Riding off into the weekend

It's been a long time since we've ridden off into the weekend. It seems a propos to link to this abondoned dinosaur park in East Berlin that apparently fell when the wall did. These dinos look much like the prospective attendees of the abandoned DisAd13.

Riding off into the weekend: Premies

There are those among us who, when they think of classic Coney Island rides, think of parachute jumps or wonder wheels or cyclones. But these pale in comparison to my personal favorite: the incubators! With live babies! State of the art natal care for the prematurely arrived!

What?

I actually am a connoisseur of classic Luna Park and Dreamland. And one of the biggest attractions back in the day? The title of the piece says it all: Babies in incubators were once an attraction at Coney Island

If only there was a way to add something like this to #DisAd13.

Riding off into the weekend

With all the talk about Disney buying Star Wars, one of the inevitable questions is if Disney will somewhere build a Star Wars land of some sort in one of the parks. Germaine to that is this article about Star Wars ride concepts. Most interesting is the design and layout of the roller coaster. I mean, this was really thought out, and I absolutely would be willing to run straight to it at rope drop.

Lots of other discussion, jokes, cartoons, whatever have been thrown around the blogosphere. Mostly people are sanguine, or at least most people who are Disney and/or Star Wars types to begin with. We've already seen the synergy for years in Star Tours and Captain EO and, for that matter, the Indiana Jones properties. Disney knows how to work this stuff. There are people off the reservation who complain that Star Wars is dead, which only points out that they've lost interest themselves. My favorite response was one that I hope is true, that unlike Lucas, Disney won't keep mucking about with the movies that already exist, and for that matter, might eventually issue them on video the way they were originally released. That would be really nice, since little Lucas did after the fact was an improvement; even if there were improvements, eliminating a movie from view in its original form, especially movies as culturally influential as these, is just bad thinking.

So in the immortal words of Obi-Wan Kenobi: "Live long and prosper Open the pod door Hal May the Mouse be with you."

Riding off into the weekend: Epcot's birthday

They used to call it EPCOT Center. It began as Walt Disney's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and it was not a theme park but a planned city. Disney, a dedicated futurist, wanted to expand beyond what he had already done into solving major problems of urban life. His idea was, in a way, one of the last of the great futurist projects, a category that stretched back almost over the entire 20th Century. The underlying problem with the futurist vision is that it's cold and clean and it eliminates all the messiness of human life that it just so happens that humans like and cities apparently need to thrive. Cities that work are organic, with accruals over time of homes and buildings and shops in different fashions for different ages. Planned communities, on the other hand, might conceivably work for a small group of people looking to fence their homes off from other people, but that's not a working premise for commerce. That's a cave. And cities are not caves.

Of course, for Walt, a man of his times, EPCOT was a potential solution to the problems of urbanization. He wasn't trying to lead us down the path of sterile ruin, he was trying to eliminate slums and tiresome commutes and economic unsteadiness. It just turned out that history has proven that his solution wasn't the right one. When he died in 1966, it was EPCOT that he left behind as his next step forward. The Florida Project was already a go. The Magic Kingdom would be built first, and then the city. But it was not to be.

I don't know whether Disney's successors came to believe that a city like EPCOT wouldn't work, or if they just weren't up to the task of attempting to create it. In any case, what they did come up with was a plan that united two different parks into one, a standing world's fair at least in its inception. On the one hand, corporations would show their ideas for the future, and on the other, countries would exhibit themselves and their people. It wasn't exactly a world's fair (usually countries want to show off their futures, not their pasts), but it was close enough.

It opened 30 years ago, in October of 1982.

It's changed a lot since the early days. Some of the changes are improvements, some are losses, but as with all of the Disney parks, they can't be envisioned as museums, and they move along with the times as the Disney corporation perceives of those times. I would kill to get Horizons back, as would most folks who remember it. Then again, who doesn't love Soarin'? Things come and go.

To celebrate the anniversary, some Epcot (now lower-cased) links:

The Epcot that never was: Walt's original proposal.

World Showcase original artwork I love concept art!

An Horizons tribute. Sigh...

The Universe of Energy original art.

And finally, original art from The Land.

All of this is from the Disney and More blog, which, needless to say, I highly recommend.

Riding off into the weekend

We've talked about Landmark Entertainment before. They're the folks who wanted to build the Starship Enterprise in downtown Las Vegas. (Damn, but that was a good idea.)

This piece is a collection of concept art for some other projects that never got built, drawn by former Imagineers. The Monopoly park is just one of them; maybe this one never got built because a lot of visitors weren't able to throw doubles to get out of jail.

Check out the rest of it (and it's all gorgeous) at When WDI Legendary Imagineers Designed Landmark Entertainment Projects

Riding off into the weekend

We need to get classic again with a roller coaster. Not a woodie, but a steel coaster that I, for one, would like to ride. Not too extreme, and quite long, which is what I like. Say hello to my little friend Shambhala:

Riding off into the weekend

Well, you can ride this. Me, I'll stand as far away as possible marveling that people paid good money for it. No, it's not malfunctioning. It's supposed to do that. (I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in Russia. They gave Pussy Riot the choice of this or jail, and the ladies chose jail.)

Riding off into the weekend: '64-65 World's Fair

Ground Zero for World's Fair buffs is probably the New York '39 fair, as one that most worked its way into the culture of the day and at the same time transcended that culture with its mix of modernism and hope on the eve of war. From the beginning of the era of big exhibitions, starting with the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, fairs were a really big deal, most of them doing their best to outdo the previous one. The creation of landmark objects became very important: the Eiffel Tower (originally 1889 Paris), the Ferris wheel (originally 1893 Chicago), the Atomium (1958 Belgium), the Trylon and Perisphere and the Unisphere (New York, 1939 and 64-5). Countries exhibited their wares, the world was made smaller, and ideas for future progress were presented.

There were a lot of fairs and expositions from the Crystal Palace on, but then they sort of petered out. For one thing, the need for international exchange wasn't what it used to be, and countries simply didn't want to spend the money in this sort of demonstration. Secondly, guessing the future is progressively more and more of a mug's game, and most people are flummoxed just guessing about the features of the next iPhone. They still have fairs and expositions, used mostly for the host countries to get support to build some much needed new infrastructure, and for developing countries to drum up business. They aren't the world destination they used to be.

New York '64-65 was one of the last of the really big ones (although it wasn't officially sanctioned by the governing body, as if promoter Robert Moses would care about that). The author of our little ride into the weekend today sums it up well: it came to town the same year as the Beatles, so for folks of a certain age, it was a game-changer. For me, it was less than an hour away via public transportation. I won't say I lived there, but I visited as often as I could.

So, return with us now to that golden couple of years: Promises Made: The 1964-65 World’s Fair

Oh, yeah. Did we mention that this particular World's Fair brought us this?

Real-life Roller Coaster Tycoon

My favorite computer game gets an upgrade:



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Riding off into the weekend: Copperfield's

Once upon a time, magic was big. Around the same time that half the kids in the country wanted to grow up to be standup comics, the other half wanted to grow up to be magicians. TV was filled with specials, and many performers reached superstar status, most especially David Copperfield. (Nice name. He changed it from his real name, Uriah Heep.)

Meanwhile, the Disney parks had been into magic since forever. There was a magic shop near the end of Main Street (in both WDW's MK and in California's DL if I'm not mistaken), where kids could ogle tricks they could purchase, and the staff performed/demonstrated their wares. This particular shop going extinct is one of the great losses of the parks.

Anyhow, put Disney and magical superstardom together, and what do you get? The World That Never Was: Copperfield’s Magic Underground.

The author of the article wonders if it would have worked. Maybe, but not unless there was a heavy dose of live performance. For a while Caesar's in Vegas had a setup where you had an evening of magic broken down into three parts: dinner with magic (hard to explain, but trust me, it was magical), close-up magic in a small venue, and major illusions on a big stage. You went from one to the other over the course of the evening. This was back when Vegas was in its family-friendly stage, and we loved it, but it has been replaced, like so many things, by Celine Dion. Magic, as it turns out, isn't what it used to be. Nowadays half the kids in the country want to grow up to be Steve Jobs, and the other half want to grow up to have any job, period. Times have changed.

Oh, well. Have a good long end-of-summer weekend!

Riding off into the weekend

Actually, riding off into a whole week. Probably won't be blogging again until 8/27 at the earliest. So I thought I'd make this one last.

First, Boingboing posted this one:



That got me looking around...



So, you might use your time not reading this blog building a roller coaster in your backyard.

Then again, you might prefer to turn Detroit into a Zombie theme park:



Here's more info, if you want to hunt down the Motown undead.

And finally, an extinct attraction. The story of it is at TPE: Nature's Wonderland. And if that's not enough, some dude actually built the ride!



See y'all soon.

Riding off into the weekend

This time out, a virtual waterslide, described at Makers' Faire. These guys actually built the thing, and you know you want to ride it.

Riding off into the weekend

This looks like a dream of Tomorrowland juxtaposed against Cinderella's castle, if you had too many pickles right before going to sleep. The io9 headline says it all: An abandoned Russian theme park (with a woolly mammoth) in Japan.

Have a nice weekend. Don't eat too many pickles.

Riding off into the weekend

We haven't been on a coaster in a while. This one is from Dollywood.



Below is what the ride actually looks like. You're hanging out in space, as you can see. I do sort of wish the landscape was more interesting, though. There's a virtual version of the ride on the Dollywood site that makes it look like you're soaring through gorgeous mountains; the reality looks more like a park that hasn't done any landscaping yet.

Riding off into the weekend

How about an attraction that was never built, to tide us over for the weekend? In EPCOT's opening day TV Special in 1982 (you can catch it on YouTube), host Danny Kaye talks to Roots author Alex Haley about the soon to be built African pavilion.

We're still waiting.

The problem, as explained in The World That Never Was: Equatorial Africa, was basically money. As in, Equatorial African nations weren't rolling in it, certainly not enough to pass a whole bunch of it to Disney. Author Josh Taylor explains in the piece that there were numerous parts to the envisioned attraction, including a virtual safari of sound.

Animal Kingdom has probably satisfied WDW's need for an African presence on property. Taylor says that Brazil is eyeing the very empty space where Equatorial Africa would have been built. That works for me. Brazil is one of those places I may never get to. Much like Equatorial Africa. But at least I could get there via Disney World...
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Birthday 2: Disneyland (sort of)

Disneyland was supposed to open tomorrow (in 1955), and today was a preview for the press. But somehow the word got out, and they were breaking down the doors. And this is the day it was dedicated, so let's go with this one.

What was the park like in 1955? Well, why not take A Journey Through The 1955 Guidebook? It was produced before the park opened, so what you see is, mostly, what you get. Here's a link to the pdf if you want to own your very own copy.

Today the park is 57 years old. What I find more amazing is that this year, WDW is 41 years old. I expect Disneyland to seem like it's been around forever. But WDW? 41? It just doesn't compute.

Riding off into the weekend

This one actually came up in the conversation on O'C's birthday, when we were talking about water park possibilities for the DisAd13. Say hello to the Cannonball Loop.

This ugly looking water slide, as you can see, climaxed in a loop. The problem was, the physics of the slide were such that your odds of getting through the loop by actually looping were pretty small. JV's eyes were aglow as he described this to us, but since you weren't there, you'll have to settle for this article at io9, Behold the water slide so dangerous it was shut down immediately.

Of course, some members of the VCA will merely have their appetites whetted by reading this. The good news is, Action Park as a whole was something of a watery death trap. Fortunately, Complex has a complete guide to all the park's attractions, including casualty statistics. So you can relive the fun, and danger, and thank your lucky stars that you weren't there to enjoy it.

As I say, JV was positively gleeful as he described this mess as only a physics teacher can.
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Riding off into the weekend

We leave you this time with not one but ten full amusement parks. There's only one catch: they're all abandoned. As the article says, there's a certain beauty to these places, but they're also incredibly eerie. You think that an amusement park ought to be filled with people, including a lot of kids, translating into a scene brimming with life. When the scene is, instead, brimming with decay, it gives you the creeps.

Check out 10 Most Incredible Abandoned Theme Parks on Earth. Touring plans are not required.

(By the way, there is no question in the universe about the best abandoned amusement park of all time. If you've never visited it, then we suggest that you drop whatever weekend plans you have and do so immediately. You won't regret it.)
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Riding off into the weekend

This week, a WDW attraction that was never built.

Disney buffs know well that, when WDW opened in 1971, there was no Pirates of the Caribbean ride. The thought was that POTC was old hat to Floridians; why would they need imaginary pirates when they lived in the place that was already full of real pirates?

To which the public responded, What? No POTC in the Magic Kingdom? I demand to speak to the manager! How can you not put in this signature ride?

Also, exactly what pirates is Florida full of, again?

The Mouse had a different idea. They were going to build a Wild West ride every bit as elaborate and signature as POTC. But they never did. Instead, they quickly built POTC (in a down-and-dirty version that never did make much sense until they added Johnny Depp), and the various elements of the Western River Expedition were later worked into things like the mountains Thunder and Splash.

The whole story is well explained at Disney Park History.

Not long ago, D23, the Mouse's official fan club, had an expo at which they displayed a mocked up ride through of the none-existent attraction. It requires a little leap of faith on your part, but how often do you get to ride a ride that was never built?



Happy weekend.
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Riding off into the weekend, Far East edition

I love woodies!



[Via]

Then again, you may be looking for more this weekend. It's been hot, at least in the northeast. So hot that you might think you're in hell. So why not Spend a lovely day with the kids at Thailand’s Hell torture theme park...

This is the sickest place I've ever seen. Enjoy (?) it.

See you Monday.
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