“What a wonderfully ironic notion it is that, in this turbulent century, urban man might, just possibly, be saved by a mouse.” The last line from the book, The Art of Walt Disney, by Christopher Finch.
Since first seeing Christopher Finch’s book, I wanted to live in Walt Disney’s EPCOT. I’m not referring to Epcot the theme park. I’m referring to Walt’s first and original concept, an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Few people knew what EPCOT was at that time. At that time the “Florida film” Walt Disney created had only been shown to a few select audiences. Finch’s work was really the first book to highlight this project after Walt Disney World was established in 1971. Published in 1973 after Roy’s death, the notions presented here would only be held for a few more years before the Epcot Center concept of having a world’s fair-type of experience would be presented in its wake. But the vision was still very bold—and very possible.
here) to get a greater context of this development. I cannot begin to say how wowed I was by the experience. I don’t say wow very often, but I was saying it throughout the entire experience. And the biggest BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) I had that day was that this development had literally taken a page out of Walt Disney’s design for EPCOT. Let me illustrate:
Undeveloped Land. At the heart of the EPCOT development was the idea that you would have to start from scratch in order to create the ideal city. To that end, Walt Disney amassed a major amount of land. At the Palm, they didn’t necessarily take undeveloped land—they created it. Out of the ocean they scooped up exactly what they wanted and where and placed it where they wanted to create the shape of a palm. In essence Disney had to do the same thing to create its parks and resorts. It had to take swamp and separate it into land and water components.
