Progress City, U.S.A.

It took some time, but this is a biggie. Survey says…

#2 – Rethink EPCOT. Completely.

Smell that? That’s the smell of potential!

It’s been a while since I last did one of these. The delay was, in part, because not only is this particular topic very near and dear to my heart, but it’s also one for which there are no easy solutions. It’s also a situation for which I actually have a number of very specific ideas and suggestions, and I didn’t want this to devolve into just another fanboy blue-sky sandbox exercise. The fact remains, though, that the problems that face EPCOT Center, that have hampered its development, and the things I’d like to see done there in the future take up the largest amount of pondering on Disney parks that I do on a regular basis. So with the disclaimer that I’m aware that I’m far too invested in this subject for my own good, here are my thoughts on EPCOT.

My obsession with EPCOT has a lot to do with timing. My first trip to Walt Disney World happened at the age of five, and we arrived in Orlando only a few short weeks after EPCOT had opened. From that point on, EPCOT was my favorite of the Disney parks. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve probably heard me base at least some of my rants against the “received wisdom” of Disney marketing in the fact that, as a child, many of my friends and I were far more “enchanted” with EPCOT than with the Magic Kingdom. When I hear latter-day Disney propagandists admit that kids just hated EPCOT before it got “exciting”, my bile starts to curdle.

My seminal Disney experiences occurred concurrently with EPCOT’s golden age, and I feel that I fell right into the “sweet spot” temporally to be completely won over by the park. Had I been a Disney fan of an earlier age, I might have grown up with Walt’s original idea of EPCOT-as-city in my head and been crushed by what was, to be honest, a massive but well-intentioned cop-out by later management. One of the interesting revelations I’ve had from digging deeper into Disney history is the realization that a lot of the public was really let down by the announcement of EPCOT Center as a theme park – people seem to have been really anticipating a city of the future and they spent a lot of time in the early 1970s pushing Disney managers for details about when it would be built. While years of corporate spin has tried to present EPCOT Center as “Walt’s greatest and final dream”, that’s just simply untrue. For many Disney fans at the time who knew the truth, this must have been a hard pill to swallow. But seeing as the only EPCOT I’ve ever known was EPCOT Center, I was able to be blown away by it without any preconceptions whatsoever.

The flip side of this is had I become a Disney fan later, I would have only come to know EPCOT during its long downward slide under the Eisner regime. Depending on where I came in, I wouldn’t have known the original Spaceship Earth, or Horizons, or World of Motion, or Journey into Imagination… I wouldn’t have known the thematic consistency of early EPCOT Center, a concept reflected in even the iconography of the pavilions themselves. I also wouldn’t have known that heady sense of excitement about things to come that was incorporated in all of EPCOT’s promotional material from that time. There were no more exciting words then than “Coming Soon” – Equatorial Africa, Spain, Israel; or Horizons and The Living Seas, to be soon followed by “Space” and “Life & Health”. A great deal of EPCOT’s potential in my mind comes from those original unrealized concepts that promised amazing and mind-blowing things to come.

Promises, promises – Circa 1983

The story of why EPCOT started off with such a unified vision but never reached its full flower has been touched on here before. Growing up, I had always wondered with irritation why Disney just didn’t get it all done at the start – why we had to wait for those extra pavilions, or the Germany pavilion’s boat ride, or the expansion of the Japan pavilion. The truth is that EPCOT barely – just barely! – opened on time as it was. The story of EPCOT’s breathless 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week rush to opening day is a harrowing one. Some key elements of the park did, in fact, open late. Many others were delayed in an attempt to concentrate resources on key attractions for opening day. We’ve mentioned a few of these delayed attractions – the rides for Mexico, Germany and Italy were all shelved at one point due to time constraints, with the Mexican boat ride only being reinstated when it became apparent that the park would need its ride capacity on opening day. The shortened construction cycle led to El Rio Del Tiempo being only half of its original planned size. Many other attractions remained delayed for a “Phase II” that never came.

Lost in Phase II purgatory: the Venezuela pavilion

One key myth perpetrated by revisionist Disney publicists is that EPCOT was somehow unsuccessful upon opening or poorly received by the public. This can be seen even in officially sanctioned media like the Travel Channel “Modern Marvels” episode about Walt Disney World. The fact of the matter is that EPCOT was a smash success, with record crowds far exceeding Disney’s own estimates. Press coverage from the time is almost uniformly positive, with the most oft-repeated criticism being that guests wanted more – more rides, more restaurants, more shops, more shows. The park was so swamped with guests that its amenities proved inadequate, and long lines only became worse when compounded with the technical issues that arise in any new theme park of such an advanced nature. EPCOT was slammed with an unprecedented wave of visitors, all who wanted more; thankfully, Disney had plans for just that.

Upon its opening, Disney continued work on the few Phase I attractions that had yet to open – key among these being the Journey Into Imagination ride – while immediately beginning work on the park’s Phase II. Loans were secured to underwrite tens of millions of dollars in new attractions and additions. Horizons was well on its way to its 1983 opening, and construction began on The Living Seas as soon as United Technologies signed as a sponsor in summer of 1983. That same year, the Kingdom of Morocco would open its pavilion in World Showcase – the first of many intended Showcase pavilions for Phase II. Additional restaurants were added to Communicore, France and China, and a second restaurant was planned but never built in Italy. The sponsorship search continued for Space and Life & Health, and Disney heavily promoted upcoming pavilions for Equatorial Africa, Spain, Israel, Venezuela, Denmark, and Scandinavia. So what happened?

It’s easy to mistake the abandonment of EPCOT’s Phase II as another instance of management failing to follow though on their promises, but that’s not the case here. The groundwork for Phase II was in place, but in 1984 there was a sweeping change in management that brought Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to Disney. Eisner’s primary concern, by far, was the motion picture and television divisions of the company. Eisner wanted to be a media mogul, and while his concerns about the under-performance of Disney films at the box office were well-founded, his massive shift in the company’s direction came at the expense of the theme parks. Eisner admitted the parks would continue to expand, but at “pre-EPCOT” levels. That first year, Disney wrote off more than $40 million worth of canceled theme park projects at the behest of the new management team.

I often see people who claim insider knowledge from that era state that Eisner “hated” EPCOT. It’s said that Eisner, who didn’t grow up attending theme parks and seemed to look down on them, saw EPCOT as an expensive blunder. I have no idea if any of that is true, but it’s clear by his actions after arriving at Disney that, at the very least, Eisner did not understand EPCOT whatsoever. Attempts to drive up attendance at the park without major further investment gave the appearance that Disney was grasping at straws, and this would only become more apparent as time passed.

A circus?? Surely this must be THE FUTURE!! (Photo: Jeff Lange)

EPCOT’s drift into chaos began almost immediately; it can easily be seen in 1987’s Daredevil Circus Spectacular. The expansions that did arrive after Eisner’s arrival were legacy projects; The Living Seas had broken ground in 1983, 1988’s Norway pavilion was a descendant of the pre-Eisner plans for a Scandinavia pavilion, and even 1989’s Wonders of Life was an adaptation of the “Life & Health” pavilion that had been under design since the mid-1970s.

So deep was Eisner’s ambivalence towards EPCOT that, for a time in those early years, Disney considered selling off EPCOT in part or in whole to another company. In what would be a scheme to raise a lot of quick money for – what else – expanding film production in California, Disney would sell EPCOT or its individual pavilions and then either lease them back or manage and operate them under contracts similar to the arrangement by which Disney operates Tokyo Disneyland. While this scheme to raise a quick billion dollars never came to fruition, the fact that Disney management was willing to seriously and publicly discuss the potential divestment of EPCOT shows the lack of regard the park was given at the time.

There followed a period of stagnation, interrupted only when the Future World sponsors’ contracts needed to be renewed in the early 1990s. The Land and Spaceship Earth received overhauls; while Spaceship Earth got a new narration and an incongruous new ending, The Land had two of its smaller attractions replaced. The film Symbiosis was replaced with Circle of Life, the first of many attempts to insert characters into the park’s attractions. The wonderful and catchy Kitchen Kabaret was also closed; its replacement, Food Rocks, was so cheaply executed that I once thought it would certainly be the all-time nadir of Disney attractions. I was wrong.

The cohesive sense of design that once tied Future World together really fell apart in the mid-1990s. Communicore, which once served to tie the concepts of the individual pavilions together and serve as an outreach resource to guests, was replaced with the crass trade show displays of Innoventions. These exhibits were crammed into the Communicore buildings, closing off sightlines and guest traffic flows, removing the natural light and open vistas that had characterized the buildings, and taking no advantage of the buildings’ pre-existing design. The public areas of Future World slowly filled with odd bric-a-brac that only created clutter and visual contradictions.

In the future, sightlines will no longer exist (From EPCOT Central; read their fantastic rundown of the many, many unsightly visual intrusions that must be scourged from EPCOT)

The attractions themselves changed, removing many of the futuristic concepts they once embraced and abandoning the iconography that once linked all the pavilions together. The Universe of Energy became Ellen’s Energy Adventure, becoming less informative and relying more on the use of familiar celebrities and humor – a tactic also employed in the then-new Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. The World of Motion closed for several years as Imagineers replaced it with Test Track; the result was an uninspiring mild thrill ride/car commercial with critical reliability and technical issues. Horizons closed, opened, and closed again; it was finally allowed to fall apart in plain sight of guests before its eventual demolition. World Showcase remained untouched since 1988. Then things really went off the rails.

Journey Into Your Imagination. A name that will send shudders down the spine of any EPCOT fan. The completely unnecessary closure of an EPCOT classic – and the single EPCOT fantasy dark ride in the true Disney tradition – led to this abomination, and the public response was so universally negative that Disney was actually forced to close it again a few years later. Horizons was torn down and replaced with Mission: Space, an expensive simulator ride which made many guests ill and resulted in a few deaths (all from pre-existing conditions, but still bad for publicity). So troubled was Mission: Space, that Disney was programming other attractions to print out free Fastpasses for the ride just a couple of years after its opening.

Recent additions show no rhyme or reason, or adherence to any unified concept for the park. Soarin’, the only successful attraction from California Adventure, was imported to The Land despite any real reason for it to be there. The entirety of The Living Seas has been re-themed to center on animated characters from Finding Nemo; while its dark ride segment is appealing, it merely retells the story of the film without adding any insight about the actual seas and their inhabitants. The same criticism could be aimed at Mexico’s Gran Fiesta Tour, a character-based ride overlay that missed the potential provided by the fantastic Three Caballeros by focusing on yet another “character hunt” instead of having anything to say or show about Mexico itself. A recent overhaul of Spaceship Earth, while laudable for its needed technological upgrades, has been criticized for “dumbing down” the attraction’s narrative and for its still-unfinished ending.

So, the park remains a hodgepodge; many layers of mismatched design from different periods collide in guests’ senses, and the lack of meaningful new additions becomes more glaring when you realize that there are no announced projects in the pipeline for at least the next several years. At the very least, though, this gives Imagineers and fans a chance to pause, examine the situation, and ask – what should happen to EPCOT?

John Hench was one of the Imagineers who worked heavily on the creation of EPCOT Center in the 1970s and 1980s, and from his writings one gains the impression that he was among the most scholarly of Walt’s original team. Hench seems, in his interviews, to be a very thoughtful person who was concerned not only with what works in themed design, but why it works and what that says about us as a species. One of the better-known ideas that Hench often spoke of involves the roots of Mickey Mouse’s popularity; Hench believed that the circles that underlie Mickey’s design tapped into an inherent human predilection towards that form. Humans, or so Hench thought, had an evolutionarily conditioned positive response to roundness; roundness meant safety and nurturing, while sharp angles meant danger. Hench saw Mickey’s triumph in public popularity over his angular rival Felix the Cat as a microcosm of this effect.

Mostly, though, Hench hated contradictions. The success of Disneyland, in his eyes, stemmed from its lack of contradictions. Every area of Disneyland grew out of a pure notion of a specific time and place that resonated deeply with the collective unconscious. In Disneyland’s Main Street, Hench said, they took everything iconic from mid-American small towns of that era and stripped it of contradictions, especially the contradictions that had crept in since the time it’s meant to depict. There never was a real small town like that, but there’s an element of truth in it that strikes a chord with visitors and is somehow true to all those Main Streets without being really at all accurate.

This must be the first goal of any EPCOT renewal – the elimination of contradictions, be they visual, thematic, or content-based. EPCOT must once more be seen as a whole, not an unrelated smattering of parts without relation to each other or to the whole. The pavilions must share similar goals, if not necessarily similar approaches; a shared and stated purpose would give this park a clear identity for the first time in decades.

These contradictions now run throughout the park, on a number of scales. They can be as small as selling pirate merchandise or Crocs from push-carts in the Innoventions breezeways or featuring Aladdin in the Morocco pavilion to something as large as the fact that Soarin’ has no relation to the rest of The Land. The cacophonous buildup of years of poor choices (a Coca Cola carwash in front of Test Track?) lies in layers over the park, and must be stripped away completely.

This does not, necessarily, mean a complete reset to EPCOT Center, Day One. While obviously I’m more a fan of the original EPCOT than its current incarnation, that doesn’t mean we haven’t learned anything in the last twenty-seven years or that the original park was perfect. For one thing, as I’ve mentioned, it was under-built to handle the initial rush of guests. Another element that received some criticism even at the time was the influence and effect on the pavilions by their corporate sponsors. Disney needed corporate participation to fund the park; the necessity of pleasing the sponsors was critical to EPCOT’s existence and often influenced the narratives of the pavilions. Where in GM’s World of Motion ride was the push for mass transit or alternatives to the internal combustion engine? Exxon’s Universe of Energy, though spectacular, has been biased in favor of fossil fuels in both its versions, and tends to gloss over any real potential for alternate forms of energy production. The Land was originally intended to focus on ecology and the world’s biomes, until sponsor Kraft signed on and shifted the pavilion’s message to nutrition and food production.

Exxon’s Energy Exchange made it clear where their bread was buttered (Disneypix.com)

In most of these examples, the problem came from a lack of meaningful exploration of cutting-edge ideas or alternatives that would mean real change for the future. By showing a future full of shiny, high-tech automobiles, World of Motion essentially punted on the idea of meaningful advances in the way we travel and just showed us a more glossy and streamlined version of our current modes of transportation. With the exception of Horizons and, to an extent, The Living Seas, truly groundbreaking ideas were not prominently embraced in the actual attractions, and if they existed at all they were often relegated to post-show areas or exhibits in Communicore.

The most glaring element missing from the original Future World attractions, as much as I loved them, was a slight deficit in humanism and a lack of global perspective. EPCOT grew out of the mid-century World’s Fair tradition, in which technology was viewed as a solution in itself to humanity’s problems. Personally, I grew up immersed in this mindset and still find it engaging. What the last several decades has taught us, though, is that technology in and of itself will not solve our problems for us, but must be promoted and applied wisely, efficiently, and equally if it’s to benefit everyone. EPCOT emerged from a very suburban worldview, where having a push-button kitchen wizard that cooks your rump roast with RADAR means real progress. What this picture misses is the fact that if someone on the other side of the world doesn’t have access or the means for RADAR, roasts, or even kitchens, those distant problems might eventually find their way to your doorstep. This global outlook was not completely absent from early EPCOT, of course; the technologies discussed in The Land might eventually prove critical for ending famine and providing economic growth in arid or resource-poor areas, and Horizons was centered on human adaptation to future lifestyles. But this idea of interconnectedness should be present in all Future World pavilions, as it will eventually be necessary to achieve the futuristic view that the park was built to embrace.

It’s this vision of the future – and what it means for people worldwide – that has often been lost in the years since EPCOT’s debut. As the years passed, many said that the Future World pavilions had become outdated and, like even the best futurism, this was often true. The critical failure in these arguments, though, is that the elements that had become outdated were mostly superficial; a dated-looking polyester jumpsuit or outmoded color scheme are trivialities and easily changed. The fact that’s often missed is that the ideas and problems addressed in the pavilions are just as relevant, if not more so, now as in 1982.

One thing that struck me repeatedly during last year’s presidential race was how often the critical issues being discussed had a direct connection to something that had once been addressed in EPCOT’s pavilions. Energy policy, transportation and its infrastructure, the environment and ecology, and universal access to information technology were all at the fore. Topics that were on the back burner of public discussion when EPCOT opened are often headline news these days; computers are no longer slightly mystical items reserved for the academic elite, and the public is now versed in subjects like the need for alternative energy, the problem of pollution and global warming, and the search for new modes of transportation.

In this regard, EPCOT is now actually behind the curve. Look at Universe of Energy – so much has been done in recent years to explore new possibilities for energy production and to understand the hazards of continuing our current path; we’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth become the highest-grossing documentary ever, and fuel cells and passive solar become fairly familiar terms. While I find Ellen’s Energy Adventure amusing and fairly entertaining, it’s also backward-looking. With everything that’s changed in the world since its 1996 debut, the Energy pavilion once more needs to embrace and evangelize cutting edge technologies that guests might one day be able to use on a daily basis to reduce our dependence on a carbon-based economy.

Disney must do this with each pavilion. While they seem to just cast about desperately for a character or gimmick to put into each attraction, they really just need to look at the fields of study the pavilions were intended to address and look at how relevant they’ve become in the real world. Energy’s importance has been discussed. Transportation has become a critical issue for both personal and mass transit, and the way these problems are dealt with both inside and between cities. The Land already has its greenhouses, which are fantastic, to address the need for more efficient methods of food production in areas where water is scarce – including the American west – and the necessity of finding creative ways to reduce our needs for harmful chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The Seas are also a vital topic of interest; key areas include pollution and the role of the seas in global warming, the best ways to exploit the seas’ resources without exhausting them, and the sheer possibilities and excitement afforded by exploration in this uncharted realm.

Space is a subject with vast, awe-inspiring potential that Mission: Space fails to exploit. The current attraction would serve, perhaps, as an adequate preshow to a fully-conceived space-based attraction that could truly convey the excitement of space exploration and the possibilities it holds for advances in various life sciences, materials science, and resource exploitation.

Now you’re talking: A rendering for a previously proposed Space pavilion from the 1990s

An even more relevant issue is now completely ignored in the park; the closure of Wonders of Life now looks patently absurd, as health issues have come to the forefront of public debate. Issues such as healthy lifestyles and preventative healthcare are a necessary part of the future that EPCOT was built to portray. EPCOT was intended to tackle these issues in an engaging and public way; Disney can continue to retreat from this idea and just provide an odd assortment of vaguely “discovery” themed attractions, or they can do the hard work and pull it all back into focus.

The trick, of course, is how to present these critical ideas and themes without becoming preachy, dry, or unentertaining. It’s an incredibly difficult proposition, of course, but it’s possible; Walt himself always believed the best way to inform was through entertainment, and that’s been proven time and time again. Look, again, at Horizons – it presented many glimpses at the technologies that will influence our future without becoming didactic or boring. Each attraction need not provide a full education on its specific subject matter, but it should give a sense of the possibilities ahead and allow guests an entry into the material that could spark further interest.

So far, I’ve focused mostly on the Future World pavilions. This is because the ideas promoted by that part of EPCOT are so much more abstract and difficult than those illustrated in World Showcase. Future World is also far easier to get wrong, as a failure of any of its parts or in achieving some sense of cohesiveness can happen easily if Imagineers take their eye off the ball. World Showcase, in comparison, is pretty easy to get right.

It also helps that the Showcase, for the most part, has actually improved over the years. This is merely my observation, but I feel that elements such as the food and entertainment have become slightly more authentic as the cultural horizons of average Americans have widened due to greater exposure to different nationalities. It seems as if these elements have become more varied in the pavilions as well; it seems that there’s always some performance happening in World Showcase at any time.

This doesn’t mean that Showcase is without need for improvement. Obviously, as any fan would tell you, it needs to be expanded. There is a thirty year backlog of unbuilt pavilions, with the last addition coming a full twenty years ago. More than that, though, there needs to be a renewed focus on the cultures of the individual nations beyond mere shops and restaurants, or especially character greeting experiences. Rides and films are always welcome, of course, but they should actually reveal something about the countries themselves rather than serving as venues for character-based promotions or cheap thrills. Aside from these more expensive options, other types of cultural features should be considered. The small museum galleries in Norway, China and Japan are always interesting diversions, but should be expanded or refreshed more often. This idea could be expanded to other pavilions as well. But beyond static displays or ride attractions, there’s room to explore new concepts. I’ve always pictured something like an incense-filled room in Morocco, with a storyteller spinning yarns from the nation’s past while in-theater effects enhance the tales. Films are great too, but must be kept fresh – the Norwegian film is about fifteen years overdue for a reshoot.

There are many fixes that could be made to EPCOT piecemeal, but I think the best way to do it is to build a dedicated team of Imagineers who understand the big ideas behind the park, and let them craft a single coherent refreshed design for the park. I also think that there should be a designated creative lead on the park; this person must be both aware of EPCOT’s history and enthused about its future. The “all at once” concept worked well in 1982, and it’s necessary now to strip the park of those contradictions we mentioned before. A team of Imagineers who see EPCOT’s potential, rather than seeing as some corny, stodgy snoozefest to be made fun of, could craft a message for Future World and insure a consistent level of thought and design throughout World Showcase. They could tie the ideas of the park together, remove the current feeling of isolated and unrelated experiences, and give the park the thesis it needs.

The Prologue and the Promise

Those of you who are new to Progress City – and there are many! – can catch up with previous entries in this series here.

#3 – Overhaul Resort Transportation

Guess which one transfixed me as a child with its awesomeness? Go ahead, guess.

Criticism – even loving, constructive criticism like the kind your friends craft here at Progress City – can be a difficult thing to pull off. One always wants to cover their flank, and hope that there’s no gaping hole in your logic to render your argument easily dismissible. The hardest counter-argument to overcome, and one that comes up most frequently in (loving, constructive) criticism of Disney is the “if it ain’t broke” school of thought. If attendance at the Magic Kingdom is sky-high, why fork out the millions for a new E-ticket? If the kids are lining up for the zoom-zoom at Test Track, why try to aim any higher conceptually?

Thus the critic can relax a bit when the subject matter presents a nice, slow, sloppy pitch right across the center of the plate. When “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t apply. For Walt Disney World, one of those areas is resort transportation. Long neglected by management, it most definitely is broken. The only solution, if I may venture a suggestion, is to fix it!

Transportation has always been a key element of Disney’s themed attractions; in fact, the entire idea of a Disney-designed park sprang from Walt wanting a place to showcase his scale-model trains. Walt’s locomotive collaborations with animators Ward Kimball and Ollie Johnston led at first to his backyard layout, the Carolwood Pacific, but soon Walt wanted to share his trains with the public. From Walt’s first idea for a “Mickey Mouse Park” in Burbank to the opening of Disneyland in 1955, the only constant in Walt’s vision was the presence of a train.

Each of the Magic Kingdoms built since has had a train route, but Walt didn’t stop there. He debuted the first daily-service monorail route in the Western Hemisphere in 1959 with Disneyland’s ALWEG monorail, and introduced a new concept for intra-city transport in 1967 with the creation of the WEDway Peoplemover. All this was a mere prelude to Walt’s plans for Florida, which would use all the technology that WED Enterprises had pioneered in Disneyland’s themed attractions to build a city of the future.

The city of EPCOT’s underground transportation hub

EPCOT – the city – was designed specifically to embrace new concepts in inter and intra-city transportation. Of all the possible changes in the social or technological forces that shape new cities, Walt elected to put a special emphasis on the innovative transportation infrastructure that would determine the layout and structure of EPCOT. EPCOT would be defined by its transportation systems, all designed to mitigate the unfortunate effects that a postwar boom in car ownership had inflicted on the highways and city streets of America. Seeing the blight that traffic had brought to the Southern California freeways, Walt had pushed for a Los Angeles to build its own monorail system. Sadly, the plan was rebuffed by city officials. The Florida project was instigated to give Walt the creative freedom that he could never have in California; no longer handcuffed by short-sighted bureaucrats thanks to the creation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Walt could do as he pleased. He could test these new systems in a real-world setting and thus prove their utility to outside skeptics.

The dreams of EPCOT city essentially died along with Walt in 1966, but many of the underlying tenets and philosophies of its design were retained during the creation of Walt Disney World’s Phase One. Key to this was the reliance on mass-transportation and the elimination of auto traffic for transportation within the resort itself. Hubs of activity within the resort would be connected by transportation that would be as entertaining as it was efficient; “getting there” would, for once, actually prove to be half the fun. Most importantly, though, was the idea that guests would no longer have to use their cars after they arrived at the resort. In fact, management originally asked that none of the resort hotels be designed with parking lots; all guests would leave their cars at a central transportation area and reach their hotels via internal transportation. This plan was scuttled due to the obvious objections by hotel managers, but it was clear that cars still weren’t part of the plan for Walt Disney World.

An attraction in its own right – the Osceola-class steamships. PS: BRING BACK THE OSCEOLA-CLASS STEAMSHIPS!

In its early years, Walt Disney World was promoted as much more than a collection of theme parks. It was presented as a fully-integrated resort experience, and key to that image was its internal transportation. Much of the space in those original guidebooks or promotional materials was devoted to the fleet of monorails, watercraft, ferries or trains that kept guests moving within the resort. Again, the transportation was presented as not a utility but an attraction unto itself. And who can argue with that? Sleek monorails gliding through the Contemporary’s lobby, sunset launches on the Seven Seas Lagoon, or Fort Wilderness’s steam trains – these were amenities few other vacation destinations could match.

All this came to an end with Michael Eisner’s arrival at Disney. The Walt Disney World resort began an unprecedented period of expansion and growth under Eisner’s leadership, but the transportation infrastructure did not grow accordingly. Buses became the default transportation option for the new resort hotels that were springing up nearly every year, and the monorail line was not extended to the new theme and water parks. A bus depot was added to the Magic Kingdom, bypassing the TTC altogether and removing the element of theatrical reveal provided by the trip across the Seven Seas Lagoon. This was necessitated by the thousands of guests pouring in from the new hotels, with buses as their only means of transportation within the resort.

That is where the situation still stands today. Dozens upon dozens of buses queue up outside the parks, belching diesel exhaust into the air and crowding the roads of the resort. They’re loud and overcrowded; no matter how many times Disney redesigns the buses to allow for more guests to be crammed in each individual vehicle, guests at peak ridership times wind up packed in like sardines. There’s nothing like walking all day in the parks, then standing during a long ride back to your resort while stuffed in with dozens of other sweaty guests while several babies scream all around you. That’s Disney magic ™ at work.

What’s ultimately the most frustrating is not the current situation in and of itself, but that it could have been avoided had any of the many alternative plans developed over the past several decades been enacted. Disney knows that there’s a problem, and has actually created elaborate plans to mitigate the situation, but whenever it comes down to a decision they opt to buy more buses instead. Many times these plans have been stymied by a lack of vision or sheer avarice, while others have been made impractical at key moments by world events.

The current Downtown Disney area, with the once planned monorail route (blue) and WEDway route (green)

While Walt Disney World was a meticulously planned resort upon its opening in 1971, many of the developments built subsequently were not as well linked into the transportation system. This was not for a lack of planning, however. Materials discussing the development of the Lake Buena Vista Marketplace and Villas during the 1970s always focused on the automobile-free nature of their design. Internal paths through the Villa communities were intended for bicycles, pedestrians, electric carts and even horses – but not cars. By the late 1970s there was a plan to connect the Village to the monorail line, and to provide a convenient WEDway loop through the area that would eventually become Downtown Disney and the Hotel Plaza.

During Eisner’s reign, plans were drawn up but not executed to connect the Disney-MGM Studios to a monorail spur from EPCOT. This line would also connect the EPCOT resort area to the monorail line, an amenity befitting their supposed status as “deluxe” resorts. Even as late as the year 2000, our very own Beacon Joe sat in on a cast member presentation by the then-Senior Vice President of Operations, Lee Cockerell, in which Cockerell outlined a sweeping new program to upgrade the resort’s transportation infrastructure. The plan incorporated light rail and possibly more monorails, and would have had the goal of phasing out bus use across the resort. Following the tourism downturn of 2001, however, these plans were abandoned and Disney began once more to buy more buses.

The proposed monorail route from EPCOT to the Disney-MGM Studios, passing by the Yacht & Beach and Swan & Dolphin resorts (Martin Smith)

One could argue against the bus-centric plan on the old-fashioned grounds of “guest experience” or “immersive theming.” But the fact of the matter is that the system has become so overloaded, unwieldy and downright unpleasant that it demands a solution. Disney could once make an argument for their steep room rates on the grounds of convenience; you would be right on property, after all, and could easily access the parks and resort via Disney’s free transportation. But in recent years it’s become such a headache to use Disney transportation that guests would often reach their destinations more quickly if they stayed off property and drove in themselves. Their off-property room would be a fraction of the price of Disney’s lodging, and one wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of those packed-in bus rides.

To give Disney some credit, a few improvements have been made in the last couple of years or so. The introduction of GPS technology and centralized tracking software has made the system somewhat more efficient. Five or six years ago, I thought that if I had one more bus driver take me on a ridiculously circuitous route across property to reach a nearby destination, I’d never stay in a Disney hotel again. Another improvement, although purely cosmetic, is the addition of the site-specific soundtracks on the buses. I actually find that incredibly cool, and hope that whoever thought that one up got a bonus.

Despite these improvements, though, the fact remains that the system is broken. Waits are often far too long, and buses are often far too crowded. Again, the transportation system used to be a selling point for Walt Disney World. Now it’s something you have to overlook and deal with if you want to experience the “magic.”

Wouldn’t you rather take the WEDway?

Let me make up a scenario off the top of my head. Let’s say that a guest is staying at Coronado Springs, and they want to go to EPCOT in the morning, do some shopping at the Village for lunch, go back to their hotel to change and wind up at the California Grill for dinner. First, they take a bus to EPCOT – that’s easy, unless there’s a long wait or the bus is crammed in with strollers and ECVs. EPCOT to the Village is a difficult one, since Disney doesn’t run buses from the parks to the Village to stick it to those tiny fraction of guests who would park at the Village to avoid parking fees. So instead guests are either forced to walk through EPCOT to the International Gateway, to take a Downtown Disney bus from Boardwalk or the Yacht Club, or to take a monorail to the TTC and catch a bus there. This trip, being wildly optimistic, would take at least an hour. Downtown Disney to Coronado Springs requires a single bus trip, although you might have to stop at Marketplace, Pleasure Island and Typhoon Lagoon along the way. That eats up quite a bit of your time as well. To get to the California Grill from your hotel, you’d either have to catch a bus to the Magic Kingdom and walk to the Contemporary, or take a bus to the Village and then take another bus to the Contemporary. This route would include all of the internal stops in Coronado Springs, and the Contemporary bus may stop at the TTC or other resorts – I’m not sure on that one. Heaven help you if you want to do something afterwards; a minigolf whim would require a trip from the Contemporary to a theme park or the Village, then a bus to the Swan hotel, then a walk to Fantasia Gardens. When all is said and done, you have to hope that transportation is still operating to get you back to a theme park or the Village to take you to the connecting bus back to Coronado Springs. Don’ t you wish you had your car?

Basically, unless you’re just going from your hotel to a theme park and back, internal transportation is a headache. Fixing the system would require a massive investment, tackling many separate goals simultaneously. It would require an entirely different plan for the resort’s infrastructure, and it’s needed immediately. They won’t do it, but they should.

Remember when I was doing this list thing?

#4 – Detoonification

Make. It. Stop.

OK, let’s get one thing crystal clear upfront: I know that this one is never, ever going to happen. I know it, you know it and the American people know it – no matter how much the parks would benefit and no matter how it would be true to Disney’s legacy, they’re never going to reverse the lamentable “toonification” trend of recent years. But they should.

When Michael Eisner came to Disney in 1984, there were no attractions based on animated characters in any of the Disney parks aside from those in Fantasyland. There had been attractions based on live action properties – the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse and Davy Crockett Canoes spring to mind – but the focus of the non-fantasy based lands was putting guests into real-life adventures from the past, present and future.

Disneyland’s Rainbow Ridge – No Woody’s Roundup in sight

It’s hard to believe that it’s been twenty-five years since that day, but in that time the marketing people took over the shop and the focus of new attractions shifted from what best suited their surroundings to what was trendy at the time of construction. While the net total of attractions in Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom hasn’t increased measurably in those years, the two domestic Disney parks are now home to:

- Tarzan, Iago, Zazu and Aladdin in Adventureland

- Shows based on Toy Story in Frontierland, as well as the placement of non-toon pirates on Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer Island

- Winnie the Pooh in Disneyland’s Critter Country

- Buzz Lightyear, Finding Nemo, Stitch (x2) and Monsters, Inc. in Tomorrowland

EPCOT Center, once home to only its original characters like Dreamfinder and Figment, now features Finding Nemo, The Lion King, The Three Caballeros, Kim Possible and, uh, Martin Short. What’s worse is that in several of these instances – especially Nemo and Caballeros – the focus is solely on the characters and not the theme of the pavilion or attraction that they inhabit. What do you learn about the seas from Nemo, or about Mexico from Donald? The Circle of Life film, which is kind of goofy at times, at least manages to remain relevant to its purpose.

Donald stands in front of the… Actually, they never tell us where or what it is

This points out how important execution is when attempting a character overlay. I really, really love the film The Three Caballeros and was initially excited about the concept of the Mexico refurbishment. But they managed to not really tell us about Mexico at all with the new attraction, and the ride captures none of the trippy, freewheeling feel of the film. It’s just loud and short.

Back to the Magic Kingdoms, though. The innovative thing about Disneyland in 1955 was that it provided all those post-war suburban families with immersive adventures in heavily themed settings. The world was a lot smaller then than today, and a trip through the jungles of Adventureland introduced millions to new and exotic concepts, no matter how homogenized and idealized they actually were. Disney’s attempts at futurism, both on his TV show and in Tomorrowland, made the Space Race accessible to the masses and helped guide a generation into a new technological era.

These adventures in fictionalized but realistic settings are what draw people to the parks to this day. The average American tourist might never travel to Africa, but they can get a taste of its aesthetic in Harambe. They might never go to Europe, and certainly something like the Germany pavilion is nothing like the actual modern country, but it at least provides a cultural touchstone for people that is outside of their everyday experience. Visiting EPCOT isn’t a substitute for actually traveling abroad, but it’s cheaper and it provides a nice jumping off point for a more informed worldview. How many guests have thought more about the actual Morocco after visiting EPCOT than they ever would otherwise?

“Beautiful! You know what would make it better? Aladdin! What? He’s from Arabia, not Morocco? The rubes will never know – put him in there anyway!”

There’s nothing wrong with giving guests what they want, and I’m sure that they do want characters in some capacity. But isn’t it more interesting and ambitious to give them something they don’t even know to demand? I guarantee that if Disney had taken a million guest surveys in 1966, not a single guest would have thought to ask for Pirates of the Caribbean or the Haunted Mansion. Thank heavens Walt didn’t need to do surveys to know a good idea.

Personally, I want to go to the Tiki Room to be whisked away to a fantastical Polynesian jungle, not to get screamed at by celebrity-voiced animated birds that have no connection to their surroundings. Things like that completely yank guests out of whatever illusion the themed environment attempts to create.

The Disney park roster is far more diverse these days than it was in 1984. The parks embrace a wide variety of environments and themes, which allow the Imagineers to create attractions outside those realms of Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. A park as thematically broad as the Hollywood Studios, for example, provides plenty of leeway for experimentation. And while Disney should, in fact, always push innovation, it doesn’t mean that they should neglect the expansive yet specific mandates that Walt himself laid down for the cardinal realms of Disneyland:

Here is adventure, here is romance, here is mystery. Tropical rivers, flowing silently into the unknown, the unbelievable splendor of exotic flowers, the eerie sounds of the jungle, with eyes that are always watching… this is Adventureland.

Here we experience the story of our country’s past… the colorful drama of frontier America in the exciting days of the covered wagon and the stage coach, the advent of the railroad and the romantic riverboat. Frontierland is a tribute to the faith, courage and ingenuity of the pioneers who blazed the trails across America.

Here is the world of imagination, hopes and dreams. In this timeless land of enchantment, the age of chivalry, magic, and make-believe are reborn, and fairy tales come true. Fantasyland is dedicated to the young at heart, to those who believe that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.

Tomorrowland… a vista into a world of wondrous ideas, signifying man’s achievements… a step into the future with predictions of constructive things to come. Tomorrow offers new frontiers in science, adventure and ideals… the challenge of outer space, and the hope of a peaceful and unified world.

No burping cartoon aliens in there that I could find.

And so we continue…

#5 – Rethink Tomorrowland

Welcome to… THE FUTURE!!!

I realize that most of my discussions so far have involved the Walt Disney World resort, as that is my main area of concern. This item, however, applies equally to all the Magic Kingdom parks worldwide and is an issue that should be addressed and coordinated at the top levels of Imagineering to ensure the best possible consistency of vision across all the parks. There’s trouble in Tomorrowland – all Tomorrowlands, actually – and something needs to be done to rectify the situation.

It seems to be some strange quirk of history that Tomorrowland is the area of each new park to receive short shrift. With both Disneyland and Walt Disney World, Tomorrowland was barely functional on opening day. In both cases, Tomorrowland was the last area of the park to be built and seemed to suffer from the rush to opening day and the scarcity of funds due to cost overruns elsewhere. Walt Disney World fans might be shocked to see pictures of Tomorrowland from 1971 – not only was there no Space Mountain or Carousel of Progress, but no Astro Jets tower or WEDway station either. The land essentially ended right past where Stitch’s Great Escape is today. Disneyland’s situation was equally dire – with the madcap rush to have things functional for opening day, Imagineers hustled to cram in sponsored exhibits and “attractions” such as the “Clock of the World” and the “Bathroom of the Future” just so guests would have something at which to look.

Some of our theme park is missing: The Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland in 1972 (Photo from AllEars.Net)

So unsatisfactory was Disneyland’s Tomorrowland to Walt’s exacting standards, it received a massive expansion in 1959 and a complete overhaul in 1967. Sadly, as I mentioned recently, this 1967 “New” Tomorrowland remains the greatest realization of the concept to date. Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland, while larger, was missing certain attractions and was never as thematically consistent (as wonderful as it was, If You Had Wings was no Adventures Thru Inner Space, thematically speaking). Tokyo Disneyland received a stripped-down clone of Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland, missing the critical element of motion created by the PeopleMover track.

When Imagineers created Disneyland Paris, they attempted to avoid the pitfalls of having to update the area for the sake of modernity by re-thinking the land from the viewpoint of Victorian and Edwardian futurists such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. The result, dubbed “Discoveryland” and owing a great deal to Disneyland’s abandoned Discovery Bay concept, was well-realized but suffered from a lack of later expansion and, again, missed that “second level” effect provided by a PeopleMover track, monorail or skyway. Hong Kong Disneyland took a fantastical approach to Tomorrowland as well, with a neon-heavy retro-cartoony feel akin to Walt Disney World’s 1994 Tomorrowland remodel which transformed that land into a Buck Rogers-inspired, neon future-deco “future that never was”.

The glowy science-fantasy future of Hong Kong Disneyland

Tomorrowland’s drift from science-fact to science-fantasy, and from attempting to provide a window into humanity’s future to relying on character-heavy franchise tie-ins, shows that no one can really get a handle on what this land should be. The fact that the concept of Tomorrowland has become increasingly jumbled since 1967 shows how much the company depended on Walt to drive innovation and push for consistent upgrades. Walt Disney died before 1967’s Tomorrowland officially opened, and without his unifying vision and willpower the same lack of purpose that led to the eventual abandonment of the EPCOT city project in Florida also led to the abandonment of Tomorrowland as a constantly-changing vision of the future. This is easily illustrated by the quantum leaps in design, technology and scope that occurred in the twelve-year span between Disneyland’s opening in 1955 and the New Tomorrowland of 1967. That decade saw numerous changes in Tomorrowland, and ended in a complete rebuilding of the area. Compare that to the current day, when it’s been a full fifteen years since the opening of Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland of 1994; many of the original plans for that renovation were never even realized, and the only changes since have come in the form of new, low-budget cartoon-based attractions.

The High Water Mark: Disneyland’s New Tomorrowland, 1967

These new attractions, built to capitalize on popular characters from Disney (and especially Pixar) films, have often been criticized for turning Tomorrowland into “Fantasyland East”. Bringing characters from Toy Story, Lilo and Stitch, and – most egregiously – Monsters Inc. into Tomorrowland destroys all pretense of attempting to create a coherent theme of futurism. Moreover, these attractions tend to be franchised and retro-fitted into other parks, leading to thematic non-sequiturs such as Buzz Lightyear inhabiting the Vernian steampunk future of the Parisian Tomorrowland.

Then there’s the original Tomorrowland – that wonderful Californian vision of the future from 1967. It was, in great part, destroyed a decade ago to make way for the now-infamous Tomorrowland ‘98. Culled from a variety of stylistic sources, including the Parisian futurism of Jules Verne, the golden age sci-fi stylings of Florida’s park, Eisner’s obsession with “Montana future”, and precious little from the original Imagineering plan for re-design called “Tomorrowland 2055″, the Tomorrowland of 1998 was a disaster upon opening and remains widely loathed today. Several attractions closed to make way for the remodeling, and were replaced mostly with shops and restaurants. The centerpiece of the new land, the Rocket Rods, took the place of the PeopleMover but was soon forced to close because a lack of funding led to shortcuts in its construction which rendered it prone to breakdowns and eventually inoperable. Thus Disneyland’s once-vibrant Tomorrowland sits desolate, with an empty PeopleMover track and a net loss of attractions.

This is the situation we find ourselves in, and no matter how it happened it needs to be turned around. Disney needs to devote the effort and, most importantly, the funding to take care of this situation not only in one specific park but in all five of its resorts. There needs to be coordination at the highest levels to determine a specific theme and purpose for each individual Tomorrowland, and a concerted program to fully fund and construct each individual concept as quickly as possible. Tomorrowland is a mess, and Disney has pussy-footed around the issue for years. It’s time to fix it. My suggestions:

Disneyland

The rusty, rocky future of 1998

The first and once-greatest Tomorrowland is, strangely, the most in need of immediate attention. Some elements of Tomorrowland ’98 have been removed or painted over, but many unpleasant vestiges remain. The 1998 remodeling was a half-hearted effort that attempted to cheaply put a Discoveryland veneer over the original 1967-era Populuxe infrastructure, and the result was a chimerical disaster.

The greatest amount of damage that was done to Tomorrowland’s infrastructure resulted from the Astro Jets being removed from their location atop the WEDway station and being relocated as a new spinner ride amongst Eisner’s “Montana future” rockwork at the land’s entrance. Not only did this ruin the thrill of the Astro Jets and remove the land’s traditional “weenie”, but it also provided a massive hindrance to traffic flow between Tomorrowland and the Hub. Job one for any Tomorrowland refurbishment should be returning the Astro Jets to their proper place atop the WEDway station and doing any necessary refurbishment work required to get both the Jets and the WEDway operating again.

The dominant rumor at the moment is that as soon as the economic crisis eases up and the corporate offices release the purse-strings, Tomorrowland will be the first area of Disneyland to receive attention. The Imagineers are well aware of the land’s current unfulfilled promise and now that John Lasseter has influence at the highest levels, the creative neglect of the Eisner years should come to an end. Imagineer Tony Baxter, it is said, has a plan. How soon that plan is revealed is anyone’s guess.

My opinion is that they should return Disneyland’s Tomorrowland to its roots – a real-life exploration of science and technology with an eye towards humanity’s future. While I’ll admit that a return to its kitschy Populuxe roots would be highly enjoyable – Saturn V and all – I think the concept of 1967’s Tomorrowland could easily be updated for the modern age. Space travel is no more of an everyday event for the average person than it was then; NASA’s planned Ares-series rockets – intended to return us to the moon and later take us to Mars – provide a nice analogue to the Apollo age of the 1960s. Issues with transportation are just as relevant as they were then, and science has learned a lot about what fills that “inner space” that we once were able to explore at Disneyland.

Disneyland’s Tomorrowland should be sleek, modern, and relevant. It should look forward, not backward or sideways. There’s room for the whimsical and fantastical – we know of many fantastic abandoned concepts from the past and who knows what WDI can come up with to revisit futuristic themes with modern technology.

Walt Disney World

While I’m usually of the opinion that Tomorrowland should reflect and expand on its original intent, I’m willing to cut some slack in Florida. The Orlando resort is blessed by EPCOT Center, which gives Disney the opportunity to explore the ideas that Tomorrowland was created to espouse, but in a much larger scope. EPCOT has (or, rather, should have) the actual future covered, so that gives Tomorrowland a little room for zaniness.

That doesn’t mean it should be a free-for-all. Monsters, Inc. has got to go. Thankfully, its simple construction should mean that it’d be easily to pluck it out of Tomorrowland and remove it to Hollywood Studios’ Pixar Place, where it’s somewhat thematically relevant and hurts no one. Stitch’s Great Escape has to go – mostly because it’s awful – and as we already have one Toy Story-themed shooter at the Studios I think that gives us free reign to re-think Buzz Lightyear.

So, where to start? First, pick a theme. I really don’t mind the whole Buck Rogers 1930s future angle, but it needs to continue all the way through the land. Compare the area leading from the Tea Cups down past the Speedway to Rockettower Plaza – you can almost see the seam where the money ran out and they just gave up. It’s possible to be fantastical and classy at the same time – witness Metropolis – without being overtly cartoony.

Then they need to pick a roster of attractions that fits whatever theme they select. This fits my personal agenda of moving the Carousel of Progress to EPCOT. I love the Carousel, although it needs updating, but it doesn’t fit the rest of Tomorrowland anymore. It would make a lot more sense at EPCOT, perhaps at the end of Innoventions East where it could serve as a grand finale of sorts for the “Road to Tomorrow”. In its place in the fantastical Tomorrowland could be an animatronic spectacle akin to the once-proposed Plectu’s Intergalactic Revue.

Something needs to be done with the abandoned Skyway station, the expansion pad beside it, and the demolished Galaxy Theater. The Speedway needs to be completely re-imagined, with at the very least a conversion to electric cars. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d like to see its footprint reduced by having a multi-story ride building with indoor and outdoor segments, which could feature black-light vistas of the “City of Tomorrow” akin to the former finale of the World of Motion.

Imagineering could then come up with new concepts to replace Stitch, Buzz, and the Monsters. The Monsters theater could always be reverted to CircleVision – I enjoyed the concept of Timekeeper, although its execution was a bit over-the-top. Or, perhaps, a re-voiced Timekeeper and Nine-Eye could take over a redesigned Monsters theater for a new show. One final option would be to incorporate the Monsters show space with the adjoining Buzz ride, creating enough room for a truly special dark ride of some sort. The entrance and queue could be on the Monsters side facing the hub, making the land more open and inviting from the entrance. If they really wanted to go far out, why not a ride based on those insane Ward Kimball cartoons for the Tomorrowland-themed Wonderful World of Color shows in the 1950s?

Admit it – this would make a killer ride

Perhaps a Kimball-themed dark ride about zany alien invasion could be paired with Plectu’s Revue and a flying saucers attraction in the former Galaxy Theater location to create a sort of Tomorrowland Roswell – Area 71? I think anything’s game for Tomorrowland as long as we have the luxury of EPCOT to represent the “real” future.

Tokyo Disneyland

It looks awfully familiar, but doesn’t it seem like something’s missing? (Photo from Disney and More)

Tokyo has farther to go, as their Tomorrowland is sort of a stripped-down version of Walt Disney World’s original 1970s version. Here’s where things get dicey, as they’re just preparing to debut an incredibly expensive, E-ticket dark ride… themed to Monsters, Inc. I don’t know what to do with that. My feeble lizard brain cannot reconcile the issue.

Much like at Disneyland, there was a plan for a complete makeover of this Tomorrowland in the 1990s. Known as “Sci-Fi City”, the concept was a combination of Florida’s neon-retro Buck Rogers “future that never was” with the lived-in, rough-around-the-edges future of Blade Runner. Sci-Fi City would be a total conversion of the land, with several new attractions unique to the Tokyo park. Eventually, though, the land’s multi-billion dollar price tag led to its postponement when that money was instead routed to the construction of the DisneySea park. To date, the only concept from the plan that has seen the light of day was the planned retheming of Tokyo’s Star Jets; the flying saucer-shaped designs seem to have been used as the basis for Hong Kong Disneyland’s Orbitron.

I ain’t gonna play Sci-Fi City

No doubt, the plans for Sci-Fi City were impressive. The combination of unique attractions, kinetic atmosphere and visuals, and the addition of the necessary “second story” to Tomorrowland with a Rocket Rod-spinoff ride served to create a unified and immersive themed area that did not skimp on detail. While the plan was not as based in hard science as the original Tomorrowland, it wasn’t an overtly cartoon-driven vision and many elements – such as the area themed as an asteroid mining colony – gave a real otherworldly feel missing the from other parks.

So what should Tokyo’s Tomorrowland be? Should it merely elaborate on more traditional themes, or should they go whole-hog and do something totally new like Sci-Fi City? I’d like to see a new, unique Tomorrowland with the full backing of the Oriental Land Company, but there’s still the unfortunate fact of their own recent Buzz Lightyear attraction and the brand-new Monsters, Inc. E-ticket. And, sadly, despite Michael Eisner’s attempt to the contrary, the Tokyo resort doesn’t have a Disney-MGM derived park in which to dump this sort of attraction. Maybe Tokyo’s Toontown needs a Pixar-centric cul-de-sac?

Disneyland Paris

Discoveryland is a fantastic concept that has never been fully exploited. Euro Disney’s financial woes precluded a great deal of park expansion after its opening, although the 1995 addition of Space Mountain is often cited as a key element in rehabilitating the park’s image and financial stability. Discoveryland was, for years, left in neglect and never really expanded on; many rides originally conceived for the park have never been built. In recent years, the park-exclusive Le Visionarium was replaced by another Buzz Lightyear clone.

Still, the fact that not much expansion has taken place in the area means that little has been done to destroy the overarching theme of the area. The foundation is still there to create a fantastic Verne-derived land, and Imagineering’s archives are full of unrealized concepts that could be easily adapted to the theme. The Toon Studio at the neighboring Walt Disney Studios park would be an excellent place to relocate Buzz Lightyear, as that park has not yet been saddled with Toy Story Midway Mania and there would thus be no duplication of theme. Then all WDI would have to do is add those critical elements of motion that make Tomorrowland “a world on the move” (steam-powered WEDway?) and bingo – a unique Tomorrowland with a cohesive and interesting theme.

Hong Kong Disneyland

Hong Kong Disneyland’s Tomorrowland – like Kristen Chenowith, quite pretty but very small

As mentioned earlier, Imagineering went with a neon-retro design for Hong Kong; in effect it’s most similar to Walt Disney World’s 1994 redesign and the chrome-and-primary-color exterior of Florida’s Mission: Space. But there’s not a lot there; the area has four ride attractions, none of them unique to the park. Hong Kong’s Autopia does have one nice feature, though – its cars run off of electricity.

Hong Kong’s Tomorrowland is essentially a blank slate – some nice atmosphere but it could go in many directions. Yet Hong Kong Disneyland’s need for expansion is so desperate that it might be a while before Tomorrowland receives attention – current rumors point to Adventureland as the site for the next expansion, if it indeed comes, and after that it’s expected that the park will add a Frontierland or Toontown.

In summary…

There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: Disneyland, 1955

It’s possible for each of the five Tomorrowlands to have a unique and special identity that doesn’t betray Walt Disney’s original intent for Disneyland’s “world of tomorrow.” I think that they should run the gamut from science-fact to science-fiction, but even when they delve into the realm of science-fantasy the focus should remain on humanity’s promise for the future – not on toys, monsters, superheros, or any other franchised product.

The next item in our list of what I’d like to see taken care of this year in the Disney parks:

#6 – Disney’s Hollywood Studios… Oh, boy…

What once was, can be again…

Just for fun, let’s torture an analogy. Let’s say that somewhere, just off-campus near Progress City University, there’s an infamous sorority house. These undergrads haven’t gotten the memo that hazing has been forbidden by the administration, and for initiation they make the various Disney resorts stand up on the table and have their “problem areas” circled with red marker. Before they lose their charter, they have a go at Walt Disney World and this is the result:

Oh, Disney-MGM Studios / Disney’s Hollywood Studios, where should I start? Unlike the Animal Kingdom, which is a well-realized concept, lovingly crafted yet incomplete, the Studios is a rampaging Frankenstein’s monster of low expectations, abandoned ambitions and half-finished plans. All of the four Florida parks need serious work and additions, but only the Studios needs a sizable portion to be razed and rebuilt wholecloth.

What’s ironic is that I used to be quite a fan of the Studios. I’ve loved film in general, and the culture of the 1930s and 40s specifically, since I was a kid. The Studios seemed a natural for my tastes. Much of it still is – Hollywood Boulevard remains beautiful, despite the accursed Hat (more on that later). The Sunset Boulevard expansion only increased the scope and theming of the area, and added a couple of much-needed attractions to the park. But once one reaches the replica of Graumann’s Chinese (again, setting the hat aside), the park falls apart. There a number of reasons for this, but the main reason the Studios is such a mess nowadays is that it was once a very different theme park with very different purpose.

In the beginning: EPCOT Center’s unbuilt Great Moments at the Movies

Much of the Studios’ genesis remains debatable, but most fans know the oft-repeated story that its origin came in large part from a concept developed for EPCOT Center. What was to become The Great Movie Ride was conceived first as an attraction for Future World, to be placed in a pavilion between Journey into Imagination and The Land. According to legend, new CEO Michael Eisner saw the designs on a tour of Imagineering and decided that the concept should be expanded into an entirely new park. And so, the Studios were born.

Cynics might point out that the rest of the park Eisner dreamed up bore a striking resemblance to plans for a Universal Studios tour long intended for Orlando – plans that Eisner had seen during his previous stint as president of Paramount. Squeamish about entering the Orlando market on their own, Universal had approached Paramount in the early 1980s about partnering on their new gate in Florida. Eisner was thus privy to all of Universal’s plans for Orlando, and although he rejected the partnership offer as head of Paramount, when he left that studio for Disney he quickly proposed the idea of a studio attraction to combat Universal’s impending presence in Florida. Universal executives were furious – and litigious – but Eisner went ahead with construction of the Disney-MGM Studios and, despite Universal’s long head start in planning, managed to get Disney’s park opened a year ahead of its rival’s.

The park was built so quickly because it was far smaller and simpler than Disney’s other parks. The Studios was not intended as a full day attraction like the Magic Kingdom or EPCOT Center – Eisner was playing it very safe with his first major project as CEO. But when the massive crowds that arrived to see the new Disney park overwhelmed the handful of opening day attractions, it became apparent that the park desperately needed expansion, and soon.

Thus began two decades of fits and starts, of announced and canceled projects, and of Rube Goldberg-like expansion. While I’ll save most of my historical lecturing for the Studios’ 20th anniversary in May, it’s important to see how the problems faced by past expansions shaped the park as it is today. The layout of the Studios is so strange that guests unfamiliar with the park’s past must be baffled by its randomness.

The most daunting problem faced by the Studios is its location. Hemmed in by World Drive on the west and Buena Vista Drive to the north, there’s not much room for expansion. Past blue-sky theories have involved expanding over World Drive to adjoining property, but one assumes that would be an action of last resort. As it stands, the existing areas of the park are so chaotic that there’s plenty of room to expand by razing obsolete buildings and infrastructure and starting over.

The confusing layout and unnecessary backstage areas stem from the Studios original mission – to be both a movie-based theme park and an actual working studio. Orlando had its eye set on becoming “Hollywood East” with tax incentives and lax labor laws meant to lure production to Disney and Universal’s soundstages. When Disney-MGM opened, more than half the park was closed off to guest traffic, and guests were unable to view any of these areas without taking the Studio Tour. The arch to the right of the Chinese Theater was intended to be the gateway to the “real” studio, and aside from the entrances to the Backlot Tour and the Animation Tour, everything beyond that gate was closed to guest access. On the other side of the park, everything south of the Indiana Jones arena was inaccessible.

Turning back time: The area shaded green represents the guest areas and show buildings of the Disney-MGM Studios in 1989 (including Star Tours, which opened soon afterward); the blue area approximates the original backstage and production areas of the park

As production waned, the “theme park” side of the park began to encroach on the “studios” side. The walking part of the backstage tour was slowly whittled down to the point that what’s left – the water tank show – serves merely as preshow for the tram tour. The tram tour has also seen massive cutbacks, and now serves mainly as a way to get guests to the worn-out Catastrophe Canyon.

The production areas slowly have become guest areas, with Mickey Avenue opening up to guests and a series of temporary attractions filling some of the former soundstages. This is the area that’s becoming “Pixar Place”, with Toy Story Mania occupying one former soundstage and the upcoming Monsters, Inc. coaster filling another.

The park today: Guest areas and show buildings in green (includes Catastrophe Canyon); backstage areas in blue

This is where the problems begin. The park’s layout made sense when half of it was a working studio and not meant for guest access. The theme park areas – Hollywood Boulevard and Echo Lake – were laid out and themed like traditional Disney attractions. The backstage areas were not intended for guests and thus do not adhere to the design traditions necessary for adequate guest flow. Essentially, as they expanded, Disney had to “fake it” – creating traffic corridors where there were none before, and trying to link areas of the park together that were never intended to commingle.

Unfortunately, a large part of this transition came towards the end of Eisner’s tenure, when any real spending was out of question. What Disney should have done at this time was to remove the soundstages and various support facilities and start over, laying out new areas along proper practices of park design. Instead, we essentially get rides crammed in to unthemed warehouses, with no access to the space needed for later expansion in more remote backstage areas. There are no visual “weenies”, no overarching theme, and no sense of place in these areas – it’s just a hodgepodge. Without massive demolition and rebuilding it will remain that way. Even if WDI goes in and drops E-tickets in all those old facilities, what we’ll wind up with are rows of parallel streets with rides in contiguous, identical rectangular buildings. Not too inspiring.

Where’s that bulldozer? The backstage former production area in orange – the grid layout is not conducive to good theme park design, and should be removed to allow for expansion. For reference, what’s left of the tram tour is highlighted in yellow, Mickey Avenue/Pixar Place is in red, Toy Story Mania’s former soundstage is in green and the area earmarked for the Monsters, Inc. coaster is in blue.

These are issues Disney is going to have to face soon if they plan on any expansion in the Studios. The eventual disposition of all the former backstage areas need to be decided, and they have to determine what’s going to happen with the vestiges of that era. It’s commonly accepted in fan circles that the tram tour isn’t long for the world, as it occupies the biggest patch of easily re-purposed land in the park. It seems that the tram and Catastrophe Canyon will go the way of the dodo as soon as management opens the purse-strings and lavishes some attention on the Studios, which depending on your way of thinking may or may not be within our lifetimes. Even if Burbank were to suddenly get generous, expansion in this area will have to wait for other projects that are closer to a greenlight, such as Star Tours 2.0 and the planned Monsters, Inc. coaster.

The other legacy attraction that needs addressing is the Animation Tour. This attraction was actually expanded over the years, and eventually altered to incorporate the swanky new building created for Florida’s burgeoning feature animation department. Then, Eisner shut down the successful Florida animation unit and the tour’s reason for being vanished. The attraction is now a sad shell of its former self, with no real animators to speak to guests and the show film changed from the amusing yet informative Return to Neverland to a pointless puff piece from California Adventure’s animation exhibit. The tour has no flow anymore and no real draw, aside from some character meet and greets. Disney animation deserves a spot in this park, and the content and scope of the tour needs to be re-thought. Disney also needs to decide whether they’re going to have an animation unit in Florida again, and if not they need to make better use of the space they’re now wasting on backstage office buildings.

One of the rumors that made the rounds when Disney changed the park’s name to “Hollywood Studios” was that the park would be re-conceived as consisting of a series of themed “studios”. These would be analogous to the “lands” of the Magic Kingdom, and would center around the different properties the shows and attractions were based on. Thus, one would get “Lucas Studios” and “Muppet Studios”, “Pixar Place” and so on. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but I think it’s a far superior way to structure the park than exists now, and provided the layout of the park could be restructured in a more logical fashion I think that this plan would be an excellent and thematically consistent way to envision the park going forward.

So, assuming they take my advice and fix all these critical infrastructure issues, what else does the park need? Well, new attractions. And a thorough refreshing of old attractions. They need to decide if they’re still going to attempt to address elements of filmmaking process – otherwise, vestigial elements like the tram tour and Sounds Dangerous need to be replaced with something relevant to the park’s purpose. I don’t think the production aspect need be eliminated entirely, but Sounds Dangerous still needs to go no matter what.

I’m going to sound like a broken record on this one, but the park needs more dark rides. As of now, it has only two (if you count Toy Story Mania). The only animatronic spectacle of the sort that guests tend to associate with Disney is The Great Movie Ride. Give us more – the history of the park is littered with interesting concepts that remain unbuilt. Again, I’ll talk more about this in May but there’s no reason why, with the realms of film, TV, radio and theatre at their fingertips, WDI can’t create a slew of amazing and amusing experiences.

From the Neverworld files – Mickey’s Movieland

The park also needs more of those small atmospheric touches that make the other parks so unique. It would be a cinch to bring California Adventure’s planned Red Line Trolley to Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard. Who knows – maybe they can find a way to make a studio tram ride that circles the park like the Magic Kingdom’s railroad. Live entertainment should also be expanded – this is the park that’s traditionally known for its epic live shows and those should become a feature of the park rather than something that gets cut first when times are tight.

All in all, the park needs logic. It needs a reason to exist, and a purpose for its now seemingly random attractions. Most of all, it needs a master plan that will determine which of the former production areas are available for future expansion, and will prevent major attractions being built in the short-term that would make long-term expansion difficult.

The romance of old Hollywood is ingrained in the global collective consciousness, and there’s no reason why a park like this can’t be a crown jewel for Disney. The entrance of the park, with its ambient music and wonderful theming, should only be the start of an amazing experience instead of its pinnacle. The Studios’ layout and divided sense of personality suited its purpose and made sense in 1989, but it doesn’t anymore. The park’s goals have changed, and it’s time to make a suitable investment in bringing it up to the standards of its peers.

No. Just no.

One last note – the Hat. Rarely are there things that so unite fandom, that are so universally reviled, as the Hat. You’ll hear any number of rumors as to its purpose, but I continue to be unable to fathom what they were thinking when they built the Hat. Out of scale and completely incongruous with its surroundings, the Hat blocks the carefully designed sightlines down Hollywood Boulevard and the once-spectacular view of the Chinese Theater. It serves no purpose, only sheltering a pin stand, and a rather feeble pin stand at that. It’s hard to believe that it’s plagued the park for nearly a decade, and one can only fervently hope that it will eventually follow the path of its once-feared-permanent brethren, the Hand. The Hat makes me deeply angry. Why not put the Hat as an entrance to a rebuilt Animation tour? Just get it out from in front the Chinese Theater. Seriously. What were they thinking? Ok, breathe…

Seriously. Ditch the hat.

And build a Rocketeer ride. Seriously.

That is all.