Tag Archives: Walt Disney

Antici-pay-shun

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tomorrowland boxWhat is the movie Tomorrowland going to be about? Rather than tell us, filmmakers Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof are turning their project into an irresistible mystery. Lindelof has already proven with Lost he can hook people and keep them on the line for years.

The publicity mystery began with the release of photos of an old banker’s box labeled “1952” on the duo’s personal Twitter accounts. Widespread speculation about the contents of the box followed.

At last weekend’s D23 Expo the pair brought the mystery box onstage with them and spent their time rummaging through its contents.

There was a blueprint for the “It’s a Small World” attraction at the 1964 World’s Fair. Also, a 1928 issue of Amazing Stories containing a story titled “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” and a piece of cardboard with strategic cutouts that, when placed over the text of the tale, generated cryptic phrases like “I’ve seen across the gap.”

And, reports Hero Complex, there was a doctored photo —

Bird noted that “the very word ‘Tomorrowland’ is evocative,” and he and Lindelof showed the audience a photograph of Walt Disney with Amelia Earhart labeled “April 1945,” which, of course, is years after the famed pilot’s disappearance. The photo is, of course, a fake, Disney’s face was pasted onto the body of Cary Grant.

Lindelof said, “It’s our jobs as storytellers to say, What if this photograph was real?”

Others might say it’s their job as storytellers to tell us the story. Ah, but for that we have to wait until December 2014 — and buy a ticket.

Leslie Nielsen Dies

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Leslie Nielsen, actor, died November 28 at the age of 84; he’d been hospitalised with pneumonia. Early appearances included the sf anthology series Tales of Tomorrow (1952-53). He played Commander J. J. Adams in Forbidden Planet (1956). His career took an unexpected shift into comedy with Airplane! (1980), with similar roles in Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), 2001: A Space Travesty (2000), Superhero Movie (2008) and Stan Helsing (2009).

Surely I will always remember him as The Swamp Fox, the American Revolutionary War leader he played in several episodes of ABC’s Disneyland series (but I know, don’t call him Shirley…) When Walt Disney’s TV show moved to NBC the season after I told my father, who worked at NBC’s Burbank studio as a video engineer, he should ask them to make another Swamp Fox story. I was an 8-year-old history buff at the time and convinced this good idea would be practically self-evident. General Sarnoff and Walt must have felt otherwise.

[Thanks to David Klaus, Steve Green and Andrew Porter for the story.]

Snapshots 46

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Here are 4 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Would you believe that an autographed collection of poetry by C. S. Lewis was among the things found by an archivist when he inventoried the office of the late Walt Disney?

“It was an eerie thing to sit … in his chair and count the paper clips in the drawer,” Smith recalled with a nervous chuckle. On the bookshelves, he discovered books and letters given to Walt by Upton Sinclair, Winston Churchill and C. S. Lewis, who inscribed one of his books of poetry with the words: “From one visionary to another.”

(2) Bad Astronomy points to a breathtaking display of TV spaceships that look as if they were photographed while participating in an air show.

(3) Neil Gaiman is grumpy about the proliferation of fictional vampires that aren’t scary and disregard other traditional features of the type:

“My next big novel was going to have a vampire. Now, I’m probably not. They are everywhere, they’re like cockroaches.”

(4) We already understand that San Diego is eager to hold onto the Comic-Con because it generates a lot of business for the city. But just how much is that?

When tens of thousands of Comic-Con attendees flood San Diego next month for their annual confab, they’ll be bringing more than superhero costumes, comic books and “Star Wars” paraphernalia. They’ll be delivering an economic bonanza of nearly $163 million, the first official estimate of the convention’s financial impact.

And yet it’s not necessarily San Diego’s most lucrative convention. A November meeting of 36,000 neuroscientists outspends comics fans. They pay more per night for hotel rooms and contribute an estimated $170 million to the local economy.

[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus, Andrew Porter and Glenn Glazer.]

Roy E. Disney Dies

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Roy Edward Disney, who led two separate revolts against chief executives of his late uncle’s corporation, and helped revive its legendary animation unit, died December 16 of cancer. He was 79. The Los Angeles Times paid him tribute in a long article.

The first chief executive of the Walt Disney Co. that Roy unseated was Walt’s own son-in-law, Ron Miller. The struggle began in 1984:

The turmoil Disney ignited eventually swept the old management group from the corporate suites. In the end, Disney, with an alliance formed with the billionaire Bass family of Texas, returned to the board and forced out the studio management, paving the way for the hiring of a new team led by Michael Eisner, Frank Wells and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

However, after the death of Wells in 1994 relations between Roy and Michael Eisner grew strained.

By November 2003, Disney learned that the board’s four-member nominating committee was planning to leave his name off the slate of directors scheduled to be elected at the company’s next annual meeting. The longtime animation chief discovered he had been shut out of a Thanksgiving week screening of ideas for new animated films. The company had been in a prolonged financial slump, with its earnings flat and its stock performance anemic, but the snub was the last straw. Disney and Gold, his business partner, abruptly quit the board of directors in December 2003 and called for Eisner’s resignation.

[Thanks to David Klaus for the link.]

Recycling Disneyland

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10 Things I Miss About Disneyland by Rick VanderKnyff triggers some great memories of all the days I spent in the park as a kid. It’s interesting to see how some rides have been updated, and shocking that a one particular exhibit has vanished.

And meanwhile this summer, a once-defunct ride has been resurrected with a brand-new movie tie-in, as the old Submarine Voyage (1959-1998), initially inspired by a historic 1958 voyage under the Arctic ice cap (remember that, kids?), came back this summer as the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage.

And on this list of things the author misses, what’s Number One? Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln began as a 1964 World’s Fair attraction before coming to the park; the main show was an Audio-Animatronic Lincoln speechifying before a closed curtain, which dramatically opened near the end of the show to reveal a replica of the Capitol building.

It was combined years ago with a salute to Walt Disney, but has been offline since the space was remodeled as an exhibit for Disneyland’s 50th anniversary. The writer of “10 Things I Miss About Disneyland” thinks it may come back with some surprising twists.

(P.S. I’m surprised the Wikipedia’s lengthy article about Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” fails to mention that it inspired Ray Bradbury’s famous “Downwind From Gettysburg”, in turn, a short story, play and TV production.)

Yesterday’s Tomorrowland

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It’s pretty easy to write the Walt-Disney’s-version-of-the-future-didn’t-happen article and several people do it every year. But few write so cleverly, or have such a science-fictional eye for detail, as Joel Garreau in his take on the subject for the Washington Post (registration required):

But this is absolutely not the future in the research pipeline. No genetically modified critters here that eat carbon dioxide and poop gasoline. No nanobots smaller than blood cells, cruising our bodies to zap cancer. No brain implants that expand our memory. No cellphones that translate Chinese. No dragonfly-size surveillance bots, no pills that shut off the brain’s trigger to sleep, no modified mitochondria sustaining our energy while making obesity as quaint as polio.

Not only can’t Disney predict the future, it seems to be having trouble predicting the present.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]