A World on the Move

On Sunday afternoon, I will be up on the second level of Innoventions chatting with wonderful people who were lucky enough to get tickets for the Yesterland tour of Disneyland. I get to talk about Tomorrowland.
Tomorrowland was about to reemerge as a shining vision of an optimistic future. This would be the Tomorrowland that Walt had always wanted but could not afford in 1955. “Tomorrowland was something very dear to Walt’s heart," said Roy Disney. "The old Tomorrowland had always been a source of annoyance to him because he never really accomplished what he was trying to do…he was involved in great depth in the New Tomorrowland until the day he died.” Joe Fowler said, "[Walt] always had it in the back of his mind to completely rebuild it."
From the start, Walt’s intention had been that Tomorrowland be "a vista into a world of wondrous ideas, signifying man's achievements, a step into the future, with predictions of constructive things to come." Walt had high hopes for Tomorrowland, but the final product was constrained primarily by a lack of time and money. "When we opened Disneyland, outer space was Buck Rogers,” Walt said. “And since then has come Sputnik and our great [United States’] program in outer space. So I had to tear down my Tomorrowland that I built 11 years ago and rebuild it to keep pace." He added, "The only problem with anything of Tomorrow is that at the pace we’re going right now, tomorrow would catch up with us before we got it built.”