When I was ten, I would've picked EPCOT in a heartbeat. I think lots of ten year olds would pick a modern EPCOT over last week's space pulp any day. As attests the ever rising popularity of science museums, of popular children's exhibits in museums, and the insatiable appetite of ten year old boys for anything relating to dinosaurs/planets/space/wonders of the world or of technology.
You could've fooled me. Science museums in some markets may be gaining in popularity, but in others, they're stagnating or falling behind. (MOSI in Tampa is a fabulous example. They're trying harder now, but for a very long time, the story wasn't a celebration at all.) It's rather telling that, aside from some notable exceptions (Chicago's MSI-produced
Mythbusters exhibit, for one), the market for traveling/temporary exhibitions has practically fallen out. Pittsburgh's Carnegie Science Center converted its large temporary exhibition gallery to a permanent exhibit on robotics, and I'm hard pressed to find anything about traveling exhibitions anywhere on the museum website. (What's more, much of the robotics exhibit is a re-hash of a robotics exhibit they showed when I was still in high school. The current Zap! Surgery exhibit was new when I was an intern after my freshman year of undergrad. That was... oh, a good, long while ago. Even then, the space would sit empty for extended periods of time with only some giant, playable chessboards or checkerboards available to the public. Not good.) This after a history of elaborate exhibits that traveled the country on actual touring sequences (Pittsburgh was always after Columbus), instead of something being developed at some institution and maybe showing up nearby somewhere possibly-maybe-if-some-grants-or-membership-sales-campaigns-etc-etc-etc. In many places (MOSI, I'm looking at you), permanent exhibitions become
permanently under-maintained exhibitions, and anyone following WDW problems can recite the evils of same.
Careful of that "insatiable appetite of ten year old
boys." If more girls were told and shown that they were allowed to have (or maybe
show) that insatiable appetite, the stereotype wouldn't exist. Parity ain't anywhere near there yet.
What kills me is that Future World wasn't a science center to begin with. Were there elements of interactive, science-center-style exhibitry around? Sure. Almost all of Communicore, the Image Works (not so didactic, that), the more expository rooms in Seabase Alpha, and several of the items in Wonders of Life (some of which seem to have been lifted from the
Exploratorium Cookbook). So very much beyond that, though, wasn't anything of the sort. Horizons wasn't a science center exhibit. Listen to/Living with the Land, nope. SSE, absolutely not. Future World fed something well beyond what the local science center could, but it certainly could send a kid rolling over to the museum (or, for that matter, the library). I think I mourn the loss of that difference as much as anything else. Future World was its own thing, and it doesn't now (nor really ever did) duplicate anything a museum could do. It never needed to!
