Alright, before
@PhotoDave219 and
@1023 go any further and need to get a room...
...am I the only one who gets horribly depressed when I see the constantly running ads for "Tomorrowland"?
Seriously.
When I first heard about the movie I wasn't particularly interested - especially since the plot was so nebulous at the time. "inspired by" can mean something decent (a couple of the Pirates films) or it can mean utter trash (the new Jem live-action reboot which has nothing more to do with the show than character names and hair color).
(NOTE: While typing the above, another frakking ad just came on...sigh. Curse "Girl Meets World" being on the Disney Channel.)
I'd seen a smattering of talk here about it, but it really wasn't until a few weeks ago when the trailer hit and then the proliferation of TV ads that I really started to pay attention. You know, the "I'll believe it when I see it" thing you have to do with Disney these days. (BTW, there are so many different TV spots that unless the film is 8 hours long, they have to have shown clips of virtually every scene.)
First I thought - OK, you've got the Hunger Games/Divergence thing going, the look of the film is pretty cool, still not sure what the hell it's about...and HEY! That's George Clooney! (See, told you, hadn't really followed development.)
(WARNING: TRAILER SPOILERS BELOW)
Then, the other day, working late, I flipped the big screen TV around to face my computer area, and there was this crazy HD footage of IASW. For a second, I thought I had left my XBOX One on YouTube and it was one of
@marni1971 's videos. Then for another second I thought it was "Escape From Tomorrow", but then I realized it was in color.
If you've seen it, you know what happens next - a chute opens up right in the middle of the ride path, the boat goes down the chute, into somewhere totally bizarre and unexpected. (I can't remember what, if you haven't gathered by now - it was late, and I was a little...tired - or at least my eyes were a bit squinty - enough so that the next day I actually debated for a moment if I really had seen it, or if it was a dream as my dreams are actually eerily similar).
So, since then...when I see these constant ads...I kind of hurt a little inside. Like, there is this movie that should be so far up my alley it could save me a my yearly exam (just kidding, I'm not that old...yet...waiting for
@PhotoDave219 to take the plunge first, as my elder).
And it's not something like the Catwoman movie - you know, should have been absolutely freaking terrific, even the actors weren't bad choices (Sharon Stone as a scene chewing comic villain? There has been worse casting in the world), but ended up sucking out loud, but not even loudly enough to be "good" like Showgirls. Sure, Tomorrowland seems like a Disney merchandise bonanza - I mean, magic buttons that open up rides? Color me shocked they weren't magic bracelets...
The movie looks good - that's not the problem. The problem is, it reminds me of everything we don't have sitting here in 2015 - how WDW is actually
less exciting than it was even 15 years ago (when I was already an adult, not looking through childhood nostalgia). How when I
was a kid in the 80's, if you'd asked me what WDW would look like in 2015, I would have never imagined that the most exciting things at Disney would remain those built before the turn of the century.
As I said above, I've been watching a lot of YouTube lately. While I am generally an early adopter of technology, I've never really caught the YouTube bug - it was a tool, if I needed a research clip if I absolutely couldn't get it otherwise. And some park videos - but I just hate watching video at my computer. That all changed when I got an XBOX One last winter - even though I have 8 different devices hooked up to my TV that are Internet capable, and most of them have YouTube (and a handful of handheld devices as well), they were always slow and the interface sucked. But with a wireless keyboard and an XBOX One, it's like Christmas in HD with all the quality stuff out there now if you look hard enough.
While I've seen a lot of them briefly before, on the computer, I have been looking at overseas dark rides (where they seem to actually still build them) and particularly lately I have been checking to Tokyo and Hong Kong stuff. While of course you can't truly judge from a video, a lot of these are really high quality HD videos, well done, and you get as good of a sense as you can possibly get without actually being there.
Seeing them on the big screen in HD, compared to on the computer, they still are very impressive - but, that said - particularly thinking about JtCTE and 20K at TDS, and Mystic Manor at Hong Kong - they aren't THAT insanely amazing. They are really really really nice dark rides. When you really break them down, though - exteriors aside - they really are pretty "simple" dark rides. Again, superbly done and well maintained, obviously - but nothing that I wouldn't have expected Disney to build in WDW. Either of those attractions could have appeared in 1998 somewhere in WDW and I would have been wow'd, but it wouldn't have been
crazy unrealstic Jetsons flying car blue sky fantasy, either.
To make a long story short (too late)...that's why I am depressed. The Tokyo parks in particular are our impossible dream - the quality we don't even begin to expect in our lifetime. We can't even get cheap, watered down clones of them, let alone real quality clones. We are lucky if a new "attraction" moves on a vehicle and isn't a Meet 'n Greet, and the Disney fandom swoons because they put one decent show scene in 7DMT.
It's not about being some Twit-turd teenage fan who is bummed about not having whatever crazy futuristic technologies Tomorrowland is about (though as a child of the 80's, I want my fraking Hoverboard, it's 2015 for crying out loud). I still honestly have little clue what the film is about other than magic pins (replicas and variations and limited edition versions available, kids!) and crazy space technology rides that somehow ties into a story of saving...something.
But that moment seeing IASW going postal is what just did me in. A dark ride that surprised you and really immersed you. It's all I can think about when I see the ads now - Disney is now making a movie about the ultimate theme park, which come on, let's face it, Clooney or not, was greenlit and paid for not only to mine the parks for ideas but "hey and it's free advertising" was helpful along the line somewhere. Parks that obviously don't offer that future fantasy experience, but don't even offer exciting experiences commesurate with 1995, let alone 2015.
So that's why Tomorrowland bums me out. I'll watch it, probably when it comes out on Blu-ray. But I just can't go to a theater and spend two hours straight being bummed - I'll have to watch it in chunks.
(Final note, as I was finishing this, I saw an ad for Jurassic World - a movie I am very much looking forward to, because - theme parks, and Dinosaurs - but also because not only are the existing rides decent, I have no doubt that in a few years at most, Universal will have all new Jurassic experiences that will wow me. Plus, Chris Pratt...mmm. Sorry Clooney, you will always be classic, but Chris Pratt is just...yummy.)
