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Image: DisneyYou may think of the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover as the outdated ride you use when you need to get off your feet for a while.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.