There is no way I could adequately prepare you, so just watch.
Why? Seriously, why?
This video was distributed at General Motors dealerships in 1995, to people who came in to test-drive cars. G.M. was, at the time, sponsoring World of Motion at Epcot Center, which was preparing to give way to Test Track. Where Leonardo da Vinci or any of this other randomness comes into the picture is anyone’s guess.
Seriously, this might be the goofiest Disney promo video ever. Although I do like how they portray Epcot as the product and culmination of one’s mastery of their own imagination.
Nice footage of the parks, though! What did you see that you miss?
So, there’s this rumor that seems to be spreading everywhere…
People keep suggesting that Imagineering has a plan to – at last – replace the unfortunate Innoventions exhibit at Disneyland with some sort of attraction modeled on the Stark Expo from last year’s Marvel release Iron Man 2.
Yeah, that’s totally not a thing.
For those of you who haven’t seen the film (and you really should), amongst the film’s many Disney references is the Stark Expo – a fictional event held in Flushing Meadows, New York, that is heavily based on the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair. Many of the actual event’s iconic buildings and features can be seen in the layout of the fictional, computer-generated fairgrounds in the film. Stark’s expo even has a theme song written by Richard Sherman, who wrote all those catchy ditties for Disney’s real World’s Fair pavilions. There is, therefore, a lot of thematic crossover between Disney’s real-world efforts and Stark’s fictional celebration, and of course Disneyland’s Innoventions is housed in the building where the Carousel of Progress once turned. The building looks like it’s ripped straight from the old fairgrounds, so it seems like it would be a thematic match.
But it’s not going to happen.
I’m not saying that no one at WDI has considered this, or sketched it on a napkin, or what-not. I have no idea. But I can tell you with a pretty good degree of certainty – and with a source who would know, that I trust implicitly – that this is not on anyone’s radar and not going to happen.
If I can add some pure speculation (and I reiterate that it is only that!) I would guess that WDI is more likely to wait and push for a larger overhaul of Tomorrowland itself instead of doing things piecemeal. Perhaps this is merely wishful thinking, but since Disneyland is known to be the darling of everyone with clout these days one hopes that it will get a sweeping rehab of Tomorrowland that will reverse the transgressions of 1998. Al Lutz has reported that areas adjacent to the land are under consideration for new attractions, and we also know that WDI is trying to figure out what to do with the old PeopleMover track. It sure would be nice to tackle these issues along with Innoventions, the Astro Orbiter, and all the other thematic trainwrecks that currently occupy the area.
Just don’t go looking for Stark Industries to be taking part.
I know that we here at the ProgressDrome can be a little hard on Disney’s output these days. Too often are their televised specials shallow, full of awkward forced synergy, and generally unentertaining and devoid of Disney-related content. I know, I know – we can be really picky. But despite how great Disney specials were back in Walt’s day, it doesn’t mean that the rest of Disney televised history was a golden age.
We’ve already documented many of the horrors of Disney television in the 1970s, from Shields and Yarnell to Pablo Cruise. When Michael Eisner arrived to make the company more “Hollywood” in 1984, the general production values of Disney’s television specials nosed up considerably. That doesn’t mean, however, that they too couldn’t be full of awkward moments that today seem as if they’d have been too cripplingly embarrassing to perform.
On December 28th, 1986, the Disney Sunday Movie aired Tiger Town, starring the great Roy Scheider, but it also featured a short presentation about Star Tours, then preparing for its grand opening at Disneyland. (This, of course, was a great affront to those of us Star Wars obsessed kids on the east coast, who would be unable to fly through the trenches of the Death Star for nearly three more years.)
While this special was shown many years before Jar-Jar Binks would arrive to darken our souls, it begins with a little number that might have been an early warning sign that all that is Lucas is not gold. I mean, look…
It’s a fascinating month in May at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, with showings of the 1941 classic Dumbo and a look at the Disney Studios during World War II. There’s even an extremely rare screening of 1943’s Victory Through Air Power! Good stuff. As always, you can find out information about the museum at its website, and be sure to subscribe to its blog.
It’s hard for “the kids today” to understand what it was like to be a Disney fan in the days before the internet. For those of us outside the Disneyana hotbed of southern California, pretty much all we knew about the parks came from what Disney deigned to tell us in its official publications. This meant a new picture book about the parks every five years or so, and, of course, the much-anticipated quarterly arrival of Disney News.
For those of us on the east coast, who were unlikely to even know anyone who had ever been to Disneyland, any real impression of that park whatsoever had to come from one of two sources. First, there were the re-runs of Walt’s old Wonderful World of Color shows that aired on the Disney Channel and every afternoon on the local syndicated station. Every once in a blue moon, if you were lucky, you’d catch something like From Pirates of the Caribbean to Tomorrowland, and that would give you a hint of what the park had been like in Walt’s day. Most then-current news of what was going on at Disneyland, however, came from Disney News. With only a couple of articles a year focusing on some aspect of the park, though, any picture or bit of information had to be picked apart obsessively to try and get a feel for the park as a whole. And with so little information to go on, it’s bizarre what little details would stick in one’s mind.
That brings us to today’s post. “Disney Serendipity” was the name of a feature that ran in Disney News during the early to mid-1980s. Photographed and (presumably) written by the mysterious Dawn and Max Navarro, these two-page spreads covered, in the words of the column, “Serendipity – that wonderfully rare word used to describe the finding of valuable or agreeable things that you really weren’t looking for, but were happy to have found.”
These features focused on the more obscure aspects of the Disney park-going experience, typically involving shopping or dining (and never failing to mention the corporate sponsors of each shop or restaurant). When most news tended to focus on major new attractions or park entertainment, these “slice of life” pieces were a real window into what the real Disneyland and Walt Disney World experience was like for visitors. Maybe that’s why they made such an impression on young readers, who thought “Wow – the restaurants in Disneyland are different than they are in Walt Disney World!”
Here’s a column from the Fall, 1984 issue of Disney News.
From the Progress City archives comes this collection of 33 tall tales and true from Disney history. Available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats.
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