The Future Is So Yesterday

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The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Paul Valery, French poet

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We and Disney and the future of the future have had an intense and wildly varied bond.

Halfway down Main Street U.S.A., as Sleeping Beauty's castle looms before you, hang a right near the bronze statue of Walt and Mickey, and you enter Tomorrowland. The rest of the world disappears as you are surrounded by all the fanciful structures devoted to, for example, Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blaster, the good old Submarine Voyage that's now involved with"Finding Nemo," the Space Mountain roller coaster and the bulbous whale of a building with the long winding ramp, called Innoventions. The latter is where you find the attractions designed to be more readily modified or replaced, such as the collection of stage-set-like rooms that make up the Dream Home.

Squint a little and you can see Walt's vision of Tomorrowland was rooted in the 1939 New York World's Fair, says Karal Ann Marling, the recently retired professor of art history and American studies at the University of Minnesota, in her definitive "Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance."

No previous fair had been so explicitly and self-consciously a celebration of progress. Its gleaming future offered an American urbanism "as it ought to be," with broad boulevards aiming at different grand statues or towers. "The rational decision-making, the neat subdivisions of the plan, and the sheer spit-and-polish newness stood in studied contrast to the down-at-the-heels vernacular" of urban reality after 10 years of the Depression, Marling writes.

It was all there -- Democracity, Futurama -- masterpieces of multimedia architectural modeling with autos of the future whizzing past miniature high-rises on tiny highways, heading for tidy cul-de-sacs with houses painted in happy, scientifically chosen colors. We were dazzled. This was a future we could believe in.

Disney's contribution to this fair was only a special Mickey Mouse cartoon for the Nabisco pavilion. But Walt was smitten. The idea that you could build an entire world in which visitors could step into a three-dimensional story about the future was a revelation.

You can still see this fair's aesthetics in Disneyland, especially in the monumentally tall objects like the signature castle or, in Tomorrowland, the Rube Goldberg-like Astro Orbiter ride. These are meant to lure visitors toward them down the broad boulevards. In Disneyspeak, these are called "weenies."

By the time the 1964 New York World's Fair opened, Disney's view of the future was ubiquitous there, from the Small World attraction at the Pepsi pavilion, to the Magic Skyway of the Ford pavilion, to GE's Carousel of Progress with the theme song "It's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow." This is also where lifelike "Audio-Animatronic" robots, which brought the effects of animation into the real world, made their big splash. You can still find baby boomers who haven't gotten over the full-size Abraham Lincoln orating in the Illinois pavilion.