The announcement that Disneyland will redesign its Tomorrowland shocked many fans at the D23 Disney Experiences Showcase last weekend. Fans were not surprised because Tomorrowland does not need a refresh. Many of us were surprised because we long ago had given up hope that Disney management would do anything to fix it.
Dead projects litter Tomorrowland like neglected gravestones in a cemetery: the long-abandoned PeopleMover/Rocket Rods track, the mostly empty and rarely visited Carousel theater, the construction wall at the land’s entrance that is well on its way to historic landmark status. Theming a land to “tomorrow” commits a park to refreshing that land and its attractions on a far more regular basis than Disneyland has over the past seven decades.
Perhaps Disney should have just embraced the oxymoron of “Space Land” for the area and washed its hands at any obligation to depict the future. After all, the Star Wars franchise that Disney uses within the land is set “a long time ago.”
Yet Disney’s creative leaders are going to persevere with the theme of the immediate future. “We’re going to start, and have started with, Walt’s original edition of Tomorrowland. That’s going to be our guidepost and our North Star,” Disneyland Resort President Jill Estorino told me and other invited reporters last week.
“We looked back to Walt’s opening-day speech, and we were inspired by his vision of Tomorrowland being a vista into wondrous worlds,” Emo O’Brien, Walt Disney Imagineering’s Portfolio Executive Creative Producer for the Disneyland Resort, said. “We garnered the sense of optimism that was at the core of everything that he was thinking about in Tomorrowland, and so we’re using that as our basis to go forward.”
Imagineers did not present any concept art or plans for what will be the New New New Tomorrowland, following land redesigns in 1967 and 1998. The land also saw three major rides added in 1959, just four years after Disneyland’s opening.
Despite Estorino’s statement, I doubt that Imagineers will return Tomorrowland to the showcase for corporate products that it was in 1955. At least, I hope they will not. Yet Disney faces a larger social problem that today’s public does not share the same optimism about technology and the days ahead that people in the late 1950s did.
Perhaps Disney should just embrace that apprehension and give us a dystopian Tomorrowland — a West Coast, futuristic version of the Villains Land that Disney announced for Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. It could feature stories of Silicon Valley tech bros set in giant data centers, with all characters and images generated by AI.
At Saturday’s Honda Center show, Disney Experiences Chairman Thomas Mazloum mentioned Disneyland’s 75th anniversary in 2030 when talking about the Tomorrowland revamp. Finishing this project in less than four years would not provide the time for the complete tear-down and rebuild that this land needs.
Fans have waited long enough for Disneyland to address its Tomorrowland problem. But the last thing we need is yet another quickie “fix” that does not solve it.