Progress City, U.S.A.

In early 1982, Walt Disney Productions was working full bore on the construction of EPCOT Center. Behind schedule and over budget, construction crews toiled around the clock to try and have the park ready for the October 1st opening date. In the meantime, Disney management scrambled to prepare both cast members and the public for what would be a very different type of theme park.

EPCOT Center under construction in early 1982. Click to enlarge.

When Walt Disney announced his plans for EPCOT in 1966, he described a vision for a city of the future to be built in Florida. The EPCOT Center that Walt Disney Productions began to promote in 1978 looked nothing like these original plans, scrapping the idea of a working city and replacing it with plans for a permanent World’s Fair. Many people at the time were confused by the shift; what happened to those fantastic futuristic vistas that Walt had promised us? And what will this new theme park actually be?

In May of 1982, Eyes & Ears, Walt Disney World’s internal Cast Member publication, attempted to answer those questions by reprinting a number of questions and answers drawn from a series of EPCOT Center Updates that had been held that March. Disney’s President of Outdoor Recreation, Dick Nunis, hosted the updates and gave the responses printed below. There’s a lot of interesting material here; not only Nunis’s transparent attempts to spin away the fact that EPCOT Center bears no resemblance to Walt’s EPCOT city, but also several mentions of impending projects at Walt Disney World that were never built.

Dick Nunis sez “HOWAREYA?”

A Milestone In Dreaming And Doing

Q: Dick, there’s been a lot of discussion over a very important question: Have we deviated from Walt’s original concept of Epcot Center? How do you feel about this?

A: I can’t honestly say what we’d be doing now if Walt were here, but I don’t think we’ve deviated from his original concept. The thing that has haunted us for many years is the rendering done back in 1966. Walt believed very strongly that to sell a concept, a picture says a thousand words. So he had someone come up with this idea with a tower and the domed city, and what Walt was trying to do was sell a concept. He didn’t want to come to Florida and burden the local taxpayers with everything he knew he had to do. He wanted to show how, though the free enterprise system, a corporation could take virgin land and develop it without government subsidy.

The first thing we started out with was what we knew how to do … the Magic Kingdom, which is the Disneyland people know.

But what he really wanted to do was develop an area where all types of corporations, governments, and academia could come together to really try and solve some of the problems that exist in the world today. We started with the recreation area, and then began the community, which is Walt Disney World Village, and now we’re building the center … Epcot Center, and we’re going to connect it all with the monorail system.

I don’t think Walt ever intended to have a permanent resident population. I think he wanted to have a large tourist population and an area where people from all walks of life could come and learn.

I can remember when we got the final big parcel of our land which included Bay Lake. It was in the summer of 1966, and Walt called me up to his apartment in Disneyland, and he was really happy. He said, “Just think Dick, we own 43 square miles. That’s like getting on top of the Matterhorn and looking 7 miles one way and 11 miles the other. We’re going to be able to have our own Disneyland, our own Knott’s Berry Farm, our own Marineland and a couple of cities to boot.”

Well Walt, we’re almost there.

Q: What kind of attendance do we anticipate at Epcot Center?

A: When we open Epcot Center, we’ll release a combined attendance figure for both Epcot Center and the Magic Kingdom … a Walt Disney World attendance. Current attendance runs about 13 to 14 million people. We project 20 million people to visit Walt Disney World, per year. I think that’s conservative … I’ll tell you why. Right now we only penetrate 25 percent of Florida visitors. That leaves a lot of room for growth. We know for a fact that people are going down I-4 and passing by because they think we run a carousel.

I figure that Epcot Center will take on the magnitude of a World’s Fair because of the size … people are going to come to Epcot Center and they’re going to talk to other guests who have been in the Magic Kingdom, and I believe they are going to convince the others to visit the Magic Kingdom also.

We also believe that the European market will be very big for us. Last year 23 million foreign tourists visited the United States, and we only penetrated four percent of that. We believe that gives us great growth potential.

We’d also like to extend our guests’ length of stay from an admissions point of view. We won’t offer a one-day admission ticket that will be good for both the Magic Kingdom and Epcot Center. The reason for that? First of all, we’d be selling something that people couldn’t get their value out of and secondly, we’re trying to extend their length of stay. We’re going to market a three-day ticket that will be a very, very good value.

Q: What hours will Epcot Center operate?

A: Well, they’re subject to change, but these are what we have planned: during the slow season, Future World will open at 9 a.m. and World Showcase at 2 p.m., and both will close at 10 p.m. During the peak seasons, Future World will open, depending on demand, at 8 or 9 a.m. and World Showcase at 11 a.m. Both will close at midnight. We’re not going to change the operating hours for the Magic Kingdom.

Q: How will we staff Epcot Center?

A: We outlined the staffing procedure in the EYES & EARS several months ago. We’re going to need a staff of 3,000 people for Opening Day and that will break down to roughly 300 salaried and the balance in hourly classifications. There is one exception to our transfer-from-within policy … World Showcase. We’re trying to give the people a feeling that they’re actually in the country, so we want to theme the pavilions with the people from the different countries. That’s where the World Showcase Fellowship program comes in. Basically, this enables us to bring university students from other countries for one year to represent their country in World Showcase and to go to school together. It’s going to be a fantastic thing. We might just wind up with the greatest United Nations that’s ever been created.

Wouldn’t it be nice someday if a major power called another to say, “Hey! What’s going on?” because they knew each other way back when they worked at World Showcase at Walt Disney World.

We’ve committed ourselves to 100 of these students, and we’re going to look internally for these ethnic groups as well. If we cant’ find them internally, we’ll reach outside because we truly want to have Germans in the German pavilion and Italians in the Italian pavilion. We think that’s an extremely important part of the overall show.

Q: Will we ever expand Epcot Center?

A: Very definitely. Epcot Center will never be complete. We want to go ahead with the Seas pavilion and we feel there is a need for a Life and Health pavilion. Beyond that, there should be a Space pavilion, but we’ve put that on hold for now because the space industry is changing so rapidly.

In World Showcase we have nine countries to begin with: Canada, Great Britain, France, Japan, the United States, China, Italy, Mexico, and Germany, and there are eight other spaces available. We think they will fill up rather rapidly. We’ve signed a contract with Spain, and we’re negotiating with Israel. We’ll have an African pavilion. We’ll probably have a Scandinavian pavilion someday and we’ve also been talking with Venezuela. Now you see why I think those eight sites will fill up very rapidly.

We also have a blue-sky dream. On both sides of the American Adventure there is enough room to make a cut through and create another lagoon on the south side of the World Showcase where there are about five good building sites. The concept involved building a hotel in Australia for instance. If you’re staying in the hotel then you’re in World Showcase already, if you’re a day guest, you could take a cruise down to Australia or to the South Seas or other parts of the world. I think it’s a good concept and would be another way to generate more hotel space.

Q: Let’s talk about our plans outside Epcot Center. Do we have any plans of expanding the Magic Kingdom?

A: Very definitely, the Magic Kingdom will continue to grow. It’s designed to expand to the north in Fantasyland, and I’d like to bring the Matterhorn to the Magic Kingdom. It’d be the tallest Mountain in Florida. Our concept would be to put the Matterhorn over the train, creating a blizzard scene with real snow. Can you imagine people in July and August riding the train to get cool?

Q: What about the Tokyo Disneyland project?

A: Tokyo Disneyland, quite honestly, will be a fantastic success. Just imagine a local audience of 35 million within a 15-mile radius. Right now, we’re providing as much creative help to support them and get it open next March.

Q: Do we plan to expand our hotels?

A: Estimates say that this area is between 15,000 and 19,000 hotel rooms short. We’re worried about it. Right now we plan to expand the Polynesian Village, Golf Resort, and the Walt Disney World Village resort area.

We also have in design three hotels. The Mediterranean will be located between TTC and the Contemporary. The Cypress Point Lodge will be west of River Country and be themed as a western hotel. It’ll include log cabins along Bay Lake.

The third one, the Grand Floridian, we’ll build on the old Asian site on Seven Seas Lagoon. It will be a replica of the great Florida hotels of the early 1900’s. Our creative people came up with an absolutely beautiful design.

In addition, we have some dreams for the Walt Disney World Village. From the Empress Lilly, we’re going into a New Orleans street, and you’ll walk right into a beautiful New Orleans hotel.

Those are the kinds of things we can continue to do in the future here at Walt Disney World … I think the sky is the limit.

Let me finish by saying that the great strength of our company is our name. It’s internationally known, and the reason it has maintained a reputation is because of the job that all of you people do. The greatest asset Walt Disney World has is its people, and right now, I’d like to thank you. We’ve been going through some very difficult times, and thanks to all of your efforts, I think we’ve done an outstanding job.

Yes; the reason I have so much confidence in our company is because of all of you. We’re going to be doing a lot of things beyond Epcot Center … we’re going to create dreams that we might not have thought of yet. And the reason is because of you.

I want you to know that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing you are important and I appreciate what you’ve done in the past. I appreciate what you’re doing now, and I appreciate the job you are going to do in the future.

Again we travel to 1986 via the magic of Progress City Public Access TV. This time we take a look at what’s new at Walt Disney World that year - note that it’s all at EPCOT Center. The clips are framed with the device of our noble hosts picking their favorite things at Walt Disney World; how strange that they happen to be the three newest attractions!

First Joan Lunden and spawn take us to The Living Seas, then Ben Vereen and pal Hooter drop in on Captain E.O. Finally Regis is there to show us his favorite attraction in Walt Disney World - the new World Showcase lagoon show Skyleidoscope. I really wonder how serious Regis was about his selection procedure. Skyleidoscope might be unfamiliar to more recent Disney fans, and is sure to make you say “wha?” In fact, looking at it now, it resembles a lower-tech version of a lagoon show from Tokyo DisneySea.

So soak up that 80s goodness courtesy of the 1986 Very Merry Christmas Parade:

Being a history-oriented Disney obsessive means that occasionally, from time to time, you find yourself immersed in activities both arcane and inexplicable to the general population. Sometimes you have to invent names for these pastimes; for this post I’m voting for “berm analysis.”

When Walt Disney Productions announced in 1978 that it would proceed with the design and construction of EPCOT Center, one of the pavilions planned for the park’s 1982 debut was known as Life & Health. While this attraction would not appear until 1989 under the name Wonders of Life, a pavilion centered around the theme of human health was central to EPCOT Center’s design from its inception.

A model from the late 1970s of the Life & Health pavilion. Click to enlarge.

While a full retelling of this pavilion’s origins will have to wait for a future post, there is a historical oddity that I’d like to throw out to the open internet in the hope that someone out there might be able to shed a little light on this mystery.

I was recently discussing the Life & Health pavilion with Disney historian extraordinaire Martin Smith, when I mentioned that during EPCOT Center’s first year there had been a sign between The Land and the future site of The Living Seas trumpeting the soon-to-arrive Life & Health pavilion. Martin thought that I must be wrong, as the only pavilion ever planned for that plot that he was aware of was the second iteration of Journeys in Space. This opinion was echoed by Mike Lee, webmaster of the spectacular Widen Your World, who also remembered the Health pavilion as always being planned for the Wonders of Life spot. As I trust Mike and Martin’s research far more than I trust my childhood memories, I surveyed the members of my family who had been on those early trips to see if they recalled the sign. Strangely enough, the only person who clearly recalled seeing it also remembered without prompting that it had been between Land and Seas.

Further contributing to the confusion were a couple of pictures which were the only documentation I’ve been able to find over the years of the signs in situ:

Future site of The Living Seas. Click to enlarge.

Future site of Life & Health. Click to enlarge.

Wider angle of the Life & Health site. Click to enlarge.

As you see, the berm behind the two signs looks very similar. As Foxx from Passport to Dreams pointed out, the round planter on the edge of the picture resembles those in Future World West as opposed to the angular planters in Future World East (now that’s good fandom!). I also speculate that, if the Life & Health sign were in the position currently occupied by Wonders of Life, the construction of Horizons would be clearly visible in the background. Perhaps more definitive is this photo that Martin sent along, which comes from the book Walt Disney World: The First Decade:

EPCOT Center, circa 1982. Click to enlarge.

You can clearly make out the berm in front of the land intended for The Living Seas which matches the landscaping behind both signs. The walkway past the site is close enough to the berm that these pictures would be possible, and it might be my imagination but I think I can make out the circular planter seen in the picture. In Future World East, where Wonders of Life would eventually be located, the Horizons construction wall dominates the angular terrain and there’s no sign of a berm or significant landscaping.

So, mystery solved? Not really, but it does indicate that my youthful memory isn’t as bad as I suspected. What we need to know now is whether this sign was really in Future World West, and whether the Imagineers ever intended for the pavilion to actually be located on that site.

After that we’ll move on to the mystery of how I have a girlfriend, and people who talk to me in real life when they know I spend my free time doing berm analysis.

The year was 1986.

Walt Disney World was celebrating its 15th anniversary, and Regis Philbin was there to document the history of the Vacation Kingdom. Regis was only the “man on the street” reporter for the 1986 Very Merry Christmas Parade; Joan Lunden and Ben Vereen provided the live and awkward commentary from the booth. These were the days when the park was the star of the show, as mercifully there was not a Miley Cyrus or boy band of the moment to be found.

We’re now farther away from 1986 than Regis and pals were from Walt Disney World’s 1971 opening day… this makes me sad. But thankfully my family VCR was there to witness it, and now as the debut broadcast of Progress City’s Public TV station WED-TV I offer to you… the first 15 years of Walt Disney World.

That ol’ Rumor Mill is a funny thing. Long, long droughts can occur and it seems like nothing new will ever come over the transom. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a flash flood of new speculation to sift through. Such is the case now, as the rumors concerning Walt Disney World’s impending 40th anniversary celebration have reached the boiling point. There are a whole slew of possibilities being discussed at this point, but precious few details of any of the planned changes.

What is intriguing about this celebration is the fact that, unlike recent anniversaries or resort-wide marketing events, the focus is not entirely on new park additions but also includes several legacy attractions. This is similar to Disneyland’s 50th anniversary, which focused a great deal on the restoration and revitalization of several classic Disney attractions that had fallen into disrepair under the shameful mismanagement of Paul Pressler. It seems at this point that the Magic Kingdom will receive a bit of much-needed TLC to revive it from its own current state of decay; the not-so-benign neglect of current management has left Florida’s park a poor shadow of the refurbished Anaheim original.

Thankfully, we’ve already seen some improvements come to the Magic Kingdom. The Pirates of the Caribbean rehab which added Jack Sparrow actually improved the attraction, something which couldn’t be said for the Disneyland iteration. Last year the Haunted Mansion received a massive overhaul which not only fixed its rickety audio system but actually plussed the attraction beyond all expectation. We’ve also reported on the Country Bear Jamboree, which goes down for a critically needed rehab this fall. After that, though, things start to get speculative.

One thing we do know is that the Hall of Presidents will be closing on the first of November for an incredibly long rehab. Disney’s public refurbishment calendar is only available up to February, but reputable message board sources report that the rehab will actually extend until early next July. With the presidential election looming in November of 2008, it was expected that the attraction would eventually go dark in order to mercifully remove the animatronic of the current child-king from his speaking role and to add the animatronic of our new commander-in-chief. What is unexpected is the apparent length of the upcoming rehab and the scope of the changes it indicates.

Ulytheth Eth. Grant

There has been a lot of speculation recently that the new president, no matter who wins, would not receive a speaking role like the current inhabitant or Bill Clinton before him. This would reduce the risk of polarization in the current political climate, as well as avoiding uncomfortable undertones due to things like marital infidelities or being a war criminal with a 20% approval rating. The predominant rumor is that the focus of the show will return to Abraham Lincoln himself, and while no one yet knows what the tone of this new presentation will be, one hopes that it will resemble the scope of the original 1971 show rather than the slavery-centric storyline that was tacked on in 1993 to appease historians critical of Disney’s efforts to build a theme park in Virginia. I could elaborate on what else needs to be done to restore this impressive attraction to its original status, but thankfully Foxx at Passport to Dreams has already done it for me. Hopefully we’ll find out more about this long and hopefully significant rehab soon.

This brings us to the final attraction currently rumored to be destined for rehab - the Enchanted Tiki Room. Unlike the two previously mentioned show upgrades, this refurbishment currently resides only in the realm of rumor and hearsay. Yet multiple sources continue to say that, at some point before 2011, something will happen to the Tiki Room. This stands to reason; after all, aside from Journey into YOUR Imagination, The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management! has to be the most reviled attraction overhaul in Walt Disney World history. Disney fans have bemoaned the attraction since it opened in 1998, and mostly tend to stay away these days. Meanwhile, in California, the original Tropical Serenade show was fully restored for Disneyland’s 50th anniversary and plays daily to happy and entertained guests. So what’s to happen in Orlando after Iago and Zazu get the boot?

LOUD = FUNNY

Here opinions differ; so far there seem to be two versions of the story. The first says that for Walt Disney World’s 40th anniversary the show will be returned to its original program for a short time while preparations are made for the installation of an entirely new show. The other version omits this return of the Tropical Serenade and says that WDI will just skip to the new attraction. Both versions agree on what this new show will be - after all, it’s already playing in Tokyo.

Earlier this year WDI debuted the third show to play in Japan’s Tiki Room, The Enchanted Tiki Room: Stitch Presents “Aloha e Komo Mai”. The new show, which is completely different from the original, adds Stitch to the mix and incorporates music from his film Lilo and Stitch. Rather than have me tell you about it, take a look below:

As a fan of the original Tiki Room, I have several thoughts about this. First, it’s not all that bad. It’s definitely a darn sight better than the current Under New Management show. The addition of Stitch makes far more sense thematically than Zazu and Iago, and the music from the film is a nice match as well. Hopefully the English script would be punched up a bit; in the version above there’s a bit too much “saying what’s happening” going on. The dialogue is a tad redundant as well, and needs a bit of that original Tiki Room charm. I’d also dial down the confusion and loudness factor, and let things play out a little bit more. The current version of the show is way too in-your-face; after all, isn’t the tiki lifestyle all about relaxation? Most importantly, though, is the cardinal importance of returning the original theme song. People going to the Tiki Room expect to hear The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room and should be able to get it without Gilbert Gottfried screaming or Stitch blowing an airhorn. Throw in the Hawaiian War Chant from the original show as well, and I’ll be a happy camper.

Note to management: Build time machine ASAP!

Again, this is all hearsay at the moment but hopefully some change is on the way to Adventureland. Sources say that the addition of the Stitch show depends on its success in Tokyo, but that seems assured. Less certain is the supply of money or willpower from management, but we can always hope. Hopefully the Tiki Gods will smile on us and come 2011 the birds will sing words and the flowers will croon once more.