The Maelstrom Desecration Response

If you have the Internet and use it to keep up with Disney-related things, then you know that this past Friday afternoon the official Disney Parks blog finally confirmed a months-old rumor; that the Norway pavilion’s Maelstrom ride will be converted to a Frozen-themed attraction.

One thing I love about Twitter is that it allows us to react to things in real time before we’ve really had a chance to think them over. Then we can scurry over to our blogs and write up a more thoughtful reaction, then go back to Twitter and tell everyone to check out our blog. It’s a circle of some kind.

^{“Hey, Internet! Here’s this thing I wrote!”}

The first thing I tweeted in response to the news was this:

Then I tweeted this:

And finally I tweeted this:

To be fair, EPCOT has been dead for a long time. They're really just molesting the corpse now. And WS was never what it should've been.

— David Landon (@futureprobe1982) September 12, 2014

And that’s pretty much where I am today. Putting a Fantasyland dark ride into EPCOT is a terrible idea, but at this point it doesn’t matter because almost everyone who really appreciated what EPCOT Center stood for doesn’t go to the park anymore. I realize that last sentence may be a bit controversial, so let me elucidate.

The generally accepted way to create a successful theme park is to take a bunch of preexisting intellectual properties that people like and build a bunch of rides, shows, shops, and restaurants devoted to them. As time goes on and your company churns out new pieces of intellectual property (or acquires them from other, more creative companies) you replace old rides and shows devoted to things that are no longer popular with new rides and shows devoted to your popular new stuff. EPCOT Center was something totally different. It was built around, not intellectual properties, but ideas like futurism and the joy of experiencing different cultures. People came to EPCOT for one of two reasons:

1. Because they already enjoyed Disney’s other offerings and wanted to check out this latest one.
2. Because they had a preexisting interest in one of the topics presented at EPCOT. Maybe they were especially interested in ocean life or wanted to eat at a Moroccan restaurant.

The people who loved EPCOT Center but still come to the park anyway belong to that first group. If you asked one of them, they’d probably tell you they’re a Disney fan. Understand I’m not criticizing these people. I’m just pointing out that they’re there. They keep coming to the park because the nostalgic feelings it gives them and their affinity for most things Disney allows them to enjoy themselves there. And that’s totally cool.

I belong to the second group. Yeah, I grew up with various Disney-related entertainment, but it didn’t inspire me or capture my imagination the way other things did. I loved EPCOT Center because of my preexisting interest in science and futuristic technology. When EPCOT moved away from those things and it became clear to me that the people in charge of the park did not care about them anymore, my interest in it declined accordingly. The fact that today’s lowercase Epcot occupies the same physical space and has a bunch of buildings that outwardly resemble those EPCOT Center pavilions I once loved is not enough to make a visit there enjoyable for me.

Now let’s talk about World Showcase for a bit. When I was a kid, I had no use for the place. Sure, part of this is because like most kids I was a cultural Philistine and World Showcase was too adult-oriented for me to appreciate yet. But Future World dealt with some pretty advanced topics, too, and it was my favorite place on the whole planet. The difference between the two was that Future World had rides and World Showcase didn’t. That wasn’t by design. There were always supposed to be more rides; a Rhine River Cruise in Germany, some kind of gondola ride in Italy, and unbuilt pavilions like Spain, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union were also supposed to contain rides. But for various reasons the plans for each of these fell through. As a result, World Showcase has always been kind of dysfunctional. Adding the Norway pavilion with Maelstrom in 1989 was absolutely a step in the right direction. Changing this fanciful but mostly reality-based tribute to Norway into a showcase for a cartoon just because that cartoon did Avengers-level business at the box office is a massive step in the wrong direction.

At this point you might say “Dave, I see where you’re coming from. Disney should using one of those empty World Showcase expansion pads for their Frozen ride!” If this is your opinion, let me respond thusly:

A trait that all the very best EPCOT attractions shared was their refusal to talk down to the audience. They managed to handle complex grown-up topics in ways that were entertaining but also assumed that you had a brain. What message does plopping a Frozen ride into the Norway pavilion send? This: “Hey audience, there’s no way the country of Norway could possibly interest you because all you care about is stuffing your face with mass-market entertainment! So here’s another helping of that!” Putting a Fantasyland ride into World Showcase goes against everything that World Showcase is supposed to be.

I’ve heard some people argue that it’s okay because Frozen was a good movie that they personally enjoyed. Those people are missing the point. The Emperor’s New Groove was a good movie that I enjoyed, but that doesn’t mean that the Yzma’s Secret Lab Roller Coaster belongs in the Mexico pavilion.

There have been some efforts to get Disney to reverse their decision by using the hashtag #SaveMaelstrom, apparently because if you can get a hashtag trending on Twitter it somehow bends the fabric of the space-time continuum and makes the thing you’re trying to accomplish magically happen. These efforts are not going to work any more than the hashtag #LessExplosionsAndSexismPlease would move Michael Bay to completely change his style of filmmaking. The people who ran the Walt Disney Company when EPCOT Center was being designed and built are not there anymore, and the people in charge now have absolutely no allegiance to their ideas or set of values. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is. No social media campaign can induce the leadership of a Fortune 100 company to fundamentally change the way they do things. Heck, as of this writing it hasn’t even been able to shame NFL commissioner Roger Goodell into resigning for looking the other way when the people in his employ violently beat women and children.

Now, after saying all of that I have to admit that while I’m opposed to the Frozen Maelstrom replacement, I’m not too worked up about it. It’s like if the Peruvian government started selling billboard space on the buildings at Machu Picchu; it’s a horrible, crass decision and I don’t like it, but it doesn’t directly affect my life in any way.

[A clever concluding sentence goes here]

The Reality Rule

Last week when the five-year-old Cars Land-in-Florida rumor was resurrected by the Great Internet Speculatron, I got to thinking about the nature of reality.

I realize that sentence may raise some questions, like what does Cars Land have to do with the nature of reality? Also, what kind of chemicals are in the water where I am? So let me explain. For the last few years those of us who care about such things had resigned ourselves to the fact that there would be no Cars Land in Florida anytime soon, if ever, and that Disney’s Hollywood Studios would remain pretty much the same for the foreseeable future.

And then somebody on a message board who is generally believed to have inside information said that Disney was bringing Cars Land to Hollywood Studios. Some people loved the idea and some hated it, but for both groups Cars Land at the Studios was real. They were already picturing themselves walking down the Streets of America and seeing off in the distance a Radiator Springs Racers sign and those angled rocks from where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn.

^{The only difference is that the Cars Land rocks are more orange}

And as things began to cool down with more rumors that maybe John Lasseter was against the idea and the realization that Disney’s thick-headed Orlando executives would rather surgically remove their own spleens than spend money on anything that’s not a DVC resort, plus the simple fact that even if Cars Land was approved it’d be several years before it opened, the orangey-colored rocks and Route 66 trappings began to fade from our mental picture of the end of the Streets of America. The Lights, Motors, Action stadium stood there again, just as it always had in reality.

This whole thing reminds me of the early years of EPCOT Center, and the excitement surrounding the World Showcase's most prominent "coming attraction", the Equatorial Africa pavilion. The definitive EPCOT Center tome, Richard Beard’s Walt Disney’s EPCOT: Creating The New World of Tomorrow, devoted a whole chapter to it, with a fairly detailed breakdown of the shows and experiences the pavilion would offer. Equatorial Africa was prominently featured as a coming EPCOT attraction in the park’s early years. Alex Haley even appeared on the EPCOT Center opening-day TV special in 1982 to talk about it, and his segment ended with him and Danny Kaye promising to visit the new pavilion together.

My point is that for a couple years there in the early 1980s, the Equatorial Africa pavilion was real. Buildings had been designed, shows had been written, concept art had been widely released, and there was a big sign on the expansion plot between China and Germany promising that Equatorial Africa was coming soon. How many people stopped and imagined that, on their next trip to Florida, the African pavilion would occupy that empty space?  And you can be sure that if today’s Internet had existed then, there would have been long debates about the new pavilion: whether it had too many attractions or not enough attractions or whether there should be a Mount Kilimanjaro coaster or flume ride to give the area some thrills. But all of those announcements, promises, imaginings and pieces of concept art were rendered moot when Equatorial Africa was cancelled and we were forced to face the fact that it was never real at all.

Over the years, Disney has announced a lot more projects that never advanced past the concept art stage: things like WESTCot, Port Disney, and Disney’s America. Other projects were drastically scaled down: only half the original Animal Kingdom concept actually got built, and the sweeping Project Gemini that would have remade EPCOT’s Future World ended up consisting solely of Soarin’. Perhaps you think this would make Disney fans adopt a “wait and see” attitude about any new rumors or announcements.

Don’t be silly.

The truth is that almost anything, be it an unsubstantiated rumor from someone who claims to have connections or a piece of concept art released on the official Disney Parks blog, is enough to whip the Disney fanbase into a frenzy of fiercely opposing viewpoints. Take Avatar Land, which is slated to open at Animal Kingdom at some point in the current century, unless it doesn’t. All that was announced was that there would be an Avatar Land at Animal Kingdom. That’s all. No concept art, no description of possible attractions, nothing. But that complete lack of data didn’t stop people from taking to the Internet to declare that Avatar Land would either be the best thing since penicillin or the worst thing since Rob Schneider’s career, and accuse the people who disagreed with them as being no better than the cowards who stood by and let Hitler overrun Czechoslovakia.

Now, the Disney fan community isn’t the only one that engages in this ridiculous behavior pattern. Right now there’s a segment of the online Superman fan community who has already decided that it hates the new movie Man of Steel, even though they haven’t seen it yet because it won’t be released until Summer 2013.

So, I’ve made a decision. By the power vested in me as a person who says things on the Internet, I hereby declare Kiri-kin-tha’s First Law of Metaphysics to be in effect online:

Nothing unreal exists, and no arguments about nonexistent things are allowed.

So, a Florida Cars Land? It doesn’t exist right now. It’s not real. So stop arguing about it. Avatar Land? It’s even less real than the Floridian Cars Land. No arguing about that either. If either of these projects actually gets off the ground and are actually built and opened, then they will be real and you can argue about them.

Okay, I’m going to get off my soapbox now. Later I’ll be back with a post about EPCOT’s logo, and as the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation gets closer I’ll have something about that.

Happy Internetting!

The EPCOT Show Building Dichotomy

The latest post at Passport to Dreams Old and New explores the various techniques used at the Disney parks to hide (or divert your attention from) the boxy, warehouse-like show buildings that house most attractions. The article mostly focused on the Magic Kingdom (with a small foray into Animal Kingdom), so naturally I started thinking about EPCOT.

In the World Showcase Disney’s show building concealment techniques are in full effect. It’s necessary, because they’re trying to create the illusion that a piece of each the featured countries has been plopped down alongside an artificial lake in Florida.

Future World is a different story. Its buildings are basically permanent Worlds’ Fair pavilions. If you look at the original pavilions (and here I mean the ones that were either already built or finalized before Michael Eisner took over in 1984. So by this definition, The Living Seas is an original pavilion, but Wonders of Life is not) they don’t really consist of a façade tacked onto a plain boxy building. Pavilions like Horizons and World of Motion looked almost as futuristic from the back as they did from the front. There’s still a little bit of visual trickery going on-The Land is not really built into the side of a grassy hill that extends from the Seas to Imagination, that “hill” is there to hide some functional areas of behind and between those buildings-but it’s fairly minimal. A ride on the old Skyway in the Magic Kingdom would quickly expose Fantasyland as nothing more than some rather plain-looking buildings with attractive facades on them, but Future World always looked just as futuristic from the Monorail track as it did at ground level.

Mission:Space completely broke this paradigm. It’s a more conventional show building with a fancy façade on the front. But the one that a lot of EPCOT aficionados have a problem with is the Soarin’ building. Maybe you’ve seen it:

 

Doesn’t really jump out at you? How about now?

Most people don’t even notice it, but it’s been said once you see the Soarin’ show building you can’t forget it’s there. I’m not sure I agree with that. Maybe it’s because I don’t often find my gaze drawn to the Canada pavilion when I’m in the World Showcase, but most of the time the Soarin’ show building is pretty much invisible to me unless I actively look for it. That’s pretty impressive, considering that it’s really too big to hide. Covering it with rockwork or something like that would draw even more attention to it, but in the end simply painting it blue seems to make it blend into the air around it.

Interestingly, the plans for the abandoned Project Gemini (the early-2000s proposal to overhaul Future World) would have placed Soarin’ on the north side of The Land pavilion, next to The Seas. Of course, that would have involved a more drastic interior overhaul of The Land than we ended up getting. Would that have been preferable? Or would there complaints be about how Soarin’ ruined the skyline of Future World had it been placed on the north side of The Land instead of the south? (Answer: of course there would be complaints, this is the Internet.)

If you really want to get a good look at some of EPCOT’s invisible areas, take the Undiscovered Future World tour. You’ll be surprised at just how well Future World’s landscape hides the park’s backstage areas.

UPDATE:

I thought I’d go into a little more detail about the landscape of Future World West and exactly what it conceals. I’m sure you’re familiar with the 1981 EPCOT Center concept painting that appears in the Richard Beard EPCOT Center book. Let’s zoom in on Future World West:

See all the greenery where the backstage areas should be? The reality, of course, is not as attractive:

Yep, most of what’s back there is rather paved and treeless. But let’s take a closer look at the “hill” that appears, from ground level, to come right up to front wall of The Land.

As you can see, the “hill” isn’t a hill at all, it’s a few truckloads of earth that was put there to hide the wall that conceals the utilitarian backstage area that’s really in front of the pavilion. See that overhang near the reddish-colored pavement? If you were to walk out the double doors near the Soarin’-area restrooms, that’s where you’d be. (NOTE: Unless you’re on an authorized backstage tour, do not actually do this.)

Another interesting illusion in Future World West concerns the true size of the Imagination pavilion. From ground level, it’s obvious that the pavilion is pretty big, but it’s easy to think that the back side of the pavilion is pretty close to the back side of the glass pyramids. In fact, the Imagination pavilion is much humongouser than most people think. (I don’t care what my spell check says, if “Nighttastic” is a word, then so is “humongouser ”) Take a look:

It’s easy to look at that picture and conclude that the original Omnimover ride was much longer than it actually was, and that the current attraction is therefore an even bigger travesty. And while I rarely pass up a chance to crack on the Dr. Nigel Channing snore-fest, accuracy demands that I point out that the entire interior volume of the Imagination pavilion was never completely devoted to attractions. There’s quite a sizable backstage area there, including a maintenance bay for the ride vehicles and a sterilizing facility for 3-D glasses. Also, notice the circular structure at the bottom of the picture; it’s the Canada CircleVision theater. Yes, the southern end of Future World and the northern end of the World Showcase are much closer together than most people think; the layout of the park basically makes you take the long way around to travel between them.

Well, what I intended to be a small update has turned into enough material for a whole other post! Thanks for reading and for your comments!

The Minicot Project

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.

Duffy Bear, meet Optimus Prime

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.

Huffing and Puffing Around the World

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.

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

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:

1. To illustrate how extremely crowded EPCOT was that day
2. 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!

Pieces of EPCOT Center

Well, I’m back from Walt Disney World, and after spending parts of three days at EPCOT I’ve got pictures (although not as many as I would’ve liked) and a few observations.

There were moments when EPCOT Center would positively enthrall you. You’d be on a ride, and the Imagineers had done their job so well that you were effectively transported to another place and time. Fortunately, there are still a few moments like that to be had in today’s EPCOT, and here they are:

• Spaceship Earth: As I’ve said before, I don’t really understand all the vitriol that’s been directed at this attraction since it’s 2007 redesign. Much of the original attraction has been retained. The Judi Dench narration is obviously aimed at a different generation of people than the Perrin, Cronkite, or Irons narrations were. All in all, it still does a good job of immersing you in different times and places.
• Universe of Energy’s dinosaur diorama: Except for the addition of the easily-ignorable Ellen animatronic and some recoloring of the dinosaurs (most notably the T-rex), the only part of the Energy pavilion that really excites people hasn’t been changed at all since 1982. It’s well-maintained, and absolutely saturated with that old-school attention to detail that Disney World did so well until Team Disney Orlando decided it didn’t want to pay for that stuff anymore. I’m not going to complain about the filmed portions of the attraction, since they were never that great. Sure, the Radok show was technically impressive, but it lacked truly entertaining content.
• The first part of Mexico’s Gran Fiesta Tour: You board your boat, and float down the waterway between the San Angel Inn restaurant and the miniature pyramid. The background painting that decorates the wall behind the pyramid is ridiculously detailed; and even as you’re scrutinizing it, finding new details you never realized were there, your boat enters a magnificently-detailed recreation of an ancient Mexican temple. And then the Three Caballeros appear and ruin everything. The minute or so before they appear is pure gold, though. Not to be missed.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

Apparently, Hypno-Hustler > World Showcase

I haven’t talked much about the Disney/Marvel deal because lots of other people already have. However, I’d like to focus on two aspects of the deal:

1. Disney paid $4 billion for Marvel . . .

2. . . .which gives them access to all 5,000 Marvel characters; not just Spider-Man and Wolverine, but also virtually unknown ones like Dazzler, Typeface, and Hypno-Hustler. This is important, because Disney obviously had no marketable characters of their own.

Now, consider this fact: EPCOT’s World Showcase has the lowest attractions-to-acreage ratio of ANY theme park ANYWHERE. Why? Because putting more attractions in there would just cost too darned much money. Not only that, but the space that was originally set aside for new pavilions or additions to existing ones  has probably been gobbled up by backstage areas, right?

Take a look at this:

It’s an aerial view of the Japan pavilion.  Guess what that highlighted yellow area is? It’s a show building! You see, back when the Japan pavilion was originally conceived by WED, it was supposed to be more than just a restaurant and some shops; it was going to have an attraction. They even built a building for it. However, EPCOT was seriously behind schedule, and in order to make the October 1, 1982 opening date some projects had to be shelved and saved for later. Then Michael Eisner took over in 1984, and “later” got changed to “never”. Hence the unused show building. Japan isn’t the only World Showcase country with a story like this, though. There’s also the country on the left side of this next photo:

I know it’s hard to tell, but the backwards-F-shaped structure on the left side of this picture is the German pavilion’s show building. As you can see, it’s easily larger than the entire guest-accessible German area. The big empty area on the right side of the picture is World Showcase’s most famous might-have-been. If you’d walked by that plot of land in the early ‘80s, you would have seen a Coming Soon sign for the Africa pavilion. Plans for the African pavilion may have been scrapped long ago, but the land set aside for it was obviously never used. To this day, it’s just sitting empty.

So, what does this little photographic tour of the hidden World Showcase tell us? That Disney can afford to pay $4 billion for the rights to Stryfe, U-Go-Girl, Spider-Man’s Aunt May, and a character named Doop, but installing attractions into empty buildings that were constructed for that very purpose? Impossibly expensive. For today’s Walt Disney Company this:

Is more important than this:

And that’s just sad.

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I realize that Disney management is pumping money into the parks in a way that we haven’t seen in years. And that John Lasseter is supposed to be the king of awesome, a kind of Walt Disney/Chuck Norris hybrid. Overall, I’m honestly optimistic about where things are headed. I just like to make fun of lame, disco-inspired comic book characters. Plus, there’s no excuse for leaving those show buildings empty for twenty years, especially if you turn around and drop $4 billion for a comic book company. (Note: I love comic books)

Feasible EPCOT Improvement #2

Finish World Showcase

Since nothing has been added to the World Showcase since 1988, one might be forgiven for thinking that it is finished, that everything planned for that area of the park was realized in some fashion. If that's what you think, click here. And here. As you can see, there were a whole boatload of World Showcase attractions that never saw the light of day. Now, I know that we'll never see a Venezuela pavilion with its aerial tram ride through the Amazon rainforest (although that would be a nice addition to Animal Kingdom, perhaps as part of an South American Rainforest-themed area that could replace Camp Minnie-Mickey), an Israel pavilion would be a huge security risk, and a lot of the stuff planned for Africa was incorporated into Animal Kingdom in some way, shape, or form. However, it would be nice if the attractions originally planned for the countries that already there were actually built.

Now, you're probably thinking that the addition of several E-ticket attractions at once is not a feasible improvement. Maybe you're right, but consider this: in the years since Michael Eisner scrapped most of EPCOT's Phase 2 projects in 1984, Disney has opened two new parks in on the Florida property, and built scores of new resorts there, too. Did they really lack the money to give Japan its bullet train, Germany its Rhine River cruise, and Italy its gondola ride/Roman ruin walk-thru? Is there any theme park anywhere, Disney or otherwise, with fewer attractions per acre than World Showcase? The Disney rumor mill is currently swirling with talk of a massive refresh of the Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland. To be sure, it's much-needed and long-overdue, but even though Florida's Fantasyland is small and anemic compared to its Anaheim counterpart, that small slice of the Magic Kingdom still has more attractions than the entire World Showcase!

Most adults don't seem to mind this very much, since the World Showcase provides dining (and drinking!) options that you just can't find in the other parks, but how do children, a key Disney demographic, fare there? Let's travel back to 1984 and see what kind of fun my sister and I had in Morocco:

There's NO place like World SHOW-case!

No wonder a whole generation of park visitors grew up believing EPCOT to be boring! I'm not suggesting that World Showcase be given the Licensed Disney Character treatment, but adding the rides that Germany, Japan, and Italy were always supposed to have would go a long way toward making the place more kid-friendly. After all, in a place like Florida where summer lasts half the year, it's important to have regularly-spaced opportunities to get off your feet and out of the heat, especially when there are kids in your party.

Sure, World Showcase has the best live entertainment of any Disney park, but it could use some rides, too. Lots of Disney fans want to see new countries added, but I'd settle for some good attractions for the countries that are already there. They were on the drawing board, once. Isn't it time they became reality?

Retro Disney Blast

I'm on vacation this week, visiting my parents in the mountains. I was going through some family photos when I happened upon some pictures of our first trip to EPCOT in the fall of 1984. We spent the morning at the Magic Kingdom, then headed over to EPCOT. Much to my dismay, my parents marched right past all the marvelous Future World pavilions so my mom could go to Morocco and shop. While she was rooting through the gift shop in search of who-knows-what, my dad snapped this picture of my sister, my grandmother, and I:

 

As you can see, I was not happy to be in Morocco. My poor grandmother was doing her best to put a happy face on the situation, but for a six-year-old there are few tortures worse than having to sit and be bored when there are exciting experiences around the corner, just waiting to be had. Fortunately, my mom soon finished in Morocco, and we headed off across the World Showcase, pausing to snap this picture:

We finally did make it to Future World, where we rode Journey Into Imagination, World of Motion, Horizons, Universe of Energy, and finally Spaceship Earth. At the end of the day, my parents took this picture of my sister and I outside Earth Station:

Sadly, it didn't occur to either of my parents to take more pictures of Future World's architectural wonders, but I suppose it never occurred to them that in years to come some of them might not be there anymore. Many people complained that EPCOT Center was too staid and "adult" to be appealing to little kids like the 1984 versions of my sister and I, but I can tell you that I was excited and inspired by what I saw that day. True, I was already prone to spend recess pretending to be Captain Kirk while other kids were pretending to be Autobots and Decepticons, so I'm not saying I was a typical six-year-old. Still, those few hours spent in Future World almost 25 years ago continue to affect me to this day. I'm not sure if Mission:Space, Test Track, or The Seas With Nemo and His Computer-Generated Friends are capable of working the same magic on today's kids.

As an added bonus, here are some pictures from my very first trip to the Magic Kingdom in 1981:


The monorail on approach to the Magic Kingdom station. The monorail has always been one of my favorite things about Disney World, and it looks just as sleek and futuristic now as it did the year the first Space Shuttle launched.


Finally, here's a picture of my chance meeting with Mickey Mouse. This is before the Magic Kingdom had designated Character Greeting Areas, and the characters roamed the park. Of course, I understand why things have to be more structured now, but it's nice to remember a simpler time.

I'll be back next week with an honest look at the plusses and minuses of FastPass. Thanks for reading!

Mid-January Bullets

• EPCOT Central posted a new article this week. Go read it.
  

• Disney's online attraction rehab schedule shows Future World's Universe of Energy going down for a rehab from January 5-March 22. According to Screamscape, the downtime will allow a new ride-control and tracking system to be installed, and they speculate that the groundwork is being laid for a more extensive update of the show itself sometime in the future. You know, if Disney made a new film for the pavilion and kept Ellen (she's still a popular celebrity, after all), they wouldn't need to touch the Animatronic portion of the show at all. It could be a fairly inexpensive upgrade for a pavilion that really needs it, and maybe we would finally get a show that doesn't focus on fossil fuels.
  

• I noticed that the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure is a prominently featured "attraction" in the EPCOT section of the Disney World website. Didn't Kim Possible go off the air? Why would Disney expend so much energy promoting a defunct cartoon series? Oh, I understand the reason for it: Disney wants to give the kids something to do in World Showcase to keep them from complaining to their parents that they're bored every ten seconds. I'm against it. I say kids should have to suffer the same way I did on my first trip to EPCOT at age 7, when my parents marched right past all the breathtakingly cool Future World pavilions just so my mom could spend an interminable amount of time in Morocco's shops, just aimlessly looking around. It builds character.
  

Africa: The Lost World Showcase Pavilion

The history of EPCOT's World Showcase is littered with planned-but-never built pavilions for countries like Spain, Israel, and the former USSR. The one that was farthest along in the planning stage, though, was the Equatorial Africa pavilion. It was even included in some concept paintings and early maps of the park, nestled between China and Germany. Of course, the only thing between China and Germany now is the Africa Trading Post, an open-air gift shop that sells the same stuff you can get in Animal Kingdom, the Magic Kingdom's Adventureland, or the Indiana Jones area of the Hollywood Studios park.

The Imagineers once had grand plans for Equatorial Africa, however. Its centerpiece was to have been a tree house, in which visitors would overlook a jungle water hole in a simulated nighttime environment. Realistic plants, boulders, and the piped-in sounds and smells of the jungle would have been combined with a rear-projected film of animals visiting the water hole to convince visitors that they were actually in the African rainforest. One of the pavilion's shows, "The Heartbeat of Africa", would have begun with a pre-show conducted by an actual African narrator who would give a presentation on the history of the drum and its significance to African culture. The show itself would have been a film on the history of Equatorial Africa that culminated with an outdoor jazz concert filmed in a present-day African city, augmented with superimposed laser images that appear to emanate from the instruments.

Also planned was a museum featuring exhibits of art loaned by various African countries. Perhaps the centerpiece of the Africa pavilion, though, would have been the show "Africa Rediscovered", hosted by Alex Haley. This fifteen-minute film was designed to teach EPCOT guests that Africa was more than a primitive continent, that it is a country with a rich history. The show would have highlighted Carthagian general Hannibal as well as the accomplishments of the ancient African kingdom of Kush.

So what happened? Why is there only a "trading post" full of overpriced merchandise in the World Showcase where the Africa pavilion should have been? Well, all of the countries included in the World Showcase put up money to finance the construction of their pavilions, and Africa is easily the most impoverished of Earth's continents. The story goes that the only African corporations willing to put money towards the project were based in South Africa, and in the early 1980s the white-dominated government of South Africa was under fire for its practice of apartheid so there was no way Disney was going to accept money from them. And given the constant political upheaval in that part of the world, it was impossible for Disney to line up a country to serve as host nation for the pavilion. So, Equatorial Africa was shelved. Of course, today there's a superbly themed African area at Animal Kingdom, and it has live entertainment by genuine African performers.

Still, I would have liked to have seen the tree house.

(Note: The information in this post came from the book Walt Disney's EPCOT Center, Creating the New World of Tomorrow, and this article by Jeff Lange.)