Disney reinvents the future
Forbes , June 14, 1998
FOR THE THIRD TIME in its history, Disneyland has opened a revamped Tomorrowland. Gone are the impersonal chrome and steel of the old structures, along with the Mission to Mars ride, the PeopleMover and the Circle-Vision theater. In their place, Disney has built a kinder, gentler tomorrow with buildings decorated in lush jewel tones and gardens filled with fruit trees and edible plants. Tomorrowland still has spaceships aplenty, but it hasn't shut out things that grow.
Nor has it jettisoned the past to make way for the future. Just as the food plants connect human beings with nature, the new attractions connect yesterday and tomorrow. The design draws on the long-ago visions of Jules Verne and Leonardo da Vinci and restores some of its own history. Tomorrowland's new restaurant is decorated with posters of 1960s rides, and Disney has rebuilt the Buck Rogers-style Moonliner rocket it once dumped as out-of-date.
Many intellectuals see the revisions as proof that the future is scary, progress a fantasy and technology suspect. Cultural critic Tim Appelo declares that "The old Disney dream of erecting a futuristic techno-paradise is dead." These critics have it wrong. For them, a good future must be static: either the product of detailed, technocratic blueprints or the return to an idealized, stable past. The choice, they assume, is between the "one best way" of expert planning and a steady-state future undisturbed by ambition or creativity.
Similar assumptions pop up on many public issues, from environmental policy to popular culture, from biotechnology to the evolution of family life. Increasingly, the fundamental divide in American political and intellectual life is not between the familiar left and right but between stasis and dynamism—between people who insist on a closed future and people who support open-ended evolution through experimentation, competition and feedback. Both the technocrats and the technophobes are on the side of stasis.
Disneyland once promised a finite, controlled future. When it was new in the late 1950s, observers as varied as Vice President Richard Nixon and science fiction writer Ray Bradbury praised its meticulous design as the way society ought to be—a contrast to the spontaneous sprawl of southern California and the untidiness of eastern cities.
Now Disney has come down on the side of dynamism. Under pressure to please customers, it has abandoned the idea that a good future must be sterile, perfectly planned and disconnected from the past. Real people don't want to live in generic high-rise apartments and walk their dogs on treadmills, la the Jetsons. With the new Tomorrowland, Disney is betting that people can love technology and also want a world of rich texture, warm colors and sweet-smelling plants.
"What we're saying here is that the future has a place for you in it," says Tony Baxter, a senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering. The goal of the new design, Baxter says, is "to get your dream machine working in your mind, rather than turning you off by creating a clinically sterile future." Far from rejecting technology, the park celebrates creativity and dynamism. The ever-evolving Innoventions exhibit, for instance, features cutting-edge products and ideas, none of which will be on display for more than four months.
A future made up of many people's different dreams, a future that grows naturally out of the past and that is subject to constant revision, is a far more sophisticated, creative and tolerant concept than the all-encompassing schemes we once confused with "progress." But it is no less optimistic.
The park's new vision, says Baxter, expresses the human impulse to "re-create, reinvent and recombine." That dynamism displeases social critics who demand that the world conform to their static ideals. But it is far truer to the trial-and-error way that progress actually takes place.