Greg Maletic
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Discoveryland only stumbles when it includes warmed-over attractions like Star Tours and Honey, I Shrunk the Audience from other parks. The realities of theme park economics unfortunately come to bear here (not every attraction can be an original) and these two attractions are out of place. But the overall effect is still a tremendous success, and Discoveryland is among the very best of Disney's creations. Despite the fact that it doesn't contain any giant-screen TVs or homes of the future, it's as inspiring to me as Disney World's old Tomorrowland. Even though the approach is completely different, there's something about it that's the same, and I think it's the subtle sense of optimism about the future: that through our technology, we can tame our universe and achieve something incredible. Whether the predictions actually come true or not is secondary.
When it came time for Disney Imagineers to redo Tomorrowland in Disney World in 1995, it might have seemed an obvious choice to clone the Discoveryland they'd built just a few years earlier in Europe. Disney did something different, however. Instead of the sober tone of Jules Verne's future, we get an over-the-top rendition of "Flash Gordon," inspired by sci-fi serials of the 30s more than any one man's dream. It is a vision of the future, but unlike Discoveryland's, it mocks visions of the future, making fun of the effort of even trying to guess what might lie ahead. You get the sense that the theming was chosen simply because it's so out of touch with reality. Its vision--what you see here could never come true--is its salvation. It's relieved from the burden of trying to be real, and park visitors can refrain from challenging it.
Like Discoveryland, Disney World's Tomorrowland is incredibly beautiful. (The designers did an amazing job of transforming the park's already-existing structures into something completely new.) Unlike Discoveryland, this land's sensibilities are totally different. The American sense of humor has turned deeply ironic in the past decade--David Letterman's influence has reached nearly every nook and cranny of U.S. culture--and maybe designers were worried that Paris's Discoveryland might play a little "square" in the States. In some sense, Discoveryland--with its ornate cast iron submarines and moon rockets--still exhibits the same naivete that inhabited the earlier Tomorrowlands. In Florida, substituting for this breathless enthusiasm is arch humor: Disney World's Tomorrowland "winks" at its guests. The attractions play along: Alien Encounter pokes fun at past corporate sponsors that once solemnly claimed that they saw the future. Carousel of Progress changed from a "real" attraction into a museum piece. Space Mountain, through the addition of wacky video ads with outer space used car salesmen and interstellar weather reports, mocks its own former concept of space travel.
Disney World's Tomorrowland succeeds by delivering exactly what it promises. For me, however, it's less gratifying than Paris's Discoveryland. In my ideal Tomorrowland, I don't want the designers winking at me. I want to see for myself that it's not real, but I want the people who built it to believe with all their hearts that it is. Discoveryland's designers, like those who made the original Tomorrowlands, wanted to believe that what they built could somehow be the future. Disney World's designers instead made a joke: a meta-Tomorrowland about the folly of building a Tomorrowland. It's clever, but ultimately not as satisfying.