News Big changes coming to EPCOT's Future World?

networkpro

networkpro

Well-Known Member
In the Parks
Yes
Rich Brownn said:
They did say it came from plants. The lead in was the plants existed at the same time great dinosaurs roamed the earth. And then it was "Now, come experience..." leading into the diorama
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That's inaccurate as the was not concurrent with the era. The beginning of the dinosaurs was the start of the Mesozoic ear. The Paleozoic era was the source of petroleum. Even the mention of Dinosaurs in the narration didnt happen until the Plebeianization of the attraction to add in Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye, both who had Disney corporation shows at the time. The closest the original came to mentioning dinosaurs was a reference to great reptiles.

https://communicorewest.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-universe-of-energy-scripts.html

Compare that to what it became with Ms DeGeneres and Bill Nye were added:

Bill: Oh, it's all around you. You see, these plants and animals are soaking up energy from the sun. When they die and get buried, time, pressure and heat'll cook them into the fossil fuels we rely on today. Like, uh, coal, natural gas, and oil.

Dream Ellen: Wait a minute. You're telling me that we're filling our gas tanks with -- well, with dinosaur soup?

Bill: Well, not exactly, but dinosaurs did live when fossil fuels were developing in the earth. And dinosaurs are just cool! Let's check 'em out!
 
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UNCgolf

UNCgolf

Well-Known Member
networkpro said:
That's inaccurate as the Paleozoic was not concurrent with the Mesozoic era. The beginning of the dinosaurs was the start of the Paleozoic ear. The Mesozoic era was the source of petroleum. Even the mention of Dinosaurs in the narration didnt happen until the Plebeianization of the attraction to add in Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye, both who had Disney corporation shows at the time. The closest the original came to mentioning dinosaurs was a reference to great reptiles.

https://communicorewest.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-universe-of-energy-scripts.html

Compare that to what it became with Ms DeGeneres and Bill Nye were added:

Bill: Oh, it's all around you. You see, these plants and animals are soaking up energy from the sun. When they die and get buried, time, pressure and heat'll cook them into the fossil fuels we rely on today. Like, uh, coal, natural gas, and oil.

Dream Ellen: Wait a minute. You're telling me that we're filling our gas tanks with -- well, with dinosaur soup?

Bill: Well, not exactly, but dinosaurs did live when fossil fuels were developing in the earth. And dinosaurs are just cool! Let's check 'em out!
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Are you mixing up the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic?

The Mesozoic was the age of dinosaurs (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous), not the Paleozoic.
 
networkpro

networkpro

Well-Known Member
In the Parks
Yes
UNCgolf said:
Are you mixing up the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic?

The Mesozoic was the age of dinosaurs (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous), not the Paleozoic.
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Yes I had them swapped
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I'm an engineer by trade, not a geologist or paleontologist.
 
October82

October82

Well-Known Member
networkpro said:
Suppositions at best about the precursors of petroleum. The majority of the biomass was herbaceous and if the they were to exclude fantasy , the dinosaurs should have been omitted.
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Epcot isn't a science museum. An element of the fantastic is certainly appropriate to the park, which is what the dinosaurs were.

The real issue with Universe of Energy is the confused narrative of (at least) its second incarnation. Many of the future world pavilions share a common structure and start with a 'where we're from' segment. In UOE, this takes the form of the Big Bang and dinosaurs sections, where both are standing in for 'deep time' and the word 'energy' here is really referring to how the natural world changes over time, rather than 'energy' as in what Exxon sells you.

The need for sponsorship turns the second half from being a 'where we are today and where we could go' into what amounts to an advertisement for fossil fuels (including a rather strange plug for non-existent 'clean coal') which barely touches upon atomic age technologies (probably out of fear of controversy) or renewables in the way the late 2000s or 2010s would have expected. That also meant it lost relevance much quicker as climate change and renewable energy went from niche topics to major contemporary issues.

That aside, fossil fuels and renewables could have been a fine 'today' section in concept. The narrative problems aren't solely about poor execution, but also about the ride never offering a coherent vision of the future. As a result, the attraction is missing an organizing narrative and feels incomplete. The disjointed second half spends so much time on 'energy as technology' that we never get a glimpse of the 'deep future' to make the overall structure clear. The end result is a narrative where the dinosaurs, rather than adding a bit of the fantastic to the first half, seems out of place in a ride about fossil fuels. Really, a bit of the fantastic in the second half would have strengthened both the education and the entertainment value of the pavilion.
 
MisterPenguin

MisterPenguin

President of Animal Kingdom
Premium Member
October82 said:
Epcot isn't a science museum. An element of the fantastic is certainly appropriate to the park, which is what the dinosaurs were.
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Not being a science museum is no excuse for purposefully muddying facts. The only reasons dinosaurs were there in the first place is because petroleum companies marketed oil as 'dead dinosaurs.' For decades before EPCOT, scientists knew that wasn't true.

That's why in the Ellen version, Nye has to hand wave away the dinosaurs as being around (millions of years later) while oil was forming from the plants/microbes that died millions of years earlier. "And they're cool!"

And they shouldn't have been there in the first place to bolster the lie of a marketing campaign.

A better cop out is they accidentally travelled to the wrong time. Or to purposely correct the myth that oil comes from dinosaurs. Nye was correcting Ellen over and over again. He could have corrected her false knowledge.

Nye: Ellen what are we doing here with all the dinosaurs?​
​
Ellen: Sorry, can't control my own dream, but isn't that were oil comes from?​
​
Nye: That's just a myth. Oil formed from the deposits of microbes deposited millions of years earlier. Those deposits are already buried, and with the the pressure of layers and layers of sediments and the heat of the earth, they're being turned into oil.​

No one's complaining about the other fantastical elements... the dream, time travel, etc... The complaint is about a falsehood.
 
October82

October82

Well-Known Member
MisterPenguin said:
Not being a science museum is no excuse for purposefully muddying facts. The only reasons dinosaurs were there in the first place is because petroleum companies marketed oil as 'dead dinosaurs.' For decades before EPCOT, scientists knew that wasn't true.
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To be clear, scientists never thought that was true. And yes, falsehoods throughout UOE are both a well documented consequence of its sponsorship and likely one of the causes of the incomplete/poor narrative structure of the attraction.

No one's complaining about the other fantastical elements... the dream, time travel, etc... The complaint is about a falsehood.
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Actually, what I was responding to here was the specific idea that "UOE belonged in fantasyland as much as Guardians of the Galaxy does". Futureworld had fantasy elements as a core part of its storytelling and narrative. Singling out the UOE dinosaurs as problematic for its fantastical elements is missing the forest for the trees. The issue isn't fantasy, it's incoherent storytelling in the rest of the attraction.

The falsehoods in the present day energy sections and the poorly conceived (re: false) transition are also problematic but for different reasons. To the extent this matters, it's because UOE was flawed in execution, not in concept. Like much of Futureworld, had it been updated with more care and regularity, it would still be highly relevant. I suspect the same will not be true of the pure fantasy of Guardians several decades from now.
 
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Epcot82Guy

Epcot82Guy

Well-Known Member
I'll reserve judgment until it's done. But, having seen it in person, it looks a lot cheaper than I thought it would. I really hope the final product looks better than it does right now. I'm sure the lighting will help (like the central gardens), but that's only for a small portion of the day most of the year.
 
FigmentJedi

FigmentJedi

Well-Known Member
MisterPenguin said:
Not being a science museum is no excuse for purposefully muddying facts. The only reasons dinosaurs were there in the first place is because petroleum companies marketed oil as 'dead dinosaurs.' For decades before EPCOT, scientists knew that wasn't true.
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They still do too. There's multiple Texas science museums with big oil sponsored Energy exhibits that have little time machine simulator rides shoehorning dinosaurs into the mix.
 

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