos, numeric indicators, and arrows was devised:

           

You see an onscreen example of this in the scene where Spock first comes aboard:

^{Wait, Spock’s shuttle is docked aft of the bridge, on Deck 1. This is the only docking port on that deck. Shouldn’t it be Docking Port 1 and not Docking Port 3? Man, I am such a geek.}

Now, these are just tiny details. They’re barely on screen for a few seconds, and most filmgoers didn’t even notice them. Nevertheless, they worked on a subconscious level to make the Enterprise feel like a huge starship rather than an assemblage of plywood sets.

Ah, but what does this have to do with EPCOT? Well, as I’ve pointed out in the past, since Star Trek:The Motion Picture and EPCOT Center’s Future World were both products of the late 1970s they shared a very similar design aesthetic. Much like the newly-refitted 1979 version of the starship Enterprise, Future World’s signage also utilized a standardized font (known as World Bold) along with a series of easy-to-understand logos representing the various pavilions. This system was utilized on directional signs:

^{Photo by Werner Weiss of Yesterland.com. Used with permission.}

. . . signs on or in the pavilions themselves . . .

. . . and even on the early park guidemaps:

     

Even mundane real-world things like illuminated EXIT signs were rendered in the official font:

All of this made the various parts of Future World seem like interlocking pieces of an interrelated and greater whole. It contributed, if only subconsciously, to the park’s futuristic feel. Sadly, Future World began to lose its thematic cohesion in the mid-to-late 1990s. The circular pavilion logos disappeared, and as each pavilion was refurbished it gained its own unique signage. That part was understandable. After all, the corporate sponsors would naturally want the pavilion on which they were spending so much money to have its own identity. Less understandable is the way park management seemed to completely jettison Future World’s unified visual design in all other ways.

The signage in today’s Future World is an incomprehensible mish-mash of conflicting styles. For example, some signs still use the classic, still-futuristic-after-all-these-years World Bold font . . .

^{I love the font, but the rest of the sign looks like 1994 threw up all over it}

. . . while other signs use some variant of Chicago, the original Mac OS system font:  

    

. . . and the sign above Guest Relations looks more like something that belongs in the Magic Kingdom’s Flash Gordon-inspired Tomorrowland:

Even during the dark hours of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a movie packed with more lazy storytelling and hackneyed plot devices than a whole season of any Glen Larson production you care to name, the folks in the movie’s Art Department still cared enough to make sure that any signage you could see in the background of those creatively-bankrupt scenes fit into the design lineage that began with The Motion Picture:

^{If only Shatner had obeyed the sign, we might have been spared the horror of the Uhura Fan Dance}

It’s a level of caring that seems to be sadly lacking at today’s EPCOT. Yeah, I know this is minor thing. The fact is that 99.9% of the park’s visitors don’t notice or even care about signage or a unified design aesthetic as long as they can quickly find out how to get to Soarin’ or Test Track or the Men’s room. Honestly, even diehard EPCOT Center geeks like me wish we didn’t have to care about this stuff.

I mean it. If you traveled back to the 1980s and asked the 10-year-old versions of me or any of my fellow Disney bloggers what we loved about EPCOT Center, none of us would have mentioned the signs. We would have talked about how much we loved choosing our own ending on Horizons, playing in the ImageWorks, or that part at the end of World of Motion where you ride past the mirrored wall and see a reflection of yourself riding in a futuristic bubble car. It was only when that stuff began to vanish that we fixated on the tiny details.

Here’s hoping that one of these days, those details make a return.

The Eisner-EPCOT Antipathy Explanation

It’s widely known in the Disney geek community that when Michael Eisner took the reins of the Walt Disney Company in 1984 he was not a big fan of EPCOT Center. Under his watch many attempts were made to “fix” the park and give it a broader appeal, things like giving Future World a real live circus and bringing in celebrity-based attractions like Captain EO and Ellen’s Energy Adventure. The reason that’s usually given for Eisner’s antipathy toward the park’s original vision is that he was an empty suit too obsessed with synergy and marketing to appreciate EPCOT Center’s true appeal, and there’s certainly some truth to that.

But I believe that, in addition to his entertainment-industry instincts to synergize and dumb things down to appeal to the lowest common denominator, Eisner’s attitude toward EPCOT Center was affected by his experience on one of his big projects at Paramount: Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

In the late '70s, a young Michael Eisner was an executive at Paramount Pictures, and one of the projects within his sphere of responsibility was the revival of Star Trek. After several aborted attempts to make a film, Paramount had decided to start a fourth television network-a competitor to the Big Three of CBS, NBC, and ABC-with a revived Trek entitled Star Trek: Phase II as its flagship program. They even held a big press conference to announce this. Then their accountants did the math, and realized that the Paramount Television Network would never make enough money to stay in business. You’d think they would have had the accountants run the numbers before they had their big press conference, but if you’re reading this then the fact that large corporations often behave illogically is not surprising to you.

Anyway, the stillbirth of the Paramount Network presented a big problem for Michael Eisner. He had to find some way to salvage a sellable product out of all the money the studio had invested into Star Trek’s revival, and at an August 3, 1977 meeting, which was ostensibly a pitch meeting for the story for Star Trek: Phase II’s two-hour pilot, Eisner found his way out. The story treatment that Gene Roddenberry, Harold Livingston, and Robert Goodwin pitched to Eisner concerned a huge, unstoppable living spaceship that threatened the planet Earth. Upon hearing the pitch, Eisner reportedly slapped his hand down on the conference table and declared “We’ve been looking for the feature for five years, and this is it!”

With that, Star Trek: Phase II became Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Not only did it provide Paramount with a way to finally get some return on all the money they’d invested in attempted Star Trek revivals, they also hoped it would give them something else they badly desired: a Star Wars killer. You see, not only was Star Wars a fantastically profitable motion picture, but it also turned tie-in merchandise into big business. Naturally, Paramount wanted their own science-fiction film franchise with a profitable line of merchandise to go along with it, and Star Trek seemed to be the perfect candidate.

However, the driving force behind Star Wars was George Lucas’ desire to make a modern version of an old-fashioned space adventure serial like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. As I’ve written before, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s aspirations were much different. Having spent most of the 1970s having his head swelled by enthusiastic convention audiences who treated his philosophical musings like the utterances of a prophet, he was keen that a Star Trek film tackle some kind of profound Big Idea. Stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were heavily involved in the creative process, and they were mainly interested in ensuring that their characters got meaty story arcs.

The making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was not a fun or happy process. When filming got underway, the script was still unfinished. Dialogue had to be repeatedly rewritten on the set as either Shatner or Nimoy would often object that their character wouldn’t say this or that, and the film’s big ending, where Decker merges with V’Ger and the Ilia-bot, was pretty much thought up on the spot. Star Trek was in the process of transforming into important tentpole franchise, yet Gene Roddenberry was still trying to maintain the same amount of control he’d had as executive producer of the TV series in 1967. He even went so far as to write his own version of the screenplay to compete with the one by the contracted screenwriter Harold Livingston, and then try and force Michael Eisner to choose between them. Eisner chose Livingston’s script, and the confrontation simply added one more headache to the movie’s already-painful birth. The film’s post-production phase was even more troubled. The film was locked into its December 7, 1979 release date, but its many special-effects shots proved more complex and time-consuming than was originally thought. As a result, post-production ran grotesquely behind schedule, and was completed only at the last possible moment. There was no time for test screenings, nor was there any time to release the film with anything but a temporary audio track. Director Robert Wise actually carried the finished cut of the movie with him to the premiere. Still, everyone was hoping that Paramount had a Star Wars killer on its hands.

And what happened? You know what happened. Star Trek:The Motion Picture had lots of special effects, just like Star Wars. It even had a lot of background aliens that could be made into action figures, just like Star Wars. But where Star Wars was fast-paced and exciting, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was grand, majestic, profound, slow-moving and boring boring BORING.

^{Pictured: EXCITEMENT!}

Sure, the music was excellent, the designs (even the much-lampooned disco pajama uniforms) were well thought-out, and the story had something meaningful to say about the human condition. But none of that made up for the fact that the movie was less fun than a PBS documentary on the history of borscht. Kids didn’t find it exciting, the toy line by Mego was nowhere near as cool or successful as Kenner’s Star Wars line, and so even though the movie turned a budget of $40 million into a domestic box office gross of about $82.2 million it was widely viewed as a flop. A flop with Michael Eisner’s name on it.

^{See that guy on the right? It’s not Frank Wells.}

At the time, no one could have known that it would give birth to a successful, long-running film series and a television revival that would include four spinoff shows and a resultant boatload of home video sales. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a stressful, painful experience that appeared not to have been worth it.

So imagine how Eisner must have felt in 1984 when he took over a Walt Disney Company that had, on its Florida property, a big expensive sciencey park that was a lot like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the very thing that gave him so many headaches during the final years of the 1970s. EPCOT Center was very grand, impressive, and profound, but like the first Star Trek film most members of the general public found it confusing and boring. I believe that Eisner quickly turned his back on EPCOT Center’s founding philosophies in part because his experience with the first Star Trek film led him to believe that such profound, educational ideas presented in a rather sterile, academic, science fictiony way just could not appeal to mass audiences.

Of course, his vision of what EPCOT should be was all about thrill rides, celebrities, and faddish trends. A perfect example of that was the Wonders of Life pavilion, which featured a garish late-80s Nickelodeon-inspired color scheme, EPCOT’s very first thrill ride, and a large helping of celebrity cameos. You could argue, though, that at least Michael Eisner had a vision. Today’s executives seem to have no clue what they want EPCOT to be, beyond a place to sell Duffy merchandise.

Still, I still hope that one day EPCOT will get a Wrath of Khan-style makeover that remains faithful to the park’s core essence while jettisoning all the pointless flotsam it’s accumulated over the last couple decades worth of attempts to make it fit in with the cool kids.

Or at least get William Shatner to narrate O Canada! That’s one celebrity cameo I can get behind.