Walt Disney World, with its Magic Kingdom and Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), gets a lot of ink and film-and rightly so.
It`s imaginative, visually exciting, intellectually stimulating and totally wholesome. It`s fun; it`s relaxing and situated in the perpetual summer of central Florida. It`s all-American in its continual change and growth; progress is its middle name.
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By the year 2000, Walt Disney World may have become the amusement park that devoured the planet.
What`s new? Lots.
There`s Typhoon Lagoon, a water park that somehow manages to bring the ocean inland. It`s all illusion, of course, but in its wet saltiness, you can scuba dive amid brightly colored fish and real gray sharks (gentle ones-no one gets hurt at Walt Disney World), surf on a mechanically produced wave that gives a good surfer an impressive ride, and swim or float in brightly colored inner tubes around the circumference of the lagoon.
For the daring
Also, sunbathe on the real sand beach (white Florida sand), take the rather dreadfully high and super-scary water slide almost straight down from the mountain to the water below (provided you are at least 10 years old, four feet tall, not wearing pants with metal rivets on them, not pregnant and have no history of back or neck ailments, etc.)
Young adults had an energetic volleyball game going, while at the other end of the park there was a mini-version of the water attractions for toddlers and little people.
Less energetic folks can walk through an underground viewing room that has portholes looking into the carefully seascaped scuba-diving tank, shop at the ever-present Disney Shop, or sit and soak up the sun under the pleasant breezes that constantly ruffle the palm trees.
The landscaping, as at all Disney attractions, is splendid and bright with blossoms.
The focal point of the park is the mountain from whose sides come the giant water slide, the mechanical wave and the waterfall that ends the around- the-park float trip. On top of the mountain is marooned a wacky-looking pirate ship from whose stack water intermittently blows high into the air.
A family place
Typhoon Lagoon is a great place for families to wind down after several days in pursuit of pleasure, when togetherness begins to pall. A family can cut loose from one another and spread out in this park in perfect safety at different attractions, where only little ones need constant supervision. Mom and Dad can loll in hammocks with iced drinks.
The cost of Typhoon Lagoon is $17.50 a day for adults, $14 for children 3 to 9; two-day passes are $29 for adults, $23 for children. It is not included in the four-day Disney World passes ($97 plus tax for adults, $77 for children) that cover the Magic Kingdom, MGM Studios and EPCOT Center.
A new pavilion called Wonders of Life has been added by Metropolitan Life to the already attraction-rich EPCOT Center. The grand opening was Oct. 30. The focus of Wonders of Life is good health, which is what one would expect from a giant insurance company that is betting you that you will live longer than you think you will.
Walt Disney World`s treatment of the human body in all its wondrous complexity was imaginative, as one would expect from Disney-and occasionally preachy. A sermonette by Goofy on good health practices seemed straight out of Red China or the Soviet Union, with its sloganeering.
Reproduction film
The rest was pure Disney magic. A film, ”The Making of Me,” was devoted to the miracle of reproduction and was getting raves from those who saw it in preview. The delightful film, many felt, should be required for health classes in every elementary school in the country.
It is also a good film for parents to watch with their youngsters to enhance communication and help make promote sex education by parents.
The narrator is a young man, possibly in his late teens or early 20s, who is telling the story of his own conception. Through the magic of Disney, he is transported back through time invisibly and sees the birth of each parent, cameos of their childhood and growing-up years, leading to the night they
”meet” at their college graduation prom.
Eyes lock across the dance floor, music swells and they fall instantly in love. They marry, they water ski, they boogie, they look at old photographs of each other as children, and they decide it`s time to begin a family.
Most of ”The Making of Me” involves actors, but the 15-minute film also uses animation (hundreds of thousands of blue sperm racing up the channel to meet the sexy egg, complete with pouty lips and Mae West feather boa, waiting at the finish line). Tasteful drawings, cartooning, animation and real footage of the embryo and fetus in utero make this a truly educational film.
Hands-on exhibits
There are dozens of hands-on exhibits about the body at Wonders of Life, including exercise equipment Disney-fashion, a place for youngsters to have their batting swings analyzed and replayed on television, and such features as ”Audio Antics,” in which one listens through headphones and attempts to identify sounds.
The Anacomical Cable Network puts on skits consisting of three actors and one audience participant, including Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Sugar (about a wife, mother and hard-driving hospital chief who treats her mid-afternoon energy level lapses with candy bars) and a skit involving Health Man and his young assistant (drawn from the audience). They wear Superman-type capes and battle Penelope the Pusher and her evil henchman, Maurice (Peter Lorre diction), who offer drugs while Health Man shouts, ”Just say no!” and gets the audience chanting, ”Just say no!”
It was all great fun and relevant to modern life.
”Cranium Command” is destined to draw crowds. This amusing little story takes an ordinary day in the life of a 12-year-old boy as told in terms of a monitor in his brain. The monitor is trying to control all the functions of a human body at the time in its development when it is at its most volatile and unpredictable.
Animation mixed in
It is utterly wonderful, with its mix of actors and animation and a character called Buzzy, a not-too-bright but totally lovable creature. Buzzy is a fledgling pilot on his first assignment as brain monitor.
It`s hilarious. One is tempted to get back in line at once to see it again.
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While waiting in the long line for ”Body Wars,” a trip through the human body and the only ”ride” within the Wonders of Life pavilion, an early-20s type was doing his best to talk this 55-year-old grandmother out of taking the trip.
”My wife-she works at Disney World, and she said it made her sick to her stomach and she would never go again,” he said. ”She said it wasn`t the jerking and jolting that got her so much as the part where you hang upside down.” He kept the insalubrious monologue going about the terrors of ”Body Wars” and from time to time would say, ”It`s not too late to turn back.”
Trying to be helpful, one supposes, the young man hyped it so much that the reality of the ride was a disappointment.
Television monitors placed in the corridor leading to the ride announced that we were going to enter a ”body probe vehicle” that would be
”miniaturized and beamed below the surface of the skin” of a patient whose finger had been penetrated by a splinter. We would fight off disease within the body with the ray guns and the friendly infection fighters in
”Star Wars”-type gear that the body probe vehicle released.
Seats jerk about
Entering the body probe vehicle-a small theater made to resemble the interior of a space ship-visitors were buckled tightly into their seats and made to stow their gear in nets under the seats. The lights went out and the film began, viewed as if through the windshield of the body probe vehicle. While the adventure through the body began, the plates on which the seats were fastened began to jerk and jolt, without actually going anywhere.
Instead of thrilling, it was actually unpleasant, not unlike driving in a wagon without rubber wheels over a rutted road. It was not an illusion of speed, but a discordant sensation of being mechanically jerked about. The real motion actually detracted from the film`s adventure. It is not an experience I care to repeat-even though we never turned upside down.
Over at the Magic Kingdom is a new ride that is much more successful.
Dreamflight by Delta Airlines, the official airline of Walt Disney World, takes the traveler through the history of flight from the balloon to the plane, from propellors to the jet and finally through a breathtaking flight to Tomorrowland. Visitors travel in typical Disney cars through areas where three-dimensional cartoon characters abound, moving on through a reproduction of the dining cabin of the Global Clipper, set with crystal, silver, linens and fine china in a theoretical trip around the world to Tokyo and Paris.
Illusion is grand
It was quite lovely, and then suddenly to be roaring down a runway with the view from the cockpit at higher and higher speeds, the illusion heightened by winds whipping one`s hair, and soaring off into flight through mountain canyons and valleys and the final touch: racing through a city that seems to be made of crystal buildings shaped like globes and spires in soft pastel colors.
It was all so pleasant that I stayed on the car and rode a second time, and it was just as enjoyable. This, however, was a preview. When it opened the next day, the lines were long and no second rides were possible without a second wait.
Another of the many new things Walt Disney World has done since my last visit is to begin building moderate-priced housing aimed at families.
I stayed at the completed Caribbean Beach Hotel, a series of rambling buildings grouped around a good-size lake with an artificial beach at one end with real white Florida sand. The moderate-price rooms at Caribbean Beach Hotel can comfortably house a family of four in two queen-size beds, with double sinks placed conveniently outside the bathroom.
Costs of Caribbean Beach rooms range from $69 to $95 a day and is expected to increase after the first of the year. At least two other moderate- priced Disney hotels are being built now. –