ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702240129
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LAKE BUENA VISTA, FLA.
SOURCE: SETH SCHIESEL THE NEW YORK TIMES
NO LONGER A PROPAGANDA machine for the space age, Disney's vision of the future looks more like "the future that never was.''
There is a place here where the future looks old. It is called Tomorrowland, and it is part of Walt Disney World, the most popular tourist destination on Earth.
When Walt Disney Co. decided to give Tomorrowland a make-over in 1995, it went retro.
Visitors to Tomorrowland's main drag, the Avenue of Planets, stroll not some asphalt version of the information superhighway, but through a green, gray and purple canyon of neon lights, oversize bolts and swooping arches of anodized steel - an antique remake of ``The Jetsons.''
``The new Tomorrowland begins with Jules Verne and ends with Buck Rogers,'' said Beth Dunlop, a Florida architecture critic who recently released a company-approved book on Disney architecture.
Tomorrowland is hardly alone. The future is growing old all over the Magic Kingdom. From the film lot to the EPCOT theme park to the real-life town that the company calls Celebration, Disney has largely given up on imagining a new future. When a story line or ride design calls for a touch of times to come, it is usually, as posters for the new Tomorrowland boast, ``the future that never was.''
The shift is profound for a company whose founder was one of postwar America's great popularizers of technology. And it is a reflection of the ennui that many Americans, at century's end, feel about the chips and bits in which they are immersed.
``We went to the moon, and all we got out of it was Teflon pans,'' said Karal Ann Marling, a professor of art history and American studies at the University of Minnesota, expressing an increasingly common attitude.
``Our goals as a people are not these pie-in-the-sky objectives that people grew up with in the '50s,'' said Marling, who is the curator for a Montreal exhibit in June on Disney theme park architecture. ``They settle now for a house in the suburbs, and to hell with the moon. What's the point of building monorails if we can hardly get the car to work?''
That was not Walt Disney's America. At the dawn of the space race, President Dwight Eisenhower used a Disney television program to introduce Pentagon brass to the possibilities of space travel.
In the 1950s and '60s, the original Tomorrowland, at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., was home to Space Station X-1 and the Monsanto House of the Future.
Disney perceived ``a role for himself almost as a middleman between industry and the public about communicating ideas of the future,'' said Marty Sklar, a 40-year Disney Co. employee and luminary of the company's fantasy-conjuring Imagineering division.
Today, though, it seems much of the public does not want to hear the message; as technology has entered more lives, it has departed from many imaginations.
Familiar with the microprocessor and the modem, weary of space flight, and suspicious of scientific advance, Americans no longer put their faith in a ``great big beautiful tomorrow,'' as the song has it at Disney World's Carousel of Progress, one of the few attractions to escape modification in the recent Tomorrowland renovation.
All over America, the future is aging. The fantastic visions of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein have been replaced on science fiction best-seller lists by the cynical ``cyberpunk'' tales of William Gibson and his imitators.
In film, science unleashed is usually far more dangerous than science ignored. Arnold Schwarzenegger came back from the future as a good robot in the movie ``Terminator 2,'' but only because there was a more advanced, evil model to battle.
As today's idea of the future has become less romantic, Disney, as myth maker, has recognized that yesterday's idea of the future is, for many, much more inviting.
``Popular entertainment picks at a theme generally that arises elsewhere in the culture,'' said Alvin Toffler, the author and futurist. ``A lot of perfectly fine and decent and human people now think that technology is a negative.
``These guys at Disney are up burning the halogen lamps to determine what will sell. They're following the bottom line.''
The vanguard of Disney's retreat into yesterday is Celebration, the town that the company is building south of Walt Disney World.
As the first of an expected 20,000 residents move in, it is apt that Celebration's only furniture store specializes in antiques and reproductions, because the town itself is a reproduction of an antique: the America built before highways and suburbs.
The facade of downtown Celebration is azure and yellow and pale pink. Its scale is comfortably pedestrian. Though the sidewalks are broad, a visitor caught himself inadvertently strolling the middle of the town's main street, as if it were the Magic Kingdom's Main Street, U.S.A.
``It's like taking a Norman Rockwell painting and blowing it up into a real town,'' said Andy Kwon, a 33-year-old taxi driver from nearby Kissimmee, Fla.
It is a far cry from what Walt Disney intended when he started buying up central Florida swampland in the 1960s. Walt Disney World was to be home not just to a theme park, but to the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.
``I heard him talk over and over again about EPCOT,'' said Bob Thomas, a veteran Associated Press reporter who wrote a biography of Disney. ``He wanted to build an ideal city, which would be pleasant living for families, give them education, recreation, amusement.''
Dunlop, the architectural historian, said: ``It was under a bubble of glass. It was a futuristic, utopian, sanitized, unrealistic dream of how people could live without having to hear garbage trucks and breathe fumes.''
After Disney died in 1966, his successors agonized over EPCOT, Thomas said. ``It's more of a World's Fair attraction,'' he said of the result. ``It was nothing like Walt had envisioned.''
Traces of Disney's vision for EPCOT have been realized. Walt Disney World incorporates an innovative underground waste disposal system and elegant monorails. Celebration appears well on its way to providing clean streets, quiet and a strong sense of community.
But it strives toward those goals in precisely the opposite way from what Disney had projected, by reaching into the past. ``We're interlopers in Walt's vision, I guess,'' Sklar said.
Disney's imagination encompassed history and fantasy. But toward the end of his life he was obsessed with the future, a future in which technology made day-to-day life better and better.
``He was convinced that if we could get American industry and Walt Disney together,'' Sklar said, ``you could stimulate people and hold out an optimistic future that was not unreal, but was something for us all to reach for.''
The difficulty of keeping pace with the future sometimes frustrated Disney, but mostly he seemed to relish the challenge.
He once said: ``The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished. It's something we can keep developing and adding to.''
Disney executives acknowledge that with the pace of technological development quickening, it is simply too hard, and too expensive, for the company to stay a step ahead.
``It's one thing if you're going to do a film,'' Sklar said. ``If it doesn't work, it's gone.
``But we build in iron and steel and cement. What was the future yesterday is not the future tomorrow.''
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