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.

Fiscally Sound Yet Creatively Bankrupt

There's been a lot of talk lately, on the forums and blogs I frequent, to the effect that the Walt Disney Company has lost its way and is teetering on the edge of creative bankruptcy. The authors of these opinions offer many supporting facts, most of them centering around the Company's attempts to cram all the theme parks (especially EPCOT) into the toddler-friendly, licensed character-heavy Disney Parks brand, even if this serves to reduce some of the parks to tacky shells of their former selves. I absolutely agree with these arguments, but I find it interesting that some of the folks making them behave as though this is happening in a vacuum, as if Disney's behavior is somehow aberrant. Viewed in the larger context of corporate America, however, it's totally understandable.

Companies like Disney that provide a product for mass consumption can be divided into two groups: those that innovate and those that don't. Being a non-innovator is not necessarily a bad thing; Coca-Cola, for example, has one main product that its customers expect to remain unchanged forever. When it tried to innovate by tinkering with the Coca-Cola formula in 1985, the results were disastrous. Similarly, McDonalds sells hamburgers and Happy Meals. Many of its attempts to innovate, such as the McPizza and the Arch Deluxe, met with failure because customers simply didn't want anything new from McDonalds.

Other companies, however, must innovate to stay alive. Consider Apple: when Steve Jobs was away from the company from 1985-1996, it nosedived. Its leaders during that period were your average CEO types; competent yet unimaginative businessmen who were fundamentally incapable of understanding what Apple was about. The company ceased to innovate, for the most part, and when Jobs returned in 1997 it was widely presumed that Apple would soon fold. Since then, of course, Apple has become an industry leader, with its competitors often engaged in a frantic scramble to emulate its successful products. I'm not saying they're perfect (I'd would never pay $2000 for a laptop without a removable battery) but Apple's success is directly attributable to their willingness to innovate.

One more example from the entertainment industry: when Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry died in 1991, the franchise was taken over by Paramount studio executive Rick Berman. Berman was obviously a good administrator, as is evidenced by the fact that production never shut down, even when the Star Trek franchise included the concurrent production of two TV shows and one movie. However, Berman was creatively tone-deaf. He felt that the best way to maintain the profitablity of the Star Trek franchise was to play it safe and never deviate from what he percieved as the Star Trek Formula. The result, of course, put Star Trek into a death spiral of repetitive television episodes and movies, each more unimpressive than the last. Star Trek's fans gave up on the franchise, and Berman's involvement with it was terminated. Over the last few years, Star Trek's reins have been handed to someone with a more creative background who was not afraid to take chances with the franchise, and early reviews of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek film have been positive.

What does all this have to do with Disney? The company that Walt Disney built was an innovator and industry leader, like Apple. These days, it's a provider of predictable comfort food, like McDonalds. Rick Berman and the Apple CEOs not named Jobs managed to alienate huge fanbases with that approach. Disney, however, has chosen to cater mainly to children, and children have notoriously poor taste. They may or may not be inspired by a Horizons or Living Seas, but a roller coaster or a Finding Nemo ride is sure to entertain them. Better yet, their parents crave safe, clean entertainment for their children, even if they themselves are bored silly by it. In the case of Apple and the Star Trek franchise, creative bankruptcy eventually translated in to fiscal bankruptcy (in a general sense). Disney, however, has apparently found a way to go creatively bankrupt but continue to rake in the cash. Any organization-be it a corporation or a sports team or a rock band-tends to take on the personality and values of its leader. We can't expect the Walt Disney Company to continue to act like Walt Disney while it's actually being run by people who are nothing like him.

I'm not defending the company's creative decline, understand, but I'm not mystified by it.

The Nostalgia Factor

Nostalgia. That's how some folks may explain the continuing interest in the EPCOT Center of old. People like me are just reliving our childhoods, they say. The park's metamorphosis from EPCOT Center to lowercase Epcot still bothers us, not because the old pavilions were actually superior to what's there now, but because they were inextricably tied to happy childhood memories. It's the same reason people in their thirties still collect action figures and comic books, they say. We're unwilling or unable to let go of the past.

Is that argument valid? On some level, I'm sure it is. But I believe the enduring appeal of EPCOT Center has more to do with the fact that it appealed to different audiences simultaneously. Someone who enjoyed the old He-Man cartoon as a 10-year-old will probably discover that it's nowhere near as entertaining today. On the other hand, if that person stumbles across an old Horizons ride video on YouTube, they'll likely find it just as delightful as it was twenty years ago, but for a completely new set of reasons.

Thanks to a devoted fanbase, it's probably easier than ever to get your classic EPCOT fix. You can read thoughtful commentary at EPCOT Central, get a great overview of the original Future World at Lost EPCOT, explore the old Universe of Energy at the Universe of Energy Companion Site, and get your fill of Horizons at Horizons1.com and the Horizons Remote Access Terminal. You can buy EPCOT ride DVDs and music CDs at the Extinct Attractions Club. To this day, EPCOT Center continues to inspire and entertain. Will we be able to say the same about the park's current incarnation twenty years from now? Will there be Mission: Space and Test Track tribute sites? Will a marine biologist point to his childhood visit to The Seas With Nemo And His Computer-Generated Friends as the spark that ignited his interest in ocean life? And will anyone even remember Journey Into Imagination With Eric Idle, to say nothing of Honey, Dark Helmet Shrunk The Audience?

I seriously doubt it.

Thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica finale

Ron Moore was wrong. He kept saying that the BSG finale wouldn't be what anyone was expecting, but my two main predictions came true. I won't bother with a detailed review (there are plenty of those to choose from) but here are a few random thoughts:

Earth: The Colonials wore suits and ties like us. They worshiped Greek gods. Well before "All Along The Watchtower" it was inevitable that their world and ours would be connected somehow, and since a major part of the show's premise was the quest for Earth, I always believed that the fleet would eventually land on Earth, and it would be revealed that all this happened thousands of years in the past and the Colonials are our ancestors.

Starbuck and the Head People: Ron Moore and co. were in a lose-lose situation with this one. No matter how they handled the mystery of what the resurrected Starbuck, Head Six, and Head Baltar ultimately were, there was no way to please everyone. From the many Internet comments I've read, I think people were upset that we didn't get some kind of Star Trek explanation, especially in Starbuck's case. The term "Star Trek explanation" refers to TNG-era Trek's propensity to reduce any seemingly unexplainable phenomonon to a quantifiable, not-at-all-mysterious thing, usually by way of dense, technobabble-heavy exposition. All in all, I'm not unsatisfied by the choices Ron and co. made here.

The Flashbacks: Watching the flasbacks during Daybreak's first hour, I assumed that they would pay off during the story's final two hours, that the character's actions in the flasback sequences would somehow inform their choices in the present day. Mostly, I was wrong. Except for the Baltar story, which set up his eventual choice to become a farmer like his father, the flashbacks just felt like a late addition. I mean, did we really need to see a drunken Adama vomiting in an alley? And yes, I understood that the pigeon in Lee's apartment was supposed to represent Starbuck, but that, too, seemed tacked on. In one of this interviews about the finale, Ron Moore revealed that it was originally concieved as a two-hour episode, but then the network gave them an extra hour fairly late in the game. More than anything else, the flashbacks look like an attempt to spend the extra hour they'd unexpectedly been given.

I haven't seen every episode of BSG, some of it is just too dark for my tastes. However, I think that Ron Moore and the writing staff did the best job anyone could have done in telling the story of Battlestar Galactica. To do four seasons of a science fiction TV series and never once fall back on genre conventions like time travel, evil twins, ray guns, bumpy-headed aliens, and cardboard characters is a feat that's never been accomplished. It's a testament to the good that can come when you scrap an old and tired way of doing things in favor of a fresh approach.

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!

Making it up as you go

Sorry for the dearth of new entries lately, but sometimes that's the way it goes. Creativity does not, unfortunately, work on a schedule; the ability to write good stuff on a consistent schedule is what separates professional writers from amateur hacks like me.

The TV shows I grew up with stayed scruplously away from anything resembling a continuing narrative. If a character got married, or died, or had any kind of life-changing event that would seriously alter the show's status quo, it would always get reset-buttoned out of existence and things would proceed as though nothing had happened. As my generation matured, though, we began to demand more sophisticated fare, and thus we got shows like Babylon 5, Deep Space Nine, and later Lost, Heroes, and Battlestar Galactica, that made heavy use of character arcs and continuing storylines.

As Battlestar Galactica draws to a close, a lot of fans are complaining that Ron Moore and the writing staff are making things up as they go. This was a criticism that I remember hearing during Deep Space Nine's final season, and although I don't watch Lost, I've heard people making the same complaint about that show. Apparently, these fans believe that the show's creator should map out all of the story and character arcs in advance, before anything is filmed, and then stick to his original plan no matter what. That's hardly feasible. Although the idea behind a new TV show may be the brainchild of one person, once it's picked up and goes into regular production it gains a whole team of writers, each with their own ideas and opinions that will inevitably shape the show. Also, it's a lot easier to set up story points than it is to deliver the payoff.

Think back to one of the earliest examples of this that people my age remember: The Empire Strikes Back. Think of all the awesome pieces of setup in that movie: the revelation that Darth Vader is Luke's father, Yoda's cryptic reference to "the other", the inevitable attempt to rescue Han from Jabba The Hutt; all of it left us screaming for more. When it came time for all that stuff to be resolved, of course, we got Return of the Jedi, and a lot of people were disappointed to learn that "the other" was Leia and she was Luke's sister, to say nothing about the Ewoks or that most of the Luke-Vader-Emperor scenes consisted of the Emperor sitting and talking while Luke stood there and looked conflicted. And although we've spent the last twenty-odd years complaining about it, I've never seen anyone put forward any better ideas. There was just no way to satisfactorily pay off the story elements that Empire set up.

Which brings me to Battlestar Galactica. Throughout it's run, BSG has been setting up all kinds of interesting story points and promising to pay them off at a later time: the Cylons' plan, Roslin's visions, Starbuck's destiny, the quest for Earth, and the future role of Athena and Helo's daughter Hera. In Season Three, a new mystery was added: the identities of the Final Five Cylon models. The last few minutes of that season's finale are amazing: the mysterious power outage that affects every ship in the fleet simultaneously and is seemingly orchestrated by a higher power, the revelation of Tigh, Tory, Anders and the Chief as Cylons after they're drawn together by strains of "All Along The Watchtower", and of course the return of Starbuck, followed by the dramatic pull-back-out-of-the-galaxy-then-zoom-back-in-to-reveal-Earth shot which shows us that the Fleet is fairly close to Earth. Like The Empire Strikes Back, there was just no way to pay off all that stuff to everyone's satisfaction. Ron Moore and company tried, though, and now that we're two weeks away from the finale's first installment, people are complaining that the writers are making it up as they go along. I wonder, would the story be more palatable if Ron Moore made it all up in 2003 when he wrote the miniseries?

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, of course, and I've read some very thoughtful critiques of the last few episodes. For example, why did "Deadlock" give us scene after scene of Adama wordlessly watching the work crews fix up the Galactica with Cylon spackle, but relegate important information like the disposition of Galactica's mutineers (they're on the prison ship, BTW) to the Ron Moore podcast? Did anyone even watch the episode after they cut it together? And you can't tell me that the piano players' true identity in "Someone To Watch Over Me" was a surprise. Most of us guessed it before the opening credits. Still, when BSG is finally over, I firmly believe that, although we may gripe about how certain things were handled, no one will be able to offer up any substantially better ideas.

So sit back and enjoy the ride. Because whether it was all made up at the beginning, or just made up as we went along, in the end it's all made up anyway.