Saturday, January 13, 2007

Wandlessly Wonderful


Is it too much to hope? First, when I vacationed at Walt Disney World in September, I noticed the t-shirt above in several shops. It doesn't take much to notice what is missing from Spaceship Earth.

This weekend, I decided to watch the latest Walt Disney World vacation video while doing chores. Throughout, Spaceship Earth is conspicuously missing the wand. Sure, there are some shots taken in the past few years in which the wand is clearly there. On the other hand, Disney seems to have gone out of its way to find and utilize pre-wand shots of Spaceship Earth whenever Epcot is mentioned -- in fact, the opening shot of the Epcot section is a closeup of Spaceship Earth in all its wandless, geodesic majesty.

Maybe I'm just jumping to conclusions, but it seems that Disney is at long last preparing for a time in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future in which theme-park management comes to its senses and removes the giant eyesore, restoring Spaceship Earth to the clean, sleek, stunning design that was always intended.

If so, Disney's "Year of a Million Dreams" only has 999,999 left to go in my book! Heck, I'll even count it worthy of 100,000 or so dreams!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope your hunch is correct and that the wand is coming down. It will certainly be a huge step in the right direction towards improving Epcot. And that is actually a very cool illustration on the shirt. It would be better to see the chinese theater on it though instead of the sorcerer hat.

Anonymous said...

Yeah -- THAT would be nice, too!

Brian said...

The really cool Epcot "throw" I purchased in August has Soarin', but no wand!

Anonymous said...

*crosses fingers, and toes* I only hope that this is true and that ugly wand is going to be removed sometime in the near future...

*dreams of the photographs that will no longer be ruined by the eyesore*

Anonymous said...

I would be really nice if they're preparing to remove that awful wand, but I'll have to see it to believe it.

But, there is hope in the new year. Over at LaughingPlace.com, they posted video of a stage show where the walk-around characters actually move their mouths and blink their eyes! This gives them a new dimension of realism and magic. I must admit that I was completely flabbergasted. It was brilliant!

Things like bringing the characters to life even more gives me hope for the future. They didn't have to do that (everything was perfectly fine with the non-articulate rubberheads), but they did it to IMPROVE things. It's a small step, but a hopeful one. Here's the link:

http://www.laughingplace.com/Lotion-View-357.asp