Feasible EPCOT Improvement #8

Return Future World Attractions to A Unified Logo/Font Scheme

Until the mid-1990s, the signs outside each Future World pavilion were rendered in a single font (available commercially as World Bold and in a freeware version called Prototype) and each pavilion had its own unique circular logo, which imbued the park with a sense of visual unity.

Although many of the informational signs in Future World still use the classic font, each attraction now has its own distinctive signage:

Although the distinctive signage for each pavilion does make EPCOT more like the rest of Disney World, it represents one more way that EPCOT has been robbed of its uniqueness over the years. However, I'm not advocating a total return to the font/logo scheme that existed in the 1980s, merely an updated version of it. The recently-rehabbed Spaceship Earth provides a good example of what I'm talking about:

Why not redo all Future World pavilion signage in Spaceship Earth's new font and give each attraction a logo that conforms to the parameters of the one seen at the top of the sign in the above photo? Informational signage could still be rendered in the classic font, which would prevent the expense of replacing every sign in Future World while retaining one of the very small number of things that haven't changed since 1982.

Now, if your first response upon reading the preceding paragraph is to worry that people will be confused if the sign for "The Seas With Nemo and Friends" doesn't look like the logo for the movie "Finding Nemo", then congratulations, you could be the next Michael Eisner! If you can't convince anyone to let you run their entertainment franchise into the ground, maybe you could make a movie about gum wrappers.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for the comments! In future installments, I'll tackle some attractions in dire need of a relevance infusion.

Feasible EPCOT Improvement #9

Make Innoventions/CommuniCore More Interesting




I have a pretty good memory, especially where Disney World is concerned. I have vivid memories of extinct attractions like Horizons, World of Motion, and Mission to Mars, but when I sat down to write this, I realized that I can't remember much about what Innoventions contains. The only thing I know for sure is that the south side of Innoventions West completely empty except for a character greeting area and some bathrooms. So, I did some online research and found this page detailing the twin pavilions' current offerings, and I didn't see one thing that made me think "Wow, I can't wait to see and/or do that!" Well, except for the "Test Drive a Segway" thing, maybe. But if the line is too long, I could skip it without feeling too bad. In fact, that's the problem with Innoventions. You can completely skip it without feeling like you missed anything. Judging by how un-crowded the place usually is, most EPCOT visitors agree with me.

How might Disney turn things around? I really don't know. Before Innoventions, CommuniCore had the same problems. To its credit, Innoventions tries really hard to be educational. There are all kind of neat little activities that kids should enjoy, but they're the kinds of things you see at any childrens' museum. There's simply no attraction or experience there that only Disney could have pulled off.

While I'm talking about the Innoventions pavilions, I've got to take a paragraph and talk about Mouse Gear, the large gift shop that takes up a substantial chunk of the eastern building. The previous occupant of that space was a neat two-level store called Centorium. Centorium carried a selection of general Disney merchandise, of course, but it also had lots of interesting things that could only be found in Future World. Mouse Gear, on the other hand, is a thoroughly generic store that sells the same stuff you can get at any gift shop in Disney World. It carries only the tiniest selection of EPCOT-themed merchandise, and most of that is T-shirts. There is nothing unique about the store AT ALL, and because of that it really sticks out like a sore thumb in EPCOT. After all, the stores in the World Showcase are full of unique and authentic merchandise from the various countries. Check out the large store in Japan; you'll think you've actually crossed the Pacific. It would be nice if Mouse Gear became Centorium again and regained some of that uniqueness.

That's all for this week. Next up: logos and fonts.

Feasible EPCOT Improvement #10

Turn the Coral Reef Into a Good Seafood Restaurant

Imagine this: a seafood restaurant in Disney World with huge floor-to-ceiling windows that look into the second-largest man-made underwater environment in the world. Sounds like a great place to eat, right? I mean, all they have to do is serve Red Lobster-quality food with some of that trademarked friendly Disney service and most people will think it's one of the best meals they've ever had.


So what's it like to eat at the Coral Reef? Here's what some commenters at Dis Unplugged and WDWInfo.com had to say:

"The food here is very average and nothing is noteworthy except for the chocolate wave dessert which is fantastic. Service is nothing spectacular either."

"I was not at all impressed with this restaurant. It has tons of potential, but the service was atrocious and the food was truck stop quality."

"I really wanted to love this restaurant, but its just okay. The aquarium is gorgeous and a real draw for me, but the food is just okay."

"The service was fantastic as was the view of the tanks. It is a very relaxing place to go and have a nice meal. The food wasn't the best in the world, but we enjoyed everything we ordered."

"Once again, Disney thinks serving food is a bonus...hey, how about good food?"

"The wait staff were very nice, but the food was terrible . . . this restaurant should be a destination, but instead is a complete ripoff."

Dis Unplugged writer Kevin Klose has reviewed the Coral Reef twice. His first visit, in August 2006, resulted in a resoundingly negative review that's still semi-famous amongst a small gaggle of Disney geeks like myself who write blogs like this. He went back in April 2009, hoping that his first visit had simply been an aberration. His conclusion? That the Coral Reef "remains a mediocre, over-priced Disney disappointment."

More than any other park, EPCOT is known for its restaurants. Le Cellier, Biergarten, and Chefs de France are almost universally loved. I've always enjoyed the meals I've had in the Garden Grill (I could do without Chip and Dale coming around and acting whimsical while I'm eating, but kids love them). Disney is clearly not incapable of running a good restaurant, but judging by the experiences of folks that have eaten at the Coral Reef and the Mexico pavilion's San Angel, food quality becomes in afterthought in places with great atmosphere.

Fixing the Coral Reef isn't impossible. It isn't even hard. Just serve better food. Transplant the menu and kitchen from a Red Lobster if you have to, but serve better food.

That's all for today's rant. Next up: Innoventions.

Feasible EPCOT Improvements: A Wish List

As my wife and I were doing some planning for our January 2010 trip to Walt Disney World, my thoughts turned to EPCOT, and how it could feasibly be improved. Obviously, I'd like nothing better than to walk into the park in six months to find Mission: Space gone without a trace, with Horizons sitting in its place like it never left. Unfortunately, that will never happen. Instead, I've come up with a list of twelve improvements that Disney management could make to EPCOT if they really wanted to. (Whether or not they're inclined to do so, and what it says about the competence of Disney management and the health of the company as a whole is a different topic altogether). Let's get started:


#12: Get rid of the graveyard at the entrance to Future World
In saner times, the space between the entrance turnstiles and Spaceship Earth was a wide open area that contained only a few planters of flowers and a fountain. Now we have this:

Is it a graveyard, or perhaps a war memorial? No, it's just a transparent attempt to get you to pull out your wallet just minutes after you put it back into your pocket after paying for your tickets. At least it was. From 1999 until 2007, guests could shell out $35-$38 for the dubious privilege of having their picture etched onto a tiny steel plate that was then affixed to the surface of one of the gray stone monoliths that litter EPCOT's entrance plaza. Now that the Leave A Legacy program has been discontinued, I really wish they'd just remove the monoliths altogether.


#11: Clean up Innoventions/CommuniCore Plaza
In the late 1990s, EPCOT was obviously invaded by a pointy-haired boss type who had a phobia of open spaces. It's the only way to explain what happened to the area around the CommuniCore buildings. What used to be a clean, open area with clear sight lines to the pavilions that ring the periphery of Future World was defaced into this:

Image borrowed from EPCOT Central 

 

It might've looked cool in the '90s, now it's just loud, and unnecessarily busy. I might be able to forgive it if those triangular tarp things served a useful function like providing shade against the Florida sun (which can be unbearable in the summer months) but they don't. If the clean, open lines of CommuniCore plaza seemed dated by the mid-90s, they're suddenly in vogue again. Look at Apple's industrial design: the cleaner and simpler their design aesthetic, the more units they sell. It's time to remove the tacky, useless tarps and the pointless whirlygigs that litter the area.

Check back later this week for Number Ten on the list. Thanks for reading!

New links now, and new posts soon

I noticed recently, that I had failed to include two excellent sites in my list of links on the right side of the page.

The first is Progress City, U.S.A. This blog contains some of the best WDW information and analysis I've seen anywhere. It's unforgivable that I hadn't linked to it before now. The second is Walt Disney's Original EPCOT Project. It's an excellent repository for information on Walt Disney's original concept for his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Fascinating reading.

Finally, I'll shortly begin posting my EPCOT wishlist, a list of twelve improvements I'd like to see at the park. Why twelve? Because I sat down and typed up a list of feasible improvements that could be made to EPCOT, and there were twelve of them. Most of the things I'll touch upon have probably been commented on already by more capable writers than I, but I'd like to put my two cents in.

Set Imagination Free

There's a very interesting article in the February 2009 issue of Scientific American entitled "The Serious Need For Play". Basically, it delves into research indicating that imaginative "free play" is crucial for emotional development, and children that don't get enough of it may grow up to be socially maladjusted. This has only become an issue in the last generation or so, as children are spending more time in structured activities like organized sports or music lessons, and less time playing and simply being kids. I couldn't help thinking, as I read the article, that the decline of imaginative play has coincided with the decline of what was perhaps EPCOT's most important pavilion: Journey Into Imagination.

In it's pre-Eisnerized form, Future World was a salute to innovation and achievement in fields like communications, energy, transportation, and agriculture. On the surface, the whimsical Imagination pavilion may have looked like a bad fit, but I believe Future World would have been incomplete without it. After all, without an active imagination, innovation is impossible. Anyway, after all the self-congratulatory isn't-humanity-great-for-inventing-all-this-great-stuff backslapping that the other pavilions indulged in, it's nice to reflect on the fact that we owe it all to something that we didn't invent-our capacity for imagination. Not to be overlooked, of course, was the first 3D film the Imagination pavilion hosted-the positively trippy Magic Journeys. I honestly can't imagine today's creative executives (whose function, curiously enough, seems to be the stifling of creativity) approving something like this today. Much like the ride-through portion of the pavilion, Magic Journeys was a disjointed stream-of-consciousness piece that did an excellent job depicting the imaginative process.

Of course, in 1998 Imagination went down for a rehab, only to reopen as Journey into YOUR Imagination, a thoroughly joyless Honey, I Shrunk The Audience tie-in. Its insulting premise was built around the idea that the audience had no imagination, and required the services of Eric Idle and the Imagination Institute to infuse them with one. Fortunately, this iteration of the ride was universally reviled, and was replaced in 2002 by the slightly less-reviled Journey Into Your Imagination With Figment. Many people who prefer the original ride saw the new version as a condescending attempt to pander to them via gratuitous helpings of Figment, but the blog Passport to Dreams Old and New recently had a different take. I strongly encourage you to read the entire entry here, but the gist of it is that the show is a slyly subversive take on the struggles between "empty suit" creative execs, symbolized by the Dr. Channing character, and real Imagineers, symbolized by Figment. Of course, in the show Dr. Channing starts out asserting that "imagination should be captured and controlled," but eventually comes around to Figment's way of thinking and decides that it should be allowed to run free after all.

While Journey Into Your Imagination With Figment is deeply flawed (no doubt because of the budgetary limitations and executive meddling with which the design team had to contend) its core message, that imagination should not be bottled up, but allowed to run free, is more relevant to our times and vital than ever.

Posting is liable to be a bit infrequent around here for a while. I am, however, planning a trip to Disney World in January, and while I'm there I plan to take plenty of pictures, most of which will end up here, and hopefully I'll be able to take the Undiscovered Future World tour and write up an account of that. Thanks for sticking around!