Cover Art for DOING DISNEY finalized!

I don't really have anything to say here other than that my talented friend Rich Siegle has completed the cover art for DOING DISNEY:  HOW TO SPEND A WEEK IN DISNEY'S FLORIDA RESORT.  I'll post the final art shortly here for all to see.

I am in the process of making my final pass, copyediting and adding a few bits here and there.  I expect to have it published by the end of November, 2013.  It will be available as a Kindle e-book through Amazon, and I am looking at potentially doing a paper version of both that book and my (currently available) short story collection, 14 DARK WINDOWS.  I may also publish both of them through the Nook store at Barnes and Noble.  But that is a project for later...

I noticed that The View on the Disney-owned ABC channel was filmed at Disneyland, and they did a focus on Carsland.  It does look really cool.  They had an interview with John Lasseter, they talked with Tim Allen (voice of Buzz Lightyear), and had a performance by Disney star Demi Lovato.

Any other Disney news?  Just a reminder that Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry has the special exhibit, "The Treasures of Walt Disney" with lots of cool stuff from the vault.  The exhibit is sponsored by D23.  If you want to check it out, go here.

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If you get a chance, please take a look at my latest offering, 14 Dark Windows, on Amazon for Kindle.  It's a collection of short stories, some horror, some milder with supernatural or horrific elements, some just nice stories, available in ebook form for $2.99!  Thank you!

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The Treasures of Disney exhibit - Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has a special exhibit going on right now:  D23 Presents:  Treasures of the Walt Disney Archives.

We had the chance to see this exhibit yesterday, and it was one of the better exhibits we've experienced at the Museum (and we've been members for several years now).  That might be because we enjoy Disney, and I love the Disney history material.  But we all found it to be quite fun, right up to the "Animation Academy" style class at the end of the exhibit.  They had costumes from Enchanted, Mary Poppins, Pirates of the Caribbean, Alice In Wonderland, and a handful of other films.  They had some interesting props, a bunch of macaques (is that the right word?) of various animation subjects, and other interesting things like the Nautilus model used in the filming of 20000 Leagues Under The Sea.    The theme parks were covered as well.

It presented Walt as a forward-thinking genius who was one step ahead of the curve in the entertainment industry.

I'd actually like to go see it again.  Check out the Museum of Science and Industry's info on the exhibit on their site.

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Midwest Attractions: St. Louis

You know it, you've seen it, the home of the Cardinals, Blues and Rams...the city on the Mississippi, Gateway to the West, all that stuff. 

We took a quick jaunt to visit the city of St. Louis a weekend or so ago, and while there we visited the famous Arch, taking the ride up to the top.  We also visited two caves about an hour west of the city, Meramec Caverns and Onandaga Cave.  We went to a really unique "museum", called the City Museum, which was more of an indoor/outdoor/rooftop urban playground, and we saw the Basilica Cathedral, which is a gorgeous example of Byzantine architecture right here in the Midwestern United States. 

Oh, and we got to see a "Naked Bike Ride".  Which could have been funny, but ended up being more annoying than anything since it made finding parking near the restaurant we were determined to dine at almost impossible.  (Plus, in my view, the folks who were riding naked probably shouldn't have been...)

Last, we stayed at the Union Station Hotel, a Doubletree by Hilton hotel, where a shopping mall and a grand hotel are built into the old railroad station.  Pretty cool all by itself, with a very nice room.

I enjoyed the caves the most, followed by the City Museum.  My kids liked the slides, passageways, catwalks and man-made caves at the City Museum the best. 

I may (or may not, depending on my mood) post in more detail about some of the individual attractions.  It should be noted that there is more to do than just what we did. 

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Science Centers...

We went to the Museum of Science and Industry yesterday, and it made me think of my last post (which was inspired by the Passport to Dreams blog entry) about Epcot and inspiration. 

I remember a similar discussion, a few years back, on the Reimagineering blog (now gone quiet, unfortunately), where some of the comments got to discussing whether regional science centers like the Museum of Science and Industry did a better job of educating and inspiring people than Epcot could do.  Those centers have the ability to change rapidly.  Exhibits come and go.  For example, yesterday the MSI had a special exhibit for the life of Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts.  I learned a ton about the cartoonist.  It isn't really science, perhaps, but it was fun and educational. 

There are larger scale permanent exhibits, too - like Science Storms and YOU! the Experience.  Every so often these exhibits undergo wholesale upgrades or changes - recently YOU! The Experience was closed for renovation and updating, and they made it much more pertinent to today's kids (and adults).  Science Storms is a relatively new exhibit where kids (and adults, again) can control a tornado and can learn about waves and air currents and a lot of other stuff.  Fast Forward also is relatively new and showcases some scientists' and inventors' work on cutting edge technologies and ideas.  Not everything is new every time we visit, but there have been modifications to the content of the exhibit. 

Science centers like MSI  do an excellent job of entertaining, educating, and inspiring visitors.  But the problem is that they can only do so one or two (or at the most a small group) at a time.  You can't have a thousand people working the controls to the tornado exhibit all at once.  And you can't rush a kid who is doing it.  There's a lot to do, and kids generally wait their turns and do things in an orderly fashion.  But can you imagine something similar at Epcot? 

It reminds me of Innoventions (the one on the Land and Seas side - I can never keep it straight if that's East or West).  It's the same sort of stuff.  It's fun if you're the one doing something.  But I for one find Innoventions to be perhaps the most boring part of Epcot.  Not because there isn't anything interesting there...more because you just can't really do too much when it's super crowded, like it always seems to be when we're there.  And then of course, you're always rushing to get in line for Soarin' or make a dinner reservation or whatever. 

I wish I would have gotten a chance to see Horizons.  The way people talk about it, it must have been something special.  It seems to have really inspired a lot of bloggers.  But I wonder if it was as impressive as they make it sound.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say.  Epcot as a science center plus theme park was a difficult proposition.  It's still pretty unique today.  Just not nearly as inspiring, or so I'm led to believe...

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Epcot Angst...

As I surf Disney-themed blogs, I read a lot of angst about that fact that Epcot today is not what it was supposed to be, or what it could be, or what it used to be.  It's probably true:  the Epcot of today doesn't really seem to educate, or inspire, its guests.  I have to take it on faith that it did this in the past, because I've read so many excellent blogs that lament the loss of their favorite park.  The latest entry I've read, An Epcot Generation Manifesto at the always informative Passport to Dreams Old & New, comments on the changes in the park, and in the mission itself for the park, saying that "What's really missing from EPCOT today isn't just Horizons, it's the whole package of information, of inspiration, the message of hope which cumulatively moved us all."

Epcot doesn't inspire anymore.  That seems to be a common lament.  So why doesn't it?

I never visited Epcot before 2006.  My only visit to Walt Disney World was in 1975, as a member of my high school band, and, well, you know how high school kids are.  Especially 15 year old male high school kids, when released in the parks along with other high school band kids (read that as "GIRLS!") from other parts of the country.  I took a few pictures, but basically I have few memories from that visit.

Epcot wasn't an option in 1975.  It wasn't built yet.  I was in college when EPCOT Center opened, and it didn't register on my radar.   Too busy majoring in chemistry and hanging out with my friends and playing rock and roll music and trying to get into dental school.  (I succeeded in all of them...)  Did I need inspiration?

I did not.  I grew up in a time where men were launching rockets to the moon.  Neil Armstrong stepped onto that world when I was 9 years old.  I found the SF of Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke at around 12 years of age, and moved on from there.  Brin, Card, Benford, Sawyer, Bear, and many others made me think a lot about what was possible.  The shuttle program began, and I wrote an op-ed piece for the Chicago Tribune after the Challenger disaster.  (The link brings you to a blog post with the link to the piece, not to the piece itself.)  If you read it, you will read the thoughts of someone who had been inspired by a lot of stuff.  But not by EPCOT.

Foxxfur states in her excellent piece that "We can argue semantics about Walt Disney's original vision for E.P.C.O.T., the political and cultural reasons these were transformed into a theme park, so on and so on but the fact remains that the guiding principle behind E.P.C.O.T. and EPCOT Center remained the same; like Captain EO, it was here to change the world.  And EPCOT did change the world, actually. This is no lie."

It may have.  I think it changed the way that science centers and museums around the world present their information to their visitors.  I remember, as a kid, visiting the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and being inspired by it back then.  I loved the place.  (So many buttons to push...)  Today, however, it presents its information and its stories in much different fashion.  It's much more interactive, much more entertaining.  I might hazard a guess that a lot of this change in the way that information is presented is due to EPCOT.  I could be wrong; after all, I never went to EPCOT before 2006 so I'm not sure how things were presented back then, but from everything I read, it sounds like EPCOT's presentation of information inspired museums to do a better job of presenting what they were trying to show.

I'm sure it changed the world in other ways as well.  But I can't enumerate those ways.  I'm not sure Foxxfur can, either.  (I looked for some specific examples but didn't find them.) 

Foxxfur makes this statement:

But every child of the eighties or early nineties who passed through those wide turnstiles and squinted up at the glare of the Florida sun off that big geodesic sphere left the park permanently marked with its message. Those catchy theme songs, so easy to dismiss as irritating simplifications, got into our DNA. They became homilies. How many kids eventually discovered the name Buckminster Fuller and connected his writing to the social concerns espoused by the theme park just because Disney name-checked one of his most famous ideas as the title of the park's iconic attractions? How easily we can come up with phrases like "nature's plan will shine above", or "the future world is born today", or "if we can dream it, then we can do it", or "one little spark of inspiration is at the heart of all creation" - all genuinely good advice, and all from EPCOT? These sound like notations not from a theme park, but from something like "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth".

 I agree.  But these things are still inspiring our kids, I think.  I know that when we walk through the turnstiles today, we are wowed by the view of Spaceship Earth.  We listen to music at home and find ourselves saying, "That sounds like something that we'd hear at Epcot!"  My kids seem interested in all sorts of things because we've encountered them at Epcot.  "Living with the Land", "The Living Seas", "Mission: Space" - the consensus seems to be that these things are sort of lame.  Maybe they are, but they still inspire.  They still can connect to kids of today, a video game generation that, no matter what we might wish, need a lot to "wow" them.  At least if I judge by my own kids, it does inspire.  The video-game-ish "Mission: Space" might be a little basic for their own video game skills, but it got them interested in space travel in a concrete sense.  "Living with the Land"'s greenhouses are still interesting enough that they talk about the methods of growing exotic foods on occasion, and they compare every aquarium exhibit we come across to "The Living Seas".  They may connect in a different way, but they do connect.

It will be interesting when I read a blog (if there is one) by a Disney fan who has grown up with this incarnation of Epcot.  I've only experienced this version, but I'm old.  "Pong" astonished me when it first came out.  Technology today is light years further advanced than what I grew up with, and I got to see it all.  I'm not saying that Epcot can't do a better job of inspiring its guests.  I'm just saying that it still does inspire, by its very existence.  And that's harder than ever to do, with the way things are in our world and nation today.

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Midwest Attractions: Chicago's Field Museum

Does she (or he) look familiar? This is Sue, the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton at the Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. It isn't her real skull attached to the body; that is displayed separately. This is a cast of Sue's skull. Perhaps she looks familiar because there is a T-rex skeleton in front of the Dinosaur ride at Disney's Animal Kingdom, which was created from casts of bones from Sue.

I didn't make it to New York City's Museum of Natural History, but we like Chicago's version. Named after the founder of Marshall Field's, the iconic department store that was absorbed into and renamed Macy's a few years back, it is a massive building that has tons of interesting displays. Of note is the Plains Indians' massive shelter built in the middle of their Native Americans displays. Also they have a really interesting permanent exhibit of Egyptian mummies and artifacts.

We didn't make it to see Sue's skull or the rest of the dinosaur bones exhibits, but we spent a bit of time in their temporary exhibit featuring GOLD, that beautiful, valuable metal. And we spent a bit of time looking at the gemstones and at the geology exhibits. They also have a permanent exhibit called UNDERGROUND, which "shrinks" visitors to the size of a bug and walks you through the world located 12 inches below our feet, complete with animatronic bugs. It's a cool if a bit creepy exhibit.

We have underutilized this attraction in our own backyard, and we hope to get to it and the other museums of Chicago's museum campus (the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium) more often in the next year.

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Museum of Science and Industry Visit

We love going to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. It's sort of like going to Epcot without the thrill rides.

They have redone their human biology section and called it "YOU! The Experience" or something pretty much like that. It was chock full of interactive exhibits and games for the kids to try. It was their favorite of the sections we visited yesterday. They have a few "cut-away" dissections of human bodies on display; these remind me of the Body Works special exhibit that I never really wanted to go see (and didn't). Everything is a video game for kids these days. Oh well... Still, this was a really interesting, well done reworking of their old classic exhibit.

The special ticketed exhibit that was open at this time was their White House exhibit, with a bunch of memorabilia from White House functions through the years, and a history lesson to boot. The most interesting thing, to me, was the miniature version of the White House itself, where the rooms are accurately depicted in the White House proper and the East and West Wings. Tons of detail to look at in this model, where the front was a closed model and you'd have to look through the windows, but the back was cutaway so that you could look into the various rooms. Much of the memorabilia had a focus on the four presidents who lived in Illinois: Lincoln, Grant, Reagan, and Obama.

The IMax show that we got to see was titled "The Human Body" and was a very well done, very educational film depicting the systems that make us "alive" in huge detail all around the viewers. My wife and I liked it a bit more than the kids, but we all thought it was interesting.

Another exhibit that I don't remember seeing before was the Art + Science = Architecture exhibit. In this one, an architect who has become a Lego artist has built several of the city's and the world's tallest buildings, as well as some planned buildings. The Lego models are displayed here along with facts about the buildings.

We finished our visit to the museum with the obligatory watching of the Swiss Jolly Ball exhibit, where a steel ball rolls through its paces on a track that takes it through buildings, up an elevator, on a ship ride, on a trolley ride, and along a bunch of track. For some reason kids (mine, and others) find this contraption mesmerizing. I referenced this pinball machine in one of my posts on things to use to fill an amusement park. Click the link above if you'd like to see a picture of it.

All in all, a very good day at the MSI.

So what's on the agenda for this theme park?

In the last few posts, I sort of convinced myself (if no one else) that designing and developing some sort of themed entertainment concept in my part of the world (the Chicagoland area) is possible and while success isn't a given, it isn't totally impossible, either.

I also argued that there were only two types of layout that would work. One would be to more or less copy EPCOT's basic idea of pavilions separated by beautifully decorated common areas and walkways. All "attractions" are located indoors, with perhaps a few notable exceptions (which haven't been determined at all). The other model would be a totally enclosed structure, sort of like Mall of America, or like what developers tried to do with Old Chicago, a theme park in Bolingbrook, IL.

And in the last post, I considered (very superficially) the reasons for failures of amusement parks around the country, and decided that most of it had to do with the places getting stale. Any park of this sort, or even any museum or attraction, has to depend on repeat business. Change is going to have to drive the attendance of these types of customers/guests. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is popular because they are constantly changing the special exhibits and the films that can be viewed there, and because the permanent exhibits occasionally get updated or redone completely in some cases. (For example, there has always been an exhibit on biology, with a heart model you can walk through, on the mezzanine which has been totally redone, and which my family and I will likely see next weekend.)

I have a couple of ideas for content of this project. I think they can be made sufficiently broad to encompass a lot of quality exhibits and attractions. Whether they can support the kind of change that would be required remains to be thought through.

About a year ago, I posted that we had visited Legoland Schaumburg, located near the very large enclosed shopping mall called Woodfield. Legoland in Illinois is a large enclosed space in a strip mall. They charge something between 20 and 30 bucks to get in. They have a walk through attraction at the beginning, with all sorts of large scale Lego creations. They have a dark ride through a Lego-based story (I can't recall the content now), they have a 3-D theater with an animated Lego-type story, they have a "Lego Factory Tour" where you crowd into a smallish room and see Lego's being "created". There is a play area where kids can build with Legos and run their creations on ramps, similar to the facility in Downtown Disney. There is a snack bar, and a Lego store. There are also, spread throughout the facility, several large scale Lego figures built by their artists.

When I look at what they have to offer, it doesn't sound like much. We'll have to do better than this in our theme park. We have to offer unique attractions that entertain families, that can hold the interest of the teens, and that can be run indoors, since we can't do any massive outdoor types of thrill rides, at least not to start out. It would be cool to add something "like" Rock'n'Roller Coaster later, perhaps, as one of those upgrades, something themed to our park of course.

I don't know how much of my ideas I want to post here. Probably I should just post everything, since I'm non exactly inundated with readers...it's not like anything I post is very likely to end up in the hands of someone else anyway. ("Hey, let's go read that Disney Fan Ramblings blog to get ideas for our new entertainment concept! He's got the best ideas and he's putting them out for us to borrow from freely!!!" Yeah, that's likely to happen...more likely is "Look at the lame ideas this guy has! At last we get some comic relief!" ) Still, I think I'll just keep arguing with myself here and sort of working some of this stuff out in print. Look for more posts on this thread sometime soon...

House on the Rock photos

We visited House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin, over Labor Day. For those who are unfamiliar with this attraction, it is a unique home designed by Alex Jordan, incorporating the natural surroundings into the house itself. The House features several interesting rooms and is highlighted by a cantilever room that extends over the wooded land below. Then there are the collections, housed in warehouse-like buildings around the House, where odds and ends are amassed in several rooms. Visitors tour the facilities, buying tickets to three separate areas of the attraction, and then walking through, reading about the various collections in the handouts provided. Not all the items are authentic, but it's an interesting journey.

One of my favorite rooms is the "Organ Room", I believe it is called. It is a dark room evoking steam-punk imagery, with different organs placed throughout the tour. Here are a few pictures of this room.