Ha....poke fun if you want....but there is simply no denying it......Future world has effectively been dismantled through the rehab of pavilions such as The Living Seas. Future World should be renamed because the glue holding the attractions togather (concepts promoting progress, peace, conservation, ect...) have been replaced by unrelated rides and arcades. Who cares if pixar is popular....when did education and imagaination become unpopular?
I've got your back here.
Y'all can poke fun all you'd like, but I spend most of my time working toward practically the opposite of what was apparently achieved by this Nemo overlay to The Living Seas pavilion. The problem we have these days as a culture is that we undervalue the importance and value inherent in engaging our youth in the sciences. We make entertainment paramount over education and suffer for it in the end when every successive generation thinks better of actors and football players than it does of people working tirelessly and thanklessly to cure disease, make crops heartier, or make our planet healthier.
Epcot was an oasis that, from its inception, has always focused upon presenting exactly how valuable the contributions of these people have been through the years and provided, through the magic of the Disney way, fascinating, overwhelming experiences that immersed its visitors in the possibilities of the future. Perhaps because of my perspective I am among the minority, but emerging into the starfield at the top of Spaceship Earth with its giant projection of Earth does more to inspire me to want to go into space than any ride on Mission: SPACE ever can. It's visceral in a different, more effective way.
The popularity of characters from Nemo or from Monsters, Inc. offers the folks at WDI a fantastic opportunity to understand and respond to the existing cultural climate that ensures that most of the kids visiting the park won't give a second thought to anything that doesn't appeal to their MTV-cultivated attention spans. These characters can act as a gateway and filter for some engaging material; opening the door to many new questions and adventures. Instead, as seems to be the case with Nemo -- and was the case before even with rides like Test Track, Soarin' and Mission: SPACE -- these new experiences that appeal to a new generation are satisfied to begin and end with themselves. They have no ambition to be anything more than they are -- simple rides with simple stories -- and they abandon all hope of showing these kids (and some adults, too, for that matter) that there are still many great, fascinating mysteries of the world that, if solved, could make their lives and the lives of their neighbor, brother, teacher... better.
I miss that Epcot.
