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The return of Epcot’s Horizons, part 4

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People are screaming for a return of Horizons. Why won’t they rebuild it? (read part 3)

Technology
Disney needs to stay ahead of the pack, and with Bob Iger at the helm of the massive entertainment empire, staying ahead means technology.The Iger-Nator: Technological storyteller

Iger, the man who took over following the ouster of former CEO Michael Eisner, has been on a mission to ‘plus’ the theme parks with as much technology as possible, mainly through the implementation of interactive queues. He has taken a look at the cultural landscape, seen that kids have more powerful computer systems at home than those that run most of the Walt Disney World attractions and decided that technological innovation is one of Disney’s top priorities.

The Horizons pavilion, an interesting bit of engineering in its own right, was in bad shape. To gain the desired vanishing horizon/landing spaceship effect, they had to give up alot of stability and that, combined with the discovery of a sinkhole beneath the building, meant the structure was falling in on itself. It was too expensive to fix and simply had to come down, whether on its own or with help. If you have to take the building down, you have to take the attraction down, and if you have to take the attraction down, you might as well put a better one up in its place. Or so the thinking went.

Eisner was a builder, so he built. A lead-footed storyteller, Eisner went full speed ahead, putting up hotel space, restaurants, shopping areas and the odd ride or two, including Horizon’s replacement, Mission: Space. Bob Iger is a plusser, so he is plussing. He has seen what he has on hand and, rather than build anew, has decided to make it better using cutting edge technology. Iger has sought to push his company past all other imitators in a field that has been at best a necessary evil—queues. The number one complaint at a Disney theme parks has always been the long lines, so rather than shrug his shoulders, seeing this ‘problem’ as simply a reflection of better numbers at the gate, he has decided to confront the issue head on with the addition of interactive games, shows and special effects that will help to ease the long wait times.

Many worry about all these interactive additions to queues, perhaps rightly, seeing a queue as a ‘pre-show’ whose purpose is to get you in the proper frame of mind for the attraction you are about to experience, and that shoehorning in technology haphazardly (debatable) diminishes from the aesthetic and overall story, but the long-term implications remain to be seen. Bob Iger tells his stories through technology, and to do any different would be betraying himself.

What does this have to do with Horizons? There are two problems with investing so heavily in technology—it is expensive and it is always racing forward.

The expense issue is simple. Spend all your money on queues and you don’t have anything left for rides. Now, this is a gross oversimplification as clearly Disney will continue to make new additions to the parks, but it is worth consideration. When you spend lots of money in areas that traditionally occupy less of the budget you have to be even more selective about the new attractions that get the green light. With this new restriction, likely any addition to the park will be something new (like Mission: Space) rather than a revitalization of something old (like Horizons).

The second issue is a little more tricky. Technology charges ahead and any company that has newest, latest and greatest as one of its stated goals had better be ready. Companies that do stay ahead of the technological curve are small and nimble, if not in size then in product offering, and can change quickly. Disney is large and lumbering, and cutting edge technology quickly goes out of date, potentially making attractions feel old before the paint is dry. Disney has learned hard lessons in the past about dating itself (see the evolution of Tomorrowland as an example), and likely will work hard to avoid making the same mistake.

Some see gloom and doom for today with either the alteration of old favorites or their loss altogether, but we should try to think forward to what the future may hold. The massive financial and ideological investment in technology today may very well be the groundwork for something very exciting just over the horizon. The tools are there, just waiting for someone who knows how to use them.

Horizons was a storytelling experience, not a technological one. The Disney company began with the great dreamer and doer Walt Disney, withered beneath the Disney-in-law Ron Miller, ballooned through the builder Michael Eisner, and now is gaining the technological infrastructure for the future through the plusser Bob Iger. Perhaps next Disney will tap a great storyteller—someone who knows how to pull all the pieces of the past together, not for their own sake but for the sake of story, and who lives, breathes and innately feels the full implications of the long lost phrase: If we can dream it, we can do it.

The return of Epcot’s Horizons

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Horizons--a mosaic of interestsHorizons, the long extinct Epcot attraction, gets an incredible amount of play on the internet. To listen to the chatter, you’d think that Disney hasn’t accomplished anything of note since the ride went up and, after a lengthy flirtation with theme park abyss, down. Walt Disney Imagineering has achieved an incredible amount since the 1980s—international theme parks, vast domestic expansion and a growing fleet of cruise ships—yet among the faithful, Horizons is the holy grail. Nothing will ever surpass the breadth of scope and storytelling.

I loved the attraction as a kid, although admittedly it wasn’t until recently that I realized it. When I would visit the parks after my childhood, I found myself flooded with vague recollections of ride scenes from the past—a man in a space capsule with a chicken, a multi armed shaving robot and something about being able to choose between three different endings for a ride. Wasn’t there a flying attraction at the Magic Kingdom that had something like this, maybe a ditched piece of Carousel of Progress or was some of it part of Spaceship Earth? It wasn’t until I watched the Horizons ride-throughs online that I realized all of these things belonged to the same attraction. I found myself almost constantly saying, “Oh yeah! I forgot about that! Wait, all this was in the same attraction, and they took it down? What were they thinking?!”

Disney is in the business of dreams, magic and fantasy, but there is no denying that it is a business. In almost every candid interview with an Imagineer they stress that fact, a concise way of saying that there is always more going on than the public sees. Businesses are complex, and the Disney company is a maze of interests and egos with a massive amount of money on the line at every decision point. Everyone wants to do the best job they can, they all want to reach for that horizon, but as it turns out, not everyone’s horizon is in the same direction.

Disney likes to make money, right? The return of a wildly popular attraction would draw in more guests, right? So what’s going on? Someone at the Disney company is bound to have the internet and they must see that people want their beloved attraction back. The Disney faithful are screaming for a return of Horizons, so why hasn’t Walt Disney Imagineering rebuilt it? Is it that they can’t or they just won’t? Time for some speculation…

Read part 2

Storytelling: Start to start to finish to finish

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Marty Sklar, legendary Disney Imagineer, tells the story of a ride concept pitch that didn’t go according to plan.

In the early days of Walt Disney World, the Disney company desperately needed sponsors for attractions within parks to help offset the enormous costs associated with operating and maintaining their vacation kingdom. Walt Disney Imagineering saw RCA, the electronics company that had its focus on computers at the time, as a prime candidate for sponsorship and assigned Marty Sklar to develop an attraction that would make them proud to be associated with the park (not to mention make them part with a large amount of cash).

Sklar, legendary Imagineer John Hench and their friends at WDI worked for nine months on a computer themed ride and hauled in their storyboards and artwork to present their concept to the head of RCA, Robert Sarnoff, only to discover they had made two major miscalculations.

The first problem came when they discovered they had set up the entire presentation on the wrong side of the room, as RCA’s head was a creature of habit and always sat in the same place. Their artwork was so far away that the pitch was entirely ineffective.

The second problem came in the form of a little note, penned by Sarnoff himself. As the Imagineers brought their presentation to a close, they sat down to make a personal, more intimate plea in an attempt to save their efforts. They had worked for nine months and spent a long day passionately going over their attraction concept, talking more or less to themselves on the other side of the large conference room. This was their chance to salvage the mess and seal the deal. As they spoke, Sarnoff took out a pen and a little scrap of paper, scribbled something and passed it off to one of his VPs. The note made its way around the table and eventually landed in front of Marty Sklar. On the small piece of paper was the following:

Who are these people?!!?

Four words sunk the ship. No one told Sarnoff who they were, and if the person you are speaking to doesn’t know that, then he’s probably not thinking about your presentation. He’s probably thinking about lunch. The Imagineers fled the scene of the disaster, left to wonder how things could have gone so wrong.

Marty Sklar and his team failed to follow the “first commandment” of what would come to be known as “Mickey’s 10 Commandments”—Know Your Audience.  Business leaders understand the need to know what they don’t know and correct accordingly, and the same holds true for storytellers. The Imagineers leapt into their story with such enthusiasm that they forgot to find out who it was they were speaking to and made key assumptions that turned out to be completely incorrect.  They assumed the head of RCA would just naturally sit where they thought was best, and, worse than that, they assumed he would already know who they were and what they were doing there.

Creative people fall into the assumption trap often. To them, the brilliance of their concept is so self-explanatory they forget to bring people up to speed. No one will ever marvel in your grand finale “what” if they can’t first get their heads around the basic “why.”

Marty Sklar’s crew from Walt Disney Imagineering forgot to tell their story, or rather their entire story. Sometimes it’s not enough to tell your story from start to finish. Sometimes you have to start before the start, making sure that your audience is in the proper position (in their case, physically) to receive the story you have to tell, otherwise they may come in cold and will be totally unreceptive. Sometimes you also have to make sure that after your story is told, it continues to be told and to resonate, otherwise you’ve wasted everyone’s time.

The computer attraction was dead in the water, but Marty Sklar, John Hench and the Imagineers came back, this time being sure that Sarnoff both knew who they were and sat where they wanted him (turns out, all they needed to do was ask). We can only wonder what a ride through the inner workings of a computer might have been like, but it was not to be. Thankfully, however, their next pitch was a success. With RCA’s blessing (and money), the Disney company began construction on the massive white structure that would come to be known as Space Mountain.

Find Marty Sklar’s story in The Disney Mountains: Imagineering at its Peak by Jason Surrell.

People want to believe

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Recently, Disney has been making additions to Fantasy Land at the Magic Kingdom, almost doubling its size and adding attractions, restaurants and even more castles. While the imagineers want their new castles to appear large and impressive, they know that to compete with the park’s main castle icon would create visual clutter and would destroy the aesthetic as a whole. That’s where forced perspective, the subject of this article by Ricky Brigante with photographs by Scott Keating, comes in.

Forced perspective is everywhere in a theme park (the classic Disney example is Main Street—the stories get progressively shorter as they go up, giving you the sense that the buildings are taller than they actually are). If shops and mountains and castles within the Disney parks were as large as they appear, your senses would be overpowered by the massive structures and you would be looking for an escape route.

Seeing Keating’s overhead images, you can’t help but wonder how the effect could be at all convincing—do people really buy this?—when clearly what you are seeing is visual trickery. It almost looks like someone took a cinderblock, put a cherry on it and called it an ice cream sundae. But when we are in that place that Disney’s artists have so carefully crafted, we see, we accept and we enjoy. So what does this say about us?

To me, this says that people quite simply want to believe. We want to believe in the fantastic things we hear and we want to believe in the wonderful things we see. People want to believe because we all love a good story, and if a storyteller can prove their mastery of the craft, we will hand over our reservations and suspend our disbelief for just a little while.

In our daily lives we are becoming more cynical, but that could just be a defense mechanism to hide the wide-eyed kid inside that wants to turn loose and play, that wants to get swept up in fantasy and wants to believe.

Again, you can find Ricky Brigante’s article with photographs by Scott Keating here: Aerial view of Beast’s Castle at Walt Disney World reveals forced perspective Disney magic

Epcot: the center II, a new Horizon

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The second of a five-part series about Epcot’s central role in the lives of the disaffected Disney fans.
Please read part 1—Epcot: the center

While so many who came of age during EPCOT’s early days share this as their favorite park, many of these same people share a favorite ride within that park—the now extinct attraction Horizons.Horizons, EPCOT center

In 1983, after a year of the park’s operation, the Disney company opened Horizons to the public, a ride that embodied “all of Epcot’s ‘Future World’ elements: communication, community interaction, energy, transportation, anatomy, physiology, along with man’s relationship to the sea, land, air, and space.” (wikipedia) Horizons was a grand tour of tomorrow and inspired many to dream about the future in a fantastic, yet somehow attainable, way.

Jason G. of Disney’s Folly has this to say:

EPCOT put these limitless dreams within specific and realistic borders. If space battles and time machines were the blatant fiction of the future, at Horizons the future formed itself around the structure that we lived our daily lives in. And it’s unadulterated message about that future? If we can dream it, we can do it. (full article)

The attraction dedicated to the future did not make it that far, but was closed and demolished in 1999, a moment that signaled the end was at hand for so many passionate fans. In its place rose Mission: Space, a technological wonder that literally shoves riders back into their seats as they pilot a spaceship through liftoff and onward to Mars. The exterior of the attraction is spectacular, color and movement that screams future and excitement, however the experience within has been less than a hit, with fed up fans saying the animation is poor, the ‘interaction’ is contrived, and it gives people terrible motion sickness (not to mention the few horribly tragic deaths related to the ride motion).

Clearly, the disaffected fan would argue, Disney, the world’s greatest dream factory, as well as the creative force behind the parks known as Walt Disney Imagineering, has lost its way. People don’t want only thrill rides, they want something that is saturated in detail so that the place becomes real. They don’t want mindless technology, they want an immersive experience that really engages them and lets them get lost in the story. And, as long as we are on the subject, people want a story. People love a good story and good focused storytelling—clear structure with a flow from beginning to middle to end so you can get involved and stay involved. This is what sets Disney apart from the common Six-Flags fare, and this is what Disney fans demand.

Now, stop and take a moment to consider this possibility: in the new attractions at Epcot, this—detail, immersion, focus, story—is EXACTLY what people got.

Next post—Epcot: the center III, receding horizon line

Putting the Animal in the Kingdom

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Joe Rohde was faced with a massive dilemma. He and his team of Imagineers had been working relentlessly on a new park for Walt Disney World that would come to be known as Disney’s Animal Kingdom, but found themselves up against a nearly project-ending hurdle.Inagineer Joe Rohde

“Are guests going to feel that animals are exciting enough?” asked Michael Eisner, head of the Disney Corporation at the time. He was not at all convinced.

When building the original Disneyland, Walt Disney had wanted live animals for his Jungle Cruise ride, understanding how dramatic close proximity to elephants, hippos and other animals could be. He quickly realized, however, that the complexity involved in producing and maintaining such a show was beyond their ability and opted instead for animatronic animals.* In a frustrating twist, despite the ability to finally use live animals for a park experience, Eisner decided animatronic animals were the way to go, feeling that real animals simply lacked emotional impact.

For a creative person, this kind of development is heartbreaking. How could that possibly be the company’s decision? Having live animals in the park wasn’t just one thing, it was THE thing. Without it, the entire project might as well not exist. Something had to be done to drive the point home, so the team sent their leader to speak with the Disney executives, armed with something a little extra special.

Joe Rohde is an intense man, and when he speaks his passion for his work comes through. He began:

We know that there are concerns about whether animals are, in and of themselves, dramatic. The heart of the Animal Kingdom park is animals, and our guests’ encounters with them. We have gone to great lengths to make sure that the animals will be displayed in a way that will bring them and people together as never before…

As he spoke, the executives in the board room were suddenly joined by a massive Bengal tiger, which proceeded to walk slowly around the table. Joe Rhode, for all his intensity, could not match the presence of 400 pounds of fur, teeth and claws that could have, quite literally, severed the head of the mighty Disney empire as it moved to within sniffing distance of the small captive audience.

Rohde continued, stressing the importance of live animals and the dramatic effect they can have, paying no attention to the tiger that had completely disoriented the powerful individuals seated at the table. As the tiger was lead out the way it came in, the Disney executives met the gaze of the passionate lead designer of the Animal Kingdom project.

“…Proximity to animals—the illusion that they are right next to you—is essential.” Joe Rohde closed his argument.

Michael Eisner was left with no option. He had to agree.

Find this story, along with the entire history of how Disney’s Animal Kingdom park came to be, in Melody Malmberg’s The Making of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park.

*”Yes, if…” note: animatronic animals behave much more predictably than live ones, so Walt reasoned the attraction would actually benefit from the fact that every guest would get the same quality show every time. A great example of using the problem as the solution.