Rebooting Superman

As long as I can remember, my three favorite things have always been (in no particular order) Star Trek, Disney World, and Superman. This blog is mainly about Disney World, and I’ve written about Star Trek from time to time, but this is the first time I’ve been compelled to write about Superman. The reason, as you might have guessed, is the recently-announced Giant Reboot Of The Whole DC Comics Universe.

There’s a lot we don’t know at this point, but it seems that Superman will get the most drastic changes, with a new origin and even a new costume:

^{Okay, why does he need a belt if he no longer has the red undershorts?}

So what’s the reason for all this? After all, this will be the third new origin Superman has been given since 2003. Well, since the reboot is being coupled with a new digital distribution scheme it’s obvious that DC is trying to create a jumping-on point for new readers. Unfortunately, there may be an even more nefarious reason for the big changes coming to Superman: lawyers.

You see, a court has ruled that the rights to the Superman’s first appearance in 1938’s Action Comics #1 should revert to the family of co-creator Jerry Siegel. I’m no expert in coypright law, but based on what I’ve read elsewhere this means that the Siegels now own all the elements of the Superman mythos that appeared in that seminal issue. This would include his classic costume, his Kryptonian orgin, his power of invulnerability, and Clark Kent’s job as a newspaper reporter with a gruff editor and a co-worker named Lois. The theory in most Superman fan circles is that this new version of Superman has been designed to excise those things. This amounts to having lawyers make creative decisions, and that’s a very bad thing.

There are already Superman-like characters that are designed to be similar to him, yet different enough to avoid claims of copyright infringement. It doesn’t matter if DC still has the right to publish comics about a character named Superman who wears the S-shield on his chest, if he’s missing half of the Superman mythos then he might as well be Mr. Majestic, Samaritan, Supreme, or any of the other knock-off characters we’ve seen over the years.

The worst-case scenario here is that Warner Brothers (DC’s parent company) and the Siegels will be unable to come to terms, and that both parties will market their own versions of Superman using the pieces of the character that they each own. This would obviously be a disaster. Hopefully, both sides realize this and reach some kind of a settlement.

The only reason I have for optimism here is that Grant Morrison, author of All-Star Superman, the most perfect Superman story ever, is involved with the reboot and will be writing Action Comics. My hope is that the “new” Superman will end up a lot like the proposed Superman 2000 revamp that Morrison, Mark Waid, and Mark Millar proposed back in the late ‘90s.

Still, if Warner Brothers and the Siegel family can’t come to some kind of an agreement over the copyright issue, then not even Grant Morrison will be able to save Superman. And that would be a shame.

Consolidating Innoventions

When it first moved into the space formerly occupied by CommuniCore, EPCOT’s Innoventions was touted as a high-tech playground of the future, a sort of permanent consumer electronics show. Just check out this commercial from its early days (I apologize for the poor video quality)

Today, of course, the high-tech experiences at Innoventions once offered have been replaced by the Wall O’ Video Game Consoles You Can Get At Wal-Mart.

^{It’s like the run-down arcade at your local movie theater, but with older games}

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. Sum of All Thrills is pretty cool. But outside of that Raytheon-sponsored exhibit, Innoventions looks pretty bare these days. The last few times I’ve been to EPCOT, you know what I’ve noticed about Innoventions? Nothing. Large expanses of it, in fact. And that’s the real problem with the place. Disney just can’t seem to secure enough corporate sponsors to fill all the exhibition space, leading to large tracts of vacant real estate. Last week, WDWMagic reported that the House of Innoventions is returning, and it will occupy the now-empty space across from the Waste Management exhibit (also known as the “what the heck is a big green garbage truck doing in Future World?” exhibit). However, the Waste Management exhibit is going away, so really we’re just trading one piece of empty space for another.

So I have an idea. Since Disney is never going to get corporate sponsors for every piece of Innoventions exhibition space, why not consolidate all the exhibits into just one side of the pavilion, say Innoventions East? Innoventions West could be converted into an A or B ticket attraction like a scaled-down version of Adventures in Inner Space or a Horizons simulator, something inexpensive but true to the spirit of EPCOT. That way, Innoventions could be the busy, bustling place it was supposed to be, and we’d get a little piece of that EPCOT Center magic back.

I doubt this will ever actually happen, but it should.

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.