April 22, 2007
I love concept cars. Popular Science's latest issue has a bunch, and you can see some here.
Whether it was the Discovery Channel's Future Car mini-series, or the concept cars at the auto show, few things inspire hope for a positive future as much as the concept car. They're like advertisements for how good tomorrow's going to be. It seems like sooner or later someone will finally invent that flying car. It reminds me of Disney's EPCOT when it first opened in the 80's.
If you went to Disney World's EPCOT when it first opened in the 80's you saw such a positive vision for the future. They would show awesome technology, they had videophones throughout EPCOT, where Fastrack is today, GM had its concept cars after the World of Motion ride. But the best ride was Horizons. It showed what they thought life would be like sometime in this century. Underwater and Space Cities, hydroponic farms it was really cool. It was a utopian vision of course, but the idea of high-speed monorails quietly whisking you between brightly lit stations is a straphangers dream come true.
The sad thing is that now EPCOT seems a bit directionless. Mission Space, Soarin', and Test Track are excellent rides, but the future looking EPCOT has been scaled drastically back. Oh, you can take a test ride on a Segway, but there's really Little of that Epxerimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow left. Even the mildly educational aspects of EPCOT are fading away. Steve Jobs is on the board at Disney, EPCOT would be an awesome platform for his company to showcase their products. Now that Eisner is gone, maybe the big cheeses at Disney will take another look at EPCOT.
For all the gloom and doom we here about the future, it seems we're forgetting the bright promise it holds. Clean energy is coming. New ideas and technologies are showing up daily. And damn awesome concept cars!
Posted by: Iblis at
02:14 PM
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Posted by: McGurk at April 23, 2007 10:37 AM (Ri74D)
Right now it is. That's the problem. Old Walt said his parks were always to be works in progress. With new stuff coming all the time. Walt didn't care about the bottom line as much as Eisner did. That's the difference between a visionary and an accountant.
While there's a place for both, EPCOT needs a visionary more than an accountant right now.
Posted by: Iblis at April 23, 2007 09:43 PM (7exB1)
Actually, Walt Disney never intended EPCOT to be an amusement part. It was converted in to the amusement park you saw after he passed away. Have you ever wondered what EPCOT stood for?
Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow
The initial concept was to build a city seperate from the rest of the economy and create a community driven utopia. Everyone in the city wuold have a role or job, they would all have the same future-style homes, and would all make roughly the same wages. Food would have been provided and so would all of the nescessities by the Disney corporation itself. (since thats where everyone would have been employed. Yeah, it sounds like Communism because thats what it was.
The city was designed to hold 30,000 citizens. GE and GM were sold on it and were flushing money in to it up until Walt's death. After he died it lost it's direction.
Epcot is pretty fun as it is really. I went there over the summer and it was entertaining to say the least. Although they COULD update it a little bit. I mean...half the stuff is either abandoned ideas or already invented.
Posted by: NthPower at April 27, 2007 11:55 AM (fdeNn)
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