TOMORROWLAND - The Movie...My thoughts

Hello!  Been a while since I posted anything here, let alone something related to Disney.  Here are my thoughts on the recent film TOMORROWLAND...

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Having read quite a bit about Walt Disney, I may be seeing this recent Disney film with tinted glasses.  I remember being inspired by the stories that Disney put on film and on TV in a myriad of ways back in the 1960’s, when I was inspired by the stories and the music to write my own stories and to learn to play the songs.  I didn’t take my inspiration for my love of science from Disney (directly); it was the space program that grabbed me and made me want to learn.  Yeah, I was one of those kids who wanted to be an astronaut.  I dreamed about traveling to the Moon or to Mars, or to even more distant places.  My interest was fed by writers like Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke (the so-called Big Three) and by Charlton Heston movies like THE OMEGA MAN and PLANET OF THE APES.

It wasn’t till I started to study Disney that I realized how interested he was in the space program himself — and in scientific advancement!  He made promotional films for NASA to help generate popular support for the project to put a man on the Moon, and in his parks was this area he called “Tomorrowland.”  Tomorrowland celebrated the future by promoting the achievements of corporations in that direction.  It had exhibits like “The House of Tomorrow”, a futuristic “People Mover” and its retrospective tribute to technology, “Carousel of Progress.”  I didn’t know about these things till relatively recently because I didn’t go to Disney World until 1975, and then as a member of my high school band who was less concerned with appreciating what I was seeing than with the existence of high school girls from other band programs in other parts of the country.

So what’s all that have to do with TOMORROWLAND, the movie?  I believe there is something of Walt Disney’s persona in this film.  And that something is “Optimism.”  Walt Disney was a futurist, according to Ray Bradbury.  A forward-thinking man who had his eyes on solving the problems of the world with technology, through corporations.

The movie isn’t as focused on corporations as agents for positive change, but it has the same optimism about the future that Walt had.  If I understood correctly, the story is that scientists figured out how to access an alternate dimension of reality and then proceeded to create a world where science was king — where just about anything was possible.  (Sort of goes with Walt’s old “If you can dream it, you can do it” mentality.)  In fact, the film starts with a boy inventor traveling to the World’s Fair that Disney used as a testing ground for so many things that found themselves into his parks, including the aforementioned Carousel of Progress and the “it’s a small world” attraction.  (At that fair, for the Illinois exhibit, Walt and company built an audio-animatronic Lincoln that people reported rose and stepped into the audience, shaking people’s hands – of course it did no such thing but, well, that’s how imagination works I guess.)  He makes his way to Tomorrowland with the help of a pretty young girl and a pin that she gives him.

Cut to the future – our future – where our space program is being dismantled and where pessimism reigns.  What’s the best an intelligent young man or woman can hope for in this world?  It certainly isn’t the Moon, or Mars.

In the film’s case, the intelligent young person is a high school girl who becomes intrigued by a pin she finds among her belongings after she is released from jail — she was arrested for sabotaging the machines that are destroying the launch platforms at Cape Canaveral.  The pin shows her a shining land of science and technology that is beyond her wildest dreams, and she must find it.

The straightforward adventure story that follows is competently written and it plays out in an entertaining manner.  But it was the concept behind that adventure — the idea that you can make a difference, that your brain is more powerful than anything else, and that amazing things can be accomplished if our best and brightest put their minds to it — that intrigued me.

And it wasn’t just me.  My kids were intrigued by the ideas, by the inspiration that they were able to take from the story.  I have smart kids, and we’ve always talked about accomplishing big things through intellect (not in those words, obviously), and they saw in this film something more than an unrealistic adventure story.  It’s the same sort of feeling we have when we leave EPCOT or Tomorrowland at the Magic Kingdom.  There’s an enthusiasm after those visits, a feeling that anything IS possible, in fact.

I found a review on a sometimes-Disney site called FutureProbe and I’m going to just quote the end of it:

The lesson our characters should have learned is that Tomorrowland isn’t a place you escape to, it’s something you make wherever you happen to be. The movie shouldn’t have ended with a bunch of robot children setting out to bring people to Tomorrowland, but with them setting out to bring Tomorrowland to the people.

I agree with the sentiment, but I think it’s being nit-picky about the final message. So what if the robots are setting out to bring the best and brightest to Tomorrowland instead of rejoining the real world? In a sense, they are metaphorically doing exactly that – inspiring the young people to create the future instead of accepting it and “gaming the system” for their own benefit. Maybe “Tomorrowland” is MIT or Harvard or University of Illinois for some particular teenager, and maybe it’s going to work for an environmentally aware company. Maybe it’s just getting the best out of yourself instead of coasting.

In any case, I found a lot to like about this movie.  I’m not going to argue that it’s the greatest piece of filmmaking ever, but it’s more than an entertaining story, or at least it can be.

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(This is cross-posted from my "Scott Dyson" blog which is where I talk about my writing and my books. Stop by if you want to see what I've been up to with my self-publishing efforts.
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What would the world have been like if Walt had lived longer?

Now there's an interesting question, don't you think? 

Perhaps your first inclination is to say that it would be pretty much what it is today, except with a better Walt Disney World in Florida.  And that might be the exact right answer. 

But we all know that Walt wasn't one to rest on his laurels.  He was always moving forward.  Any reason to think that wouldn't have continued?  His passion at the time of his death was his reimagined city concept which may or may not have been a success. 

I know I've written in this blog that what we got may in fact be preferable to what Walt wanted.  But I wrote that as a Disney fan.  I would never try to argue that what we got was "progress" in any sort of really important way.  Whether his ideas proved to be workable or to be a complete failure, the world would have gained something - knowledge about what might or might not work. 

Would having that knowledge have improved the world?  Well, it certainly would not have hurt the world.  Think of the mess our cities are today.  Not technologically, but socially.  I live near Chicago where we can't seem to stop the kids in gangs from killing each other and often (far, far too often) catching innocent bystanders in the crossfire. 

I'm not sure that Walt's social experiment with urban planning would have helped these people.  But who knows?

But more to the point, Walt was, in my opinion, his generation's Steve Jobs.  Yes, he focused on entertainment most of the time, but in a way, so did Steve Jobs and Apple.   What has Apple really changed?  They've changed the way we consume our entertainment, with our tablets and our iPods and iTouches and our smartphones.  Cool toys, all of them.  I'm pretty sure they all have applications beyond entertainment.  (For example, you can download my DOING DISNEY ebook and read it on the Kindle app on an iPad...shameless self-promotion...and not really to the point since reading is entertainment.)

What if Walt had taken the next step in his audio-animatronics and created actual AI robotics?  What shape might such things have taken?  What if Walt had put his mind to space?  His contributions to our space program were mostly PR-related, but would it not have been cool if he would have had any sort of input, through the megaphone of the Disney media giant, into the direction our space explorations might have taken?  Can you imagine Walt's excitement if he had actually lived to see Neil Armstrong step onto the moon?  Disney might have more than a few satellites in orbit (I'm assuming that, as a media company, they have at least a couple of those things flying above our heads)...they might have actually had a presence in space, if Walt could have envisioned it - and I'm pretty sure that if anyone could have, Walt could have.

I'd love to assume I have someone reading this, and if that is the case, I'd then love to hear what changes, if any, Walt might have involved himself in beyond the urban planning exercise he was devoted to in Florida.  The comments are available if you have anything to add to what is, to me, a fascinating thought experiment.

(As an aside, read   HABST AND THE DISNEY SABOTEURS if you want to take a look at Leonard Kinsey's thought about what might have been if Walt's mind had been allowed to continue working on problems in the world...)

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If you want to read a book about one family's strategies when vacationing for a week at Disney World, feel free to check out my title , Doing Disney: How To Spend A Week At Disney's Florida Resort   It's available on Amazon for $2.99.  I tried to write it for families who get to spend a week in the World every year or two and want to maximize their time in the parks and in the area.  It doesn't try to be comprehensive, but I think you might find a few helpful tidbits within its electronic pages...

Thanks!

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My Magic Plus...

This new program that Disney Florida is rolling out was a mystery to me.  But after reading FutureProbe's article on the subject, now I'm worried.

Go ahead and read the article, titled The Pixie Dust Detoxification Effect. 

Is this going to enhance or ruin the Disney vacation experience?  Sounds like the latter...

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Lincoln Child's UTOPIA revisited

I'm sort of a book nut; I've got thousands of the things laying around.  I mostly read mystery and thriller fiction, but at a given time I could be reading something in any genre:  I read a lot of science fiction, horror, and some fantasy.  (I read a lot of books on Disney, too...as many as I can...)

A while back I made this blog post about the Lincoln Child novel, UTOPIA, and talked generally about the story, which was a thriller about terrorists holding a huge indoor theme park sort of built into a canyon near Las Vegas hostage.  It was a good taut story, in my opinion, with interesting characters, from a really good thriller writer (Child is well known for his collaborations with Douglas Preston, stories featuring Agent Pendergast).  One of the major characters in this book is not a person at all, but the theme park where everything takes place.  Child delves into the details of the place, and I have always found it to be a repeatable read for me.

This is a scan of the drawings at the beginning of the book, depicting the park as it is designed.  You can see that there are four distinct areas to the fictional park.  The first, Boardwalk, is sort of a carnival area with thrill rides and an aquarium.  From there you can go to Camelot, which is sort of self explanatory.  Gaslight, a third area, is an area themed to a part of London, England, and last is Callisto, a space station/skyport futuristic area.  A fifth area is scheduled to open, themed to Atlantis.

I think that the detail of the drawing is really well done.  It's a very thoroughly thought-out concept brought into book form.  According to Child, there are no plans for future novels set in Utopia.  But I wonder about Child's obvious fascination with the art form known as the "theme park".  Where did his inspiration for this come from?  There are some obvious (to Disney fans, anyway) comparisons to be made between the found of this park and Walt Disney. 

I'll just reiterate:  it was a fun read and I probably will read it again someday soon.

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Disney's X-Pass (Virtual Queues...)

I don't regularly read Jim Hill Media but I find his articles interesting usually.  I was perusing his site and came across this article which discusses rumors and inside info about the X-pass virtual queuing system that will allow WDW guests to reserve up to 4 attraction/experience times depending on how far in advance they are making their reservations.  It sounds like a super-Fastpass thing except that according to the article it will extend to things like shows and spots for fireworks and parades and such. 

Reaction in the two pages of comments I read was mixed.  Either people hated it or they thought it was a great idea.

I know that studies show the number one thing that bothers/irritates theme park guests is waiting in long lines.  I hate it myself; we use Fastpass to bypass lines at most of the popular attractions.  It means only experiencing those attractions one time (via Fastpass), but really, so does standing in a 60 minute standby line.  There are only so many hours available for attractions in a day as it is.  Fastpasses make it possible for us to relax a bit more at lunch, or do a little shopping, or maybe see that movie in Canada or China that we'd never seen before. 

So the search for a solution for long queues predictably passes from theming to make those queues more interesting and entertaining while in them to figuring out a way for more guests to line up "virtually", through a reservation system of sorts.  I just don't know if this is a good move. 

As many Disney bloggers and cast members have pointed out, Fastpass works by allowing people to "stand in two lines at the same time", be it a line for food or for a less popular, low-wait time attraction.  This in turn increases wait times for those who don't have Fastpass.  A cast member in Disneyland commented on how long the lines for the Nemo Subs would be if they had Fastpass at that attraction.  I see the logic in this assessment.  Yet I use it to my advantage when we go to WDW or Disneyland. 

It seems the best way to reduce wait times would be to have more attractions.  And by that I mean they should have more "popular" attractions.  Carousel of Progress and the People Mover have short waits most of the time, and their presence does not seem to affect the wait times for Buzz or for Space Mountain.  What if there was another "Buzz" or "Space" type ride that was as popular as those two?  Wouldn't it follow that there will be less people in the other lines? 

More capacity would seem to be a better answer than virtual queues.  After all, those people in the "virtual queue" are still in line, and still making the lines and wait times longer; you just can't see them from the standby line...

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