News Tomorrowland love

jt04

Well-Known Member
Chapek is not that person. But is Josh D'Amaro??

Maybe. Iger tended to delegate to creatives. This strategy is still needed in the parks. Just as Kennedy and Lasseter had a lot of freedom to make decisions, they need a similar authority over the parks. Somebody that enforces the rules Walt and crew established back in the day.
 

tirian

Well-Known Member
Maybe. Iger tended to delegate to creatives. This strategy is still needed in the parks. Just as Kennedy and Lasseter had a lot of freedom to make decisions, they need a similar authority over the parks. Somebody that enforces the rules Walt and crew established back in the day.
Iger did that at the beginning before his ego got in the way. Chapek might. We don’t know yet. His time over P&R was a disaster after the previously approved jobs pushed through.

Kennedy is a bad example. She doesn’t have a creative bone in her body; she was always just a money person. RIP Lasseter. ;)
 

bcoachable

Well-Known Member
See what happens when they let all the interns go? Someone higher up has to make all the calls on paint and colors.
No one in charge has had to do this much planning and design by themselves in 28+ years...
(tongue in cheek..... sort of...)
 

jt04

Well-Known Member
Iger did that at the beginning before his ego got in the way. Chapek might. We don’t know yet. His time over P&R was a disaster after the previously approved jobs pushed through.

Kennedy is a bad example. She doesn’t have a creative bone in her body; she was always just a money person. RIP Lasseter. ;)

Kennedy had veto power for better or worse and that is what is needed.

George Lucas famously had a stamp he used to approve concepts as they evolved through the developmental process. He obviously couldn't handle everything involved in the movies personally but he could manage the process with that stamp.

WDI needs somebody who 'gets it' to wield such a stamp. Joe or Tony are two possibilities for example. Though I'm sure there are many. WDI needs such a leadership position. It need not stifle creativity but the process needs a more disciplined framework and visionary. The line got broken at some point. IMO.

P.S. Uni has thrown in the towel at IoA but what they are doing will work with today's audiences. At least short term. Interestingly Epic Universe seems to be returning to established rules that are proven over time. Walt would be intrigued by E.U. I think.
 

Brad Bishop

Well-Known Member
I was initially excited to get a new Tomorrowland years back when it was announced.

After "the purple wall" it seemed to me to be obvious that the direction was going to be: Paint + Tron.

I think that they just need to dump Tomorrowland at all of their parks, anyway. It was originally there because of the excitement of space travel, automobile travel (interstate system), new home designs, new materials, etc. Disney used to be a technology company which is why I found them exciting. Monorail! Peoplemover! Going to the Moon/Mars! - all very exciting.

Disney is now an IP holding company and Tomorrowland doesn't fit. Everything else inside the castle-parks is based on a genre of fiction with exception of Tomorrowland which is supposed to be, largely, non-fiction (at least have a basis in fact). I think the idea of "Discoveryland" or, even better, "Sci-filand" would be much more appropriate. Put in Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Jules-Verne themed attractions. I think that would work.

Tomorrowland? All we're going to get is a promise of a new Tomorrowland every 20-30 years and then some paint.
 

Speedy71

Well-Known Member
I know. Things were so hopeful when I started this thread. Four years later we get a big box and a mostly mismatched thematically damaging paint job.
I remember when you made this thread... so many were so hopeful.

What the hell is wrong with TWDC... are they that lost they cannot figure out theme cohesiveness anymore?!?

Forty five years and counting. And space mountain STILL has yet to get that track replacement.

smhp.gif
 

Phil12

Well-Known Member
I was initially excited to get a new Tomorrowland years back when it was announced.

After "the purple wall" it seemed to me to be obvious that the direction was going to be: Paint + Tron.

I think that they just need to dump Tomorrowland at all of their parks, anyway. It was originally there because of the excitement of space travel, automobile travel (interstate system), new home designs, new materials, etc. Disney used to be a technology company which is why I found them exciting. Monorail! Peoplemover! Going to the Moon/Mars! - all very exciting.

Disney is now an IP holding company and Tomorrowland doesn't fit. Everything else inside the castle-parks is based on a genre of fiction with exception of Tomorrowland which is supposed to be, largely, non-fiction (at least have a basis in fact). I think the idea of "Discoveryland" or, even better, "Sci-filand" would be much more appropriate. Put in Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Jules-Verne themed attractions. I think that would work.

Tomorrowland? All we're going to get is a promise of a new Tomorrowland every 20-30 years and then some paint.
Tomorrowland was created so Walt Disney could sell large monetary sponsorships to huge corporations such as Monsanto, Dutch Boy Paints, American Motors, Richfield Oil, TWA and any other company that had a significant advertising budget.

And of interest is that Dutch Boy Paints had an exhibit in Disneyland called, "Our Future in Color" from 1956 until 1963. It should be noted that Dutch Boy Paints was owned by the National Lead Company. All of their paints were lead based. It wasn't until 1978 that lead was banned in residential paint formulations and National Lead Company sold Dutch Boy Paints to Sherwin-Williams in 1980.

The bottom line is that if you had the money, Walt Disney would build a nice attraction for you. So what TWDC really needs is more corporate sponsors. But lacking that, they should be selling their own IP. The object of all this is to make more money.
 

marni1971

Park History nut
Premium Member
Original Poster
Tomorrowland was created so Walt Disney could sell large monetary sponsorships to huge corporations such as Monsanto, Dutch Boy Paints, American Motors, Richfield Oil, TWA and any other company that had a significant advertising budget.

And of interest is that Dutch Boy Paints had an exhibit in Disneyland called, "Our Future in Color" from 1956 until 1963. It should be noted that Dutch Boy Paints was owned by the National Lead Company. All of their paints were lead based. It wasn't until 1978 that lead was banned in residential paint formulations and National Lead Company sold Dutch Boy Paints to Sherwin-Williams in 1980.

The bottom line is that if you had the money, Walt Disney would build a nice attraction for you. So what TWDC really needs is more corporate sponsors. But lacking that, they should be selling their own IP. The object of all this is to make more money.
Alien Encounter and The Timekeeper were nice attractions.
 

yensidtlaw1969

Well-Known Member
Disney is now an IP holding company and Tomorrowland doesn't fit. Everything else inside the castle-parks is based on a genre of fiction with exception of Tomorrowland which is supposed to be, largely, non-fiction (at least have a basis in fact). I think the idea of "Discoveryland" or, even better, "Sci-filand" would be much more appropriate. Put in Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Jules-Verne themed attractions. I think that would work.
Would it work? Yes, but the real issue is whether or not today's Disney ever do it.

Disney owns more intellectual property now than it ever has before and it hardly seems to know what to do with it. The issue isn't even whether they own the IP - there are probably 100 properties they own at this point that could be cherry picked to make for any number of spectacular Tomorrowlands. But how many of them have the heightened contemporary mainstream appeal that Disney considers essential before it even considers building an attraction? THAT number is much smaller.

Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Jules Verne are all great jumping-off points for potential Disney attractions - some have even been given the chance and proven their mettle. If only any of that mattered to the company that exists today. There's no need to ditch Tomorrowland in favor of those concepts simply because those concepts don't interest Disney either. I'll eat my hat if we ever see Bob Chapek or his successor greenlight another Jules Verne themed attraction without mega-movie tie-in, and I'd be so happy to do it I'd eat it without salt.

Even TRON is a case study in this - we basically lucked into it because they didn't believe they had a more-relevant property to build in Shanghai, and Space Mountain never fully registered with guests in Hong Kong for a number of reasons, so the need was felt to try something different. Guests have famously had a habit of taking a picture in front of Space Mountain at HKDL and then moving along without going inside because it doesn't telegraph clearly as an attraction, let alone what kind it is. Hence why TRON is similar but features an outdoor portion - it says immediately to the guests that something waits inside and what it is. That they could tack onto it a movie that played recently-ish in China was seen as a bonus rather than an essential ingredient - hence why the attraction fails to fully live up to the coolness of the concept of a TRON Lightcycle roller coaster. It's not that corporate was dying to build a TRON ride. It quickly became the 2nd most popular attraction in the park and became logical to import to MK on that basis, rather than the success of TRON as a film property. Had it not gotten past the gatekeeper in Shanghai I can't imagine we'd have actually ended up with TRON in the Magic Kingdom.

Ratatouille is similar in that sense was made of building it in DLP, and once that was done it became easier to make sense of building another one elsewhere. But there's a reason you never really heard of them considering a Ratatouille ride for the US when the Ratatouille movie actually came out - because it wasn't a so big a hit here for it to make sense on those terms alone. Despite it being one of Pixar's finest turns.

Now, that said, both TRON and Rataouille, I believe, will prove to be great examples of why Disney needs to get its act together and focus less on IP integration and more on quality attractions - I can't imagine either of these attractions not doing well by the parks they're built in once they open, but given that both those films were sort of middling successes at the box office here in the US, it's not like the success of the rides can be traced back to that. My impression of both these attractions is that they don't actually completely come together as experiences, but I suspect most guests will seriously enjoy them the way guests do overseas. So if they were to build quality experiences based on any of their properties that may not have hit big stateside but fit the Tomorrowland theme, isn't it likely that those would do just as well as the above?

At which point there's no need to change theme. They've just got to choose to adhere to it. Never in the company's history has it had so many properties under its umbrella that could suit a Tomorrowland, they've just got to get over the idea that only the uber-blockbusters are worth translating into experiences. Especially because we've seen that even that play doesn't guarantee success.
 

412

Well-Known Member
Everything else inside the castle-parks is based on a genre of fiction with exception of Tomorrowland which is supposed to be, largely, non-fiction (at least have a basis in fact). I think the idea of "Discoveryland" or, even better, "Sci-filand" would be much more appropriate.

Tomorrowland '94 more or less solved this problem, changing reality-based Tomorrowland into a Buck Rogers "Sci-fi Land" (as you recommend).

Now Disney is updating the land's aesthetics, but I worry that "Tomorrowland 2020" won't match Tomorrowland '94's level of cohesive storytelling.
 

UNCgolf

Well-Known Member
Tomorrowland '94 more or less solved this problem, changing reality-based Tomorrowland into a Buck Rogers "Sci-fi Land" (as you recommend).

Now Disney is updating the land's aesthetics, but I worry that "Tomorrowland 2020" won't match Tomorrowland '94's level of cohesive storytelling.

That cohesive '94 Tomorrowland didn't last very long anyways. Buzz Lightyear went in in 1998 and it didn't really fit that theme (not that what it replaced fit either).
 

_caleb

Well-Known Member
I like the idea of Tomorrowland having a unified theme, but I’d be okay with a few sub-themes. A retro section, a fantastical sci-fi section, and a section that offers a realistic future could all live side-by-side. Space Mountain is kind of retro sci-fi already anyway.
 

999th Happy Haunt

Well-Known Member
Space Mountain has a few Horizons references in it already, I would love for a new Tomorrowland to go all in on the aesthetics from that attraction, maybe even being set in the Horizons “universe.”
 

Phil12

Well-Known Member
Alien Encounter and The Timekeeper were nice attractions.
I hope they learned their lesson with both of these attractions. The Timekeeper was Circle-Vision 360° show that required guests to stand. As a result, the show had very low attendance. Guests don't enjoy standing for shows. But certainly The Timekeeper was far and away better than MILF. But even CoP is better than MILF. I can only think of one attraction that is worse than MILF. That would be CBJ.

Alien Encounter was good but the warnings were poor. I thought it rather funny to see countless children traumatized by that show as they exited screaming with tears of terror in their eyes. Then the moms would darn near pull their child's arm out of its socket as they quickly dragged their screaming youngster to guest relations to complain. Those were the days.
 

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