Tomorrowland

Tomorrowland is the themed land devoted to the future — space flight, new technology and science-fiction adventure — in Disney's "castle parks". It was one of the original lands of Disneyland in 1955, and a version has opened with every castle park since: the Magic Kingdom in 1971, Tokyo Disneyland in 1983, Disneyland Paris in 1992, Hong Kong Disneyland in 2005 and Shanghai Disneyland in 2016. Paris uses a variant name and concept, Discoveryland. The two American versions have their own articles at Tomorrowland (Disneyland) and Tomorrowland (Magic Kingdom).

Advertising

SupaParkFounding advertisersupapark.com

Concept and design

Tomorrowland has always carried a built-in problem: the real future keeps arriving. Walt Disney presented the original land as a glimpse of life in 1986, the year of a return of Halley's Comet, and filled it largely with exhibits sponsored by American companies showing plastics, chemistry and space-age living. Because real progress quickly overtook those exhibits, Tomorrowland has been rebuilt more completely, and more often, than any other land. Later designers solved the problem by turning away from prediction altogether, towards futures imagined in the past — in pulp science fiction, or in the novels of Jules Verne — which cannot go out of date in the same way.

Certain elements recur in almost every version: a rocket or spinning astro-orbiter as a visual centrepiece, a Space Mountain or equivalent headline coaster, the Autopia driving ride in some form, and, in Florida, Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress and the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover.

Disneyland

At Disneyland, Tomorrowland opened on July 17, 1955, unfinished and heavily dependent on corporate exhibits; only a handful of its planned attractions were ready. The 1959 additions of the Submarine Voyage, the Monorail and the Matterhorn gave it substance, but by the mid-1960s it already looked dated. In 1967 the land was demolished and rebuilt almost from scratch. The new Tomorrowland, dedicated on July 2, 1967, added the Carousel of Progress, Adventure Thru Inner Space, Circle-Vision and the PeopleMover, and is remembered as the land's classic form. Space Mountain followed in 1977 and Star Tours in 1987.

Disneyland's third Tomorrowland opened on May 22, 1998. Influenced by Paris's Discoveryland, it repainted the land in bronze and gold retro-futurist colours and centred on Rocket Rods, a fast ride on the old PeopleMover track that proved mechanically unreliable and closed for good in 2001. A repaint back towards the 1967 white-and-blue scheme followed in 2005, and the lagoon eventually reopened in 2007 as the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage.

Magic Kingdom

Florida's Tomorrowland opened with the Magic Kingdom on October 1, 1971, at first incomplete; Space Mountain and the Carousel of Progress, both housed in the land, arrived in 1975 and gave it its anchors. In 1994 the land was comprehensively re-imagined as New Tomorrowland, billed as "the future that never was". Taking its cue from Discoveryland in Paris and from 1920s and 1930s pulp science fiction such as Buck Rogers, Imagineering recast the land as an intergalactic spaceport city, headquarters of the League of Planets, with metallic fins, neon and new arrivals including The Timekeeper and the ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. Much of that story layer has since faded, but the 1994 architecture still shapes the land, now also home to TRON Lightcycle Run, which opened in 2023.

Other parks

Tokyo Disneyland's Tomorrowland, opened in 1983, follows the classic American model most closely. Paris deliberately broke with it: Discoveryland, opened April 12, 1992, presents the future as imagined by European visionaries, above all Jules Verne, with a Nautilus walk-through and a Space Mountain designed as a colossal cannon firing trains towards the Moon. Hong Kong's Tomorrowland, opened in 2005, began as a compact version of the modern American land and has since leaned heavily into Marvel, gaining the Iron Man Experience in 2017 and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Nano Battle! in 2019. Shanghai's Tomorrowland, opened June 16, 2016, is the most distinct modern design: a sleek, multi-level land on the opposite side of the park from the other versions, with no Space Mountain at all — its headline is TRON Lightcycle Power Run beneath a sweeping canopy.

See also

• Tomorrowland (Disneyland)
• Tomorrowland (Magic Kingdom)
• Space Mountain (Disneyland)
• Space Mountain (Magic Kingdom)
• TRON Lightcycle Run
• Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress