This breaks my heart.
It is stunning technology. There's no better place than EPCOT to apply such a remarkable display of ingenuity. It is incredible to witness.
And it's so utterly wrong.
Guests will love it. They'll think it delightful and adorable and fantastic, and they'll take lots and lots of videos and pictures to send to friends back home.
Executives will crow about the cross-marketing opportunity. It shows the perfect marriage of Disney and its pricey Pixar acquisition.
But all it says to me is that given the opportunity to showcase such jaw-dropping technology and demonstrate how it could be used to improve the world ... Disney has used it as an opportunity to bring more cartoon entertainment into EPCOT.
This wonderful theme park used to herald the "Dawn of a New Disney Era." Now it simply serves as a billboard for the Opening of a New Disney Movie.
So much promise, squandered! If that makes me a curmudgeon, so be it.
Sigh.
3 comments:
I totally agree! I wrote something similar (but far less eloquently) on my Epcot Tumblr.
The fact that there are also TWO marketing monorails right now is just salt in the wound. Do we really need a Monsters U monorail AND an Iron Man 3 rail?
I agree wholeheartedly. This killed me when I saw it, too. And the technology is nice, if used correctly. For example, at some point in the evening the Mike Wazowski image was temporarily replaced with the default Mac "galaxy" wallpaper, and the result looked like this: http://instagram.com/p/YjUGxEMYcB/
Now that's something I wouldn't mind seeing every night! Heck, can you imagine some kind of a nighttime show where Future World-appropriate images were projected onto Spaceship Earth? It'd make a nice Illumniations prologue, wouldn't it?
I hate that the company has chosen to use this great technology in the stupidest possible way, but it unfortunately does not surprise me.
I see nothing wrong with what they did but I have to agree that they should use this technology for the enhancement of EPCOT and Spaceship Earth (maybe shown every 30 minutes and switched with the normal lighting coming on 30 minutes after that) Disney is a marketing firm now, we have to accept that. I also think EPCOT is dated as I went last summer (2012) and it felt old especially on the Universe of Energy and, dare I say it, Carousel of Progress (my wife fell asleep while I watched it for the memories). There has to be a balance for little kids and adults like us. However, the rides need to be kept updated to keep with the original concept of EPCOT. Totally miss Horizons which probably would have needed to be updated also. They need another type of Horizons ride for a new Carousel of Progress (I love the original but the older it gets, the less relevant it becomes....you can't get rid of it seeing it's a Walt Disney original but at the same time have to update the future part of it and maybe the animatronics as well).
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