The New York Times, February 23, 1997, pp. 1, 22:
Once-Visionary Disney Calls the Future a Thing of the Past
By Seth Schiesel
Lake Buena Vista, Fla. -- There is a place here where the future looks
old. It is called Tomorrowland, and it is part of Walt Disney World, the
most popular tourist destination on Earth.
When Walt Disney Co. decided to give Tomorrowland a makeover in 1995, it
went retro.
Visitors to Tomorrowland's main drag, the Avenue of Planets, stroll not
some asphalt version of the information superhighway, but through a green,
gray and purple canyon of neon, oversized bolts and swooping arches of
anodized steel -- an antique remake of "The Jetsons."
"The new Tomorrowland begins with Jules Verne and ends with Buck
Rogers," said Beth Dunlop, a Florida architecture critic who recently
released a company-approved book on Disney architecture.
Tomorrowland is hardly alone. The future is growing old all over Disney's
magic kingdom. From the film lot to the Epcot theme park to the real-life
town that the company calls Celebration, Disney has largely given up on
imagining a new future. When a story line or ride design calls for a touch
of times to come, it is usually, as posters for the new Tomorrowland boast,
"the future that never was."
The shift is profound for a company whose founder was one of postwar
America's great popularizers of technology. And it is a reflection of the
ennui that many Americans, at century's end, feel about the chips and bits
in which they are immersed.
"We went to the moon and all we got out of it was Teflon pans," said Karal
Ann Marling, a professor of art history and American studies at the
University of Minnesota, expressing an increasingly common attitude.
"Our goals as a people are not these pie-in-the-sky objectives that people
grew up with in the '50s," said Professor Marling, who is the curator for a
Montreal exhibit in June on Disney theme park architecture. "They settle now
for a house in the suburbs and to hell with the moon. What's the point of
building monorails if we can hardly get the car to work?"
That was not Walt Disney's America. At the dawn of the space race, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower used a Disney television program to introduce Pentagon
brass to the possibilities of space travel.
In the 1950s and '60s, the original Tomorrowland, at Disneyland in Anaheim,
Calif., was home to Space Station X-1 and the Monsanto House of the Future.
Mr. Disney perceived "a role for himself almost as a middleman between
industry and the public about communicating ideas of the future," said Marty
Sklar, a 40-year Disney Co. employee and luminary of the company's
fantasy-conjuring Imagineering division.
Today, though, it seems much of the public does not want to hear the message;
as technology has entered more lives, it has departed from many imaginations.
Familiar with the microprocessor and the modem, weary of space flight and
suspicious of scientific advance, Americans no longer put their faith in a
"great big beautiful tomorrow," as the song has it at Disney World's Carousel
of Progress, one of the few attractions to escape modification in the recent
Tomorrowland renovation.
All over America, the future is aging. The fantastic visions of Isaac
Asimov and Robert Heinlein have been replaced on science fiction best-seller
lists by the cynical "cyberpunk" tales of William Gibson and his imitators.
In film, science unleashed is usually far more dangerous than science
ignored. Arnold Schwarzenegger came back from the future as a good robot in
the movie "Terminator 2," but only because there was a more advanced, evil
model to battle.
Disney, of course, makes full use of modern technology. The company
recently bought ABC, the television network, and is in talks to make an
investment in Starwave Corp., which develops content for the World Wide
Web.
For Disney's 1995 hit movie, "Toy Story," 117 advanced work stations were
used to create the first full-length film drawn completely by computer.
Yet the toys that technology was used to animate -- Mr. Potato Head, the
Etch-a-Sketch, the Slinky -- are denizens of the 1950s. When an astronaut
doll appeared, he was at once naive and arrogant, deluded by fictions of
space travel.
As today's idea of the future has become less romantic, Disney, as myth
maker, has recognized that yesterday's idea of the future is, for many, much
more inviting.
"Popular entertainment picks at a theme generally that arises elsewhere in
the culture," said Alvin Toffler, the author and futurist. "A lot of
perfectly fine and decent and human people now think that technology is a
negative.
"These guys at Disney are up burning the halogen lamps to determine what will
sell," Toffler said. "They're following the bottom line."
The vanguard of Disney's retreat into yesterday is Celebration, the town that
the company is building south of Walt Disney World.
As the first of an expected 20,000 residents move in, it is apt that
Celebration's only furniture store specializes in antiques and reproductions,
because the town itself is a reproduction of an antique: the America built
before highways and suburbs.
The facade of downtown Celebration is azure and yellow and pale pink. Its
scale is comfortably pedestrian. Though the sidewalks are broad, a visitor
caught himself inadvertently strolling the middle of the town's main street,
as if it were the Magic Kingdom's Main Street, U.S.A.
"It's like taking a Norman Rockwell painting and blowing it up into a real
town," said Andy Y. Kwon, a 33-year-old taxi driver from nearby Kissimmee,
Fla.
The town's designer hardly disputes the description. "Most of my work for
Disney has a foot firmly in the past," said Robert A.M. Stern, the New York
architect who is a member of Disney's board and co-author of Celebration's
master plan.
"The architecture of the building," he said, "is based on familiar themes of
American town architecture."
It is a far cry from what Walt Disney intended when he started buying up
central Florida swampland in the 1960s. Walt Disney World was to be home
not just to a theme park, but to the Experimental Prototype Community of
Tomorrow.
"I heard him talk over and over again about Epcot," said Bob Thomas, a
veteran Associated Press reporter who wrote a biography of Mr. Disney. "He
wanted to build an ideal city, which would be pleasant living for families,
give them education, recreation, amusement."
Ms. Dunlop, the architectural historian, said: "It was under a bubble of glass.
It was a futuristic, utopian, sanitized, unrealistic dream of how people could
live without having to hear garbage trucks and breathe fumes."
After Mr. Disney died in 1966, his successors agonized over Epcot, Thomas
said. "It's more of a World's Fair attraction," he said of the result. "It
was nothing like Walt had envisioned."
Today, across Epcot's lake from the 12 pavilions that illustrate various
national cultures, "Future World" offers what some visitors consider a dated
view of tomorrow.
Fifteen years after its construction, tourists still gape at the huge geodesic
dome called "Spaceship Earth."
But the ride inside, touted as "a dramatic history of communication," inspires
less awe. After showing how the papyrus scroll begat the telegraph, the ride
brings visitors up to date by showing schoolchildren using video conferencing
equipment.
"When it opened it was all right, but then it got old," Mike Kindell, a
55-year-old retiree from Jacksonville, Fla., said as he left the ride one
Sunday last month.
"That goes for the whole place," Kindell said. "They broad brush everything.
They don't give us specifics on where we are going or what it means. Are we
going to laser technology? Are we going to interactive? Are we going to go
with computers? What?"
To counter the criticism, Disney officials point to Innoventions, an Epcot
area resembling a catalogue store where technology companies tout their
latest wares. Sega Enterprises commands the largest space for dozens of
terminals offering demonstrations of the company's video games -- which,
like almost everything at Innoventions, are already for sale.
Traces of Mr. Disney's vision for Epcot have been realized. Walt Disney
World incorporates an innovative underground waste disposal system and
elegant monorails. Celebration appears well on its way to providing clean
streets, quiet and a strong sense of community.
But it strives toward those goals in precisely the opposite way from what Mr.
Disney had projected, by reaching into the past. "We're interlopers in Walt's
vision, I guess," Sklar said.
Walt Disney's imagination encompassed history and fantasy. But toward the
end of his life he was obsessed with the future, a future in which technology
made day-to-day life better and better.
His weekly television program in the 1950s -- for years one of the highest-
rated shows in the country -- sometimes featured Wernher von Braun, the rocket
scientist. Together the two men fueled America's fascination for outer space.
"He was convinced that if we could get American industry and Walt Disney
together," Sklar said, "you could stimulate people and hold out an optimistic
future that was not unreal, but was something for us all to reach for."
The Alien Extraterrorestrial Encounter was probably not what Mr. Disney had
in mind. The ride, part of Florida's redesigned Tomorrowland, is the
company's first theme park rendition of a now-popular story line: when science
goes wrong. The encounter, which features an angry space creature and a Star
Trek-style teleportation device, elicits screams.
Across the Avenue of Planets is the Timekeeper, a time-travel attraction that
introduces passengers to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Less than a minute of
the ride depicts the future -- a flyover of a 2189 cityscape that largely
resembles what Tomorrowland itself might look like from a hundred feet in the
air.
The difficulty of keeping pace with the future sometimes frustrated Mr.
Disney, but mostly he seemed to relish the challenge.
He once said: "The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished. It's
something we can keep developing and adding to."
And Tomorrowland, in both California and Florida, has been overhauled a
number of times -- but always to keep up, not give up. Rocket to the Moon
eventually became Mission to Mars. A 1967 remodeling in Anaheim brought
"Adventure Through Inner Space" and the tram-like Peoplemover.
California's Tomorrowland is now being remodeled along the lines of the
Florida version, with perhaps a bit more chrome. The company calls it a
"classic future environment."
Disney executives acknowledge that with the pace of technological
development quickening, it is simply too hard, and too expensive, for the
company to stay a step ahead.
"It's one thing if you're going to do a film," Sklar said. "If it doesn't work,
it's gone.
"But we build in iron and steel and cement. What was the future yesterday is
not the future tomorrow.
"When you build something in a park that's supposed to last 20 years, you're
darned lucky if you get half of that."
Disney chief executive Michael Eisner wrote in the company's latest annual
report that its theme parks would continue to become more popular "so long as
we design with unlimited imagination."
But these days Disney is directing that imagination at technique and process.
Nicholas Negroponte, director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, one of whose sponsors is Disney, thinks that the
company has realized that the future, as it unfolds today, is no longer good
entertainment.
"The story line just doesn't carry with it the same sort of punch as going off
to the moon," he said. "Things like highly personalized information services
and computer agents that do things for you just don't make a good story."
[End]
Once-Visionary Disney Calls the Future a Thing of the Past
By Seth Schiesel
Lake Buena Vista, Fla. -- There is a place here where the future looks
old. It is called Tomorrowland, and it is part of Walt Disney World, the
most popular tourist destination on Earth.
When Walt Disney Co. decided to give Tomorrowland a makeover in 1995, it
went retro.
Visitors to Tomorrowland's main drag, the Avenue of Planets, stroll not
some asphalt version of the information superhighway, but through a green,
gray and purple canyon of neon, oversized bolts and swooping arches of
anodized steel -- an antique remake of "The Jetsons."
"The new Tomorrowland begins with Jules Verne and ends with Buck
Rogers," said Beth Dunlop, a Florida architecture critic who recently
released a company-approved book on Disney architecture.
Tomorrowland is hardly alone. The future is growing old all over Disney's
magic kingdom. From the film lot to the Epcot theme park to the real-life
town that the company calls Celebration, Disney has largely given up on
imagining a new future. When a story line or ride design calls for a touch
of times to come, it is usually, as posters for the new Tomorrowland boast,
"the future that never was."
The shift is profound for a company whose founder was one of postwar
America's great popularizers of technology. And it is a reflection of the
ennui that many Americans, at century's end, feel about the chips and bits
in which they are immersed.
"We went to the moon and all we got out of it was Teflon pans," said Karal
Ann Marling, a professor of art history and American studies at the
University of Minnesota, expressing an increasingly common attitude.
"Our goals as a people are not these pie-in-the-sky objectives that people
grew up with in the '50s," said Professor Marling, who is the curator for a
Montreal exhibit in June on Disney theme park architecture. "They settle now
for a house in the suburbs and to hell with the moon. What's the point of
building monorails if we can hardly get the car to work?"
That was not Walt Disney's America. At the dawn of the space race, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower used a Disney television program to introduce Pentagon
brass to the possibilities of space travel.
In the 1950s and '60s, the original Tomorrowland, at Disneyland in Anaheim,
Calif., was home to Space Station X-1 and the Monsanto House of the Future.
Mr. Disney perceived "a role for himself almost as a middleman between
industry and the public about communicating ideas of the future," said Marty
Sklar, a 40-year Disney Co. employee and luminary of the company's
fantasy-conjuring Imagineering division.
Today, though, it seems much of the public does not want to hear the message;
as technology has entered more lives, it has departed from many imaginations.
Familiar with the microprocessor and the modem, weary of space flight and
suspicious of scientific advance, Americans no longer put their faith in a
"great big beautiful tomorrow," as the song has it at Disney World's Carousel
of Progress, one of the few attractions to escape modification in the recent
Tomorrowland renovation.
All over America, the future is aging. The fantastic visions of Isaac
Asimov and Robert Heinlein have been replaced on science fiction best-seller
lists by the cynical "cyberpunk" tales of William Gibson and his imitators.
In film, science unleashed is usually far more dangerous than science
ignored. Arnold Schwarzenegger came back from the future as a good robot in
the movie "Terminator 2," but only because there was a more advanced, evil
model to battle.
Disney, of course, makes full use of modern technology. The company
recently bought ABC, the television network, and is in talks to make an
investment in Starwave Corp., which develops content for the World Wide
Web.
For Disney's 1995 hit movie, "Toy Story," 117 advanced work stations were
used to create the first full-length film drawn completely by computer.
Yet the toys that technology was used to animate -- Mr. Potato Head, the
Etch-a-Sketch, the Slinky -- are denizens of the 1950s. When an astronaut
doll appeared, he was at once naive and arrogant, deluded by fictions of
space travel.
As today's idea of the future has become less romantic, Disney, as myth
maker, has recognized that yesterday's idea of the future is, for many, much
more inviting.
"Popular entertainment picks at a theme generally that arises elsewhere in
the culture," said Alvin Toffler, the author and futurist. "A lot of
perfectly fine and decent and human people now think that technology is a
negative.
"These guys at Disney are up burning the halogen lamps to determine what will
sell," Toffler said. "They're following the bottom line."
The vanguard of Disney's retreat into yesterday is Celebration, the town that
the company is building south of Walt Disney World.
As the first of an expected 20,000 residents move in, it is apt that
Celebration's only furniture store specializes in antiques and reproductions,
because the town itself is a reproduction of an antique: the America built
before highways and suburbs.
The facade of downtown Celebration is azure and yellow and pale pink. Its
scale is comfortably pedestrian. Though the sidewalks are broad, a visitor
caught himself inadvertently strolling the middle of the town's main street,
as if it were the Magic Kingdom's Main Street, U.S.A.
"It's like taking a Norman Rockwell painting and blowing it up into a real
town," said Andy Y. Kwon, a 33-year-old taxi driver from nearby Kissimmee,
Fla.
The town's designer hardly disputes the description. "Most of my work for
Disney has a foot firmly in the past," said Robert A.M. Stern, the New York
architect who is a member of Disney's board and co-author of Celebration's
master plan.
"The architecture of the building," he said, "is based on familiar themes of
American town architecture."
It is a far cry from what Walt Disney intended when he started buying up
central Florida swampland in the 1960s. Walt Disney World was to be home
not just to a theme park, but to the Experimental Prototype Community of
Tomorrow.
"I heard him talk over and over again about Epcot," said Bob Thomas, a
veteran Associated Press reporter who wrote a biography of Mr. Disney. "He
wanted to build an ideal city, which would be pleasant living for families,
give them education, recreation, amusement."
Ms. Dunlop, the architectural historian, said: "It was under a bubble of glass.
It was a futuristic, utopian, sanitized, unrealistic dream of how people could
live without having to hear garbage trucks and breathe fumes."
After Mr. Disney died in 1966, his successors agonized over Epcot, Thomas
said. "It's more of a World's Fair attraction," he said of the result. "It
was nothing like Walt had envisioned."
Today, across Epcot's lake from the 12 pavilions that illustrate various
national cultures, "Future World" offers what some visitors consider a dated
view of tomorrow.
Fifteen years after its construction, tourists still gape at the huge geodesic
dome called "Spaceship Earth."
But the ride inside, touted as "a dramatic history of communication," inspires
less awe. After showing how the papyrus scroll begat the telegraph, the ride
brings visitors up to date by showing schoolchildren using video conferencing
equipment.
"When it opened it was all right, but then it got old," Mike Kindell, a
55-year-old retiree from Jacksonville, Fla., said as he left the ride one
Sunday last month.
"That goes for the whole place," Kindell said. "They broad brush everything.
They don't give us specifics on where we are going or what it means. Are we
going to laser technology? Are we going to interactive? Are we going to go
with computers? What?"
To counter the criticism, Disney officials point to Innoventions, an Epcot
area resembling a catalogue store where technology companies tout their
latest wares. Sega Enterprises commands the largest space for dozens of
terminals offering demonstrations of the company's video games -- which,
like almost everything at Innoventions, are already for sale.
Traces of Mr. Disney's vision for Epcot have been realized. Walt Disney
World incorporates an innovative underground waste disposal system and
elegant monorails. Celebration appears well on its way to providing clean
streets, quiet and a strong sense of community.
But it strives toward those goals in precisely the opposite way from what Mr.
Disney had projected, by reaching into the past. "We're interlopers in Walt's
vision, I guess," Sklar said.
Walt Disney's imagination encompassed history and fantasy. But toward the
end of his life he was obsessed with the future, a future in which technology
made day-to-day life better and better.
His weekly television program in the 1950s -- for years one of the highest-
rated shows in the country -- sometimes featured Wernher von Braun, the rocket
scientist. Together the two men fueled America's fascination for outer space.
"He was convinced that if we could get American industry and Walt Disney
together," Sklar said, "you could stimulate people and hold out an optimistic
future that was not unreal, but was something for us all to reach for."
The Alien Extraterrorestrial Encounter was probably not what Mr. Disney had
in mind. The ride, part of Florida's redesigned Tomorrowland, is the
company's first theme park rendition of a now-popular story line: when science
goes wrong. The encounter, which features an angry space creature and a Star
Trek-style teleportation device, elicits screams.
Across the Avenue of Planets is the Timekeeper, a time-travel attraction that
introduces passengers to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Less than a minute of
the ride depicts the future -- a flyover of a 2189 cityscape that largely
resembles what Tomorrowland itself might look like from a hundred feet in the
air.
The difficulty of keeping pace with the future sometimes frustrated Mr.
Disney, but mostly he seemed to relish the challenge.
He once said: "The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished. It's
something we can keep developing and adding to."
And Tomorrowland, in both California and Florida, has been overhauled a
number of times -- but always to keep up, not give up. Rocket to the Moon
eventually became Mission to Mars. A 1967 remodeling in Anaheim brought
"Adventure Through Inner Space" and the tram-like Peoplemover.
California's Tomorrowland is now being remodeled along the lines of the
Florida version, with perhaps a bit more chrome. The company calls it a
"classic future environment."
Disney executives acknowledge that with the pace of technological
development quickening, it is simply too hard, and too expensive, for the
company to stay a step ahead.
"It's one thing if you're going to do a film," Sklar said. "If it doesn't work,
it's gone.
"But we build in iron and steel and cement. What was the future yesterday is
not the future tomorrow.
"When you build something in a park that's supposed to last 20 years, you're
darned lucky if you get half of that."
Disney chief executive Michael Eisner wrote in the company's latest annual
report that its theme parks would continue to become more popular "so long as
we design with unlimited imagination."
But these days Disney is directing that imagination at technique and process.
Nicholas Negroponte, director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, one of whose sponsors is Disney, thinks that the
company has realized that the future, as it unfolds today, is no longer good
entertainment.
"The story line just doesn't carry with it the same sort of punch as going off
to the moon," he said. "Things like highly personalized information services
and computer agents that do things for you just don't make a good story."
[End]