One of the most famous of these was Monsanto’s “House of the Future”, which occupied a spot right off of the park’s central plaza from 1957 to 1967. As much a World’s Fair exhibit as a theme park attraction, the house used “modern” building techniques to create a unique four-lobed, plastic structure chock-full of the latest electronic amenities.

What must it have been like to visit? What would it have been like to live in such a wondrous home? Well, thankfully, we have this promotional film to show us just what it would have been like if we showed up at the park and just decided to move in. Those thousands of people waiting in line won’t mind; just make yourself at home!

This video is truly spectacular, and joins the pantheon of mid-century promotional films featuring odd hallucinations about having nicer appliances; it’s slightly more grounded than Once Upon A Honeymoon or Design For Dreaming, but still delightfully strange. Amazingly, both those films were made in 1956 – just a year before the House of the Future opened and this short was most likely filmed. In one of the opening shots of the house you can see the large steel support for the Skyway in the background; this would soon be replaced by the Matterhorn which opened in 1959.

So kick off your shoes and pop something in the microwave range – make yourself at home, it’s the future! Just don’t forget to change out of your park-going formal wear before you start dinner…

Good thing, then, that I wasn’t a child in Britain in 1975 when the fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker, crossed over from Doctor Who to appear on Disney Time; the fusion of these two universes would have been so incredibly cool that I might not have survived. Disney Time was an annual or semi-annual special that appeared on the BBC from 1970-1983 during Christmas and other major holidays. It involved a number of clips from Disney animated shorts and animated or live action features, all linked together by live-action interstitials featuring various celebrities. Baker appeared in character as the Doctor for the Christmas, 1975 special.

The video is of poor quality, and the actual Disney clips have been removed, but you get the idea…

I have to say that aside from wanting more Doctor with my Disney, Disney Time itself is a pretty good concept. The studio is sitting on a vast archive of material, none of which it is utilizing. I grew up on this sort of thing, fed a daily dose of Disney thanks to the syndicated Wonderful World of Disney, but where today will kids get to see True-Life Adventures or Blackbeard’s Ghost? Maybe a regularly-occurring clip show like this would be one answer, and even though Baker has long ago hung up his scarf I’m sure the eleventh Doctor would be glad to make an appearance…

I’m sure between ABC, ABC Family, the Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Junior, they could find some place to put it.

And although I never knew one of my life-long goals was to hear the Doctor talk about the Apple Dumpling Gang, I’m glad to have finally experienced it.

The first thing that always jumps out to me is what a natural “ham” Walt is; as a child he always wanted to be an actor, and he might have actually been a pretty good one. He has the Midwest-deadpan thing going for him, but his timing is really quite good – in fact, he’s better than Benny, who admittedly I’ve never “gotten”. Benny hams it up and plays to the camera, but Walt manages to hit the right notes perfectly.

You have to love how smooth Walt is at promotion. He stages the bit so that it starts with product placement for the then-upcoming That Darn Cat – “The title of the picture is important! You gotta punch it!” You sure do, Walt! Well played. He also drops Mary Poppins in there. And while he doesn’t like to talk about the charity work that Disneyland does, he apparently does keep huge bricks of tickets in his desk just in case!

Just another day at the studio, I suppose. No wonder kids of this era thought Walt was just this side of Santa Claus – he hangs out in his huge office with magical birds, tigers roaming the halls, and deskfulls of free Disneyland tickets. What a life!

While Benny managed to make out like a bandit on this visit, Walt had managed to get some money out of him previously; when Walt’s Celebrity Sports Center opened near Denver in 1960, one of its investors was the tightfisted Benny.

This has taken me by surprise, and I’ve been at a loss to really explain it. As I’ve said, it’s an odd time to be a critic, with the company willing to spend once more but making dubious choices in the theming of these multi-million dollar expansions. Even more baffling is Walt Disney World, my personal area of greatest interest, which seems to rise and fall on a daily basis; depending on which subject you’re addressing – attractions, entertainment, foods, transportation – you can waver between optimistic and despondent on an hourly basis.

Big new Fantasyland plans? Yay! Decaying Tomorrowland? Boo! Tasty new burgers at Pecos Bill? Yay! Shortened hours and generic chicken nuggets at Columbia Harbour House? Boo! Classy new Town Square Theater? Yay! The hideous Stitch stage blaring Cotton Eye Joe in Tomorrowland? Boo!

It’s hard to keep track. And it’s hard to really chart the progress of the resort when you have snazzy new rockwork going up in Fantasyland but monorails falling apart outside the gates. What is most baffling is that many of us feel that the absolute nadir of the Magic Kingdom is behind us, and the park has seen an overall rise in quality and maintenance over the last few years. While it is far, far from its historical peak, of course, it’s at least better – better than when Under New Management festered in Adventureland, or the Exposition Hall remained empty, or the 20,000 Leagues lagoon sat stagnant and filled with floating garbage. The Magic Kingdom is better off, and the other parks are certainly no worse off than they were five years ago, so why are so many people worried? And why does the future quality of the resort feel like such a dicey proposition?

At last we have a cogent reasoning for exactly why this happens courtesy of Foxx at Passport to Dreams Old and New, who provides a compelling dissection of just how broken the system is at Walt Disney World in the prologue to her annual “report card” for the Magic Kingdom. The reason Walt Disney World’s efforts seem so scattered and fragmented is – surprise! – the resort’s executive and departmental structure is scattered and fragmented. The system is broken, and it will take a wholesale rethinking of the way things are done in Disney’s largest and most prosperous resort to return it to its former level of service and quality.

It is important for fans to realize just how Walt Disney World is structured so they know who is responsible when things go pear-shaped. In many ways it doesn’t matter who is calling the shots at the top; no matter the agenda of Iger, Staggs, or Rasulo, Walt Disney World will continue to botch the important details because of systemic failures.

Basically, Walt Disney World is set up like a feudal kingdom. Every vice president has their own fiefdom, and heaven forfend they all collaborate to create a better, high-quality experience for the guest. Instead they in-fight, stymie each other, seek to secure and consolidate their own power, and generally try to make themselves look better at the expense of everyone else. The company treasury is parceled out amongst these departments, with some better funded than others, which is why Entertainment can blow tens of millions of dollars on a hideous stage in Tomorrowland that is used for less than six months while other departments can’t perform basic maintenance for critical on-stage show elements. It’s why those goofy games that no one ever plays in the Space Mountain queue cost more than the actual show improvements to the ride itself during its 2009 rehab.

It’s because there’s no one in control. There’s no one with the power or the authorial vision to whip these squabbling principalities into line and make them all function as one for the betterment of the entire resort. There’s no one with the brass to spend money on non-revenue elements like the monorail, which don’t bring in cash but make the resort worth visiting. And there’s no one to stick out their neck and make a decision on where the entire ship of state needs to go next. Instead it’s hit-and-miss advances and declines, with victories eked out where some enterprising soul can trick the system into working and stagnation elsewhere as the inertia of mediocrity grinds everything to a halt. The system is rigged to prevent things from happening. It’s rigged to keep those folks who work hard for little pay and no recognition from making real and lasting change; the folks at the top have no idea what’s happening on the ground, and there are a million levels of bureaucracy set up to stifle innovation and improvement.

I compared Walt Disney World to a feudal kingdom, and we have a name for the era during which Europe was ruled by a similar setup – the dark ages. With all the infighting amongst the petty lords, not a whole lot got done at the time, and this might give you a clue as to why management in Orlando can’t figure out a replacement for Pleasure Island, or why simple positive changes can’t be made in the parks on a regular basis.

It does seem slightly insane to proclaim a broken system when I’m the first to argue that the Magic Kingdom has improved in recent years, but as I said while some things have progressed others have regressed, and it’s important for people to know why we’re subjected to hula-hooping on Main Street and Cotton Eye Joe in Tomorrowland. Why the same company who is spending millions on a new Tomorrowland allows a rotting transportation system and a Future World at Epcot that looks like… well, it looks bad.

There are a million different chefs in the kitchen, and some of them are great chefs, some of them are lousy hacks, and some of them are just there to stir the pot until they get a better gig. What Walt Disney World needs is a clear vision, and it would help if the corporate folks in California took a little interest in sorting out these structural problems before they leave the resort to its own devices.

But read Foxx’s post – it makes a lot more sense than this heap of metaphors. I’ve told Foxx we need more of this type of analysis; while Disneyland has had Al Lutz monitoring its every internal move for the last fifteen years, Walt Disney World has no such watchdog with a working knowledge of its own internal dynamics and goings-on. This has been much to our collective detriment, as the Florida resort’s politics and operations differ so greatly from the setup in Anaheim, and unless you’ve seen the system at work it’s hard to understand how it really works. Academically, I knew all the things that Foxx mentions in her article, but I don’t have the working knowledge to be able to find all the connections and to “see the Matrix” – to be able to trace the thread of how some arcane departmental setup leads to specific instances of shabby show.

Knowing how the system works is critical if we’re going to fix it, or even if we simply want to assess who to blame or praise when things go wrong or right. Foxx’s piece is a great place to start. The great news is that talented and enterprising people still exist at Walt Disney World who “get it”, and who share the values that made the resort great. The trick is how to set up a system that empowers them, and that is the message we must get across at both the fan and corporate levels.

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I hope you enjoy our silliness, and congratulations to Matt and Nate on 100 episodes!

Cartoon Brew posted a link to an autobiographical video written, produced, and narrated by Earle before his death in 2000. It’s a wonderful artifact, and I wish more of the great Disney artists had the foresight and means to leave similar documents.

The artwork is, without a doubt, astounding, as is his animation work.

The video is in three parts, linked below.