The End of the Space Shuttle

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.

Horizons, Simulated

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.

Horizons Resurrected

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/

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

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.

January 28, 1986

Twenty-four years ago today, a senseless and preventable accident claimed the lives of of seven brilliant and brave human beings. The loss of Dick Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe are the most tragic result of the Challenger disaster, and we must never lose sight of that.

But something else died that day with the Challenger and her crew and even as an impressionable seven-year-old I sensed it. Ever since it became clear that manned spaceflight would one day be possible, futurists and science fiction writers delighted us with tales of a time when a trip into space was every bit as routine as a ride in a Chevy. And on that clear day in January 1986, it seemed as though those dreams were finally starting to come true. Regular, uneventful shuttle flights had certainly given us the idea that spaceflight had become a routine endeavor, and the inclusion of a high school teacher on a space mission seemed like a logical development. One day soon, I thought, anyone might be able to take a ride on the Space Shuttle!

This idea was not limited to my seven-year-old brain, however. Take a look at this scene from EPCOT Center’s Horizons:

What’s that vehicle delivering that 21st century family to their new home on the Brava Centuari space station? It’s the Space Shuttle! Very little of Horizons was grounded in the “now”. The places the characters lived, the technology they used, even the clothes they wore bore more resemblance to the Star Trek films of the 1980s than they did to anything in the real world. The Space Shuttle (seen in the scene above and also in the background of another space scene) was the only piece of the Horizons future that we had right now, and its very existence (and successful, routine operation) was an assurance that space colonies and floating cities lay not too far off.

Those dreams evaporated at 11:38 AM on January 28, 1986. We found out the hard way that launching a manned vehicle into orbit is not (and may never be) as relatively safe and easy as flying a jetliner from New York to Los Angeles. The accident exposed longstanding flaws in the way NASA went about its business, and shattered any ideas we may have had about the possibility of living in large space colonies by the turn of the twenty-first century. Worst of all, seven families lost sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, moms, dads, husbands, and wives.

Today we have a more sober, pragmatic view of human spaceflight. The loss of the Columbia in 2003 reminded us that anything can go wrong at any time on a space mission, and the astronauts aren’t really safe until they’re standing on terra firma. The shuttle program is scheduled to end this year, and the International Space Station may be abandoned and deorbited by 2016. There were not, as the Horizons narration suggested, all kinds of valuable resources floating around in near-Earth orbit waiting for us to exploit them. The moon seems to be devoid of any resources that would be worth our while to figure out how to mine, and the asteroids in the belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter would have to be full of cancer-curing magic beans for us to even begin investigating how we might go about mining them.

The fact is that in every life there are hardships and tragedies that force us to let go of childish ideas we once had and grow up. It’s no fun, but that’s the way it is. For my generation, the Challenger disaster was one of those tragedies.

Artificial oranges vs. the real thing

I have a terrible confession to make: you know the orangey scent from the desert farm scene in Horizons, the one that people talk about as though it were some kind of olfactory orgasm? I don’t remember it. I made four trips to EPCOT during Horizons’ lifetime, and it was my favorite Disney attraction of all time, but the orange scent just never made that much of an impression on me. And anyway, the Horizons orange grove wasn’t the best-smelling place in EPCOT. That distinction belongs to The Land.

I’m completely serious here. When I walked through the doors of The Land a month ago, the first thing I noticed was how good it smelled in there, thanks to the two excellent eateries (the Seasons Food Court and the Garden Grill) at the east and west ends of the pavilion. Of course, the Garden Grill is one of EPCOT’s two character dining locations, so it’d be popular even if it didn’t serve excellent food. But the Seasons has become so popular that the beautiful fountain on the pavilion’s bottom level was removed to make way for more seating. Sure, some of that popularity can be attributed to the fact that it’s right next to Future World’s busiest attraction, Soarin’. But it also provides a nice alternative to the greasy fast-food fare that most counter service places at Disney World offer, and I have to believe that’s a factor, as well.

However, if you’re not hungry by the time you board your boat for the Living With The Land ride, then you definitely will be once you hit the greenhouses. Forget artificial scents, the downright tasty smell of the very real edibles in The Land’s greenhouses fills you with an almost irresistible urge to hit the Seasons or the Garden Grill once the ride is over. (Good luck getting into the Garden Grill without reservations, though) Sure, Living With The Land is educational, fascinating, and increasingly relevant, but it also deserves credit for its ability to make even the most devoted carnivores (like me) want to eat their vegetables.

And that’s no small accomplishment.

Two Birds With One Stone (or how to get Horizons back, sort of)

There's a lot of love for Horizons out there, and no shortage of ideas on how to bring it back. Some folks advocate a new Horizons pavilion between The Land and The Seas With Nemo and His Computer-Generated Friends. Others point out that the former Wonders of Life pavilion is sufficiently large, and since it's sitting vacant a new Horizons ride would be a good fit there. A couple weeks ago, a person on one of the message boards I frequent suggested a Horizons-themed eatery be installed in the Odyssey building, with different rooms themed to the various futures presented during the course of the ride (Jules Verne's future, the Neon City future from the '50s, etc.) and I got to thinking: what about converting the Wonders of Life into a huge, immersive Horizons restaurant?


It could be divided into exquisitely-themed areas representing the different "future" environments seen on the ride. You'd check in at the with the maitre'd in the FuturePort, and from there you'd be escorted to your table in one of the restaurant's three main areas: the Nova Cite Concourse, the Mesa Verde Terrace, or the Brava Centuari RefreshmentPort. Utilizing either high-definition or (ideally) glasses-free stereoscopic 3D screens, each area would offer an expansive view of the environment "outside", be it Nova Cite's bustling futuristic metropolis, Mesa Verde's desert oasis (with just the subtlest hint of orangey scent) or the magnificent vista outside the viewport of the Earth-orbiting Brava Centuari station. No, I'm not forgetting the floating city of Sea Castle, but the fact is that Future World already has an underwater restaurant of sorts. However, in my post about the shortcomings of the Coral Reef restaurant, a commenter named Omnispace put forth the intriguing idea of doing away with the Coral Reef altogether and extending the Seas ride-through attraction through there, and if that were to happen (or if the Coral Reef were to close for some other reason, such as declining patronage due to poor-quality food and iffy service) then of course the Horizons Restaurant would not be complete without a Sea Castle section. The "view" through the "windows" could automatically change according to the time of day, so breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the restaurant would each be a unique experience.

None of this is impossible from a technological standpoint. Using technology available in 1998, Industrial Light and Magic created hyper-realistic 3D-modeled environments for Star Wars Episode I. Eleven-and-a-half years later, the technology is much more affordable. Glasses-free stereoscopic 3D screens exist too. Sure, as yet they're not very large, but as technology advances they'll quickly get bigger and less expensive. For the menus, what about building a multitouch system like Microsoft Surface into the tables?

Of course, someone will wonder why in the world EPCOT would need another restaurant. After all, the World Showcase is full of them, and Future World already has two table service and two counter service venues. The last time I was in Future World on Labor Day in 2007, though, they were all packed to capacity at lunchtime (okay, I'm not sure about the Coral Reef, since it's so out-of-the way, but the rest of them definitely were). Even though my wife and I had an ADR at the Garden Grille, we still waited almost twenty minutes for our table. I think another table service eatery in Future World would do pretty well. But, if I'm wrong and attendance figures just wouldn't support a large new restaurant, then I say they should close the Coral Reef. It was a great place to eat once, but now positive reviews of the place are few and far between. It really isn't worth it to eat there unless you get a table right next to the tank, and even that can be a mixed blessing if nearby diners allow their children to come press their noses against the glass right next to you and crowd you while you're trying to enjoy your meal. I figure if you're going to have some vacant real estate in Future World anyway, the hind end of the Seas pavilion is a better place for it than a huge, hard-to-ignore golden-domed building.

Sure, it's not a perfect idea, but it does address some of Future World's problems: it gives that monstrous building between Universe of Energy and Mission:Space a reason to exist, it adds a needed restaurant to Future World, and it allows us to spend a little time immersed in Horizons' futuristic utopia.

What do you think?

The art of Bob McCall

A number of amazingly talented people contributed to EPCOT Center. One of them was renowned artist Robert McCall. Mr. McCall's incredible career has included work for Life magazine, NASA, and several science fiction films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He is also known for his fantastically detailed paintings of futuristic settings.

Most of McCall's EPCOT work could be seen in Horizons (which gives us one more reason to mourn its passing, I suppose). In the queue area visitors could see his paintings of three of the futuristic environments depicted in the ride: Nova Cite, Brava Centuari, and Sea Castle:

copyright Disney

copyright Disney

copyright Disney

On the way out of the pavilion, Horizons visitors walked by this mural, entitled "The Prologue and the Promise":

copyright Disney

After my first trip to EPCOT in 1984, I was so enthralled with the place that my grandfather bought me the large hardcover book Walt Disney's EPCOT Center: Creating The New World of Tomorrow. Each of McCall's gorgeous Horizons queue area paintings was given its own fold-out page. I spent hours poring over them, imagining myself in that future world. Little did I realize at the time that those paintings weren't the only ones McCall did on the subject. The book Vision of the Future: The Art of Robert McCall contains many more spectacular paintings of a future where mankind has figured out how to control gravity itself, giving rise to sparkling cities that float through the sky like clouds. Additionally, a large gallery of Mr. McCall's work can be found on his website, mccallstudios.com. Unfortunately, the pictures are on the smallish side. The site also offers a limited collection of prints, but the prices are a bit exorbitant for my taste. If there were a wider variety of prints offered and more affordable prices, you can bet my walls would be covered with them.

The futuristic vistas that Robert McCall painted were more than just pretty pictures. There was a logic to the designs, a sense that things had been thought through. Whereas Horizons allowed us to peep through a window on the future, McCall's paintings show us the future on a grand scale. They're a feast, not just for the eyes, but for the mind as well.

How educational was EPCOT?

It's widely believed that the EPCOT Center of the 1980s and early 90s was a more educational place than the Epcot of today. But was it really? Let's compare the pavilions of EPCOT Center with today's lowercase Epcot and see. Of course, it should be noted that what follows is purely my own opinion.

Spaceship Earth: To be fair, I haven't had the chance to ride Spaceship Earth since the Siemens rehab. However, I've watched a little ride video, and I've listened to the entire audio track on Subsonic Radio a few times. In my opinion, the new ride has a lighter tone and is less scholarly than the communications-themed experience that preceded it. Is it actually less educational? It's a tough call. It seems to me, though, that the old ride contained more historical facts than the new one.

Universe of Energy: Among those of us who remember the first version of this pavilion, there's the widespread perception that Disney dumped the respectable, serious original show in favor of a lighthearted and airheaded Ellen Degeneres vehicle that's too busy dropping 1990s pop culture references to convey any information. So I went back and watched some videos of the original show so I could compare them. And honestly, they both convey pretty much the same information, although the original show goes into a lot more detail about oil exploration. Whether you prefer the scholarly and serious presentation of the original show, or the 1990s flavor of the current incarnation is a matter of personal preference.

Wonders of Life: This pavilion used to be an interesting EPCOT destination featuring shows and exhibits about health and the human body. Now it's an empty shell.

Horizons/Mission:Space: Anyone who reads this blog knows how I feel about Horizons. It was absolutely my favorite theme park attraction of all time. If I had the power of Q, I would rebuild Horizons, convert the second-floor VIP lounge into an apartment, and live there. Nevertheless, Mission:Space is more educational. Why? Well, even though it's nowhere near the triumph of Disney Imagineering that Horizons was, and in fact it makes people sick, it realistically demonstrates why not everyone is cut out to be an astronaut. Horizons was more fun. Mission:Space is more educational. I don't like it, but it's the truth.

World of Motion/Test Track: Although it is fondly remembered, no one would accuse World of Motion of historical accuracy. How many kids got off that ride believing that the wheel was introduced to mankind after an Egyptian Pharaoh picked the round model over square and triangular versions? To be fair, though, the post-show area had some educational value. Test Track has a narrower focus, simulating an automobile testing ground instead of telling the story of human transportation, but it does try to educate riders about the testing process that new car models are put through before they go to market. I wish it explained why GM's cars are so unreliable compared to Honda and Toyota if they really go through all these tests, but I guess that story doesn't have as much entertainment value as the testing process itself. Comparing the old and new rides is a bit of an apples-and-oranges proposition, but I'd have to give the nod to Test Track here.

Journey Into Imagination/Journey Into YOUR Imagination with Figment and Eric Idle: The Imagination pavilion was never meant to be educational in the slightest. It was simply supposed to be a fun, whimisical trip that reminded visitors of the potential of their own imaginations. I've written at length on this before, of course, but in brief the old ride was charming, the newest one is a sad joke, but neither had any educational value (unless you count the present-day post-show area that "educates" you about some of Kodak's more banal services.) The Captain EO movie might have been educational had it been retitled "People You Should Never Allow Near Your Children".

The Land: Although the boat ride portion of the pavilion has changed very little since the pavilion opened, the change from a live guide to a recorded narration track during the greenhouse sequence was an improvement, as everyone now gets the same information. The biggest change at The Land, of course, was the replacement of the Kitchen Kabaret/Food Rocks show with Soarin'. Although Soarin' is definitely the superior experience, it's one of the biggest examples of the "generic Disney-Park-ification" of EPCOT. Soarin' makes The Land one of EPCOT's most popular destinations, but the place was more educational without it.

The Living Seas/The Seas With Nemo and Friends: I've written about the Seas pavilion before. As I said then, my favorite version of the pavilion is WED's amazing original concept that United Technologies was too stingy to fund. The attraction that opened in 1986 was perfectly serviceable, however, and it did a good job educating us on the amazing variety of living things in our oceans. Unfortunately, people today aren't wowed as easily as they were in 1986, when the line to get into The Living Seas stretched almost to the monorail track. For better or for worse, Disney decided it was the ocean's fault. Since actual sea life wasn't sufficiently entertaining, the whole place got a Pixar makeover, complete with digital characters from Finding Nemo that seem to float inside the aquarium (which is still the world's second-largest man-made underwater environment.) I haven't had the chance to examine all the exhibits inside the refurbished Seabase, but from what I can tell the Seas pavilion isn't as much about turning guests' on to the wonders to be found beneath the ocean as it is about entertaining preschoolers.

CommuniCore/Innoventions: The old CommuniCore had more exhibits that tied into Future World pavilions, but it also had lots of cheesy gimmicks (anyone remember the Astuter Computer Revue?) Innoventions plays more like a sales pitch for different corporate sponsors, but such things have a long history at Disney. Still, Innoventions does convey actual information, even if it's not very entertaining. Overall, CommuniCore wins out. It had a teachers' resource center, and there was just more of it. CommuniCore took up two buildings; Innoventions only takes up one.

So, was the old EPCOT Center really more educational than today's Epcot? Yes, but not as much as you might think. The main difference was that it cared about educating visitors in a way that today's Epcot really doesn't.

On the future of dark rides

Hi! Sorry it's been so long between posts, but things have been hectic. Also, due to some stuff going on at work, it looks like I'll have to postpone my November trip to Disney World until January 2010. So about a year from now you can expect the first of many posts filled with recent pictures from all over WDW (with a heavy bias toward EPCOT, of course) and my impressions of the Siemens rehab of Spaceship Earth. But on to the topic at hand-

I love Disney's Audio-Animatronic dark rides. They offer an immersive experience like none other. Unlike thrill rides, which primarily rely on the ride system itself to deliver the attraction's experience, dark rides are all about theming and detail. The great dark rides (Pirates of the Carribbean, Horizons, Journey into Imagination, World of Motion, and Peter Pan's Flight, to name a few) make you forget that you're in a Florida theme park. Returning to the "real world" after a good dark ride is always a bit of a shock.

Unfortunately, Animatronic-based rides tend to suffer the worst when Disney goes into Clueless Cost Cutting mode. During Spaceship Earth's sponsorless period, the movements of the Animatronic characters were stiff and jerky. The ride system was loud and creaky. It was painfully obvious that Disney was skimping on maintenance because there was no sponsor to help foot the bill. This is perhaps the Animatronic dark ride's biggest flaw: all the Imagineers' brilliant work can be completely undone by a miserly maintenance schedule.

All of this was running through my mind recently when I saw the Horizons ride vehicle that's for sale on eBay. It occurred to me then that, if you placed the vehicle in front of a large-enough screen that was playing a good-quality Horizons ride video, you'd have a pretty fair approximation of the Horizons experience. Then it occurred to me that, with today's technology, a good CGI artist (or a team of them), could essentially re-create the ride in CGI, and do it so well that only a hardcore EPCOT fanboy would be able to tell they weren't watching an actual ride video. And then I remembered how impressed I was with the 3-D version of Meet The Robinsons, how the Disney artists really made it appear as though you were looking into a diorama, as opposed to watching a movie screen.

I think you can see where I'm going with this: if you created a stereoscopic 3-D CGI Horizons ride movie, projected it onto an Omnimax-like screen positioned in front of a row of ride vehicles similar to the ones from the original pavilion, then topped the whole thing off with piped-in smells (oranges, anyone?) and simulator effects, you would effectively re-create Horizons without having to construct a huge pavilion with hundreds of Animatronics and set pieces. Ah, but would it have the same immersive quality as a "real" ride with physical sets and characters? That's a matter of personal opinion, I suppose. However, my experience with Soarin' makes me think it could. As an old-school EPCOT fan, I was skeptical of Soarin' at first. There is almost no theming at all. The ride system is basically a giant Erector-set construction in front of an Omnimax screen, and absolutely no effort is made to hide this. Then the ride starts, and you forget that you're sitting inside a giant Erector set construction in front of an Omnimax screen. The combination of scented air blowing at you and subtle ride carriage movements synchronized with the film completely sells you on the idea that you're really flying. It's amazing. When I rode it, I sat at the leftmost edge of the carriage and I could clearly see the edge of the movie screen, but it didn't matter. The ride sucked me in and made me believe in it. So, if Disney can deliver an immersive experience with metal benches, scented air, and a 2-D movie, I believe they could do the same thing with a 3-D movie, a more enclosed ride vehicle, and a bit more theming. Maybe some "real" foreground elements could be added to hide the edges of the screen and blur the line between what's physical and what's not. Of course, there's still one major problem to consider: to un-immerse yourself from the ride, all you'd have to do is remove your 3D glasses. Or would you? Glasses-free stereoscopic 3D screens do exist. Sure, it's still brand-new technology, but after a few years I imagine the bugs will be worked out and the price will come down.

The way I see it, 3D movie-based dark rides would stand the test of time much better than Animatronic rides, if for no other reason than that they'd need much less maintenance. Animatronic dark rides are hugely expensive to build and maintain. A dark ride like this would still be expensive to create, but it would probably cost less to maintain in the long run. And when the guests begin to tire of a certain ride, all you have to do is re-theme your queue area, commission a new film, reprogram some vehicle movements, and mix up a new batch of scented air and boom!- you've got yourself a brand-new ride.

Just to be clear, I am NOT suggesting that Animatronic dark rides need to go away. They're an irreplaceable part of the Disney World experience. I'm just speculating on what the future could hold. Hopefully, it's a fun synthesis of the old and the new.

The Definitive Horizons Ride-Through Video

Lots of other folks have linked to this, but there's just no way a self-respecting blog about EPCOT could not include perhaps the best Horizons video ever, posted on YouTube by a user named century3horizons. It's seperated into three parts, but for convenience I've combined them into one playlist. Enjoy.

Horizons 2012: Try to Imagine. . .

Imagine, if you will, that Disney decided to celebrate Epcot's 30th anniversary in a big way by rechristening it EPCOT Center and, on October 1, 2012 unveiling a brand-new Horizons pavilion in Future World. "Sure," you say sarcastically, "and imagine that I could fly there for free on a giant winged pig!" I hear you, but since Disney is all about wishing on stars to make dreams come true and crap like that let's just close our eyes and pretend, okay? (I meant that figuratively. You can't keep reading if your eyes are closed) Anyway, if Horizons were to live again, where in Future World would it go? How would a new incarnation of the pavilion differ from the original? Those are the questions I'm going to try to address here.

First of all, just where would it go? The Horizons pavilion was massive, and looking at an aerial photo of Future World it's hard to see where a new building would fit. More than one person on the subsonicradio.com forums has pointed out that the old Wonders of Life pavilion would be perfect for a new Horizons, and I agree that's probably the best fit. But would you put Horizons into the existing building, or demolish it and start anew? I'm not sure what the best answer is, but since the design of the old Horizons pavilion was so much a part of its identity, I'd prefer to see the existing structure demolished in favor of a re-constructed pavilion that's outwardly identical to the original Horizons.

Now that we know where a new Horizons would go, what would it be like? Well, the first two scenes ("Looking Back at Tomorrow") could be virtually unchanged, although it might be good to add some more recent mistaken views of the future. The Omnimax sequence would need to highlight current advances in things like nanotechnology and green energy. Of course, the "future" sequence would need the biggest overhaul. Here are some bullet points I thought of to serve as a guide:

• No flying cars: Although they've been included any almost every vision of the future for the last hundred years, they're obviously not practical. All they'd do is make auto accidents more deadly.
• No videophones: The videophone is another staple of the generic "world of the future". Although we've had the technology for quite a while, there just isn't any widespread consumer demand for it. To be sure, the future Horizons shows us should have some kind of innovation in communication. But in today's world where we carry around personal communication devices that double as handheld computer/camera/music player/GPS devices, I personally can't imagine what that innovation would be. Still, something's bound to come up. After all, who in 1983 could have imagined texting on a cell phone?
• No ridiculous clothing: Trying to predict future fashions is a huge mistake that will just date the show. Put everybody in regular clothes; nothing overly faddish, no visible brand names, just simple, middle-of-the-road outfits. Spacesuits and undersea gear should look advanced, but without flourishes that seem futuristic now but may look dated in a few years.

Those points take care of things that the future should not contain, but just what would we see? Well, the city of Nova Cite could look a lot the "green megacity" envisioned in a recent issue of Popular Science. The idea of desert farms seems like an even better idea now than it was in the early eighties, but the utility of space habitats or ocean cities isn't as immediately apparent. The original Horizons did mention aquaculture (primarily kelp farming) as one benefit of ocean colonies, and a new ride should probably show that there's a point to ocean colonization beyond scuba diving and undersea restaurants.

It's ironic that we think less about space colonization in 2008 than we did in 1983. Most folks wonder exactly what benefit there would be to space habitats, other than the fact that living in space would be cool. Physicist Gerard O'Neill had the answer when he floated the idea that space colonies could double as solar power stations that collect energy from the sun and beam it back to Earth, and that idea could definitely be touched on. One idea from the original "space" scene that should be dispensed with is the asteroid mining. It's just too science-fictiony. Unless the asteriod belt between Mars and Jupiter is full of some magical space mineral that cures baldness, flatulence, and cancer, I don't see how it could possibly be cost-effective to go all the way out there to grab asteriods, then tow them all the way back to someplace between the Earth and the Moon. Also, the space shuttle should be seen nowhere. Any space vehicles should look appropriately futuristic.

The original Horizons had no room for a post-show area, but if you've visited any Disney park in the last decade you know that many of the rides exit into a gift shop. I'm not totally averse to this idea, as long as the gift shop is full of can't-get-it-anywhere-else Horizons gear and not just the same stuff that MouseGear sells. It would be nice if there were a section of CommuniCore (I refuse to call it Innoventions) set aside for exhibits where you could learn more about the technologies that make up the Horizons future.

So,those are my ideas for Horizons 2012. As always, I claim no ownership of them, and I certainly don't claim that they're any good. If anyone reading this has additional or better ideas, leave a comment!