I have seen the future and it's lots of fun: great scenery, scary stuff that works out okay in the end and a starring part for everyone.
The future I'm talking about is an entertainment called Space Mountain, which opened at Disneyland late in May and has been doing miracle-at-Lourdes business ever since. Its capacity is about 2000 people an hour: yet, at the end of the day, people who have been waiting for up to three hours to take the three-minute ride are still being turned away.
The idea for Space Mountain, a part-planetarium, part-movie set and part-roller coaster ride that simulates a space journey, came from Walt Disney himself back in the mid-sixties. It then took twelve years, a reported $20 million (some $3 million more than Disney spent to build the entire amusement park in 1955) and several refinements in computer technology to put the 118-foot-tall, 2OO-foot-wide multi-spired white mountain where Disney wanted it in Tomorrowland.
Space Mountain is perhaps the world's best amusement park ride. Not simply because of its speed (as fast as 32 miles per hour) or the number of twists and turns, but because its many devices are combined so effectively. At WED (Walter Elias Disney) Enterprises, the Glendale complex where rides for the Disney parks are designed and built, Space Mountain is referred to as a “packaged experience," a fulfillment of Disney's intention to take the spectator out of his theater seat and put him in the middle of a drama that he could believe not only aurally and visually, but viscerally. And this three-minute deployment of light, sound and motion is doing the trick for a sensation-jaded public. The people coming off Space Mountain do not look like they have been to a movie, a rock concert or a stage play. They look like they have been to outer space.
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