The Dork Who Fell To Earth
(I think theidolhands might want to hear about this little "space oddity".)
Today, my buddy Paul gave me an audio CD copy of content he acquired though his Disney contacts...
...Soundtracks from the Moonliner and Mission To Mars attractions at the Disney theme parks.
Listening to them threw me back thirty-one years to the first time I visited Florida and Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was my favorite of the attractions then. The concept was a flight-simulation theater that took the crowd on a semi-realistic journey to the Red Planet, with rudimentary motion seating and panoramic projection screens of the spacecraft's external views. Before entering the theater itself, the crowd would go through a "Mission Control Brief" led by an audio-anamatronic character, who stood in front of banks of NASA-variety high-tech consoles "manned" by other robotic mannekins. The far wall of the room had large screen video and movie projectors. Going through that was, to a twelve-year-old kid, like living the future.
This disk had all fifteen minutes of audio from that attraction, and now my imagination can flit back there and remember it all. Three other tracks were from the earlier Moonliner incarnation of the ride, with public address chatter of a ("transistor-punk"?) aerospace passenger terminal, engine noise from a George Pal-era spaceship, and overture music from when it was 100% acoustic orchestral hardware. No better evidence of how much the world has changed...and also, how much the world's future avoided what we thought we wanted, back in those decades after WW2.
I'll go back to Florida, but I'm not sure I'll go back to Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was replaced before I finished my flight training around 1990, and space tourism is either alive and well, or about to be swept aside by history, depending on who you ask. In the meantime, I'm the Dork Who Fell To Earth, looking for the next hyperspace portal and saving up for a ticket to Anthea. Hope you'll be on the flight with me. I could always use a travelling companion.
PS: Thanks to www.lunar.org...some visuals of what space tourism looked like to Disney from the outside:
And from www.davelandweb.com...Mission Control:
Today, my buddy Paul gave me an audio CD copy of content he acquired though his Disney contacts...
...Soundtracks from the Moonliner and Mission To Mars attractions at the Disney theme parks.
Listening to them threw me back thirty-one years to the first time I visited Florida and Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was my favorite of the attractions then. The concept was a flight-simulation theater that took the crowd on a semi-realistic journey to the Red Planet, with rudimentary motion seating and panoramic projection screens of the spacecraft's external views. Before entering the theater itself, the crowd would go through a "Mission Control Brief" led by an audio-anamatronic character, who stood in front of banks of NASA-variety high-tech consoles "manned" by other robotic mannekins. The far wall of the room had large screen video and movie projectors. Going through that was, to a twelve-year-old kid, like living the future.
This disk had all fifteen minutes of audio from that attraction, and now my imagination can flit back there and remember it all. Three other tracks were from the earlier Moonliner incarnation of the ride, with public address chatter of a ("transistor-punk"?) aerospace passenger terminal, engine noise from a George Pal-era spaceship, and overture music from when it was 100% acoustic orchestral hardware. No better evidence of how much the world has changed...and also, how much the world's future avoided what we thought we wanted, back in those decades after WW2.
I'll go back to Florida, but I'm not sure I'll go back to Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was replaced before I finished my flight training around 1990, and space tourism is either alive and well, or about to be swept aside by history, depending on who you ask. In the meantime, I'm the Dork Who Fell To Earth, looking for the next hyperspace portal and saving up for a ticket to Anthea. Hope you'll be on the flight with me. I could always use a travelling companion.
PS: Thanks to www.lunar.org...some visuals of what space tourism looked like to Disney from the outside:
And from www.davelandweb.com...Mission Control: