Dream It! Do It! (Disney Editions Deluxe) (20 page)

This is the sketch John Hench made for the engineers. The completed “geodesic sphere” was, when it was built, the world’s largest, encompassing 2.2 million cubic feet of space inside, with an outside surface area of 150,000 square feet.

Ray Bradbury’s story treatment became the framework for our communication theme, taking us from the cave walls of France to the exploration of outer space
. “Where did we come from? Where are we going? How do we get there?”
Ray began…and his first draft answer ran fourteen pages!

One of the key assignments in creating the Spaceship Earth show went to Peggie Fariss. It was Peggie’s job to organize the research, including the work of outside academic consultants. What were the key periods and events in world history that advanced our ability to spread communications? What civilizations made quantum leaps forward? What did the people of the times wear, ranging from the royalty of ancient Egypt to the inventor Gutenberg at his printing press?

To assure historical accuracy, Peggie led a research effort that reached out around the country to specialists in the Renaissance, Egyptian hieroglyphics, ancient and biblical languages, and communications. Our primary authority was Fred Williams, founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and professor of communications at USC. In addition, Peggie’s bibliography of books consulted is nineteen pages long, from Cro-Magnon art to Greek language and “Latin graffiti.”

We launched Spaceship Earth with narration recorded by the wonderful voice of television actor Larry Dobkin. Then, in an attempt to create some star power with a voice familiar to our guests, Tom Fitzgerald wrote a great script for a fan of Walt Disney World and Epcot: Walter Cronkite. With changes in the show in the nineties, Tom created a new script for still another amazing voice: that of Jeremy Irons. And finally, with Siemens becoming the presenter of the new and current show in 2007, Pam Fisher created the current narration recorded with Dame Judi Dench.

The ride system was the most vexing issue of all. There were ride engineers at Imagineering who argued vehemently against the advisability of a ride that would rise 164 feet in the air, and descend backward. The first outside ride vendor selected closed its theme park unit after we chose them.… And retreated into transporting supplies in manufacturing operations.

This was one of those classic moments in the development of an attraction when “no” was not in the Imagineering vernacular. Predictably, placing a 180-foot “wienie” at the entrance to a park was so enticing that every guest wanted to know “what’s in the ball” (sometimes “golf ball”). There was no getting around solving the challenge of that huge elevation change from ground level to the 164-foot height, which entailed dealing with the dramatically steep slopes and the heavy, endless chain of vehicles needed to achieve the THRC (Theoretical Hourly Ride Capacity) of 2,571 per hour.

Last, but far from least, has been the challenge faced by every design and production team: designing and installing sets and scenes in a limited space environment where the audience is constantly moving upstream or downstream. Don’t let that “big ball” fool you: once the track envelope was established, the spaces left for show inside the geodesic sphere were extremely confined, often limited by structural elements, with practically no flat or square surfaces. As one show producer told me, “This building does not conform to easy storytelling!”

The original design and production team thought of loading in the show as a giant jigsaw puzzle. All the scenery was finished three or four months before the freight elevator was installed, so that the elevator shaft could be used to haul all the scenes from ground level to the top…because once the freight elevator was installed (and for subsequent changes in the show), all the set pieces had to be built in sections to fit into the limited space.

In so many ways, Spaceship Earth in Epcot represents our desire to communicate the connections all of us share with the past and the future on our fragile planet, expressed so beautifully by poet and statesman Archibald MacLeish. “To see the earth as it truly is,” he wrote, “small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

* * * * * * * * * *

One of my favorite projects was The Land, presented by Kraft. We had a great relationship with the participant’s executives, first with Bill Beers and then, when it became Dart & Kraft, with President and COO Arthur (Bud) Woelfle. (It’s now sponsored by Nestlé.)

The original pavilion included two of the major food facilities in Epcot and three main attractions: the film
Symbiosis
, Paul Gerber’s tour of the world to review the delicate balance between technological progress and environmental integrity, between man and nature; the Kitchen Kabaret, a humorous musical show devoted to telling the story of the benefits of good nutrition, starring “Bonnie Appetit”; and the Listen to the Land boat cruise. Today, the boat ride is still a major feature, but the main event is one of Disney’s most popular attractions in California and Florida: the hang glider–like experience called Soarin’.

Most Imagineers believed the experience that most exemplified “Walt’s Epcot concept”—experimental prototype of the future—was (and still is) The Land boat ride. The narrated, thirteen-minute trip in tandem boats carrying forty passengers (over two thousand per hour) travels at a speed of two feet per second through a story of agricultural development in challenging environments around the world—the rain forest, the desert, and the American prairie—then enters a world of agricultural beauty and bounty. There’s an Aquacell where fish are raised, and three major Living Laboratories: Tropic, Desert, and Creative or Experimental greenhouses. All told, some forty different food crops and sixteen growing systems demonstrate the potential of CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) in a thirty-thousand-square-foot facility where real food from all around the globe thrives, including the lettuce I had teased Card Walker about. Key staples such as rice, corn, sorghum, and tomatoes grow here year-round, and guests often see exotic plants from six continents around the world: African fluted pumpkin, jackfruit, cacao, Java apple, and dragon fruit (from a cactus).

Carl Hodges, then director of the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona, was another find by Peggie. Once we visited his labs, located a few steps from the Tucson Airport, we knew that he and his colleagues had to become part of our Epcot team. Hodges and his agricultural scientists’ work in halophyte research was especially noteworthy, stretching all the way back in time to the civilization of the Aztecs in Mexico who, it seems, knew more about growing plants in saline soil than anyone. The significance of halophyte research is that more than 99 percent of the water on earth is seawater or ice. The development of plants that can be irrigated with seawater has an important potential for the future.

We charged the University of Arizona group with developing the systems for growing food in The Land pavilion’s greenhouse-like structures. To prove the principles, in a controlled environment in Arizona, we had them build and plant a third of the total length of what would ultimately be the Florida boat ride. At the pace the boat would travel, we walked the attraction. We could almost pick the corn, tomatoes, banana squash, pineapples (and lettuce!) as we passed by. It was clear that Listen to the Land would be a winner—it was a thrill just to smell the attraction.

Almost as an afterthought, Carl Hodges asked, “Where do we keep the bees?”

I looked at him incredulously. “Carl, those boats that will be riding through the greenhouse—they will be filled with real people. Bees are out.”

“Well then,” Hodges shot back, “how do we
pollinate
the plants?”

“Look,” I replied, “we are the storytellers. We’re in show business. You are the scientists.
You
tell
us
how you are going to pollinate the plants!”

Today, when you ride the boats or take one of the nine backstage Harvest Tours offered daily and walk through the biomes of The Land, you will very likely see a scientist member of The Land’s team pollinating each plant, individually,
by hand
. It takes about fifteen hours per week to pollinate the dozens of plants growing in the Living Laboratories, and they have been doing this for thirty years.

At the dedication of The Land in October 1982, Kraft’s president, Bud Woelfle, read a quote from the renowned microbiologist, environmentalist, and humanist René Dubos—words that are inscribed at the entrance to the pavilion:

Symbiotic relationships mean creative partnerships. The earth is to be seen neither as an ecosystem to be preserved unchanged, nor as a quarry to be exploited for selfish and short-range economic reasons, but as a garden to be cultivated for the development of its own potentialities of the human adventure. The goal of this relationship is not the maintenance of the status quo, but the emergence of new phenomena and new values.

The dedication speaker followed. We were honored that the speaker was Dr. Norman Borlaug, agricultural geneticist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient in 1970, who is often called a father of the “green revolution.”

When the speechmaking ended, I followed Carl Hodges toward the entrance of The Land. Suddenly, he stopped with a shudder, and I worried he might have some kind of physical issue.

“Carl, are you all right?” I asked.

“I suddenly realized what this means for me,” he said. “By the end of the day, more people will have seen my work than in the previous thirty years I’ve been doing it!”

The impact of telling your story to fifteen thousand or twenty thousand people a day, and to millions each year, can be frightening to a scientist—imagine inviting thousands of people into your laboratory. Or it can be a giant stimulus, pushing us to explore new frontiers…just as Walt had envisioned the spirit and impact of Epcot.

* * * * * * * * * *

From early in the project development, we had an excellent working relationship with Exxon. To test the impact of working together, Disney produced a comic book called
Mickey and Goofy Explore Energy.
It quickly became the most widely distributed comic book in the history of the medium. Ten million copies were soon in the hands of young readers in schools around the country. A follow-up,
Mickey and Goofy Explore the Universe of Energy
, promoted our Epcot pavilion with an even larger distribution.

What no one knew was what was happening behind the scenes with the brand-new, then one-of-a-kind ride system we had committed ourselves to develop. Each show begins with ninety-six guests seated in each of six electric-powered passenger vehicles—the largest in the world, other than electric trains. Each of the vehicles, eighteen feet wide and twenty-nine feet long, weighs six and a half tons. And, despite the fact that when they leave the guest loading area, they “break apart” into a single file ride-through, the vehicles are driverless.

The vehicles are guided through the Universe of Energy by a small wire (one-eighth of an inch in diameter) buried in the floor. Sensing units mounted under the ride-through vehicles detect signals from a guide wire, and issue commands to the independent steering units on the front and rear axles to keep the vehicles centered over the wire. Inductive power coupling transfers electric power from a source in the roadbed to vehicles by electromagnetic induction across an air gap. Power is transferred without contact only when the Universe of Energy vehicles are stopped in the theaters. A central computer operates the movement of these “traveling theaters,” with a secondary computer acting as a go-between for the individual vehicles. Significant changes in direction in the attraction are accomplished by giant turntables, which spin the theater cars on a cushion of air. The two turntable systems, eighty and ninety-two feet in diameter, can handle six cars and a load capacity of eighty-five tons.

I was soon to find out why no one had ever attempted a ride system this complicated. Tony Baxter, senior vice president in the Creative Division of Imagineering, recently reminded me of a call I received and put on my speakerphone, as we were reviewing Tony’s design for the ride-through on his imaginative project, Journey into Imagination. The call was from John Zovich, our vice president of engineering, one of the prime people responsible for the ultimate success of Epcot’s technology innovations. But on this occasion, the news was all bad.

“We give up, Marty,” John said. “We cannot make this system work. It’s just too complicated.”

“John,” I responded, “if you can’t make the ride system work, we have no show and therefore no Universe of Energy. We lose our sponsor. If we lose Exxon, it’s a domino effect, and what will happen is, the other sponsors we are soliciting will go away. And at the end of the day, we will lose the project—no more Epcot Center. So, John,” I said, pausing a few seconds for emphasis, “don’t call me again until the ride system is working!” And I hung up on our chief engineer.

I won’t say our Imagineering ride engineers were entirely successful. For a full year after we opened, I received a weekly call from Exxon’s senior vice president, Jack Clarke, pointing out that the ride and show only operated at 80 to 84 percent efficiency, in contrast to the 98 to 100 percent we target. By year two of Epcot’s life, we were in the 90 percentile every week, and Jack Clarke and I could concentrate on an occasional tennis game where, as I pointed out to him, we were both hard-pressed to achieve 50 percent efficiency.

The Epcot advisory boards were absolutely critical to our success. The members were academics and government officials, futurists and history experts, and industry executives and foundation leaders. One of the very best was our advisory group for The Living Seas, which included directors and/or senior scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Geographic Society president Gilbert Grosvenor, and Dr. Sylvia Earle, who would later become the chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).