Theme park as bait

Image: Disney

In the earliest mock-ups of E.P.C.O.T., the one thing missing from the blueprints was a theme park. Those came later after Walt Disney met with his board of directors. While acknowledging the bravado of his initiative, none of the money men at Disney liked the idea of such a massive undertaking without a theme park as an anchor of the endeavor. This wasn’t the news the company founder wanted to hear at first, because he stated on many occasions that there would only be one Disneyland. He viewed his achievement with his novel theme park as inimitable.

While Uncle Walt planned differently at first, he quickly saw the upshot of building the East Coast version of Disneyland suggested above. He simply hadn’t locked in on Orlando, Florida, as the ideal destination yet. Eventually, he appreciated that his ideas might be too advanced for some of the simpler folk who adored Mickey Mouse. They’d need an incentive to spend their vacation at the prototype community. He also knew from the dramatic success of the 1964 World’s Fair that the timing was perfect for an eastern response of Disneyland, even though he felt conflicted on the topic.

Once Disney latched on to this way of thinking, a wellspring of ideas came flooding into his mind. He appreciated that he could design his entire Florida Project with a theme park as the bait. That’s precisely why Magic Kingdom sits in the northwest corner of his new land. By doing so, he’d force tourists to visit (or at least take a monorail ride by) all the other portions of E.P.C.O.T. He hoped that in doing so, they’d take an interest in the more important parts of the new city than the one with amusement attractions.

His adaption of the original plans also breathed life into an unheralded but critical aspect of the Florida Project. Walt Disney no longer saw his life’s work as Disneyland. That was too limited in scope for what he dreamt about the lands of tomorrow. Instead, his plans grew and evolved into a Disney World, a place where loyalty, intelligence, wisdom, and selflessness would lead the residents of the city toward a utopian existence.

The Disney bubble

Image: Disney

You may be familiar with the philosophy that Imagineers adapt with regards to designing theme parks. They want visitors to leave their troubles behind the instant they approach their Disney vacation. In order to accomplish this, Disney tries to build an insular bubble, a region where there is no outside world, only Disney magic.

The first time a person reaches the monorail, they should feel like they’re escaping reality to enter a better place full of joy and laughter. The company’s Magical Express program takes this concept a step farther by extending the boundaries of the bubble. People exiting Orlando International Airport never have to go through baggage claims to grab their luggage. Disney does this for them and also provides bus service directly to onsite hotels. Literally the moment theme park tourists reach Orlando, Imagineers are ready to nurture them by encasing them in the magic bubble.

This entire concept stems from Walt Disney’s vision for Orlando, Florida. He sought to build a literal bubble for his Tomorrowland, an enclosed space where his team of Imagineers would control the weather. In fact, his idea may have included an actual dome. The plans were definitive that people who lived in Walt Disney’s city would always have a roof over their heads. This may have been thanks to a bubble structure. The central residential area of E.P.C.O.T. would encompass 50 acres, and in the words of the Disney Epcot clip:

“This entire 50 acres of city streets and buildings will be completely enclosed.”

Disney later offered the explanation for such an odd choice:

“In this climate-controlled environment, shoppers, theater goers, and people just out for a stroll will enjoy ideal weather conditions, protected day and night from rain, heat and cold, and humidity.”

I should note that there’s hefty debate about the dome, as some people argue that there’s no explicit mention of the word dome in the video. There is, however, a picture of a town in a dome, not unlike a snow globe. The media all reported the dome as fact, and Disney died too soon afterward to clarify either way. In fact, his lung cancer diagnosis occurred less than a week after the release of the Epcot announcement video. Had he lived, the visionary would have felt significant pressure to build a dome. Right or wrong, that was how the media reported the story and so the public expected the utopia to include it. The Walt Disney Company would have suffered through a spate of negative headlines if they hadn’t built a dome, ironically because incorrect headlines trained people to expect them.

To a larger point, that’s how Uncle Walt perceived the entire project. In his own words, "Everything in this room will change time and time again as we move ahead. But the basic philosophy of what we're planning for Disney World is going to remain very much as it is right now". He knew that his initial plans for E.P.C.O.T. were necessarily fluid. Without the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, Disney’s most daring project would fall into chaos and, ultimately, failure.

Alas, the prototype community Walt Disney intended to build for his children never came to fruition due to his untimely death. It’s easy to fantasize about what might have been not just with E.P.C.O.T. but also the entirety of society influenced by the revolutionary proceedings at the Florida Project. Every bit of it is idle speculation, though. We’ll never know how powerful a driving force Disney’s strength of will would have been in making his dream for a better tomorrow come true. What we do know is how Disney Imagineers remained true to his legacy as best they could in the face of tragedy. That’s the topic of part two of this article.

In the interim, here's the original announcement video of Walt Disney's E.P.C.O.T. plans.