The Contemporary Monorail

Disney was also a huge fan of architecture. He appreciated the importance of wienies, structures so remarkable in design that casual observers couldn’t help but look at them. While the most obvious wienie at Walt Disney World is Cinderella Castle at Magic Kingdom, I don’t think that’s the structure that would dazzle Zombie Disney.

Instead, the most impressive architectural feat on the Walt Disney World campus is one designed only a few years after his death. Some enterprising Imagineer saw the plans for the A-frame hotel that we now know as Disney’s Contemporary Resort, and that person presciently envisioned a way to make it better. The architect would combine two things that Walt Disney loved: monorails and onsite hotels.

Image: DisneyDisney hadn’t owned or built the original Disneyland Hotel. Instead, he’d asked for help from a business ally, Jack Wrather, who had jumped at the opportunity to build a hotel at the Happiest Place on Earth. Disney couldn’t afford it at the time but always regretted watching other parties capitalize on his theme park venture.

That’s why onsite hotels at Walt Disney World were always a part of the plan Still, it’s the marriage with a monorail that sets the Contemporary apart. It’s the perfect example of plussing from the early days of construction. The monorail tracks go straight through the building, creating a show-stopping wienie that everyone can see from far away. Up close, it’s even better. Diners at Chef Mickey’s and the Contempo Café often watch in awe as monorail trains zip through the narrow interior corridor. Uncle Walt would have loved watching people eat 20 feet away from a working monorail.

Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover

Image: Disney

In its original incarnation, EPCOT would have whisked citizens around the capitalist utopia via the PeopleMover. Disney deemed it the future of mass transportation. He designed his city of tomorrow to have cars travel on a lower level, out of sight. That’s because he hated the visual of traffic cluttering his perfect city. Instead, residents and guests would travel on the railway of the future.

In hindsight, a few problems exist with the concept. Most importantly, having guests get transported around town takes away a lot of important exercise, and that would lead to the type of physique best embodied in a Disney movie called WALL-E. The corpulent humans in that film have computers cater to their every whim, and it’s made them soft and flabby, albeit extremely sweet and well-intended.

Image: DisneyStill, the PeopleMover was a demonstration of how Walt Disney tried to solve congestion problems by finding unprecedented solutions. While he wouldn’t be happy to know that the PeopleMover had failed the test of time, he’d still love to know that his EPCOT land includes a working version of the premise. Disney park planners know this, which explains why one of the first displays on the attraction is a scale model of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.