Podcast: The Ride - Horizons

Episode Date: November 20, 2020

An in-depth look at the beloved Epcot attraction that was often called a spiritual sequel to the Carousel of Progress.  A Day in the Park With Barney episode up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: http://foreverdogpodcasts.com/plus FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forever Dog Warning the following podcast contains gushing fawning Breathless praise and at least one brief joke about a robot or something. It's horizons on today's podcast the ride the show where we like to say i'll take the city yes it's always exciting i'm jason sheridan joined as always by mike carlson yes i'm here uh i always say that i'll take the city uh you know it's one of the one of my merch items i sell on my personal etsy shop oh yeah the front says i'll take the city in the back says yes it's always exciting and then i also have yeah like

athletic pants that say that on the butt as well on the seat's always exciting and then i also have yeah like athletic pants that say that on the butt as well on the seat excuse me yeah and then you have small shorts that say i'm serious on one cheek and the other cheek says well i am too like unusually confrontational look it's a big ride today folks i'm going narrow there were so many i'm sure there's lots of uh lines about the future i could have started with scott gerner also here as usual um yeah i yeah i wear a hoodie that says uh stretching frontiers into reality um which is what um leonard vickers the general electric vp of corporate marketing uh said what this attraction was about um i yeah and then my and then on the and then i wear pants that on the say i ride for leonard vickers have we we have never talked about leonard vickers on the show before i don't think

no this is the first time five minutes getting straight into leonard vickers um we have to get you know we have to get stuff out of the way because there's so much stuff but can leonard vickers get it um i don't have a photo that one of the only google results for him is uh an obituary and the photo used is a candle so uh i cannot off of that determine whether he can get it okay well we'll come back we'll find uh like young hunk pictures and then we'll determine that later um oh wait no wait i do have a photo wait all right from progress city usa and just to explain general electric was the sponsor of this Epcot attraction we're talking about today and

alright I will share my screen and please announce if you think that he can get it I will say he's not as good as E-Card Walker yeah that's what I'll say I don't want to put him down I don't want to say he can't get it I need to see more photos but I will say he's as E-Card Walker. Yeah, that's what I'll say. I don't want to put him down. I don't want to say he can't get it. I need to see more photos, but I will say he's no E-Card Walker.

That's all I'll say. He's in a suit in front of like a wall of equations, like on a whiteboard. That's what we're looking at. He's approximately 62 years old. Or 34, depending on like the time period and how people aged um yeah i look i don't know getting it is i i think he may have once been able to get it let me be nice to leonard vickers yeah yeah um look we got we got a lot of stuff we got a lot of stuff but shout out to progress city usa a great website website and Twitter account I've read for years.

Folks, we're talking about Horizons. The most, I will say, and I've seen lots of other people saying it, the most beloved closed attraction when it comes to Walt Disney World. Yes, it's gotta be. Yeah, it's gotta be. Right?

Maelstrom is closed, but you know, the bones of it are still there and even then that's maelstrom is not nearly the horizons original journey original journey yes I guess there

it's for sure there but is it just because we can see at least c figment even in this bastardized version maybe the great movie ride great yeah but i i don't know i don't not to not to me yeah yeah could be this definitely could be this um yeah hey and we're hitting early epcot barely not original epcot this was a year delayed but um it's pretty early epcot and uh it is shameful how little of this we've done we did universe of energy and then haven't touched one in in a little bit uh and so we'll start getting through them and this one is huge is this is it

maybe a result of us enjoying things where we can like talk shit and make fun of it like the american dream mall or uh some of these you know bizarre things that we cover as opposed to this where i mean i'm so excited to talk about it but i think it's going to be an episode full of like and then the bad thing that was so good and then the music that was so good the c base look it's two stories and there's animatronics on both and you there's it's like a die cut uh yeah jason what you're trying to say is it's so good it's so good yes i mean it's a lot but it's very earnest love for this thing i i think with all of us i was trying to figure out what the comedic angle on it was because i also thought

oh no this is going to be just a gushing episode, which I'm sure people like. I think they like that, but they do come here to podcast. All right. For the laughs. I was trying to like, I'm like,

Oh, I think, you know, we could joke around about this interesting tidbit. So I have a couple joke notes to try to make sure that there's some levity in this episode. I mean, that was, some levity in this episode. I mean, that was... But maybe I'll forget them. My funny discovery, I've watched this ride through now like four times,

which is not unusual when prepping an episode, but this ride is like 20 minutes long if you watch all the endings. So I feel... Because there's just so much I was having trouble remembering and wrapping my head around and about an hour ago as I was watching the last one the thing that struck me as funny is the dynamic between the grandparent characters uh and they're like clearly like each other but they they do snap at each other every now and then were you referencing that earlier is that what that little uh back and forth was about uh yeah i i the i'll take the city

yes it's always exciting is like begrudgingly like yeah they're making a good point but the best i think is the lines when they're talking about uh the floating city and the one says i'm serious and the other says well so am i i don't remember this little this little bickering wow wow um so uh elderly couples still fight in the future no matter how hopeful it is right Right. Let me ask this right up top. Did this make you sad for the state of the world? Oh, yeah. Watching this video. Because it certainly made me sad.

I anticipated this. And I was thinking, I feel like we have to put a moratorium on discussion of how the future is bleak and not as good as Horizons. Fair. Because the more of that that's run through this episode this will be a miserable slog hey i hear i hear that that's why i wanted to get it out of the way right now is that i was watching it and i was just like oh yeah that would be oh yeah wouldn't have been great if we were like here by now right um i am optimistic. I do agree with one of the mission statements of the ride that this future is possible. All you have to do is get rid of fossil fuels, the current iteration of wage labor, policing, the military industrial complex, the current concept of nation states and nuclear weapons, which, yes, that sounds great.

Let's go for it. Let's have horizons. Surely the DNC and pelosi can stay wouldn't you say jason i mean look as long as they're ripping up paper and clapping that's all that's all i care about hell yeah commemorative scarves man these ballers they're gonna bring they're gonna get us to horizons future there should be a new version of horizons where an empty political gesture is one of the scenes and then the next scene we see what happened so it's like pelosi clapping and then all of a sudden we're on the moon and a moon base we've colonized the moon because of that gesture oh it inspired people so much to be the best version of themselves

yeah it created harmony on earth and enabled an international cooperation to build uh brava centauri that's right so that could really draw the parallel i think in a future version of this but again that's maybe that's future brainstorming i don't even want to get there uh i do think there there's a funny realistic version of this where it's like wow we have a colony on the moon thanks to spacex uh-oh the founder of spacex is tweeting about a local worker that's trying to rescue a child he's calling him a pedophile again and this really in the moon colony is on fire the first instance of fire in space elon musk is spending most of his days trying to debunk

COVID testing. He really should be more focused on his futurism, his future colonies. Why is this colony just thick with blunt smoke? Has been for years, apparently. This is a weird, I don't want to like over

explain this thing because i think many of the listeners just absolutely know what horizons is and have it memorized and have been wondering when we were going to get to it but i feel like it is a product of it being gone since 1999 that there are a lot of people who don't really know it uh didn't get to go on it um and in in doing so i mean the the basics of it are uh early epcot attraction open to year late um it is where mission space is now um and it is like a hard ride to synopsize it is a yes it's it's a it's a dark ride that is about the future. It is visions of futuristic life, sometimes from the past, ideas from the past of what the future would be. And then you get to see a bunch of ideas from 1983 of what the future could be, which I'm on record many times as saying is the best future, the most optimal future.

Some of these futures make my heart stop they are so beautiful uh it's uh it's it is a weird wonderful ride yeah it's it's i i thought this while i was watching the video and then i saw that i think internally and some other people thought of it kind of as a sequel to the carousel of progress yes which of course if you don't know one of that is that's like sort of the history of technology in America and whatever. And with a little now, of course, it has a quote-unquote future scene, which is 20 years ago future scene, which is less fun. Although, my favorite thing in the ride, certainly. It is fun.

And also, due to the cyclical nature of trends vr came back around like rugby shirts came back around so it stuck around long enough to be kind of relevant oh voice activation is real and very inconvenient now uh it's here and it's a pain in the ass and every version not perfect every version of ios uh the dictation just gets worse at least if you have a philadelphia regional accent it just doesn't understand what the fuck you are saying at all yes um so yeah it's like it's like in the same vein they use the carousel progress song in there which is nice which i was really like kind of impressed by that thinking of like oh a ride sequel is really a cool idea yeah which we don't see a lot of i guess i guess i've

talked about before the monsters after dark guardians um halloween overlay which is kind of a sequel in the same ride but i was like oh yeah this is like this is exactly this is completely than a continuation of that idea and on a bigger scale more you know longer ride different kind of rise sequel in a different place yeah it is pretty rare let me ask you this uh because i i did not know i i guess i knew it was in the spirit i knew it was sort of related uh um to the carousel of progress and the song was in there the ge sponsorship uh sort of unites the both of them um at least initially uh but did you guys know that it was the same family because i had never put that together when i did not yeah when i started the research it started to come up like the same family in theory i mean this is like

a heightening an expansion of carousel of progress yeah yeah we take them into the future the way distant yeah i did i did not know that it was they meant it to be in the same canon mythology i mean this is predating like see the of course the society of explorers and adventurers that was going to connect rides via this like group of horrible rich people international tyrants yes yeah which we love we still will still do an episode on that soon but yeah this is predating that by years and i like i really i will admit that as a kid i went on horizons but i it didn't loom large in my head until i was older and reading about it and stuff it wasn't something that i was crazy about like figment or something right but well let me

let me say this about my childhood uh feelings about it and this is me this is in general i think a lot of epcot put together because i went when i the first time i think when i was seven um and in my head um i just i have like such strong evocative memories of epcot in general maybe not specific things but i remember the feeling of going on lots of very long, claustrophobic, creaky, shadowy rides. There's so many of them. And so to me, for a long, long time, Horizons, Spaceship Earth and World of Motion were all just tangled up in my brain. And I did not know, probably until we started doing the podcast, I had not completely untethered, like, okay, which is the one with, like, the horse and the buggy and the horses jumping? Which is the one where there's, like, a guy in a tunic with a scroll?

That's a beard guy. But then there's also a beard guy in a capsule with a chicken. like they're all it's all similar styles of animatronic um and all similar styles of very small vehicle that you're in for a long time that moves upward and clanks along i just i remember like the base feeling of all of it but i could never pick them apart for the longest time yes i completely agree with that i agree with that too. The thing that sticks out in my mind, like the flashes of childhood for World of Motion is the overturned horse cart street scene. In this, probably the robot butler. Robot butler never really...

There was always an image of him somewhere, even in shops or something. But choosing your own ending was like what stuck with me for this ride like going back and watching it i was like oh wow the first like third of this ride is so like bonkers and abstract and like i feel like it wouldn't get away with that anymore it feel it feels like a lot of this a lot of the stuff uh adding to the legend of this ride it's like imagineering firing on all cylinders had to make some minor cuts but they still spend a lot of money on this ride it's loaded with animatronics it's got like an a-list team of people working on it the corporate sponsorship like actually seemed to be contributing ideas and not demanding like

light bulbs shoved in there and like we're we're into the you know message of it and we're into like having their name on something positive and uplifting as opposed to like um make goofy hold a pepsi you know, that would never happen. Disney's a Coke corporation. But, you know, it's just a lot of elements are just working correctly. Yes, for sure. It's also a period. I mean, I think because Epcot obviously has a rocky history of it being a real city when Walt was envisioning it and then it's switching

over to theme park but they were trying to stay sort of true like they were really trying to stay true to like Walt's ideas so I feel like future world is of is like like they got to do an art album they got to do an art concept album whereas scott's saying they all blend together and i completely agree with that in the same way that whatever let the suite at the end of uh abby road blends together it's like all kind of of a piece it all kind of can you could probably sub in different scenes for the each ride and it wouldn't be completely out of, or it wouldn't be completely jarring. And the other thing is that Horizons was the keystone. It brought together all of the communication

and transportation and innovation and all of these ideas are kind of present in here. Even the sea, the literal seas, seas energy like it all shows all the other pavilions kind of feed in to this uh gd captain planet ass right where like it it just uh makes makes a larger piece yes it would have almost made more sense now with the new version of future world if they had just taken out pieces of all these rides and just thrown them into spaceship earth and made spaceship earth like a greatest hits of original future world oh that's an idea that's a good idea that would have been

i mean i guess it's still possible but like then you can at least like get a lot of the iconic stuff from this this uh these rides because it sucks that like horizons is gone because it feels like horizons should have been pirates like it feels like you shouldn't have been able to touch this ride at least you could update it and make it new and cool but it feels it feels bad to me that horizons isn't there obviously in the same way figment isn't the same and i don't know i'm not i'm not mad about like spaceship earth changing but this being gone 100 yeah this is very strange for something that and it wasn't there that long when you add it all up and right in the last few years it was pretty spotty whether it'd be open or not so it got kind

of like a not graceful exit i think i only went on it on my first trip i don't i don't think i don't think i got to say goodbye yeah i don't i don't have a memory of going on it when did i it closed in 99 is that right yes it closed like january 99 that was a big thing i saw mentioned there is a a website called like horizon timeline or if that's what the page on the website is and they made sure to point out that despite epcot being at capacity on the night of december 31st 1999 they did not reopen horizons like in fact they closed horizons a year before the future was supposed to start which is darkly funny but like a little grim yeah no a very grim yeah i i did not go on this because i went in 2002 so i probably had yeah i

probably went on it when my when i was like 12 or 13 for the last time or maybe like yeah something like that um you know it's another thing with them sorry the other thing with them just like mushing up all together um and being this sort of unique little concept album is that you know you don't see any of your friends in them like it's all either anonymous animatronics or they are portraying uh you know jules verne or like a real like man from the from the Roman era. And like you got you get no Mickey. You don't even get a fox on the hound. You get nobody that, you know, which I'm that's not a complaint for me.

It's just like it was like so much melancholy and not what I expected a theme park would be at all. Actually, you add Maelstrom and Mexico Boat Ride to that, too, which are also sort of claustrophobic, sort of darkly lit. Just that whole half of the park is so, and the scary dinosaurs. Like, Epcot was a like moody theme park yes it's a moody concept album of a theme park that doesn't give you the hits from the magic kingdom it doesn't give you what you want it's a challenging it's challenging which is why so much of it is gone it's why fans like it it's like no no no sit down and listen to it because if you actually like really listen to it you're gonna get it but people who only have a passing fancy just want to hear

the hits they just yes they just want those first early albums of pop pop songs which are great this is the marketing though right this was the mission statement for epcot is was for the adults for the adults who are coming staying at the contemporary water skiing when they weren't at the parks you know and and a permanent world fair a showcase for ideas uh i mean just the concept art alone this beautiful like uh book cover painterly art of the the herman uh herb ryman uh paintings not herman um are just so great for horizons i don't think i know that exactly but i think i know what you're talking about here i i have it here um i mean he did that famous painting of the castle but then this was an early one for horizons and then look at this look at this big oh yeah oh it's sort of like it feels a little more like 60s of an art style and

uh oh boy just like you know rays of sunlight flashing through and so much color hitting everything is this family with two little girls in hats they can't wait to go meet their friends at brava centauri oh there's some swingers over here if you can see them that's warren baby i think that is warren baby in his pocket and he's with someone's wife it's ali it is ali mcgraw it is ali mcgraw still oh wow yeah uh yeah so it's i guess i understand why all this stuff has closed but it does it i guess it's for us as adults not necessarily for even the general population of adults if you took spaceship earth just throw figment on spaceship earth and he's your guide through the best of all the epcot rides how about that oh yeah you got a fun fun person for the kids

fun character for the kids that's pretty interesting yeah and just do something else with the bit like is the back half just more of like that's like you end up doing your uh like why don't the screens just show you these videos where you choose your future path instead of bad like 2006 era jib jabs yes cards your mom would send you yeah so anyway i mean we're doing some of the end of the podcast now we're doing sort of our concept album podcast because we're sort of starting with the end yeah well and that's sort of that's sort of outside the box. Thinking is what you get with horizons. You know,

when you get a business genius like Jack Welch involved, the oft mentioned on 30 rock GE executive Jack Welch. Yes. Who eventually appeared on 30 rock. I don't know if he counts as a, um, uh, what I was calling for CEO performers like Eisner and Brandon Tartikoff.

He's a little bit in there if just from that one appearance. Sure. Yeah. He helped think of this. He did a real thing. I he was I think the original like CEO Reginald Jones and then Jack Welch was like his lieutenant who would then take over the company and would be revered by the fictional Jack Dongy. But they don't talk about Horizons on 30 Rock.

No, sadly. I haven't heard a lot of Horizons references, no. But it is funny that GE would go on to own the other theme park company down the line. Oh, that's line. Oh, that's right. Oh yeah. Yeah.

But then with this, it's like incredibly ambitious and very adults, which is sort of what their theme park property is a little more. It's like, uh, it's almost universal esque and it's, uh, it's adultness and darkness and ambition.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's funny and ambition. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny to think that... It's funny because the company hasn't thought like this since this. Like, MGM Studios, definitely like for Disney's MGM Studios, definitely for the parents as well. But that's much more... All the stuff they've put in there is much more kid-friendly

than any of this Epcot stuff. No, up because you're meeting your friends left and right you're meeting c-3po and indiana jones and uh rod serling um and busby berkeley oh yeah what uh uh jimmy duranty or wait no who's in the which gangsters do you meet? James Cagney. James Cagney, there you go. All the kids' favorites. Ray Bolger. All of them.

Yep. So, yeah, this is the only, like, time in the Disney company history where they were fine with no friends. Which I liked as a kid. Very few friends. company history where they were fine with no friends which i liked as a kid i did i appreciated it on a certain level because you get bombarded with friends at the magic kingdom you get bombarded with friends at mgm studios so i like the different vibe of epcot you know sometimes it's nice to be away from your friends that's what we're saying you need need a little, you know, you need a little break. You need a break from your friends. You just need like nine months to a year and a half away from all of your friends.

That's what we all need. Quick nine to 18 months. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's interesting. So that's, yeah, I get why it's not there but i was just so feeling so nostalgic for it while watching this you know something i didn't feel nostalgic for as a child yeah i didn't have so much fun as for the child it's funny uh mike and i uh talked to

a student group at ucla the other day and as we were talking that's right you can be impressed I but as we were talking to them I realized because they had horizons on the back of my mind I realized like oh my god were you all born after this ride closed I think that timing works out yeah that's what I'm saying a lot of people we only went on it once I yeah it Yeah. I feel like it lives on through videos and articles almost primarily, one of which I will quote real fast just to say the scope of it because he broke it down real well. Our friend Doug Jones, who wrote a great article in Dangerous Minds about it, he spelled it out really nicely with these stats that I copy-pasted.

Thank you, Doug. 54 audio animatronic figures, 770 props, 12 projectors, and a pair of massive OmniMax screens. Groundbreaking technology at the time. Spread across 24 sets. Set in the year 2086. Incredible. So, and the show building is so massive when you're looking at it. And it's not it and it's not just uh it's not a fake facade it's not just for show like it's so tall because they had to fit

those giant screens in the middle omnimax is the type of domed screen that they use on soren and um i guess that's not the exact type on soren but back to the future the ride definitely yeah um and they had to be huge this is the first ride to to use them um and you also just technologically and you know i'm jumping around a little bit here but um with this interactive ending that it builds to where you choose the future that you go to which interactivity already is a huge thing this ride's doing for the first time. But also, I think until watching the Martins vids, I didn't realize how they did it, which is like you're like on your way out of the ride, you were watching a little like flight simulator path to a future destination. And it's this crazy thing where I think you're like going along a screen,

but the projector is traveling with you so you're like the the projector is mounted and like four cars all collectively pick which future that you go to and then you're like moving along with the screen which feels very harry potter ride like it's all these like early analog versions of things that that are a little more i don't even want to say commonplace i feel like horizons did things that are mega blockbuster moments in rides of the 2000s and 2010s. Yeah. I mean, we were talking about the, I think, Haunted Mansion episode where you'll see a really cool thing in a new ride and you'll be like, hey, what cool new technology is that? And they're like, oh, it's Pepper's Ghost. And you're like, oh yeah, it's's a really good illusion that still works and it does feel like maybe yeah like this one it's like they

probably still use this type of thing i think so all of this technology orange scent we get an orange scent in it which is like the thing that people are nostalgic for uh in soren over california as opposed to the later one it's i think we've agreed the superior smell even with all the many smells in the new version um but they did orange uh they did an orange smell first i think that was probably pretty rare at the time i don't think yeah we i we were talking about it i don't think there's any other orange smell anywhere i mean before 1983 i don't know somebody will correct that i'm sure but i don't know if it's a correct analog we you can think of what the actual one is but what we're saying is like

incredibly influential ride did all these things that were done uh you know later to more success but they did it first and this concept album thing it's what is it velvet underground what is it what are we uh what's is this the velvet underground of rides uh that's a good question is it television that's a good one like big sprawling long songs um yeah it's not pop singles but if you want a little challenging 10 minute experience absolutely yeah i think that's pretty close maybe the television of rides television is a band by the way for the younger listeners it's not the television it's not a ride about television it's um you don't watch televisions on it though we're comparing it to the band yes right um scott you mentioned the martin's vids the thing that struck me in that not just like the seven projector array for the ending but

the schematic for the omni max sequence where like it spirals around like it it just seems like when you look at it as a blueprint it it's one of those ones that looks like an impossible architecture and one of the few where the like it's not just a square show building behind it it's like no it yeah it that shape of the building extends behind it it's such a unique looking building and something that is i think missing from epcot you know now right right yeah the blueprints are so confusing to look i still haven't wrapped my head around all of how it works or wait are you saying did you just say that it's like your tree it's not one projector on top of your vehicles it's seven oh i think it's like seven that's how they did i like a half moon almost of projection wow wow that kind of fans out in front of you uh until you get back

to wow wow that's the other folks if you haven't if you don't if you haven't seen this ride it through in a while or you don't remember riding it uh search on youtube horizons revisit it which is like a cleaned up de-interlaced uh restored ride through that is like it's so rare you get like a quality video uh of these long gone rides and it is like it's a rare you get, like, a quality video of these long gone rides. And it is, like... It's a 20-year-old ride. And a lot of times those look like shit on YouTube. Yeah.

And they cleaned it up. Retro WDW and the Lake Buena Vista Historical Society cleaned it up and put this video out. And it is wild to watch this. There's so much stuff. Like, even watching it through a couple of times, it was like, I forgot about that. Like there's so much, especially because of that first,

like I said, chunk of the ride is so abstract. I definitely, I hate to keep coming back to the concept album idea, but you're saying there's just so much. I'm like, I'm just scrolling again. I've scrolled through this now 20 times, but there's so much stuff. And then I remember hearing that

when they were talking about building westcott tony baxter was talking about there was going to be a 45 minute boat ride that would that would like be just go along the circumference or not yeah the uh the edge of the park essentially and there would be four stops you could get off whenever you want it would be like the train the disneyland train except it would be full-scale dark ride for 45 minutes with like pirates drops like drops like at the start and i feel like all right like they're just getting going with ambition here and they're like let's throw everything at it we don't have to do anything like we're we're we're feeling so emboldened by the success we've had thus far

that they were like we're gonna throw everything at this thing and we're not going to not gonna apply any of the rules we would you would assume they would have for a ride like this and then uh like world war ii breaking out a conflict in europe happened and everyone uh tripped on their own dicks so uh that being you're saying the euro disney the euro disaster which kills like more ambitious bizarre like non ip rides like this which probably would have been strewn throughout the 90s if they had that not happened yeah i mean it's really the thing that like made eisner blink like it like made him like threw him off i think you start to see like the decline and what there's a a list um a theme park tourist i believe made a list of like here's everything that got closed or delayed because of euro disney fall

out and it's it's tomorrowland 2055 westcott the closures 20 000 leagues under the sea in florida uh horizons you know it was a miracle that animal kingdom was so good uh when it was right right right uh rough year maybe the maybe the roughest until this year i would have to think. Don't we think to get Disney back on track, they need to build Westcott and have a 45-minute boat ride with no IP on it? Absolutely. Bring the ambition back. Get crazy, guys.

That's what you have to do. Deficit spending, folks. You know, don't be afraid of it. You got to spend your way out of a recession. Spend your way out. Also, like, that's what I'm doing with toys. For sure. You know, nobody's gonna want the, like, we should, this is the point

beyond which we're not gonna want all the presidents, right? Like, if we do it here, if we do it not with Trump, then, like, we can't say, nobody will say it was Trump's fault. Let's just, like, do it with Biden, do it not with trump then like we can't say it nobody will say it was trump's fault let's just like do it with biden we're done with all presidents and repurpose all of the robots and make them like animatronic like do something like this again put them in a space city or add them all to pirates uh if nothing else just like throw all of this disperse the presidents into different pirates of the caribbeans across the

globe oh and not and not change anything about them right they're just the presidents a lot of them already look like weird old you know martin van buren can be drunk on the bridge james garfield is uh harpooning somebody oh yeah oh that's yes that's a great idea honestly like obviously have throw a bunch of presidents in the ballroom in the Haunted Mansion. Yeah. Or pirates just build 46 more wells to dunk them in. They have it coming. They're going to build Biden to do that.

They're going to build Biden still, but put him into pirates. Hey, man, back in my day day dunking in a well that's party look jack he's saying that as he comes up for a second dunk me harder jack hey look fat malarkey yeah that's more fun look fat you're lying with the pigs you're not gonna get the map you know replacing depp even just with biden replacing jack sparrow in general popping out of the barrel yeah and the on the chair at the end of the ride yeah yeah he's he's completely

spinning the yarn toward to you um is he is he is he surrounded by treasure like what's by what's biden's dream room at the end ice cream oh a bunch of ice cream yeah a bunch of ice cream. Yeah. A bounty of ice cream. Pints galore. You know, if Donald Trump Jr. heard this podcast, he'd be so mad at us. They insult my dad every single episode. And then when it comes to Biden, what's the joke? He loves ice cream. Podcast the Ride is soft.

They're biased. And they will be banned from podcasting in term two yes sloppy podcast the ride is no longer hot not like nasa yeah hey wait we're all being not optimistic trump is the trump made space hot again that's like horizons dreamed of doing that's true he did make it hot again you're right um i let me let me shift gears into uh well you started talking about just the the building and the architecture this is one of the best things about it i could stare at that building all day oh my god i it's hard to say because i like so many of those old pavilions but

this is probably the best this big crazy diamond ufo spaceship thing this big angular weird steel with the sign up front uh that that amazing logo um just aesthetically before you even get in the door and it was a bummer when it closed but at least like before they just crushed it down the side to start building mission space even like seeing this thing over a fence still was kind of nice i just like that i just wish the building was there yeah it had the full hat trick great sign out front great building and then the logo icon the minimalist epcot pavilion icons is yes it's great for my favorite one i think i will declare i like a lot of them i like all of them but the

the little like angled path to the horizon and the lines get thinner and thinner as as you get up to the horizon line yeah that little icon logo is is wonderful they pack so much information in there and yet it's still really minimal um i love it here's my here's my like oh i feel dumb because i didn't process this like i feel like i had heard over the years that this was kind of the you know touchstone it combines a lot of the elements of all the different pavilions but like if you stare at the building the vertical lines on the front go to a point they go to a horizon at the top of the building oh interesting huh did not catch that yeah no i didn't catch that either um i i will also um this this building has just given me this permanent attraction to uh big austere

buildings from the 80s built in office parks um i can drive around because of this i'll be driving around you know irvine or uh west lake village californ, or the area around Fashion Island and Newport Beach. Sometimes I will see a building and a corporate logo out in a big lawn. That's an important thing also. It's got to be a big, austere, sort of unfriendly, but imposing, but fascinating building. And then a big lawn and then a round sign up front. I'd put the land in this too. The land is also a very cool

building but i uh i don't if anyone can think of buildings where they've been to or work or something that are like the horizons building i can't get enough like if i get a horizons vibe from a building uh i just uh it's it's like um the the ratatouille bite uh that the critic takes it just like flashes me back to it just takes me back to childhood and i feel good well i think there's going to be a lot of building uh hunters now looking out for you i hope so you know exactly is there a hashtag you could throw on this what we're're talking about here? Hashtag horizons-esque. Okay. Yeah, that's good.

Think about it. The horizons for me, the building, I always think of, I don't know if you've, guys have seen Star Trek The Next Generation when they would do like, we're beaming down to a planet, an alien planet, and they will do like a kind of a painted looking like far away shot of the planet with some buildings and then they'll just cut and it's obviously a shitty soundstage on the paramount lot like it's this really like beautiful looking picture of a planet with like cool looking buildings that are similar to the horizons in the early epcot buildings and then it cuts and it's just like it's either like Griffith Park or

it's like some studio some soundstage on Paramount but the buildings to me get that give me that very like Star Trek-y vibe oh man yeah it's that Logan's Run thing too just like this should be just one model

on a giant table that you only see for 10 seconds at the beginning of a movie. But in this case, you get to go be inside it for a really long time. Yeah. Yeah. And it is, it would have been nice if they could have preserved. I keep being negative and talking about it, but it would have been nice if they could have preserved some of this a little more with Epcot. Well, you also have the problem that uh and this is seems

alternatively debunked or not debunked i can't tell but there's at least the theory out there that there was a sinkhole under this building and that might be some of the reason why horizons went away right yes and i think other parts of the building deteriorating too. I rewatched the documentary about Hooten Chief, the guys who would constantly sneak into Horizons and walk around it because there was no security system. And one time, one of their feet went through rotten plywood. And that has led to a reoccurring pain in their foot they still have so they don't always keep everything up up and going maybe more now i feel like osha is a little

more aggressive now a little more but like what scott was talking about on haunted mansion it was like there's a moat in the madam leota room and Oh, yeah. You can't walk up to her. You would just fall. Yeah. So, obviously, these are already not designed for people to hang out in them casually. Yes. Oh, the other thing from that documentary,

this Omnimover vehicle has no restraints, so you could just vault over it. Oh, that's right. That's why they were able to... Yeah, and this is by uh matt serrano who did the helix documentary that we got to be a part of and uh yeah it's so fascinating yeah these guys shot all this footage of themselves running around getting off the ride and going and like we can go be in this scene for two full minutes before anybody catches us

and it's all about like the all right so there's a gap this amount of gap between cars and we know if there's one that where there's six empty spaces that means that we won't get caught like they figured out all the rhythms of it it feels oddly akin to like when you hear about the guy who learned how to game press your luck the whammy game show and like all right i figured out the code i cracked the code by watching it for hours and hours and hours um but yeah so strange they just yeah as opposed to safety bar lowers for you they just jump out the top and can go hang out with the family and feed the fake seal in the in the ocean world um yeah i feel like they spent a collective like many hours just hanging out in horizons

yeah i mean i am delighted by that story but don't do that folks please don't no stress me out stress me out uh but uh wonderful with some perspective with a couple decades perspective to look back on it's like well that's kind of cool pretty impressive uh no way i want people to go hang out there right now the parks aren't open now's your time to sneak in what's the book about a museum is it um the head the name in my head is like uh basil e frank weiler the like what's the book about staying over in a museum yeah i know what you're talking about i might weigh the hell off on that name i don't you know there's a book about spending the night in the museum or a movie called night at the museum

the movies um anyway uh everywhere yeah go do that go find a a vent to crawl into no one will find you if you go live in rise of the resistance for two months have your royal tenenbaums evening uh living in anaheim rise of the resistance for two months have your royal tenenbaums evening uh living in anaheim rise of the resistance that's right yes um am i way i wait bezley frank weiler is it is that the museum yeah yeah kids yeah siblings run away to the metropolitan museum uh of art in new york city got it right okay few self-corrected no apology necessary let's continue that's a funny that would be a funny episode is we each bring in the weirdest kids book we were obsessed with or like kids think we were obsessed with oh yeah i got some of my grandfather's books from the 19

tens and some of those kid books are weird thanks Thanks. I don't believe that. Yeah. Can you throw, can you, can you just get a wetter appetite? What's a name of one of these books? The one that sticks out. Well,

there's two that stick out. One was just called Boy Scouts on the Moon. And then another one, which my family just laughed at because of the old aphorisms. I believe it was called Papillot and the Pickled Peacock. And that was like a blockbuster movie that kind of like uh alliteration back then that just drove people wild it was like the train driving right at you people losing their mind which is surprisingly not in this uh ride they've got the moon the moon with the ship and its eye uh like anything that references the early days of cinema it's got the moon with the ship in the eye right earth yeah yeah i am just real quick with that you reminded me with that kind of thing like weird turn of the century stuff my uh my

grandfather who was a writer i think uh at least contributed some material to something called captain billy's whiz bang which um do you know about captain will called Captain Billy's whiz bang. Oh my God. Do you know about Captain Billy's whiz bang? I think I. Wait, that's. Yeah. That's also a reference in something.

I can't remember. I think it's in the music man. Oh. Is that right? Yes, I think you're right. It's the music man. That's what I'm thinking of. Yes, it is. It is.

Yes, you're right. Wait a minute. It's in You it's in you got trouble isn't it yes yeah i i believe so is it a thing that's warping young minds because this was kind of yeah it was like the mad magazine of its day like a sort of like cheeky racy bawdy magazine and i just in google imaging it it looks like i just found a cover that seems to reference the fatty arbuckle incident like they're parodying that in a mad magazine style um so um surprising no one i have a copy of captain billy's whiz bang around here somewhere whoa in europe whoa

they put out a facsimile like 10 years ago. Some like book publisher, comic publisher. I have no idea who put it out. But I found it at a store and I bought it. Wow. Wow. I'm going to find it and see if there's a Gairdner original in there. Carl Schrader would be the name.

Carl Schrader. Okay. Carl Schrader, if he's in there. Given Fatty Arbuckle the what for yeah anyways uh um away from the 1920s into the the 2080s this is clearly what's that was that the year it was supposed to be 100 years forward yeah apparently uh again thanks to doug jones for highlighting that fact i don't think i realized that which is that you then you wonder well how could it be

the uh family from carousel of progress but of course they jump 20 years in time in every scene the carousel of progress is a magical family in general they're like a bicentennial man situation like how could the same family go from the turn of the century to the 60s to the 90s or whatever? And I guess it keeps going. This eternal family makes it all the way to the 2086. They're like another kid's book, Tuck Everlasting, the family curse to never die. But it wouldn't be a problem if you got to live in this world, go into this future. But I guess we're going a little out of order because the well, OK, before we this is going very Haunted Mansion esque.

We talked about the outside, the the incident. You just walk in that first room and then you see a big display of like the flight itinerary. Like this is your your airport here's where you could go uh depending on which gate you go to and it says future port just that oh my god this like octagonal i don't know how many sides it is but like just the font of future port the crazy places you get to go striped with pink neon every room in this thing is such a aesthetic dream for me that feels like uh like in your dream house one of the rooms looks like that yeah absolutely and and also with dream house you i was thinking how much i would like to have this is a thing it's in a couple disney rides but it's in this too once you board the, right before you take off into the ride proper, you are facing a wall of like pink slats.

I guess the slats aren't pink. It's like glowing pink, just like a big wall of light. And then those like oval shaped like future-y, I don't know how to describe it exactly but uh it's in space mountain at the when you get off of space mountain those kinds of thing those it's future slats and uh star tours in the line as well uh i would love for like just a wall to be like that in my house and i don't know how to do it how would you how you would have to get somebody to make like you'd have to go to like nick offerman's place to get him to make you future slats maybe i think so but i feel like i'd be going on and on about you know it's like this epcot right horizons which is kind of this cool

image of the future prophet centauri and you know it's all uh you know because i loved epcot in the 80s and he would just glare at me the entire time unmovingly it's possible i get so insecure but maybe he'd just say i'll do it and you'd be fine you give him the money and he does it yeah look i'm paying you nick yeah chop up the chop up some future slats for me future slats i've never seen at any of these disney auctions future slats on the menu i wonder if it was built into the like the support beam it was built into the drywall or something maybe but i think don't isn't it like it's probably comprised of a bunch of smaller pieces that's another anyone let me know if you know how if what do you know about

future slats listener hashtag horizons ask hashtag future slats. I like, yeah, I was just gonna say like, I would want a hallway to lead into the room too that has sort of that plasticky kind of vibe, which is also very like Starship Enterprise as well. Yeah, big time. Yes. Yeah. Monorail-ish, all of that, yeah.

Feels like part of a package. Yeah package yeah yeah monorail has that kind of thing too yeah absolutely i gotta crack it i'm gonna figure it out i think even before that boarding like you were saying the departure board uh all around you there's a lot of glowing colored lights you go around some corners and then you get on the ride and when there's a hundred and seven it was something like 174 ride vehicles on this omni mover system i i never remember waiting a long time for horizons well yeah i think that's right i mean that's the problem probably other than the sinkhole well yeah that that too but um but it was nice that it was a ride i feel like the outdoor um the outdoor section of like the spaceship earth cube backs up a lot and that can look a lot worse

than it is i really don't have much memory of the cube for world of motion but i think it's horizons you get the leaderboard and you're pretty quickly at the loading area. And then the first thing you see, you see this crazy ride. It's like an Omnimover, but it's got walls on the sides, and the track is above you. It's not below you. It feels like Harry Potter in a way, these little pods that are that that face flat um they're uh yeah we were also we were talking about ghostbusters

and we looked at uh the the vehicles for a proposed 80s ghostbusters shooting ride that never happened and that felt like the vibe of these ride vehicles a little bit i love the color scheme i feel like ghostbusters would have been similar to it's like that that like reddish orange that's the backing and then just like black silver on the front they look so cool i'd also love like a die cast one of these yeah oh yeah that's i mean just in general like the nostalgia merchandise seems lacking from horizons like give us the building give us the building. Give us a little building. Give us a little toy of the building. Oh, my God.

One of the kits you put together that supposedly just really cut up your fingers if you try to do it. Let's give it to you. I'll do it. I will destroy my hands. You bring that up. I could not find a lot of real vintage merchandise on eBay for horizons i found a lot of

t public accounts selling like the logo um so if you want the logo you can certainly get variations of it but i really didn't find a lot of like vintage stuff out there for sale i just think this was not appreciated at the time like yeah in hindsight i think at this the groundswell of support has happened but it just at the time i just don't think it was moving enough people and and we can see that now and it's they're not like exploiting it for nostalgia money they don't they don't see it i i think i think it's there now more than they know essential that's what i'm saying i guess the fact that those guys were able to sneak around the ride for so long and that they could count on

giant stretches of ride vehicles that were empty going through constantly that sort of tells you it's a bummer too because like in like sinbad ride in japan and we were only there for a few days but we went on in a couple days and it was like that was empty too and i was like i hope this doesn't mean this is going away but it does feel like sometimes great rides aren't people aren't going on them but some of that is they're efficient oh yeah for sure and then both sinbad and this one obviously was an omnivore that was very big yes that's definitely part of it but i feel like maybe that maybe works like haunted mansion is can get through a lot of people but is you know usually has a decent line it's pretty backed up yeah yeah so i wonder if it's like those evil money people at the parks look at it and go

well this these this line isn't that isn't longer than five minutes. It means it's not that popular. Well, maybe they had dreams of a ride that would give people seizures and make them sick. They just had to get in a ride that could affect you negatively for the rest of your life. From the good people at Compaq. Oh, right. Oh, my God. We got to do Mission Space. space uh yeah mission space i'm also

getting the sense now that there's a dedicated mission space fan base that i did not think existed maybe we'll run into them about yeah we've been negative about mission space or at least i have and i think scott is jason are you well i less negative i think the first time or two i wrote it i was very impressed at what it was able to simulate and then the last time my family all went down we all walked off and everyone needed to sit on a bench like everyone's like i need 15 minutes to collect myself like everyone was like oh like between headaches and queasiness um oh yeah no i that's my experience i think visually i think the spaceship earth building is uh cool to look at mission space or mission space what did i say yeah spaceship oh space where yeah no uh space where the rules um no mission space i think the buildings are right

but compare it going deep dive on horizon for like a week now it's just like oh man it really makes mission space look like shit uh it's also a ride that is 15 minutes of sitting on a bench yes that's true best way seeing the best stuff seeing the best looking at a screen the size of like a nintendo ds and that's you're watching the that's another thing that's unique about it it's like three times as long as other omni mover rides, but it's a third as long as the moving theater kind of rides. And I don't really know what else falls into that category, you know? It's just strange. It almost reminds me of Rides of the Resistance in its like weird multi-act nature

in that you explore all the parts of this little campus in many different ways that combine. Here's the animatronic zone, and here's the screen zone, and here's a different kind of screen zone. It's just, it's all over the place. Yeah, and I think that may be part of its genesis. Like, it had so many different names. They were going to call it Century 3, but they were concerned. International guests wouldn't understand that at some point it was just called horizon.

And then we got horizons briefly was considered, uh, the name briefly considered was future probe. And everyone's like, Oh, that's the medical implications on that. Um, we're all,

we're all aware that we have probes in our future and yeah but it's good it'll help us take care of uh potential health issues but i don't want to think about them when i'm on a ride did they did they want to call body wars future probes more accurate that's what it is yeah yeah that would make sense um Just the ideas, jot it down. The early idea was for an innovation and enterprise, which became science and intervention. Then, oh God, what's this one? GE really wanted it to be about Thomas Edison.

That seemed like it got scratched pretty quickly. Another name I came across, the incredible time machine colon, a journey into the worlds of science and invention. That doesn't really roll off the tongue like Horizons. No. I mean, Horizons is a great name. Yeah.

It also sounds like it could be maybe like a rehab facility. Or the name of your yearbook yes yes for sure horizon so look back at 2003 right it is a great name though but it is not so specific no uh i gotta say though this century three piece of concept art is awesome wow yeah like i wish they sold a decent print of that that's all the vehicles going in a big starburst that looks real cool century three century three is a cool i do like century three yeah yeah i think they called i think there's a vehicle in the ride labeled century three somewhere i think that's right yeah um well i let's get into some stuff i mean like i don't know that we have to

like you know room by room it but like the i guess i in a way i sort of until watching ride throughs i sort of forgot all of the past of the future or the future wait yeah the uh future as filter through the past yeah um which that's another thing there's a lot of spaceship birth also you end up like watching old footage with like kooky music like which also i think happens on dream flight uh no i think i mushed that up in my head too um uh but um it's neat you see jules verne in a pod with a dog I'm still I guess I'm confused by that that's how he thought he would get to the moon is in a little pod where he'd be standing and like have a little like trunk yeah a chicken I think I think the chicken would provide eggs maybe

well they were also like his idea was like well what if you built a gun big enough to shoot a man to the moon cool you yeah you'd write like i know you were in the bullet yes and then you bring one chicken with you who you hopefully is pretty regular with egg production which then do you have to bring a hot plate so that you can cook them up in there you could a rocky style oh sure yeah just eat them eat them raw pure proteins straight out of the shell yeah that's all you need i mean that's everyone else is overthinking it right now we just get in a giant bullet and go to the moon with a chicken now should i strap myself in inside the bullets and the same question goes for my dog and my chicken or do i just stand without a seat belt i think you probably should

well if the but you know if the bullet is completely the correct human size and it's like there won't be any room to bump around in oh no no no jules's vision was that there'd be a lot of room and that the chicken and the dog are untethered to anything and that he's just in a full thick suit like a big starchy 1800 suit i don't think it's occurred to me how insane this scene is until right now yeah no you're right yeah standing through my trip to space it feels like correct because of all the other like oh da vinci and michael michelangelo paint but that's like normal stuff compared to this anyway you also meet jules verne this ride came later but you meet jules verne in the old uh dreamatorium or whatever that ride the vision visionarium

oh yeah there's multiple else magic kingdom then also had a jules verne thing and then doc brown's obsessed with jules verne and then a lot of there's all these things that are like this is the future jules verne and so much jules verne in the parks i jules and verne were doc's kids in the cartoon and in the movie technically i guess yes and somebody pointed out when i uh i posted a picture of me uh with my finger in an inappropriate place on the monorail after a few too many adult libations and somebody said that it looked like vern at the end of back to the future 3 it was weirdly pointing to himself oh right right whatever the hell that's happening there so i'm sorry yeah that's a pretty bad own i'm sorry i looked like that's something to aim for is to not look like vern look like vern it's funny name your kids

jules jules and vern is such a oh what a tribute you your father must have your mother must have loved his work but then like if it was like hey vern it totally loses any like if you're completely out of contact just like then you just think of ernest's friend vern yeah yeah if you aren't introduced after your brother yeah right jules at least. You go, oh, Jules. That's a sophisticated name. You go, hey, Vern.

What's up, Vern? Yeah, yeah. And Ernest ruined it forever. Ernest. It's Ernest's fault. There's also a lot of things for a lot of people. I'm sorry. There's like little lanterns in this Jules Vern car, too.

I kind of can't get off of it now. Like, would you have to light a candle inside these yeah and then there's drawers but the drawers aren't baby locked like the these drawers would be flying around he's the first okay the first things i'll say is that he looks like he's in genie's bottle from i dream of genie oh yeah uh and then second second he uh it's like uh ed wynn in mary poppins a little bit oh yeah yeah so he's it's like he's laughing and he's floating and like you don't get the sense that like he's in space here no not really the the um there's like kind of a tube at the bottom which maybe answers a question that I had, which is how are Jules and the dog and the chicken doing their business? Bottom tube?

Yeah, bottom tube, I guess. You're shitting the bottom tube. I shouldn't underestimate him. He thought about it. Unless it's just one of these lanterns isn't a light bulb. It's not lit, they just like keep putting their droppings into the top of that could that be sort of like the exhaust could that be help helping fuel the propulsion oh maybe so yeah yeah in case it loses any energy from having been shot out of

a giant gun right exactly and then of course we know that the bullet ultimately ends up in the moon's eye and that the eye winces and it seems mad that a bullet. He's not the moon's not dead, but here he is right now. There's that moon. I love that trip to the moon moon. Yeah. And that was what comedy was in France for like 80, 90 years until they got Jerry Lewis. They were still just laughing at the moon with a with a bullet spaceship in its eye they gave it awards every year yes every year once again the best actor

the bullet moon he did other movies rom-coms he fell in love with the sun the french loved the smashing pumpkins tonight tonight video, a return to form. We haven't liked the movie since Nutty Professor. Billy Corgan is our prime minister now. What else is in that old timey? Are there other animatronics in that initial run? Well, there's all the kind of illustrated version of the da vinci stuff and then it kind of very quickly jumps to like 1930s pulp uh future with with the

infamous robot butler and a lot of just art everything is art deco the windows the chairs the avid i think they reference the Avenue of the Planets. Does that get referenced in Tomorrowland 94 as well? Oh, right, right. Future That Never Was, I think, is a reliable theme park standby. It's always good. I like any version of them, essentially. Yeah, I love that weird future. I like a little robot butler i like this there's a there's

a big there's a hair cutting machine that tans you and if you watch one of the videos you see a close-up with like the different settings you can go to hawaiian tan or palm springs tan um i think that's where great big beautiful tomorrow is playing in an old-timey fashion um there's a woman in a bathtub at some point that's a Hoppin future that's the same version of it's a big great big

beautiful tomorrow that plays when they are demonstrating the radio they have in progress yes it's like a real like jaunty describe that jaw i guess jaunty is the word yeah um how many people like uh this is what is the percentage of people that went through it that went oh my god this is a sequel to the

carousel progress how many people knew the carousel of progress to begin with right i i they're like oh yeah they they had probably just been on it that morning and already lost it yes i don't under underestimate uh progress lamp the the version from the world's fair because if you were from the the like tri-state new york new jersey pennsylvania like area when the world's fair is that was a big thing my dad always talks about going to the world's fair so then everyone who was a kid going to the world's fair then they can hop on a plane when they're adults two hours away go to disney see the carousel of progress again so kind of primed for like a big horizon sort of thing. Sure. But I'm still, I think, I feel like what Mike is saying is like,

if you're like a sunburnt, like Budweiser drinking half shirt guy from Florida in 1983, maybe your world's fair knowledge is low. But, you know, you could be always surprised by the type of world's fair fan you know you never know yeah who loves the world's fair who shouldn't judge a world's fair fan by its cover the secret flame there's a there's a lot of talk about you know automation right now because of the pandemic and and some companies are now going to probably use this opportunity to accelerate to automation and to replace human workers. I will say from this scene, if they do it with cute robots, I think we'll all be a little bit more happy with it, even though it'll put a lot of people out of work and cause some strife for a while no good yeah as long as they're cute yeah fine done deal it's like this dish this dishwashing robot i think deserves more merch robot butler sort of i think

has become the most famous yeah he's got the merchandise i we've i've got scott do you have him in a park star i don't have him, no. But they made him. But I feel like Dishwashing Robot definitely deserves some love. A little more attention? Sure. Yeah. Where do we go from here? We were in that screen land.

Lots of future visions and Buck Rogers-y stuff. Yeah. There's a version of the future. The next two scenes are both kind of neon wire work scenes which are really art movie concept albany and apparently were put in as a cost-cutting measure but i think are so cool to look at there's the movies uh popular culture kind of movie versions of the future and then there's the neon like modern non-1950s view of the future yeah i mean you could definitely like obviously these are videos

and my memory isn't so clear of the ride but yes why as you're saying like you can tell it's like not as expensive as robots but you're watching you're like this looks awesome this looks like a cool like real life jetsons right right yeah um um when when do we end up on when do we end up in omnimax the so the omnimax is next and and this is right before it is the second of three of like kind of transitional like colored like cloud sequences which i I think work pretty well as a transition rather than just like black, like a totally black room. I think that's kind of like the lights are synced up to the talking.

Oh, that's right. Yeah. Oh, the 1950s, there's a great dialogue exchange about like, wow, we thought the 1950s, that version of the future is pretty out there and then the grandmother again says like well we all wanted to have some fun you know everyone keeps bringing up fun in this ride uh which is very funny to me

the uh the these these lines again have not lasted like the carousel progress i assume just because it's not as around as long but i i they haven't they didn't stick with me even as much as they did with you did you were you listening for the old people talking and writing down or was that just something that struck you It just struck me after a few viewings of like, this is very funny, the naturalism they tried to make this dialogue, the way they tried to do this dialogue. It is funny because I guess, yeah, what you're illustrating is they're still sort of playing on the old trope of like, the husband and wife hate each other.

They're going gonna be passive aggressive they're not applying sort of the like like start to the next generation's concept gene roddenberry's concept of the future was that by and large humans had resolved their interpersonal conflicts right he was like he was talking about like you know they're really just trying to like go about the universe and try to deal with problems that come into contact they come in contact with but the disney futurism was still was still like well the husband and wife are passive aggressive and they cut each other down and that's just how it always will be so they were still going with an old

school like sitcom yeah way of approaching their future characters it's optimistic but you gotta get a little lockhorns in there for mom and dad to laugh you know are the lockhorns represented in toon lagoon that is a great question um i could be wrong are they king feature syndicate well i'll have to look that up otherwise i won't get to sleep tonight um so yeah so from the cloud sequence then you hit the omni max uh screen sequence we see some dna chains which was like a pretty new thing i don't think we were too dna aware at that point um that all looks cool had to be computer rendered um if i could nerd out slightly on a thing here um there is some cool synth stuff going on in this sequence kind of throughout the ride but especially in here there's a real like synth landscape happening and i was like i wonder if i could figure out who did it i wonder if i could look look it up. I looked it up. It's a guy named Michael Boddicker.

Michael Boddicker is one of my favorite names that you see in albums, liner notes all the time. I was so excited to see his name. He's a thriller guy. He's all over thriller. He's on all my favorite stuff, which is like Michael McDonald and George Benson and Al Jarreau. We Are the World. I think the beginning, the big synthy part of We Are the the world is him he did the score for buckaroo bonsai um so that's a cool one uh plays on greatest love of all by whitney houston mainly was very excited to see michael boddicker's name because uh we on uh

minister electrical parade we talked about my thing l Lords of Synth. Lords of Synth is about people, like analogs of Giorgio Moroder and Vangelis and Wendy Carlos. And to do Wendy Carlos, I was like, I remember tossing out like, now that's got to be one of those old keyboards. It's like an old Moog and it's got like all the patches, all the wires. So go find that. And then some production designers like, those are extremely expensive and very hard to find.

And so he just went searching for people who had just actually had working equipment from that era, like what Wendy Carlos would have used. And where did he end up finding one from this gentleman, Michael Boddicker? We used a real old keyboard. I looked up what it is. It's the Moog System 55. We used a real like vintage piece of equipment and i remember being told if you break this thing this costs like two times the budget of this entire piece so do not be extremely careful with it we were i didn't know till after

we shot it that it was this is from the collection of this guy who played on thriller i'm 80 sure he played the creepy awesome evocative synths that play while you're waiting for captain eho like outside like there's all this like ambient stuff at the beginning and maybe maybe some of this horizon stuff was played on that thing that we got to use as carlo windows's synth in uh one of my favorite things i've ever been a part of was it plugged in on doing it or was it just for the the look um just for the look no no we didn't i i think you'd need like a real technician to figure out how the hell to uh to operate it and i remember the actress being very tentative like okay i heard the scary warning and we're like just bash the thing.

Keep plugging stuff in and out. And she's like, should I, though? Yeah. And you are still paying for the repairs, but it was very funny to see Josh Fadum take a pratfall through it. Didn't end up using it in the cut. It just didn't work, but it was fun. I'm glad he tried it. And yes, I will owe money to michael boddicker

for the rest of my life that would honestly they'll give you a good excuse maybe to see him once in a while oh my god yeah yeah i've been wondering if there's a way to contact him um here's a check here's your check for the month what i heard is that because when i asked like why did this guy lend it out and and he said well i explained the concept and that it was referencing you know wendy carlos and stuff and he was like that sounds cool look i i should charge you way more but i just want this thing to be a part of it i think he's just like a nice guy uh so yeah listen to his cool stuff especially in this omni max room this guy rules uh that's very cool and and accompanied by like just really again abstract but pretty beautiful like it feels like an art film when they cut from a city to a microprocessor

very still kind of new in the popular consciousness at the time and then crystals and uh the ocean and dna strands and then at the end just the sun yeah this is in that zone of like scary epcot films the films announcing epcot were scary the films in universe of energy the movie at the end of maelstrom just these like strange narrator free you're just left to free associate what imagery is all about um there's so yeah so many films in epcot and all of them extremely stark all of them very adults there's nothing where somebody's like doing a cute voice and talking to you it's all like just like criterion type scary 70s documentaries it would be these are the you would be like if you were if it would be like the equivalent of like taking a film class in college and they're like now we have to watch

like 2001 and now we have to watch yeah these are the challenging films these are yeah you're not going to do your wizard of oz's and you're right ind. You're getting like Stan Brackage ink blots, paint drops and stuff. But I love scary Star Cap cut. But of course, things get a little friendlier when we go to the future. And this is like the meat of the thing that you are. You visit three very different visions of the future, which are essentially land, sea, and space. I guess land, you could be more specific and say desert. Desert.

Well, you see the city. Like an irrigated desert. The grandparents live in the city. Oh, that's what I was going to say. The city is separate from, or is that considered part of land in general? Yeah, land is kind of split in two that's another cool like a film cut almost where it's like you see the apartment

they're like i'll take the city yes it's always exciting and then they kind of transition into the uh the deserts the reclaimed desert where the daughter is uh in irrigation agricultural engineering so does the city not count as one of the futures because i was going to say we should like pick a i mean i think we still could in general but like at the end we should discuss what's our ideal future i i i don't know if the city counts but that's where i want to be i i love that city very much well it's always exciting so it's always exciting it's always if if i pull up this and and forgive listener forgive me but we'll describe it uh triangular buildings with weird

like uh orby things coming out of them um like the fountains out front perpetual dusk like beautiful this beautiful pink dusk i i want to be here so very much it's like build there's buildings that look like the studio 54 logo essentially um i i mean i mean i think this picture i literally did send to somebody involved in moonbeam city i think we were we're chasing this vibe where it's always pink dusk um or this this orange one too like i have nothing um productive to say i just love these places so much and i want to be in that apartment i want to i i want to be where that Carousel of Progress guy is wearing his jumpsuit. I want to be playing his orb keyboard, his weird light up nonsensical instrument. I love this world so much.

Yeah, I feel like it's an aesthetic that I kind of never goes out of style. And one thing I saw mentioned in the genesis of Horizons is that people's visions of the future had kind of matured a little in popular culture. You know, you had Blade Runner, you had Alien, you know, and very grim and grimy. And this kind of marries the two of like a mature version of the future, but it is hopeful. It is optimistic, you know? and realistic and realistic yeah it's real it still seems realistic um yeah it's not so well it's all

like based in current technology it's all like you know several steps beyond technology that we have like the the irrigation machines i guess that's a lot of steps beyond but i guess this is that's kind of one of the most striking parts of the ride is uh right fields that's being plowed by these giant machines that feel like they like if if reprogrammed in a wrong sky netty way could do a lot of damage these These feel like War of the Worlds a little bit, but they're friendly. They harvest oranges for us. They're fine. I mean, they're not as cute

as the dishwashing robot, but yeah, they're friendly, I think. I was just reading an article. There was one there was a climate scientist that was very alarmist saying that we're already past the point of no return as far as climate change. Although I've seen now other people say that's not completely true. We can always turn it around. But he was saying that we're already past the point of uh of no return as far as climate change although i've seen now other people say that's not completely true we can always turn around but he was saying that there needs to be like massive uh machines built to pull carbon out of

the air right yeah we'll figure those out right we're gonna get them yeah which i mean humanity in general is is like you know how i was in college like i put everything off to the last minute like a lot as we saw with the virus and we saw how well that went yeah yeah so maybe we'll build these giant machines to pull carbon out of the atmosphere like a couple weeks before the planet dies and just like college mike carlson we knew about the problems for a very long time because like oh yeah reclaiming the desert for like lush green space crops desalinate uh desalinization of salt water to make it uh consumable or usable in in crops the people

have been thinking about that for hundreds if not thousands of years at this point oh yeah yeah and i we gotta we gotta uh yeah you know there's this guy so mark zuckerberg broke the world. And then, you know, we'll get to the desalinization, you know? But yeah, I mean, there's no... Yeah, all the futurism is rooted in like reality of the time. And so we're saying now is still stuff that needs to be done or still possible things that could help turn some problems around. I'm trying to think think was there anything in here like they didn't forecast everything they didn't forecast like celebrities going to

swedish clinics to get teenage blood to stay alive longer like i assume quincy jones is doing they they forecasted like pluots like the lemon orange like uh creations in this ride you know oh wait yeah no hang on i this is something i never caught and i copy pasted this big stretch that by the way this world that we're talking about is mesa verde that's the that's the land world uh um which of course, oddly, is a recurring location in Better Call Saul. So, Horizons used it first. Disney, get suing. But, yeah, Mesa Verde World. And it's, yeah, we're dealing with irrigation.

One of the characters in it we follow is like a farming person. And there's a shelf that you see that's a bunch of fruits. And I never put it together that they are's a bunch of fruits and i never put it together that they are weird hybrid fruits of fruits that we have um let me see there's this ivy that you look at but it's not a regular ivy it's called circuit egg ivy i don't understand that one uh pep cumbers i guess that one's pretty clear and i liked saying the word flavor grapes well now that's just uh sir you're just gonna show me regular grapes but tell me that this one tastes like a lemon this one's a kumquat i mean that's a that's lazy naming i think the idea is sound yeah yes

but the the texture and experience of eating a grape is good. And I would be interested to try different flavors. If a grape surprised you with its flavor. Yes, that would be cool. This one's black licorice. Ew. So jelly bellies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ew, popcorn.

Popcorn grape. Poop. And then pin. Okay, how do you say this pine i guess it'd be pine annas pine annas yeah yeah or pineapples that's gotta be delicious that kicks ass yeah i would i mean that'd be a good drink every day yeah yeah yeah um and loranges limes and orange also michael's his own oranges oranges i want i need the assistant the lord the loran jets uh need to give me a basket of oranges or i can't start the meeting if you go into lauren's office do not eat the little orange it is just the bowls of little oranges are just it's a test you're not gonna get update if you eat the lorange yeah guys i'm realizing because i know a mesa is like a geographical you know like a plateau

but it only occurred to me just now that the name mesa verde is a word play because uh mesa i believe the translator is telling me it is also the Spanish word for table. So, technically, Mesa Verde means green table. Huh? Oh. Greenery? Harvest? Yeah, right?

How about that? So, they named it because it's a national park. So, they named that. That's a cute name. Yeah. That's nice. That's a cute name. Yeah. That's nice. It's a cute name. Or it could just be named after the national park and I'm going too far.

Maybe. I don't know. I didn't realize until Blank Check and Griffin Newman did a great episodes. They're there and there's a Mechus run and their Back to the Future episodes have been great. And I didn't realize till he pointed out that hill valley is like a conundrum impossible and all these years i never put that together that hill valley makes no sense yeah that's funny that's a joke that's been there the whole time and it's just uh it's a little easter egg you get it later and then we all just went like hmm that's the degree of uh oh yeah i like it when i like it when christopher lloyd yells

that's more what i was focusing on um okay so i mean this one's cool uh brava centauri wait no you end with that you i guess the next one is uh what what's the sea called um uh sea castle sea castle yes so a great transition here where the granddaughter teenage granddaughter is talking to a video conference call um of her boyfriend uh who they call a beach bum and then she's like he works he works on a floating city and then it cuts to the other angle where there's an animatronic boyfriend and the video girlfriend i believe the boyfriend in the video is a young tom fitzgerald one of the lead imagineers on this ride yeah i guess so um i you know um yeah i i threw it out to a friend of the show bugman buzz buzz because i know he shares the my fondness for like epcot attractions being weird and scary uh uh and just like yeah being up at night and exploring these claustrophobic spaces and i'm like i'm just

like what is his main thing with horizons because i know he's gonna have one and he said uh the that there would be that you see characters as on a video screen as real human beings and then as robots is so clever and so like also like off-putting and upsetting a little bit. A little bit. When you take each individual side of it, that you're watching a robot whose boyfriend is a real man, and then you switch it and it's the other way. And he was like, yeah, who are these actors? Has anyone tracked them down? So interesting finding out that one of them wrote The Ride. And the other one, apparently, i had her imdb up her name is corinne cook um and she has some fun credits uh including that she is in a movie called

malibu hot summer which has also been released as sizzle beach usa and uh this is one of the first maybe the first film credit of kevin costner oh yeah wow so check out malibu hot summer let me see if i can get a tagline on it real fast three girlfriends who find careers and the hottest offer of their lives in wait what in malibu hot summer what's weird i got confused by the grammar in that part way through fuck you malibu hot summer what's weird i got confused by the grammar in that part way through fuck you malibu hot summer i want to add to the unsettling i'm sorry the dialogue they actually call that what they call him is a beach boy not oh yeah it's beach boy yeah yeah beach boy and the dialogue is because she's defending the beach boy to her parents instead of flirting or is it them the parents bickering instead of flirting with that

beach boy he is not a beach boy as if that's so bad as we've determined that i these are now plans that i have to join the beach boys um and i would think that any uh parent-in-law would be very proud of me yeah look like this is another where they're like sort of just going in the going with the past because you know in 2080 obviously the beach boys will still be touring in 2080 and i'm gonna be the most like tangible original member like i'm propped up by uh robotics like like he he actually did meet mike love right before he died so he counts he's the one with the most

legitimacy you look like of course the emperor on x on x a goal you're being you have a arm a kooka arm behind you uh puppeted does sort of tap a keyboard and play uh kokomo 2070 the update that we did the concerts are now only uh vibrate are real vibrations

you can't hear it it's just you're hearing them like on these low tones. Yeah, yeah. You have to be a precog. You have to be in the precog tubes to experience. You gotta be in the tubes. And you will be on the floating city, but it is not the beautiful utopia of this floating city. It is called an atoll. Oh, yes.

The future. Played by smokers. Floating atolls. Floating. The deacon and his posse of beach boys. Pokers. Floating atolls. Floating. Um, the deacon and his posse of beach boys. Um, yeah, he's a

marine biologist and they call him a beach boy. A beach boy. Odd disrespect to that profession. I do, I mean, that's obviously, I feel like that's a thing in the 50s and 60s where your parents would be like you're good for nothing surfer boyfriend huh what a real loser he is

if he was respectable he'd be dying in a factory right now yeah he'd be in Upton Sinclair's the jungle putting the meat pieces in the casing machine but all these I mean all these old parrot heads they would love a beach boy yeah they'd be

like oh great you it's your one of us i'd say so you know yeah well and these guys have so much fun up there they get to show uh kids some seals and float around in the ocean with some projected scenes right yeah yeah they're having a lot of fun in this so this one's like a competitor it's it's it's tough to the three are all competing for best future it's hard to determine I don't know which button I'm going to press at the end yeah I mean I I didn't watch a lot of Sequest DSV

as a kid but I certainly did put it on Peacock last two nights ago how'd it go I have like I have like affection for it exists for remembering that it existed when i was young yes the vague idea of it yes yeah so i don't know i like the idea of of all of this but i don't know yet i'm still well do we do we bring the third one in do we bring uh brava centauri in as the option number three a quick shout out for the number of animatronics in sea in that two-story

sea castle scene yeah and then you see the people enjoying their dinners uh in the little like porthole viewing stations uh this is also where you get the grandmother saying a very curt well so am i uh it's just very take it take a look at that dialogue exchange it's funny to me why are they so upset they live in that awesome loft apartment in triangle city they look at dusk every day i think it's dusk from morning to night it's always dusk there they said it's only a few minutes to go and see their kids but they are also had the option to video everyone's video chatting that's a funny thing that where this ends up is like it's a birthday and and their people can't be there in person so they all just project videos of themselves and that's a future that we

have realized why we had spent a whole year of virtual birthdays isn't it as fun as horizons yeah yeah this is fun wow grandma got on the machine well that's and she's synced up in her singing with mom who's off in Seattle. This rules. Just as good. Well. No problem. My son-in-law and his family would choose to live nowhere else. Whatever they say.

Boy, if Horizons could have predicted Zoom backgrounds and all the fun that we've had with those. Definitely enough ideas for how to have predicted Zoom backgrounds and all the fun that we've had with those. Definitely enough ideas for how to play with Zoom backgrounds to sustain two years worth of Zooming. I'm realizing now I should have. Too real. Yeah, I know. Here, now I'm doing it. Let's get back to the fun future. I want to say about the future.

It looks like the Cloud City. Yeah. In Star Wars. That's neat. That's the place to be. Which is what, in any of these hotels, I think would be more fun than the Star Wars hotel they're building. Oh, yeah. Being, yeah, Cloud City Hotel, yes, would be very cool.

Yeah. In that tiny little cell, prison cell on the star wars hotel we'll see we'll go uh we'll have to go try i'm gonna go i'm gonna pay a nine hundred dollars a night to go to this hotel pay a rent a month just under a month's rent payment yeah anyway for who uh well nine hundred dollars okay living in a closet um all right moving it uh so uh the we're in space we're in brava centauri brava centauri uh now just in general to talk about like you know we're deciding here living in space i there was no fantasy i had more like that loomed in my mind than living on the enterprise as a kid so while we're this is a little bit more like clinical yeah yeah it's yeah not as fun not as fun of a space as star trek

but man watching this i'm like yeah that's as a kid that always felt like the coolest thing i think i would definitely have picked space as a kid yeah um well you get to be upside down in this one you get upside down animatronics in this one yeah the the the hanging um omnimover setup really adds to the like floating through underwater floating through space um i i think really heightens that in a nice way also the going from ocean to like there's a little bit of blackness in under the ocean and then little stars show up and then you're in space a lot of cool theatrical tricks yeah transitions yeah it's it's like i'm trying to think and maybe this is unfair to like little mermaid but it just like it feels like it's doing so much of a better job simulating you going and changing like terrain

yeah like little mermaid you go underwater and like obviously we've talked about that like the original idea was like it would feel more like you're floating but little mermaid always to me feels like you're just on the haunted mansion like omnimover track for the most part but this yeah this they went all out really trying to immerse you and make you feel like you were switching um scenery and switching terrain switching gravity i have a question maybe you guys can confirm for me about one of the tricks in the birthday party scene in space the video screens are they animatronics kind of like poking out of the video screens is that right was i imagining that or is that a pepper's ghost is that a Pepper's ghost? Is that a Pepper's ghost? Yeah.

That's a good question. Yeah, because they are coming out of it, essentially. It's hard to tell from a video. Yeah. Yeah. It's just kind of a funny choice of like, oh, did this get built first? And then they had to resort to filmed footage for the other ones for like saving money. I don't know.

I do like it it looks cool like it looks like pepper's ghost to me yeah that's my guess because like i'm on the video and i'm just scrolling here to try to on this video i'm looking at it does look like pepper's ghost but i don't know that to be a fact not sure i don't have a lot about the space stuff. It's cool up there. I like seeing people upside down. I like seeing, you know, little like jumpsuited kids. I guess I wanted to be a jumpsuited kid. I wanted to be like a Bill Mummy.

I don't know. Kids in space always have a good time. Yeah, kids in space. Except for Newt in Aliens newt and aliens very bad time ender's game yeah all right kids don't always have a good often kids have a horrible time in space but are you talking from alien three newt um what happens with what's up with newt by then no two he gets well no newt is an alien is in Aliens, which is Aliens, the second Aliens. And then in between Aliens two and three, he just gets killed off screen.

Oh. Oh, no. Oh. Aliens, the third Aliens, it's just like he's dead. But Newt's a girl. Oh, yeah. You're right. Sorry.

Newt dies. Newt dies in between. I'm forgetting. Right, right. Okay. The movies. But that happens for sure. Newt dies.t dies in between i i'm forgetting right right uh okay movies but that happens for sure newt dies okay okay no i yeah i for some reason i haven't seen alien 3 so i don't know uh um depressing well uh now i guess we're all right if we're picking if we're picking a button if we're picking a return path or or if you had to live in one of these futures i guess i guess that's really the question do you like because now we get these three awesome model sequences that are

like star tours before star tours like the biggest model sets ever built these shoots that took two years these things are so awesome uh these little minute-long simulator sequences. But what do we choose? If you had to take one of those paths and then live the rest of your life in Mesa Verde or Brava Centauri or Sea Castle, what do we pick? I think I always picked Brava Centauri or Sea Castle. Brava Centauri used in all of the marketing material uh the the in i watched an in-room loop from 1992 that little short snippet of space flight i feel like was they just got marketing material for years out of that footage oh yeah like disconnecting from the docket and kind of and starting to fly through yeah yeah and i was like i have that footage lodged in my brain and i could never remember what it was from uh and i sometimes

i forget it was it was horizons yeah um this okay so wait in the if i'm choosing is it i'm gonna live here for the rest of my life hmm um is that what were the exercises well i don't know uh maybe we're just maybe we're just picking a button on the ride, if that makes it easier. Oh, okay. Yes, that makes it a lot easier. What do you want to kill you? The pressures of underwater, the pressures of the vacuum of space, or the unrelenting heat of the desert?

The pressures of big city life. Oh. I think I'm going space. Because, yes, all that Brava Centauri stuff. And even though it's not quite the Enterprise, still, you get to float around. You got the jumpsuit on and there's still like just that fantasy as a child, I think is still too strong. You know?

Yeah. I think I got it. I got to go. As cool as the city is. on um i think i'm going uh mesa verde it's not that mesa verde is that cool in and of itself and i don't know if i want to work in irrigation i don't know if i want to program those giant machines but i would like to smell oranges and i think that um model sequence that flight path is extremely cool i like that you land on a little like helipad

outside of like a you know future new mexico build it like this is the vibe of like future southwest i think is so awesome um so maybe i'm going with that one maybe maybe c is too claustrophobic for me like that path is cool and they you know the the little model footage that they shot they made it look underwater by uh you know using like fog effects they didn't actually shoot in a tank or anything they simulated it with with fog and smoke um so that sequence is cool but it's also it's also murky like if anything leaks i think down in sea castle you're in a lot of trouble um so if i go to uh mesa verde then I can go hang out in Pink Triangle City whenever I want. And I think I'm set.

Well, Mesa Verde, that's the long-term choice. For sure. Yeah, yeah. And I get that. Well, it gives you more flexibility, you know, being close to your parents. I'm still pretty close to my parents where I am now. I didn't make the leap to Los Angeles, which is equivalent to you guys making the leap to the sea or space as you did by moving here. Yeah, I think I would choose.

I'll complete the triangle. I will choose Sea Castle because different things. Wow. We all make different things. I don't know. I just feel i like being by bodies of water i like staring at a lake or staring at the ocean uh if i can't sleep i automatically put on like running water mountain stream waves uh i think it's just one way i reset

my brain certainly it's one of the ways i have managed to sleep during uh our current future well you are a beach boy i am a beach boy yeah i love the beach you don't yeah you don't deny it you don't think you don't find that to be an insult as the grandparents intended i can barely hang a framed photograph uh i am not an engineer of any uh irrigation or uh marine biology or or uh space i am solely a beach boy have you ever hung a picture i've hung a picture i just when you start to get into you gotta find a stud oh is the drywall strong and i just hate all that shit um it depends what you're hanging yeah well uh yeah no we'd all be screwed in terms of working in any of these places yeah i don't know i don't know if they accounted for podcasting uh as your

employment in these worlds but it may be interesting now via zoom we know that uh we can do this distantly so maybe there is a future in which we're recording this podcast separately from space, the desert, and under the sea. Yes. But popping out of our frames in a hologram fashion and wishing each other happy birthday. Yes. The ride does not, the experience does not end there. So as you get out of the ride there were a couple

different versions of the exit one uh was a beautiful hand-painted mural called the prologue and the promise by robert mccall and i'll bring it up i have it right here with uh robert mccall in the photo uh you can see him right there real that's the scale of it he's as big as the people in the oh my god that really shows you how huge this thing is yes and so uh this only lasted a few years before they subbed it in for like a glowing ge logo and i asked around in preparation for this episode because I saw one blog that said they preserved this canvas. They preserved the mural.

And I asked some of our peers, do you know where it is? And the answer was, I think it's been lost. I don't think at least anyone at the moment knows so if you know where the prologue and the promise and the rock the mccall estate uh you know recall was a big like space age painter um and they they have it on their website and i'm sure you can get a nice print of it and it's a very beautiful painting but uh only lasted a little while it's a mural about the promise of the future and they lost it it's gone it's destroyed well i think it's just things

happen in like 30 40 years like you take it somewhere you put it in a warehouse and god knows where it ends up and then the building it was in is destroyed but i i did not realize i only stuck around for a little while well they scattered horizons things all across uh different parks internationally those are little ways you could experience uh horizons elsewhere in the disney park reverse uh one of them being um these the three amazing model sequences of flying to your future destination are all used at or were used at the end of star tours in tokyo disneyland i think i mentioned this a little in our episode about the pangal Pizza Port. But basically, it was like a post-flight thing. You would end Star Tours, then you go up to this

bank of monitors and see all of the offerings of these different settings in a big screen called Tour Scan. And there's a little robot telling you about all of them, about desert and space and sea. And that robot was the robot named dan android uh which delights me as much now as it did a year ago when we talked about that so check out the pangalactic pizza port on uh on the second gate a bunch of other things like robot parts and various horizons odds and ends were all the dumped on the france backlot tour uh where they pretended these were props from movies or something instead of a ride that almost fell into a sinkhole um the the france backlot tour we clearly have to hit it because disney just put out this video saying here's what's coming up in the future and one of them

uh i i forget i don't know which of you tweeted this but i that that i the concept art of here's catastrophe canyon and here's a big cars truck smiling at a fire it is the creepiest imagery somebody on twitter said it reminded them of the everything is fine dog yeah finally the cars can feel pain the cars can scream that was jason tweeting i figure yeah it seemed in jason's voice i like that but the um yeah that franz beckler tour what a bizarre mess um i so anyway i don't know they like strewed a bunch of uh horizon shit all over there i forget what um but i don't know i think they did this ride dirty um i think it was replaced by a thing that is that a lot of people don't know. I think they did this ride dirty. I think it was replaced by a thing that a lot of people don't like. I remember, I think I might have been in Disney World at a point where they were mid-destroying it.

I'm not totally sure. Just seeing it with a fence around it was bad. Or maybe I'm just conflating that with that I've seen photos that a wrecking ball went through half of this beautiful building. It's such a bummer. I don't know. It's such a not graceful end to a really cool, ambitious attraction. Yeah.

Yeah. It's brutal. The operating schedule of like fall 93, the GE sponsorship ends late 94 horizons closes. It reopens December 95 because a universe of energy was being redone and World of Motion was being redone. And January 9th, 1999 was the last day of operation. There were some tests, supposedly in fall 99, there were some press groups who got to go through it, but it just never reopened again and that's very sad because the the people who worked on this just a murderer's row of imagineers who worked marty sklar

uh george mcginnis claude coates john hench roly crump early on like tom fitzgerald we said like so many people that just come up in the history of the disney parks and theme park design in general were like had a hand in this music by the guy who co-wrote the music for sunny eclipse with um cal david the voice of sunny eclipse what do we think of the theme song oh yeah i think it's a nice one i think i mean i'd love to, they need to put out a vinyl. Or wait, there's an Epcot vinyl, isn't there? Maybe there is and I don't have it. If there's, I should get, if it exists, whatever has all these songs.

Because as we discussed, I do like Living with the Land, the song. Let's not have confusion about that. That I like. Listen to the Land is the song. Oh, okay. Living with the Land. Jeez. Living with the Land is not listen to the land is the song oh okay the land is geez listen to the land yeah there's an official epcot album i don't know if it was put out before after horizons but yeah when you say the official song do you mean the like

easy listening kind of like uh track yeah i mean i can play a snippet real quick i also have if we're gonna i also have the unreleased demos what really yes why because they're on youtube but weird wow uh let's just get a little taste here so this is the main one I think I'd like it if it had no children on it children's choirs I'm not a big fan of but the instrumentally i think it's wonderful it's like the carpenters or something it's right lovely and there are five different demos i found on youtube here and i'll just play one of them i'm not gonna you can go and find it yourself but they were doing some different styles tomorrow like the heartwarming side of a friend

where we work where we play dreams come true every day New Horizons We have learned to get more out of living I like this. This sounds like the song they would play when the world ends. Like when the last light is snuffed out. It's an epilogue for humanity. This song plays during the end of something. This time there is space As we reach for new horizons this is what music will all sound like in the future near 2080 this though you know back to

albums you know prince has been releasing the prince estate has been releasing these albums full of like five discs of demos how about we start doing that with these rides? Because you know multiple versions of songs existed. Obviously, they had to work on things, and they tried things. Absolutely. Yeah, let's get this. Yes. Let's get this for all the rides.

Let's get an official releases remastered. Yeah, every instrumental track, every false attempt, and let's make that weird orb keyboard exist because I'd buy that. That's what I would, I'd spend $20,000 to buy that if it worked. Yeah, I agree.

The theme song brought up a big thing we have missed talking about. If we can dream it, we can do it. The much misattributed quote, which D23 had an article, the D23 website, or no, was it io9? I forget now. This has been confirmed over the years

as all these guys start to age and no one is telling the really good dirt stories yet, but everyone is calling their shots of like that was me and tom fitzgerald says i'm familiar with that phrase i wrote it now why is this an object of fuck you i thought of dream and do it because it is often credited to walt disney ah right uh and and for years i thought marty sklar wrote it but uh yeah i think fitzgerald i i one of the uh former gawker gizmodo sites had a here are fake walt disney quotes and here is the actual context for these quotes and that was one of them you you when you say fake you mean ones that people

think are him not the game i played a couple years ago with everyone and i made up generic quotes yes ones ones but they are similar of like sure sure with the power of imagination even a poor man can be rich you know like it's like walt did not say this fuck you i thought of uh the world has room for all of the magic we could ever imagine give me some fucking respect very important phrase yeah so that is that is a thing also i i did not see the video for this but uh it appears like much of early epcot uh there was a grand opening ceremony with a lot of people in white jumpsuits and you love to see it yeah yeah holding big uh future tennis rackets with an epcot logo as the net um this looks like a hell of a party um wonderful i i think i thought of a good way to go out with these with these quotes and just thinking about like

the futurism of of walt disney or tom fitzgerald and the the hope uh and these visionaries who created and inspired um this this very hopeful ride uh and and to to combine that with the visionaries that we actually ended up with um i'm right gonna i'm right now going to share my screen uh i'm gonna go to uh elon musk's twitter and um let's just i think let's go around robin and all three of us say one of the last thing if it's just a retweet it's not going to work but let's just find like the last coherent things that he's tweeted and say them in the most walt disney-esque fashion that we can and this will be a beacon to to the future of now or the future of 2020 not to the horizon's future um let's see

and i haven't screened these so this this might not work i don't know um oh i think it's gonna work great all right um you know there's a saying that i often think i stop and think to myself and it's this tesla holiday software release is fire two fire emojis. I guess I'll go next. Well, there's something I always would say Cobra Kai is a deep cut.

And this next one's confusing. I wonder if there's a more clean. Yeah, try to find one for you. It's hard to vocalize the galaxy brain. No, no, no. Yeah, that's and now he's just been tweeting about the launch. Oh, no here. I should just keep trying to find one for you it's hard to vocalize the galaxy brain uh no no yeah that's and now he's just been tweeting about the launch oh no here i should just keep trying to find one because he was got a positive covid test oh that's right or two positive covid test two negative wait where wait what did he tweet about the that's that's what we close on uh yeah he's been

he's been tweeting he's been trying to like debunk kovat he's he's on a mission for months to debunk okay okay then here's here's what i'm gonna do here what jason you should close it out uh will you just look up whatever he tweeted about having kovid uh and in the meantime uh i will say our final things you survive podcast the ride horizons edition i hope you feel nice and hopeful uh and uh if you do share some of that hope by uh interacting with us uh you can choose between the three choices of twitter instagram or facebook uh and uh also be sure to check out three bonus episodes every month at the podcast or at the second gate at

patreon.com slash podcast the ride um uh did you find anything i didn't i don't know if you have a phone or computer uh handy uh i didn't mean to just command you there jason uh no i got it okay great uh so so in the words of uh our great futurists of today. Let me set this up a little like they would in the style of the ride. Yeah. These futures might seem far out, but they are possible with the power of imagination and progress. And something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for COVID four times today.

Two tests came back negative. Two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD. If you can dream it, yes, you can do it. Yes, you can do it. Goodbye, folks.

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