In our last land with Sam Gennawey, we cover Tomorrowland in all its retro-future glory. Presented by AAA.
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The Disney Dish with Jim Hill
Episode 14: Urban Design with Sam Gennawey - Tomorrowland
This podcast is sponsored by AAA, the American Automobile Association. AAA members get discounts on tickets, resort accommodations, and more at Walt Disney World and other Orlando attractions. If you book a qualifying Walt Disney World Resort vacation package at select AAA offices, you'll receive a free subscription to Turinplains.com, as well as dedicated trip planning resources just for AAA clients. Go to AAA.com or ask your local AAA travel agent for more details on this offer. How did they retain those paths? It's nice. Hi, this is Len Testa, and this is another episode of the unofficial guide Disney Dish podcast with Jim Hill. We're continuing our series of talks with Sam Genouay, author of the book Walt and the promise of Progress City. And today's episode, we're going to be visiting Tomorrowland, and we're going to take a little bit of an unconventional route to Tomorrowland, and that we're going to take the walkway from Fantasyland through Tomorrowland, and we're going to end up with our first attraction as Space Mountain. And as we walk along this pathway, we've got two other pathways on either side of us. On the left-hand side, we've got the Walt Disney World Railroad, and on the right-hand side, we've got the diesel smelling, the exhaust smelling anyway, Tomorrowland Speedway. Very forward-looking, isn't it? It is. So, apparently in the future, people will be riding small cars, powered by small engines. Yes, that's right, and going and whopping 7 miles per hour, and with really no scenery to look at whatsoever. But, you know, I have to always remind myself with the topia that we're a little bit older than like 9 or 12 years old. That's right. And if we were 9 or 12 years old, driving our own little car would be really quite cool, and you know, running into our siblings and bashing them in, that's really quite fun. So, once again, as a planner and as a historian, you kind of have to sort of put your head in the place of the people that you're thinking and riding about, so it's still kind of awful. But that's a little different. It's one of the few examples of actual car cars that you can ride in the park tracks. So, test track is another. But when you think about the modes of transportation in Walt Disney World, well, that's the big thing. I mean, in the end, Walt was a transportation guy. He loved transportation systems. He loved trains. That's why he did the monorail and the people mover and all these different technologies. He was constantly in motion and in some respects, actually in many respects, and a lot of it's still left here at the Magic Kingdom, but it's been gone now at Disneyland, is the overall concept of Tomorrowland here is based on the 1967 Tomorrowland at Walt Disney Land, which was known as the World on the Move. And what you had is you had motion vehicles working at a variety of heights. So let's start at the top. At the very top, you've got the Astro-Orbearers, way up high, about 77 feet high, right? Three stories, right. All right. Then you come down, the next level is the People-Mover track, which goes completely around. It was the first use of induction motors, magnetic induction motors to power vehicles. The reason it doesn't go up and down is the train cars have to relate relatively flat. They don't have the ability to go up and down grades. Really? Is it because of the induction? Because of the induction, they're not able to be pushed that way. It's not that powerful. Right. And the thing is, though, the thing just goes on and on and on. If a magnet breaks, it still doesn't stop the trains. It was designed by Bob Gur, and it was designed so that Disney could sell the technology to other cities. In the end, the People-Movers, as they stand, didn't happen. But if you think of most fast launch coasters now, they use these kind of magnets at a much higher energy level and speed to launch the various vehicles. So it's a technology that Imagineer Bob Gur developed as the next step within the evolution of the People-Mover. Then we get down to the ground plane, and we've got the Atopia Cars. So they're kind of down here with us on the pedestrian scale. There's actually one level down from where we're at. Yeah, yeah. You've got the people on the ground floor. That's right. So if you think of look at Walt's concept, as you read the book, you'll learn that Walt wanted to bury the cars underneath the city, and it's the same thing here. The cars are down below grade. Pedestrians have the high ground to it. And everything here, it's another kind of like Main Street when you enter into Tomorrowland. It's a very narrow corridor that has the equivalent of the castle, the tower that holds the Astro Orbiter, and then a big central hub, which is the area with the People-Mover track and a lot of space for people to do things. Right. That's really interesting. So you can get to the Tomorrowland a couple of ways from the central hub, you can sort of make that right after the ice cream place, sort of right through the Tomorrowland Terrace Needon Station. You can also go directly on the bridge over the hub. Yeah. Yeah. In the dynamic space, lots of motion, not only are the vehicles moving, but buildings are moving with the carousel of progress going. Now, the beauty of Space Mountain, that was designed by Imagineer John Hensch in the middle 1960s. His original idea was that the roller coaster would not only be indoors, but the vehicles would exit the building and you would be top high up on the building outside, which I think is like the way it is in Disneyland Paris, right? You do go outside in Disneyland Paris. Okay. So that got implemented then. But it's a humongous building, and in a sense, it's a tomb, wild mouse roller coaster stuck indoors. That's true. And it's the icon at the very end. It's certainly the draw because of an attraction. And I think that for many people, it has become one of the major symbols. And if you're staying at the contemporary or balic tower, it's the predominant structure that you see in keeping with that modern theme. That's right. So the transition from the contemporary is first you see Space Mountain, then you see the rest of Tomorrowland, including the astronauts, and then farther along you sort of see Cinderella Castle and then the rocks of Big Thunder, but Big Thunder is really far off in the distance. That's exactly it. So the interesting thing is that, you know, Space Mountain, you don't see from the hub. You see the astro orbiters from the hub. And then you only see Space Mountain once you get to the astro orbiters. Right, because that's because the astro orbiters is actually the weenie, not the castle. Other things that I like about this, you know, they try to at one point theme it as sort of an inner inner inner windows being a spaceport, an intergalactic spaceport. Thank you. And that's what they're really trying for. So there's some really kind of funny odd things. You know, I always kind of admired these completely functionalist metal palm trees that theoretically I guess could move and close and stuff like that. They don't really provide shade. They're just sort of third they're they're design. But I guess the implication is that in the future we can't actually grow plant materials so we have to create them out of metal. But tomorrow land if you bring a fork, a knife, and a salad bowl, all of the plant materials in tomorrow land at Disneyland are organic and you don't don't try that in don't try that in. Yeah, but don't try that. Well Disney World because you'll notice that they're like cactus plants. Yeah. So not only not only would you die, you'd die painful that that's right. So this whole area is in a sense very much like we're kind of standing in the hub of Main Street functions exactly the same way. The idea of tomorrow land was to project forward to demonstrate how American technology can solve all of the problems that we have when this area is re themed. The only negative I have on it is to me I don't see it so much as tomorrow land, but I sort of see it as Pixar fantasy land because all of the rides are now mostly Pixar characters as you go about and they're not really rooted in the future. In fact, I'm not exactly sure why why the monsters in laugh floor is here because are the monsters in the future or they in a contemporary time or they in another space. But the real cool things that still remain that new make sense are things like this ball. So there's giant middle glow black, I guess it's plastic globe on on on on a on a on a little water base. So anybody can move it and it's quite fun. The little phone booth where you can go in and you can hear phone calls intergalactic phone calls. There's a few of these little kind of things that remind you that this is supposed to be like the convention center land area of tomorrow land. You kind of see it in the in the posters if you're walking from the Tomorrowland Terrace Doodle Station. You kind of see the the transportation the hub sort of theme in those posters as well. And another really important thing is the people mover itself. You see whenever you watch a show with Walt Disney, he would always give you sort of like Main Street, get you all on the same page. But he would when he would do shows of the parks, he would fly over the parks to give you kind of an overview. Yeah. So you can orient yourself and you can plan your day and figure out which attractions you want to go on. Well, that's what the people mover does. If you go on that first, you get a sampling of every single ride that's within this area, every single attraction. It's the same way that the railroad that goes all the way around the park gives you a view into each of the different lands. So you know what to expect. And the same thing in a sense with the river boat does in what the river boat does over in Frontierland. As you're going on the river boat, you get to see both Liberty Square and Frontierland as well. So like all good movie people, you want to give people previews. This is one of those previews. So the TTA is a preview. It's a preview and the and this was the technology of the of the T. It's the people mover now land. And we're back to calling it the right way. In fact, you know the name people mover was not what it was going to be called. It was a placeholder name that Walt Disney was going to use and the name kind of stuck and they never got rid of it. And this is the same thing with the contemporary. That was going to be the Tempo Bay Hotel. But they had it marked as the contemporary and the name just sort of stuck. So sometimes those sort of parking names kind of stick. But the idea of the people mover at first at Disneyland and here was specifically designed to be used as the major transportation system within the city of Epcot. They were not designed to be theme park rides. They were designed to be public transportation. The key is is that there's no better way of testing technology than a theme park because of the abuse of the visitors, the amount of visitors. If it's going to work, it's going to work. And if it's not going to work, you're going to find out very quickly that it's not going to work. So it's a great test bed for that type of technology. If this is lasted, it's wonderful, it's beautiful. It does make me cry a little bit, however, because when you're going past the model of Epcot, the model of Epcot was originally 6,900 square feet. It was 115 feet long by 60 feet deep. It had 22,000 trees and shrubs. It had almost 2,500 moving vehicles. It had 1,400 illuminated lights, almost 5,000 buildings. And the buildings towards the very front that you could conceivably see through the window, some of them even had furniture in their interiors as well. And it was fully animated, everything was moving. You'd have mother and father from the last scene of Carousel of Progress describing what life and progress land would look like. And I just weep a tear because what you see today is less than one quarter of the size of what was the original model. And that model was put into Disneyland as Walt's way of teasing people about the city he was building in Florida without necessarily telling you that he was building in Florida. That's great. Yeah, so it's much smaller here. Does the model still exist? Well, the only bits of it that are left are enshrined up where the people mover is. It's not in the archives. Does he didn't keep it? No, no. You know what? A lot of the models are gone, I think probably the most tragic one was the model of the original Pirates of the Caribbean was also destroyed. And although Walt never went on the ride himself, he went through the model numerous times and they developed a little ice coke for him so that you can see it through the point of view of a visitor and put him on a little wheel chart that was at the height where the visitor was. And it's really quite tragic. Some of the mequets were made out of clay and they became very fragile. Those are the little statues. And ultimately the model itself got destroyed. In this case, they did preserve a little bit of it, but it's not the same. You know, my book is about being like a young boy, seeing the model, seeing all the vehicles moving, being proud of my general electric nuclear power plant which was just off the distance and knowing that that was my clean source of energy and unfortunately, sadly, what you get is a former shell of itself and it's not terribly impressive. But at least a little bit of it's there and I go by and I weep every time. That's right. Let's continue walking. So while we're walking, we've got Stitch's Great Escape on our right. We've got the Monsters, Laffour comedy show on our left. Jimmy Hill brings up a good point about this particular show building, the one with Monsters Inc. It's historically not done well in terms of shows because from a facade perspective, it's terrible. When people are coming off the hub, it's not like there's anything here that pulls them in to tell them, "Hey, there's a show in here that you want to see." That's right. I've noticed as I walk by, they're generally having cast members standing out front trying to flag you. If they have a barker, whereas had they designed it correctly, it would have just done it itself. Yeah. That is kind of unfortunate. And even the architecture of the area, what they decided to do, this was always really the big problem with Tomorrowland because by the time you finish with Tomorrowland, Tomorrow's already here and it starts to update it. So it was Disney Land Paris was the first one where they said, "You know, let's go a different direction. Let's go something a bit more timeless, Jules Verne, that sort of thing." Then they tried to apply that here by taking into sort of a fantasy future and from what I can gather, buildings aren't just buildings, but they're all mechanical. And much like the tenets of modernism, they expose the mechanical structure. But here the implication is that the large fans above are able to move and close things. Almost every piece of furniture you see has giant screws or bolts and it gives the implication like a tinker toy. You could take it apart or they'll move and they'll actually activate themselves. What's really strange is there is a building in Los Angeles. The Caltrans building in downtown Los Angeles, which has now mimicked this and it has metal screen but the metal screens will open and close depending on where the sun is at the time so that they can allow light into the building. So you know, maybe the future is not so far off of having buildings that can morph to whatever the weather is and that's what they've tried to do here. That's fantastic. These don't open up, right? No, no. Everything just, but you know, because of the gears and everything, it doesn't fly it. It looks like it could. Yeah. That's pretty clever actually. Yeah. I've never noticed that before. That's really neat. It's a nice detail. Huh. Alright, let's walk through the Tomorrowland Terrace Noodle Station, which is never open. There's a restaurant over there. Apparently Legend has it. Sam. Many years ago. Nice bathroom stuff. Our forefathers had a restaurant here that you could actually buy food and then sit at these tables. And they're glorious because you know, it's great shade. Yeah. Churches are deep enough that you get a breeze. They've got fans. It's quite comfortable. No wonder people want to fight and die to go here for the fireworks and stuff like that and are willing to shell out the big bucks. That's true. It's really good. So it's a great little space. It's just never open, which is a shame. Yeah. And one of the other things that I really enjoy about the Magic Kingdoms Tomorrowland is the gateway. When you go walk through the bridge and over the bridge and you've got that little tower, it's a very distinct, very clear gateway that already starts to set the theme pretty early on. And I thought that's very well done over there too. I like the waterfalls and other side of that. And I think the water, the moon of water. Yeah. You know, the original idea was all white, all pristine and they had those giant, remember the giant waterfalls were on both sides. Yeah. They kind of slid on down. Those were, I thought, really spectacular, where you basically are entering in through the waterfall. But once again, the idea of Tomorrowland is already past time. They had to do something. This sort of timeless theme has allowed them not to have to remodel it again any time terribly soon. That's what it is. We're going to keep on it. Well, now we're at the end of Tomorrowland where it's really interesting actually. So at the border of the Tomorrowland Terrace building itself, you can see where it ends in Main Street begins because although it's both concrete, one of them is sort of a purplish color, which is Tomorrowland. The other one is red. So again, this is the... It's reddish towards a pink because it makes people look better. It does. In photos? Yeah. That's awesome. But like the other areas that we've walked in, the transitions are not absolute, like some of them are at Disneyland. You start to have Tomorrowland walls, Main Street fences. You have the Main Street little area next to the bathroom, but the bathrooms are whole So there's a little bit of a crossover just like in a film. Well, that's a good place to end this particular series of podcasts. We'll have to have you back to do what we'll have to do next. But an absolute joy, Lynn. I really like this. For Sam Genouy, author of the new book Walt and the Promise of Progress City. I'm Len Testa. This has been the unofficial guide Disney Dish podcast with Jim Hill. We'll see you guys on the next show.