Walt Disney died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966. I’m sorry to lead with such a downer, but he did. His untimely passing cast his grand plan for the Florida Project into chaos. Even as Imagineers mourned the loss of their beloved visionary boss, they strategized the best ways to honor his memory.
The goal was to bring his E.P.C.O.T. blueprints to life. Many considered that hope idealistic but unrealistic. A brutal headline in the wake of Uncle Walt’s passing summarized the conventional wisdom regarding the Florida Project. “Epcot died ten minutes after Walt’s body cooled.” Clearly, cynics saw little hope of the prototype community of tomorrow becoming a reality.
Undeterred, Walt’s older brother, Roy, put off his plans for retirement to take control of the project. Even though he didn’t quite understand it, he knew that the younger Disney’s concept for E.P.C.O.T. would stand as the culmination of his life’s work. The onus was on Roy to bring Walt’s plans to fruition. Otherwise, critics would discredit the creator of Mickey Mouse as losing touch with reality in his final days. No one involved with The Walt Disney Company could stomach the idea of such post-death rewriting of Uncle Walt’s legacy.
A glaring, seemingly impossible problem presented itself, though. For all his talents as a leader and motivator, Uncle Walt never communicated his plans for E.P.C.O.T. eloquently enough that his employees understand the specific details. They knew that he wanted a residential area capable of permanently sustaining thousands of citizens, yet nobody knew how the schools would work. Would there be full-time students? Would visiting corporate executives living there for a short term have the same rights as permanent residents? Would their children get to attend the Disney schools during this period? And who would handle waste management in this city of carefully selected overachievers?
Image: Disney
Building a utopia is already virtually impossible. The death of the man with the plan somehow made it that much trickier. Think about the situation in more modern terms. What would Apple engineers have done if Steve Jobs had died a couple of months after coming up with the idea of the iPhone? Would we still be carrying around iPods and texting on Blackberrys? Ideas that carry this sort of intellectual resonance need their inventors to bring dreams to life, and Walt Disney’s desire for a communal paradise was among the most ambitious ever. Had he not died, our entire perspective of Orlando, Florida, might be different. But he did, and his beloved Imagineers had to carry on in his stead.
How do a group of dedicated people pick up the pieces of a shattered dream? If they’re Disney Imagineers, they take the kernels of thoughts that weren’t their own and repurpose the concepts into the most popular family vacation destination in the world. This is the story of how a group of friends honored the memory of their mentor by building his dream facility, even if it wasn’t quite what he intended.
The new republic
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The Walt Disney World that you know shares only one true similarity with what Disney himself envisioned in the mid-60s. If you look at the original blueprints for his Project X, Magic Kingdom and Epcot reside in a similar position to where the plans indicated they would go. Presumably, this is because Imagineers were stubborn. Even though they had to accept that most of his ideas were impossible in the wake of his death, the one thing they wouldn’t do is alter the location of the first two gates at Walt Disney World. Everything else…wound up depressingly different.
When Disney died in 1966, the protégés he’d trained had a hard pill to swallow. His brother Roy Disney pointedly informed them that the dream was over. The Utopian community Uncle Walt envisioned for his recently acquired swampland would never exist.
The worst part is that there was so much joy within the company prior to his cancer diagnosis. In the years before this tragic turn of events, The Walt Disney Company enjoyed historic levels of optimism. While still celebrating their stunning triumphs at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the company founder and his most trusted advisors assembled frequently in the Florida War Room, discussing the future they would build. They conversed about the philosophical and practical issues of constructing a new community.
With Walt Disney gone, his team determined that no matter how impossible the odds might seem, they’d somehow find a way not just to build an entire theme park worthy of their lost leader but also repurpose many of his ideas into this new venture.
Originally, Epcot was to include the other parts such as a business center and a theme park. After the company founder’s death, however, his beloved Imagineers embarked on a quest to build a small world worthy of the Walt Disney name. Its current status as the unquestioned champion of the theme park industry exemplifies their success. Here are some of the ways they built such a titanic theme park while still honoring Disney’s original plans for Epcot.
Reinventing the wheel
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One of the seminal aspects of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was that the entire city would feature a hub design. This wheel shape would feed all traffic from the outskirts of town to the center, thereby preventing a glut of people from overwhelming the cultural and business centers. The underlying premise was that the hub would act as the core that connected everything else.
Walt Disney was a world traveler who tried to learn new ideas everywhere he went. One of his favorites came from Pierre Charles L’Enfant, an architect born in France who later became an American citizen. L’Enfant received one of the greatest honors ever provided to an 18th century architect. President George Washington personally asked him to design the structure for Federal City, which eventually became known as Washington, D.C. The L’Enfant Plan ensured that every part of the city end at the governmental facilities.
Disney co-opted the plan in building the Happiest Place on Earth in 1955. His blueprints for Disneyland guaranteed that Sleeping Beauty Castle would act as the centerpiece. The surrounding territories such as Fantasyland and Tomorrowland stood as the spokes that connected to Sleeping Beauty Castle, the hub of the wheel.
The E.P.C.O.T. Walt Disney had in mind was intended to share this premise. The commercial part of the utopia would stand as the community center. The town managers would route all transportation to the middle. Everything else would exist in different parts of Epcot, but the “spokes” would easily transfer people from places such as the theme park and underground driving regions to the center hub. As much as anything suggested during the E.P.C.O.T. announcement, the logistics of the city of tomorrow were fully formed as an idea. The prototype community would mesh commerce and residency while simultaneously embracing all the cultures of the world.
Space age transportation and the art of the compromise
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The original E.P.C.O.T. announcement included plans to bring guests to a hub entitled E.P.C.O.T. Transportation Lobby. That obviously doesn’t exist, but there are variations of it thanks to the Magical Express pick-up at Orlando International Airport. Plus, there is a Transportation and Ticket Center that shares a parking lot with Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort that hosts many of the intended duties of the Transportation Lobby, albeit with a critical difference. The E.P.C.O.T. version would have connected underground driving with main level monorail transportation. That was one of the first ideas to fall by the wayside when Roy Disney took over the project. Another concept from the announcement is handled fairly well today. Uncle Walt had the original idea to greet guests in their own languages. While that’s a functional impossibility to date, Walt Disney World stands apart as one of the most inclusive vacation destinations in the world. Bilingual greeters oftentimes do introduce themselves to foreign travelers in their own languages, even if hello and welcome to Disney are the only phrases they know.
With regards to the larger issues of transportation logistics, Roy Disney and the Imagineers had to come up with a Plan B in the wake of his brother’s demise. Part of it was obvious, while another key component required a bit of trust in the eventual customer base. The unmistakable choice was that the monorail would become a key ingredient crisscrossing the Florida land. People already associated the Disney theme park brand with Uncle Walt’s favored form of transportation. The Florida Project would seem like a pale imitation of Disneyland, much less the development Disney himself promised, if it lacked a monorail. Its inclusion was a foregone conclusion even as Disney execs agonized over how to implement as many their founder’s promises as possible in the new locale.
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The part that needs people to show some understanding is the People Mover. Today, Walt Disney World aficionados know it as Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover, aka the best place to nap at Magic Kingdom. Disneyland fanatics fondly remember it as the WEDWay PeopleMover, an attraction that lasted from 1967 to 1995 before Disney foolishly closed it in favor of Rocket Rods, one of the least popular Disney rides of all time. Walt Disney himself forecasted grander plans for the concept he perfected at the 1964 World’s Fair. He wanted it to become a Jetsons-esque space age kind of moving sidewalk that guests would habitually utilize to move about the new city.
The idea was that the monorail would take people across vast distances quickly. The WEDWay (as it was called in the announcement video) would carry guests the rest of the way to their homes, to local shopping, or to their place of employment. Walt Disney understood all the potential benefits and concerns of this kind of transportation, and he had specific ideas about how to bring them to fruition. His death fundamentally ended those plans.
To put this situation in modern terms, imagine if Elon Musk had died prior to building the batteries that power the Tesla automobile. Without him, the remaining staff at Tesla Motors might have had every intention of making his dream a reality. Unfortunately, they lacked the know-how and technical ingenuity to complete the feat. Even though Disney himself had only been a part of the crew that developed the PeopleMover for the World’s Fair, he was the one with the grand ambition about how to forcibly evolve this technology into a basic part of living in the prototype community.
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In the absence of their leader, Imagineers could have built a much larger WEDWay to transport people across the tens of thousands of acres of land Disney owned in Orlando. What would have been the point, though? Everyone realized that the city as envisioned was now impossible. That negated the need for such localized vehicles that were functionally multi-directional elevators. Rather than ignore Disney’s vision entirely, however, they eventually showed respect for their roots by adding the PeopleMover at Magic Kingdom in 1975.
The question of why they waited until four years after the park’s opening to introduce such an iconic part of the original plans for E.P.C.O.T. once bothered me and might annoy you. In reality, the answer is simple. It all came down to financing. Finding the money to pay for all the new developments at Walt Disney World played out as a never-ending shell game for Disney execs. In the end, they settled on the same strategy that Walt Disney himself had accepted in the months leading up to the announcement of The Florida Project. They needed new revenue streams to come from somewhere. And the where was readily apparent.
East Coast Disneyland
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As mentioned in part one, a theme park wasn’t part of the original blueprints for E.P.C.O.T. While the impetus for this East Coast development was an attempt to provide Disney’s brand of family entertainment to people east of the Mississippi River, Uncle Walt considered another Disneyland a lateral move. That’s why many of the rumored developments in New York and Missouri never got off the ground.
Once Disney acquired land in central Florida, the calculus changed only in that the business needed revenue to offset the hefty price tag of all the new acreage. Disney himself didn’t even pitch a theme park at first. It was only after pressure from his board of directors that he relented on the subject. They sagely pointed out that a Floridian answer to Disneyland would earn enough money to finance the more ambitious plans contained in Project X.
For his part, Uncle Walt planned to monetize through different means. His idea of a business haven nestled in the heart of a utopia seemed reasonable due to his previous achievements in conquering the business world. The board felt that it was a needless risk that they could easily mitigate by giving the people what they wanted. Disney ceded to this request, but he never warmed to it. The design of E.P.C.O.T. purposefully forced people to travel through the new elements of the city prior to reaching their presumed tourist destination, the theme park. It was Walt’s way of making people eat their vegetables before getting dessert. Alas, everything changed with his death.
Tragically commercial Kingdom
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The original hub of The Florida Project was downtown, but the need to monetize became the driving impetus behind all construction. Roy Disney hoped that by building enough new revenue via a new theme park, he could gradually bring some of his brother’s bolder plans to life. And that became the first compromise. The initial hub of Walt Disney World and still arguably the central part of the land is Magic Kingdom.
Originally intended to stand out on its own as a destination for playtime, the world’s most popular theme park eventually became the central building block of Project X. Roy Disney felt compelled to stop all other building projects involving the new land in order to prioritize the one surefire breadwinner. Don’t mistake this as a bastardization of his brother’s vision, though.
Once shown the budget numbers for The Florida Project, Uncle Walt also understood that what he considered the least interesting part of the development, the theme park, had to come first. Without its presence, even a salesman with the reputation of Walt Disney would struggle to entice corporations to start visiting Florida swampland to enjoy new entrepreneurial opportunities. Even though he projected viable revenue streams via governmental and corporate contracts and business sponsorships, Disney knew that when given the choice, people would always choose dessert over eating their veggies.
While this, too, became a compromise of the announced plans for E.P.C.O.T., The Walt Disney Company has still managed to snag its fair share of corporate sponsorships for Disney attractions over the years. My current favorite is Siemens AG, which acts as a benefactor for Spaceship Earth, particularly the post-ride entertainment in the lobby. Such sponsorships have actually dwindled in recent years due to the recession and a post-recession conservatism from budget-conscious major corporations, but Disney has proven itself as one of the rare companies worthy of such fiscal considerations, a fact that imbued Uncle Walt himself with pride back in the 1950s and 1960s.
The entire situation must have felt uncomfortable for Roy Disney. He understood that his deceased brother had bristled at the thought of Disneyland II. Walt Disney had no interest in lateral moves, much less repeating himself. In order to build something worthy of the E.P.C.O.T. announcement, however, he’d have to make certain trade-offs along the way.
Image: Disney
The unmistakable reality stood unquestioned. People on the East Coast were desperate to enjoy a localized version of Disneyland. Roy was already putting off retirement in order to sustain his younger brother’s legacy. He wouldn’t gain anything by throwing away everything great about the Happiest Place on Earth and starting from scratch with entirely new ideas. All that would accomplish is that it’d reset the timer on the opening date of what he had already decided to name Walt Disney World.
Since his Imagineers were already under the gun to construct an entire theme park quickly enough that nobody would forget of Walt Disney’s dream, the choice was obvious. The first phase of what had previously been known as The Florida Project would be a new theme park undeniably similar to Disneyland. Imagineers ported many signature rides from Anaheim to Orlando. Only three original attractions were available at launch as opposed to 20 variations of existing Disneyland attractions. The new ventures were Country Bear Jamboree, The Walt Disney World Railroad, and Cinderella’s Golden Carousel.
Even if the company founder might have winced at the similarities, the results were unmistakable. Magic Kingdom quickly became popular beyond Roy Disney’s wildest dreams. 400,000 people visited during the opening month alone. That’s particularly amazing when you consider that the official park debut isn’t October 1st as many people note. That was a soft opening the company planned to avoid the nightmare that transpired on Disneyland’s opening day 16 years prior. The grand opening of Walt Disney World didn’t come until October 23rd, which makes the 400,000 attendance that month all the more amazing. And with so many people emptying their wallets at The Florida Project’s theme park, the company had more money to attempt some of Walt Disney’s more profound concepts.
The other parts
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Walt Disney World in its E.P.C.O.T concept phase would involve an “airport of the future,” a high-density housing area, schools, playgrounds, and cultural meccas. A theme park was also integral to the design, since it would incentivize tourists to flock to Orlando. Since Florida provided Disney with “the blessing of size,” all these ideas were easily feasible. And thanks to his negotiated municipal jurisdiction from the state of Florida, he had free reign to implement them.
The purpose of the airport was to foster the Disney bubble. Uncle Walt expected a constant influx of world travelers. He wanted them to feel like they were nestled safely in the East Coast’s version of the Happiest Place on Earth the instant they exited the plane. A monorail would ship them to E.P.C.O.T. quickly and conveniently, an almost unprecedented concept in the early days of commercial flight.
A more cosmopolitan Disney experience
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These guests had to have a place to live. Since only residents of the city could stay in the apartment housing, the plan was for guests to stay at the 30-story Cosmopolitan Hotel and Convention Center in the central part of town. Always focused on the landscape, Disney took a special interest in this building, planning it as the primary skyscraper people would see as they approached the downtown hub. He also appreciated what the view would be from the top of the building.
Designs called for a recreational facility on the top of the skyscraper. Here, guests could participate in traditional games such as tennis and basketball, and there’d even be a swimming pool with a panoramic view of the surrounding area similar to the third floor pool at Paradise Pier at Disneyland. Uncle Walt felt so enamored of the schematics for the Cosmopolitan Hotel that he pointed to a miniature scale bench and told one of his Imagineers, “This is where Lilly and I will sit when this thing is finished, taking everything in.” Even Disney himself spent a part of his Florida planning time fantasizing about a better tomorrow at a place where his wife and he could relish in the community they constructed from swampland.
Disney had also learned from the popularity of The Disneyland Hotel, a facility he never owned. His next venture would include temporary housing for tourists, and his company would reap the financial benefits of maximum occupancy. His far-reaching plans were to build a vacation destination at a utopia, and he could benefit more by monetizing the influx of traffic from curious onlookers. These plans unfortunately fell by the wayside after he passed.
Still, the Imagineers discovered a way to honor his vision. They opened the Disney’s Contemporary Resort and Disney’s Polynesian Resort at the same time Walt Disney World debuted, just as Uncle Walt prophesied for Cosmopolitan Hotel with E.P.C.O.T. Today, it’s hard to separate the idea of the Disney theme park from the adjacent company-owned resort. While the integration isn’t as tight as Disney had projected, Imagineers deserve a tremendous amount of credit for doing the best that they could in a difficult situation.
A different world (showcase)
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One of the logical parts of the monetization of E.P.C.O.T. involved the international appeal of Disney’s intellectual properties. Disney programming aired on channels all over the world. By the early ‘60s, people on all the continents loved Mickey Mouse. The reverse was also true. Americans knew of many classic cities across the world that they had little hope of visiting during their lifetime. Disney felt confident that a shopping center focused on bridging the gap between cultures would prove wildly popular. And you know that he was absolutely right on the point. It’s just that the way this transpired at Walt Disney World didn’t line up with his grand plan.
As originally conceived, a cultural melting pot of commerce would reside a floor below the top of the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Here, travelers heading to the upper deck of the skyscraper could stop for a quick dose of retail therapy. Then, they could lounge on top of Walt Disney World. Alternately, people leaving the city after a vacation could pick up a few goodies at the shop on their way down from the best in/of the city.
That’s the reductive evaluation, though. Uncle Walt’s plans were much greater. He envisioned a constant World’s Fair, a concept so near and dear to his heart after the New York event. The prototype community concept was one that Imagineers capably duplicated after Disney’s death. The World Showcase as we know it includes 11 pavilions attentively constructed to reflect the cultures of the countries represented. These cultures are so authentic that guests feel as if they’re visiting faraway lands.
To best exemplify Disney’s vision, America is one of the countries at World Showcase. The others are Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, and Norway, although the last two weren’t part of the original Epcot launch. Russia and Switzerland were part of the initial plans, but they didn’t make the final cut. That’s a loss for Walt Disney World fans, because Switzerland as presented was to include a version of Disneyland’s iconic Matterhorn Bobsleds.
Whether the World Showcase succeeds as permanent World’s Fair is in the eye of the beholder. What I would note is that almost 20 World’s Fair exhibitions occurred since the debut of Epcot in 1982. How many of them did you hear anything about? Contrast to Epcot, where even the most innocuous updates like a new grilled cheese sandwich generate dozens of Internet headlines.
Most Magical Place on Earth: Population Everyone
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Walt Disney’s announcement for the city of tomorrow indicated that about 20,000 people would become permanent residents of E.P.C.O.T. They would cede voting privileges in exchange for enjoying cost-controlled (or possibly free) living in the most modern homes on Earth. The infrastructure would include transportation across the city plus housing upgrades whenever the governing council determined them requisite. All that Disney would require of its employees is that they all worked somewhere in the utopia and that “everyone who lives here will have a responsibility to help keep this community an exciting living blueprint of the future.”
Once Roy Disney settled on a different strategy for The Florida Project, the idea of citizenry comprising the core of E.P.C.O.T. no longer seemed feasible. Uncle Walt’s dream of 20,000 people providing quality services that could entice six million annual visitors seemed impossible. I think you see where I’m going with this.
Magic Kingdom alone enjoyed 19.3 million visits last year, more than triple Walt Disney’s 1966 forecast. 62,000 people work as cast members at the four theme parks as well as other Disney-related ventures in the greater Orlando area. The Walt Disney Company spends over a billion dollars annually on payroll for these people alone. So, while the original plans quickly became antiquated, the perseverance of Roy Disney and his Imagineers enabled his brother’s dreams to come true in this regard, even beyond Uncle Walt’s grandest visions.
Not quite a utopia but still a Celebration
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After Walt Disney World had proven itself an overwhelming success over two decades, The Walt Disney Company went back and re-evaluated one of the original concepts of E.P.C.O.T. Okay, that’s probably overstating the situation, but the people running Disney did like the idea of a city that they built and controlled. They also already possessed all of the assets a person would need to run such an enterprise.
As part of the land grab in the mid-1960s, Disney attained the Reedy Creek Improvement District. It’s almost 39 square miles of land that Disney literally rules. They acquired broad legislative rights from the Florida government when they bought all the swampy regions of Central Florida. After Uncle Walt’s passing, Disney’s board realized they had zero interest in operating an actual city. That was their founder’s dream. They were in it much more for the money.
So, Disney owned a functionally autonomous part of Florida that could operate outside of many inconvenient government laws, but they didn’t use it for more than 20 years. By the early 1990s, they owned enough money and property that the premise of a controlled city suddenly seemed sensible to members of a more modern, Disney history-focused board of directors. They realized they couldn’t create an actual utopia – sorry, residents of Celebration! – but a low-crime, high-income city just down the street from Magic Kingdom seemed like a worthy compromise version of their founder’s plans.
There were obstacles, though. The original implementation of Disney-employed city residents gave them voter rights that Disney himself had never intended. It was the company’s way of side-stepping several potentially annoying laws at once. In order to incorporate a new city, however, they had to alter administrative rights of the new residents since many people represent a larger legislative wild card than a handful of Disney zealots.
Disney de-annexed this new enterprise and its citizenry so that they could control their laws but not the ones that would apply writ large to Walt Disney World. Some Floridians outside of the affected counties took offense at the practices, and it actually became a hot button political issue for a time.
Despite all the aggravation, the city of Celebration became a reality in the mid-1990s. The Walt Disney Company ceded most of their control over this land that they owned in exchange for the elimination of company voting rights for the residents of the city. It does, however, maintain a direct connection to World Drive, which is a road you’ve been on many times if you’ve spent any time at Walt Disney World. And while the connection to the company is allegedly tenuous, several Disney offices reside in Celebration, affirming the unmistakable coupling of business and residence, just as Walt Disney dreamt about 30 years prior to its existence.
Of course, the entire situation exemplifies the type of struggle Uncle Walt would have faced if he had lived long enough to try to build the community of tomorrow. The people on the outside looking in have a tendency to experience jealousy regarding the things they don’t have, and it makes them lash out. Meanwhile, the residents of a city, even a utopia, are oftentimes unpredictable since each one has a mind of their own.
Wherever you stand on the idea of building a viable utopia, a few points from Walt Disney’s E.P.C.O.T. presentation stand out. The first is that he had a vision for a crime-free, impeccably clean city where the citizens would feel a constant sense of civic pride, one so unmistakable that visiting guests would pick up on the vibe. The constant conversations about the appeal of the Disney bubble reinforce the success of his Imagineers and other cast members in this regard.
Disney also wanted the culmination of Project X to feature a far-reaching parcel of land where the pedestrian is king. It was one of his grandest ambitions, and the people who carried the torch after his death largely accomplished the feat, at least among people who stay onsite. Orlando residents of course don’t quite see it in the same terms. Walt Disney World resort guests can wander around four parks and an entire shopping district, carrying only a Magic Band, and they’ll be able to enjoy anything the facilities have to offer.
Sure, a visit requires some vehicular movement and no, the WEDMover never became viable as full-fledged transportation method, but those are nitpicks. The underlying intent of Uncle Walt’s vision has come to fruition, even if his employees had to make many compromises along the way. We should all be so lucky with regards to how our loved ones carry on our legacy. The fact that people still mention Walt Disney’s name with such reverence is a credit not just to him but also to his brother, Roy, and the Imagineers they both trained to understand, embrace, and carry on the Disney brand.
