The Future Is So Yesterday

But that, in many ways, was the high-water mark of the Disney core idea that "progress" was identical to the change brought to you by big corporations.

The novel technology that really launched Disneyland, of course, was television. "Disneyland," the TV show, debuted in 1954. The show became such an elaborate plug for the forthcoming park that the theme park's 1955 opening was broadcast on ABC in the biggest live telecast to date, featuring celebrities such as Frank Sinatra and Ronald Reagan.

Disney's television and film productions from "Davy Crockett" to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" translated directly to Frontierland and Fantasyland. But the future of Tomorrowland, "muffled in hope and the trappings of a thousand bad science-fiction novels," as Marling puts it, was driven most directly by Walt Disney's personal fascination with institutional research and technology, from Bell Labs to the space program.

When Walt died in 1966, some of his future died with him. His original plans for the 27,000-acre Disney property outside Orlando, for example, involved a real-life 20,000-resident city of our dreams -- the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. After his death, however, the board couldn't figure out why this was such a hot idea. So it never got past the drawing boards. When Epcot Center opened in 1982, it was a prudent, feasible, corporate theme park, albeit on a far larger canvas than was available on the original 160 acres of Disneyland in Anaheim.

The '60s and '70s were not good to the original Disney vision of the future. The Vietnam War, the assassinations, the revolt against anything square, the idea that big corporate computers only served to mangle individuality and imagination, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women's movement -- all challenged the notion that every day, in every way, things were getting better and better.

Even more profoundly, the 2,000-year-old idea of the inevitability of "progress" was taking holes beneath the waterline. As Robert Nisbet notes in "History of the Idea of Progress," across every ideology, people stopped believing one or more of the major premises that were its underpinnings -- that reason alone, and the scientific method, was inherently worthy of faith; that economic and technological flowering was unquestionably worthwhile; that Western civilization was noble and even superior to its alternatives. The theme of the Jimmy Carter years was "malaise."

Inevitably, perhaps, audacious optimism did resurface. In 1977, "Star Wars" returned us to a heroic future past. That same year the Apple II offered the novel notion that technology could empower the individual. In 1984, Ronald Reagan proclaimed "morning again in America." In 1989, the Wall fell and the generations-long Cold War cloud lifted. In 1993, a new browser brought to us the World Wide Web.

The damage to the idea of a benevolent future, however, had been done. The punk rock Sex Pistols, in their anthem "God Save the Queen," sang: "No future for you no future for me/No future no future for you."

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My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.

Charles F. Kettering, American engineer

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