Roddenberry’s Box

Note: After writing the screenplay for Star Trek: Insurrection-the ninth film in the series-the late Michael Piller prepared a manuscript for a book that detailed the film’s creative process. That book, entitled Fade In: From Idea to Final Draft, was never published because Paramount blocked its publication. It was briefly posted to Trekcore.com in 2010, but it was taken down at the Piller family’s request. Fortunately, I was able to download a copy for myself. It left me with a lot of interesting thoughts, and they’ll form the basis for my next several posts. Oh, and since I don’t want to go against the wishes of the Piller family-or their lawyers-I will not be posting the book for download.

One of the worst things that can happen to a creative person is for them to become a huge success, because that success tends to insulate them from criticism. The poster child for this is George Lucas, but another interesting example is Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

As I’ve written before, Gene Roddenberry spent a lot of time in the 1970s addressing adoring convention audiences who believed he was some kind of visionary prophet because he’d been partially responsible for a TV show they enjoyed. Unfortunately, Roddenberry believed it, too, and it started to drive him crazy. Like the folks who inhabit the lunatic fringe of the Star Trek fanbase, Gene stopped thinking of Trek as just a television show and started to believe that the imaginary future it depicted was real. By the time he got to work on The Next Generation in the mid-80s, he was a permanent resident of the alternate universe where the brain of one Eugene Wesley Roddenberry was the sole source of all good ideas. He’d make pronouncements about the 24th century as though it were a real place he had visited. “In the 24th century, no one goes hungry and you never lose your socks in the dryer,” was the kind of thing you’d hear him say on a disturbingly regular basis.

You know, as insane as George Lucas has become, you never get the feeling that he thinks Star Wars is real or anything. He openly admits that he’s doing what he thinks is cool, and he doesn’t really care what anyone else thinks. But with Star Trek, you hear a lot about “Roddenberry’s vision”, especially when the people who took control of the franchise after he died are explaining why spinoffs like Voyager and Enterprise were less fun than getting a root canal from Captain Hook. “We were just trying to stay true to Gene Roddenberry’s vision”, they’ll say. And from some of the stuff Gene Roddenberry said from the 1970s onward, you get the impression that he really thought he’d seen a vision of the future and it was his mission in life to faithfully translate it to the television screen, even if it did not result in what your or I would call entertainment.

A key part of Roddenberry’s vision was the idea that 24th century humans would have none of the foibles or personality flaws that people have had throughout recorded history. Only aliens would be allowed to have human failings. If a human character-especially a member of Starfleet-ever acted shifty, selfish, or even argumentative, it was a sure sign he was under the control of an alien brain worm.

Michael Piller called Gene’s rules of 24th century human behavior “Roddenberry’s Box” and he ran up against it on the very first episode he worked on as head of The Next Generation’s writing staff early in the show’s third year. A young aspiring writer named Ronald D. Moore (yes, the very same guy who went on to create the reimagined Battlestar Galactica) submitted a story called “The Bonding” where the mother of a young boy is killed on an away team mission and the boy bonds with a holodeck re-creation of her. Roddenberry flatly rejected it. “This doesn’t work” he insisted. “In the 24th century, no one grieves. Death is accepted as a part of life.”

In the end, Piller was able to save the story by reworking it so that benevolent aliens re-created an image of the boy’s dead mother and Captain Picard got to give them the “Death is a part of life” speech. “The Bonding” turned out to be a solid entry in the Star Trek canon. I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t point out that later in the season there was an episode called “Hollow Pursuits” where a new crewman escapes into holodeck fantasies to deal with his social anxiety disorder, and our series regulars react to this by making fun of him behind his back like high-school jocks snickering at the awkward new kid. Strangely, there’s no record that Roddenberry had any problem with that script. So, according to Roddenberry’s Rules of Evolved 24th Century Conduct, grieving over your dead mother is not acceptable, but making fun of people who get nervous in social situations is perfectly all right. The future is easy!

Still, Mr. Piller began to view Roddenberry’s Box as a positive thing, believing that it prevented writers from falling back on familiar storytelling devices and forced them to be original. Also, he reasoned that Star Trek had been staying within Roddenberry’s Box since the 1960s and had proven to be successful, so obviously Gene was doing something right. Each of these lines of reasoning, I believe, is fatally flawed.

First of all, the huge run of success that prompted Paramount to bring Star Trek:The Next Generation into existence in the first place all happened before Roddenberry’s Box was even a thing. Watch the Original Series, which was produced before throngs of adoring fans convinced Roddenberry that he was a Visionary Prophet Who Could Do No Wrong. The regulars are all virtuous and generally free of the worst human flaws like bigotry or greed, but they’re not perfect.

And the most successful films that came out before The Next Generation went into production were the Harve Bennett-produced Star Treks II, III, and IV over which Roddenberry had no control whatever. In fact, Gene often complained vociferously about how Bennett and his team failed to depict the idyllic 23rd century future he envisioned. The control that Gene did exert over the first film was seen as a big reason why it turned out to be a talky and ponderous bore, and the word in the Star Trek fan community is that Paramount tapped him to create The Next Generation only after Harve Bennett and Leonard Nimoy turned them down.

Secondly, there are no truly “original” stories. Humans have been writing fiction for thousands of years, and virtually every story that can be told has been told in some form. In some ways, writing fiction is like reaching into a big bag of Legos and building something new out of the preexisting pieces you find there. This is especially true when you’re writing for an established franchise like Star Trek. All Roddenberry’s Box did was take away the various types of human conflict that writers have been using for millennia as the building blocks of drama. To replace them, Star Trek’s writers were forced to come up with new, inferior building blocks that mostly involved technobabble and increasingly ludicrous sci-fi scenarios.

In my next post, I’ll talk about some of those ludicrous scenarios and technobabble, and the fun that results when entertainment executives completely misunderstand their audience. Stay tuned!

The EPCOT Confusion Conundrum

A while back I idly wondered what would happen if you found your average, non-geek member of the general public who had just taken a trip to EPCOT, handed them a blank map of the park, and asked them to name all the attractions. The result, I imagined, would look something like this:

I posted the above image on Twitter and it got a lot of laughs and many expressions of agreement. No one seemed to disagree with its premise-that the millions of people who visit EPCOT every year leave with a fundamental ignorance of what the park contains.

What’s the reason for this phenomenon? Is the general public stupid? Of course it is! After all, Mr. T couldn’t have made a career out of pitying fools if there weren’t so darned many of them.

^{“I pity the fool who says the general public’s not full of fools!”}

Still, most members of the general public can identify Cinderella Castle, Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, and It’s a Small World as things that are in the Magic Kingdom. So why are they largely ignorant about EPCOT even once they’ve been there? I think a lot of it has to do with what it takes for a theme park attraction (and by extension a theme park itself) to sink into the public consciousness.

I think there are two criteria that need to be met for that to happen:

1. The attraction has to be unique or memorable in some way
2. It needs to stick around long enough for people to enjoy it as kids, grow up, and share it with their own children.

The second point is especially important because it builds a sort of generational loyalty. Ask yourself: why is a low-tech ride like Peter Pan’s Flight so popular? It has the unique aspect of having the ride vehicle hang from the track, so you get a slight sensation of “really” flying without being too intense for little kids. But a big part of its popularity is generational: people are taking their kids on it because their parents took them on it when they were kids, and they want to pass along that fond childhood memory. Same thing with Dumbo and It’s A Small World.

And here’s where EPCOT falls short. Because its attractions tend to vanish or drastically change every time a pavilion loses its corporate sponsor or gains a new one, they’ve never been able to get any long-term traction. Rather than receiving incremental updates that allowed them to stay current whilst preserving the essence of the attraction, most of the stuff that enthralled young school-age visitors to EPCOT Center in the 1980s-like Horizons and the upstairs ImageWorks-is long gone.

Because EPCOT doesn’t have any attractions with the long-term popularity of Pirates of the Caribbean, Peter Pan’s Flight, or even Dumbo, people don’t go there with a firm idea of what they’re going to experience like they do when they visit the more familiar Magic Kingdom. Therefore, their memories of the place are not as easily catalogued, and they don’t remember it as well as the Magic Kingdom or the other parks that offer more familiar experiences like roller coasters or shows based on popular movie characters.

EPCOT might be turning the corner a little bit, though: Test Track, which has been an audience favorite ever since it opened in 1998, is getting a glowy, TRON-looking upgrade that updates the attraction while keeping it recognizable as Test Track. Its 20th anniversary is in just six years, which means that Test Track may soon be on the road to becoming a generational favorite as as the people that first experienced it as kids introduce it to their own kids-provided they meet the height requirement.

Still, EPCOT badly needs the kind of unifying philosophy it had in its early years. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll have another three decades of the park being known only as “that place with the giant golf ball”.

The Theme Park-Social Media Enjoyment Effect

The Internet is a great thing for Disney theme park aficionados, because it’s an unlimited fountain of information about all the latest goings-on at the parks. And that’s a good thing, right? Or is it?

There’s an old saying that familiarity breeds contempt, and I wonder if it doesn’t pertain to our relationship to the theme parks in this era of instant information. Before we had access to palm-sized communicators that allow us to broadcast our thoughts to whoever on the planet is interested in hearing them, we were blissfully unaware about what was happening at Disney World when we weren’t there. And even then, we mostly only knew how things were going in the immediate area of the property where we were at any given time. It was easy to imagine that everything at Disney World worked perfectly (or almost perfectly) all of the time, because we had no evidence to the contrary.

But now, every time a Monorail line or attraction goes down, or some in-ride effect or Animatronic stops working-even if it’s only for a few minutes, someone is bound to tweet about it. This constant flow of instant information exposes the parks for what they really are-a complex system made up of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of moving parts that do not always work perfectly 100% of the time. When you’re actually in the parks having a good time, though, little mishaps and outages don’t bother you too much. Sure, you may grumble about the inconvenience of having to take the ferryboat or the Resort Monorail because the Express Monorail went down, but a few minutes after you get to the Magic Kingdom you’ve forgotten all about it. And if the Davy Jones projection doesn’t work on Pirates of the Caribbean or the Burning Rome smellitzer isn’t working on Spaceship Earth it won’t really ruin the ride for you or anyone else.

Now, I’m not giving Disney a free pass for shoddy management that’s myopically focused on short-term profit at the expense of absolutely everything else. My point is that when we’re not in the parks, and yet we’re instantly aware whenever anything in them breaks down for five minutes, it can create the perception that nothing ever works right and things are worse than they really are. And when we do visit Disney World, we might find ourselves scrutinizing every in-ride effect and Animatronic looking for some hint of a malfunction so we can whip our our smartphone and tell the world about it. With that mindset, a trip to the Vacation Kingdom seems more like work and less like, well, a vacation.

Obviously, sometimes this kind of reporting from the parks can do some good. For example, Kevin Yee’s video of the completely broken Splash Mountain finale scene shamed Disney into fixing it, at least temporarily. And if you’re actually in the parks it’s nice to get a heads-up that an attraction or mode of transport has gone down so you can adjust your plans accordingly.

Otherwise, try to place the daily flow of information in its proper context. After all, if a brief Monorail outage doesn’t ruin the day in Orlando, there’s no reason it should ruin yours if you’re not even there. So relax. Things are not going so bad at Disney World that on your next visit you’ll be forced to row an inflatable raft across the Seven Seas Lagoon to the Magic Kingdom just so you can ride through darkened show buildings full of broken Animatronics and deactivated effects. A friendly Cast Member will do the rowing for you.

The Wonders of Florida

Lately, I’ve been somewhat critical of the way that Disney’s Orlando management team executes its duties. Reading some of the stuff I’ve written, you might get the idea that I believe a truckload of Chihuahuas hopped up on caffeine could hardly make worse decisions than the Orlando executives, and you’d be right. Recently, someone left a comment (one of many, actually, but we’ll get into that later) that basically said “You’re a big hypocrite because you complain about the way Disney World is run yet you continue to go there”

So let me set the record straight: although many of my fellow theme park bloggers are Annual Passholders who go to the parks all the time, I am not. My wife and I had Annual Passes from late 2009-late 2010, and we did not renew. Since their expiration, we’ve made only one visit, a day trip to EPCOT last year to meet up with some old friends we hadn’t seen in years. Although I’ve continued to write about new developments at the theme parks, we’ve taken to spending our vacation time (and dollars) elsewhere.

The foremost reason is that, although a trip to Disney World is fun every few years, once you cram a lot of visits into a relatively short time it starts to get a tad repetitive. Also expensive. And much like I love steak, but it’s not the only thing I eat, there are a lot of other recreational activities I enjoy besides visiting theme parks. So, here’s a short list of fun (and affordable) things to do in Florida outside the Orlando theme parks:

The Beach: Long before the Walt Disney Company transformed Orlando into a place people have heard of, Florida was already a prime vacation spot thanks to its 663 miles of beaches. And although Disney World often remains crowded (and expensive) after the summer vacation season ends, many of the coastal resort areas do not. The weather in Florida often remains warm into late October and even early November, which means that you can still enjoy all the outdoor activities associated with the beach, but without the crowds and intense heat of the summer vacation season. And if you’ve become used to Disney’s prices, you’ll be surprised by how much cheaper a coastal vacation can be. In fact, late last October my wife and I spent three days and two nights in a two-bedroom beachfront condo for just over $150 a night. I feel obliged to point out that $150 a night won’t even get you a room at one of Disney’s moderate resorts like Caribbean Beach (which is neither in the Caribbean nor on a beach) This was the view from our balcony:

And, although there was no evening fireworks show, we enjoyed something even better: a beautiful sunset over the Gulf of Mexico:

However, if you want to stay in a place where there’s more stuff to walk around and see, then you can’t go wrong with:

St. Augustine:

The oldest continuously inhabited city in the continental US, downtown St. Augustine offers a lot of things to see and do within an area that’s small enough to be traversed on foot, provided you don’t mind doing a lot of walking. But then, if you’re used to visiting a theme park you’re probably used to it.

If you’re looking for a World Showcase-like experience (by which I mean walking through a scenic area lined with European-styled buildings that house restaurants and souvenir shops) then you’ll want to head to St. George Street at the center of the downtown area:

^{indianapete.phanfare.com}

There’s a lot there, but one shop you’ll definitely want to visit is Whetstone Chocolates, because they make the best fudge on Earth. That is not an exaggeration. It is actually a federal crime to leave St. Augustine without getting some fudge from Whetstone’s. And if you get fudge from Kilwin’s instead of Whetstone’s it’s a capital crime. You think I’m kidding.

Of course, after you gorge yourself on the finest fudge this planet has ever seen, you’ll need to work off all those calories. Climbing stairs is an excellent way to do that, and there’s no better place to do it than the St. Augustine Lighthouse.

This is a real, functioning lighthouse that’s been in service since 1874. From on top you can enjoy beautiful views of the coastline and surrounding area, but in order to get there you have to climb the longest spiral staircase you’ve ever seen. Fortunately there are landings along the way where you can stop to rest briefly. The climb can be exhausting, but trust me, the view is worth it.

Of course, there are other ways to see St. Augustine if you don’t want to hoof it. There are a couple different tram services that run continuously between different downtown points of interest. You can also take boat tours and even horse-and-carriage rides.

Finally, as someone who loves attractions that use old technology, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Fountain of Youth. It’s a privately-owned park located on the spot where Ponce de Leon allegedly first landed in Florida in 1513 (although the actual spot is most likely closer to Cape Canaveral) and is home to a number of exhibits that have not changed since before I was born. My favorite is the Discovery Globe, a planetarium-like show that has not changed since it opened in 1959. It’s the kind of thing that would have been in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland during that period, and as you sit in the darkened theater listening to Mr. 1950s Narrator trace the routes that Spanish conquistadors took to the New World on a giant illuminated globe, it’s easy to imagine that you’ve traveled 50 years back in time.

So far, all the destinations I’ve mentioned are best experienced in the winter, fall, or spring. Florida’s summers, with their triple-digit temperatures and humidity, are just too brutal for most outdoor activities. However, the intense heat is the perfect weather in which to enjoy:

The Springs: The state is home to a number of crystal-clear freshwater springs that have a year-round temperature of 72 degrees-which is colder than it sounds. My favorite is Itchetucknee Springs, at the headwaters of the Itchetucknee River. For just a few bucks, you can rent a raft or inner tube and enjoy a leisurely three-hour float down the river. It’s fun, relaxing, and inexpensive.

That’s just a short list of places to go and things to do in Florida that have nothing to do with the Orlando theme parks. There are even more things I didn’t talk about, like Kennedy Space Center, the glass bottom boats at Ocala’s Silver Springs, not to mention the many state parks.

Myself and others in the online Disney theme park fan community tend to spend a lot of time bemoaning the company’s lack of interest in doing anything to actually earn our business. Fortunately for us, Walt Disney World is not located in remote wasteland like North Dakota. It’s located in Florida, where there are a wide variety of fun and affordable vacation options that do not involve forking over money to the Disney Corporation.

Look, if you’ve never been to Disney World, or if you have kids who have never been and they’re at the perfect age to enjoy it, then go if you can afford it. But if you’ve been to the parks so many times that you could navigate them while blindfolded, then go somewhere else. You’ll get so much more vacation for your money. Florida has been attracting tourists since before Mickey Mouse even existed. Come find out why.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! If you’re inclined to comment, you’ll notice that I’ve tweaked the settings and you’re required to have some kind of an account, Google or otherwise, in order to do so. You see, I really don’t mind if someone wants to entertain themselves by leaving what they think are cleverly-worded comments about what a pathetic no-life loser I am for writing this blog instead of, I don’t know, bringing about world peace or something. It’s hard to find joy in posting bitter comments on a blog about mostly EPCOT and Star Trek that only gets a few hundred hits a month, but if you can pull it off then I salute you. I won’t even delete the comments unless they contain language that’s not family-friendly. But I’ve decided that if you’re going to troll me, you’ve at least got to go to the trouble to register an account somewhere.

Thanks again for reading!

The NextGen Aversion Rationale

As the Fantasyland expansion project at Florida’s Magic Kingdom inches toward completion, you’d think that it would be the main topic of conversation in the online Disney fan community. And you would be wrong. Fantasyland is already old news. No, the big topic of conversation these days is the NextGen initiative, which encompasses things like interactive attraction queues and parkwide games like the new Sorcerers Of The Magic Kingdom and is moving implacably toward a new system called XPass.

I’m not going to talk much about XPass here because most of what we think we know about it comes from one source and there’s been no official information released as of yet.

I am, however, going to talk about the parts of NextGen that we do have today: interactive queues and (briefly) Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom. This little Groucho Marx ditty nicely sums up my feelings about them:

Now I know what you’re probably thinking: I’m a curmudgeonly fanboy who hates change and wishes Disney World would stay forever frozen in the year 1989. But that’s not it. Nor do I object to the implementation of new technology. Heck, I love new technology. But here’s the main reason why I have a problem with NextGen:

The company is spending over a billion dollars on it while existing attractions and facilities are deliberately allowed to fall apart or stand empty.

A perfect example of this is Peter Pan’s Flight. It’s a very popular attraction, kids love it, and it always has a long line. It’s also basically the same ride that opened at Disneyland in the ‘50s, and as maintenance at Walt Disney World has fallen by the wayside, it’s begun to look rather musty and dilapidated. A few new effects, maybe a modern Animatronic or two, and some general TLC would go a long way toward making the attraction fresh and new again. So that is not what Disney is doing. Instead, they’re going to be putting in an interactive queue, presumably with touchscreen video games for people to play while they’re waiting. That’s a bit like getting an expensive paint job for a rusted-out car. And while interactive queues are great for rides like Soarin’ that are not continuously loading, all they do for rides like Peter Pan or Space Mountain is slow things down.

What about interactive games, like the new Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom? From what I’ve heard, it certainly seems to be popular with kids. But it also seems to be causing traffic problems by causing lines to form where none were ever intended to be.

After the NextGen project has blown through its alleged billion-dollar budget, what will we have to show for it? The Monorails will still be falling apart. Various aging and ill-maintained Magic Kingdom attractions will still need the improvements that have been vetoed by park VP and world-class idiot Phil Holmes. Over at EPCOT, the Imagination pavilion will still be a pathetic shell of its former self, the Wonders of Life pavilion will still be empty, and Universe of Energy’s show will still resemble an overlong episode of I Love The 90s. The Backlot Tour at the Studios will still be a joke, and Animal Kingdom will still have, well, all the problems that Animal Kingdom has. Also, Downtown Disney will still be a complete waste of time.

If all four parks on the Florida property had reached ideal buildout, every attraction was well-maintained and the infrastructure was in good shape, then I could see this NextGen thing as a good idea. But as things currently stand, it’s just a shiny object dangling in the face of clueless senior management, distracting them from the real improvements the resort needs.

And that’s why I’m against it.

The WDW Mass Transit Conundrum

One of the defining characteristics of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow that Walt Disney hoped to build in Florida was its forward-thinking transportation system. A key part of this system was the idea that cars entering the city would park near a central transportation hub, where visitors could ride the PeopleMover to an in-city destination or jump on the Monorail to travel to the Magic Kingdom, the industrial park, or some other destination outside the city. Pedestrians, automobiles, and the property’s dedicated vehicles would all move in their own dedicated spaces. Therefore, a pedestrian would be in no more danger of being hit by a car than being hit by a Monorail, and since neither pedestrians nor the property’s mass transit systems would utilize the automobile roadways, traffic would flow much more smoothly than was possible in a large city like New York or Chicago.

Although Walt’s EPCOT city was never built, many of its guiding principles could be seen in the design and operation of the Walt Disney World resort, especially with regards to its transportation system. Indeed, transportation between the resorts and the theme park was no mere afterthought; the Magic Kingdom resort area and its Monorail system were actually designed around each other. At one time, up to five resort hotels were planned for the Seven Seas Lagoon/Bay Lake area, each with its own stop on the Monorail line. Only two of those hotels were actually built (if not for the OPEC embargo in the late 1970s there likely would have been more) but the system was clearly designed for expansion. Of course, an EPCOT Center line was added during the construction of that park, and in the mid-to-late 1970s there were plans in the works to extend it all the way out to Lake Buena Vista as part of the residential/recreational community that was supposed to sit where the vastly inferior Downtown Disney is today. And like Walt’s EPCOT city, the Buena Vista community would have had a PeopleMover system for intra-community travel. How cool is that?

Even though the Lake Buena Vista community never materialized, during the first couple years of EPCOT Center’s operation there was reason for optimism that any future expansion of the Walt Disney World resort would include a concurrent expansion to the property’s futuristic transportation system. But then, in 1984 Disney CEO E. Cardon “I Love Golf” Walker was replaced by the guy who thought Star Trek: The Motion Picture would be as exciting as Star Wars.

^{“Trust me, I know what I’m doing!”}

To be fair, Michael Eisner did do a lot of positive things for the Walt Disney Company, especially during his first decade as CEO, and current executives could learn a lot from his early focus on the quality of the theme parks. One reason for his success was that, unlike some of the company’s old guard, he did what he thought best without being paralyzed by worry about what Walt would or would not have done. This approach yielded a mixed bag of results. Yes, it led to the company ballooning into a multimedia behemoth, a run of successful animated films that have become modern classics, and an unprecedented expansion of the theme parks. Unfortunately, it also drove the final nail into the coffin for Walt’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

Under Eisner’s regime, the demand for more hotel rooms on the Florida property was met by the construction of several new resorts. Additionally, the property gained two new theme parks: Disney/MGM Studios and Animal Kingdom. However, since Michael Eisner felt no particular allegiance to the tenets of Walt’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, there was no concurrent expansion of the Monorail system, and no addition of a PeopleMover system to link those areas that were separated by shorter distances. Thus, the only way to travel to or from many destinations on property was to use the existing roadways. And this called for a fleet of buses to move people between the various resorts and parks. Of course, an increase in roadway traffic around the property led to stoplights and traffic jams and all those problems of big cities that Walt Disney had wanted his Prototype Community to solve or avoid.

Now, probably 99.999% of the vacationers on Walt Disney World property at any given time do not know or care about this, but it drives us hardcore Disney futurist nerds nuts. We’re fond of saying that the transportation system needs to be fixed, and we’re not just talking about giving the Monorail fleet some much-needed maintenance (or maybe a complete replacement, seeing as how the current fleet is entering its third decade of service) We want to get rid of the buses, and replace them with Monorails or PeopleMovers or even a light rail system. Sadly, that ship has long since sailed.

The original Magic Kingdom-area resorts were built around a Monorail-and-boat transportation system. Future expansions on the property were supposed to follow a coherent long-range plan. Since that kind of long-range thinking was largely abandoned during Eisner’s tenure and expansions were done on a case-by-case basis with no overarching long-term plan in place it would be pretty much impossible to just plug an elegantly efficient transportation system into the property as it’s currently configured.

Unfortunately for we futurists, the buses are here to stay. But who knows? Maybe one day the property will get a fleet of those elevated superbuses the Chinese are working on:

^{Imagine this thing covered with DVC advertisements and Princess-themed festoonery}

Wishful thinking? Probably. But who knows?