Friday, May 18, 2007

Disney's (Somewhat Dated) Version of the Future

James Lileks gives some quick takes on his family trip to Epcot. An excerpt:

Here’s what I wrote in my notebook about 11 minutes after entering:

"It’s the Good For You Disney World. If life is high school, then the Magic Kingdom was designed by theater majors, and Epcot was designed by AV geeks with taped glasses and well-thumbed copies of sci-fi novels in their briefcases. This is a compliment, sort of. It tries like hell not to look like a 1968 vision of The Future, but the previous incarnation as a big Object Lesson still makes up the bones. When you see a monorail crossing in front of a building that could have come from the ’64 NY World’s Fair, you have a direct line into the way Walt (see, I’m calling him by his first name now) saw the Future. It’s odd – the man so instrumental in nailing down for All Time a certain way in which we see the Past was also a visionary, to use the tired word. But his descendents had to slather the Future with au courant accoutrements to keep the attention of the present."

Ah, I love the smell of half-baked ruminations in the morning! Smells like . . . pretention. But I'll stick by that first impression.