Top 4 Reasons Disneyland’s Tomorrowland Is Stuck in the Past and Present
According to Sam Gennawey’s “The Disneyland Story,” Walt Disney postponed work on Tomorrowland in 1954 because he wasn’t happy with the way it was going. When work finally started in earnest in January of 1955, the park was a scant seven months away from opening day. Tomorrowland was supposed to be “a step into the future with predictions of constructive things to come” and “a living blueprint of our future” according to its dedication plaque.
The original attractions included the Autopia, a small highway system, which forecasted what was to come for automobiles and drivers. The Clock of the World sponsored by Timex showed the current time in cities around the world. The TWA Moonliner was a large rocket ship that captured guests’ imaginations. Space Station X-1 showed the United States from space before anyone had been there. To help fill out Tomorrowland, Walt brought in set pieces from “20,000 Leagues under the Sea.” The Rocket to the Moon sponsored by TWA opened five days later than the park and took guests on a trip to the moon.
These attractions were a part of the “science-factual” nature of Tomorrowland. Walt wanted to show people appositive future that they would actually love through. He set the first Tomorrowland in 1986, the year Halley’s Comet would make its return to Earth’s sky.
Other attractions joined these, many sponsored by corporations and celebrating the future of a particular business’ focus. Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation brought in an attraction about aluminum. Monsanto’s Hall of Chemistry celebrated better living through chemicals. Tomorrowland hosted several other corporations who presented their products in reference to the present and the future.
In 1967, Tomorrowland was revamped to show a more optimistic future. Before his death, Walt recognized the problem with the land. “The only problem with anything of tomorrow is that at the pace we’re going right now, tomorrow would catch up with us before we got it built,” Walt was quoted by David Fisher in the Fall 1997 “Disney Magazine” (as cited in Gennawey, p.229). Men had been to space and highways had been built, which meant the old Tomorrowland was losing its relevance as a predicter of constructive things to come. The Monorail was already in place, but the Disney Company added the Submarine Voyage, the PeopleMover, and the Carousel of Progress.
1967’s attractions would also become outdated, and Tomorrowland would get another update in 1998 where Imagineers tried to create a version of tomorrow that futurist had thought of since Leonardo da Vinci. The idea was to present a timeless vision of the future rather than a realistic one. The decision is what led to the decline in Disneyland’s vision of the future.
Today, Tomorrowland still has the Autopia, which is incredibly popular but no longer futuristic. Even after the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, it has Star Wars Launch Bay, HyperSpace Mountain on occasion and Star Tours — attractions all set “a long time ago” according to “New Hope’s” title crawl. The Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage and Buzz LightYear’s Astro Blasters are set in the world of today. This leaves the Monorail as the loan attraction that even remotely faces the future. What’s the problem with Tomorrowland that Disney can’t fix? It comes down to four main reasons.
Profit Margin
Money is the company’s first concern. Innovation and creativity are expensive, and spending money every 11 years or sooner to update a land about tomorrow is not an investment the Disney Company wants to make, especially when it can get away with putting its own IP in the space of Tomorrowland and use the opportunity to keep their entertainment fresh and in the public’s mind. Buzz Lightyear may not be the popular attraction it once was, but it certainly supported the company’s Toy Story 4 release by helping people remember their happy memories of the previous films and this attraction. It’s a part of the synergy that the company has built into its business model.
Corporate Secrecy and Competition
In the early days, corporations used Disneyland to sell their products to America through pavilions much like a World’s Fair. Because Disney was able to pull in corporate sponsors, it was able to show a version of the future that people would experience. With competition at the front of every corporation, it has become more difficult to get companies to show what they are developing for release more than a couple of weeks away. Even then, corporations can simply set up a web conference and reveal to a larger audience than Disneyland could guarantee (which doesn’t explore the fact that Disney would rather have its own IP in its park).
Creativity and Innovation Are Difficult
Coming up with new things is difficult even for a business that has been considered one of the most creative companies for decades. Look at Disney’s 2019 movie slate and see where the creativity has dropped off. It may be that the Disney Company has just siphoned that creativity into other areas, like its Disney+ programming and its Star Wars: Galaxy Edge. But that has left nothing for the future. Creativity and innovation require risk, investment, and time. To continually do that for a single land seems like too much investment of resources for a small payoff, especially when their other future leaning properties, like Epcot, are moving away from the future and taking on a more pragmatic corporate approach to capturing their guests’ dollars.
Lack of Optimism about the Future
In the 1950s, science, technology and the atom were going to save humanity. Atomic energy would take care of America’s need for energy. Plastics were making everything safer from medical procedures to food storage and more. If they were going to create a problem, they could also solve it. Corporate science was the answer to the question of how the future could become better. The 1980s corporate science was seen in a different light as was the future. Imagineer Tony Baxter blamed the apocalyptic vision of 1982’s “Bladerunner” for Disneyland being unable to come up with an optimistic version of the future that didn’t seem corny. “America changed in the 1970s. People developed a cynical view of the future,” Baxter said to Jerry Hirsch of the “Orange County Register” (cited in Gennawey, p. 359).
None of these reasons are sufficient to conclude that the Disney Company can’t build a new Tomorrowland that would explore better ways of living and advances of science based on more than corporate intervention. Disney is still home to some of the most creative people on the planet, and if the company wanted to, it could expand its base of idea-makers to come up with ideas that would create a continual influx of newness and joy into Tomorrowland.
For a start, it could tap into its own incubator program and allow the start-ups it has sponsored to develop their tech onsite or to give people a view of a couple of new technologies. It could embrace the corn, just as Walt Disney had done when he was alive and present a positive future as an alternative to the apocalyptic dystopias that are popular in YA literature and on the screen. It could devote a larger portion to a visible research and development team that would be allowed to present its ideas to the public without fear of losing a possible proprietary innovation.
At the moment, however, judging by the plans for Epcot, that seems like too much to hope for. That leaves the challenge of coming up with a better vision of the future to us.
