A New Approach

In my discussions of Disney themed design I have long employed the practice of my (theoretical!) classifications of attractions into either Stratificational or Presentational design groups. I have employed these theories in my dissertations, and overall hopefully proved the usefulness of such an approach since introducing these concepts in 2007.

There are inherent problems in such an approach, even beyond the disconnect between theory and practice which is the white elephant of most critical writing. With the ascent of Eisner and his story mandates the concept of Presentationalism, that unique aesthetic mode which WED had been carefully building to towards since 1955 - climaxing with EPCOT in 1982 - was no longer permitted. As a result the usefulness of the classifications of "Stratification" and "Presentationalism" become by and large useless by the mid-80's. I have never attempted to leverage the two theories at products which followed the end of the Golden Age of Themed Design for just this reason.

In the fallout of this tide change, a number of new schools began to grow. In WDI designs there is a "return to naturalism", a "faith in the theme", and a faith in "justified decor" which old-school WED designers were content to either divert or ignore due to those designer's faith in abstract representation. But I think the chief development in the "Second Wave" which is often discussed but rarely labeled is the growth of what I have begun to call "Post-Themed-Attraction Design".

First, a few thoughts on that cumbersome name.

What I seek to label when defining a work as being part of the Post-Themed-Attraction school is an attraction, which often appears to perch itself in the Stratificational mode, but which is implicitly or explicitly a reaction to the traditional modes and operations of the designs of WED's Golden Age. It cannot simply be an acknowledgement of the audience; since WED designs were meant to really "bring you there", this happens constantly in classical Disney design:

"If we weren't in the show starting right away we'd be in the audience too."

"They have selected you to fill our quota, and they'll haunt you until you return!"

No... to truly be in the school of the Post-Themed-Attraction Designs, the work must overall acknowledge its' position as a theme park display or its' overall role in the diagesis of the theme park "show". It is one thing to include the audience in the world of the show and quite another to make reference to the theme park location of the show and to rely on the spectator's familiarity with the mode of the traditional theme show to create a spark which carries on the shows forward momentum.

I. Post Themed Attraction Design

The name itself is a compromise. I have often seen attractions of this stripe labeled "post-modern"; but in reality we're culturally closer to "post-post-post-post-modernism" today than anything else. Not wanting to create more confusion in my use than simply refraining from using such a term, I elected not to use the term "post-modern". The second term which came to mind was "Post-Disney", but again this creates more unnecessary associations with the death of Walt Disney in 1966 than it resolves. Closer still was "Post-Disneyland", but again, this creates an unnecessary emphasis on a certain place, date, person or time. What the admittedly weak term of "Post-Themed-Attraction Design" seeks to create an understanding that this is a mode which responds not just to Disney works but to the whole business of creating a Disneylike diagetic environment overall. Universal, for example, is probably the best and most prolific practitioner of Post-Themed Design in the world.

I see two overall grades of the Post-Themed show. Version one strikes a subtle balance between the traditional Stratificational mode and its' Post-Themed content. A noteworthy attraction in this vein is Star Tours, where we are still tourists, albeit tourists on a space shuttle instead of a theme park simulator. Still, the overall joke of several sequences in Star Tours is in the tourist status of the assembled crew, and we are meant to recognize this as a moment where Disney has broken the "third wall"; not towards us, the spectators - but towards itself, in a way. The moment of non-diagesis forms an ironic counterpoint to the otherwise straightforward nature of the presentation. The Timekeeper, from 1994, included a gag where tourists were beamed forward in time out of the audience, although again the diagetic nature of the attraction was not violated too strongly here as, after all, in the 1994 Tomorrowland we are all meant to be tourists to the land of the future.

Alien Encounter was a few steps up the scale and also only a few physical steps away from Timekeeper. WDI's 1994 effort to launch a "franchise ride" aimed at teenage thrillseekers was in reality a handy salvage of an effects chair Imagineering had been tinkering with for years; the original concept was to use the Xenomorph from "Alien". The resulting attraction was a strange bedfellow for the Magic Kingdom, wildly oscillating between interesting satire and "hip" cynicism, and in fact was removed from service shortly following its premiere to be made more "scary".

The satire elements of Alien Encounter were the interesting ones, and this is the aspect of the attraction which tips the hand into the realm of Post-Themed Design. The fictional X-S Tech Corp of the attraction, headed by an ethereal CEO seen only on television, is a rather transparent version of Disney; a corporation which employs richly funded but inadequately tested technology to mysterious ends. The CEO is to be teleported into the theater but the signal is lost; in a panic technicians recklessly beam in whatever signal they happen to find which turns out to be, naturally, a dangerous carnivore.

Disney is well known for its ability to feed with one hand and slap with another, and the didactic tone of Animal Kingdom is only a recent example. Although the message is slightly diverted by a mention of "Disneyland Moon" in the Alien Encounter preshow, making it clear that Disney apparently exists alongside X-S Tech, the cautionary tale of a company using new technology to achieve "magic" and its' dangerous outcome resonates through the Disney canon, from the Flying Saucers at Disneyland to the ongoing charade which was Test Track at EPCOT, diverted for years because the very sophisticated ride vehicles simply would not perform their desired functions. WDI spends years developing concepts and ride vehicles and lots of money on things that never see the light of day; it's not hard to see the correlation and it wasn't hard for spectators to see it them, either. Alien Encounter may have been in suspect taste, but there was nothing like it in the Disney canon at the time.

II. Past, Present Dialogue

2000 saw the opening of Journey Into YOUR Imagination at EPCOT, a bare bones replacement for the lavish Kodak pavilion of 1983. It closed only two years later to be replaced with yet another attraction due to rampant guest complaints, and it is this second version - Journey Into Your Imagination With Figment - which interests us here. The short lifespan and heated dislike of version 2 of the attraction perched version 3 in the uncommon situation of being both a replacement of and an apology for the second version, and an intriguing dynamic was created.

In the attraction, a scientific research facility known as the "Imagination Institute" - a concept salvaged from a throwaway joke in the nearby "Honey I Shrunk the Audience" - is headed by the stuffy Eric Idle, who is giving a tour which is repeatedly interrupted by carefree Figment. In version 2 of the attraction, Idle's chairman of the institute was the authoritative voice, but here he is constantly sidetracked by Figment, and it is not hard to extend Figment the role of being the literal embodiment of WED designs and EPCOT Center in general. Figment, for example, is associated with the disruption of the weirdly sterile atmosphere of the Institute, which is literally exploded in the finale into a succession of abstract spaces - an orange sunset, a starry night, and finally a room which materializes out of nowhere. WDI designs favor concrete and demonstrable spaces - Harambe, Africa, or the sterility of a Hollywood movie studio - but WED era designs created any old imaginary - often not very well developed - spaces they felt like, in any order they pleased. Figment's explosion of the Institute office corridors into upside down houses and abstract spaces is literally the destruction of Disney's modern concepts of themed design "placemaking".


Besides his inherent historical association with EPCOT, Figment is employed in other ways to subvert Idle, who is essentially filling the role of a modern "creative executive", a placebo for the hundreds of "empty suits" who continue to stifle creativity in WDI. Figment appears in his trademark yellow sweater and watches animation from the 1983 version of his attraction (a sobering contrast to the gaudy 3D animation of Figment seen elsewhere) on an upside down television. He walks on the walls and ceiling around the cars in a clear allusion to the opening of World of Motion. At one point he summons an oncoming train heard in sound effects which "rush through" the audience, a possible allusion to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. He even actually stops the attraction from continuing and diverts the cars through nonsense space with spinning cutout Figments and lighting effects. So concerned is the attraction with pleasing an audience of hardcore Disney fans that a clever visual reference to The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is even included. This is in contrast to version 2 of Imagination where a hollow reference to the Haunted Mansion was included, very similar to the perfunctory name dropping of the Mansion in California Adventure's Superstar Limo.

"Angels, execs, producers beyond... give us a sign the Green Light is on."

A fairly subversive quotation, actually, when removed from its' apparent Hollywood context and placed in the similar decision making world of Imagineering.

Journey Into Your Imagination With Figment may be the only Disney attraction currently operating which seeks to create a dialogue between design team and audience, not intended for the millions of tourists who traipse in and out of the building all year mostly unaware of the subtext and history and meaning behind it. And Disney fans have not embraced it either, not only for its' uneasy atmosphere and near constant assault on the senses, but because it is not the beloved original attraction. The final verdict on Journey into YOUR Imagination with Figment may rest on whether this "reading" of the attraction is correct or not. I believe it is, and may therefore actually rank as one of WDI's more subversive achievements, a funny but sad cry of despair from the pit of Disney's darkest era of themed design. It's hard not to hear famous creative executives like Paul Pressler behind lines like:

"I want you out of sight!" "I believe Imagination should be captured and controlled!"

And some beleaguered creative team sticking it to the boss, making themselves into Figment, a blind eye turned to them for the moment under the pressures of time and money:

"Imagination should be set free!"

III. WDI on Corporate Culture

1998 saw the opening of possibly the most universally contested attraction in Disney history, The Enchanted Tiki Room Under New Management. Unlike the gross injustices played out on the EPCOT Center attractions of 1982-1983, The Tiki Room was largely considered to be hallowed ground, a Walt Disney attraction from 1963 which had been playing in roughly its' original form since then. The 1971 Florida version upgraded the size of the theater, the exterior building and preshow and included beautiful new effects not possible at Disneyland, but was still more or less the Tiki Room, and by the 1990's was starting to play badly with audiences. At nearly 20 minutes, the sedate original show is subject to walkouts even at the fiercely historical Disneyland. In 1994 an island-themed bird replaced the original Wally Boag "barker" toucan, but it failed to draw more people in. A creative team, probably charged only with creating something loud, colorful and short, was assembled. To these Imagineers, the project was undoubtedly an unpleasant "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, and the show they created is a fascinating doubled edged sword which plays with many of these uneasy themes.


The show is among Disney's most alienating, although it is a fascinating and less oblique bit of commentary on WDI's management. The tone is set immediately in the preshow, where the original Clyde and Claude toucans have been replaced by William and Morris, two smarmy talent agents. Where Clyde and Claude provided amusing banter about Adventureland, William and Morris are immediately annoyed at one another and begin bickering. Prominent Disney brands (in 1998) are name dropped, like The Mighty Ducks, and eventually the two birds just start shouting at one another as the preshow abruptly ends. This is the first overture to the audience about the show inside.

Disney bird characters Iago and Zazu have purchased the Enchanted Tiki Room, which is an intentional absurdity in and of itself, as the birds are from unrelated franchises, owned by Disney, and are now appearing in another unrelated franchise owned by Disney. Disney has always carefully guarded the diagetic integrity of their brands, and so the bringing together of these three properties was either created wholly by some marketing department somewhere or by the design team themselves as one more reflection of the heresy of the assignment. Eisnerite Disney may have ground out dozens of "cheapquels" to their most valuable properties, but we never saw Ariel pop up in, say, Beauty and the Beast part 6, and even in the hugely successful Disney Princess line of paraphernalia all of the girls are clustered together but all staring off in slightly different directions so they, eerily, never seem to be quite inhabiting the same space.

The Under New Management preshow also nearly immediately brings up the most important point in the whole project, which is money. To say that the designers were enamoured with the money making potential of the show is probably wrong, although others in the company assuredly were and they do go to great lengths to put these opinions in the mouths of many characters throughout the show, starting with these two cynical toucans.

"Just look at these paying customers waiting to get in."

"...Did you say paying?"

"As in money!"

"...As in ten percent?"

The audience is being manipulated for cash, the show repeatedly tells us, which is a second absurdity in that attractions are loss leaders for Disney, not money makers, and doubly in that the Enchanted Tiki Room in any form hasn't inspired copious cash flow from the bulk of tourists in decades. It's easy to interpret these essential themes as being quite earnest in the show, although the logic of doing so doesn't and never has quite added up. But this never comes off as funny or detached; it comes off as honestly cynical and rotten. This is why the show has been and continues to be so poorly received; what was probably intended as satire comes off as a sort of thesis statement on audiences, taste, culture, Disney and everything else. This authorette remains unconvinced, for reasons I will shortly elaborate on.

The show begins just as it used to, but even before the signature number "The Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Room" gets underway, Iago descends from the ceiling and stops the show short, bellowing that the song, a classic Disney number, is going to make him "toss his crackers", a line which is so cringe inducing that the show actually stops dead and hardly recovers. But the writing here is essential and significant because in order for the show to be "justified" in altering the WED original, Iago, as the voice of change in the show, has to be the hero - but he is portrayed as a villain. He sits on a pillow, shouts through a megaphone, and says of Zaszu, who warns Iago that he "cannot toy with the Enchanted Tiki Room", "He's not my friend!". Where we have been constantly warned about "New Management", seen talent agents, heard shouted arguments about money and ego, and now had a Walt Disney product violated in front of us, it's easy to connect the dots. Iago, a villain in Aladdin, is a stand in for the "empty suits" who greenlit the project and demanded change, whereas Zaszu is the protesting creative team.

"Hey you boring old Tiki birds!
I'm a big celebrity!
That's why we're gonna go and change the show!
Ain't it great to have a friend like me?"

This is not a positive picture being painted of the whole concept of a brand new Tiki Room.

Iago not only violates the Walt Disney era song, but one of his own product, "Friend Like Me", and turns it on its' head - from a celebration of the possibilities of Aladdin to become a "someone" via the Genie in the 1993 film to the ego driven mania to change things because Iago is in a position of power over the 1963 show. Even the trademark "friend like me" line is corrupted to become cynical.

The Tiki Room, however, will have the last word. The third component of this nexis of "new management" vs "old management" is the Tiki Room itself, which is obviously a stand-in for Walt Disney and all the corporate heritage that comes with his work. In protest, the architecture of the Tiki Room itself seems to summon fictional Tiki goddess Uhoah, who literally blows up Iago, banishing him. It is literally the past materializing in the present to banish "new management", and its' short sighted profit minded ventures.

The show goes on for a few more minutes at this point, ending rather inconclusively. The remaining original Tiki Room effects - chanting totems, the girlie birdie wheel, etc are displayed very shortly and the audience is shuffled out the door with the show in full swing. Iago returns and declares the Tiki birds acceptable. There is an atmosphere of dulling the business end of the message of what has transpired, and ending the thing as quickly as possible. Neither "old management" nor "new management" has won in the end, interestingly, and the Tiki room show goes on. The largest weakness, actually, of the show's integrity (not of the original version, but of this version, by itself) is not that it models a dynamic, as lopsided as it may be towards "new management", but that the show fails to resolve it.

The show's final message may actually be best voiced by Morris at the very end of the preshow: "Hey, who am I to go against the status crow?"

Yet that is the corporate culture of Disney, where neither side wins but the company grinds on regardless. Many people dislike the new Tiki Room show but many do like it, doubtlessly because it is loud, colorful and short. It may be the nearest Disney ever got to creating something analogous to a music video, right in the middle of the height of the "MTV Generation". The Enchanted Tiki Room Under New Management is irreverant, disposable and easy to dislike, but the reverberations of its' core message should not be forgoten or swept under the rug so quickly - it has some sharp teeth behind that smile.

IV. Summation / Some Warnings

I have profiled one Disney attraction here which I personally find lacking and two which are nearly continously condemed in the mainstream of Disney writing, but I do not come to this subject to condone or condenm. Even if such labels were easily applied to anything, both "good texts" and "bad texts" deserve equal weight, and I believe that all of these attractions profiled above have recieved insubstantial serious treatment. The label of "Post-Themed-Attraction Design" does not inherently mean any one work is bad, nor is it exclusive to bad or second tier attractions; Countdown to Extinction and Kilimanjaro Safaris contain echoes of this style.

There also remain other major works which either partially or fully model this mode. Ellen's Energy Adventure is one of the most successful and pleasing. Test Track contains some elements of Post-Themed design, and Stitch's Great Escape may be added to the "infamous two" profiled above as a crucial "third part" of an informal trifecta of key Post-Themed works. I can only hope that this new concept proves useful in charting Imagineering's past, present and future of design as well as filling in a major discussion point which I often feel is lacking in current discussions of the possibilities and the products of our modern era of theme park going.

Elements of Theme Design

Hello All;

Well I am very proud to announce that Passport to Dreams Old & New has finally surpassed 100 posts - and although many other blogs have since passed that mark (especially ones which began publishing around the time I began publishing - late 2006), just about the average length of one of my posts is around a thousand words (I calculated 1500, in the interest of disclosure). Allowing for variance, this means that had I not been writing about Disney Parks I could have had something about the length of Treasure Island by now. Oh well.

At something of a loss to commemorate this event with, I decided instead to offer an overview of some of the things I've since offered on this blog in the form of a handy glossary of concepts which I believe are essential to identifying the components of possible designs as well as links back to previous posts where I discuss these concepts, for handy cross-reference. Consider this a snapshot of my work so far on this blog, a tactile record of what I've found so far in my studies.

But first, a few warnings:

STRIKE THESE WORDS FROM YOUR VOCABULARY!
What follows is a few words which impede understanding of the workings of themed design and it's core elements, and the sooner the Disney community at large ceases to be impressed by these terms, the sooner a larger understanding of the designs at work will become apparent:
Magic
Story
Back Story
Guest
Imagineered
Transport / Convince
Time / Place

"Magic", in particular, is a very destructive term. It has nearly been copyrighted by Disney to describe the effect of their themed design, but it is not actually a useful term for coming to understand the workings of themed space. "Magic" is a candy-coated term to refer to the effect of the elements I discuss below, but it does not hint at its' function. It may be better replaced with "Receptive State", to imply the willingness of an audience correctly exposed to elements of themed design to accept their reality, or "themed space", to refer to the elements themselves. Never ever ever ever use the word "magic" if you expect to take yourself seriously in discussing Disney design. Doing so necessarily limits the discussion to effects rather than causes, which is Disney's job, not yours.

"Story" is the second-biggest lie in the Disney lexicon. The experience of the spectator in a Disney themed environment is not guided by story but by emotion, which flows out of accumulation of the elements of design which comprise a themed space. Since the Eisner corporate/creative takeover of WED in the late 80's the concept of "story" has supplanted the sensible function of "aesthetic" and "experience" in the lexicon. Today, more often than not, Disney will force a "story" onto a themed environment because they are not confidant enough to make their own aesthetic choices; the "story" or "back story" thus functions in the place of artistic integrity. Example: Wilderness Lodge was designed by Peter Dominick, Jr., which WDI then "reclaimed" by inventing a complex back story to "motivate" the project's chief aesthetic choices. But it is the architecture, not the back story, which moves the spectator in this themed space.

"Guest" - a Disney hospitality term which was designed to supplant "customer". Design does not have "guests", it has an audience of spectators, who will view it to receive an aesthetic experience.

"Imagineered" is a poor replacement for "designed". It creates false prestige around the Disney name, implying that its' designers and artists are somehow performing superhuman feats requiring an invented description.

"Transport", "Convince", "Time", "Place" - symptomatic of a public culture which promotes effects over causes. The first two are better referred to an the "themed experience" or "receptive state", the second are best described as aesthetic choices whereas the lesser terms imply a concrete and correct single choice. Themed space is built up of hundreds of aesthetic choices which "stack up" or "stratify" into an aesthetic experience, and there is no right or wrong choice as defined by "story". There is only design, and how it effects the spectator.

MODES OF THEMED DESIGN
Stratificational - Traditional mode of themed design, e.g. one area or structure is designed to evoke a specific time, place, or idea which exists in the same "reality" as all others. Rarely literal, often seeks to be convincing through an accumulation of "accidental" detail. Preserves continuity of time and place. Examples: Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean. Reading: Taking Apart World Showcase, EPCOT's Modern Aesthetic

Presentational - Style which creates a non literal "montage" of places, times, and ideas. Architecture, interiors often convey abstract concepts rather than concrete places and times. Examples: The Land, Horizons, If You Had Wings, Tomorrowland 1967. Reading: An Aesthetic History of EPCOT 1, Futures With No Future, If You Had If You Had Wings

ELEMENTS OF THEME DESIGN
Correlation - Method of master planning where the relationship of one area to another is strategically and logically devised. Example: flow from Liberty Square through Frontierland at the Magic Kingdom, view of Mt. Prometheus from the various areas of Tokyo Disney Sea.

Fractional Architecture - Buildings are represented only partially, or more often, many discrete styles of buildings are "pushed" together to form a cluster of facades which is not possible in reality but is aesthetically pleasing. Examples: New Orleans Square, Main Street USA

Forced Perspective - Film method of reducing scale in relation to vantage, often exploited to make themed space seem more charming and toylike, or sometimes larger than it really is. Only appropriate for use in situations where a vantage point can be controlled.

Stratification - Method of "stacking" elements of design so that they appear to recede endlessly into space. Used extensively in traditional modes of themed design in conjunction with Correlation and False Portals. Can employ architecture or decor. Reading: The Long, Lonely March, Visual Structure in New Orleans Square

Shape - Employed by master planners and architects to create meaningful space, usually exterior. Examples: Communicore Center.

Scope - Closely related to Forced Perspective, scope is often restricted in themed design for both budgetary and aesthetic reasons. Most common application: structures of foreshortened scope surround one of very large scope, which creates an even greater contrast. Example: Cinderella Castle, see also American Adventure.

Negative Space - Literally vacant space, often used in interior themed design to allow darkness to "fill in" areas of minimal importance. Related to the film practice of selective lighting. Example: Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Space Mountain.

False Portals - Chief extension of "stacking" method of theme design whereby an already deep space enters into "deep extended" space through windows, door, caves, skylights, pits, or any other portal which does not in actuality lead anywhere. Some of these can be quite elaborate, with forced perspective scenes inside. Often used to disguise functional backstage areas as themed environments. Example: Main Street USA, Sunset Blvd. Reading: Taking Apart World Showcase

Implied Space - Differs from negative space in that while negative space is an area which is supposed to "fade away", implied space "comes forward" through the use of stratification, false portals and other methods. Implied space wants you to think it's present, while negative space wants you to ignore its' presence. Often used to mask stock rooms, offices and other such areas. Implied Space can be created with lights, curtains, props, and even diagetic music and sound effects.

Duration - Variable element which is often controlled in interiors through lighting, ride mechanisms, etc. Sometimes Shape has been used to create an experience which may effect Duration. Examples: Main Street USA looks longer entering than leaving due to Shape and Correlation; New Orleans Square demands a slower pace due to its' Stratification and Forced Perspective.

Music (Non-Diagetic) - Often used in themed design to create a more convincing mood or atmosphere. Usually telegraphs information. Reading: Some Notes on Diagesis

Decor - Accumulation of "stuffs" which are not strictly related to architecture, correlation or shape which create setting and atmosphere. Decor is the technique currently favored by WDI to create verisimilitude in Stratificational themed design, and the "theme" is often allowed to dictate to extreme degrees the vintage of decor which is installed. Recent efforts have begun to favor strength of decor over strength of design to achieve success. Examples: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Expedition Everest

All of this, of course, is my own terms for labeling such things, and as a result is my personal vocabulary rather than a universally functional one. But having the vocabulary in place is a huge step forward.

While writing this I was reminded of a certain quote by a film critic regarding film watching. His name is Pierre Rissient, and I know very little about him or his writing, but this statement has never left me: "It is not enough to like a film. One must like it for the right reasons." People are likely to get their back up about that as it sounds like snobbery, but one must understand that he does not impose "right reasons" within the statement; his reasons are not the same as your reasons or my reasons. I think it's a true statement about film watching and a lot of other things in life. So much of our culture encourages us to never think while we absorb our entertainment, and it's still true as ever that an unexamined life is not worth living. Although Disney may be hopelessly middlebrow, it doesn't mean that we, the people who are trying to take her seriously, must be. These, above, are my right reasons.

Futures With No Future

“Tomorrowland attractions… have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures which are a living blueprint for our future.” – Walt Disney as quoted in Walt Disney’s Disneyland A Pictorial Souvenir, 1975

One of the least bemoaned results of Walt Disney Imagineering’s wars against all things not “Story” is the overall Presentationalist aesthetic – that mode of design which forgoes convincing, unified places and times for the straight, linear, didactic shot into information and conceptualization. Individual elements are sometimes mourned – EPCOT Center’s Future World pavilions chief amongst them – but nobody seems to reserve much love for Tomorrowland in its “white period”. Yet I think of all elements removed wholesale from The Magic Kingdom, the loss of all the character from that portion of both parks ranks as the most damaging. Tomorrowland balanced and reinforced the rest of the Disney lands, and the park is now a scale tilted too far off balance to ever fully recover.

The future has always been remade. In the 1960’s, Disney did the chief sensible thing and had the 1955 Tomorrowland removed entirely to make way for the 1967 model. This version of Tomorrowland probably got the formula the “most right” of them all: the movement of the spinning Rocket Jets attraction to the top of the Peoplemover platform created perhaps one of Disney’s most recognizable architectural features, giving the land interest and form. Those little pastel Peoplemovers dashing this way and that, the monorail, the Matterhorn bobsleds, Rolly Crump’s rising stage, the spinning Carousel of Progress and more spoke of a hub of energy, interaction, the “World on Move” Disney wanted. Many of the key features were already in place: a dark ride inside a commercial, a circle-vision film, a simulated moon flight in a theatre with vibrating seats. When Disney would add Space Mountain to this mix in 1977, the energy of the place would be nearly uncontainable.

The Florida version added scope and size. Those little triangular ridges atop the buildings housing America the Beautiful and Adventure thru Inner Space became enormous spires fighting the castle for attention; whereas Anaheim had little fountains outside the entrance to the land, Orlando’s spires would spurt water straight down into the castle moat while water cascaded down the sloped walls to the left and right; a true torrent unmatched by any other Disney structure ever devised. Inside, the symmetry of the Disneyland version become even more pronounced, each building on the main pedestrian corridor becoming a terraced, glass enclosed, buttressed expression of modernism (fans of California Googie unfamiliar with this version would do well to study it). Claims about this “white Tomorrowland” often ignore the fact that, even in those early days, the area was overflowing with pastel yellows, oranges, blues and pinks. In later years the subtle palette would be cheapened to bright whites, blues and reds, but at least this earlier paint scheme was perhaps the best affirmation of John Hench’s claim that he had something like 70 versions of “white” in his paint palette.

Nor was the land totally monochromatic; in full evidence were bright reds and blues inside Space Mountain and on the Star Jets, black and yellow and white inside If You Had Wings, green and black on the Grand Prix, and astonishing yellows, oranges, reds and browns inside the Tomorowland Terrace. Once the area was fully built up with its own Carousel of Progress, Space Mountain, a less meandering but more advanced Peoplemover and more, it was distinctly related but very different from the Disneyland sibling.

What these future worlds were all about was variety. While much of the rest of The Magic Kingdom, for example, was lit by ornate lanterns and sconces, Tomorrowland was ablaze with bright halogens, neons, and incandescents casting variations on white too carefully planned to be ugly. The Tavern Singers and J.P. and the Silver Stars offered area/period correct music elsewhere in the Magic Kingdom, but at the Tomorowland Terrace, the modern and tastefully suspect Kids of the Kingdom offered show tunes and red polyester. In later years, the fascinating Michael Iceberg held court here in his fog-spewing electric organ shaped like a pyramid. In Anaheim especially, youth held court in Tomorrowland with dancing and nighttime festivities, while adults were more likely to be found over in the Blue Bayou or Tahitian Terrace. Tomorrowland was a fully developed deviation from something like Frontierland or Adventureland and their fantasies nostalgic. Without the 1971 Tomorowland, for example, the east side of the 1971 Fantasyland makes no sense, gradually becoming more austere and angular around the Mr. Toad area in comparison to the rich Germanic atmosphere of the Skyway area. The loss of this variation makes the overall “palette” of Disneyland and The Magic Kingdom less rewarding.

The 1994 Tomorrowland is really an effort to bring the area in line with the rest of the park’s aesthetic mode, to tame the wild aesthetic departure into a homogenous sameness. Whereas once the playful nostalgic was the sole domain of the West Side of the park, now Tomorrowland would be remade as nostalgic futurism, a la 30’s pulp. This concept is much better of paper than it is in actuality for, much how EPCOT Center is today filled with distracting junk, this makeover essentially involved putting shells over all the existing infrastructure. Those massive water-spewing towers were demolished and, in their place, jutting rocks arrived – and not cool, futuristic, Fortress-of-Solitude type rocks, but more like Big Thunder Mountain Wished Upon Futuresville Rocks. The two most obviously dated shows – Mission to Mars and the Circlevision film – were replaced with “edgy” attractions like the ambitious Timekeeper and witless Alien Encounter. The WEDway People Mover became the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, evicting the harmless if unremarkable ORAC-1 with shouted announcements and other nonsense.

Sky-reaching palms, added to reinforce the angular nature of the Tomorrowland 1971’s structures, were replaced with bland shrubs and flat-leaf plants. Anything not made metallic was painted purple or blue. It all amounts to a lot of work that doesn’t enhance what was there to begin with. There are some whimsical touches that are too little, too late, such as a phone of the future, a robotic newsboy and some clever parodies of local organizations which were, still, done better at Disneyland’s Toontown. There’s nothing wrong with the ideas present, but in execution they are too often straddled with low budgets and unreasonable expectations.

Disneyland’s Tomorrowland met with an even less enviable fate for at least Orlando was permitted to retain its’ Peoplemover, Astro Jets, and for several years Skyway. Bad decisions compounded on bad decisions in California and, among other changes seemingly calculated to remove the “local color”, the spinning attraction was moved to ground level and tacked onto the hub of Disneyland, the Peoplemover was replaced with an unreliable speed rocket attraction which destroyed the original open air track in the process of zipping around Tomorrowland, and the Skyway was long gone. Crump’s rising stage became a sign for the food court which it anchored. All of the life was sapped from the place.

The question then becomes what the role of Tomorrowland is in the Disney patheon. If Imagineering will no longer tolerate the Presentational mode, and if Tomorrowland must have a “story” and exist harmoniously with the other themed areas of the castle parks, perhaps Disneyland Paris had the best idea with their Verne-themed Discoveryland. Orlando’s pulp writing theme is promising, even if it needs less Buck Rogers and more Fritz Lang in its DNA and a lot more work and money after its abortive first try. Anaheim’s gold-hued Tomorrowland has already been vanquished in favor of that “old”, “white” version, but there is still no real life to the space. Both areas are in a transitional mode right now, and either need to be allowed to be what they are designed to be or rethought and reworked even more than they are now.

Space Mountain, one of Disney’s most viable franchises, seems to have doomed Tomorrowland to existence, and the inclusion of Star Tours and Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters seem to be the most viable opportunities to continue to resuscitate the land. But I ask: why? Hong Kong Disneyland’s flaccid, flat, vacant Tomorrowland is window dressing to their version of Space Mountain, so if the inclusion of a whole area to validate the existence of a single thrill ride is deemed important to the essential makeup of the park, then the solution is to reinvent Space Mountain so it doesn’t have to inhabit a Tommorowland area and axe Tomorowland from all future designs entirely. Disney seems uncomfortable with futurism these days, and real forward-thinking futurism died in mainstream culture around the time of Walt Disney’s passing.

What Tomorrowland really is doomed to be today is camp, in the true, almost lost meaning of the term: the elevation of unimportant things to places of undue prominence. The 1994 Tomorrowland is awash in irony, where the spectator is encouraged to perceive something like a robotic newsboy as a relic of an outdated era and its’ idea of what the future will be. The existence of such a “futuristic” but simultaneously obsolete figure creates a distance where the spectator is superior to but still celebratory of the object in question; it becomes camp. This isn’t a future that’s relevant to us today, which is the joke, and the “modern”, “cutting edge” Alien Encounter, with its’ attitude and jaded horror film vibe is what we were meant to see as the “dark heart” of that Tomorrowland, where there’s no beautiful tomorrow on the horizon.

This concept was antithetical to the rest of the Magic Kingdom, and now that Timekeeper, Alien Encounter, and much of that Tomorrowland’s ancillary themeing (remember when there were walk around alien face characters and rollerblading custodians??) is gone, the area – and the Tomorrowland concept - is waiting for its’ future to arrive.

Taking Apart World Showcase

Modes of Representation

Although as I have demonstrated previously all of EPCOT Center, including World Showcase, exhibits principles of the aesthetic mode I call Presentationalism, it is World Showcase which has resisted the business end of the account's axe much more successfully than her sister area Future World because of the Showcase's retention of aspects of Stratification - the mode of the castle parks - in a manner simultaneously traditional and unique. It is traditional in that each pavilion is essentially a self contained "land" with a consistent aesthetic at work in each, but it is unique that, being in the Presentational mode, there is no effort to blend one pavilion with the next.

But an early version of World Showcase, International Street at Disneyland, would have worked this way - flowing freely from one country to the next - and the result would have likely been an incoherent muddle as obliquely "foreign" as the bulk of Adventureland. EPCOT Center's Future World did things the same way World Showcase does, letting each aesthetically unique pavilion stand all on its' own in a sea of futuristic green lawn - but those pavilions fell prey to their non-obligation to present an "objective reality" and thus would stylize themselves in any way they saw fit. As a result of this stylization the concepts behind their futuristic design templates would fall out of style and thus make them likely targets for strip-mining. The bulwark of World Showcase betrays similar design concepts but because it functions, at least on the surface, in Stratificationalist modes and because it claims to represent a specific material time or location, the trickery becomes submerged into the mire of "representation" and ceases to be visible to the spectator as being identifiably dated.

The form of the EPCOT Center country pavilions essentially breaks down into two categories: courtyards and streets. On the courtyard end we have Norway, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Those pavilions which take the form of streets or passageways include China, Morocco, France, United Kingdom and Canada. The three outliers are: Africa - more of a McDonald's stand than a pavilion and thus disqualified - Mexico - which is basically a courtyard with a complex setup and payoff preshow which I have described here - and The American Adventure. American Adventure is the total outlier in World Showcase, more designed after the patterns of Future World pavilions like Horizons and Universe of Energy (ie single attraction pavilions) in both presentation and scope. It's massive bulk betrays the massive show building sitting behind it, and it is the only "monumental structure" in all of World Showcase. Its' facilities are arranged in a straight east-west row, and there is no sense of traveling through or back when the pavilion is explored which is one of the key traits of the Showcase installations. It is essentially a massive structure which hides a single attraction, and it does it sloppily. Suffice to say that WED could hardly have failed to adhere to their own rules more had they built Space Mountain at the west end of Frontierland back in 1975.

Guiding the Spectator

One of the forms to take into consideration when forming an appraisal of the pavilions is their functionalities in hiding their infastructure. Although France and Morocco especially take the form of streets which leads back to a large building, most of the countries in this financially overrun theme park hedge their bets and those which require travel back in space are usually doing so in an effort to hide their show buildings. Indeed the Canada pavilion, essentially a courtyard in design, becomes a passage by dint of its' desire to hide its' massive circle vision theater. The chiefly brilliant design stroke in Canada is to enclose this building in a big faux rock mountain range and then force the spectator to walk her walk all the way to the back of the pavilion to enter: the mountain is the only artificial landscape feature in all of World Showcase and its' effect is singular. That you can enter through the elevated courtyard which originally held a number of gift shops or through a narrow lantern-lit gorge far below to get to the mine shaft where the travelouge film plays is another brilliant design touch, allowing a freedom of exploration essentially unknown to EPCOT Center's Presentationalist mode. It's nearly as good as any of WED's better moments in traditional theme design.

Similar in layout is the China pavilion, but the burrowing back and then emerging back out where you came is inverted to the more traditional entering at the front and leaving at the back, which allows the exit, not the entrance, to be the exploration experience. Whereas you feel as if you are going to a location to enter the Canada circlevision film, you see the China film and then work your way back out towards the lagoon. It is the difference between an experience which takes the form of a prelude or a postshow, and the attention to detail in China's Street of Good Fortune emphatically states "you've seen the beauty of China, now live it!" Even better is France's two streets taking you towards the Impressions de France theater at the very back; although it is more of a destination, the pavilion isn't hiding anything but shops between its' public spaces and as such a sense of depth and possibility - Stratification in effect - is more fully conveyed than in the Canada pavilion, where the faux landscape is pierced occasionally with a standalone structure. The "back of the pavilion destination" model is best represented by France, but Germany, Norway, Mexico, Morocco and even Japan share this trait as well. Although the attractions meant for Japan and Germany never materialized, their architecture and layout thrusts the spectator back to the intended entryways. Although it is just one function all of these pavilions hope to accomplish - hide their anchoring attractions - the sheer variety and complexity of the ways which they go about doing this is testament to the myriad variations possible on Walt Disney's "weenie".

Thematic Embellishments

As embellishments, the water effects and locations in World Showcase aren't distinctly different than the traditional ways in which WED had been using water since the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971. The fountains, waterfalls, and whimsical embelishments are intended to give the front of each pavilion a sense of life and of prestige, tying the harnessing of water of the various cultures. The Canada pavilion has a rushing waterfall and gushing river for adventure and nature: Japan, a peaceful koi pond for beauty and harmony. France's complex entrance fount reinforces culture and sophistication while nearby Morocco's waterwheel-fed well tells of an agrarian past. But the most exciting innovation is that all of these pavilions must be passed in order to get all the way around the lagoon: the hub concept for Disneyland, there a revolutionary gesture of convenience, here becomes a solid lake where once there was only a circular moat and links all of the civilizations to the original water from which they emerged from. The hub of Disneyland which offered both inclusion and exclusion (a spectator could visit Disneyland and never once enter Tomorrowland, for example) now is a wheel uniting all cultures in location in the geometric pattern of the globe they all share, a globe which is also the master layout of the sister area Future World and the icon of the collective entity known as EPCOT which they embody. Although it may be crassly commercial in some departments, the symbolism of the World Showcase is undoubtedly touching.

Of course one of the strongest challenges to the little country reproductions is appearing to actually be inhabited, which Disney responded to in 1982 by "inhabiting" them with actual foreign nationals - who act in theory as "ambassadors" for their country in EPCOT - which effectively takes care of the gift shops, eateries, and attractions. What of the rest? Thankfully, WED had extensive experience in turning rows of facades into Main Street USAs and World Showcase is one of the most extensive uses of a simple design trick I call the "false portal".

A false portal can be a window, door, or any opening placed in any such way to suggest that any given themed space continues beyond where in reality it will stop immediatley out of sight. Throughout Disney parks there are false doors, false windows, false caves, false skylights, false rivers, false balconies, and practically anything which can be reasonably built to suggest that regular human activity is going on in the theme park, one of the least accommodating areas for regular human activity ever devised. The spectator isn't trained to look at the theme environment as being built for the express purpose of selling an idea to them; they look at it as they would any real life environment where things are where they are because that's where they were built, and as a result the aim of Stratification is achieved subliminally.

Even the most basic Stratificationalist environments use the false portal, but the best of them use a complex pattern of false and real portals so that which is false and that which is actually present becomes intertwined. New Orleans Square and Liberty Square make extensive use of patterns of false portals, but even the more straightforward Main Street USA has little tableau and lamps and lights behind their windows to give the impression of things other than storerooms and offices back there. As such we can identify the more advanced type of false portal, more than being a phony door or window, as showing off a visible scene or prop. When these false windows are interspersed with windows or doors that lead to actual, accessible scenes and rooms, the line between actual and representational reality begins to break down completely in the mind of the spectator.

World Showcase's false portals usually contain a scene or lighting rig behind them. Most all of them are lit, the only ones not lit being the dust setting inside the Mexico pavilion where the designers wish to draw attention away from the buildings which represent the "walls" of the environment and towards the focal point forced perspective scene.Those Mexico second story false portals, by the way, are very limited, essentially having two props of a vase of flowers carved to resemble a woman and a porcelain parrot in a cage. There is little definition where one structure ends and the next begins, but it hardly matters because they are more ornate than their function of being ignored dictates. Germany also, one feels, wishes to draw attention away from its' upper levels which are among the weakest to be found. Not only are the upper areas inaccessible, physically as well as visually (Italy suggests accessible second levels by running steps up to them, the only saving grace of those false portals), but the forced perspective is strange and draws attention to the illusion. The designers of the Germany pavilion are laboring to hide a massive show building and they do it with a castle (as in Norway and Japan), and they deserve credit for making the castle a discrete element of the village square rather than just pressing the "expand" button as the designers of American Adventure did and then trying to hide the ghastly size with a massive village square. Quaintness and scale are touchstones of Disney design which is what makes World Showcase more digestible to the average spectator than Future World, but this is also yet another reason why EPCOT Center was so revolutionary.

Suggesting false space: France's Plume et Palette upper landing; a stairway to nowhere in Germany's Der Teddybar.

The most complex and effective use of False Portals is the row of pavilions from The United Kingdom, through France and on to Morocco. Morocco creates false space in two gift shops through highly effective use of a halfscale balcony running along the back wall; although the balcony is a bit too close to the spectators to fully effectively read as full scale two lighting fixtures hang just out of sight in it. Because the roof of the balcony is accented in this way it draws attention away from the extreme short distance between the ceiling and the floor of this little balcony and the effect of there being a full size passageway up there is fully convincing. The effect is compounded by being in a narrow shop where the spectator cannot get far enough away to judge the relative size of the balcony and the major killer of false perspective is eliminated. A similar effect is used in the "Fez House" courtyard next to this little shop, where sight lines are so restricted we can only see the underside of the roof and a bit of the walls. Because there is no good way to judge the actual height of the walls from our perspective we assume they are full height and the illusion is carried out. World Showcase displays Disney's most sophisticated forced perspective in that almost always the connecting structure between foreground and background elements is totally hidden from our perspective: in order for the trick to work part of the spectator's impression of the space must vanish totally from sight, like different panes of glass in a multiplane camera.

The false portal: Morocco's balcony in the Casablanca Carpets store; France's Le Petit Rue

The United Kingdom gets the most credit for fully mixing real and false portals and providing visually accessible upper levels to demonstrate that this space is actually real, ie, constructed. The upper levels found in the Crest & Crown and Heraldry shops shows you an entire richly detailed upper area that is inaccessible but beautiful; walk outside and some windows have lanterns in their Elizabethan windows which create false space beyond. The upper level of the Rose & Crown, which would traditionally be an inn, has windows facing the streets with a small wallpapered wall where little framed pictures hang just beyond, creating the sense of an upper passageway. Throughout, the variations of false portals where scenes are suggested and real portals where scenes are shown give the upper areas of this little pavilion a sense of purpose and activity.

France, too, suggests upper level activity through the visually accessible second level in the perfume shop and the actually accessible Bistro de Paris eatery above the popular Chefs du France. But even better are the two finest false portals in World Showcase: one is above the entrance to Impressions du France, where at night an ornate chandelier can be glimpsed through a gauzy curtain only by its' twinkling lights, creating romantic space where the hazy diffusion of a dream is achieved through the practical and logical device of a curtain. Better still is around the corner on the Petit Rue, where a large window by day becomes transparent at night with a flickering gas lamp and silhouettes static socialites can be seen in a loft apartment. Although the effect is more representational than it is convincing, it's beautifully executed - more felt than seen.

The combination of these traits - layout, forced perspective, the hidden area, the false portal - support the sometimes quite beautiful travelogue attractions and films, eateries and shops, to make World Showcase a height of Disney Design in any arena. Considering that the largest public spaces of any of these little design oasises is no larger than a single block of Main Street, they are remarkably sophisticated and offer more to learn about effective theme park design than any single "land" in any of Disney's castle parks.

EPCOT's Modern Aesthetic

In the past few years a lot of (choose one: blood/tears/ink/spite) has been spilled over EPCOT, and seemingly also, strangely, recently rapidly receded. As if to coincide with the 25th anniversary of only a few weeks ago now, in preparation for the event the Disney fan community collectively reared up on their hind legs, their dignity affronted, and then........ Disney suddenly demolished the much hated wand and played vintage music out in front of the park for a day. And suddenly all the tension has dissipated.

Although the removal of the wand is a huge first step towards admitting that there is a problem, EPCOT is still in the midst of a massive, crippling identity crisis. The past few administrative regimes have allowed laziness, cheapness, and - worst of all for the last gasp of real optimism about our futures in the 20th Century - post modern sarcasm to enter the EPCOT realm. Yet strangely all does seem to be good in Prototype Land as of this writing, and it is strange to reflect that the last serious bit of writing about The Place With The Big Golf Ball posted on this blog was made in March while we were still under the shadow of The Big Wand and on disaster watch for El Rio del Tiempo's successor. Well now the wand is gone but the relief of El Rio del Tiempo's awkwardly named successor not being a disaster has been heavily negated by an honest to god tragically awful new Canada circlevision film. A new head of EPCOT has been named, a museum has opened, and Disney has sold us an old-fashioned EPCOT T-shirt for twenty bucks.

I say that now, before Spaceship Earth reopens as something possibly very different in March, while we're still feeling all warm and happy about the 25th, while the godawful wand no longer casts a long shadow over Communicore Center, and while the two best things about EPCOT - Food and Wine and Holidays Around the World - are in full swing... now, now is the time to begin to probe the question as to exactly what the hell EPCOT thinks she's up to.

I wrote a very basic examination of EPCOT's aesthetic history back in January, and this is what I said about EPCOT's modern sensibilities:

What WDI is actually doing is slowly recasting the EPCOT aesthetic in a new mold which seeks to reduce the monolithic lines, huge open spaces and serious atmosphere of contemplation and exploration. Everywhere kinetic devices and colorful distractions whirl and turn and loom and dance and play music in an effort to stimulate the pleasure center synapses, not the intellectual response the buildings are actually designed to evoke. Even the classy exterior of Paul Pressler’s Mission: SPACE pavilion is more intended to evoke excitement and use up extra digital camera space than the more abstract horizon-line / gemstone of Horizons, which it replaced. It may integrate with EPCOT aesthetically but, like The Living Seas and Wonders of Life before it, Mission: SPACE doesn’t know what it’s doing here in this strange park full of so much serious information.

Let us, then, use this as a blueprint for attacking the Future World side of the equation.

Clutter

EPCOT sure has a lot of clutter strewn across her landscape these days: although the wand is gone, everywhere tiny things like water play areas, purple hot dog carts, neon, and weird netted canopies are flying this way and that. The Living Seas, which once had the most memorable entrance sign because of the waves crashing over it, a subtle but cool enhancement, is now strewn with those obnoxious birds from Finding Nemo. Areas which were once uninterrupted rolling hills of green and flowers have now had coffee carts plopped down in front of them. Useful but ugly big LED signs have sprung up all across Future World telling you not only wait time information, but things like the time and the weather that we're used to seeing on scrolling signs outside drug stores.

It's not all bad and recently there has been in effort in the Communicore Central to reduce the amount of stuff that's there to pester you, but ill-fitting carts and diversions and whirlygigs still fill this area. In "An Aesthetic history of EPCOT" I spoke of how EPCOT totally eschews traditional modes of the theme park space, and I think the problem is that the People In Charge still haven't figured out that EPCOT, unlike Magic Kingdom, does not benefit from little pockets of activity you can stumble across. EPCOT's aesthetic is built right into her very buildings and walkways, and that is sleek, uncluttered lines and open spaces. You can't cover these up and the result of trying is to make these original design choices more, not less obvious to the casual observer. The act of having to look past the twirling whirlygig to see the bold primary shapes of Communicore just accents the disjunction.

But let's take this seriously for a moment and say that the honest intent of these is distraction. This appears to be another effort to make EPCOT more like the Disneyland model: Magic Kingdom, where you can look anywhere and see something subtle and interesting, as on Main Street, relies on the methods of Stratification, where details pile up, one on top of the other, and recede apparently endlessly backwards into space, suggesting things which are not there. EPCOT Center is all surface: the details of the buildings scaled back until there are nothing but bold simple shapes which interest the viewer the way the intersecting lines of, say, Escher do. It is modernism, and I've called it Presentationalism before: here it is, it's all out in the open, this isn't detail, this is important. This is pure input.

Stratification or Presentationalism. Oops, I think I've just named the two existent kinds of themed design...!

EPCOT's Future World requires much more work to be a Stratification kind of park, it needs a lot more detail, many more structures, less open space, but it's what is being done and undone, so now we know it by a name.

Color & Harmony


Above is a chart of EPCOT's main color patterns in three attractions of 1982 and 2007. What's important to remember about EPCOT is that Future World's main colors were silver and blue with accents of red; in 1982 Future World was a veritable concrete garden of white and blue and the dull green of florescent. Inside, blue and muted red carpets paved a path to better futures through Communicore and Universe of Energy and elsewhere; although many have argued about the merits of EPCOT Center's dual-park design, Future World is the best aesthetically integrated park ever built. Looking at the 1982 color tones above, it becomes clear just how muted everything was.

Compare those sets to the 2007 sets to their right. If colors have been retained, they've been made bright and loud and attention hogging. Other colors have been added to downplay a "sterile" impression, generically warm colors like yellow and orange in stark contrast to the dynamic, uncompromised bright red which used to adorn Universe of Energy, World of Motion, EPCOT Energy Exchange, and others.

The most prevalent color which has been introduced to Future World (and it's everywhere, from those Communicore Central awnings to stanchion poles) is purple, with bright orange a short step behind. Purple is traditionally associated with royalty, but also with uncertainty and madness, neither of which have much of anything to do with EPCOT. It could be an extension of the popularity of Figment, but I doubt it: probably intended more to harmonize with the current and most famous lighting scheme of Spaceship Earth, it misses the point totally. White and blue are the colors of the sky; purple and orange are colors of whimsy. EPCOT Center looked to the sky.

Minimalism

The other major color to have infected EPCOT lately is black. It's more due to the dissemination of the concept that modernism can be represented in themed design through minimalism throughout WDI than anything else: all through Future World now there's big cavernous black spaces through once moved audio-animatronics, elaborate sets, and Presentationalist tableaus which better represented modernism than any amount of darkness.

When I refer to Modernism we must remember that Modernism is not a movement which is producing much work today; confusion of "modern" and "current" is prevalent both inside of and outside of Disney. Modernism is a concept evolving as a rejection of Romantic values which rose heavily out of the work of Freud. Modernist art eventually mutated into things like Cubism and Pop-Art. Therefor, all things which are contemporary are not Modernistic (although, ironically, The Contemporary at Walt Disney World is Modernistic!). On the contrary, the prevalent cultural "ism" today is Postmodernism, buoyed by such self aware populist works as Star Wars.

Although Minimalism is indeed a concept found in Modernism, it is not a concept which is productive in a theme environment (I talked about this in The Haunted Mansion in regards to Claude Coates). Nor is Postmodernism useful; witness California Adventure. But Minimalist Postmodernism flourishes throughout EPCOT today, an unhealthy combination of the two least conducive forms in theme design. While the outsides of EPCOT structures are covered with gaudy excesses of stuff, the insides are stripped away. There is no harmony anymore - in theory, content, color, design or even between the insides and outsides of attractions.

Yet there are ideas at work here, just not the ideas the park opened with. Through color, through clutter, through (not entirely intentional) disharmony, Disney wants EPCOT to be a pleasure center, full of eye popping colors and spinning devices, places to get espresso (a contemporary sign of sophistication), and do interesting things like go into "space". It's more of a shopping mall with rides than anything. Which is ironic, because as shopping malls become more like theme parks and theme parks become more like shopping malls, a line must be drawn. Some malls around Central Florida are calling themselves "Town Centers", fully manufactured commercial downtowns plopped down in the middle of nowhere, or are billing themselves as 'culture centers" and get the local newspaper to write up little blurbs on famous citizens and put them on bronze plaques around the shopping plaza and throw lots of public art up everywhere.

I think "culture center" is a fair assessment of EPCOT, certainly more fair than any billion dollar commerce zone. It is, however, different than the original meaning of the term, and it is different than "learning center", which is what EPCOT was originally more like.

Which is ironic, because originally Future World was more like the theme park, with bad restaurants and good rides and generic stores, and World Showcase was your upscale mall with great food and great shops - EPCOT Center was the total package, your day of fun and your shopping spree and dinner out afterwards rolled into one.

But World Showcase has been changed the least of the EPCOT package, so therein must be a key, right? I posit that it's worth considering here that Future World's roughest spot was 1994 - 1998, when we saw:
- The Land refurbished to a new color scheme, Symbiosis replaced, Kitchen Kabaret gutted
- Communicore disbanded
- World of Motion closed
- Horizons put on seasonal status
- Universe of Energy, Spaceship Earth refurbished into significantly different shows
- Journey Into Imagination closed
I sometimes call this period, not fully jokingly, EPCOT Center Apocalypse (A Go-Go). Yet the best and most profitable thing EPCOT has going for it today, The Food & Wine Festival, opened smack dab in the middle of this otherwise dreary period, in 1995. This suggests that there has been a concerted effort to make EPCOT... what's that word I just pinpointed? Ah yes. Sophisticated.

After all, Post-Modernism's bubble hasn't burst yet (nay, we're right in the middle of its' hump), so things Post-Modern are seen as sophisticated. And so is having an appreciation of good food and spirits, coffee, and other things EPCOT offers you in abundance. If so, is it possible that EPCOT is attempting to carve out it's own kind of Neo Future Sophistication? It's a long shot from RCA's Home of Future Living, but it's there.

So the question remains: is it working? Certainly, eating sushi while waltzing through a big flashy shopping mall of the future is kind of what people think is sophisticated, if the retailers and clientèle of the big soulless Mall at Millenia just up I-4 is any indication. Is it lasting? I'm not sure. Will it last us longer than Modernism lasted EPCOT, opened in the last possible moment before Post-Modernism arrived and sucked all the wonder out of our life? Perhaps... but in the future, we can probably expect a lot more of wining and dining out of EPCOT and a lot less of the attractions which made her famous.

If You Had If You Had Wings

Walt Disney World was conceived as a vacation destination in all of its’ forms back in the late 60’s and early 70’s – all of its’ forms, contrary to what our ardent but often short-sighted emphasis on the parks would suggest – its’ four golf courses, the Shopping Village, the resorts. This came complete with, seemingly perversely to current Disney practices, plugs for possible visits to other places in the universe not hosted or colonized by the mouse.

Among these pavilions was Eastern’s If You Had Wings, a rather strange way to promote air travel, designed by master layout man Claude Coates. The attraction, by virtue of its’ maddening deployment of repetitions of elements, Buddy Baker’s theme, and its’ then-unusual free admission, has fluttered its’ way into some corner of popular American culture. The aesthetic features of the attraction were primarily composed of minimal sets into which have been inserted projected footage of people dancing, playing, fishing, plunging to their doom, etc. Practically unimaginable today, Coates’ triumph was to create a refreshingly minimal attraction, not designed to attract attention, and all the more memorable for it. The spatial continuity the projections created was essentially similar to that of the traditional television commercial, whereby passengers move from one image to another designed to evoke exotic escape with minimal “filler” between.

As a phenomenon unique to The Magic Kingdom, If You Had Wings was merely interesting. Thanks to the lineage of location, crew, and conveyance, it is often coupled with Disneyland’s Adventure Thru Inner Space, with which it shares certain visual tropes (the entry into a dark void, white images moving across a dark wall).

Yet that comparison tends to reduce its’ form and content to an extrapolation of a prior success, which in reality the work itself bears little similarity to. Adventure Thru Inner Space was a relatively straight narrative, despite the unusualality of its presentation and content, with a clear inciting incident, rising action, climax, and falling action. If You Had Wings is less an antecedent of Adventure Thru Inner Space as it is a precedent of EPCOT Center and the mode of informational discourse practically invented for that park. It is important here to distinguish that the attraction may be only unique in the context of its predecessors, but in terms of its progeny, it is a genuine evolution.

The survivor of If You Had Wings is/was El Rio del Tiempo, a charming if much more seemingly accidentally fantastic attraction which outlived the Claude Coates piece by perhaps 20 years. As of the writing, the attraction is down for revision, after which it will return under a new name and with presumably new elements which may or may not be faithful to the lineage of the attraction.

The only World Showcase pavilion set itself entirely inside a contained unit, and the only pavilion in EPCOT Center which makes every effort to disguise its interior nature as a natural environment, the Mexico pavilion truthfully has less to do with EPCOT Center and more to do with Disneyland’s Blue Bayou, of which it is a very clear descendant of the original “Thieves Market” concept of containing shopping and dining in a swamp setting. The realized version of the Bayou dropped the shops for a boat trough, but Mexico unites them all into a reasonably harmonious unit under the auspices of a Mexican village. For this the designers must be commended, although less so for failing to replicate the reason the Blue Bayou is so successful – the Disneyland “great indoors” sacrifices depth for width – we can forgive the visible back wall because the Bayou seems to go on forever to the left and right of us. WED Enterprises, possibly in an exploratory mood, inverts the layout, achieving brilliant depth but no sense of width whatsoever and, in effect, a vista which only looks as great as it ought to from its’ farthest vantage point.

The Mexico pavilion and truthfully all of World Showcase is a victim of gross over-
spending on the part of Disney to get EPCOT open on October 1, 1982. At least one photograph exists showing a much larger and more complex Mexico pavilion and key attraction, El Rio del Tiempo, in model form. Even promotional materials supposedly approved by Disney betray the hand of budget cuts – Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow by Richard Beard, in its extensive library edition, not only promises us a Roman Empire section of the Italy pavilion, an Equatorial Africa installation, but a special effects show on the water’s edge inside Mexico recreating the Mayan myths. At least we got the volcano. (click for larger, above)

For a troubled pavilion, Mexico comes off among the cream of the crop among EPCOT’s World Showcase pavilions, not just because of its romance, but its impeccable showmanship, designed by people who were paying attention to precedent – for pure control of a dramatic space there is nothing in EPCOT which can rival the reveal of the second Mayan temple and volcano at nightfall. The effect is achieved identically to Disney’s highly regulated reveal of the castle at the end of Main Street: guests are funneled through two portals to the left and right of an intriguing structure, then deposited in a square area which must be traversed and exited via a single channel to reveal the fantastical transformation of space and time.

Ta-daa!!!

Mexico’s designers one upped this classic manipulation of space by adding obstructing arches and terraces, prolonging the full reveal even further, and placing a full marketplace and fountain in the way, adding extra show value. The deployment of repetition, of exiting a pyramid to view a second, distant pyramid, gives the transition a magical feeling. Furthermore, an emotional variation was added by making the square space, rather than a town square, a somber temple interior (originally) devoted to Mexico’s ancient cultures - not without a touch of menace - breaking up the lushly romantic exterior and interior with a moment of doubt, while also effortlessly advancing the rather obtuse concept of forcing visitors to walk the cultural evolution of Mexico. Even more remarkably, this tonal shift was repeated on the interior boat ride without seeming stale. This pavilion was built by people who knew about theme design.

El Rio del Tiempo, a holdover from a transitional phase in Mexico’s culture when it was deemed to be the next probable First World country, paints a rosy portrait of Mexico’s present and future that strikes many riders as dated or offensive. The past is treated with an aura of mystery and magic, and the Colonial period infantilized into a literal clone of It’s A Small World. But, like the rest of EPCOT, its form was unique and sophisticated – another maze of projected, filmed loops which rendered transitional space as essentially irrelevant set dressing. El Rio’s sets were more complex and emotional than If You Had Wings’, but the effect was similar, even including a maddeningly simple theme and a flat-on-the-floor rear projected image of a scuba diver (this was included in Horizons as well and both can be considered a nod to the Coates attraction).

Now, imagine they're Animatronics. See?

Like good designers, however, WED’s Mexico pavilion team wasn’t ready to merely repeat a success, and pulled in out of Disney history was a striking influence evident from The Three Caballeros, the 1946 Disney Studio release which was partially devoted to Mexico and took the form of a modified travelogue – much like If You Had Wings and El Rio del Tiempo. Exactly like El Rio, Caballeros features reappropriated live action footage of tourist areas, beaches, and merchants. Much of the motifs of pure romance, of night-time festivals and a fireworks finale is repeated. The influence is so extensive that both works include a Mary Blair inspired segment. This is, incidentally, why this author is not chafing at Disney’s attempt to integrate the two properties – they are aesthetically related, if not practically identical.

Aesthetic lineage between Three Caballeros & El Rio del Tiempo

El Rio del Tiempo as not a perfect work, with its’ brevity and poor decisions often under-
mining strong concepts – the opening segment, for example, featuring the story of early Mexican cultures told through dance. Since this is never explained to the viewers, what guests tended to see was exactly what was presented… people in strange costumes dancing to comic effect. The best touch in the whole segment – the final screen of Moctezuma contemplating a falling star which foretells the doom of his empire – was utterly lost.

Following this segment with a literal and tacky Small World reference (a friend of the author’s once called El Rio “It’s a Third World After All”), and then proceeding to show primarily Gringos enjoying the Mexican tourism trade, further dampened the mystery of the opening Peppers Ghost effect. Beard’s book assures us the design team was composed primarily of Mexican-Americans, but very little of this seems evident in the final result. And besides the incomprehensible finale where the Mexican people were portrayed as puppets on a carousel, the final scenes placed a strange emphasis on souvenirs one could purchase in Mexico (it was the last thing you saw), turning the whole presentation into a very overt sell where none was expected. At least If You Had Wings put its commercial value up front, even offering an Eastern reservation desk at the exit.

But the attraction still exerted a vibrant and wonderful mystery, a livelihood, and a thankfully short line. And it lived on, for years and years, outliving not only If You Had Wings, but that attraction’s similarly aviation themed replacement, Dreamflight. Its continued existence seemed to be mostly validated by the adjacent restaurant’s popularity, while throughout EPCOT many promising additions, such as Meet the World and Equatorial Africa, failed to materialize. As one of the last pieces of EPCOT Center left untouched after 25 years, by the time of the attraction’s closure, its time has clearly come. The only surprise is that it didn’t come during the “EPCOT Center Apocalypse” phase of 1994 – 1998.


Its importance can be summarized in its’ successful collection of many WED tropes under one roof for the first time: utilizing spatiality, the interior exterior, and uniting two Presentational attraction predecessors (If You Had Wings and It’s A Small World) into one blend, El Rio was perhaps the last attraction to come out of Disney’s “Magic Window” school of attraction design for many years, and the last minor attraction to come out of the Presentationalism style in the classical period to close. It will be missed.

October 1, 1982 – January 1, 2007