Disney delves into the past to remake Tomorrowland

LOS ANGELES -- When Walt Disney rolled the dice and opened his Disneyland theme park in Anaheim in 1955, the park's Tomorrowland echoed a confident, peculiarly American vision of the future.

Though it was the least-finished part of the pioneering theme park when it opened, Tomorrowland would soon have an MIT-designed plastic house, a streamlined Rocket to the Moon and a optimistic vision of technology that promised the ability to overcome any limits.

But 40 years later, after the technological terrors of Chernobyl and Bhopal and dystopian films and books such as Blade Runner, Alien and William Gibson's Neuromancer, the future doesn't look so warm and fuzzy anymore. Which made it difficult for Disney's Imagineers to keep Tomorrowland both part of the "Happiest Place on Earth," and hip and forward looking, said Tony Baxter, a Disney senior vice president of creative services. So when Disneyland debuts its revamped Tomorrowland on Friday, visitors will quickly notice one thing. Disney cheated. Rather than redoing Tomorrowland into the latest vision of what will be, the company went back to the future, in some cases by a few hundred years, to tomorrows incarnated by the works of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, even Leonardo Da Vinci. "They've updated it in sort of a really practical way," said Karal Ann Marling, the University of Minnesota professor who culled 50,000 Disney plans, designs, drawings and more to create a just-opened exhibit at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood on the design intentions behind Disney's theme parks. "It has to be reassuring," Baxter said. "It's kind of our mantra." The Hammer exhibit displays 350 items -- including drawings, plans, designs, working models, even an audio-animatronic toucan from the Enchanted Tiki Room -- most of it hidden away in company archives for decades. The exhibit lays out Disney's ground-breaking ideas about architecture and design and the way they combined to create a highly lucrative, highly controlled environment that pillowed visitors from the buffeting of modern society, allowing them to relax into an idealized past and a hopeful future. All four Disney theme parks -- in Anaheim, Florida, Paris and Tokyo -- are based on a "hub and wienie" plan, where large, eye- catching monuments such as the Sleeping Beauty Castle give visitors visual cues that orient and reassure them, said Cindy Burlingham, the Hammer's acting chief curator. "At no time in the park can you get lost," said Burlingham. "Indecision makes you tired and creates anxiety." All the parks are heart-shaped, surrounded by a steam train's tracks and an earthen berm that cuts off contact with the outside world. Once visitors park their cars, they are whisked into an environment totally insulated from the complexities of the outside world -- with an idealized, pedestrian-dominated Main Street. "It's a very controlled environment," Burlingham said. Over time, Tomorrowland was the most serious evocation of Disney's utopian desires to create a more perfect, more livable city. But it took awhile to get there. "Part of the problem with that first Tomorrowland, there were all sorts of plans for it, but with the pressure of time and Walt's limited financing, there wasn't much there," Marling said. There were drawings of a monorail and buildings on stilts, but little had been created. On opening day, balloons hid the holes in Tomorrowland's array of mismatched details. "We had a bathroom of the future, and the Kaiser Aluminum (pavilion) of the future," said Disney Vice Chairman Marty Sklar. "No one had done it before, so we tried out a lot of things. With the plants, Walt said, `whatever's there, even if it's weeds, put up a sign with their botanical names on it.' " Sklar, who started work with the company a month before Disneyland opened, said the company has always struggled with its Tomorrowlands. "It's always the hardest thing to do in a theme park, because the future is a moving target," said Sklar. By 1959, most of the original Tomorrowland was already in the past, Sklar said. Among the major new additions were a fiberglass house of the future and the nation's first working monorail. Tomorrowland underwent another overhaul in 1967, when Disney added a people mover, the Carousel of Progress and what Baxter called a "very institutional" feel because of the numerous corporate-sponsored exhibits. The carousel's 32 audio-animatronic figures proclaimed "There's a Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow!" as its moving ramp carried visitors past Progress City, a 115-foot-long diorama of Disney's vision for the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. In 1976, "Space Mountain" was added, followed a decade later by George Lucas' "Star Tours" and related attractions. But Tomorrowland's look and feel changed little from its 1967 makeover and had become badly dated, Baxter said. In 1989, the Imagineers began toying with ways to redo Tomorrowland, considering a version of the alien spaceport in Lucas' Star Wars, but couldn't find a satisfactory direction, ultimately putting it aside for five years to work on other rides and Disneyland Paris. The change of direction proved fruitful, however. The challenge of designing an American theme park that would engage the notoriously xenophobic French forced the Imagineers to consider a more European version of Tomorrowland. In Paris, they found inspiration from an old city that still proudly displays many of its previous attempts to look forward, such as Baron Haussmann's urban redesign, the Eiffel Tower and the Pompidou Center, Baxter said. It was the exact opposite of Southern California's approach to futures past. "One of the mistakes we make about the future is that we don't show the previous versions of the future from the past," Baxter said. "Each time we erase that, we lose something."

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