futureprobe reviews The Epcot Explorer’s Encyclopedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Next?

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

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

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

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

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

Another New Look-And More To Come

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

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

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

I hope you'll stick around.

EPCOT: Whither The Marketing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disney Synergy: The Secret Origin

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Panel For the Rest of Us

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

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

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

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

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

WEDHead’s Panel Answer: 1989. Next question.

Here’s another example:

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

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

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

And one more:

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

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

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

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

And isn’t that what Disney really wants?