futureprobe

The Magnificent Desolation of World Drive

2012-01-19T13:13:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-12T12:08:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-20T17:04:00.001-05:00

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

2011-12-12T17:30:00.001-05:00

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.

Disney In Space Part 4: From Ray Bradbury to Lt. Dan

2011-12-07T22:13:00.000-05:00

EPCOT Center may have been the boldest, gutsiest thing the Walt Disney Company ever did. Instead of rides based on familiar Disney properties like Snow White or Peter Pan it had pavilions devoted to big, sweeping topics like agriculture, transportation, and energy. Each pavilion either contained one huge experience (like Universe of Energy and Horizons) or a number of experiences under one roof (like The Land or Journey Into Imagination), allowing you to spend an hour or more exploring one topic. Since Future World was devoted to, well, the future, and since all optimistic projections of the future always included space travel in some form, it seemed logical that EPCOT Center would open with a Space pavilion.

It did not.

However, a Space pavilion was definitely planned. In fact, Disney’s 1977 Annual Report actually contained a description of the proposed pavilion:

“A huge, interstellar "Space Vehicle" will transport passengers to the outer frontiers of the universe, highlighting man's efforts to reach out for the stars around him ... from the early pioneers who looked and wondered ... to modern-day space travelers and their triumphs ... to the challenges and possibilities of future space technologies and exploration”

Although lots of concept art and photos of early ride mock-ups for EPCOT’s other pavilions have been published, we’ve only ever seen a tiny number of images from that early Space pavilion concept. The most common are a photo of the ride’s scriptwriter, the great Ray Bradbury, and designer John de Cuir examining a model of the show’s theater/ride vehicle . . .

. . . this artistic rendering of the same theater/show vehicle:

. . . and finally, this rendering of the pavilion’s exterior:

According to Martin Smith’s excellent Mission:Space tribute video, the pavilion would have been located on the plot of land now occupied by The Living Seas. the experience would have started with an Omnimover ride that took visitors “up into space” and deposited them into an area where they could choose from several activities, including the main show.

Supposedly, outer-space visuals would have been projected onto an Omnimax sphere outside the “windows” of the huge theater/simulated space vehicle, which would have moved in sync with them in some way. As near as I can tell from all these fragmented pieces of information, the show would have been a cross between Universe of Energy and Horizons’ Omnimax sequence. If the Ray Bradbury-penned narration for the original Spaceship Earth is any indication, his script for the Space pavilion’s show would have been similarly majestic and profound. Much like the original Universe of Energy or the original Spaceship Earth narration, though, it likely would have been rather mirthless and scholarly. Kids like me who were weaned on Star Trek would have loved it, but our more numerous Star Wars-oriented peers-who thought of space travel as a thrilling roller-coaster ride where you shoot lasers at enemy spaceships while making wisecracks to your Wookiee co-pilot-would surely have been disappointed.

The Bradbury Space pavilion, as we EPCOT Center geeks refer to it, was unfortunately shelved due to the lack of a corporate sponsor. A scaled-back version called Journeys In Space was planned for a while in the late-80s/early 90s, and would have occupied the expansion plot between The Land and The Seas pavilions, but it, too, was shelved.

Which brings us to the space attraction that EPCOT actually ended up getting. Notice I said “attraction”. By the time Mission:Space opened in 2003, EPCOT’s “permanent World’s Fair” concept had long been abandoned by unimaginative executives who couldn’t and wouldn’t understand it. So we weren’t getting any more pavilions with their multifaceted experiences that a person could spend hours exploring. Also, since the prevailing opinion was that Disney needed more “thrill” rides, there’s no way we were getting one of those fun-but-mild-experience-that-can-be-enjoyed-by-the-whole-family rides that EPCOT Center did so well. No, Mission:Space will go down in history as the first Disney attraction to come equipped with barf bags. Still, it’s not without its good points.

The queue is extremely cool. Also, the attraction features some very advanced technology, and I’m not talking about the simulators. I’m talking about the Lt. Dan Animatronic. Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking: “That’s no Animatronic, that’s really actor Gary Sinise!” But look more closely:

Notice how his forehead is completely smooth. Next time you watch the preshow video, observe how as he talks, his forehead and most of his other facial features remain completely immobile. That’s the sure mark of an Animatronic. Or it could be botox.

Finally, for all its flaws, Mission:Space is the most realistic space attraction Disney has ever done. I was as imaginative a kid as you’ll ever see, but when I went on Mission To Mars back in the mid-80s, I never once believed I was in a rocket ship and not a show building. And as I discussed in previous posts, neither Space Mountain nor Star Tours really tried to realistically simulate spaceflight. Mission:Space, though, gives you the most realistic space launch experience you’ll get outside a NASA training facility. Yes, the Orange Team version makes a lot of people sick, but so would an actual space launch. It’s one reason why so few people qualify to become astronauts.

So, removed from the context of the thing it replaced (Horizons) and the grand Space pavilion we never got, Mission:Space isn’t as bad as some people make it out to be, in my opinion. It’s certainly a product of our current era of scaled-back ambitions and MBA thinking, but at least it gives the space travel concept the seriousness it deserves^* and doesn’t try to shoehorn in any licensed characters.

I mean, we could have gotten Stitch and Duffy Take a Ride Into Space (starring Lt. Dan). Right?

*I meant to say that the main show treats space travel seriously. The post-show is another story. The “Space Race” game is more like a space-themed game show, and the rest of the post-show is like a high-end McDonald’s play area.

The Muppets is a Gem, But Will It Be Appreciated?

2011-11-25T21:09:00.001-05:00

Like most of the people who are extolling the virtues of their newly-released movie, I grew up with the Muppets. I watched them on Sesame Street during the day and on The Muppet Show at night. My local library had the book Of Muppets and Men:The Making of The Muppet Show, and it introduced me to the men behind the characters, to Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, and all the rest. I went to see The Muppets on its opening night this week, and I spent most of the movie with a big goofy grin on my face. I even got misty-eyed during The Rainbow Connection.

The Muppets totally lacks the mean-spiritedness that’s so common in today’s entertainment. Think about it; how many action films revolve around the audience rooting for the hero to violently kill the villain? How many reality shows encourage us to mercilessly mock their contestants’ failures? There’s none of that in The Muppets. Quite the opposite, in fact. Case in point: instead of doing the normal idealistic-youngster-gets-disillusioned-by-the-celebrity-he’s-always-idolized thing, when our protagonist Walter meets Kermit, he’s kind and welcoming. The movie is two hours or so of good, old-fashioned Muppet mayhem. But is it enough for today’s audiences?

As I left the theater, I realized that the movie was made specifically for people who’d grown up with the Muppets, for people like me. And there are not a lot of people like me. I enjoyed TRON:Legacy, for crying out loud. But will the things my generation loves about the Muppets also appeal to the same mass audiences that gobbled up scene after scene of brutal robot-on-robot violence in Transformers 3 this past summer? I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to wait for the box office returns to find out. If nothing else, we got to see an honest-to-goodness Muppet movie done right. And that’s not such a bad deal.

Disney in Space Part 3: Robotic Jar-Jar

2011-11-14T17:10:00.001-05:00

You thought this post was going to be about EPCOT, didn’t you? Well, in a perfect world where EPCOT Center’s Space pavilion got built, it would be, but as it is we won’t be getting to EPCOT until the next post.

The crowd-pleasing, utterly unrealistic thrills of Space Mountain nicely foreshadowed the success of Star Wars in 1977. Much like Space Mountain, Star Wars made no effort to realistically depict space travel, its sole aim was to tell a fun, exciting story. Nevertheless, because of the dented, “lived-in” look of its environments, Star Wars felt more realistic to the general public than the sterile, scientifically accurate 2001: A Space Odyssey. And because of the success of the original Star Wars trilogy and its tie-in merchandise, it captured the imagination of a whole generation of children.

However, by 1986 it looked as though Star Wars was running out of steam. The last installment in the trilogy was three years in the past, and there were no firm plans for future films. Star Wars merchandise was almost impossible to find in stores, and George Lucas looked like this:

^{There is no chin under George Lucas’ beard. Just more of his neck.}

Yes, the mid-to-late 1980s were a strange time for the Star Wars franchise. But in 1986 the spirits of young Star Wars fans everywhere (including an 8-year-old me) were lifted by the news of a Star Wars attraction by Disney that used revolutionary simulator technology to take you on a trip into hyperspace and down the infamous Death Star trench! Unlike Disney’s previous space rides, in which the opportunity to experience the thrills felt by real-life astronauts was the primary draw, here the main attraction was prospect of being immersed in a popular fictional universe-one, it should be noted, that was not a Disney creation. In many ways, the decision to insert Star Wars into Disneyland mirrors the recent decision by Disney’s leadership to bring James Cameron’s Avatar franchise to Animal Kingdom. If today’s Internet had existed in the mid-1980s, might the online reaction to Star Tours have mirrored this year’s Avatar announcement? It’s interesting to consider.

You’d expect that any marketing campaign for Star Tours would focus heavily on the popularity of Star Wars and its familiar characters, and you’d mostly be correct. But there’s also this amazing gem unearthed by Progress City USA’s Michael Crawford that aired during the Disney Sunday Movie on December 28, 1986. It starts with a C-3PO rapping, and then it really gets weird. Just watch:

After watching that, you probably have a lot of questions, which I will do my best to answer in a handy Q&A format:

Q: Why was C-3PO rapping?
A: it was kind of a fad back then for people who had no business rapping to publicly humiliate themselves attempting to do so. Remember this?

Q: I thought Sidekicks starred Chuck Norris and that kid from SeaQuest, not Buck Rogers and the kid from Surf Ninjas?
A: Ah, you're thinking of the better-known 1993 film of the same name. Sidekicks was also a short-lived TV show starring Gil Gerard and Ernie Reyes, Jr.

Q: Was it about an asthmatic Ernie Reyes, Jr. having daydreams about Buck Rogers?
A: Thankfully, no.

But the C-3PO rap number and the awkward presence of the mismatched Gil Gerard/Ernie Reyes team is the least of my problems with this sequence. You know how it was when you were a kid, and a a cheerful, well-meaning adult would clumsily try to relate to you despite the fact that they obviously didn't know anything about the stuff you liked? "Hey, you like Star Wars?" they'd say. "Is that the one where Dark Vadar and Dr. Spock beam down to the Planet of the Apes?"

Well, Disney obviously found one of those people to write the script for this weird little adventure. Not only was this person clueless enough to think Star Wars is an aspirational, scientifically accurate tale about the future and the wonder of human achievement like Star Trek, but they even thought TRON was a space movie. A space movie! Because it takes place in a computer, and spaceships have computers, and therefore any movie about computers must automatically take place in space, right?

Fortunately, the people who worked on Star Tours were not so out-of-touch. During the "dark period" where there were no new Star Wars productions on the horizon, Star Tours offered the only "new" content we'd see until 1999. I can't emphasize enough how cool it was to walk through the queue for the first time and see C-3PO and R2-D2 for real, in three dimensions. Unfortunately, the Rex character's "comical" incompetence and panicked flailing was an unfortunate precursor to the Jar-Jar antics that would soil the long-awaited Episode I, but Star Tours was such an enjoyable ride that it was easy to look past that.

The Star Tours ride system was adapted for only one other Disney attraction: EPCOT Center's Body Wars, which opened with the Wonders of Life pavilion in 1989. Until the mid-90s, it was promoted as EPCOT's headlining attraction, much like Soarin' is today. Unfortunately, the Wonders of Life pavilion was shut down as a cost-cutting move after it lost its corporate sponsorship, and the Body Wars simulators were scavenged for spare parts for Star Tours.

This wasn't the end of simulators at EPCOT, though. EPCOT Center would finally get its Space pavilion in 2003. In the concluding post in my Disney in Space series, we'll talk a bit about the Space pavilion that never was, and then take a look at the only attraction on Disney property to feature Lt. Dan and in-ride barf bags.

Words You’ll Never Hear On futureprobe

2011-11-10T16:47:00.001-05:00

Recently the author of the EPCOT Explorer’s Encyclopedia tweeted an interesting video in which Disney’s Global PR Chief cited a very interesting statistic: for every person who posted something negative about the company, eighteen people would spring to Disney’s defense.

That statistic got me thinking about the way some of my fellow members of the online Disney fan community use language, specifically how the words and phrasing some of them use mimics Disney’s advertising to an uncanny degree. For example, how often have you seen a posting on a message board, a blog, or on Twitter that uses words like “magic” or “pixie dust” to describe the experience of visiting a Disney theme park? Now, I’m not trying to be critical of anyone here. Most companies have approved messaging and verbiage that their employees are expected to use when talking about the company. Such approved verbiage is generally designed to depict the company in the most favorable light possible and downplay any of its faults or mistakes. And as you might imagine, most of the people who are required by their employer to parrot such verbiage don’t really believe it themselves. Some of them are just really good at delivering it convincingly. And that’s why it kind of makes me laugh when I see people who aren’t on Disney’s payroll voluntarily adopt its approved messaging and verbiage in their writing.

And make no mistake, it’s easy to do. The company has crazy good ninja marketers who can write ad copy that melts into your brain and merges with your thought processes without you ever realizing what’s happening. But since I dislike the idea of partially ceding control of my mind to a corporation whose sole aim is to get me to give them money, I believe it’s important that we recognize when these tactics are being used on us and try to resist them. I also believe that there’s no need for me to function as an unpaid parrot for Disney’s marketing messages, like a computer with inadequate security protection that’s become part of a botnet. Therefore, here are a couple of Disney-related terms you will rarely, if ever, see me use on this blog:

Guest. This word has been around since Walt’s time. It’s used to convey the idea that visitors to a Disney facility can expect a higher, more friendly level of service than they might get at their local grocery store or county fair. But let me ask you a question: suppose I invite you over to my home for a steak dinner. I’m asking you to be my guest, right? But what if I tell you it costs $15 to park your car in my driveway, $85 to walk through my front door, and the steak dinner will be $50 per person? Are you still my guest? No, you’re my customer. They’re different things. Now, if I invited you to my home as a guest and the house was a little messy and ill-maintained and I didn’t cook your steak exactly right it’s not a big deal. But if I made you pay through the nose for the experience, you’d rightly expect everything to be better than perfect. To me, calling Disney’s customers “guests” undermines the business relationship between the company and the people who pay to get into its parks and stay at its resorts.

Back to my analogy. Suppose I have a really cool game room at my house, full of the latest in home theater and video game technology, and from time to time I invite you over to play some NBA Jam or watch a movie on my giant TV. Again, if I’m charging you admission to my house and we have a business relationship, you’re not coming over spend time with me because I’m such a cool guy. You’re coming over because I have cool toys to play with, and I let you win at NBA Jam. Now suppose I decide I need to cut expenses-not because I’m hurting for money, but because I’m kind of greedy. So I strip my game room bare, sell off all my cool toys, and block the door with a potted plant and a sign that says “The game room is closed-please enjoy the other rooms at David’s house”

^{It’s a good thing Disney never does anything like that}

And then to top it off, what if I raised my admission price to $95, and continued to raise it once a year regardless of whether or not I bothered to improve or even maintain my property? You’d accuse me of all kinds of things. You’d call me a jerk and a cheapskate. And you would be right. You’d also leave and go spend your money somewhere else. But that never seems to happen to Disney, does it? And why is that? It’s mostly because of their crackerjack marketing department, and another word they’ve plucked out of the English language and pretend to own the copyright on:

Magic. How many times do you hear this word in connection with Disney? The parks aren’t just fun, they’re “magical”. The bus that picks you up at Orlando International Airport isn’t a reasonably nice motor coach, it’s the “Magical Express”. Staying on property? You’re not just paying above-average room rates for the convenience of being close to the parks and getting to use Disney transportation, you’re “staying close to the magic”. This is blatant manipulative advertising language. It helps to foster the notion that an expensive Disney vacation has some intangible value that makes it worth the money. And that’s okay, it’s what advertisers are paid to do. But you’re not going to catch me doing it, because I’m not a Disney marketer and they’re not paying me a penny.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Disney World. And most members of the Disney fan community (especially the ones who link to this blog or follow me on Twitter) are fantastic people. I’m not bashing anyone here. But, maybe because I work in the IT industry and not in sales, I have an aversion to sugarcoated marketing language. So, you’ll often hear me refer to Disney park “visitors”, “parkgoers”, and even “customers”, but never “guests” unless I’m quoting someone else or writing about someone for whom Disney picked up the tab for their visit. And while you’ll often hear me refer to the Disney parks as “fun”, “entertaining”, or “enjoyable” and the customer service as “friendly” or “excellent”, you will never, ever see me use the word “magic” to describe these things in a non-sarcastic way.

In fact, if you ever catch me using words like “magic”, “guest”, or “pixie dust” the way Disney uses them, It’s a sure sign that the aliens have taken over my brain and are preparing to invade, and only Jeff Goldblum and his MacBook will be able to save us.

Disney in Space, Part 2: Here’s to the Future and You!

2011-11-03T17:02:00.001-04:00

In 1964, with Disneyland in its ninth year of operation, Walt Disney approached Imagineer John Hench with an idea for a brand-new space ride that would anchor an overhauled Tomorrowland. What was the new ride’s inspiration? Dr. Werhner Von Braun’s newest theories on the future of spaceflight? NASA’s drive to put a man on the moon by decade’s end? Actually, it was something much closer to Earth: the Matterhorn.

It may be hard to imagine today, but in Disneyland’s early years the park had no thrill rides. That changed in 1959, with the opening of the Matterhorn Bobsleds. The world’s first tubular steel continuous track roller coaster, the Matterhorn proved to be hugely popular. Walt’s idea was for a similar, space-themed version of the ride, called “Space Port”. It would have multiple tracks like the Matterhorn, but it would take visitors on a fast-paced trip in the dark with special effects to create the illusion of racing through the stars. John Hench’s initial concept sketches pictured a towering edifice that resembled a fanciful futuristic circus tent.

The project was shelved for a number of reasons, one of them being Disneyland’s lack of space. The new Walt Disney World in Florida, however, would have plenty of room, and the new attraction, now called Space Mountain, was the most visible part of Tomorrowland’s Phase 2 that opened with much fanfare in 1975.

There was a lot more to the Space Mountain experience than just the roller coaster, however. The large indoor queue area was home to one of Disney’s great immersive themed queues. And after the ride was over, visitors exited onto a long speedramp that took them past a series of dioramas that made up RCA’s Home of Future Living. Even if they were unable or unwilling to ride the coaster, guests were still encouraged to come into Space Mountain to experience the queue and the Home of Future Living. I wish I could say I did this during my childhood visits to Walt Disney World, but I never got to. And it’s a real shame, too, because the Home of Future Living perfectly predicted the world of the 21st century:

Yep, after a long day at the office, there’s nothing I’d rather do than slip on my multicolored jumpsuit, sit down in my living room that’s tastefully decorated in the avocado-and-gold color scheme that’s so popular here in 2011, and watch a movie on my RCA VideoDisc player. I know all of you do the same thing.

Aside from the 1970s cheesiness, I think my favorite thing about early Space Mountain was the marketing that surrounded it. Obviously, slogans like “Space Mountain-Just Like The Matterhorn, But In The Dark” would not have been very catchy. Instead, Disney World’s new thrill ride was promoted as a realistic space adventure. Just check out some of this promotional prose from the January 1975 edition of Walt Disney World news, which was highlighted on the excellent Passport To Dreams Old and New a few months back:

. . . in Space Mountain, presented by RCA, you, without any previous aeronautical acquaintance, can experience the incredible adventure of outer space!
You'll board the eight passenger space capsule, buckle your seat belt and be whisked away into the most enthralling, free-falling flight through brilliant stars, whirling spheres and unearthly forces ever imagineered!

Obviously, a ride on Space Mountain simulates real spaceflight about as accurately as the Michael Bay film Armageddon. However, this entertainment value-over-realism approach proved to be very popular, and nicely prefaced the entertainment phenomenon that would take the world by storm just two years after Space Mountain’s grand opening: Star Wars.

In the next post in this series, we’ll talk about Disney’s next space ride, Star Tours. Best of all, we’ll tackle the eternal question of what Buck Rogers and that kid from the 1993 schlockfest Surf Ninjas have to do with a galaxy far, far away.

In the meantime, check out Widen Your World’s fantastic Space Mountain page for more information about the original version of this landmark attraction.

Disney in Space, Part 1: To The Moon

2011-11-01T17:37:00.001-04:00

Note: The next few posts will be devoted to the history of space rides at Disney parks. The guys at WEDWay Radio are also tackling this subject, and I encourage you to check out the first installment of their Disney In Space series, devoted to the forgotten Disneyland attraction Space Station X-1.

Among Walt Disney’s many interests was space travel. And although human spaceflight was still in the future when plans for Disneyland were made, it seemed logical that it might become a routine fact of life by the end of the 20th century. After all, the Wright Brothers made their first flight in 1903 and by the end of the Second World War airplanes were commonplace.

In March 1955, about four months before Disneyland opened, the Disneyland TV series debuted the episode Man In Space, which used a mixture of lighthearted animation and staid academic sequences to educate audiences about the possibilities of human spaceflight. The opening of the original Magic Kingdom in 1955 gave the public a new prospect: a simulated trip to the Moon.

Early Tomorrowland’s attraction lineup wasn’t all that impressive, and things like the Aluminum Hall of Fame and the Monsanto Hall of Chemistry are just footnotes in Disney history. Rocket To The Moon, though, was destined to become one of Disneyland’s great shows. One of the park’s iconic structures, the gleaming white-and-red TWA Moonliner (which inspired the visual design of this very blog, among other things) served as a beacon to draw visitors to the futuristic-looking twin-domed show building, where audiences were seated in one of two circular theaters meant to mimic the cylindrical interior of a rocket ship. The “flight” into space played out on two screens on the floor and ceiling of the theater. Although it seems crude to us, Rocket to the Moon really was an excellent “mass-market” simulator by 1950s standards. More rigorous simulators might be fine for the test pilots that would become America’s first astronauts, but Walt Disney was not about to strap his customers into some kind of a spinning centrifuge that would make them lose their lunch.

Despite the fact that it was among the first Disney attractions, Rocket to the Moon survived more or less intact into the 1990s. It gained an Animatronic preshow and a new name, Flight To The Moon, during the 1967 New Tomorrowland upgrade. That upgraded show was cloned for Walt Disney World in Florida, but in 1975 both the East and West coast shows were refurbished once again into Mission To Mars. The destination of your rocket trip had changed, and the sci-fi convention of hyperspace travel was used to explain how you could cross the vast distance from Earth to Mars and back during the course of a five-minute show, but underneath all that it was virtually the same experience that greeted Disneyland’s first crowds in 1955. Even the takeoff and landing animations remained unchanged from the 1955 version of the show.

Much like the Man In Space episode of the Disneyland TV series, and its follow-up installments Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond, Flight to the Moon’s purpose was not to provide thrills, but to simulate as realistically as possible what an actual trip into space might be like in the future. Much like the more whimsical animated sequences in those television shows, though, Disney’s next big space ride would eschew realism in favor of entertainment value. Check back soon for the next installment of my Disney In Space series where I’ll dive into one of Disney’s landmark attractions: Space Mountain. In the meantime, check out Daveland’s excellent photo page devoted to the Moonliner and the Rocket to the Moon attraction.

The Perfect Intersection of Time and Place

2011-10-23T23:09:00.000-04:00

It started with a question on the Discussion Kingdom forums:

“I've been checking out the site for a few hours. I see a lot of love for EPCOT . . . I just want to know why are so many people so passionate about EPCOT”

So I got to thinking: why is there so much affection for old-school EPCOT Center? I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, and I’ve formulated a theory. Tell me, what goes through your mind when you see this picture?

^{Besides dysentery, I mean.}

If you belong to the generation that grew up playing Oregon Trail on Apple II series computers in school, you’ll probably react with recognition and nostalgic fondness. “I remember that game!” you’ll say. “It was fun!” If you don’t belong to that generation, though, such fondness would be hard to understand. For a child of the 21st century, it’d be downright inexplicable. Only someone who grew up in the 1980s, when Oregon Trail and Apple II computers were state-of-the-art could really understand it.

And so it is with EPCOT. The Future World of the 1980s, where you could talk to a robot via telephone and use a computer touchscreen to make restaurant reservations or color a picture, was a wondrous place because it was the only place you could do those things. Today you can do them all with an iPhone and access the sum total of all human knowledge from almost anywhere.

In the early 80s, our perceptions of what the 21st century would bring were shaped by the nascent personal computer revolution and the brand-new Space Shuttle program. EPCOT Center was perfectly calibrated to showcase the future as we envisioned it then. When things went in a different direction, in many ways the park was unable to adapt. Unlike the experiences at the Magic Kingdom, which are basically timeless and can continue to appeal to new generations with only minor upgrades, many of the experiences offered at EPCOT Center’s Future World resonated best with kids in the 1980s, and their appeal does not translate to successive generations.

I’m not saying that the stuff that replaced Horizons, World of Motion, or CommuniCore is better. But when someone outside my age group scratches their head and says they just can’t fathom why some people would rather watch a Horizons ride video than ride Mission:Space, I’ll understand where they’re coming from.

Thank You, Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T22:32:00.001-04:00

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the personal computer or the graphical user interface. He didn’t invent MP3 players, tablet computers, or smartphones. But those devices have made such a huge impact on our lives largely because of his efforts. While other companies rolled out watered-down products designed by committees and focus groups (Microsoft’s Windows-powered Smart Displays, for example), Apple under Steve Jobs’ leadership consistently cranked out amazing stuff we never knew we wanted until we saw it.

So thank you, Steve Jobs. Thank you for the 21st century.

Park Number FIVE?

2011-09-30T17:28:00.001-04:00

So I was reading Jim Hill’s latest column. He started off by explaining that Disney isn’t making a big deal of Walt Disney World’s 40th anniversary this year because they’d rather wait and make a bigger deal of the resort’s more important 50th anniversary in 2021. Sounds reasonable, right? I think we all suspect that Disney will do something big for the 50th, although it’s surely too early to know exactly what that will be.

Or is it? In a sentence that was obviously written to make the reader do a double-take, Hill claims that Walt Disney World’s 50th anniversary celebration will span all five Florida theme parks. And then he “elaborates” by saying that Disney plans to have a fifth gate on the Florida property by 2021 before quickly ending the column.

The rumor of a fifth gate is a persistent one in Disney fan circles. I have no doubt that the possibility has been discussed within the company, and I’m sure that concepts and ideas for such a park exist in somebody’s filing cabinet. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I’m not a Disney employee, I don’t know any Disney employees, and I have no inside information. I’m just a blogger with opinions. However, I can state with unequivocal certainty that when Disney World’s 50th anniversary celebration kicks into gear in 2021, there will still be only four parks in Florida. If I am wrong, may Mr. T himself strike me down.

^{“I pity the fool who says Disney World’s gonna get a fifth gate!”}

How can I be so certain? I’m glad you asked! Here are my top three reasons why Walt Disney World will not get a fifth gate anytime soon (and probably never):

The economics don’t make sense. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the global economy is in the toilet. Oh, things are going pretty well for some people-such as former HP CEO Leo Apotheker, who spent a year running that company into the ground and was rewarded with a $10 million severance package when they fired him. But the other 99.9% of the population is not exactly rolling in greenbacks. During an appearance on the September 11 episode of the WDW Today podcast, Jim Hill mentioned that because of the bad economy people have been booking their Disney vacations about six weeks out instead of six months or more, which makes it difficult for the company to predict what their staffing needs will be. If the dire economic conditions are preventing Disney from predicting customer demand for their existing parks, how could they justify dropping billions of dollars to construct another? Even if they could, they probably wouldn’t because . . .
Team Disney Orlando hates to spend money. Did you know that Team Disney Orlando was opposed to the Fantasyland expansion? It’s true. Even though it will help alleviate some of the capacity issues that force the park to turn away paying customers during the busiest days of the year, and therefore make the Magic Kingdom more profitable in the long term, the geniuses at Team Disney Orlando tried to veto the project. The adults at the corporate office in Burbank were forced to overrule Orlando management and thus the project went forward. If they’re unwilling to spend the money on a project that will lead to demonstrable benefits, why would they spend billions on a fifth gate, where the benefits are more nebulous and may not materialize? Speaking of which . . .
A fifth gate will not cause people to extend their vacations. Aside from a desire to siphon business away from Universal Studios and Busch Gardens, what motivated Disney to build the Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom parks? They wanted people to book longer stays on property. However, in the years following the opening of Animal Kingdom it became obvious that this strategy had not worked. Rather than staying an extra day to see Animal Kingdom, people were just spending less time at the other three parks. I have no firsthand knowledge about the company’s inner workings, but I imagine Disney was counting on the increased revenue from longer stays on property to help offset the continuing cost of maintaining Animal Kingdom. That revenue didn’t materialize, and now the company is forced to operate the park without it. I doubt they’d make the same mistake twice by adding a fifth gate.

So there you have it, three reasons why we will not see a fifth theme park at Walt Disney World—not in the near future and probably not in the far future either. And yes, I’ve heard rumors of a smaller, limited-access gate for the very wealthy, but judging from the downward trajectory of the economy and the upward trajectory of Walt Disney World admission prices and room rates, it’s not too hard to envision a future where the entirety of the Florida property is a limited-access gate for the very wealthy.

Well, that’s all for this post. Coming up later, I’m working on a post about how EPCOT opened at the perfect point in history to capture the imagination of a generation of parkgoers, and after that I’ll have on a history of Disney space rides.

Revitalizing the Carousel(s) of Progress

2011-09-26T13:20:00.000-04:00

^{Picture from WDWMemories.com}

If I’m at the Magic Kingdom and I overhear someone say they’re going to skip the Carousel of Progress because they think it’s old or boring or whatever, I immediately decide that person is a Grade-A Nimrod. I might even jump on Twitter to let everyone know what a big stupid idiot I just encountered. Within minutes, my Twitter friends will most likely chime in to agree that this guy is indeed the world’s biggest moron, and if he’s incapable of appreciating a Classic Disney Attraction that was worked on by Walt Disney Himself, then maybe he’d be happier at Six Flags.

We WEDHeads have a fiercely protective love for the Carousel. Why? Well, after Disney bulldozed, gutted, or dumbed down almost every Future World pavilion at EPCOT, the Carousel is one of the last bastions of the optimistic futurism that Walt Disney always embraced. And given the company’s track record, we’re terrified that they’ll close down the Carousel one day and replace it with something inane like “Stitch and Duffy’s DVC Adventure Starring Tow Mater”. Sometimes, though, I think that our emotional attachment to the show keeps us from viewing it as it really is.

Unlike other “classic” attractions such as the Tiki Room or Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, the Carousel of Progress is not a timeless show. It was designed for an audience that no longer exists today. The typical audience at a showing of the Carousel show at the 1964 World’s Fair was composed of people who actually remembered living in each of the time periods depicted. That made the show resonate with them in a way that’s impossible in this second decade of the 21st century. In an earlier post, I said that the Carousel should either be updated to restore the twenty-year gap between scenes or simply reverted to the 1964 version and left that way. I’ve done some more thinking on the subject, though, and I’ve changed my mind a little bit.

First, I believe that Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress needs to make a return to Disneyland. None of the shows that have occupied Anaheim’s Carousel Theater since the original show left in 1975 have measured up to it, in my opinion. Yeah, I know a lot of people have fond memories of America Sings, but I don’t think singing animals belong in Tomorrowland any more than Nemo and friends belong in Future World. Disneyland visitors have a love for classic attractions that most Florida visitors do not. Therefore, I think that a 1964-flavored version of the Carousel (minus some of the more sexist dialogue) should return to California, complete with a brand-new Progress City post-show on the second level.

Florida, I think, should get a new Carousel show that focuses on the innovation that’s had the biggest impact on today’s generation: computers and the Internet. The show would begin sometime in the late-1970s to early 1980s, where our Carousel family is excited about the possibilities of their first “home computer”, and end perhaps twenty years in the future, showcasing the advancement we expect to have by then. As long as the final scene isn’t too overly specific about the technology and doesn’t make the mistake of putting everyone in “space clothes” that look cool now but will look stupid in five years, it could seem futuristic for a decade or more.

More than just the advances in computing technology, this new Carousel of Progress would be about how the availability of personal computers and the Internet have changed the way we listen to music, watch TV and movies, play games and even socialize. If done well, it would resonate with 21st century audiences much as the original Carousel did with audiences in the 20th century.

Well, that concludes my not-quite-a-series of posts on Tomorrowland. I hope you enjoyed it, and thanks for reading!

Animal Kingdom’s Tall, Blue Expansion

2011-09-23T20:51:00.000-04:00

Well, I was all ready with a post about the Carousel of Progress and then Disney went and dropped a bomb on us. A very large, very blue James Cameron-y bomb. I’m referring, of course, to the news that Animal Kingdom is finally getting a much-needed expansion in the form of an Avatar Land.

Predictably, the online Disney fan community erupted with howls of outrage. A lot of folks felt that a more original concept would have been better, and that it looked as though Disney were copying Universal by purchasing the rights to a popular franchise and building an area devoted to it. Others complained about Avatar itself, either about its story problems or its PG-13 content. The following short but very funny review nicely sums up how I feel about the film. Watch it, it’s hilarious.

So I am not an Avatar fan. Nevertheless, I had a positive reaction to Disney’s announcement. It addresses maybe the biggest problem on the Florida property: the lack of anything to do at Animal Kingdom. Now I know what you’re thinking: isn’t putting an Avatar Land into Animal Kingdom as thematically retarded as adding the planet Vulcan to EPCOT’s World Showcase? Probably. But since I don’t have the same affection for Animal Kingdom that I have for EPCOT and the Magic Kingdom, I don’t really care. Animal Kingdom’s slate of offerings is so anemic that almost any new additions (excepting an expansion of Chester and Hester’s Dino-Rama) are welcome.

But my good feelings about this announcement go beyond the fact that I might actually have a reason to visit Animal Kingdom in five or six years. Along with the multibillion-dollar overhaul of California Adventure and the Magic Kingdom’s Fantasyland expansion, this latest piece of news seems to signal an important shift in the attitude of Disney management toward the parks. You see, since the late-90s Disney’s philosophy seemed to be that people would flock to the parks no matter what, so there was no need to try overly hard to please their customers. During this period we saw E-ticket attractions closed and replaced either with nothing or substantially inferior substitutes. Worst of all we got two seriously flawed parks: Animal Kingdom-which had roughly the same number of attractions as Adventureland spread out over an area the size of EPCOT, and California Adventure-which seemed as though it were Imagineered by an accountant.

A couple years ago I was pretty sure things would never turn around. Disney seemed content to just crank up the volume on the marketing messages about how “magical” the parks allegedly are and ignore the hole they’d dug themselves into during the late ‘90s and early 2000s. But now things have changed. The company seems to recognize the mistakes that were made and is spending substantial amounts of money to fix them. Are they fixing them in a way that we all agree with? No. But in my mind it’s silly to jump on the anti-Avatar Land bandwagon before we know anything about the place.

And while it’s tempting to make a list of the late-Eisner-era mistakes that Disney needs to fix after Avatar Land opens, right now I’m going to sit back and enjoy the fact that one of my fondest wishes for the property-that Disney would do something to make me want to visit Animal Kingdom-will be fulfilled in just a few years.

A Heartfelt Tribute to EPCOT Center

2011-09-13T12:03:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago I was listening to my favorite songs from The Muppet Movie, and halfway through Gonzo’s “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday”, I realized it was the perfect song for an EPCOT Center tribute video. With the large amount of archival EPCOT Center footage available on the Internet, it seemed like it might be fairly simple, although time-consuming, to cobble together such a video.

Unfortunately, there were two problems: I am not a skilled videographer, and the only video-editing software I have is the rather limited Windows Live Movie Maker. So, I had to adjust my ambitions downward a bit and make more of a montage of still images. Hopefully, it still accomplished the effect I was going for. I’ll let you be the judge:

I’m hard at work on a post about the Carousel of Progress. Hopefully it’ll be ready by next week. Thanks for reading!

The Real Problem With Tomorrowland

2011-08-24T17:15:00.000-04:00

^{Picture from WDWmemories.com}

The Walt Disney World fan community is more or less united in the belief that there’s something wrong with Florida’s Tomorrowland. The most common complaint, aside from the existence of Stitch’s Great Escape, is that Tomorrowland has turned its back on a realistic future in favor of a fantastical “future that never was”. I don’t really see that as a problem, and here’s why:

The original intention at the first Magic Kingdom park, Disneyland, was that the overt fantasy be restricted to Fantasyland. The other lands were more or less based on reality, or at least reality as we perceived it in 1955. Main Street was supposed to simulate a real turn-of-the-20th-century American town, something that was an actual childhood memory for some of Disneyland’s early guests. Adventureland’s sole attraction, the Jungle Cruise, had not yet acquired the comical edge it has today but was presented as a “real” trip into the jungle. Westerns were still hugely popular, and Frontierland was presented as an actual tribute to America’s past and the “frontier spirit” of the people who settled the West (as was customary back then, very little attention was paid to the fact that there were already people in the West when the white settlers got there). It’s worth noting that, since the days of the Old West were only 70-90 years in the past in 1955, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that an elderly visitor to 1950s Disneyland might have childhood memories of that time. Finally, Tomorrowland-with an attraction lineup that included the Monsanto Hall of Chemistry and the Kaiser Aluminum Hall of Fame-was devoted to real science and technology.

Let’s compare that to today. I’d argue that the areas of the Magic Kingdom that once allegedly represented aspects of the “real world” no longer do. The American Main Street of the 1900s is too far in the past to serve as a nostalgic touchstone to anyone. The idealized, sanitized Old West of Frontierland never really existed, and the same can be said of Adventureland’s Afro-Poly-Caribo-Asiatic tropical pastiche. Really, adjusting Tomorrowland to represent a fantastical “future that never was” caused it to be more consistent with what the rest of the park has become.

Secondly, the opening of EPCOT Center in 1982, with its detailed Future World, made Florida’s Tomorrowland kind of redundant. Future World was Tomorrowland on a much grander scale. Perhaps this is best illustrated by Delta Dreamflight, the aviation-themed attraction that made its home in the southeastern sector of Tomorrowland from 1989 to 1996. It followed the same template as several Future World attractions-a ride through the past, present, and future of something accompanied by a soaring 1980s-flavored melody. Dreamflight would have been a good fit in California’s Tomorrowland. But in Florida, located a short monorail trip away from EPCOT Center, it looked like a pared-down Future World attraction. Converting Tomorrowland into something more fantasy-based served to differentiate it from EPCOT.

Still, I believe that the 1994 Flash Gordon overhaul created a problem that didn’t exist before. You see, this was one of the few times where Michael Eisner’s edict that everything had to have some kind of a backstory actually worked. The storytelling details that peppered the land-from the drone of the pre-2010 TTA announcer to the posters advertising the Tomorrowland Towers Hover-Hotel and the Leonard Burnedstar concert-really helped to create a sense that the Tomorrowland you could see was a tiny sliver of a much bigger retro-futuristic metropolis. They also whetted your appetite for some kind of an immersive family attraction that would take you on a tour of the “invisible” Tomorrowland that was implied but not seen. Sadly, no such attraction exists. The result-at least in my experience-is that walking through Tomorrowland creates a kind of indefinable frustration. The storytelling details are telling you that there should be something more there, but none of the land’s attractions adequately scratch the itch that those storytelling details create. It’s a real shame, too, because I really think that the presence of a satisfying family attraction that immersed you in Tomorrowland’s retro-futuristic theme would serve to lessen the antipathy a lot of us feel towards the land as it currently exists.

I certainly don’t have enough of a knowledge base to do any armchair Imagineering, so I don’t have a detailed idea of how such an attraction would work or where it would go. I just know it’s something that I keenly feel the absence of.

We’re not through with Tomorrowland yet. I’ve got a post in the works about the land’s Holy Grail, the Carousel of Progress, and farther into the future you’ll see an article about the history of space rides at Disneyland and Disney World. Thanks for reading!

Somebody Call The Waaambulance!

2011-08-21T18:21:00.001-04:00

The Walt Disney Company has created a monster. I’m sure that’s not what they set out to do. They saw the success the various Comic-Con style conventions were having and decided that all those Disney fans out there would relish the chance to pay admission for the privilege of crowding into a packed convention center to buy overpriced merchandise and have the company’s newest offerings aggressively marketed to them.

However, as is often the case when Disney tries to copy what all the cool kids are doing, they made a critical mistake. One of the main things that makes Comic-Con so popular, besides the Slave Leia cosplayers, is the announcements about various upcoming things. There’s always news about some highly anticipated comics event, genre film, or TV show. People are conditioned to expect Big Announcements at these types of conventions, and therein lies Disney’s problem. You see, the stuff that’s promoted at the annual Comic-Con is generally stuff that will hit the market before the next year’s Con. Studios don’t use Comic-Con to promote projects that are several years from seeing the light of day. That’s exactly what Disney did, though, when they announced the New Fantasyland project for Florida’s Magic Kingdom at the first D23 Expo in 2010. Now we’re conditioned to expect big announcements at every Expo.

So, when the Parks and Resorts presentation at this year’s Expo failed to yield anything new, the online Disney fan community erupted with howls of outrage. The way it sounded, you’d think the Walt Disney Company killed their dog. People I like and respect were comparing the company to an abusive boyfriend, because the plight of abused women is so similar to that of aggrieved Disney parkgoers with a sense of entitlement, isn’t it?

Disney has really painted themselves into a corner with this Expo thing. They’ve pretty much guaranteed that every Parks and Resorts presentation from now until the end of time will have one of the following outcomes:

Disney makes a big announcement, and the fans immediately take to the Internet to complain about its shortcomings.
Disney fails to make a big announcement, and the fans immediately take to the Internet to complain about that.

Let’s get real, guys. Disney is in the middle of three large projects: WDW’s New Fantasyland, California’s DCA overhaul, and Shanghai Disneyland. Neither will be finished anytime soon. If you seriously think that Disney has done you wrong by not announcing another E-Ticket attraction this year, then your car has arrived:

Enjoy the ride.

The Birds Are All Right

2011-08-16T11:32:00.001-04:00

Well, the moment hardcore WEDHeads dreamed of but scarcely believed they’d live to see has actually come. It came yesterday, actually, when the restored Enchanted Tiki Room opened its doors, forever free of the excerable Iago-and-Zazu overlay that had been inflicted upon it during the Dark Ages of the late 1990s. Before the Internet, those of us who are unable to drop everything and scurry down to Disney World whenever we feel like it would’ve had to rely on secondhand accounts or even worse, Disney marketing-babble, to tell us what the show was like. That being said, thank the Tiki Gods for technology!

Obviously, watching a video is no substitute for experiencing the show in person, but here are my preliminary thoughts:

Imagineering did a good job on this. I admit to being a tad disappointed to lose the “Let’s All Sing Like The Birdies Sing” sing-along, but I think it was a wise omission. Florida, after all, has a greater percentage of first-time visitors than California does, and the sing-along is more geared to repeat customers. I don’t much mind the loss of the Enchanted Fountain, either. The show moves along just fine without it.

Back in January, after the sheer awfulness of the Under New Management Show caused it to spontaneously combust, I was eager for a return of the original show. Still, I wondered if audiences would just get bored and walk out in the middle, the way they were doing in the ‘90s shortly before Iago and Zazu took over. Only time will answer that question, but it looks like the Imagineers have done a great job editing the show down in such a way that maintains its essence without dragging on in a way that would grate on modern attention spans. The average visitor who doesn’t have the original show audio on their iPod won’t even be able to tell where the cuts where made.

I don’t know when I’ll be back in the Magic Kingdom again, but whenever I return, it’ll be nice to know that, instead of scowling at the Under New Management sign as I pass the Sunshine Pavilion, I’ll be able to go inside and enjoy a charming show with no obnoxious interruptions. And since my wife never got to see the original show, it’ll be nice to be able to share this reborn classic with her.

Thanks so much for reading. I’ll be back next week with another post about Tomorrowland.

Tomorrowland: Nostalgia vs. Reality

2011-08-05T16:47:00.001-04:00

On my last few trips to Florida’s Magic Kingdom, I’ve often found myself longing for the pure, unspoiled pre-Flash Gordon Tomorrowland of my childhood:

The funny thing is, the last time I was there I didn’t feel that way at all.

It was 1992. I was 14 years old, and my family was on a day trip to the Magic Kingdom. Even though park maintenance had not yet begun to slip the way it would later in the decade, Tomorrowland felt like an abandoned corner of the park that the Imagineers had forgotten about. More than anything else, it reminded me of Marineland.

Marineland was Florida’s first theme park, a kind of proto-Sea World. Located just south of St. Augustine on A1A, it opened in 1938 and remained popular with tourists well into the 1970s. I made frequent visits on school field trips and family outings during the ‘80s, but by then Marineland had entered into a sustained period of decline thanks to the opening of Sea World. I didn’t notice it when I was in elementary school, but the last trip we made to Marineland was in 1990, and by then even my dense twelve-year-old self could tell that the park had seen better days. Marineland in 1990 was quaint, creaky, and obviously old. Just like Tomorrowland in 1992.

Unfair, you say? Let’s take a look at Tomorrowland’s 1992 attraction lineup. Guests entering the land from the hub were greeted by two attractions that anchored Anaheim’s Tomorrowland when it opened in 1955: Mission To Mars (which was really just Flight To The Moon with a different film) and a CircleVision theater. Pushing farther into the land you had Delta Dreamflight (or as I like to call it, The Wonderful World Of Plywood Cutouts) a low-budget attraction that even hardcore WEDHeads admit was not one of Imagineering’s finer efforts. The final scene of the Carousel of Progress was showing audiences of the 1990s what people in the late 1970s imagined life would be like in the late 1980s, and the Grand Prix Raceway was another Disneyland original that was no more futuristic in 1992 than it is today. Compared to EPCOT Center’s sleek, modern Future World, Tomorrowland looked about as pathetic as Marineland did when compared to Orlando’s sleek, modern Sea World.

It’s tempting to look at today’s Tomorrowland with its visual clutter and its crass Licensed Character-infused attractions and think that everything would be perfect if we woke up one morning to find it magically restored to its pre-1994 iteration. That might satisfy a tiny minority of the Disney fan community, but it wouldn’t play well with the general public, that’s for sure. And if we take an objective view, I think even hardcore WEDHeads like me would admit that the old Tomorrowland is best left in the past.

The End of the Space Shuttle

2011-07-21T16:09:00.001-04:00

At 5:57 AM Eastern this morning, about thirty-three minutes before my alarm clock went off, the Space Shuttle Atlantis landed in Florida, officially ending the Shuttle program. This milestone ends an era that began with a prototype named Enterprise and a photo-op by the original cast of Star Trek, dressed like they were on their way to meet John Travolta at a disco:

^{Pictured: Gene Roddenberry and the original cast of Star Trek, minus William Shatner, who must have been off filming Kingdom of the Spiders or something}

More than anything, that picture really underscores how old the Space Shuttle is. If you owned a car that old, you’d be able to register it as an antique. And yet, in the early 80s we thought the Shuttle would be around forever.

So, while the end of the Shuttle program means different things to different people, to me it means that at least one piece of this scene from Horizons is now technically impossible:

And to be honest, that makes me kind of sad.

When You Wish Upon A Spreadsheet

2011-07-10T21:50:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, Disney announced that an executive named Al Weiss would be retiring. The Disney fan community, believing him to be responsible for every bad thing that has happened since Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, reacted like this:

The good feelings lasted until it was revealed that much-reviled Walt Disney World president Meg Crofton would be promoted to oversee theme park operations in the USA and France, at which point the online Disney fan community did this:

I want to stress that, unlike many of the folks who follow the Disney company more closely than I do and are plugged into various sources of inside information, I don’t really know a whole lot about these people. Some folks more knowledgeable than myself seemed to think that Crofton’s promotion was the worst thing to happen since Michael Bay decided to go into the movie business. Others insisted that any bad decisions that seemed to have been made by Crofton in the past were not actually her fault, but the fault of the old executive structure that existed before Al Weiss’s departure. I had no way of knowing which opinion was closer to the truth, so I resolved to wait and see what happened.

Then we got the news that Monorail service will be discontinued during evening Extra Magic Hours. Permanently. The Disney fan community, myself included, reacted in a measured and logical manner:

Okay, that’s not entirely true. Many folks on the WDWMagic forums were falling all over themselves to justify this, to the point that I began to wonder if they were either

On Meg Crofton’s payroll, or
Had family members being held hostage by Ms. Crofton, and going on the Internet to justify this horrible decision was one of the conditions for their release.

Or maybe they’re just idiots. I really don’t know. What I do know is that this is the first time I can remember Disney actually targeting their highest-paying customers with such an openly hostile policy. Consider: if you can only afford to stay at an All-Star resort, this really doesn’t affect you at all. When it’s time for you to go back to your room at 2 a.m. after Extra Magic Hours at the Magic Kingdom you’ll just get on a bus, the same as you would any other time. But what if you’ve plunked down the cash for a Club-level room at the Contemporary with a Magic Kingdom view? (which could run as high as $885 during the peak season) For $885 a night, how will Disney be returning you to your resort? Let me show you:

^{Image borrowed from YourFirstVisit.net}

That’s right. You get to walk. In the dark. Along a route that requires you to cross a four-lane road. Yes, I know there are street lights, but that’s not exactly the point. There’s an implicit understanding we all have with the companies with whom we do business: the more money we give them, the more they will pretend to care about us. This means different things at different companies. Paying first-class money to an airline, for example, will just get you a seat designed for a human being (as opposed to the seats in Coach class, which are designed for smaller life-forms such as gerbils) But paying first-class money at Disney, a company that allegedly prides itself on stellar customer service, should get you an amazing experience. Instead, you get to walk back to your resort, or wait for a small, slow-moving boat if you’re staying at the Polynesian or Grand Floridian.

Now, there’s been an allegation that, far from being an exercise in cynical corporate cost-cutting, this move was actually demanded by Transportation employees who felt that the monorails needed more maintenance downtime. I’m no expert in park operations, but I do know that there are eleven monorails, and that the maintenance garage located east of the Magic Kingdom doesn’t have room to service all of them simultaneously. During evening Extra Magic Hours at EPCOT and the Magic Kingdom, I can’t imagine that there are more than three trains on the line. Therefore, I can’t imagine how running two or three trains during the three nights a week that either the Magic Kingdom or EPCOT have Extra Magic Hours would make things difficult from a maintenance perspective. Maybe I’m wrong. If you know more about this than I do, please feel free to correct me in the comments.

I believe that there’s an even more insidious purpose to this new policy than just cutting Monorail-related costs, however. Management might be trying to sabotage evening Extra Magic Hour attendance to provide a pretext for discontinuing them altogether. They’ve done this kind of thing before, most notably in the mid-1990s when they restructured Journey Into Imagination’s queue to steer people toward Honey, I Shrunk The Audience, thus creating an artificial drop in attendance for the ride-through attraction and providing a pretext for its eventual Eric Idle-themed ruination. I have no inside information, but my Spidey-sense tells me that’s what’s going on here.

To be fair, Disney parks management has made some good decisions lately. For example, nixing the Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty meet-and-greet that was planned for the Fantasyland expansion and putting the more expensive Seven Dwarves Mine Train coaster there instead. However, this latest fiasco serves to remind us that, for all its bleating about magic and dreams and wishing on stars, the executives at the Walt Disney Company are no different than the executives at any other mega-corporation. Like it or not, success is measured by numbers on a spreadsheet.

And, like the Accounting Fairy said in the movie Reverse Pinocchio, where a real boy grows up to become a wooden puppet, “When you wish upon a spreadsheet, a few angry customers are no big deal.”

Saddle Up For The Soarin’ Stampede!

2011-06-22T15:09:00.000-04:00

I’ve mentioned this before, but I really admire the people on the Walt Disney World Mom’s Panel. No doubt you do, too, if you’ve ever spent some time reading the questions they’re asked. But maybe you’ve wondered, what if those questions were answered by someone without superhuman reserves of cheerfulness and patience? Someone less like Mr. Rogers and more like Dr. House? What if they were answered . . . by a WEDHead?

Well, wonder no longer! Here are the latest batch of real-ish questions and answers from the WEDHead’s Panel!

Q: How much does it cost to swim with the sharks at The Seas With Nemo? –C. Snozzwanger, Boise, ID

A: Trust me, swimming in the shark tank costs more than you can afford. But if you walk up to me and call Spaceship Earth a "giant golf ball", I'll throw you in there for free!

Q: I did the Leave A Legacy Program back in 2000. Is there any way to view my picture online without visiting the park? –L. Hornswoggler, Baltimore, MD

A: If I understand your question correctly, you're asking if there's any way to view a low-quality black-and-white picture of yourself on the Internet. And the answer is no. You have to go to Epcot and purchase a full-price admission for everyone in your party. It costs an extra $100 to look at your Leave A Legacy tile, but if you can find me I’ll let you see it for only $75.

Q: Is it possible to see Illuminations from the Garden Grill Restaurant? –P. Whangdoodle, Ames, IA

A: Sure! All you need is a very long telescope and a drill to bore a hole in the wall of the Land pavilion. You'll get a great view of Illuminations before you're apprehended by Security!

Q: My family has an 8:30 breakfast reservation at the Crystal Palace, but the Magic Kingdom doesn't open until 9:00. How will we be able to get in? V. Knid, Jacksonville, FL

A: Your best bet is to camp out on Tom Sawyer Island the night before, then swim to shore in the morning and walk to the Crystal Palace. With any luck, only a few of you will drown or be eaten by alligators.

Q: I'm excited about seeing Captain EO! What's the best place in the theater to sit? -J. Nelson, Kansas City, MO

A: Front row, next to Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot.

Q: In your opinion, what is the most popular thing at Epcot? -V. Salt, Hahira, GA

A: Without a doubt it's the Soarin' Stampede. What's the Soarin Stampede? I'm glad you asked! The Soarin' Stampede is the mad rush to The Land pavilion that occurs right after rope drop. Actions that would be considered extremely rude at best or felony assault at worst are perfectly acceptable during the Soarin' Stampede! Trample the elderly! Trip children! Anything goes in the race for a Soarin' FastPass! Soarin' Fastpasses are worth more than gold and have the power to raise the dead! I mean, why else would people make such idiots of themselves just to get hold of a slip of cardboard that grants them the right to wait in a forty-five minute line five hours from now, when they could just hop in the Standby line right away and wait for only fifteen minutes?

Q: Umm, were you being sarcastic just now?

A: I honestly don't know.

Well, that’s all for today’s WEDHead’s Panel! Tune in next time when the WEDHead’s Panel will answer such well-formulated questions as “Are Mickey in the epcot ball?”

Rebooting Superman

2011-06-14T17:24:00.001-04:00

As long as I can remember, my three favorite things have always been (in no particular order) Star Trek, Disney World, and Superman. This blog is mainly about Disney World, and I’ve written about Star Trek from time to time, but this is the first time I’ve been compelled to write about Superman. The reason, as you might have guessed, is the recently-announced Giant Reboot Of The Whole DC Comics Universe.

There’s a lot we don’t know at this point, but it seems that Superman will get the most drastic changes, with a new origin and even a new costume:

^{Okay, why does he need a belt if he no longer has the red undershorts?}

So what’s the reason for all this? After all, this will be the third new origin Superman has been given since 2003. Well, since the reboot is being coupled with a new digital distribution scheme it’s obvious that DC is trying to create a jumping-on point for new readers. Unfortunately, there may be an even more nefarious reason for the big changes coming to Superman: lawyers.

You see, a court has ruled that the rights to the Superman’s first appearance in 1938’s Action Comics #1 should revert to the family of co-creator Jerry Siegel. I’m no expert in coypright law, but based on what I’ve read elsewhere this means that the Siegels now own all the elements of the Superman mythos that appeared in that seminal issue. This would include his classic costume, his Kryptonian orgin, his power of invulnerability, and Clark Kent’s job as a newspaper reporter with a gruff editor and a co-worker named Lois. The theory in most Superman fan circles is that this new version of Superman has been designed to excise those things. This amounts to having lawyers make creative decisions, and that’s a very bad thing.

There are already Superman-like characters that are designed to be similar to him, yet different enough to avoid claims of copyright infringement. It doesn’t matter if DC still has the right to publish comics about a character named Superman who wears the S-shield on his chest, if he’s missing half of the Superman mythos then he might as well be Mr. Majestic, Samaritan, Supreme, or any of the other knock-off characters we’ve seen over the years.

The worst-case scenario here is that Warner Brothers (DC’s parent company) and the Siegels will be unable to come to terms, and that both parties will market their own versions of Superman using the pieces of the character that they each own. This would obviously be a disaster. Hopefully, both sides realize this and reach some kind of a settlement.

The only reason I have for optimism here is that Grant Morrison, author of All-Star Superman, the most perfect Superman story ever, is involved with the reboot and will be writing Action Comics. My hope is that the “new” Superman will end up a lot like the proposed Superman 2000 revamp that Morrison, Mark Waid, and Mark Millar proposed back in the late ‘90s.

Still, if Warner Brothers and the Siegel family can’t come to some kind of an agreement over the copyright issue, then not even Grant Morrison will be able to save Superman. And that would be a shame.

Consolidating Innoventions

2011-06-12T15:51:00.001-04:00

When it first moved into the space formerly occupied by CommuniCore, EPCOT’s Innoventions was touted as a high-tech playground of the future, a sort of permanent consumer electronics show. Just check out this commercial from its early days (I apologize for the poor video quality)

Today, of course, the high-tech experiences at Innoventions once offered have been replaced by the Wall O’ Video Game Consoles You Can Get At Wal-Mart.

^{It’s like the run-down arcade at your local movie theater, but with older games}

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. Sum of All Thrills is pretty cool. But outside of that Raytheon-sponsored exhibit, Innoventions looks pretty bare these days. The last few times I’ve been to EPCOT, you know what I’ve noticed about Innoventions? Nothing. Large expanses of it, in fact. And that’s the real problem with the place. Disney just can’t seem to secure enough corporate sponsors to fill all the exhibition space, leading to large tracts of vacant real estate. Last week, WDWMagic reported that the House of Innoventions is returning, and it will occupy the now-empty space across from the Waste Management exhibit (also known as the “what the heck is a big green garbage truck doing in Future World?” exhibit). However, the Waste Management exhibit is going away, so really we’re just trading one piece of empty space for another.

So I have an idea. Since Disney is never going to get corporate sponsors for every piece of Innoventions exhibition space, why not consolidate all the exhibits into just one side of the pavilion, say Innoventions East? Innoventions West could be converted into an A or B ticket attraction like a scaled-down version of Adventures in Inner Space or a Horizons simulator, something inexpensive but true to the spirit of EPCOT. That way, Innoventions could be the busy, bustling place it was supposed to be, and we’d get a little piece of that EPCOT Center magic back.

I doubt this will ever actually happen, but it should.

futureprobe reviews The Epcot Explorer’s Encyclopedia

2011-05-23T11:19:00.001-04:00

If you follow R.A. Pedersen on Twitter (his handle is @EPCOTNRG) it will not be very long before you learn that he has a book out, and is very eager to distribute it as widely as possible. “Hey @TheBible,” he’ll tweet. “How about adding a 67th book to the canon?” Or if someone complains about high gas prices, he’ll suggest “Why not just walk to work and use your gas money to buy multiple copies of my book?” Of course, if you had worked as hard on The Epcot Explorer’s Encyclopedia as R.A. Pedersen appears to have done, you would promote it at every opportunity, too.

The book is packed with information. It’s 262 pages long, and there are no illustrations. Probably this is for legal reasons, but it means the book is absolutely devoid of padding. The history of every current and former EPCOT pavilion is delved into. The Epcot Explorer’s Encyclopedia isn’t a modern version of the old Richard Beard EPCOT Center book; that volume was really a piece of promotional literature. More than anything, it’s like a written version of Martin Smith’s Ultimate Tribute videos, and that’s a good thing. As much as I love Martin’s videos, I don’t always have an hour to sit down and watch one, but I can spend maybe fifteen minutes reading this book and get a lot of the same information.

The intended audience of The Epcot Explorer’s Encyclopedia is the Disney geek community. I don’t believe the author has ever come out and stated that, but it’s the most logical conclusion. After all, the book isn’t designed to help you plan a trip, and the casual reader will probably be turned off by the lack of pictures. Again, I understand why there aren’t pictures-many of them would have had to come from official Disney sources, and with that would come all the complexities of copyright law, but some pictures would have helped to illustrate those pieces of old attractions like Horizons, World of Motion, and Journey Into Imagination, that we WEDHeads remember clearly but the general public does not. Really, it highlights the fact that Disney would never lend their official support to book like this, which is a shame. The Epcot Explorer’s Encyclopedia doesn’t dwell on the negative aspects of the park’s history, but it doesn’t go the Disney corporate route and pretend they don’t exist, either.

If I have one criticism of this book, it’s that the editing and proofreading was done by the author himself, and therefore some spelling and grammatical errors were missed. I know how difficult it can be to proofread your own work; I once wrote a rather lengthy story for one of the Star Trek fanzines published by Orion Press, and the editor, Randy Landers, was able to point out errors I hadn’t noticed during my proofreading. I was enormously grateful for his assistance. It’s my hope that, if the author of The Epcot Explorer’s Encyclopedia produces future editions of the book, he’ll avail himself of a second set of eyes to look over the manuscript.

In conclusion, if you’re at all interested in EPCOT, I definitely recommend this book! Commander Willard Decker bought the book, and he ascended to a higher plane of existence after merging with a self-aware space probe!

Klingon Commander Kruge failed to buy the book, and he was kicked off a cliff by William Shatner!

Information on the various ways to purchase The EPCOT Explorer’s Encyclopedia can be found here: http://www.epcyclopedia.com/buy-the-book/

What’s Next?

2011-05-17T17:35:00.001-04:00

The various fan communities on the Internet are ravenous beasts. We have an insatiable hunger for as much information as possible on the subjects of our geekish devotion. If a movie about our favorite superhero is greenlit, we want to know which actors will be cast and who the villain will be and what the costume will look like and what the story will be, and we want this information RIGHT NOW. And as soon as that stuff starts to leak out and our curiosity is satisfied, we start wondering about the sequel.

The Disney fan community is no different. For weeks, even months, we speculated about the rumors that Disney would announce a Fantasyland expansion project at Walt Disney World. And even though the project is now under way and won’t be totally complete until sometime around 2014, it’s old news to us. We know what’s going on behind those construction walls. What we want to know is: what’s next? What’s the next big project? The beast digested all the Fantasyland stuff long ago, and while the news about Star Tours and the Tiki Room were nice snacks, there’s not a lot of mystery there. The beast is hungry, and it wants to know where the next meal is coming from.

But is that really fair? In the old pre-Internet days, we wouldn’t have even known about most of these projects unless our local newspaper happened to carry a story about them. More likely, we’d hear about it from a friend, or find out because we happened to visit the parks while construction was going on. We were curious, sure, but the curiosity didn’t consume us. Why the change? Some say it’s because the Internet has turned us into impossible-to-please information junkies, desperate for our next fix. Others seem to feel that, because Disney has stumbled so badly with attractions like Stitch’s Great Escape and Chester and Hester’s Dino-Rama, we can’t feel comfortable sitting back and trusting them to do a good job. We have to scrutinize each scrap of leaked information and pounce on anything we don’t like in the hopes that our outcries will be heard back at Disney corporate headquarters, or at the very least we’ll know ahead of time that a new attraction is going to be bad and steel ourselves for the disappointment.

Don’t get me wrong. There are things I’m desperate for Disney to do: restore the Imagination pavilion, do something with the vacant Wonders of Life, and replace Stitch’s Great Escape with something that’s actually good. But right now, they’re in the process of expanding Fantasyland into an area that’s been vacant since 20,000 Leagues shut down. In the process, we’re increasing Fantasyland’s attraction count by one, and the long-rumored Seven Dwarves Mine Train is finally going to be built.

So, even though we’re all eager for fresh scraps of Disney World news, why not sit back and enjoy contemplating the biggest expansion to the Magic Kingdom since the Tomorrowland expansion of 1975? For a little while, at least? Would it be so bad if the beast went on a little diet?

Another New Look-And More To Come

2011-05-13T22:03:00.001-04:00

Welcome to yet another visual overhaul here at futureprobe! Much like some of my online friends who love EPCOT Center even though they're too young to have experienced its 1980s heyday, I've always had a fondness for the old "analog" vision of the future that was epitomized by shows like the original Star Trek, movies like 2001, and of course Disneyland's grand "re-imagined" Tomorrowland that opened in 1967.

That Tomorrowland was home to one of the most imaginative dark rides ever: Adventures In Inner-Space. It was a trippy, wholly unique experience that might not wow modern audiences, but still left an impression on those who saw it. And just like the people today who wish they'd gotten the chance to ride Horizons, I often wish I'd have been there to take a ride through the Mighty Microscope:

It's not just my fondness for old-school Tomorrowland that prompted the new TWA Moonliner-inspired look, though. This is the first step of an exciting new project I've recently become part of, a project that will bring futureprobe into a new medium.

I hope you'll stick around.

EPCOT: Whither The Marketing?

2011-05-03T17:24:00.001-04:00

If you were alive in the 1980s and early 1990s, you knew that EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World was a big deal. You knew this because Disney marketed the heck out of the place. Not only were entire television commercials devoted to it . . .

. . . but Spaceship Earth was featured prominently in the intro to the weekly Disney Sunday Movie, even more prominently than Cinderella Castle:

A person back then could be forgiven for thinking that Spaceship Earth, not Cinderella Castle, was Disney World’s signature icon. Today, things are very different. Take a look at a couple of Disney Parks commercials from the last five years:

Judging from commercials like these, you’d think that the Magic Kingdom is the only thing at Florida’s Disney World. Now, I understand that the Magic Kingdom is the most quintessentially “Disney” park on the Florida property. But EPCOT is the most unique theme park on the planet. Universal has Studios parks in Florida and California. Busch Gardens has animals and roller coasters. But only Disney World has an EPCOT. Where else can you ride through the history of civilization, see giant Animatronic dinosaurs, visit a Mexican pyramid, and take a Viking boat ride all at the same park?

Disney has a stated desire to appeal to a broader demographic than just little girls and their parents. That’s why they cancelled the princess-themed meet-and-greets in the new Fantasyland in favor of a Seven Dwarves coaster. In EPCOT, they’ve got a whole park with that kind of broad appeal. Why not advertise it? Why not remind people that it’s there?

EPCOT is a big gun in Disney’s arsenal. It’s time they remembered to use it.

Disney Synergy: The Secret Origin

2011-04-13T22:25:00.001-04:00

Most people who follow the Walt Disney Company will point to 1984 as the year when the company began to change from what it always had been-a uniquely creative company that had its troubles (example: most of the Disney films of the 1970s) but was still ambitious enough to build something like EPCOT Center-into what it is today. Under Eisner’s tenure, the story goes, Disney morphed into a soulless multimedia conglomerate that thought nothing of slacking off on park maintenance or churning out terrible direct-to-DVD sequels of classics like Cinderella and Bambi just to make a few bucks.

The truth, though, is that the roots of Disney’s transformation into a company that’s not all that different from Pepsi or General Electric go back much further than 1984. Actually, they go all the way back to 1966. True, that’s the year of Walt Disney’s untimely death, but it’s also the year that Paramount Pictures was acquired by the industrial conglomerate Gulf and Western. The next year, 1967, Gulf and Western also acquired Lucille Ball’s tiny Desilu Studios, home of productions like Mission: Impossible and the original Star Trek. Gulf and Western’s executives paid little heed to the idea that show business was a unique thing. They believed you could run a studio like, say, a refrigerator company.

In the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, former Desilu and Paramount executive Herb Solow referred to the new executive thinking that Gulf and Western brought to Paramount as “an ideological disease called MBA.” When he showed a buzzword-laden memo from their new bosses to Star Trek Co-Producer Bob Justman, Justman replied in disbelief “We don’t manufacture widgets here. Don’t they know this is show business?” Later, in a meeting with a committee of these new executives, one of them declared his confidence that his previous stint as Director of Advertising for the American Safety Razor Company taught him all he needed to know about television production. Earlier, Gulf and Western chairman Charles Bludhorn had visited the Star Trek set and was unable to understand why a director would need to shoot more than one take of a scene. “It’s just not cost-effective. I want it to stop.” He decreed.

It was this very same Gulf and Western-run Paramount Pictures, thoroughly infected with the “disease called MBA”, that made one Michael Eisner President and CEO of their movie studio in 1976. Eisner was not the originator of the philosophy that said a company that makes movies and theme parks can and should be run like a company that makes refrigerators or breakfast cereal. He was a product of that philosophy, and that system.

By 1984, although Disney was still run by the people who had been closely associated with Walt, it was in trouble. If Disney had not embarked on the path that led to its mushrooming into a multimedia behemoth, it likely would have been absorbed by a corporate conglomerate, much like Desilu Studios in 1967. When you think about it, it’s kind of impressive that the company’s old guard was able to stave off the MBA disease long enough to build EPCOT Center.

So complain all you want about Eisner’s legacy or Bob Iger’s stewardship of the company. But know that things could have been much, much worse.

A Panel For the Rest of Us

2011-03-22T21:31:00.001-04:00

In an effort to reach out and “connect” to all the Disney World neophytes who visit the parks, Disney has this thing called a “Mom’s Panel”. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Basically, it’s a place on the official Walt Disney World website where people who are unfamiliar with the parks can get answers and trip-planning advice from non-threatening Mom’s panelists. Not all of the panelists are women (some are men who have been biologically altered to bear children) but they’re there to give commonsense advice from the perspective of a parent with kids, as opposed to a professional travel agent. So, not only can they answer travel agent-y questions about resorts and ticket prices, but they can also tell you what to do if your three-year-old ralphs all over Mickey. (Note: that joke about the male panelists being biologically altered to bear children was not true. As far as I know.) It’s pretty obvious by their advertising that Disney markets their parks mainly to families with preteen children. The Mom’s Panel is a natural part of that, and I want to emphasize that all of the Mom’s Panelists are fantastic people who are great at what they do. Especially ones like Zanna who link to this blog.

Anyway, I got to thinking about the Mom’s Panel recently because Disney had some kind of social media event for them last week. My Twitter timeline was full of #DisneySMMoms hashtags accompanied by tweets about what a great time the tweeter was having at World Showcase or Adventureland or some other Disney World location that was much more fun than my cubicle at work. Naturally, this made me a little jealous. It also reminded me of an idea I’d had for a sort of Mom’s Panel alternative.

While the relentlessly sunny demeanor of the Mom’s Panel fits well with Disney’s company image, the fact is that the Internet is largely populated, nay, infested with people who have strong opinions and an ironic sense of humor. You know, people like me. Shouldn’t we have our own panel? I’m thinking of a sort of Disney Geek’s panel. Only we’d call it the WEDHead’s Panel because it sounds cooler. How would the WEDHead’s Panel differ from the Mom’s Panel? Let’s take a look: (NOTE: The Mom’s Panel answers given here are simulated, and should not be mistaken for the real thing)

Question: What’s the best time to visit Epcot?

Mom’s Panel Answer: There’s always something to do at Epcot! In the spring, you can enjoy the Flower & Garden Festival. And don’t forget to come back for the Food & Wine Festival in the fall!

WEDHead’s Panel Answer: 1989. Next question.

Here’s another example:

Question: My six-year-old daughter loves the fairies and I know she’ll want to drag me along to meet them. The thing is, I’m a 40-year-old man. I love my little girl very much, but the thought of standing in line to meet Tinkerbell just makes me feel foolish. Do you have any advice?

Mom’s Panel Answer: The magic of Walt Disney World makes everyone into a kid again! Don’t feel foolish about meeting Tinkerbell with your daughter; rest assured there will be lots of other dads in line with their daughters, too. And don’t be afraid to play along with the characters! It’s lots of fun and it’ll give your daughter a memory she’ll cherish forever!

WEDHead’s Panel Answer: I know where you’re coming from, dude. I mean, what’s a grown man going to talk to Tinkerbell about, the pitiful state of the New York Knicks defense? But look at it this way: Tinkerbell and her friends are attractive women in short skirts who are required to pretend to be nice to you. As long as you’ve got your daughter in tow, you can go see them and your wife will be totally okay with it. Just don’t do anything creepy and you’ll be fine.

And one more:

Question: My three-year-old tends to throw up when he gets nervous. What if he vomits on Mickey during a meet-and-greet?

Mom’s Panel Answer: I really hope this doesn’t happen to you and your child, but if it does, don’t sweat it! Disney’s Character Attendants are well-prepared for these little accidents.

WEDHead’s Panel Answer: Start loudly insisting to anyone within earshot that this is not, in fact, your child. Then run away.

After witnessing these examples, how can you doubt the usefulness of a WEDHead’s Panel? Still, I know what a lot of you are thinking: “This WEDHead’s Panel of yours is just a scheme to get Disney to let you into their parks for free just for being sarcastic on the Internet.” And you would be correct. But aren’t I also opening Disney’s eyes to a new market? I mean, we opinionated and sarcastic Internet denizens may not always say what people want to hear. But we’re a sizable market segment that, if catered to properly, will pay top dollar for pretty much any fool thing you can think of.

And isn’t that what Disney really wants?

Horizons, Simulated

2011-02-17T17:00:00.001-05:00

First of all, I want to thank all 44 people who voted on the poll concerning the blog’s recent visual overhaul. Three-quarters of you liked the new look, so it will stay. If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve things, please fire away in the comments. Now, on to today’s topic:

The future is never what we imagine. Sometime in the mid-80s, my parents bought my sister and I a set of educational National Geographic books. One of them, entitled Science-It’s Changing Your World, contained this picture of a kid playing a futuristic videogame:

I have absolutely no idea how this game was supposed to have worked (I think it involved lasers) or why the kid was wearing a motorcycle helmet, but it looked so futuristic, like TRON! I was sure that, by the time I was in high school, I would be able to go down to the local arcade and play the Laser Pod Game for myself.

By the time high school rolled around in the early-90s, I had forgotten all about the Laser Pod. Instead, I was anticipating the newest Big Thing That Was Just Around The Corner: virtual reality! As crazy as it sounds, we spent most of the ‘90s believing that the future of video games looked like this:

Which is why I wasn’t one bit upset when I learned that EPCOT Center’s CommuniCore was being replaced by something called Innoventions. In the beginning, Innoventions was advertised as the place you could test drive all the new technologies that were about to revolutionize our lives, including virtual reality. Because I was young and stupid, I assumed that this was EPCOT’s way of taking the first step into the New Millennium. I imagined that, on future EPCOT visits, I’d spend some time playing with the virtual reality in Innoventions, then head out to ride updated, plussed versions of Horizons, Journey Into Imagination, and World of Motion.

And just like we arrived in the 1990s without Laser Pods at our local arcades, the Innoventions of 2011 is significantly less exciting than we imagined it would be. Excepting the Sum of All Thrills exhibit, it seems more geared to showcasing stuff we already have in our living rooms.

^{Case in point}

Also, the place seems largely empty. Imagine how Future World would look if every sponsor-less pavilion got bulldozed. Clearly, Innoventions needs some fun, permanent exhibits that aren’t dependent on corporate sponsorships. For example, a Horizons simulator.

This is not a farfetched idea. The guys behind WEDCon are already building one that could easily fit into one of the larger plots of empty exhibition space. And Chris Wallace, the guy behind the Horizons Resurrected project, is in the midst of creating a virtual reality version of everyone’s favorite lost EPCOT pavilion that could be utilized in a much smaller space, like where the Wall O’ Playstations currently resides. It would be Disney’s favorite type of attraction: a relatively inexpensive, permanent exhibit that, aside from regular maintenance, never needs any costly upgrades. (Okay, that’s not completely true. Disney’s favorite “attractions” are actually revenue generators like gift shops and character Meet-and-Greets)

Over the past year or so, little things have been happening at the park that delight EPCOT Center fans. Universe of Energy was returned to its old exterior color scheme, the painted monoliths on Spaceship Earth’s legs were removed, the Fountain of Nations got that cool new railing, and the whirlygigs are disappearing from Innoventions plaza. Clearly, someone with decision-making authority at the company has at least a passing affection for old-school EPCOT. So why not a Horizons simulator, or maybe a 21st century refresh of old CommuniCore exhibits like Energy Exchange? Not only would it make people happy, but it could fuel an expansion of the extremely popular line of retro EPCOT merchandise.

So come on, Disney. You know this needs to happen. In fact, I am willing to throw a little something in. Remember how I once promised to publicly embarrass myself before the whole Internet if the Imagination pavilion ever gets a worthy overhaul? That promise still stands, but now I’m going to add to it: if a worthy Imagination overhaul happens OR if Innoventions gets a Horizons simulator, I will celebrate like a crazed chipmunk, and said reaction will be posted on YouTube for all the Internet to see. So come on, Team Disney Orlando. Do the right thing. Make me embarrass myself on the Internet.

Sinkholes and Showtunes

2011-02-03T16:46:00.001-05:00

When EPCOT Center opened in 1982 it was, to put it mildly, kind of a big deal. Disney excels at making even regular occurrences look like big events (the opening of the Magic Kingdom every morning, for example) and for EPCOT they pulled out all the stops. There was a huge publicity campaign, including a grand-opening TV special hosted by Danny Kaye. Take a look:

Whoever uploaded this video obviously can’t spell “century”

These days the idea of using a showtune to announce the 21st century’s early arrival seems a mite cheesy. However, this was a time when shows like The Love Boat, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Joanie Loves Chachi sat near the top of the Nielsen ratings. It’s safe to say we were on an all-cheese diet.

However, I find this little musical number interesting primarily for the revisionist history it presents. It’s a clean, very Disney-esque narrative: Walt Disney had a dream called EPCOT, and in 1982 it came true. The truth, of course, is that the EPCOT project went through numerous iterations. Michael Crawford at Progress City USA wrote an excellent couple of articles about the many forms that EPCOT took after Walt Disney’s death in 1966 (check them out here and here). The publicity campaign that surrounded EPCOT Center glossed over all that, though, and pretended that the park that opened in 1982 was exactly the thing that Walt had dreamed up back in 1966. No mention was made of the original plan to build a futuristic city on the EPCOT Center site. Almost thirty years later, I assumed that was still the company line.

Interestingly, though, it appears that Walt’s EPCOT city has found its way back into Disney’s official company history. When I took the Undiscovered Future World tour the guide actually mentioned the EPCOT City, but said that it was scrapped because the land was too swampy to support the complex. That’s not entirely true, of course. It was actually Walt’s death that sealed the fate of his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. However, construction in central Florida has unique challenges. When I lived in Lake City, a shopping center that was less than twenty years old had to be abandoned and demolished because a sinkhole opened up next to it. Sinkholes have swallowed up houses. And plans for the Venetian/Mediterranean Resort, which would have occupied a site between the Transportation and Ticket Center and the Contemporary, had to be scrapped after the land proved to be too swampy to support the structure. So, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the construction of the EPCOT city might have been complicated by sinkholes and swampy conditions. It’s nice to see Disney admitting that their founder’s vision of EPCOT differed from the park that was finally built.

Maybe in another thirty years they’ll acknowledge the real reason why.

What’s In a Name? (or Acronym)

2011-02-02T16:53:00.001-05:00

Recently, I got into a little bit of a Twitter argument (or Twargument) with someone over the “correct” capitalization of the word/acronym EPCOT. Now, I am not the kind of person who enjoys arguing on the Internet. I’m not one of those people on message boards who’s always single-mindedly ranting about things he doesn’t like and attacking people who disagree with him. So, this post is not an attempt to get the last word in a conversation. It’s simply an attempt to explain why I do something (in this case, spell EPCOT in all capitals rather than use the Disney Parks-approved “Epcot” spelling) without being bound by Twitter’s 140-character limit.

There are two ways to look at the EPCOT-vs.-Epcot “issue”. You could point out that the real EPCOT-Walt’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, was never built and that the name of the theme park located at Walt Disney World in Florida has been named “Epcot” by the Walt Disney Corporation which owns and operates it. And you would be correct.

I take a different view. Although Walt’s grand futuristic city was never built, EPCOT Center was founded upon the ideals it embodied. Only a small number of people would actually have lived in Walt’s EPCOT; most people would have experienced it as tourists. Concerning his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, Walt Disney said “I believe we can build a community that more people will talk about and come to look at than any other area in the world.” Why did Walt think the general public would want to visit EPCOT in large numbers? To ride rollercoasters, perhaps? To meet Mickey Mouse? Of course not, that’s what the Magic Kingdom was for. People were supposed to visit EPCOT to be amazed, to be inspired, to go home feeling energized about the possibilities of the real world.

EPCOT Center was not the community Walt envisioned, but it was built with the same purpose: to inspire, educate, and amaze. I believe those things are important. The Disney executives of the mid-1990s disagreed. Lowercase Epcot, to me, represents all the worst aspects of the lowest-common-denominator approach to the park that almost ruined it in the mid-90s to early 2000s. And I refuse to surrender to that.

So I’ll continue to refer to my favorite theme park as EPCOT. Because “Epcot” is a meaningless nonsense word, but EPCOT is the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It’s an acronym that still means something to a few people out there. Including me.

25 Years Ago Today

2011-01-28T10:02:00.001-05:00

On January 28, 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded seventy-three seconds after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. Millions of people have died since that day, and their deaths are no less tragic, to be sure. But, even though I was only seven years old then, I still remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news.

I wrote about the Challenger tragedy at length last year, but I encourage everyone to take a moment today to remember Dick Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Christa McAuliffe, and Gregory Jarvis.

Never forget.

Some Thoughts on the Tiki Room

2011-01-15T23:34:00.001-05:00

First of all, you may have noticed that the blog has acquired a glowy new TRONified look. Although I enjoyed TRON: Legacy, the main impetus behind the visual overhaul was making it look better on larger monitors. If you’re using a monitor that runs higher than 1600x1800, you’ll notice that the background image is no longer tiled, meaning that the blog no longer looks like a GeoCities website from 1995. Please let me know what you think of the new look by voting in the poll to the right. Thanks!

Now, on to the Tiki Room. On Wednesday, January 12th a fire broke out in the Tiki Room’s attic and damaged several animatronics before it was extinguished by the sprinkler system. The Disney fan community reacted with shock and dismay, until we learned that no one had been hurt, and the fire was in the “Under New Management” Tiki Room at Walt Disney World. Then we reacted by dancing the Funky Chicken of Joy in front of our computers. This created problems if we happened to be in a public place.

Michael Crawford over at Progress City U.S.A. has written an excellent article about the fire and what changes may come to the Tiki Room as a result. Like many of us, Michael hopes that Disney might decide to go ahead and bring back the original show for the park’s 40th anniversary. After all, they’ve already done it at Disneyland, and the current show is disliked by both hardcore fans and casual vacationers. However, the way I see it there’s just one teeny tiny little problem: the reason the old show went away in the first place was that it became unpopular. People were staying away from it, or getting up and leaving in the middle of the show. If it were brought back, mightn’t the same thing happen again?

I’ve never been to Disneyland, so I have no way of knowing how popular the show is with audiences there. However, it’s a well-known fact that a larger percentage of Disneyland’s visitors are Annual Passholding locals who are quite intolerant of classic attractions being replaced by crass commercials for current Disney franchises. By way of contrast, the vast majority of Walt Disney World’s customers are one-time-only casual vacationers who can’t tell the difference between a classic Disney attraction and a hole in the ground. Many of these folks have never seen the original Tiki Room and have no warm, fuzzy memories of it. Sure, in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and even into the ‘80s, singing Animatronic birds were kind of impressive. Now, not so much. Modern audiences might very well turn their noses up at the classic Tiki Room, just like they did in the ‘90s. (Although many of these same people think reality television is entertaining. The world is stupid.)

On the other hand, Captain EO seems to have picked up a whole new generation of fans who weren’t even born yet when it debuted in 1986, and that show lacks the timeless quality of the original Tiki Room. Maybe the same thing could happen in Adventureland. Personally, I think that the best-case scenario would be a “remastered” version of the original show. Make the Animatronics a little more lifelike, with the smooth, fluid movements you see on the newer models. And, although it pains me to say this, the show may need to be condensed a little to hold the attention of modern A.D.D.-addled audiences.

And those are my thoughts on the Tiki Room. As always, thanks for reading and commenting. I hope the new look doesn’t hurt your eyes.

My Year at WDW-The Seas with Nemo (and His Computer-Generated Friends)

2011-01-06T16:57:00.001-05:00

Like most Disney attractions, the Seas pavilion went through a number of changes between the initial concept and the final design that actually got built. One feature remained constant, though, from the early concepts:

. . . to the final ones:

The aquarium. From the beginning, it was the Seas’ central attraction. But EPCOT is a Disney park, so visitors would have been pretty disappointed if the Seas was just an aquarium. Something else was needed to draw them in.

In the early concepts, visitors were transported to the aquarium viewing area via an immersive dark ride hosted by Poseidon, God of the Sea. By the time the pavilion actually opened in 1986, it had been scaled down to a short Hydrolator trip and a three-minute Seacab ride. Jim Hill says this was because corporate sponsor United Technologies was too cheap to fund the original concept, while Martin Smith’s Living Seas Ultimate Tribute video implies that WED decided on their own that the Poseidon-hosted dark ride was too fanciful and opted for the more academic tone.

The Living Seas, with its preshow film/Hydrolator/Seacab ride combination, did a good job of drawing in visitors, at least until the departure of its corporate sponsor. Forced to fund the pavilion’s operation on their own, Disney went into aggressive cost-cutting mode. The Seacab ride was deactivated and walled off, the Seabase began to take on a dingy look as routine maintenance was scaled back, and visitors began to stay away from the pavilion. People began to grimly refer to it as “The Dead Seas”. Fans began to wonder if the Seas would suffer the same fate as the Wonders of Life.

You know what happened, of course. Disney pumped some money into the pavilion, and in 2007 it reopened as The Seas with Nemo and Friends. Was any attempt made to make the pavilion’s new theme fit in with the rest of Future World? No. Does the ride-thru attraction have any point other than to say “Hey kids, here’s Nemo!” and rehash the plot of the movie? Again, no. However, after making multiple trips to EPCOT last year, I have to admit that the Nemo rehab, ill-conceived though it was, has succeeded in one important area: drawing people back to the Seabase.

Even when the pavilion was The Living Seas, the main attraction wasn’t the Hydrolators, or the Seacab ride, or the preshow film featuring that female narrator with the amazing voice. It was the marine life inside the aquarium. But there really isn’t any point to it being there if no one is compelled to come look at it. During the handful of trips I’ve made since the Great Nemo Rehab of 2007, the Seabase has always been packed with excited families, even on days when the ride-thru attraction was a walk-on. And the families weren’t all crowded into the waiting area for Turtle Talk, either; every window into the aquarium was lined with kids staring into the water with amazement. I heard far more cries of delight at the antics of the dolphins than I did on the ride when Nemo and his friends appeared. Without exception, every kid I saw was much more excited to see a real shark prowling the reef than they were to see Animatronic Bruce and his artificial cohorts. And that’s why I have to admit that The Seas with Nemo and Friends is ultimately a success.

From its initial concept to the finished product, the purpose of EPCOT’s Seas pavilion was always to inform and educate people of all ages about the incredible array of life beneath the ocean’s surface. And when I see the Seabase area full of kids eager to look at and learn about the marine life in that massive aquarium, I’m forced to admit it’s accomplishing that purpose. Maybe it’s not going about it in quite the way I would prefer, and maybe if Disney had stuck with the original concept and built the pavilion with a big and elaborate dark ride I wouldn’t even need to write this. But love him or hate him, at least Nemo and his Computer-Generated friends are getting kids excited about a piece of the real world (specifically, the piece that comprises 70% of the globe). Maybe it’s only an unintended benefit of a rehab that Disney did primarily to sell more Nemo merchandise. But it’s proof that the spirit of EPCOT Center is still finding ways to shine through.

My Year at WDW-Security as Theater

2011-01-03T00:00:00.000-05:00

When I was a little kid, I was afraid that there was quicksand in my backyard. Was it because the soil conditions in my area were especially conducive to the formation of quicksand? Nope! It was because of the scary depictions of quicksand in realistic documentary programs like Gilligan’s Island and the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan films. While I was tiptoeing around the backyard worrying about nonexistent quicksand, my mom was inside worrying that the Roadrunner cartoons would make me drop an anvil on my sister. Our brains seem wired to fear ridiculously improbable things.

It’s even worse if it’s something that’s highly publicized. The abduction and murder of Kimberly Leach in 1978 and Adam Walsh in 1981 made parents during my childhood terrified that their local malls and playgrounds were infested with evil kidnappers ready to snatch their children the second the parents’ back was turned. The Disney parks have always had an excellent reputation for safety and security, and their carefully-crafted atmosphere has usually been pretty good at causing visitors to discard those kind of fears. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, though, had such an overpowering effect on the American psyche that no amount of Disney theming could make park visitors forget about the newfound danger of terrorism. So management had to do something to make their customers feel safe so that Walt Disney World (and Disneyland, too) continued to be a desirable destination. You know what they came up with: bag checks.

X-ray machines and metal detectors would have been too expensive (and it’s not like they stopped the 9/11 hijackers) but the bag check stations outside the park entrances are sufficiently reminiscent of airport security checkpoints to cause vacationers to relax, secure in the knowledge that all those strangers in the Space Mountain line with them have passed through the bag check successfully, and are definitely not terrorists. After all, if they were terrorists, then the security guards at the bag check stations would have found a brick of C-4 or an AK-47 in their backpack, right?

Obviously, Disney has always had security at their parks. Currently, the New York Times story about the Magic Kingdom’s line-monitoring command center is generating some buzz. If Disney puts that much effort into monitoring attraction lines, how much more seriously do you think they take security? After all, a violent incident like a mugging, a rape, or an armed standoff would damage the company a lot more than a long line for Dumbo. (And no, I’m not implying that Disney cares more about its corporate image than the physical safety of its customers) Much like all the other backstage operations that keep the parks running smoothly, security is practically invisible. But it works. The real world doesn’t stop at Disney’s property line, and I’m sure that people have managed to smuggle drugs or even weapons onto the property. But despite the fact that Walt Disney World is visited by something like 17 million people per year, how many violent crimes have happened there? (The Celebration murders don’t count, since Celebration isn’t part of the resort) Despite the fact that, in the Magic Kingdom the number of people per square foot often rivals the busiest parts of New York City, there aren’t problems with pickpockets or muggers.

Ah, but what about terrorists? I’m sorry, but if you seriously think that a retiree in a policeman costume shining a flashlight into a backpack will be any deterrent to someone who’s so determined to kill people that he’s willing to blow himself up to do it, then you’re not just suffering from Vacation Stupidity Disorder, you’re suffering from Full-Time Stupidity Disorder! The only bad guys a bag check is going to thwart are the cartoon villains that menace Mickey Mouse.

After 9/11, our very natural feelings of fear and insecurity were heightened by media people breathlessly imagining all the ways a prospective terrorist could attack. Radioactive dirty bombs and attacks with biological weapons were favorite scenarios. Almost a full decade has gone by, and with the exception of the anthrax mailings (which were not a coordinated Al-Qaeda attack but the work of a lone crazy person in the U.S.) none of that stuff has happened. And even if Disney World were targeted by Al-Qaeda, or just a single psycho acting alone, there are plenty of places they could strike besides the parks. A bomb or biological agent would kill just as many people in a crowded monorail station, a ferryboat, or even in the bottleneck created by the bag-check stations as it would inside the Magic Kingdom.

The bag checks are a show designed to create an illusion. They’re not a real security checkpoint any more than the Astro Orbiter is a real space voyage. Their sole purpose is to quiet the fears of panicky vacationers whose brains have slipped into Reduced Functionality Mode, and ease them into the frame of mind that’s most conducive to consuming mass quantities of twenty-five dollar T-shirts and ten-dollar hamburgers. They’re like a night light to ward off monsters under the bed. So, even though Disney’s Illusion of Security Show is inconvenient and contributes little or nothing to park security, I expect it to stick around forever. Because as old as people get, they never quite stop believing in monsters under the bed. Or quicksand in the backyard.

My Year at WDW-In Which I Actually Say Something Nice About The Tarps

2010-12-27T00:00:00.001-05:00

During the weekend that bridged the end of July and the beginning of August, when the Florida heat is so intense that merely turning your air conditioner down to “medium” can cause you to faint from heatstroke, I did a very stupid thing: I went to Disney World. Walt Disney World is a bad place to visit during the summer because, as any hardcore Disney fanatic will tell you, large chunks of it are located outdoors. A few posts ago, I made fun of the Team Disney Orlando executives for forgetting that little factoid when they gave the green light to Stitch’s Supersonic Celebration. Well, as I baked in the sun while walking through Future World’s large unshaded expanses, I started to realize something: the designers of EPCOT Center forgot it, too.

EPCOT Center aficionados like me are always waxing poetic about the grand open spaces Future World used to have, especially in CommuniCore Plaza, and angrily denouncing all the visual clutter that’s ruined once-magnificent sightlines. Now, I still maintain that the tarps and whirlygigs in Innoventions plaza are unsightly, to say the least:

It looks like the nineties took a dump in the middle of Future World, and nobody cleaned it up.

But the tarps do occasionally serve a useful purpose:

Shade. Ditto for the hideous awning-looking thing that was bolted onto the front of the former World of Motion pavilion during its conversion to Test Track. Sure, this:

. . . is infinitely more attractive than this:

. . . but at least there’s some shade to be found under that giant ugly awning.

Of course, Walt’s original EPCOT concept offered a more elegant solution: the shopping area that inspired today’s World Showcase would have been enclosed and climate-controlled. No ugly tarps or giant Erector-set pieces required. One more reason why I’m envious of the version of myself that lives in the alternate universe where Walt’s EPCOT City actually got built.

Oh, one more thing. In addition to all the man-made clutter that’s popped up on Future World over the years, something else you’ll occasionally hear complaints about is clutter of the natural variety, by which I mean trees. Because EPCOT’s trees have not had the decency to remain the exact height they were when they were planted in the eighties, scenic vistas like this:

Now look more like this:

Okay, so the newer picture isn’t taken from the exact spot as the old one (I didn’t have the old photo with me for reference when I took it, also I think there’s a pretzel stand there now) but you get the idea. Anyway, I have no problem with this. Trees grow. That’s what living things do. Sure, they may obscure what might have been a postcard-perfect picture, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to chop them down or whack them in half.

And those are my thoughts about visual clutter at EPCOT. Insert a witty and clever ending here.

futureprobe reviews TRON:Legacy

2010-12-19T22:41:00.001-05:00

UPDATE: For the funniest TRON:Legacy review on the Internet, click here. You can see a lot more of Doug Walker’s amazing work on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com. Now, on to the review:

By now you’ve read the reviews by people who are Experts In These Things. They’re all pretty much the same: TRON:Legacy is visually impressive but light on story. And I suppose they’re right. But why is that a bad thing? If all we wanted was to watch a story being performed on a screen, we could stay home and watch television. Or even YouTube. But we go to the movies to have an experience we can’t get at home, and TRON delivers that. In spades.

So why isn’t that going to be enough to make this movie the giant commercial success that would have had Disney considering a TRON makeover of Tomorrowland? After all, Transformers 2 had a putrid story and impressive visuals, and it made $400 million bucks. True, Transfomers commands greater nostalgic affection, overall, than the original TRON ever did. But the Transformers films had something else that the mass market loves: stupid comic relief. Oh, TRON:Legacy has a tiny bit of it, in the End of Line nightclub scene. But the makers of the film cared too much about staying true to the story they were trying to tell to cram in obnoxious characters that serve no purpose other than to entertain the people who find Larry the Cable Guy intellectually stimulating, and for that the box office returns will suffer.

Oh, one more thing. Very early in the film, before we go down the computerized rabbit hole, ENCOM’s board of directors are congratulating themselves on the release of their flagship operating system which costs more than the previous version, but whose only new features revolve around making it impossible to distribute for free. A suggestion by Bruce Boxleitner’s character that perhaps the company should treat their customers better and become a better corporate citizen, the way it was when Kevin Flynn was running things, is quickly dismissed by the greedy executives. I know that this wasn’t the filmmakers’ intention, but it really felt to me like a very on-the-nose commentary on the way Disney runs its theme park business these days.

More than anything, TRON:Legacy’s impressive visuals made me wish Disney would rip out Tomorrowland’s busy Flash Gordon jangles and replace them with the sleek electroluminescent look we saw in the film. It’ll never happen, of course, but wouldn’t it be something?

Horizons Resurrected

2010-12-14T17:01:00.001-05:00

So there’s this guy Chris Wallace, and he has an amazing idea: re-create Horizons, one of the most immersive and amazing theme park rides in the history of the planet, as a 3D virtual model, and he’s blogging his progress.

I’m sure that anyone reading this will want to head right over to his site immediately. Here’s the link:

http://horizonsresurrected.com/

Why Stitch’s Supersonic Celebration Really Failed

2010-12-09T17:58:00.001-05:00

Most hardcore WED-heads (myself included) are not huge fans of Stitch.

It’s not so much the character himself we dislike, it’s the way that Disney has tried to force him upon us. For the past few years, the company has been shoving him in our faces at every opportunity, as if to say “THIS IS STITCH! HE IS VERY POPULAR! YOU WILL LOVE HIM AND ADORE HIM AND TAKE OUT A SECOND MORTGAGE TO BUY ALL HIS MERCHANDISE!” So naturally we threw back our heads and gave a hearty laugh last year when Tomorrowland’s new show “Stitch’s Supersonic Celebration” was taken out and shot after less than two months. Some fans saw it as proof that Disney’s slow-witted management had finally realized that Stitch is not as popular as they thought he was. However, I think that that there was another, more basic reason for the show’s failure.

Stitch’s Supersonic Celebration premiered on May 9, 2009. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Floridian weather patterns, that’s the time of year when temperatures began to creep up from Merely Warm to Unbearably Hot And Humid. Now, through the magic of Google Maps, let’s take a look at the prime location that Disney selected for Stitch’s twenty-five minute show:

Image borrowed from Google Maps

Notice the abundance of concrete and the lack of any shade or seating. I’d argue that Stitch’s Supersonic Celebration was no more insipid than any other stage show in the parks (confession: that syrupy wishy-dreamy show at the foot of the Castle makes me retch) but it failed because people had to stand in the hot sun for a half hour to watch it. Never mind that it’s hard to see a video screen in the bright sunlight.

Of course, this means that the Team Disney Orlando executives are even more clueless than we thought they were. It’s bad enough that they they prefer to ignore common sense and make decisions based solely on spreadsheets and focus group data. Every large corporation does that. But the simple truth that nobody wants to stand for thirty minutes on a large unshaded concrete slab in the middle of summer is an inescapable fact of life in Florida, and the idea that Disney could spend maybe thousands or millions of dollars to develop a show that ignores that makes me think that the group of executives we call Team Disney Orlando is, in fact, a group of trained seals that communicate by clapping their flippers together and barking.

And that gets me thinking. You know how people are always starting silly irrelevant Internet petitions to get corporate executives to resurrect a TV program that no one was watching or something like that? Well, I have a much better idea: let’s just send buckets of fish to the Team Disney Orlando office building with a note that says “Fix Journey Into Imagination and there’s more where that came from”, or “Want more? Fix the Carousel of Progress.” I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.*

*Note: That suggestion was made purely for satirical purposes. Under no circumstances does futureprobe endorse the sending of buckets full of aquatic or other life forms to the Team Disney Orlando offices. I can’t believe I actually had to say that.

My Year at WDW: Animal Kingdom

2010-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00

Between 1981 and 2007, I made maybe eleven trips to Walt Disney World, most of them before 1990. However, I was able to afford an Annual Pass in late 2009, and since then I’ve taken ten trips. As a result, not only do I know the best places to go the bathroom, but my perspective on the parks has undergone something of a metamorphosis. My next multi-part ongoing series, entitled “My Year At WDW”, will delve into that new perspective a little bit.

Let’s start with Animal Kingdom.

When the Magic Kingdom opened in 1971, it was missing a lot of the attractions we think of classics: no Space Mountain, Carousel of Progress, or PeopleMover, no Pirates of the Caribbean, and no Big Thunder Mountain. By the time the park celebrated its twelfth anniversary in 1983, all of those attractions had been added, and the Magic Kingdom as we know it today was largely complete.

Animal Kingdom opened in 1998 with only two rides, a smattering of shows, and lots of room for expansion. Surely, all kinds of stuff must have been added in the twelve years between 1998 and today. Let’s compare an 1998 guidemap and a 2010 guidemap and marvel at all the new attractions the park has! Well, there’s Expedition Everest, that’s a big one. Asia has gained Kali River Rapids-a little on the short side, but good on a hot day-and the Maharaja Jungle Trek. Over in Dinoland, they built that Chester and Hester’s Dinorama thing that nobody likes. And that’s it. Two rides (one of which is built around an Animatronic that doesn’t work as advertised) a walkthrough attraction that’s not much different from something you can see in one of your better zoos, and a cheap carnival area. And hey, the cheap carnival area is all concrete and metal, making it one of the best places to enjoy Florida’s blistering summer heat! To make things worse, the park’s only dark ride, Dinosaur, has had so many effects deactivated over the years that it’s hardly worth experiencing. Check out Martin Smith’s excellent Dinosaur tribute video for more details on that.

Another issue that I have with Animal Kingdom is that it’s basically the Star Trek: Voyager of Disney World parks. It’s the one they never should have built. The idea was that a fourth park on property would induce people to extend their vacations. Instead, it’s just cannibalized attendance and maintenance dollars from EPCOT and the Studios. If you want to hear more about this, I encourage you to check out Episode 46 of the WDW Fanboys podcast for a very insightful discussion on it.

My personal feeling is that while there are some nice things at Animal Kingdom, it’s just not worth my time. The executives obviously feel that having the Disney name on the park is enough to overcome its shortcomings, and that spending any money on the place is unnecessary. Fine. If Team Disney Orlando doesn’t want to spend any of their money on Animal Kingdom, then I definitely don’t want to spend any of my money at Animal Kingdom. Unfortunately, my wife likes the place, so I’m sure I’ll be dragged there at least once per trip. But I sure won’t be buying any merchandise or eating any expensive table service meals there.

And that’s it for Animal Kingdom. Next week, I’ll take a look at another park.

The Minicot Project

2010-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I had the extremely good fortune to take the Undiscovered Future World tour recently with the guys behind the Minicot project. What is Minicot, you ask? Well, rather than tell you about it, I’ll just show it to you. Or rather, I’ll let YouTube show it to you:

Now, if only somebody would give these guys several million dollars and a 5-story, 130,000 square-foot building, I’ll bet they could come up with a pretty excellent re-creation of Horizons.

The Undiscovered Future World Tour Reviewed

2010-11-17T18:01:00.001-05:00

Okay, first of all I know the Disney literature calls it the UnDISCOVERed Future World tour, but I refuse to spell it like that. It looks like the Caps Lock key got stuck. I’ve wanted to take this tour ever since I first learned of its existence a few years ago, and when we got Annual Passes last year I vowed that I would do it before they expired.

If you’re an EPCOT geek (and if you’re reading this, I assume you are) then you have to realize that you’ll find very little that’s new or informative in the script that your guide is required to recite, and really that’s to be expected. You do, however, get to go into some really cool areas where your average park visitor is not allowed. For example, the Living Seas VIP lounge:

Sorry for the poor picture quality; my camera isn’t very good in low-light conditions. I was surprised by how large the lounge is. It’s easily as big as the Coral Reef restaurant, probably bigger. In a perfect world, it would be converted into an exclusive lounge for EPCOT Center aficionados, and the password to gain entry would be “George McGinnis”.

You also get to go into Mission:Space’s Mission Control and take a close-up look at the control console prop that you can see from the queue:

The level of detail is very high; the buttons all work, and some of the little video screens are playing the footage of the bird that always set off the alarm in Tomorrowland’s old Mission to Mars attraction.

You also get to go into the (surprisingly small) backstage area at Universe of Energy. There are a couple of unused pterodactyl Animatronics stored there, and they’re the only thing you’re allowed to photograph backstage, as long as you don’t photograph them from an angle that reveals more of the room.

The best things on the tour, though, is the stuff the guide doesn’t point out to you, the little pieces of EPCOT Center that litter the backstage areas. Things like a Magic Journeys-era sign with Figment on it that tells guests where to deposit their 3D glasses after the show, a prop from Kitchen Kaberet, or what looks to be a vintage Universe of Energy operations manual sitting on a shelf in a back room. That’s the stuff that really makes the Undiscovered Future World tour worth the money.

I must admit, though, I felt kind of like an invader in some of the backstage areas, particularly in the Cast Services building. When they’re onstage, Cast Members are expected to stay “in character” at all times, and be friendly, cheerful, polite, and happy regardless of what’s going on in their lives. Backstage, away from the prying eyes of demanding Disney vacationers, they can decompress a bit and drop the Public Relations smile for a moment. All the Cast Members we met were exceptionally friendly, of course, but I still felt like an intruder.

A few of my online friends encouraged me to ask the guide to take us to the old upstairs ImageWorks. We had a large group, though, so it really wouldn’t have been feasible. However, I had a good fortune to have a couple of the guys from Minicot in the group with me. These guys have, among other things, built a scaled-down Soarin’ replica at their home in Minnesota. I’ll have more about their impressive work in my next post.

So, is the Undiscovered Future World tour worth the time and the money? Absolutely. Your casual Disney visitor would probably find it rather boring (except the part where you get to ride Soarin’ via the VIP entrance, that is) but in the absence of a true EPCOT Center Geek’s tour, Undiscovered Future World is the next best thing.

Whatever Happened to the City of the Future?

2010-11-08T15:02:00.001-05:00

In September 1966, the original Star Trek debuted on NBC, and gave this blog one reason to exist. In October, Walt Disney gave it another one: the EPCOT project.

From Vimeo via EPCOTMedia

Not many people love EPCOT Center more than I do, but if I could take a one-way trip to a universe where Walt’s original concept was realized and EPCOT was a city instead of a theme park, I wouldn’t even hesitate. The way I see it, PeopleMovers beat Omnimovers every time.

I must admit, it’s bittersweet (okay, more bitter than sweet) to look back on a time when Disney’s creative energies were focused on urban planning and futuristic transportation systems rather than merchandise sales. But thanks to the Internet, an innovation Walt Disney never could have imagined, the good ideas that made up the original EPCOT project are still floating around in the electronic ether, waiting to be discovered by new generations. Maybe one day they’ll resurface, and we’ll get our pedestrian-friendly city of PeopleMovers and Monorails after all.

Gangsta Mickey?

2010-11-03T08:56:00.001-04:00

Disney fan community, I owe you an apology. You see, on Saturday, October 16 I was standing in EPCOT’s Innoventions Plaza a few minutes before rope drop, and I overheard a couple of middle-aged ladies behind me decrying how today’s kids don’t know the words to the Mickey Mouse Club song.

“Before long, they’ll probably bring it back as a rap song,” I joked.

The ladies laughed.

“Gangsta Mickey!” I said, certain that Disney would never do anything so ridiculous.

They laughed even more.

I should have kept my mouth shut, because Disney obviously has listening devices hidden throughout the parks, and whenever a tourist, their brain functions dulled by the phenomenon I call Vacation Stupidity, says something like “I wish there was a show where Stitch ate a chili dog and then burped in your face,” or “You know what the Tiki Room needs? Gilbert Gottfried!”, it sets off the Bad Idea Alarm at Disney Corporate Headquarters, and the Imagineers are ordered at gunpoint to bring this idea to life.

How else can you explain the show Disney Dance Crew, which debuted one week later in Anaheim? Perhaps you are not familiar with Disney Dance Crew. Allow me to enlighten you:

If you’re like me, your reaction to that show went something like this:

Normally I try to have at least one positive thing to say about the stuff I criticize, but this time I’ve got nothing. Nothing at all. Disney Dance Crew is nothing more than a pathetic attempt by a committee of middle-aged suit-wearing white men to appeal to a young audience they don’t understand and don’t particularly like. It’s more degrading than reality television. And it’s all my fault.

Still, I guess we should just be thankful that Mickey didn’t come out holding a gun sideways, or introduce Minnie as his “’ho”.

Oops, I’d better not say that when I’m on the parks. I don’t want to set off the Bad Idea Alarm again.

Into the Vault: WDW’s Tencennial

2010-10-25T17:06:00.001-04:00

Walt Disney World’s 40th anniversary is quickly approaching, and there’s been quite a bit of online discussion about what the Company will or won’t do to honor it. However, I was going through an old shoebox full of family photos and souvenirs recently and uncovered some stuff from a much earlier anniversary, WDW’s tenth. Dubbed the “Tencennial”, it was celebrated from 1981 to 1982. Back then, my family would make more-or-less annual visits to the Vacation Kingdom, and our spring 1982 trip fell right in the middle of the Tencennial festivities.

On the way into the Magic Kingdom, guests were greeted by a special Tencennial sign and decorative banners:

Yes, the camera-shy kid on the right is me. There’s so much retro goodness in this picture: the Tencennial sign, the Mickey-themed floral arrangement, and the old-school WDW shopping bag on the ground next to us. Also, check out the blue-and-white banners above the Magic Kingdom sign.

It’s a safe bet that visitors to Disney World next year will see the 40th anniversary logo plastered on everything. As you can see in this next picture, the same was true during the 10th anniversary:

Check out the 10th anniversary logo on the cup! I have no idea where in the park we were when this picture was taken. If anyone out there thinks they know, please leave a comment.

Finally, here’s a special treat: visitors to the Magic Kingdom in early 1982 were given a four-page pamphlet advertising all the 10th anniversary-related festivites in the park. It included a plug for the Walt Disney World Village and the EPCOT preview center, and I was able to make some high-quality scans of it. Click the pictures for larger versions.

That’s all for now. Over the next few weeks, I’ll have more pictures of Walt Disney World past. Thanks for reading!

Star Tours 2: It’s Going To Be All Right

2010-10-15T11:13:00.001-04:00

At first, the news that Star Tours was going to get that long-awaited 2.0 upgrade got a pretty positive reaction. However, there have also been some negative comments (on the Internet? Impossible!) and some genuinely worried fans. After all, George Lucas doesn’t exactly have the best record when it comes to improving things:

Case in point

Star Wars fans haven’t forgotten how they were bitterly disappointed by Episode I . . .

For some, this face still haunts their nightmares.

. . . and how that disappointment turned to anger when Episodes II and III weren’t much of an improvement. But what was wrong with the prequels, really? Pretty much everything but the special effects. Well, guess what? Star Tours is really nothing more than a special effects reel with synchronized cabin movements. Plot doesn’t matter all that much, and whatever acting there is will be peripheral to the main experience. The only thing I worry about is the 3-D.

You see, Disney and Lucasfilm are not the first people to think of putting a 3-D movie in a motion simulator ride. When I visited Busch Gardens Williamsburg in the mid-90s they had one. And it made me nauseous. Sure, the technology has come a long way (and I can’t remember if the Bush Gardens ride used stereoscopic 3-D or the old kind with the red-and-blue glasses) but based on my past experience I’d say it’s definitely possible that Star Tours 2.0 will make more guests queasy than version 1.0 did.

Aside from that one minor concern, though, I predict that Star Tours 2 will mostly avoid the pitfalls to which George Lucas’ more recent Star Wars projects have fallen victim. After all, it’s not like it’ll be a five-minute reel of Greedo shooting first, conversations about midichlorians, and Jar-Jar antics.

At least I hope not.

Resisting Your Inner Rooney

2010-10-11T14:41:00.001-04:00

Most people have heard of Andy Rooney. He’s been doing his Grumpy Old Man act on 60 Minutes since Alexander the Great was President. If by chance you haven’t experienced the Joy of Rooney, then let me enlighten you:

Wasn’t that perfectly awful? I never knew someone could be so angry about having survived to see the 21st century. I couldn’t help but think of Mr. Rooney, though, after witnessing the reaction within the Disney fan community to the news that WDW’s The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh will be getting a new queue with video screens and interactive elements. The small corner of Twitter-sphere where I live was all a-grumble with negative comparisons to the current version of Spaceship Earth and general complaints about Disney attractions with video screens of any kind. From all the vitriol, you’d think that Pooh was a beloved decades-old attraction, instead of the thing that replaced Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in 1999.

I’m a little more sympathetic to the howls of protest over the installation of an interactive queue at the Haunted Mansion. After all, the Mansion is a classic attraction with generations of fans. But the immediate denunciations of the changes to Pooh really surprised me. Sure, the way that video screens are utilized at Journey Into Dr. Nigel Channing’s Imagination is extremely cheap (like everything else on that ride), and I’ve read some very well-thought-out negative opinions of the screen-centric Toy Story Midway Mania, but the fact is that all this newfangled interactive stuff is the future, just like Audio-Animatronics were the future in the mid-1960s. Can you imagine a frequent Disneyland visitor complaining about Pirates of the Caribbean in 1967, saying that these Audio-Animatronic things were just another gimmick and that Disneyland was better before they started popping up everywhere?

Sure, there are legitimate issues to be had with the way that new technology is being implemented in the parks, and a lot of the folks complaining about it are people I respect tremendously who write blogs infinitely better than this one. But I think we need to realize that times (and theme-park audiences) have changed. While describing the nightmarish crowds that Walt Disney World experienced on Thanksgiving Weekend in 1971, the book Realityland relates that people were waiting in line for two hours to see the Country Bear Jamboree. There’s no way Mr. Average Theme Park Visitor of the Year 2010 would be willing to do that, not for the Country Bears.

Obviously, it’s really tempting (and fun, to be honest) to go all Andy Rooney when confronted with the fact that the world has changed and forgotten to bring you along for the ride, and in the case of pop culture abominations like reality TV it’s totally justified. But maybe, just maybe, we should try to suppress our inner Rooney sometimes, just long enough to try a new thing and see if it really is worthy of the disdain we were so ready to heap upon it.

Of course, if really is as bad as we feared, then all bets are off.

Symphony of Science-The Case For Mars

2010-10-03T12:59:00.001-04:00

28 Years Ago Today . . .

2010-10-01T09:36:00.001-04:00

. . . EPCOT Center opened to the public. And what better way to commemorate it than with a series of vintage videos? First, the Today show’s preview:

I love how they tell kids to “leave their mouse ears at home” because they won’t see Mickey or any of his friends. And even though a chunk of the old Sunrise Terrace restaurant is taken up by the Character Spot, and The Living Seas and El Rio De Tiempo have been “toon-ified”, EPCOT has still not been taken over by licensed characters to the extent that the other parks have.

Next, here’s a taste of the park’s opening ceremonies:

If there was one thing we were sure of in 1982, it was that the future would include lots of interpretive dance and disco-inspired white spandex jumpsuits! Still, the 21st Century is only ten years old; I suppose that stuff could still make a resurgence. With any luck, I’ll be dead by then.

Why Disney Needs a Visionary (but not the George Lucas kind)

2010-09-28T16:07:00.001-04:00

Most companies that produce goods for public consumption, be they entertainment companies like CBS/Paramount or consumer electronics companies like HP, operate in pretty much the same way. They conduct tons of market research to determine exactly what kinds of things schlubs like us want to buy, and based upon the results of that research they either formulate products for our consumption or concoct an ad campaign to sell us the stuff they already have. Market research is very important to the serious people in suits who run these companies, because on their own they frankly have no idea what we wormlike members of the public want. They understand us about as well as we understand the Mucous Beings of Planet Glornax.

Now, companies that operate in this way do manage to produce useful things. I’m writing this post with Windows Live Writer on a Dell PC running Windows 7, and it works pretty well for me. However, when I drive around the college town were I live, I never see cars with Dell or Microsoft bumper stickers. You know what logo I do see, though? Apple. Those white Apple stickers that come with new iPods are in car windows everywhere. Outside of some professional sports franchises, no business organization in the world commands loyalty and affection like Apple. Every time they launch a new product, it dominates the 24-hour news cycle. Major news magazines like Time and Newsweek fall all over themselves to devote cover stories to how awesome the new product is. Apple’s success is even more amazing when you consider that the company was pretty much dead in the late ‘90s. What changed? The answer, of course, is Steve Jobs.

Unlike its competitors, Apple makes innovative products that we never knew we needed. Sure, during their late ‘80s-to- mid ‘90s Jobs-less period they came out with some impressive devices like the PowerBook and the Newton, but overall the company’s succession of traditional CEOs who ran things in a traditional way was an unmitigated disaster. Because he was one of Apple’s founders, and because the company was in such poor shape when he returned in 1997, Jobs was able to force Apple to do things his way. In fact, the way that Steve Jobs runs Apple reminds me of another company with a charismatic founder who had a unique way of doing things: Disney.

Like Apple today, Disney during Walt’s time was famous for giving us amazing things we didn’t even know we wanted, like full-length animated movies, the modern theme park, and Audio-Animatronic shows. After Walt’s passing in 1966 enough of his creative energy remained in the company (in the form of people who had worked with him) to give us some pretty amazing things, among them EPCOT Center and a new bunch of animated films that have become modern classics.

However, just like Apple in early 1997 Disney is largely coasting on its reputation these days. The uniqueness that Walt brought to the company he founded has largely been drained away by traditional corporate executives that can’t blow their nose without consulting a focus group. Unfortunately, unlike Apple Disney has no legitimate competitors, at least not in the theme park industry. It’s not going to slide into oblivion unless a visionary CEO comes along and saves it. And anyway, there aren’t a lot of visionary CEOs out there to be had. It’s easy to point to specific things that Disney is doing wrong: Team Disney Orlando is too cheap, the Disney Channel is nothing but vacuous shows aimed at ‘tweens, etcetera. However, the overall problem is that Disney is the kind of company that needs to be helmed by a visionary CEO with the unquestioned power to do whatever he wants, and it does not have that. Disney needs a Steve Jobs. Or even a Mark Cuban. If it never gets one, you can be sure we’ll see more of this:

And less of this:

And that would really be a shame.

Tow Mater vs. Someone You Never Heard Of

2010-09-24T16:27:00.001-04:00

Two posts ago I talked a little bit about Duffy the Disney Marketing Bear, and how his marketing campaign seems to be borrowing from the Transformers/He-Man/GI-Joe playbook from the ‘80s that used commercials disguised as entertainment to sell toys to kids. Now, I’m going to tackle a somewhat-related topic: how Licensed Characters have taken over Disney theme park attractions, and why it’s kind of our fault.

Pretend for a minute that you’re a movie studio executive, and that you’re asked to give $200 million of your studio’s money to someone that many film critics consider to be one of the worst directors in the business. The proposed script for the movie reads like it was written by a super-caffeinated person who has only a passing familiarity with linear thought. It features two prominent characters who are obviously racist caricatures, a small, annoying character who vigorously humps the leg of the female lead, and a main character who spends most of his time running away from explosions while shouting scintillating dialogue like “Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa!” and “Wait-wait-wait! No-no-no-no!” Now, if you have any common sense at all you will laugh in this director’s face and ask him if this is some kind of April Fools’ prank, and maybe even inquire as to what kind of complete idiot he thinks you are. And you would probably get fired, because the director is Michael Bay, many of the characters in question are giant robots, and the movie is Transformers 2, which turned a budget of $200 million into a worldwide box office gross of over $800 million, and that doesn’t count the profits from merchandise and DVD sales.

Yes, Transformers 2 may have been universally reviled by critics and ripped apart on the Internet, but it was a huge hit with the average moviegoing public. You probably won’t admit it out loud, but you probably went to see it. I know I did. In fact, if the last decade or so has taught us anything, it’s that movies based on recognizable and beloved licensed characters are virtually guaranteed to make money, no matter how bad they are. Theme park attractions are a lot like movies, when you think about it. Both cost many millions of dollars to make and must appeal to a broad audience. So, since the general public love its licensed characters, what are you going to do if you’re Disney and you own a huge stable of them? Obviously, every time you need to create a new attraction or rehab and existing one, you’re going to cram a licensed character in there! After all, the people have voted with their wallets; it’s what they want. And if you’ve made a habit of going to see movies featuring licensed characters, then you’ve voted with your wallet, too.

Ah, but why must Disney always simply do whatever the rest of the entertainment industry is doing? Why can’t they dare to be different, blaze new trails? It worked out pretty well for them in the past, after all. I’ll be taking up that topic in a post next week. Thanks for reading!

This Looks Familiar . . .

2010-09-23T17:14:00.001-04:00

Today, the tech blog Gizmodo published an article and some images of a new HP tablet. As an EPCOT-lover, the picture of the tablet’s back side really caught my eye:

Hey, what better way to make your product look futuristic that to mimic the look of one of the most futuristic things in the world? For the record, Spaceship Earth’s aluminum-encased look was futuristic back when Apple was still encasing their products in beige plastic.

Duffy Bear, meet Optimus Prime

2010-09-19T23:51:00.001-04:00

In a new effort to give EPCOT’s World Showcase more kid appeal, and to give the parents of said kids an exciting new opportunity to shell out more money for merchandise, Disney is bringing in reinforcements from Japan . Duffy the Disney Bear, a teddy-bear-like character who’s been very popular at Tokyo Disneyland, will get his own Meet-and-Greet on October 4th, at the gateway to the World Showcase. Also, Duffy will be for sale in each World Showcase country, wearing a country-specific costume.

A lot of old-school Disney curmudgeons like myself are irritated by this. Unlike Mickey, Donald, the PIxar characters, or the princesses, Duffy did not begin life as a character in an animated feature. He started as a piece of merchandise, and now he’s being promoted as though he were a “real” character all for the purpose of selling toys to children. Those of us who grew up during EPCOT Center’s 1980s heyday just can’t remember a marketing campaign ever targeting children this way:

Optimus Prime disagrees

Except the most treasured pieces of our childhood, that is. Yes, the 1980s were chock-full of toys that were given their own Saturday-morning cartoon shows for the express purpose of marketing them to children! Transformers, He-Man, GI-Joe, My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite: these things that virtually defined childhood for anyone who grew up in the ‘80s weren’t created to bring joy to little kids, they were there to wring money from the parents of elementary-school children. None of that mattered to the kids, of course. We just loved our licensed characters and the cartoons in which they appeared. We may have known that the cartoons were only created to market the toys, but we didn’t care. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Duffy gets his own Disney channel show or direct-to-DVD feature in the near future.

Of course, the whole Duffy thing does seem to point to a disturbing mindset on the part of Disney Parks management, a mindset that the parks exist primarily to sell merchandise and the attractions are simply there to implant a desire for whatever is sold in the gift shops they exit into. Speaking as an adult, I find this kind of thing to be crass and almost offensive. But back when I was a six-year-old, and the Hasbro corporation was using a red-and-blue truck that transformed into a giant robot to separate my parents from their money, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Next time, I’ll be talking about Disney’s tendency to tie almost every new attraction into a licensed character, and why this is all our fault.

Technology Unchained or The Symphosizer: 2083’s Answer to the Magic Trackpad

2010-09-13T12:10:00.001-04:00

The creators of Star Trek:The Next Generation envisioned a 24th century full of comfortable environments where technology, although heavily utilized, was very much in the background, deemphasized. Gene Roddenberry called this philosophy “technology unchained”. It wasn’t exactly a new idea, however. For almost four years before TNG’s 1987 premiere, Horizons at EPCOT Center had been giving thousands of people per day a three-dimensional look at just such an environment. Let’s take a trip to the world of 2083, as we imagined it in 1983:

The Nova Cite apartment was my favorite Horizons environment. It’s also the one that holds up the best twenty-seven years later. Some production designers tasked with creating a futuristic environment make the mistake of cramming it with complicated-looking futuristic equipment, as if its occupant had just gone on a shopping spree at the local Best Buy. Such displays tend not to age well. The best “future” technology is something that looks simple. Let’s take a closer look at the Symphosizer:

I know, you can’t wait until 2083 so you can have your own periwinkle leisure suit with matching plastic booties

The only visible controls are 14-16 large colored keys that don’t appear to move or depress in any way. It would be easy to deride it as a cross between an old Simon game and a Fisher-Price My First Piano, but its apparent simplicity could very well be deceptive. After all, who in 1983 would believe that a telephone in 2010 would look like this:

. . . or that the computer mouse, a very cutting-edge device in those days, would be replaced by something that looked like this:

Could anyone familiar only with early-1980s technology look at those pictures and get the slightest idea what those devices were or how they worked? Most likely, they’d simply dismiss them as nonfunctional slabs of plastic and aluminum. So it is with the Symphosizer. If we were to go back and slap an Apple logo on it, most people today would instinctively realize that it must be more complex than it appears. In fact, maybe the “Symphosizer” isn’t really its name. Maybe it’s called the iMusic.

It’s good to know that, in the world of 2083, Steve Jobs (or more likely, his brain downloaded into an iPad) could still be coming up with ideas. Or at least taking credit for them.

The Beginning

2010-09-07T16:04:00.001-04:00

If a new Star Trek series ever materializes, we’ll learn about it a year in advance. Before we watch the first minute of the pilot episode, we’ll already know everything about it (and probably the next few episodes, too) thanks to the Internet. In 1987, of course, none of that was possible. The only way one might learn that a new Star Trek series was in development would be through a magazine or newspaper article or maybe a television report. As a nine-year-old kid, I didn’t have access to a lot of magazines. Our local newspaper, the St. Augustine Record, was much smaller in those days and didn’t offer much national entertainment coverage. And since my mother firmly believed that too much television would turn me into a brain-dead juvenile delinquent, I didn’t get to watch tons of TV, either. (Then again, it’s not like there was much to watch. We didn’t get cable until 1989.)

My point is that I had no detailed information about Star Trek:The Next Generation before it premiered on September 28, 1987. In fact, I only knew two things: it was set almost a hundred years after the Original Series, and there was going to be a new Enterprise. I’m sure that Starlog or another magazine probably had an issue chock full of pictures and interviews as the premiere date approached, but I never saw it. In fact, the only picture I remember seeing is this one, in the Entertainment section of a Time or Newsweek magazine in a doctor’s waiting room:

Why do half of them look grim, and the other half look stoned?

Who were these people? Why did the crew of the new Enterprise include old bald guy, a dude with a womens’ hair accessory on his face, and a teenager in an ugly sweater? I had no idea. But as soon as I got home I Googled “star trek the next generation” and—actually, no I didn't, because, as I might have mentioned, there was no Internet. Also, we didn’t own a computer and “Google” was not yet a verb, just a misspelling of the number “googol”. What I really did was wait until “Encounter at Farpoint” premiered on September 28. I may have seen a few brief TV promos beforehand (I distinctly remember one that described Worf as “the friendly Klingon”-and even as I type that I can hear Worf’s voice in my head saying “I protest! I am not a friendly Klingon!”) but that was it.

It is safe to say that I was stoked beyond belief for the premiere of the new and improved Star Trek. And I was not disappointed. Star Trek:The Next Generation instantly became my new favorite show. “But how can that be,” you ask, “given the fact that most of TNG’s first season was so bad it induced seizures in laboratory animals?” I’ll let you in on a little secret: nine-year-olds are notoriously poor judges of quality. At this point, I was only aware of two categories of Star Trek episodes and movies: the ones I was allowed to watch, and the ones I was not allowed to watch because my parents deemed them too violent or whatever. I enjoyed “Spock’s Brain” just as much as “Balance of Terror”.

In my next post, I’ll talk about TNG’s pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint”; my impressions of it in 1987, and how it shaped my view of what futuristic technology looked like, a view that heretofore had been influenced mainly by the Original Star Trek and EPCOT Center. Oh, you might have noticed that futureprobe has a Twitter account now. I plan on using it mainly to let people know what blog-related thing I’m currently working on, and perhaps I’ll also include the odd EPCOT-related thought or tidbit of info that isn’t “big” enough to warrant an article here. I included the Twitter gadget on the right-hand side of the page so you don’t have to actually go to the Twitter website if you don’t want to. I’m not really into the Twitter thing (which makes me a member of the Internet Amish, I know) so it probably won’t be updated very often. For now, though, I’ll leave you with this, the original “Encounter at Farpoint” promo spot that ran immediately before TNG’s world premiere:

A New Feature

2010-08-27T18:00:00.001-04:00

2010 has been a busy year for EPCOT. The World Showcase received a rare new addition with the opening of the Via Napoli restaurant this month, and the expanded Hacienda de San Angel is scheduled to open in September. In Future World, the return of Captain EO managed to shamelessly capitalize on the death of someone Disney would undoubtedly ignore were he still alive, and remind us of why some things from the ‘80s are best left there.

I’m not privy to any inside information, but I predict that 2011 will be a much quieter year for our favorite park, primarily because most of the company’s attention (and money) will be focused on the massive Fantasyland expansion project now underway in the Magic Kingdom. I seriously doubt that EPCOT will get any new additions until after Fantasyland is completed. Don’t be surprised if there’s a subtraction, though. On my last visit to EPCOT on a hot and crowded Sunday, every Future World attraction had a longer-than-average wait time. Except one, that is: Journey Into Imagination With Dr. Nigel Channing. Throughout the day, the tip boards in Future World consistently showed no wait time at Imagination, even as the temperature climbed close to 100 degrees. No lie: I saw more people drink Beverly at Club Cool than I saw enter the Imagination pavilion. When people won’t even enter your attraction to escape the Florida heat in August, you’ve got a popularity problem. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Disney’s bean-counters notice this and turn Imagination into a “seasonal” attraction a la Sounds Dangerous, reopening it only if Test Track, Mission:Space, and Soarin’ all break down at the same time. Maybe after the Fantasyland project is completed, Journey into Imagination will get the upgrade it so richly deserves. We can only hope.

In the meantime, I’m rolling out a new continuing feature here at the blog, a Star Trek: The Next Generation retrospective. It won’t be an episode-by-episode review; there are enough people on the Internet who do that sort of thing, and the vast majority of them are better writers than I am. Rather, it’s going to be a recounting of what it was like to experience TNG’s seven-season run as it happened. Too many reviewers make the mistake of evaluating the show by modern standards, and that’s not really fair. Simply saying that TNG’s first couple seasons were badly written and full of 1980s cheesiness is like making fun of Vanilla Ice; it’s too easy and anyone can do it. Clearly, the show was able to garner enough of an audience to allow it to survive to its third season when it really got good.

Just as it can be hard to remember when EPCOT Center was brand new and untouched by the ravages of Eisnerian cost-cutting and 1990s attempts to be “hip”, it can also be difficult to imagine a time when Star Trek only consisted of a cancelled television series from the ‘60s and four movies. A new series with unfamiliar characters seemed like a very risky proposition. Over the next few months, I’ll be looking back on some key moments in TNG’s evolution from an uneven not-quite-sequel to the original series to the launching point for the rest of the Star Trek franchise.

I hope you’ll stick around.

The Most Amazing EPCOT Redesign Plan You Will Ever See

2010-08-10T18:02:00.001-04:00

There have been lots of ideas, over the last few years, on how to improve EPCOT. Some, like WDI’s Project Gemini, were meant to erase the park’s stodgy, academic reputation and make it more popular with teenage thrill-seekers. Others, like those put forward by Disney aficionados outside the company, aim to make the park into an updated version of the EPCOT Center they remember from the 1980s. All the ideas, though, boil down to a list of attraction refurbishments and additions.

Well, a guy named Peter Schaab has come up with a comprehensive redesign of the park that goes much, much further. It is, quite simply, the most far-reaching, visionary plan to re-focus and re-imagine EPCOT that I have ever seen. If Walt Disney were to try to remake the existing park to conform more closely to the spirit of his original EPCOT idea, I don’t see how he could do better than this. Sure, there are a few aspects with which I don’t personally agree, but that shouldn’t detract from the project’s breathtaking awesomeness.

I’m not going to go into the details of Mr. Schaab’s work, because it really demands to be seen for itself. Go to this site: http://www.peterschaab.com/epcot.htm Read everything, watch the videos, look at the pictures, then download the PDFs and read them all. You’ll be glad you did.

The Coral Reef Reviewed

2010-08-06T11:26:00.000-04:00

The Coral Reef Restaurant at EPCOT’s Seas pavilion has always held a certain appeal for me. The whole idea of dining under the sea, like the underwater restaurant patrons in Horizons’ floating city scene, is just so darned cool. From the time I first heard of its existence when the Seas pavilion opened in 1986 I’d always wanted to eat there. However, a few things held me back.

For one thing, the tiny selection of menu choices didn’t really excite me. I’m from the coastal town of St. Augustine. When a seafood restaurant there serves you its “catch of the day”, you’re actually eating fish that was caught that day. There are lots of restaurants there whose menus overflow with shrimp, crab, lobster, whatever you want. You know how many seafood entrees the Coral Reef offers? Four. And one of them, the Lobster Ravioli, probably has way more pasta, tomatoes, and sauce than lobster.

Also, the negative reviews the place had received tended to put me off the Coral Reef. Words like “disappointment”, “mediocre” and “overpriced” kept popping up (although complaining about things being overpriced at Disney World is a little silly. It’s like going to a Michael Bay movie and complaining about the explosions). After repeating some of those negative comments here, I felt that I at least ought to try the place and see if the criticism was warranted. So, I had lunch there last weekend, and this is my report:

It should be noted that I’m not a food snob. Menus with strange, unidentifiable items like “Compote of whipped Marscapone in a Spaetzle reduction” don’t make me feel like I’m in a nice restaurant, they make me feel like I’m in a Klingon restaurant. As Forrest Gump might say “Never eat anything you do not know what it is”. So, don’t expect me to talk about food like it’s a job applicant: “This escargot is certainly efficacious, but it has an almost ideological conflict with the arugula.” Not gonna happen.

Our lunch reservation was at 1:45. We checked in about five minutes early and were given a beeper that would go off when our table was ready. (Okay, it’s technically not a beeper since it doesn’t beep, only flashes little red lights, but calling it a “flasher” makes it sound like a creepy dude in a trench coat.) Unlike some of the reviews I’ve read, the staff at the front desk was quite friendly and attentive. Within five minutes our “beeper” went off, and we were escorted to our table by a nice guy named Antonio or something. As we walked, he rattled off a memorized spiel about how we were now going “under the sea”, pausing to remind us to watch our step each time we stepped down one of the restaurant’s three tiers. I don’t blame him for the tacky memorized spiel, I blame Disney for making their employees say crap like that. I mean, it’s obvious that we’re supposed to be under the sea, there’s a giant aquarium right in front of us! We were pleasantly surprised to be seated at a table right next to the aquarium. Just on the other side of the window from where were were sitting, a large sea turtle was resting. He stayed there throughout our meal, occasionally swimming up to the surface for a lungful of air. The tank was teeming with ocean life; we saw sharks, rays, and several varieties of fish. Best of all, the old Living Seas area music was playing over the restaurant’s PA system! Unfortunately, the noisy conversation from the restaurants other patrons worked against the quiet peacefulness that the aquarium, the restaurant’s subdued lighting, and the area music were trying to create, but it’s not like Disney can put a Cone of Silence over every table.

I was already familiar with the menu and knew what I wanted to order. Before we left home, my wife had printed out the menu and highlighted a couple of items that she might like to order as well. This was a good thing, because whenever we eat at an unfamiliar restaurant she tends to be paralyzed with indecision. Unfortunately, she left the printout at home. So it took quite a while for her to figure out what she wanted. Our server came back to check on us at regular intervals, but I never got the feeling that he was getting impatient. He was very helpful when my wife had questions about the menu, and finally she decided on a Caesar salad with chicken, with Ranch dressing instead of Caesar. I ordered the New York Strip, cooked medium-rare.

One of the knocks on the Coral Reef is that the portions are too small. I’d have to disagree with that; I found them to be quite sufficient. I didn’t have any food left over (except for the watercress, which I chose not to eat) but I wasn’t hungry after I finished eating, either. My wife’s Caesar Salad came not with just cut-up pieces of chicken, but with an entire chicken breast. We both enjoyed our entrees very much. My steak was grilled to perfection, and the potatoes were very tasty as well. My wife enjoyed her salad very much, and she absolutely loved the Chocolate Wave she ordered for dessert. She said it was even better than Le Cellier’s Chocolate-on-Chocolate Whiskey cake. High praise, indeed! Our only quibble was that the Bloody Mary my wife ordered had too much vodka in it for her tastes.

So, would I recommend the Coral Reef? I can honestly say it’s the best table-service restaurant in Future World. And if you really want a steak and can’t get a reservation at Le Cellier, then the Coral Reef isn’t a bad second option. The atmosphere is wonderful, even if it does get a little noisy in there. I really wish they’d transplant the menu from Fulton’s Crab House (or even Red Lobster), but as long as they serve a good steak I’ll probably be eating there again at some point.

The Return of Captain EO

2010-08-04T08:19:00.000-04:00

Although I visited EPCOT Center a couple times during Captain EO’s original run, I never got to see it. Its return, therefore, gave me a unique opportunity to experience a classic EPCOT attraction as an adult, unencumbered by any childhood memories. On Sunday, August 1, I experienced Captain EO, and here’s what I thought of it:

There are some things from the 1980s that will always be awesome, like The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, and The Goonies. There are things from the '80s that are cheesy but still fun, like Knight Rider, the first season of the original Transformers cartoon, and Mr. T. And then there are things that should never, ever, for the love of all that is holy, ever see the light of day again. Things like the Garbage Pail Kids, films by Golan-Globus, parachute pants and Captain EO.

Sweet mother of Optimus Prime, where do I even begin? How about the preshow? They're using the old 1986 preshow here, which is sort of a making-of montage. It's got shots of sets being built, Francis Ford Coppola directing, and dancers in leotards and leg warmers. Also George Lucas. Lots of George Lucas. You can tell that they were very proud, back there in 1986, to have George Lucas associated with the project, because he shows up in the preshow video more than anyone else. He's always pointing at things, making descriptive hand gestures, and telling people what to do while they listen with rapt attention, basking in his genius. This is meant to make the viewers feel that they are about to witness a spectacle of pure visionary awesomeness, but one Star Wars prequel trilogy and an Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull later, we know that the only reason any self-respecting filmmaker would have George Lucas on their project is so they could listen to his advice and then do the opposite of whatever he said.

Well, the preshow is over soon enough and it's time for the main event. It begins with a dated special-effects shot of a starfield and a glowing, 3D galaxy-looking thing. The narrator tells us about a brave band of rebels who fight the forces of darkness (hey George Lucas, I wonder where that story point came from?) and as he talks a whitish rock appears on the screen. It's a 3D rock, and as the narrator talks about the rebels and their brave leader, it just keeps spinning towards us. It was on the screen for so long that I started to wonder if maybe the rock was the rebel leader the narrator was talking about. I got the impression that the filmmakers really wanted us to be impressed with this 3D rock of theirs. Anyway, just when it seems that the rock is floating just beyond the tip of our nose, it's destroyed by a laser blast from Michael Jackson's spaceship.

Despite what the narrator says, Michael Jackson, uh-I mean Captain EO, doesn't appear to be a brave rebel leader. He's the commander of a ship full of cheesy comic relief Muppet creatures, proto-Jar-Jars basically, who seem to be low-level space delivery boys. They're less like the Rebel Alliance and more like UPS. Only instead of brown shorts, Michael wears something much more embarrassing. Also, he delivers every one of his lines with a high-pitched, quivering tone that makes it sould like he's about to break down and cry.

After a space battle that plays like something from Star Wars if it was made with less money, they crash on a forbidding alien planet and are taken captive by guys who look kind of like the Borg. The Borg take them to the Supreme Ruler, who looks like a cross between the Borg Queen and the Wicked Witch of the West. After she threatens them, Michael breaks into a song-and-dance number where he reveals his superpower: with an energy blast from his hand, he can turn the Borg creatures into dancers with fabulous outfits and 80's hair! He's like a superhero, 80's Hairstylist Man! Zap! You've got a mullet! Zap! You've got a jheri curl! It's hilarious, but not on purpose.

Finally, Michael turns the Borg Queen into Angelica Houston, and everyone goes home happy, except for the audience who realizes that they've just found the answer to the question, "what could be worse than Honey, I Shrunk the Audience?" Look, I understand that Captain EO is popular at Disneyland. But southern California spends most of its time on a very different plane of existence than the rest of planet Earth. Once the "newness" of Captain EO wears off, it'll seem just as dated and out-of-place as it did in 1993.

In fact, it already does.

Pastel Pajamas and Future Cities

2010-07-26T15:54:00.001-04:00

One reason why I liked EPCOT so much as kid was because it reminded me of something else I loved: Star Trek. EPCOT Center of the 80s and the Star Trek films of that same period shared remarkably similar design aesthetics. How similar? Well, take a look at some of the Cast Member costumes for CommuniCore circa 1982:

Image borrowed from ImagineeringDisney

. . . and notice how they bear more than a passing resemblance to this:

The costumes for the late-70s TV series Space: 1999 share the same aesthetic. Pastel pajamas were once considered to be very futuristic. But the similarity between early-80s Star Trek and early-80s EPCOT didn’t stop with the wardrobe. Compare Horizons’ apartment of the future . . .

. . . with Admiral Kirk’s apartment in a 23rd century San Francisco high-rise:

The Horizons apartment looks a little more futuristic (probably because the EPCOT guys had a bigger budget than the production staff of Star Trek II did) but the similarities are quite strong.

Finally, compare the architecture of Future World (and the view outside the narrators’ apartment in Horizons) to this view of 23rd century San Francisco from Star Trek IV:

Is is just me, or do the geometrically-shaped buildings remind one of Future World?

In June 1984 I saw my first Star Trek film, The Search for Spock. I had only ever seen the television show before then, (usually on my family’s 15-inch black-and-white-TV) so needless to say it make quite an impression on my six-year-old self. Three months later, in September, my first trip to EPCOT Center made an even stronger impression. Their aesthetic similarities made being in Future World feel like a walk though 23rd century San Francisco. Horizons’ scenes of futuristic living seemed to fit in well with the Star Trek movie universe, too. It seemed like I was seeing the stuff that was hidden just beyond the edges of the movie screen. The early ‘80s were an interesting time. Space adventure films were in vogue thanks to the success of Star Wars, and the new Space Shuttle seemed poised to make space travel routine. It was a fantastic treat to be able to see EPCOT Center while its vision of the future was still “current”. I’ll never forget it.

Well, I’m continuing to make little tweaks to the layout here. The background image I’m using is 1600 pixels wide, which may very well be narrower than the horizontal resolution of the monitors many of you are using. So, if you’re seeing white space along the left and right edges of the page, please leave a comment telling me what resolution you’re using, and I’ll try to adjust the background image accordingly.

Yet Another Facelift

2010-07-23T22:52:00.001-04:00

Ever since Blogger unveiled their new Template Designer, I’ve been itching to give this place a facelift. I had some spare time over the last couple days, and now here it is: futureprobe 4.0. This place has already had more rehabs than the Imagination pavilion!

My wife and I will be spending the weekend of July 31-August 1 at Disney World, so the following week I’ll post reviews of Captain EO and the Coral Reef Restaurant, along with pictures of some of the new additions to the World Showcase. As always, thanks for reading!

Huffing and Puffing Around the World

2010-07-14T17:19:00.002-04:00

EPCOT’s World Showcase is delightfully innocuous, a place where you can lightly sample the music, food, and gift shops of other cultures in a mall-like atmosphere. You’re never forced to leave behind the comfortable familiarity of the USA. However, World Showcase does push you out of your American comfort zone in one important way: it makes you walk long distances.

People in other countries do a lot more walking than Americans do. This is true for a variety of reasons. In Europe, for example, just about all of their cities predate the automobile because they wasted many valuable centuries burning heretics and dying of the Black Plague instead of spending those years inventing useful modern conveniences. By way of contrast, the Mayans’ only real vices were human sacrifice and a tendency to worship silly-looking dragon gods, and they were so advanced that they were able to devise a calendar which correctly predicted that people would make a big deal about the year 2012 for no good reason. But I digress.

The point is that people in other countries do a lot more walking than Americans do, because the people who designed their cities in the Middle Ages did not allow for parking places, or because they live in the Third World and no one can afford cars. Also, Americans are big fat lazy slobs. True story: in 1979 my parents encountered some people from Quebec who were mortified that our fast food restaurants had drive-thru windows. “You Americans are so lazy, you can’t even walk inside to get your food!” they exclaimed. And that was thirty-one years ago, when the width of the average American rear end was much less than it is now. I think that explains the animosity some Americans feel toward the French: they are in much better shape than we are. One American probably has the body fat of a dozen French people.

The huge size of the World Showcase, and just how much walking you have to do to get around it, never really registered with me until I started pushing 30. By then, nearly a decade of sitting at a desk all day had caught up with me, physical-fitness-wise, and circumnavigating the World Showcase Lagoon was suddenly a fairly exhausting proposal. It doesn’t help that Florida is often given to hideously uncomfortable weather, so when you’re crossing a big distance on foot, you’re generally walking as fast as you can to get indoors. So what’s the solution? Some form of motorized transport, like a tram that circles the lagoon? Or maybe a PeopleMover on an elevated track?

Honestly, I don’t think either one is a good idea. The walkways in some areas of World Showcase simply aren’t wide enough to accommodate passenger vehicles. And since the park wasn’t designed for a Tomorrowland-style PeopleMover, something like that would just look tacky, ruin the sightlines for IllumniNations, and create new traffic problems when the queue to get into the various stations spilled out onto the sidewalk on busy days. But hey, before we denounce Disney for being cheap for not building some kind of mass transit system into such a large park, maybe we should thank them. After all, World Showcase is home to some of the best restaurants on property where you can fill up on all kinds of food from around the world. How else are you supposed to burn off all those calories?

Imagination: the Rumors Are A-Swirling

2010-07-01T16:29:00.002-04:00

With the return of Captain EO, EPCOT’s Imagination pavilion is once again the subject of rumors. Cast members working at the pavilion have been telling people that Kodak’s 28-year sponsorship is coming to an end, and this rumor is being repeated on more than one message board. Others speculate that Captain EO’s return might refocus attention on this otherwise neglected pavilion, perhaps leading to that long-awaited fourth refurbishment. What’s really happening? I haven’t the slightest idea; as I’ve said in the past I’m not a Disney insider, just a blogger with opinions. That being said, here are my opinions:

Whenever an EPCOT pavilion loses its corporate sponsor, there are always fears that it will close. It happened to Horizons and Wonders of Life, after all. Other pavilions have simply been ignored. After AT&T left Spaceship Earth, for example, the post-show area was left vacant and maintenance was badly neglected. So, will Imagination close if/when Kodak leaves? Personally, I think that the 3-D theater will remain open, but the ride-thru attraction could very well close. It’s not like Dr. Nigel Channing has a devoted fanbase.

However, it must be noted that EPCOT’s busiest pavilion, The Land, is sponsorless, yet it continues to be well-maintained. And lackluster though it was, the fact is that the Seas pavilion was refurbished without a corporate sponsor. Universe of Energy, too, lacks a corporate sponsor yet continues to operate. It even receives regular maintenance (although there appears to be no update on the horizon for its woefully-outdated show). So, it’s not inconceivable that the Imagination pavilion could get its sorely-needed rehab even if Kodak leaves.

However, Disney World is currently in the midst of a huge addition to the Magic Kingdom’s Fantasyland that won’t be completed until around 2013. Over at the Studios, Star Tours is finally getting its first upgrade ever (please no Jar-Jar cameos!) and the rumor mill strongly indicates that a new Monsters Inc.-themed coaster will be moving in next to Toy Story Midway Mania. Where does that leave our poor neglected Imagination pavilion? Who knows? If we do get Imagination 4.0, it probably won’t be until sometime after Fantasyland is finished. Until then, my personal outlook on the situation is decidedly pessimistic.

Nevertheless, I will make this promise: IF Imagination 4.0 is ever officially announced, and IF enough confirmed details about the project emerge to lead me to conclude that it will definitely be a worthy successor to the 1983 original, then I will react to the news something like this:

. . . and the ridiculous scene I make will be recorded and posted on YouTube for all the Internet to see. Of course, I will also link to the video on this blog and on the message boards I frequent.

So there you have it, Team Disney Orlando. Do you want to see me jumping all over the place, hooting and hollering like a fool? Then you’d better get cracking on Imagination 4.0!

Isn’t It About Time Disney Had a Competitor?

2010-06-28T17:22:00.001-04:00

Well, Universal Studios Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter has finally opened, and it really shows what Disney Imagineers can do when they’re given a free hand. It’s just a shame they had to go work for Universal to get it. Kevin Yee’s review was especially effusive about Potter’s centerpiece attraction, a coaster/dark ride called Forbidden Journey that’s unlike anything Disney has right now. One line from his review especially caught my eye: “The ride itself spares no expense.” Spares no expense? You know, there was a time when Disney spared no expense. It wasn’t that they spent money recklessly, but a visitor to the parks or resorts never got the impression that the company was sacrificing customer experience to save a few bucks. That is not the case anymore. Let me cite just one recent example: the return of the Michael Jackson vehicle, Captain EO.

During its first run at the Disney parks, the show had in-theater smoke and laser effects that accentuated the action onscreen. Responding to the rumors last year that EO would be returning, Disney CEO Bob Iger said “It’s the kind of thing that, if we did it, would get a fair amount of attention and we’d want to make sure we do it right.” What happened? You know what happened: Captain EO opened at Disneyland on February 23 without the smoke and the lasers, and there’s no reason to believe they’ll be present at EPCOT or any of the show’s other venues at Disney parks around the world. I’d understand if the show was only going to be around for six months or so (actually, no I wouldn’t. This is Disney, for Pete’s sake, not Six Flags!) but the word is it’s going to be around for one or two years. The in-theater effects may have just been a gimmick, but I’d argue that this twenty four-year-old show needs all the help it can get.

Now, in all fairness things have improved from their late-90s, early-2000s low, when even basic maintenance was obviously being neglected just to save a few bucks. But a basic fact of the business world is that nothing puts the fear of God (or their customers) in a company like some serious competition. Another unfortunate fact is that a company that’s been without competitors for a long time will generally fail to recognize them when they materialize. For a real-world example of that, look no farther than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s initial reaction to the iPhone. He laughingly dismissed it and expressed satisfaction with Microsoft’s current smartphone strategy. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that the iPhone would race past Windows Mobile like it was standing still and three years later Microsoft’s share of the smartphone market would be somewhere close to zero.

That’s why I’m worried about Disney. Florida’s Magic Kingdom has long been the most-visited theme park in the world, and the Walt Disney World Resort is Florida’s most popular vacation destination. Judging by Team Disney Orlando’s disinterest in making substantive improvements to the property, it seems obvious that they can’t imagine things any other way. On the WDWMagic forums not too long ago, Disney videographer extraordinaire Martin Smith listed just a few projects that the Orlando executive team has vetoed in the last three years:

Imagination 4
Space Mountain 2.0 (ostensibly with onboard audio, like the Disneyland version)
a World Showcase project
an Illuminations replacement called Skydance
a “Lucasland” area at Disney’s Hollywood Studios
a new attraction at Animal Kingdom

Why were these projects vetoed? From what people in the know are saying (and let me emphasize that I am not one of those people) the executive train of thought goes something like this: “Walt Disney World’s parks are some of the most visited in the world, so why should we try to improve anything when we can just spend the money on executive bonuses instead?”

“Ah, but what about the Fantasyland expansion project now underway about the Magic Kingdom?”, you ask. A lot of people may disagree with me on this, but the Fantasyland project is not Disney’s response to Harry Potter. It’s a response to the fact that on the busiest days of the year, the Magic Kingdom reaches its maximum capacity and is forced to turn away customers eager to enter the park and spend money there. Don’t believe me? Consider this: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter didn’t take anyone by surprise; it was years in the making. Disney had plenty of time to ready up a slate of offerings to compete with it. And what did we get for this, the Summer of Potter? Captain EO and the Main Street Electrical Parade! Zip-a-dee-frakking-doo-dah. (Pardon my Caprican)

The best thing that could happen to Disney right now is for The Wizarding World of Harry Potter to be such a huge hit that Universal is inspired to bring the rest of their parks up to that same level of quality. Hopefully, Universal sees Disney’s complacency and smells blood in the water. If they could start to steal visitors from Disney, to the point where the parks actually see attendance decline, maybe that would bite Team Disney Orlando in its most sensitive spot: right in the executive bonus. Maybe then they’d turn the Imagineers loose to make some of that old-school Disney magic.

Fear and Nausea: Now THAT’S Entertainment!

2010-06-18T16:18:00.001-04:00

As I was being turned upside down at sixty miles per hour, I understood why EPCOT Center was never as popular as it should have been.

Perhaps I should explain that.

I have a longstanding phobia of roller coasters and coaster-like thrill rides. I’m okay with simulators; Mission:Space or Star Tours give me no problems. I just can’t handle steep drops, barrel rolls, hairpin turns, and inversions. Nevertheless, everyone’s always saying how much fun these rides are, and how they or someone they know used to feel the way I do, but then they rode <insert coaster name here> and now they can’t get enough of them. And so I bowed to peer (and spousal) pressure, screwed up my courage, and climbed aboard Rockin’ Roller Coaster at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. As the ride took off at sixty miles per hour and sent me though a dizzying array of turns and inversions, I realized that rides like this are specifically designed to trigger your brain’s automatic fear and nausea circuits. I couldn’t just relax and enjoy the ride because the ride doesn’t let you relax. And this is what people consider to be fun. Heck, I could’ve experienced the same level of enjoyment by standing on my head and sticking my finger down my throat. And that, my friends, is why we don’t have EPCOT Center any more.

You see, EPCOT Center’s designers thought that the general public wanted Animatronic dark rides and CircleVision films. It’s easy to understand why they thought so; the dark rides and CircleVision film attractions at the Magic Kingdoms in Anaheim and Orlando were consistently popular with park visitors (although I admit that I don’t get the CircleVision thing. Who wants to stand in line just to go into another room and stand some more?) But unlike Pirates of the Caribbean or the Haunted Mansion, EPCOT’s attractions had a more scholarly tone. Aside from Journey Into Imagination and World of Motion, there was no fluffy escapist fare. EPCOT Center was designed to engage your brain on a higher level. And judging by the general public’s disdain for EPCOT Center, and its corresponding love for rides like Rockin’ Roller Coaster, it’s safe to say that people don’t want their brains engaged on any higher level. They want them engaged on the level that makes them sorry they had lunch at Pizza Planet.

It’s a point of view that I acknowledge. Just don't ask me to understand it.

Well, my business trip to Orlando at the end of the month has been canceled. However, my wife and I will be heading down there at the end of July to check out the Summer Nightastic festivities. We’ll be there long enough to squeeze in a visit to EPCOT, so I should have some pictures for you and a review of the Coral Reef Restaurant. Thanks for reading!

Thoughts on Star Wars Weekends

2010-06-09T12:16:00.001-04:00

This past Saturday (June 5) my wife, her brother, and I headed down to Disney’s Hollywood Studios to experience Star Wars Weekends for the first time. Despite the heat, humidity, and crowds, it was an unqualified blast! The best thing about Star Wars Weekends is the wonderful sense of humor the event has.

The fun starts about fifteen minutes prior to park opening when two Stormtroopers appear atop the turnstile plaza and entertain the crowd with their humorous banter. This year, they were joined by Boba Fett:

Throughout the park, there are several Star Wars characters doing meet-and-greets. Some, like Darth Vader and Chewbacca, have designated greeting areas. Others, like Stormtroopers, Tusken Raiders, and Gamorrean Guards, roam freely.

Here’s a picture of my brother-in-law and I with a Stormtrooper:

And here’s a Tusken Raider clowning around Darth Vader’s greeting area while the Dark Lord was on a 5-minute break:

One cool thing about Star Wars Weekends is the fans in costume. Usually, Disney prohibits guests from wearing costumes in the parks, but this policy is relaxed for certain events. We saw several people in very authentic-looking Jedi costumes, one guy in an excellent Lando Calrissian outfit, and someone dressed as Han Solo from The Empire Strikes Back, complete with the late-70s/early-80s hairstyle!

There was also a rather large gentleman I saw sitting on a bench, wearing a white T-shirt, white shorts, and a Clone Trooper helmet. You know how Stormtroopers have different outfits for different environments? There are sandtroopers and snowtrooopers and swamptroopers and even spacetroopers. Well, this guy must have been dressed as a Floridatrooper. You’ve got to admit,the T-shirt and shorts are way more practical than that hot plastic armor! And yes, I do have a picture of him, but to avoid seeming mean-spirited I’m not going to post it.

One feature of Star Wars Weekends that’s become a regular thing at the Studios is the Jedi Training Academy for kids:

I wish the photo op portion of the show was available for adults; I imagine there are lots of guys in their 30s and above who would love to get a picture of themselves crossing lightsabers with Darth Vader. I know I would!

The highlight of Star Wars Weekends, though is the Hyperspace Hoopla show that closes out each day:

It is, in my opinion, one of the best shows at Disney World. Hyperspace Hoopla’s only problem is that not a lot of people are able to watch it in its current venue. The stage is not that far off the ground, so anyone farther back than about three people deep has trouble seeing. The terrace of the adjacent Backlot Express restaurant is a good place to watch from (that’s where we ended up) but again, there’s not a lot of room there. I really hope that the upcoming Star Tours 2.0 refurb addresses this. Alternately, the show could just be moved to one of several locations in the park that are better suited to handling the large crowds that Hyperspace Hoopla always draws.

So, my final verdict: despite the crowds and the Florida heat and humidity, Star Wars Weekends are a can’t-miss event.

One other thing: I may have mentioned in the past that I’m not a big fan of thrill rides, especially roller coasters. My phobia of coasters is matched only by my phobia of large spiders. However, at the urging of my wife and several friends, I decided to take the plunge and ride Rockin’ Roller Coaster. After all, it only lasts one minute and five seconds, how bad could it be? Well, here’s a picture of me after the ride was over.

I’m not vomiting, I’m kissing the ground. More accurately, I’m pretending to kiss the ground for comedic effect. No, roller coasters still do not agree with me. Still, the experience got me thinking about the popularity of thrill rides, what people consider to be entertaining, and how that relates to EPCOT, so that will be a subject of a future post.

Lastly, in three weeks, I’ll be spending three days in Orlando on business, and after trashing the Coral Reef Restaurant a couple of times on this blog, I thought it only fair that I at least eat there one time to ~~see if it really sucks as bad as I think it does~~ give it a fair shake. Hey, I survived Rockin’ Roller Coaster didn’t I? I feel brave. So I made a dinner reservation there, and I’ll be writing about that experience, too. It’ll be my first-ever restaurant review.

Until then, happy trails and thanks for reading!

Here’s What’s Coming Up Next:

2010-06-03T17:27:00.001-04:00

On Saturday, June 5 I’ll be at Disney’s Hollywood Studios for Star Wars Weekends, and next week I’ll post pictures and a review of the experience.

Next, if all goes according to plan, my Clark Kent job will be sending me to Orlando for three days at the end of the month for training on a new software package my team will shortly become responsible for managing. Class is from 8-5, which leaves me free to head to the parks during the evening. I plan on spending one evening at the Magic Kingdom to witness the recently-returned Main Street Electrical Parade and the new Summer Nightastic fireworks show, and the next evening I’ve made myself a reservation at EPCOT’s Coral Reef Restaurant. I’ve been pretty hard on the place in the past, so I figure I really should have a meal there and provide y’all with a firsthand account of it.

Thanks for staying tuned.

Why EPCOT Matters To Me

2010-05-24T18:03:00.001-04:00

I’ve been trying to write this post for quite a while. I apologize in advance if it seems to be overly long or rambling.

<ramble> If you’ve read some of my posts here, you probably figure that I indulge in nostalgic mourning for lost attractions as I walk through EPCOT, and to a certain extent that’s true. But EPCOT represents something more to me than just cool rides and an appealing futuristic philosophy, something that was weighing very heavily on my mind two weekends ago, when I saw my grandfather for what will probably be the last time.

We’ve always had a special relationship; I’m the firstborn grandchild, and I’m named after him. Upon my first trip to EPCOT in 1984 at age 6, I quickly fell in love with the place, and as soon as my grandfather found out he bought me my first copy of the definitive EPCOT Center book: Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow.

During a family trip to Plant City in the fall of 1986, he decided to stop off at EPCOT on the way home (home, by the way, was three hours to the north in Lake City, so it was no small detour). My parents weren’t in favor of the EPCOT visit (after all, my brother was barely a year old at that point, and dealing with a cranky and tired baby at a crowded theme park isn’t exactly fun), but he wanted to go, and he knew that I wanted to go, and so we went. 1986, of course, was the year The Living Seas opened, and even though the line to get in stretched almost to the monorail track, we waited in it, and were rewarded with a fascinating trip under the sea. I was a little mystified as to why the pavilion I visited didn’t line up with its description in my EPCOT Center book (answer: that description was based on WED’s original concept for the pavilion, which sponsor United Technologies vetoed in favor of the cheaper pavilion we ended up getting), but even so the Living Seas was the coolest thing 8-year-old me had ever seen. I actually believed the Hydrolators took you under the water, and that the Seabase was inside the massive saltwater tank, surrounded by water.

Three years later, in the summer of ‘89, he took me on perhaps my best EPCOT trip ever. Wonders of Life was brand new then, as was the World Showcase’s Norway pavilion. We did everything I had always wanted to do at EPCOT. It was the last time I saw the original Universe of Energy, World of Motion, Earth Station, and CommuniCore. In retrospect, 1989 was probably EPCOT Center’s best year. Three new pavilions had been opened in the previous three years, and the “older” attractions still looked new and cutting-edge. The future looked bright. Without my grandfather, my only trip before the place got Eisnered in the mid-90s would have been that half-day in 1984.

In the Magic Kingdom, they’ve done a pretty good job of making changes without totally destroying the place I remember from my childhood. EPCOT, though, is where some of my fondest memories live. Sure, it was always meant to change with the times, but that change was supposed to be positive. Too often, however, EPCOT’s changes have been motivated by managerial cluelessness and an overriding desire to be as cheap as possible. If the Magic Kingdom is meant to be a place of eternal childhood innocence, then EPCOT is adulthood distilled; its journey from the late-80s to the 2010s mirrors the one most of us take from youth to adulthood, a journey that begins with grand ambitions and limitless possibilities but becomes a series of compromises until we reach the point where we’re happy if we can just keep our head above water most of the time.

I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

I wish that there were more than just glimpses of the old EPCOT Center underneath all the layers of cost-cutting and ill-advised attempts to be hip, so I could go there and maybe, just maybe, recapture a little bit of what life used to be before my treasured older family members began to die off, back when “If we can dream it, then we can do it” was a promise for the future instead of a relic of the past. </ramble>

According to the widget on the right-hand side of the page, futureprobe now has 30 followers! I’m impressed; I never really tried to have an audience; this blog was just supposed to be a place for me to write about things that were meaningful to me. Thank you one and all for reading. As a native Floridian, I’ve long maintained that only a fool would willingly head down to Disney World during the summer months. With that in mind, I’ll be in the Studios on June 5 for Star Wars Weekends. The weather promises to be unbearably hot and humid, and I’m sure that there will be an hourlong wait for everything, including the bathrooms. Still, at some point in my life I’d love to have my picture taken with Darth Vader and tell him that I’m a big fan of his brother Chad (Google “Chad Vader” if you don’t know what I’m talking about), and this looks to be my best opportunity. So I am going to willingly subject myself to ridiculous heat and ridiculous crowds at Disney’s smallest Florida park. I’ll try to have pictures and a full report within a few days after my trip.

Thanks for reading!

The Carousel of Progress: Should It Move Forward or Stand Still?

2010-04-27T18:09:00.001-04:00

One of the main criticisms leveled at Walt Disney World management by people like me is that they’re too quick to discard much-loved older attractions in favor of things that are more “thrilling”, cheaper to operate, or that tie in better to whatever licensed characters the Company is currently trying to market. In light of this climate, it’s truly amazing that the Carousel of Progress is still operating.

The Carousel premiered at the 1964 World’s Fair, and by all accounts it was one of Walt Disney’s favorite shows. Its four scenes showed the impact of electricity and electrical devices on the American family in twenty-year increments, starting in the 1900s and ending in an idealized version of the 1960s, with the family enjoying technologies that were supposed to be right around the corner. In 1975, the show made its home on the southeast corner of Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland in Florida, featuring a new theme song “Now is the Time” and a slightly updated closing scene depicting an idealized home of the 1970s. The Carousel was updated a few more times over the years (most notably in 1985 to remove all references to GE after that company ended its sponsorship) but it received its biggest overhaul in 1993, as part of the “New Tomorrowland” rehab. The original theme song, “Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” was restored, the show was renamed “Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress”, and an introductory video was added to the queue area to emphasize the show’s connection to Walt and the 1964 World’s Fair. Also, the final scene was tweaked yet again to show the family enjoying virtual reality video games and accidentally burning their Christmas turkey in a voice-controlled oven. None of the featured technology looked to hit the mainstream for another decade at least. The scene could easily remain in place for six to eight years without looking dated. Or so it seemed.

Experience 1999 in 2010 the way we imagined it in 1993

Unfortunately, as early as 1995 the “present-day” Carousel family was beginning their slide toward obsolescence. Why? Because the creators of the ‘93 show failed to account for the Internet revolution. To be fair, in 1993 the Internet was not much of a blip on anyone’s radar. According to technology pundits at the time, virtual reality and CD-ROM were the Next Big Things. And since the show had received at least one update during each decade of its operation, it was reasonable to assume that by 2003 or so, the Carousel would be tweaked again to keep up with the times.

Seventeen years later, we’re still waiting. And each time the “modern-day” daughter character remarks to the grandfather that people of his day “didn’t even have car phones”, you can be sure that at least one kid will tug on his mom’s sleeve and whisper “Mommy, what’s a car phone?”

Also, how crazy is it that the son and the grandmother are playing their video game with Power Gloves?

Sorry, but I just had to work the Power Glove joke in there.

Seriously, though, something needs to happen with the Carousel. And I don’t mean simply updating the final scene again to reflect the world of 2010. Consider: the original show showed us the innovations of the 20th century in twenty-year intervals, starting at the turn of the century and ending in the ‘60s. If you reset the final scene to the modern day, then you’ll have a show that takes three twenty-year jumps forward followed by one huge fifty-year jump. And that’s just silly.

The original Carousel was a look back at a period of time that was still fairly fresh in everyone’s memory. In order for the show to resonate with modern audiences in the same way, you’d have to overhaul the entire thing. The first scene would be set in 1950s, the second in the 1970s, the third in the 1990s before we arrived at the 2010s. However, keeping it fresh and relevant would necessitate a big upgrade every ten years in which the “oldest” scene would be discarded and a new final scene set in the current decade would have to be designed and built. Given that Team Disney Orlando is extremely reluctant to spend any kind of money at all on the Florida theme parks unless it comes from a corporate sponsor (TDO did not want to embark upon the costly Fantasyland expansion project; they had to be ordered to do it by Corporate headquarters in Burbank) I can’t imagine they’d actually do this. Which leaves us with only one other option:

Since it’s already called “Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress”, why not just restore the final scene of the show to what it was in 1964? I mean, the first three scenes are almost exactly as they were in ‘64 (minus the General Electric references) so you might as well be consistent. Sure, it means turning the show into a museum piece, but really that’s all it is anyway. Currently, it’s caught in the awkward position of trying to pretend it’s still up-to-date even though everyone knows it’s not. If they restore it to its 1964 incarnation, it’ll become the kind of attraction Team Disney Orlando likes best: the kind that requires only periodic maintenance. Disney could promote it with some kind of a “you won’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been” theme.

Sure, it might seem incongruous to have an attraction devoted to the past in a place called “Tomorrowland”, but since the rest of the land is devoted to cartoon characters, gasoline-powered go-carts, and a roller coaster that hasn’t changed much since the ‘70s, the 1964 Carousel really wouldn’t be so out-of-place.

What do you think?

Project Gemini: The Bullet We Dodged (or did we?)

2010-04-12T13:03:00.001-04:00

Every WED-Head worth his or her salt knows that the Disney archives are full of amazingly cool projects that, for one reason or another, never saw the light of day: WestCOT, Port Disney, Beastly Kingdom, Equatorial Africa, the Rhine River Cruise, the 1994 Horizons rehab proposal, and others too numerous to mention. Every few years, someone will write an article on one of these projects and how it almost happened, and we’ll all sigh and reflect upon the cruel twists of fate that robbed us of an experience that would have been cooler than an Optimus Prime-Mr. T-Batman team-up movie.

This is not one of those articles.

In February 2003, everyone’s favorite professional Conveyor of Rumors That Are Best Taken With A Grain of Salt, Jim Hill, reported on an ambitious project to totally remake EPCOT’s Future World into a tree-filled “Discoveryland” by 2006. And when I say “ambitious”, I mean “completely insane”. But don’t take my word for it, see for yourself:

Click the picture for a larger version

You can read the article (link is here) but I’ll hit the high points. For starters, Future World would have been renamed “Discoveryland”, thus relieving Disney of any pressure to keep this part of EPCOT futuristic. Spaceship Earth (dismissed in the article as a “herky-jerky . . . ride past sleeping monks and smoking ruins”) was to have been gutted and replaced by a Microsoft-sponsored Thrill-ride called Time Racers. For some reason, though, the post-show would supposedly have retained its Global Neighborhood theme from the AT&T days, despite the fact that AT&T would no longer sponsor the pavilion. Maybe this is because Project Gemini never progressed past the early planning stages, and WDI never gave any thought to what kind of post-show Time Racers would actually have, or maybe it’s proof that the whole “Project Gemini” concept was a fabrication. I honestly don’t know.

Wonders of Life was pegged for some kind of replacement, and a “Junior Autopia” would have been constructed in front of Test Track to cater to kids too young for that attraction. The area in front of The Land would become home to a “Rainforest Rollercoaster” which would take you on a “fast, fun, and informative trip through the canopy of a simulated rainforest”. How one would go about designing an educational roller-coaster, I don’t know. Maybe it would’ve had an onboard audio track where the Micro Machine Man rattled off facts about the rainforest while you tried not to lose your lunch.

The only thing the article got right was the addition of Soarin’. The Project Gemini concept placed its show building on the north side of the Land pavilion, between it and The Seas. However, Soarin’ was to have gotten a new film for its Florida debut. We all know what happened to that. And, as I’ve discussed in the past, The Living Seas would still have gotten a cartoon makeover, but it would have been themed around The Little Mermaid instead of Finding Nemo.

The CommuniCore/Innoventions area would also have been dramatically changed. The twin CommuniCore buildings would have been split up into six smaller structures. The east side would have housed “Leading Edge”, where you could see the “latest and greatest scientific breakthroughs” (a scale model of the Large Hadron Collider, maybe?), “Robot Restaurant” (a re-theme of the Electric Umbrella) and the “Future Mart” (because they must have thought Mouse Gear needed a stupider name.) The buildings on the west side would have included “Cool Stuff” a kind of mini-Consumer Electronics Show (which, interestingly, is how Innoventions was initially marketed), and-hold onto your hat-an Internet cafe. Given the fact that even McDonalds has free wi-fi these days, that seems like a pretty stupid idea. But I’ve saved the best part for last, because the alleged proposal for the sixth building in the former Innoventions complex manages to combine an EPCOT rumor that turned out not to be true (Project Gemini) with a Magic Kingdom rumor that also turned out not to be true. It’s the Home Of The Future, which would have utilized some of the Animatronics from Tomorrowland’s Carousel of Progress (which was rumored to be closing). Finally, the look of Future World (or Discoveryland) was to have been totally altered by the dozens and dozens of trees that would have been planted everywhere. That’s not a bad idea in itself, as EPCOT can be a pretty brutal place during those unfathomably hot Florida summers, but it would have totally ruined the clean, open aesthetic that Future World has always had.

So, after detailing the changes that Project Gemini was sure to bring to EPCOT and encouraging his readers to stock up on Future World merchandise because the whole “Discoveryland” thing was totally, for sure, going to happen, at the end of the article Mr. Hill does some pretty serious backtracking. He says that, as of early 2003 the U.S. economy is “in the toilet” (today’s economy must be in the septic tank, I guess) and that any major plans would likely be postponed until after the Iraq War was over (ha!) and things got back to “normal” (ha ha!). Finally, he allowed that the whole project would probably cost over $500 million, and most likely only a scaled-down version of it would actually happen. At least he was right about that part.

The only part of the whole “Project Gemini” hooey that actually came to fruition was the addition of Soarin’. And, rather than getting a new film, Disney elected to save money by using the existing one from California. Sure, Future World has seen some changes since 2003: Spaceship Earth and The Seas were overhauled, and the Wonders of Life closed down without ever becoming the site of any “future expansion”. None of those changes were made according to any overriding plan, however, they all seem to have happened independently of each other.

Project Gemini had two main goals: make EPCOT more exciting to the under-18 crowd, and free the park’s northern sector of the expectation that it should be futuristic. On both those counts, Disney seems to have succeeded. Soarin’ and Test Track are considered must-visit attractions, and people (especially the under-18 crowd) will literally stand in line for as long as it takes to ride them. 100-minute wait times are not uncommon. The Seas With Nemo appeals to the little kids, even if it makes my head hurt. Finally, although Future World still technically retains the name it’s had since 1982, Disney’s promotional materials usually describe EPCOT as a “discovery park”. The futuristic aspect, which used to be extremely prominent, is now barely mentioned.

The way things are today, I really don’t think that a sweeping re-do of Future World is still needed. Honestly, if they’d just take down the tarps in Communicore plaza and fix the Imagination pavilion, I’d be happy.

EPCOT Center, 1993

2010-04-09T18:03:00.001-04:00

A couple weeks ago, Progress City USA posted Disney’s 1993 vacation planning video. This is significant because 1993 was the last “normal” year before the parks (especially the Magic Kingdom and EPCOT) began their mid-90s metamorphosis into what they are today. I highly encourage you to head over there and check out the whole thing (click here) but I wanted to comment on the section of the video devoted to EPCOT Center:

First of all, it’s interesting that the World Showcase has barely changed at all. Other than El Rio De Tiempo becoming the Gran Fiesta Tour, EPCOT’s southern half is pretty much exactly as the video describes it.

The Future World portion of the video, though, is what really makes you realize how much has changed. What blows me away is how much more there was to do at Future World in 1994 compared to today. Part of it, of course, is that Wonders of Life is now closed, and it housed two large attractions (Body Wars and Cranium Command) and several smaller shows and exhibits. But what about the existing pavilions? Horizons, World of Motion, and Journey Into Imagination were all replaced with rides that are significantly shorter. Soarin’ is also less than half the length of the Kitchen Kaberet/Food Rocks show that it replaced. So, even if you remove Wonders of Life from the equation, the fact remains that today’s EPCOT visitor spends less time actually experiencing attractions than they would have in 1993 simply because the rides are shorter.

In an article about Horizons that I read recently, one of the factors in the decision to close and demolish it was said to be that the current generation of theme park visitors gets bored during fifteen-minute dark rides. Is that true, I wonder? Have our attention spans shrunk over the past fifteen years or so, so that anything other than a five-minute thrill ride is incapable of holding our attention?

I encourage you to tell me what you think in the comments.

By the way, if you look at the right side of the page, you may notice that I’ve added lots more tags. Hopefully, they’ll make it easier to find the posts that interest you.

How Surreal!

2010-04-06T16:50:00.001-04:00

Recently I was reading a thread on the WDWMagic boards about the possibility of Captain EO returning to EPCOT in light of its success at Disneyland. Predictably, someone said “why not just bring Magic Journeys back?” and the folks who replied all expressed the belief that Magic Journeys was too surreal and unorthodox a show for today’s Disney. And they were probably right.

It was not always that way, though. And I’m not just referring to the 1980s and early 1990s, when the Disney theme parks were at their creative peak. Much earlier, during Walt’s lifetime, Disney was not afraid to do things that were surrealistic and downright weird. Fantasia is by far the most prominent example, but my favorite instance of surrealistic strangeness by the Walt Disney Company occurs during 1968’s Winnie The Pooh and the Blustery Day (Walt was involved with “Blustery Day’s” production, even though it wasn’t released until after his death). It starts out as a perfectly normal A.A. Milne-flavored little story, with Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore and long winded speeches from Owl, and then without warning it drops some acid:

The “Heffalumps and Woozles” number is so completely unlike the rest of the Pooh shorts, and such a huge departure from the source material, that it must have been a pretty big risk to take. One certainly can’t imagine today’s Disney, the international multimedia conglomerate, putting a psychedelic acid trip into a kid’s movie about English stuffed animals. And that’s kind of a shame, because
“Heffalumps and Woozles” is awesome.

And that brings us back to the Magic Eye theater. According to Martin Smith (who is never wrong) one of the proposals to revitalize Journey Into Imagination involves extending the ride-thru attraction into the space the theater now occupies. If that does not happen, however, and Disney decides instead to restore the original ride track (half of it is still there, after all, as part of the current ride) then the theater would still be there, and still stuck in the 20th century.

Seriously, fix this

So, if there’s a future for Disney World’s first 3D theater, what kind of production should it house once Honey, I Shrunk The Audience is put out of its misery? Well, let me say that I’m not in favor of simply resurrecting an old show. And I really don’t want to see a rehash of the “A routine performance/scientific demonstration goes comically awry” plot that every single 3D film at Disney World currently employs. What I would like to see is a film that uses the power of 3D coupled with modern filmmaking techniques to take us on an exhilarating, dreamlike trip into our imaginations. If the presence of licensed characters is deemed to be absolutely necessary (and these days it seems that Disney doesn’t go to the john without the presence of licensed characters) then why not use the pavilion’s mascots, Dreamfinder and Figment? And if it’s a little strange, a little psychedelic, a little surreal, then that much the better.

Finally, speaking of things that are surreal, I can’t believe that futureprobe has 20-count ‘em-20 followers! According to my spinning globey-thing on the right side of the page, I’ve had visitors from five continents, including Sao Paulo, Brazil; Oslo, Norway; Dharan, Saudi Arabia; Hornsby, Australia, and many places in the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe and Asia. Thanks so much for reading and commenting! And if you surfed here accidentally looking for pornography, then I’m truly sorry. How you could fail at finding porn on the Internet is beyond me.

The weather is warming up here in Florida after our record-breaking Antarctic winter, and I’ll try to get down to EPCOT one more time before it gets too hot for outdoor activity. Hopefully, I can bring you a report on my experience on The Sum of All Thrills at Innoventions, and I will try to put aside my thrill-ride chickenhood long enough to finally ride Test Track.

Mrs. Future Guy and I will be celebrating our wedding anniversary during this year’s Food and Wine Festival at EPCOT, and hopefully I’ll be able to get down there around that time to experience the World Showcase’s new Mexican and Italian restaurants, assuming they open on time, and get some pictures and reviews for you.

Until next time!

EPCOT Center Is Still There (You Just Have To Know Where To Look)

2010-03-30T13:08:00.001-04:00

One of EPCOT Center’s coolest little details was the circular logos that represented each Future World pavilion. They slowly disappeared during the 1990s and 2000s as pavilions were refurbished and updated, but there are still two places in Future World where you can see them, not counting the retro EPCOT merchandise in Mouse Gear.

The first one can be seen just inside the entrance to the Energy pavilion, where the old Universe of Energy logo is still incorporated into the colorful mosaic that decorates the foyer.

The second place is inside The Land, where the pavilion’s old logo still decorates the FastPass machines near the Living With The Land queue area.

This same logo also decorates the right shoulder of the uniforms for the Cast Members who work in the pavilion.

Most EPCOT visitors don’t notice little details like this, and while their presence may not seriously impact anyone’s enjoyment of the park, it’s heartwarming to see them all the same.

Oh, to be at EPCOT now that Spring is here . . .

2010-03-24T11:05:00.001-04:00

The EPCOT Flower and Garden Festival is in full swing, so my wife and I headed down there last weekend. I thought I’d share some pictures I took while we were there, and for your enjoyment, you can click on each picture to see a larger version.

For an EPCOT Center geek like me the best thing about these special events is that the former Wonders of Life pavilion is open. The attractions are long gone, even their signage has been removed, but you can still see small glimpses of the way the pavilion used to be.

One of the best things that’s happened at EPCOT in the last year or so has been the restoration of the Universe of Energy pavilion to it’s original color scheme. Sadly, it still houses a show only 90’s Kid could love, but at least the pastel rainbow is no more.

Now for some actual Flower and Garden-related stuff. The area behind Innoventions West has been given a nice flower arrangement that features dolphins, stars, and a giant Mickey head.

I took those pictures from the bridge that links the Innoventions area to the Odyssey pavilion, known to today’s EPCOT visitors as a good place to go to the bathroom. Naturally, I couldn’t resist snapping a few pictures of this relic of EPCOT Center.

The bridge between Innoventions and the Odyssey is also a good place to get a picture of Test Track that allows you to imagine you’re really looking at World of Motion, because of the way that the trees almost obscure the ride track that wraps around the building.

As we walked around the World Showcase, we stopped between France and the UK to snap a picture across the lagoon. You can see the Characters in Flight balloon from Downtown Disney peeking over the treetops.

Next, my wife wanted to get some pictures of the fountains in front of the Imagination pavilion’s Magic Eye Theater. Other than the iconic glass pyramids, I believe that the fountains are the only feature of the Imagination pavilion that hasn’t been completely ruined by vicious cost-cutting and the desire to promote a lackluster film franchise nobody remembers or cares about. Of course, now that I’ve said that Team Disney Orlando will probably raze the fountains and replace them with a Dr. Nigel Channing statue.

My wife insisted that I sit in front of one of the jumping fountains so she could get a picture of the water jumping over my head, resulting in the only picture of me that I will ever post here. I’m sorry you have to see this.

Next, we relaxed on the Living With The Land boat ride (after a 20 minute wait; the park was very crowded that day!) and my wife took pictures of various Mickey-shaped things along the way.

By this point in the day, we were sunburnt and fatigued, so we decided to call it a day. I paused in Innoventions plaza to take this picture:

I included this picture for two reasons:

To illustrate how extremely crowded EPCOT was that day
So I could say “Mr Iger, TEAR DOWN THESE TARPS!”

My wife ducked into Mouse Gear to shop a little before we left, and I got this picture of the corpse of Dreamfinder’s Dreammobile.

As we headed for the exit, I pasued one last time to take this image of the giraffe topiary outside Project Tomorrow.

There were many, many other Disney character topiaries scattered throughout Future World and the World Showcase, but it was impossible to get a good shot of them because because of how crowded it was. However, I’m sure that there are some very nice pictures of them elsewhere on the Internet, taken by photographers much more capable than myself.

I hope you enjoyed this little pictorial. Thanks for reading!