by Ray Bradbury
Like Hollywood, like America, like the world.
For the simple fact, proven over and over in the history of towns and cities, is that city fathers and chambers of commerce know not habitations, nor much of anything else. The cities have gone to ruin and the people a ruination within. With no imaginative cures, the mayors and councils have floundered and sunk in tar and taxes. The Disney duchies are the answer.
The Disney duchies? Men who answer to the motto: In excellentia lucrum. In excellence is profit. Imagineers who show up, ask for carte blanche, no interference from dreamless officials high or low, and proceed to blueprint a city and build a dream.
Just a few years back, Houston Intercontinental Airport asked Imagineering to create a PeopleMover to sort out and distribute the airport’s mobs.
Imagineering has just completed a master plan for recreating the remnants of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, delivering forth a fresh new Seattle Center.
With this as a beginning, by century’s end, most if not all of our American towns will have been touched and changed all for the good, by Walt’s Paris-inspired, France-rejuvenated ghost.
After Walt died, a rumor had it that he had become a giant popsicle at some cryonics morgue in East Azusa. Not so! How ridiculous! Walt didn’t have to immortalize himself.
As he himself said: “Nothing has to die.”
So—turn backward, turn backward, O Time in thy flight. Let old cities and new arise.
And Walt? Hell, he’s not dead. Just hiding out, like the hipbone of old Abraham L. and the Renaissance, at Disney Imagineering.
Or, as he said to me one day when I asked him to run for mayor of Los Angeles:
“Oh, Ray, why should I be mayor, when I’m already king?”
As for the Hipbone of Abraham L.? When the Disney technicians finished a new model of Lincoln and were ready to discard the old robot, someone, looking at the mechanical hipbone, said, “What’ll we do with this?”
“Why,” said someone else, “send it to Ray Bradbury.”
They did.
It’s here, on my desk, as I write.
1988
MOVIOLA MICKEY or HOW TO JUMP-START A MOUSE AND ANIMATE AN ANIMATION MUSEUM
“Who are we? What are we? Where have we been? Where are we going?”
It was Disney Imagineering calling in 1988.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Don’t you know who you are and what you’ve done?”
“Yes,” they said, “but you know better, you’re outside the skin, we can’t see ourselves for the seeds. Come over.”
So I worked, or rather played, for a week with Roy Disney, John Hench, Van Romans, and some other artists who sat in to illustrate our chat as it came out of our mouths. The great thing about Disney is that you say, or type something in the morning, and by late afternoon, you have ten or twenty pen and ink or watercolor sketches to put flesh on your conversational-IBM-Selectric III-typewriter bones.
It turned out that the Disney folks wanted to blueprint a Museum of Animation.
Easy as cartoon pie, I said, remembering that I had got my Mickey Mouse Club pin at the Genesee Theater in Waukegan, Illinois when I was ten, and had seen all three hundred of the Mouse and Silly Symphony Cartoons from 1927 on.
Well, not quite cartoon-pie simple. Roy Disney and John Hench handed over some plans and photos of an Animation Exhibit already in cardboard cut-out, mock-up shape. Which is to say fascinating but not fascinating enough.
Then they all looked at me for answers. What could I add, subtract, or subdivide on the right side of my head? The whole plan was terribly still, awfully quiet, like many other museum exhibits over the centuries. Did I have an electric charge on me somewhere so I could jolt the entirety to life?
I searched my pockets for several days of meetings, riffled through all my Mouse and Dinosaur Fantasia books, and rummaged among some sketches I had birthed at age fourteen. In bed with a cold, I had crayoned forth some bad reproductions of Mickey, Donald Duck and Horace Horsecollar. Carrying these with me, I went back to the studio for what might have been a final round of what looked to be a frustrating talk.
Then, someone threw a plastic photo of Goofy on the table. In it were imbedded seven or eight images of the confused and hyperactive Dog. As you moved the photo or your head, Goofy circled about in various antic poses, continuously in action. I had never seen a so-called three-dimensional photo with so many positions and actions trapped and ready to move. I held onto Goofy for a full two or three minutes, making him run, pause, or leap backward. A sheer delight. Out of this delight I at last said:
“Can we get six- or eight-foot-tall photos like this reproduced by any company anywhere in the United States?”
No one was quite sure, they would look into it. “But why?”
“Because,” I said, “if we can get life-size, three-dimensional images of Mickey and Donald and Pinocchio and Maleficent, and place them on both sides of the Museum Corridor, then when you walk through the halls, the whole museum will walk with you! It will be an animated museum that animates, the first in history. My God, a museum that not only celebrates animated motion, but moves in an earthquake of action, propelled forward, accompanying you as you walk, pause, go ahead again or step back.”
“Good Gravy,” or something like that, everyone said.
Phone calls were made. A company was found that could make the plastic sheets with photography imbedded in long vertical strips like Venetian blinds set sidewise.
The name of the process, the same one that binds those tiny dinosaurs into your measuring ruler so they raise or lower their heads, was lenticular photography. It has been around for years, imbedded in measuring sticks, calendars, and postcards. Now I wanted to grow it to giant size to set free Monstro the Whale, Flowers and Trees, Bambi and the Wicked Witch in the Museum of Disney Animation. My God, I thought, if only we can do it. No, I thought, my God, we must!
So my plan, scribbled out swiftly on a note pad, and brought to perfection by artists sitting with us, was this:
Up front in the Moviola Mickey traveling museum must be a series of Moviolas, those editing machines into which you peer as into kaleidoscopes or wishing wells, to watch the editable flickers, the images of films that you can cut and slice to fit your fancy, run a riot or end a plague. From one of the large-size Moviolas a huge boa constrictor of film would leap. Arcing across the lobby area the film frames would grow larger and larger until they reached a wall and became a door. Future audiences would step through the slotted film-frame and advance through a long, serpentine-like corridor, a history of animation. Gertie the Dinosaur would perambulate with them as they strolled, and then Mickey and Minnie and all the other barnyard friends would follow, imbedded in lenticular Venetian blind slats upended on the vertical. As the audience advanced, they would encounter videocasette frames in the walls in which, for a half minute or minute, scenes from Steamboat Willie or The Skeleton Dance would be repeated endlessly. Moving on, the shapes and the colors in the lenticular walls would change.
With Flowers and Trees, the lenticular images would assume all the rainbow colors. And the old barnyard cartoons would find an additional friend, Donald Duck, to walk with lenticular hops and jumps into the years ahead. Images of the Band Concert would whirlwind in the three-dimensional walls, leading us to The Old Mill, where again convenient videocassette screens would illustrate Disney’s progress leading up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio and beyond. Needless to say, the Dwarfs would march to and from work in the walls, pursued by the Whale, the Dinosaurs, and Maleficent and her monsters.
In a great theater at the end of the exhibit, a longer demonstration on the wide screen would give Fantasia a chance to expand and drown us in color and sound.
At the finale of our trek, accompanied by bright mobs of familiar friends and enemies, photo-imbedded in every inch of corridor paneling, in one long strip of film, it would seem, by the notched projector holes in ceiling and sill, we woul
d step out of the serpentine and see the film we had inhabited snake up on the air and spiral down to vanish into a final Moviola waiting to devour it.
There you have it. A museum that is one long three-dimensional march through animation history. A museum of animation that animates. A corridor where antic shadows wait to escort you through time. An exhibit, what’s more, that can be taken apart, like Lego architecture and moved from Denver to Seattle to Chicago to the Museum of Modern Art to the Smithsonian and back, and perhaps, to some half-permanent, shadow-show perch at EPCOT or Disney World.
That’s how I cranked the big Moviola.
Now it’s up to the Disney Mousekeepers to run the flickers and start the show.
1991
BEYOND 1984: THE PEOPLE MACHINES
Optimism is an excuse to behave optimally.
People ask me to predict the Future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better. My plan is to sneak us by 1984 when it isn’t looking and make it to the high ground of 2001, which will be a good year, a vintage year. Who says? I do. Guaranteed? If you follow my nose.
First off, between now and 1999 we must engage in the greatest Airlift in History.
To save Berlin? No. Beach more boat people? Hardly. To salvage refugees adrift in a wrecked city called Detroit, New York, or Chicago? Yes.
For if we can take in one million Cubans, and welcome four hundred thousand strangers each year from far places, we can surely pull three or four million Americans out of their Primeval Digs and Black Holes.
Up and away from the Chicago Abyss. Down and onto the Kansas Plain. OZ has got to be out there somewhere, doesn’t it? For God’s sake, let’s find, no, let’s build it! For it’s no use airlifting beast-people out of their sties if we have nowhere to go, nowhere to put them down.
Once upon a time, of course, there were places. They were called small towns. But for various reasons—jobs, money, wanderlust, sex, technological change, mass media—the siren metropolis called, and the Jerkwater Stops fell flat in the dust. What was left of the small town was smothered and crushed when a Juggernaut Shopping Mall wheeled mindlessly through and squatted in a meadow a mile out from Main Street to sell its medicines and grab yokels.
The pattern is familiar now. We have seen it repeated and repeated by mall builders, who think too much and city fathers who think too little.
The situation calls to mind that Mexican farmer who, 36 years ago, while plowing his field, stumbled over a small fire-and-smoke pothole in the midst of his maize. By late afternoon, there was a small creek of lava in his front yard. At noon the next day, the hut was long lost in a burning river. When it was all over, a mountain of lava had surrounded and taken the nearest village and put the town church hip-deep in cooling rock. So, the Paricutin volcano was born.
For that surprised Mexican farmer, substitute your typical small town mayor and chamber of commerce. For Paricutin, substitute any one of several thousand shopping malls or centers that have erupted across America in the past ten years, and you have an inundation in reverse. The townsfolk rushed out to view the shopping explosions. Downtown Pigs Poke, Idaho, soon resembled Saturday night at the old burying ground. When the folks wandered back in from the shopping mall cow pasture, they took one look at Main Street and never set foot in it again or went away to Minneapolis forever.
How do you make the small town work again? How do you prepare it for my airlift of forlorn and despairing city folk clamoring to be born-again hayseeds?
Putting wheels on the meadow mall and rolling it back into Dead Falls won’t do it. But it would be a start.
All right then, what do we build?
A People Machine.
Walt Disney didn’t exactly patent the idea, but by God he surely reinvented it. Disneyland and Disney World contain many of the Machine units that we could nail together and set down in a thousand lost towns between now and 1990.
What are we talking about? Not just a shopping center where people come to buy one sheet, one shirt, or one shoe, but a place where lingering, staying, dawdling, socializing are a way of life. A refuge from the big city, or, sometimes worse, your own parlor. A place so incredibly right that mobs will rush to it crying “Sanctuary!” and be allowed in forever. A place, in sum, where people can come to be people. The idea is as old as Athens at high noon, Rome soon after supper, Paris at dawn, Alexandria at dusk.
Let’s face it, there is no use building a center or a mall where people only come on occasion to argue fresh fruit and give up coffee. A town is conversation, gossiping, chatting, watching, looking, noting, and staring. We must give people back their eyes. And their mouths. And their derrieres.
What to do with your eyes is what our People Machine will teach.
What to do with your mouth is what our townsfolk will learn.
What to do with your rump roast posterior is Ballet Position Number One in the plaza of the future.
We must build a social machine of such curious and mixed and delightful parts that the city beyond the horizon will fall over dead with envy and sink into the tar where its dinosaur unsociability belongs.
“Okay, Prophet, put the pieces together,” you cry. “What do we build and fit?”
For starters, a fresh new idea, thought of just seventeen million mornings ago: The Town Plaza.
If you have one lying about, summon it back to life.
“How?” Here’s the blueprint:
The Longest Bar in the World is in Tijuana. Why not, facing our plaza, build the Longest Soda Fountain in the World! With one hundred stools facing an old-fashioned soda fountain. Beyond the stools, put another 50 to 80 tables, and beyond the tables another 40 or 50 booths.
On the opposite side of the plaza, let us add a wonderfully colored, imaginatively built bookstore, whose paperback department, in particular, would carry a cross section of just about every and any kind of book that people out in the Plaza might want to hold in their hands or sit on. The bookstore would open late in the afternoon and stay open until at least midnight every night.
The bookstore, needless to say, should be fabulous, metaphorical, mythological, and as exciting as the books that line the shelves. Libraries may well demand silence, but, why not as you enter our bookstore, have a Robot Computer King or a Queen-of-Egypt mummy standing near the door, to whom you can whisper your needs, and who will tell you all the latest wonders in the grand stacks and corridors! The mummy’s breastplate might have, in gold beetle symbols, the names of the various sections, which, if pressed, would whisper the new stuff just arrived from across the world! A golden amber beetle, plucked up on its wire, would tickle the quiet message in your peach-fuzz ear.
Wandering the stacks, you could stick your hands in various myth-holes to view tiny dioramas of the areas you are traveling through by book. Stick your head in here: OZ, with music. Stick your head in there: Caveman Territory. Next hole: Dinosaurs. Next after that: Alpha Centauri! Andromeda! With sound! With symphonies!
How do you get to the Children’s Section?
By sliding down a Rabbit Hole into the basement!
Who could resist that? Not me!
Where are all the Star Books, the Future Books? Where is the Grand Universe itself? Up a twisting circular staircase into a miniature, domed planetarium where John Carter, Luke Skywalker, and Chewbacca wait!
Over in the adult mystery section, as you prowl the stacks, why not, on occasion, the sound of a faintly squeaking door, a dim rattle of gunfire among the dark, leaning books if you pick up some stethoscopes hanging there and give a listen. Now—back out to the Town Plaza!
On the third side of the plaza build a fairly large bike rink, with humps and hills and semi-detours, fast and slow lanes, where you can rent a bike and take off for a few miles of nice work with a view of the plaza, the ice-cream eaters, and the
book people. Under a canopy, of course, for fair and foul weather.
On two opposing corners of the plaza, the finest restaurants you can put together under sane or insane but imaginative chefs. On two other opposing corners, cinemas running the latest appalling imports from the prison side of Hollywood, or the great stuff from Alpha Centauri and Beyond.
If your plaza is near a college or university, great. Lacking that, toss in a university extension building as close to the Ice Cream Parlor as possible. We want all those nice young bodies, every three years a new mob, parading around being lovable idiots.
Now, next door to the bookstore, what?
That old-fashioned Kaleidoscope, the vast store you could hold up to the sun and see just about anything you wanted to see and touch and buy—The Dime Store!
And I mean a bright, well-lit, clean, uncrowded, though full of incredible junk, Dime Store, the way they used to be before you took one look and never went in again—the year they began to look like garbage dumps.
Next to that, a Drug Store, and I mean a Drug Store, the way they used to look and smell. Remember the smell? All the mysterious medicines and cosmetics and perfumes. Somebody should bottle that. The smell alone makes the feet drift, the body turn and move in its direction.
Next to that—a Penny Arcade, but not just your old-fashioned Penny Arcade with robot-tarot-witches, penny-moviola machines, and Electrocute-Yourself-For-A-Penny devices. I mean an Arcade where Darth Vader will cream your tiny guts with his laser. Where Outer Space beckons in three dimensions, where you can blast off in an electro-sensor Pod, to knock hell out of the Empire’s rockets, zap the Orion Nebula, disintegrate the Moon, and rebirth ten billion Suns, all in an afternoon. Talk about your Old-fashioned Shooting Gallery taking on new intergalactic aspects! And, with bigger, better, more incredible Computer Games coming up, in monster as well as mini-sizes, you can add to your Penny Arcade, your Outer Space Arcade, as the money pours in.
The Laser Light Arcade, incidentally, might be the first stopping place for any People Mover or electric bus that enters the downtown area of your Future Small Town. Mothers who want to gab and shop can drop Annihilating Junior or Bust-’em-Up Betsy at the Arcade for a few hours of socking Martians or traveling to far countries.
