Carousel of Progress's climax
Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels -- the exciting climax scene from the Disney World/GE Carousel of Progress, originally built as an exercise in animatronic, futuristic boosterism for the 1964 World's Fair. I love this ride, a revolving theater that tells a highly slanted version of the history of electricity, culminating in this glorious, 1980s living room complete with terrible, blocky VR game and comedy voice-recognition technology. It inspired me to write a forthcoming story, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life" (podcast in seven parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Link
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Wow, that brings back memories... For some reason, I seem to remember something about the future people ordering a ham and cheese omelet in French.
Something neat I noticed the last time we were there is that we own things that are props in 3 of the 4 sets.
We have the same sewing machine that's in act 2, the same Bakelite radio that's in act 3 (except ours is brown, not white), and in act 4 it's an electric pencil sharpener.
I'm still rooting for the Bladerunner future. Flying cars ftw.
Does "Carousel of Progress" still exist? Was that the pavilion they gutting to make "Alien Encounter"?
Honestly, at this point, since Disney has made Tomorrowland less an attempt to look like a likely future and more a retro one, the last stage in Carousel of Progress ought to have steampunky representations thereof, maybe riffing off the styles and appliances in the first stage, and to a lesser extent the later ones.
Then at the end a nanite storm liquifies the family, their burbling, bubbling song barely breaking the surface of the grey goo.
oh wow. i totally remember this exhibit! it brings back sooo many memories. thank you!
@ #4- no, Carousel of Progress is in a different building. "Stitch's Great Escape", nee "Alien Encounter", was formerly the home of "Mission to Mars".
(Geek alert? Busted.)
And here, I always thought the climax to Disneyland's Carousel of Progress was when they gutted the ride to send to Orlando, replaced it with "America Sings" and killed an 18 year old park employee with it. She was working the re-tooled ride as an usher/hostess, and got too close to the walls of the rotating stage.
http://www.snopes.com/disney/parks/amersing.asp
It's been an awful long time (when was Worldcon in Orlando?) but I remember enjoying TCOP ironically.
I recall that the final set had a crummy Olivetti PC on it.
("What Mother means is they're still shooting it out, but now it's in color!")
The picture set is nifty, and I especially like the shots through the scrim. No privacy around these parts, indeed.
I think my favorite thing about the "current" Carousel of Progress is radio man and novelist Jean Shepherd's narration as the father in the piece. He has quite a connection to the Carousel of Progress.
Shep toured the 1964 World's Fair for his radio show on WOR, lugging about a small reel-to-reel recorder to capture the sounds around him. There's audio of him sitting in the original Carousel of Progress. While in the show he quietly rips it apart in his friendly beatnik way, commenting on how transparent this paean to progress is and how silly it is to think that we as a civilzation have advanced solely due to the efforts of the good people at General Electric.
So I enjoy the irony that thirty years later, steeped in Americana and being so homey and nostalgic (though he always vehemently denied being a nostalgian) Shep was tapped to provide the voice of the father.
There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow, indeed.