You (probably) don't want to live in Walt Disney's version of E.P.C.o.T.
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- Опубліковано 2 лип 2024
- In 1966, just weeks before his death, Walt Disney filmed a special preview of the plans for his "Florida Project". This was the world's introduction to the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or E.P.C.o.T. Unfortunately, with Walt's passing, most of these plans remained forever in the realm of imagination and dreams.
Like many others, we wondered what the original E.P.C.o.T. plans would look like, if they were actually built. Since we can't do that for real, we settled for building a version in a popular city planning simulation game - Cities: Skylines. Join us for this episode of Sightlines - the second part of a two-part series - where we analyze the city planning aspects of our simulation of Walt Disney's Epcot.
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What a great video. No retirees in the city? I think with all the ideas and visions Disney had he didn’t realize Florida was gonna be such a haven for retirement lol😂
Thanks for going through the effort to go do this rabbit hole in exploration. Like the studio lot adjacent version of Disneyland, Epcot would have gone through a few iterations of redesign as outside constraints were introduced.
Unfortunately with Walt's passing his full vision was never realized.
In Epcot 2.0, Epcot became an admission park rather than a city center. This is concept is in opposition to the original concept, which appears to be more of a company town where the residences of EPCOT either work directly at the theme park or are support staff (similar example Hershey Park). Perhaps they should actually be called cast members. Nonetheless Walt's vision was to have more autonomy of the region beyond the boundaries of the park.
If Epcot was the epicenter of the Walt Disney World ... then perhaps the center was a public gathering / mixing space where both residents and visitors would gather and conduct commerce. And from the center both residential and resort communities would exist.
The whole concept of EPCOT seem similar to the Garden City Concept by Ebenezer Howard. Obviously in the concept, it is presented a controlled environment, but modern day Orlando is vaguely similar with a less than ideal mass transit system.
Perhaps Walt's original ideal is still alive but has grown pass the border of a Disney controlled parcels. EPCOT was the seed, but modern day Orlando now is home of multiple theme parks.
Thanks for another great video.
I for one would love to play a city simulation game based of the original E.P.C.O.T. concept and I bet a lot of other folks would feel the same.
One thing that I do wonder is, what if the hottest new tech you are testing out fails….for everyone? Sure, if the RCA video camera fails 4:24 you can always knock on a door (even if it’s not as futuristic and fun), but what if your fridge melts, or your dishwasher spits out all the water and floods your kitchen?
Perhaps it says more about me not being too much of a risk taker but I can’t imagine the infrastructure that would have to be in place to get people repairs and maintenance in the event of a tech failure - especially on a large scale since you are dealing with prototypes.
In any case, another awesome video!
I think the idea was more to have the people in Epcot be beta testers. Ideally, you’d still do a significant amount of testing on the new product before putting it in production large enough for the community to get it in their homes. Bulls a few prototypes, make sure they work for several hundred cycles, then ramp up production.
But you’re absolutely correct that this would’ve been an issue. If a new dishwasher model had a gasket that blew out after six months of use, you’d have a sudden surge in failures, with the company trying to replace the broken (and soon-to-be-broken) models across the city. That’s not great for the average homeowner, who probably (according to the Disney pitch) never asked for that new dishwasher in the first place.
One of the biggest unknowns in the Epcot plan is how any of this would be handled. The idea was that people living in the city would just come home to a new dishwasher or a whole set of new (read: experimental) appliances. If one of those failed, and burned the house down, who’s paying for it? The company? Disney? The homeowner? Imagine how bad it could get with a lawsuit - or worse, class action suit - dragging through the court for years.
@@ThemeParchive man, I hadn’t even considered the potential for legal action.
Still, big dreams and visions leads to advancements. This city model may have been fundamentally flawed, but as you pointed out in part one, Disney was trying to put forward a solution to a problem he saw with the way cities were being built.
This video series did make me curious about how the Disney company has taken on residential housing with golden oak or the future retirement communities they announced a while back.
I actually have a counterpoint that I don’t think another park was ever truly intended, with the idea that wdw would just continually get better and better. Kind of like old Disneyland.
Definitely. There were no plans or even mentions of a second Florida park in the original Epcot city plans. There were mentions of other attractions, like the swamp boat ride near where today's Coronado Springs Resort sits, but nothing about a second gate. That said, we mention it in the episode more to highlight a concern with the original city design.
Walt said Florida would solve the biggest problem with Disneyland: space. The modern company (after Walt's death) would almost certainly want to add more parks, like they added DCA in Disneyland. But given the way the Epcot city was laid out, adding a second gate would've presented a significant infrastructure hurdle regardless of where they put it on the property.
Edit: I posted this before finishing the video where you said you uploaded your map, however I'm having a hard time locating it on the workshop. Any chance you could provide a direct link? Thanks!
I’m tempted to try and recreate this map in my game with all the DLC unlocked and mods like TM:PE and network multi-tool - there’s an actual monorail system in one of the DLCs, plus pedestrian roads. I’ve also spent wayyyy too many hours of my life in this game making the most realistic, functional cities I can.
Would you be willing to share your map or save file? Or at the very least your gridded overlay of the region?
That was my bad, actually. I just straight up forgot to upload them to the workshop. They're in review now (both terrain map and my most recent save of the city). Here's the link to the city save: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3008839489
I'd love to see you make this into a more realistic version. Especially with the theme park area being an actual amusement park in the game. The save will be missing the custom "tourism breaker" item, but that was just a pile of garbage assets with maxed entertainment and capacity stats to get the city to max out tourism. Since you'd probably want to replace those anyway with more realistic assets, I didn't bother uploading those. Good luck with it!
How long did it take to build?
I honestly don’t remember. 😅 I was just kinda playing the game in my spare time with the idea to make a version of Epcot. I made a first version that was just based on estimates, and I kinda liked how it was turning out (even though it was more oval than circular).
I wanted to remake it more accurately, but it felt like a waste of time until I realized I could make a video out of it. The version that you see in the videos took a few days, but I don’t recall exactly how long I spent each day on it. I know I basically pulled an all-nighter the first day and got most of the city done. The rest was just tweaking things to make them work better, adding small details, or goofing off with things like the waterfront area. Overall, I’d probably say I spent around 20 hours on it, but at least some of that time was just spent riding the monorails around and looking at how cool the city looked. 😂
Where did you get all the reference photos of the original plans?
A lot of sites have reposted those images over the years. One of my personal favorites, which has not just a ton of image resources, but has a bunch of good writeups and stuff as well is www.the-original-epcot.com. Also, most of the video stuff in these two episodes came from the E.P.C.o.T. film produced by Disney a couple months before Walt's death.
All nice but would non-Disney merch be allowed?