Walt Disney once announced his intent to build a better tomorrow. His blueprint for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (E.P.C.O.T.) was functionally a utopia predicated upon capitalism. Even before this presentation, however, Disney had obsessed what the future world would look like. He even tried to encapsulate the best ideas in a themed land, one we still celebrate to this day. Here are seven amazing facts about the history of Tomorrowland.
Tomorrowland reflects Uncle Walt’s love of astronauts
Image: DisneyThe genesis for Tomorrowland was Walt Disney’s obsession with society’s future. He was far ahead of his time as a gadget guru, passionately embracing new technologies and ideas. He envisioned Tomorrowland as a celebration of the seemingly impossible, particularly mankind’s attempt to conquer the moon. We’re talking about an era where the word astronaut wasn’t even a popularized term yet! Despite the science fiction nature of the concept, Disney embraced it as science fact.
During the 1950s, Uncle Walt interacted with many NASA scientists and other experts on space travel. He picked their brains as he planned Tomorrowland and used this knowledge to build an attraction that simulated the experience. Rocket to the Moon was similar to in-the-round concerts in that a circular movie projector rested in the middle of the attraction. Guests encircled these screens and watched as their “rocket” lifted off, escaped orbit, and headed toward the moon.
Image: DisneyThe problem with running a theme park that projects the future is that time passes. What once seemed impossible one day becomes the present and, eventually, the past. Rocket to the Moon became outdated when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969. In 1975, Disney altered the attraction to reflect this change, creating Mission to Mars in the same space. They also mirrored it at Tomorrowland at Magic Kingdom, offering fitting tributes to Walt Disney’s love of space travel. Alas, both versions of the attraction closed in the early 1990s. In their place, Space Mountain has become the lingering remnant of Uncle Walt’s love of astronauts and space travel.
Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland was incomplete
Image: DisneyWalt Disney famously bought as much land as possible for the Florida Project, and he did so on the sly. He knew that if anyone realized he was the buyer, the acquisition costs would skyrocket. By largely keeping his plans under wraps, Disney was able to purchase 40 square miles of land, which is basically a space the size of San Francisco.
Due to the land purchases, The Walt Disney Company was tight on cash when they opened Magic Kingdom. The purpose of the theme park was to earn money so that Disney could pay for later expansions and, hopefully, a version of E.P.C.O.T. With money in such short supply, the opening version of Tomorrowland was threadbare. As you’ll see in a moment, only two attractions were open, and the express purpose of one was to carry guests out of Tomorrowland. Disney always planned to fill out the themed land later, which they did with the construction of seminal attractions such as Space Mountain in 1975. If you’d visited Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World in 1971, however, you would have felt extremely disappointed.
One attraction vanished, but you’ll (kind of) see it again
Image: Disney
At Walt Disney World’s version of Tomorrowland, only two attractions were open to the public when Magic Kingdom debuted. One is no longer in operation. Skyway to Fantasyland was a gondola lift that transported guests from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland. It was modeled after a not-quite opening day attraction at Disneyland. That iteration opened in 1956, less than a year after the launch of the Happiest Place on Earth.
In 1999, Disney removed the gondolas at Tomorrowland, although we now know that they will return to Walt Disney World as a new form of park-to-resort-to-park transportation. The next time that you see a gondola, you should understand that you’re actually stepping back to an earlier version of the park, one from the 1970s and 1980s. Gondolas used to have tremendous significance at Disney, and their triumphant return as a mode of transportation is a welcome change.
One attraction has stood the test of time
Image: DisneyWith the gondolas gone, the only original attraction from Tomorrowland that still remains is…Tomorrowland Speedway. It had a different name at the time, though. Imagineers constructed Grand Prix Raceway in 1971 as a tribute to Autopia, one of the most consistently popular attractions at Disneyland.
Unlike its West Coast predecessor, this iteration didn’t have a futuristic theme at the time, an odd choice for a Tomorrowland attraction. Instead, Disney designed an international Grand Prix in order to have a viable sponsor, Goodyear. Money was tight during the early years of Walt Disney World. Any attraction that they could monetize was a viable option.
With Tomorrowland Speedway, park planners could pay tribute to Disneyland’s Autopia, add an attraction that’s popular with kids AND has tremendous throughput, and get a sponsor to foot the bill for many of the costs. For these reasons, this attraction has survived much longer than anyone would have expected despite frequent rumors that it’s in danger of closing for good.
But it’s shrinking!
Image: DisneyIn 1994, Disney ditched the Grand Prix theme and built the Tomorrowland version that we know today. That wasn’t the only change that park planners made. One of the dirty secrets about the speedway is that it’s shrinking. It was initially 3,118 feet long. When Disney needed, well, space for Space Mountain, they reduced the footprint of Tomorrowland Speedway. That’s happened multiple times since then, too.
The track is currently 2,119 feet in length, meaning that it has lost 999 feet since 1971! Even with the reductions, it remains one of the largest attractions at Walt Disney World in terms of layout size. If you ever look at a map of Magic Kingdom, you’ll appreciate just how large Tomorrowland Speedway still is relative to other popular attractions.
A transportation that never became a reality
Image: DisneyYou may think of the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover as the outdated ride you use when you need to get off your feet for a while. Regrettably, that’s the conventional wisdom about one of the seminal attractions in Disney’s illustrious history.
Once upon a time, Walt Disney and his team of Imagineers had higher expectations for the PeopleMover. When Disney announced his plans for E.P.C.O.T., it wasn’t a ride. Instead, it was a mode of transportation. Disney didn’t view the perfect society as using cars for intra-city movement. Instead, they would rely on two forms of travel to move citizens around the area.
Image: DisneyMonorails would carry guests to the farthest reaches of the utopian city, offering quick travel across large distances. For the shorter distances, people would hop on PeopleMovers. They were a variation on the concepts of escalators, trains, and moving sidewalks, vehicles capable of carrying many travelers at once. In the case of the PeopleMover, it had a seemingly endless supply of individual segments, each one a standalone automated carrier. It was a revolutionary approach to traffic congestion that could have changed society.
Alas, the death of Walt Disney changed the situation. Many of the plans for E.P.C.O.T. fell by the wayside. The PeopleMover morphed from an inventive form of transportation into a Tomorrowland attraction that winked at a future that will never come to pass. Today, it feels more like a vestige of Disney theme park history, but the original ambitions were the grandest. The PeopleMover represents a Tomorrowland we all wish had become our today.
One Tomorrowland attraction at Walt Disney World is several years older than the park!
Image: DisneyEvery day is a great big beautiful tomorrow at Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress. This attraction has Uncle Walt’s fingerprints all over it. He and his team from WED Enterprises constructed the show for General Electric (GE) at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It quickly became one of the five most popular pavilions, and then Disney persuaded GE to pay to ship all the parts to Disneyland. It stayed there from 1967 until 1973, at which point Disney sent it back east where it took up permanent residence at Magic Kingdom.
The symmetry of the continued existence of Carousel of Progress is perfect. It was Disney’s tribute to the technological improvements that led to his modern world during the 1960s. Because of the clever design, it was also easy to maintain and update. The scenes from the earlier generations remain intact today, while the “modern” one is easily updated whenever Disney wants to reflect the current version of society and its relationship with technology. Virtual reality is even on display at Carousel of Progress right now, and that’s a technology that is probably several years away from widespread consumer adoption.
Disney uses Carousel of Progress as the way to keep Tomorrowland facing forward, but it also maintains a connection to the Disney of old, the one that Uncle Walt constructed and maintained. It’s quietly one of the most important attractions in operation today. And its theme song, There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, is the philosophy that has driven Disney theme parks for many generations now. Hopefully, it will continue to do for many more decades. In doing so, it can connect the Tomorrowland of the 1950s to the Tomorrowland of, well, tomorrow.
