Greg Maletic
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Tomorrow Never Dies
Disney's next-generation Tomorrowlands head off in an entirely new direction from their predecessors, with mostly amazing results.

As a kid, Tomorrowland was always my favorite part of Walt Disney World; I would sketch over and over again its main thoroughfare, framed by its two towering waterfalls. On the left and right I'd draw Mission to Mars and CircleVision 360 featuring "America the Beautiful", and in the center, the StarJets and its Saturn V centerpiece perched atop the PeopleMover station. Along with this fascination came an equal but opposite incredulousness that none of the adults around me were exerting any effort to make our reality into the future that Disney was showing us. I kept looking for my hometown to start taking its design cues from Tomorrowland, with its speedramps and beautiful white concrete buildings, but to no avail: my town never strayed one inch from being plain, old Davison, Michigan, built from cinder blocks and aluminum siding. My dreams then turned inward in an effort to make my own environment more futuristic, but there I was stymied as well, waiting for technology to catch up with my ambitions. That big, twenty-inch TV that sat in the corner of my bedroom, with its huge dials and rabbit ears? I couldn't wait to someday laugh at it as the RCA Home of Future Living wall-size model took its place.

Amazingly, thirty years later, almost everything in the Home of Future Living actually has come true: we do have huge, beautiful high-definition television, we can shop for dinnerware in the comfort of our own home, monitor our children through video cameras, even go skiing virtually through our video games. So, if we have what they had, why does our present feel so...unspectacular? Our daily existence seems pedestrian compared to the sparkling, beautiful future that the Home of Future Living family inhabited.

This is understandable: our past and future always seem more enticing than our present. Walt Disney knew this, hence Disneyland: a place designed to take you to the past and future…everywhere except the present. And despite the jokes that people made over the years concerning the aging concrete facades of Tomorrowland, to me it was always the most inspirational land of them all.

Alas, nothing stays the same, and the Tomorrowland I saw as a child has been updated. This new Tomorrowland--and its companions in California's Disneyland and Disneyland Paris--are a whole lot different than the old ones. Their ancestors tried to foresee the future; these new ones try to show us alternate-reality futures, thereby making them immune to the ravages of time (there's nothing more inconvenient than the forward march of progress showing up your predictions.) It's easy to criticize and claim Tomorrowland should have stayed the same, but you have to be sympathetic to the dilemma that today's Imagineers face: it isn't as easy to build a Tomorrowland today as it was back in 1955.

Look at the approach that Imagineers of the past used when trying to build a Tomorrowland: take that day's technologies, carefully project them thirty years into the future, and voila: an accurate vision of the future! Well, maybe not. Our priorities today are rarely our priorities in the future, hence the technologies of yesterday--outer space travel, atomic power--don't progress as far as we expect. Innovation takes place in entirely different areas that we hadn't imagined, and as a result, our futures are different than we could have predicted.

The era in which the original Imagineers lived--the 1950s--was a particularly fortunate time to build a Tomorrowland since the most exciting technologies then translated easily into theme park attractions. In the 50s and 60s, America's collective vision of the future included advances in transportation (producing the PeopleMover, the Monorail, Autopia, among others) and space travel (Space Mountain, the StarJets). The future at that time was about traveling, and traveling fast. It's not too hard to come up with amusement park rides based on that.

Today it's not so easy. We live in an era where our most exciting technologies make lousy rides. Computers? I could imagine an attraction or two based on computers, but if Disney's biggest fear is that Tomorrowland becomes dated too quickly, then computers are too fast moving to touch. Communications? Okay, but sort of boring: Spaceship Earth already covers this territory, and I'm not sure it's worth reproducing outside of Epcot. Genomics? Not highly ride-worthy, and probably too controversial. The environment? A lot of money is put into green technologies, but again, it's not a rich source of attraction concepts. All in all, it's not impossible to come up with a few ideas related to today's technologies, but enough to base an entire "land" around?

Given these roadblocks, it's appropriate that Disney headed in new directions for its more recent visions of the future. Disneyland Paris's Discoveryland was the first manifestation of this trend: it attempts to create a future dictated by the ideals and aesthetics of the 19th century. (This was the first new "Tomorrowland," and the name "Discoveryland" indicates a certain discomfort with the idea of calling something so blatantly fantastic "tomorrow." Disney obviously got over this hang-up in succeeding years.) Discoveryland succeeds for numerous reasons, the most obvious one being that it's just plain beautiful. The "Jules Verne" aesthetic that, to my knowledge, was codified by Harper Goff's Nautilus submarine from the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, proves to be an incredibly rich architectural foundation for a themed land. The Orbitron, looking like some sort of enormous mechanism modeling a far-off solar system, is breathtaking. (Who knew you could make the StarJets seem so special?) Spectacular also is the Hyperion blimp emerging from its Videopolis hangar. The later addition of Space Mountain and the full-scale Nautilus were the icing on the cake. (If only they'd put a little more effort into rendering the interior of the Nautilus more faithfully! Still, that's a quibble--it's great.)

More important than its good looks, Discoveryland does a phenomenal job of setting a consistent tone. As with Disneyland's 1967 Tomorrowland remake themed to "transportation," it all looks as if it came from a single designer. The attractions all feel like they're part of the same world, each infused with the same "advancement through science" aesthetic--and the effect is thrilling. Yes, Discoveryland's designers had the advantage of starting from scratch--the renovators of the U.S. Tomorrowlands didn't--but it can't be overstated how important this sense of unity is to providing an immersive experience.