SPEAKER_07 0:01

Anomobile is approaching snowflake specimen. All phases stand by to verify resolving power.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Phase blue. Phase blue. Light wavelength. Approximately 0.5,000 millimeters. Definition.

SPEAKER_08 0:13

Excellent. Phase green. Resolving power decrease.

SPEAKER_07 0:16

Phase green. Increase U angle. Verify. Phase green.

SPEAKER_08 0:19

U angle increased to 14 degrees 29 minutes. Anomobile definition. Excellent.

SPEAKER_07 0:24

All phases hold U angle until forward units reach crystalline stage of snow flight.

SPEAKER_06 0:29

Your attention, please. This is the tracking procedure of an adventure through inner space.

Kelly 0:50

Hello and welcome to the Lowdown on the Plus Up, a podcast where we look at everyone's favorite theme park attractions, lands, textures, and novelties. We talk in, over, about, and through our week's topic, and then, with literally no concern for practicality, safety, or economic viability, we come up with ways to make them better. My name is Kelly McCubbin, columnist for the theme park website Boardwalk Times, and with me as always is Peter Overstreet, University Professor of Animation and Film History in Northern California.

Pete 1:24

So, Pete, what are we talking about today? Well, today we're going to talk about a um very big attraction that started off as a little idea. Or is it the other way around? This is actually one of Kelly's and my absolute favorite attractions at Disneyland. It's none other than Monsanto's Adventures Through Inner Space.

Kelly 1:47

So it's an attraction that has not been there almost 40 years now. Wow. Yeah. It closed in 1985. So yeah, Adventure Through Inner Space. It's it's a conundrum of an attraction. It is one of my favorite attractions of all time. It might be my favorite attraction of all time. And uh there is some disturbing complexity behind this thing.

Pete 2:16

Aaron Ross Powell Some may actually make the argument that this is the one attraction that I think has influenced more parts of the globe than any other through Disneyland. Yeah, potentially. Potentially. We'll talk about that in a little bit as to why. And it's not for the reasons that you might be thinking. Right.

Kelly 2:35

So let's uh a a little quick beginning of the episode getting the world up to date. Uh first off, world's very scary. We recognize that. Yeah. We're we're we're humans too. Hang on to each other, everybody. Absolutely. Um and I don't want to go too deep into that, but just wanted to say we get it. Um real quick, George Wilkins died. Yes. Talk about George Wilkins. Yeah. I just I I wanted to kind of get this in there. Uh George Wilkins was basically the sound of the future for kids that grew up when we grew up. You know, as as you well know, the 21st century started in 1982 with the opening of Epcot Center. Yes. And George Wilkins was very fundamental to the future world side of Epcot Center. He wrote and arranged the lion's share of the music that you heard in the parks, on the rides, a walking around, the atmospheric music. He was really foundational to what a lot of people who love the legacy of that park really love. Um really great guy is his masterpiece, and you can probably go out and find this uh in different places on YouTube, is his score for the almost 20-minute-long Horizons attraction, uh, which is just wonderful. He's beloved and he will be missed.

Pete 4:04

I one of the things I liked about his um his work is that he made futurism playful. He did. That's right. He made it playful. I mean, can you imagine opening up uh Epcot to have some sort of futuristic soundtrack by someone else besides him? I mean, imagine Tangerine Dreams rendition of the Epcot, you know. Yeah.

Kelly 4:26

Uh or or even worse, uh Jean-Michel Charret, you know, it would just you'd be walking through Epcot with like 30 minutes of which would be interesting in some ways, but not what we're going for. Not for we're going for it, no. Yeah. You know, he he was a protege of Buddy Baker, uh, who was the main theme park composer for Disney at the time. You know, as as many people know, he's probably most famous for writing Grim Grinny Ghosts for the Haunted Mansion. And evidently, uh what I read recently was that Buddy Baker was working on Epcot as they were getting ready to open it, and he was in a car accident, and he was fine, but it was a hair's breadth away from he would have been very much not fine. Well, jeez. And the Disney studio said, um, Buddy, you're our sole music guy, and we're about to open up possibly the biggest project we've ever put together. Do you got any backup?

SPEAKER_03 5:29

Please, do you have any backup?

Kelly 5:31

And and he started putting George Wilkins into the scene. And eventually uh Baker went off to kind of do more film work. He scored the fox and the hound, stuff like that. Sure. And George Wilkins just took it over. Wilkins himself also had a couple of uh proteges later on that he got started in theme park and movie and video game soundtrack. So he he he passed it forward too. Wow.

Pete 5:59

That's so cool. Well, our condolences to uh all relatives and friends of Winslow, all the little Wilkinsons out there. But thank you very much for all of your contributions to our amusement and our notion of what the future could be. Yeah, a positive, progressive future.

Kelly 6:17

Yeah, absolutely. Um so adventure through interspace. I I think I would love to start off by talking about um something that we are intimately involved with, Pete and I, which is my tattoo. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 6:38

Uh-huh.

Kelly 6:39

I asked um what was this about a year and a half, two years ago? Roughly yeah. Um, I asked Pete to draw me a picture for me, to draw a picture for a tattoo that I now have over a the largest size part of my body. Well, that came out wrong. Anyway. And still I continue to shrink. So it's it's it's on my chest. It's on my chest, everybody. Okay, you people so it is a picture of the adventures through inner space ride, the the op the cue in front of inner space with someone who is basically Julie Reim, the Disneyland's Mrs. Tensennial. Yep. Um quoting uh James Joyce's Finnegan Swake.

Pete 7:39

Because Kelly. No, that's it. I mean because of you. Like this is your sensibility.

Kelly 7:47

And um so I mentioned this to point out just uh how affectionate I am about this attraction. It is the only attraction that is actually permanently on my body. Right.

Pete 8:05

It's permanently a part of you, yes. As opposed to other people who are even more intimately acquainted with that ride. Yes. Because they were conceived on it. Right. But we'll talk about that later. Yes.

Kelly 8:20

So this is this is the kind of the the glorious parts of this ride. There's a lot of firsts here. Uh it is the first ride to have an omnimover.

SPEAKER_07 8:31

Bob Gurr.

Kelly 8:32

Designed by Bob Gerr. Interest here's an interesting thing about the design of the omni mover that I didn't know until very, very recently. So it goes back to guess which event? The World's Fair. The 1960s. That wasn't a World's Fair? Not a World's Fair. It does. So Gurr had worked on the Ford Magic Skyway there with Walt Disney, um, which was pretty much the ride system that eventually became the people mover. But what Gurr was interested in was something that General Motors, not Ford, was working on at the World's Fair. What he was interested in was a thing called, officially called Futurama II. Okay. So Futurama II was actually a sequel attraction that was a sequel to something that General Motors had done at the 1939 New York World's Fair, which was called Futurama. And for everyone who's asking, yes, that is supposedly where the cartoon got its name from. It was from this particular uh attraction. Wow. Okay. And the thing that Bob Gerr saw was that Futurama 2 was a series, it was basically, and there's some film of it, so you can see it. Um it was basically theater seats, like sort of uh scaffolded theater seats. Um, you know, you get like three or four rows of theater seats, like maybe five across. Um and they were all on a chain drive. And so it was like, you know, one set of theater seats and another set of theater seats and another set of theater seats, constantly moving on this chain drive. This was the beginning of his idea for the Omni Mover. Huh. Because he wanted a system where the cars never stopped. So this is where that started. But of course, the the improvement that Gurr makes on this is that he also wants the cars to move in m several different directions. Right. Okay. So he wants them to be able to spin and focus on a certain thing. The the Futurama 2 cars didn't do that, uh, but GERS did. They they would both spin and and aim at whatever the imagineer wanted them to see, and they would tilt back, which the ones in the Haunted Mansion actually do tilt. Yes, they do. Yeah. And um there's an interesting thing I noticed. Gur didn't say this, so I'm speculating. Uh-huh. Uh there's footage of of Futurama 2, footage of the ride, and it's neat. It's super neat. Like it's these theater seats going through all of these like futuristic landscapes with like you know, lunar rovers moving around outside the windows and weird little aliens and stuff. And it's neat. There's it it looks super cool. But outside of the actual ride is the the showroom for the sort of new GM cars and sort of prototype futuristic cars.

SPEAKER_03 11:57

Yeah.

Kelly 11:58

And what are they doing but swiveling and tilting independently on their pedestals? Huh. So if you put that with the actual Futurama 2 ride system, you have the OmniMover. If you put those two things, all from a General Motors uh exhibition that nobody really talks about anymore.

Pete 12:19

Do you think because everybody has heard the apocryphal anecdote of Bob Gurr being inspired on the design of the OmniMover with a candy apple? Yes. With a fight taken out of it. Is there any truth to that as far as you know? Or do you think that that has that literally is kind of one of those fan stories that people love to repeat because it sounds neat, but it actually is not true?

Kelly 12:41

No, I think it is true. I um I don't think he I don't think it was so much that he saw that and said, let's build something like that. I believe what happened was Claude Coates. I'm showing uh Pete my giant copy of uh Claude Coates Walt Disney's Imagineer, The Making of Disneyland by David Bossart. Available now on fine bookstores. Was was talking to Gurr and saying, is there a way that we can do this? And and some of this I think was a financial consideration. Sure. It is uh, of course, useful to be able to focus people's vision on whatever you want them to see, but it also means you don't have to build out everything they can't see. Right. Right. And uh he was talking to Gurr about something along these lines, and Gurr supposedly picked up a candy apple, spun it in his hand, and said, like that? And Coates went, yes, like that.

Pete 13:39

Okay. Well, that makes much more sense. You combine that with what you were just telling us about the two rides of Futurama, Futurama 2, that suddenly makes a lot more sense. Yeah.

Kelly 13:48

And and it sounds like Gurr did uh a lot of the kind of basic design. He was like, this is how this is supposed to work. Sure. And then it went to imagine it was Roger Brogy and Bert Brundage who actually did the nitty-gritty work on it.

Pete 14:03

Oh, of course, yeah. And Bob actually, when we met with Bob briefly, and also sat and listened to him at Garner Holt during the summer of this year. Yeah, uh, he did mention that and actually talk a little bit about his contributions from a mechanical standpoint. Yeah. So and give credit where credit was due.

Kelly 14:23

Absolutely. And this is an aside, but that's what we do. Uh tell the nice folks what you reminded me about our trip through Garner Holt's.

Pete 14:33

Oh, Steve's looking at me like on the headlights. No, no, no. So so I don't know. The people at Garner Holt might be a little mad at me for saying this.

Kelly 14:48

All of them that are listening.

Pete 14:49

Yeah, all three of you, of our joyous listeners. But we didn't take any pictures, but we could probably mention we're we're gonna speculate. Yeah. But um Universal Studios has been putting together for their islands of adventure, uh, one of their attractions is a uh themed area that is uh close to my heart, which is the Universal Monsters milieu. And they have a very nice looking Frankenstein animatronic and Wolfman and Dracula and Mummy, etc. And my speculation is that when we were there, I spied Frankenstein and Wolf, and I was thinking to myself, what are those for? Yeah. I have a feeling that those were actually at, you know, made by Garner Holt for Universal. Yeah. So I'm speculating. Totally. We're full of speculum this time. Yeah, I'm totally wow. This this is I don't think we're gonna be able to monetize this one on the magnification. Magnification. Um but anyway, um sorry. No, it's fine. Uh, but I think that's one of our things. Is uh I think I think uh our little trip to Garnhole gave us a little sneak preview as to what's gonna come. I think so too. And you know what? They did a great job. If if they did, if they didn't, whatever park is gonna get those figures, they kick butt. Yes, but Universal, you guys pick the right people if it's Garner and his team.

Kelly 16:21

So that's that's the guy, right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Pete 16:24

Uh I I do want to, I mean, if we're talking about older fairs and we're talking about this notion of moving people through a story like this, I do want to do one of m my favorite things, which is going way far back as far as we can go. Yeah. And remind everybody of the notion of this type of dark ride approach uh and its origins. And it really has to do with a type of amusement that was called the scenic railway.

Kelly 16:56

Yeah. And the scenic railway is we talked about this a little bit with um electric uh electric park in in St. Louis.

Pete 17:03

Yes. Yeah. So I want to remind everybody with the scenic railway, it's essentially a uh sometimes it was combined with a little bit of a dippy-doo type of roller coaster. No, no loop-de-loops or anything like that. But it was, you know, there was some speed to it. Um but other times it would just be a a like a mine car. Sometimes it was an elaborately uh carved dragon inspired by European designs or by the drawings of Windsor McKay from uh Little Nemo in Slumberland. Uh but the uh scenic railway, you wandered around outside and then you would go in and out of a building looking at different scenes. Um sometimes in the dark, sometimes it was completely lit with colored lights. It depended upon how permanent the attraction would be. Yeah. One of my one of those uh attractions that I would love to go back in time and see was a scenic railway at the Midwinter Fair in San Francisco in the 1890s. Okay. Yeah. And it was based off of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Whoa. There's a lot of references to it, but to m for the life of me, I cannot find a photograph of it anywhere. I've I've searched, I've looked through libraries. People were just not taking snapshots back then. Right, yeah. You know, there weren't a lot of San Francisco San Franciscans with brownies back then. Right. Um I even recently found a fellow who had collected tons of photographs from uh the World's Fair over on Treasure Island and also uh some of the stuff for um Playland at the beach.

Kelly 18:42

Uh well we we talked about Laurie Hollings last episode, who had a ton of those pictures. Yeah.

Pete 18:48

Yeah. And and uh I went to a store in uh Petaluma recently, and they had huge boxes full of all these photographs, and I did not nearly have the cash on me to start scooping these up because it's like I would be walking out of there with a huge armload of these things. Uh but it was very fascinating to look at. And of course, my first instinct was, oh, they have some midwinter fare, but it was all pictures of gardens and esquimos and that kind of stuff. Right. Um, but apparently it was a scenic railway where you would go in and out of the story of the War of the Worlds. And to me, I'm just gonna boggles what it would have looked like and what they would have done.

Kelly 19:24

Yeah. I you know, there's there's uh a recounting of Ray Bradbury from his childhood. I don't rem I want to say it was a world's fair, but I don't I don't remember this exactly. I wonder if it could have been the Futurama from 1939. But um him him going through some sort of attraction where you like circled a giant alien landscape. But I mean, this was like the 30s. Yes. And I I just man, I would love to see that.

Pete 19:58

Well, uh, so let's let's talk a little bit about that notion of scenes that we go through. Mm-hmm. And most of them, even to this day, all rely upon simple tricks like forced perspective, yes, uh you know, scale-down figures and scenes, um, dramatic lighting, sound effects, and sometimes recorded materials. Right. There's a very interesting father to all of this.

Kelly 20:28

Yeah.

Pete 20:29

Um, he was a Frenchman who built the first diorama, where we get the f I I I don't know if we I'm I'm I'm sure it is all based off of panorama, but the diorama uh was basically these scenes of antiquity, whether it be Mount Vesuvius erupting over Pompeii, or whether it be a depiction of Louis XIV's court at Versailles, but they were roughly about six feet wide and about four foot tall, and they would basically be like these little kind of like puppet shows depicting these moments with lights and sound, and these dioramas would be performed on a regular basis. And this is how this gentleman made his living for some time until he started picking up another hobby, which was chemistry. Okay. And through his chemical experiments, he started figuring out that certain salts and other types of solutions could actually be used to react with light and shadow. And his name was Louis Daguerre. As in the Daguerreotype. As in the Daguerreotype. One of the fathers, I won't say the father, but one of the fathers of photography as we know it. He was the inventor of the diorama. He's also famous for not having a neck. And if you don't believe me, do a Google image search and you'll find Louis Daguerre. He's He's wearing these very high collars. He doesn't really have much of a neck, but he puts way too big of a cravat on. So it just looks like he's all shoulders. But but uh but very talented fellow to have gone through that. But the Daguerotype eventually became the cyclorama. And the cycloramas were insane because we'll talk about this at some point whenever we cover uh uh circle vision. Yeah. But uh the cyclorama was basically you went on this in this big circular building and went up this walkway as a ramp and went all the way to the roof and then climbed down either a set of stairs or a ladder onto this hanging platform over this giant circular reverse dome. So you'd be like what could possibly go wrong? Right? So, and usually this would be depicting famous battles or buffalo herds. There was a cyclorama of Custer's Last Stand, there was a cyclorama of uh uh the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of Gettysburg, and they would have wax figures all set up and they would have the sky painted and huge distances, and you're basically looking at this giant diorama, but you're looking from the heavens down upon it. Yeah. You could walk around this platform and look at all these different vistas on the cyclorama.

Kelly 23:16

Wow.

Pete 23:16

And you combine those notions with uh the mechanisms of a scenic railway. Now you start getting into uh the invention of dark rides. Yeah. Which is essentially what uh Adventures Through Inner Space is. It is a dark ride, but it is an omni mover-based dark ride. Right. Most uh scenic railways were not continuously moving. I think that's what makes the omni mover such a great innovation. Right. Because even to this day, one of the most frustrating things about most dark rides is that they stop and start.

Kelly 23:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete 23:49

One of the biggest drawbacks for the Peter Pan ride, as much as I love it, which is a dark ride essentially over a cyclorama.

unknown 23:58

Yeah.

Pete 23:58

A miniature cyclorama approach. Um so even though it's not circular, you can look 360 degrees, but you're mostly you're flying, so you're looking down upon it. But anyway, that stop and start notion does not eat people, as they say in the business. You know, you need to have a people eater. So you need to be able to get people through it as fast as possible so you can maximize the return on your investment. And I so I think this is what makes Bob and all of the other people who worked on the Omni Mover process for the for these rides, yeah, was so innovative, is because they they changed how we view moving people through rides. Yeah. It's like, you know, don't just wait and stop and start like you do on Snow White's scary adventure. Oh, I'm sorry, not so scary adventure anymore. Or Peter Pan or Mr. Toad or anything. No, just keep it moving. Get them on, get 'em off. Get 'em on, get them off.

Kelly 24:50

Yeah, absolutely. And and you can really see from uh to an extent inner space, but of course the the atomic explosion of this, which come into play soon, um in the discussion of this ride, it would be the Haunted Mansion omni mover, the Doom Buggies. Yeah. Uh the the Omnimover in in uh inner space is called the Atomobile.

SPEAKER_03 25:12

Yes, yes.

Kelly 25:13

And uh in the Haunted Mansion is the Doom Buggies. But the Doom Buggies really change everything. Yes. Like ri ride vehicles are suddenly really becoming focused on how do we direct people's attention.

Pete 25:26

And I think this this notion of technology crossing over um and finding ways on how to blend technological innovations and scientific pursuits with amusement. Yeah. Uh has been a constant at world fairs and in theme parks ever since their creation.

Kelly 25:49

Yeah. And that really it ties in so strongly here because what we've got, let's kind of get up to what the ride actually is. Yeah. Because it hasn't been around for 40 years, and we're just assuming the people know. But, you know, so this is this is a ride that was sponsor so early days of Disneyland, they relied very heavily on sponsors, and there were there were a lot of them. Not so much in the fantasyland rides, but uh everything on Main Street sponsored. Most of Tomorrowland sponsored, and one of the biggest uh, in fact, we talked about uh Richfield as a sponsor because they did both the Autopia and the World Beneath Us. Yep. Yeah. Uh but one of the biggest sponsors in Tomorrowland was the Monsanto Company. And we're gonna have a lot to say about Monsanto. But when they started out, they they were an opening day sponsor. Uh they started off with the Monsanto Hall of Chemistry, um, which is about as interesting as you think.

SPEAKER_06 26:55

Over here, you can see the merging of molecules.

Kelly 26:59

And then we moved to the Monsanto House of the Future. In the wheelchair, most people will wash their dishes with pushing buttons. I'm I'm holding up another Dave Bossart book of c about the Monsanto House of the Future. It's actually a really wonderful book. And uh after that, and that was uh what year? 1957, so still very early on. Oh, yeah. And um, interesting fact about the House of the Future, when they finally decided to close it down, so it's made entirely of plastic. Which, if you're gonna use plastic for something, building a house is not a bad idea because it's durable. Right. But um the when they tried to take it down, they pulled in wrecking balls, so they took it down in like I don't know, 66 or so. Um they pulled in wrecking balls to knock it down, they just bounced right off. Like they couldn't smash it. Eventually, which is actually pretty good for a house, right? I kind of want to make that a midway game. Yeah, smash the house of the future.

SPEAKER_03 28:00

Smash the house of the future where you're like, you take this huge lead ball and just like throw it at this plastic house of the future and it bounces off.

Kelly 28:12

Wow. Eventually, to dismantle it, they literally had to come in and take every rivet out. Wow. There was no it wouldn't break. And you can still at Disneyland, if you're in the uh area over near Tomorrowland, you can still see some of the foundation of it.

Pete 28:26

It's still there. And if you want to have a feel for what it felt like in its design and in its scope and its scale, yeah, the Howard Johnson's hotel in Anaheim has a loving replica or at least a homage to it as a suite. Yeah, the suite of the future.

Kelly 28:44

The suite of the future. Actually, I think it's called the suite of the retro future.

Pete 28:47

I like that. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. So our our our pal Bill Burns, who cosplays as Walt.

Kelly 28:53

Yeah.

Pete 28:53

Uh not officially associated with the park or the family in any way, but he goes for fun. Yeah. But I I guess he and his uh his lovely wife went there and uh got tons of pictures of him as Walt, you know, with a fake cigarette and like drinking coffee. I think he even had a can of beans. I don't know if he did or not, but uh I just love the notion of him eating a cheese sandwich with beans like Walt would do at that age. Yeah. And uh and I guess the Howard Johnsons were like thrilled that he was there doing it. They were like it's like, yeah, get in there, you know. So they were they were super thrilled. So if you want to experience it, that's that's a great way to kind of get a little taste of what it was like.

Kelly 29:31

Yeah, I um I got to go and tour the suite suite of the retro future. I was meeting up with uh our our friends from the Backside of Water podcast, who are super nice guys, and they were holding an event there. So I got to spend some time in it. It's super cool. It's such a great idea. I don't know how much it costs. I as I recall, I talked to um Heather, who's their communications person there, and who's also a very nice person. Yeah. Um, and at the time it was like it was 1,955 uh or $1,957 a night because it was this the same amount as the year it opened. I don't know if that's still the case.

Pete 30:20

So, listeners, we will be selling. Kelly and Pete want to go to the House of the Future Suite t-shirts. Yes. Through our Zazzle site. Please buy uh what's 1957 divided by 20.

Kelly 30:42

We have more than 20 listeners.

Pete 30:44

We will also be selling there's snow on the manor horn, but there's coke on Main Street t-shirts there as well.

SPEAKER_03 30:53

So please buy as many shirts as you want. The holidays are coming up, folks.

SPEAKER_00 30:58

Just saying, below down on the plus up is a boardwalk times podcast.

Kelly 31:10

At boardwalktimes.net, you'll find some of the most well-considered and insightful writing about the Walt Disney Company, Disney history, and the universe of theme parks available anywhere. Come join us at BoardwalkTimes.net.

Pete 31:42

Yes. Just to make you happy. And we'll probably get Bill in there too, so we can actually interview Bill as Waltz.

Kelly 31:49

We'll get a recording of the Toilet of the Future flushing.

Pete 31:53

Narrated by Ludwig van Drake. Yes. Which, the voice of Ludwig van Drake, is also the voice of our explorer into inner space.

Kelly 32:05

That's right. Paul Fries. Paul Fries, who is also the voice of the ghost host in uh The Haunted Mansion, the two primary omni mover attractions. Yeah, and and and he's wonderful. I I have a recording of some of the sessions. Oh man. And they're great. They're so great. Sometimes he gets fed up, he starts cussing, it's awesome. I gotta hear these.

SPEAKER_03 32:30

Anyway, continue. I think that's a good question.

Kelly 32:32

No, no, no. So we were we were talking about um kind of the the backstory, and so Monsanto did those. Monsanto has another attraction in between. Do you know what it is? No, tell me. It's Monsanto's fashion and fabrics throughout the ages. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 32:51

What? 1965. Wow. Yeah. And lawn. It's the wave of the future. Gore-Tex. Yeah.

Pete 33:02

It's waterproof and health-free.

Kelly 33:04

And some of that kind of gets incorporated to the end of the of inner space because you remember at the end of the attraction, you come out into all of these like modern fabrics, and there's that weird, like spinny thing with little bits of glycerin swirling down surrounding a fake model in a I don't know, rayon or something.

Pete 33:23

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, it looks like Twiggy and some sort of wrapper. It's like this mini burnouse.

Kelly 33:31

But anyway, so they they decide, you know, they're about to start really trying to fix Tomorrowland because Walt's always been disappointed in Tomorrowland. It was never really what he wanted. They had to race to get it done. Originally, they weren't even planning to open Tomorrowland when the park opened. But at like a few months beforehand, Walt was like, nah, let's open it. And of course, you know, the imagineers are pulling their hair out. So there's not much there. Um I think the the 20,000 Leagues walkthrough exhibit is there. Yep. So you can basically walk through a rep uh recreation of the Nautilus and look out the portholes that well, the well, yeah.

Pete 34:08

We'll talk about this when we talk cover the submarine ride at some point. But the the the I mean, I'm a massive 20,000 leagues nerd. Yes. Um, and the reason why that was put in there, it was so quick and cheap to do because all of the sets were made of fiberglass of the Nautilus. So they could just tear them apart, rearrange them, and put them in. Yeah. And people could see all the actual sets and props, including the organ, uh, which eventually wound up inside the haunted mansion. That's right.

Kelly 34:36

It's there to this day.

Pete 34:37

Yep. And uh the seat is not. Right. The seat is different because they had to they had to remove the seat because the seat has all the animatronics for the or the phantom organist playing through it. Right. The seat I think is actually owned um uh by Pete Ellenshaw's uh estate. Oh huh. I think I I I could be wrong about that. I'll I'll look that up and we'll do a correction on the the social media about that. But um but the seat is still out there, but the organ itself is now permanently ensconced inside the mansion.

Kelly 35:07

Yeah. Yeah, and so they they they were getting ready to redo Tomorrowland. Uh the head of Monsanto, uh Dr. Charles Allen Thomas, uh who actually got his start as a plutonium researcher for the Manhattan Project, he uh agrees with Walt that this stuff all needs to be updated and they should do something new. And what they do, this is not a new idea. They pull out an old idea of Claude Coates's. So in the in like around 57, when they realized like Disneyland's a hit, it's not going anywhere, let's talk about expanding. They were trying a whole bunch of different ideas. It was like there was like Edison Street, um, a whole bunch of different stuff. And one of the things that they were considering, and this was gonna go right where Space Mountain is now, uh, was a thing called Science Land. Okay. And um in Science Land, they had started, Claude Coates had started planning something called uh the micro world. And Sam McKim, I'm gonna show Pete this picture because it's so great, and I'll post it online later. Sam McKinn, whose hundredth birthday would have been last week, by the way. Did this amazing sketch for so this is 1957, a full 10 years before InnerSpace opens. He does this sketch.

SPEAKER_03 36:33

Oh wow. Oh yes.

Kelly 36:36

It is, it is for those of you listening at home, um, it is something very similar to the entryway of what inner space was, including cars going into a giant microscope that is pointed at a water droplet.

Pete 36:52

Except the cars are little microbes. They're protozoa. Very happy people being absorbed into protozoa. And it's really adorable, they're adorable. It is actually. I kind of want to be on that ride. Like, oh, okay, I'll ride Protozoa.

SPEAKER_03 37:06

That's awesome.

Kelly 37:07

But so that was shelved. Aww. And they um you know, when they decided they weren't going to build Science Land, but then they pulled it back out when they started talking about what the new Monsanto attraction was going to be.

SPEAKER_03 37:20

Uh-huh.

Kelly 37:20

Um, this where Inner Space is went into the area where the old Monsanto Hall of Chemistry was. And they started having discussions about like what you know, what this was going to look like. They pulled these these drawings out, and the guy was like, Dr. Thomas was like, Yeah, this is great. Let's let's go with this. Yeah. But then there became this huge argument about what kind of molecule you were going to go into. So what Monsanto wanted particularly was something that they had created. They wanted something that where they had bonded some stuff together and gotten a new substance.

Pete 38:08

We've got this thing called DDT. And we want to Sorry. Which they did. Yes, they did.

Kelly 38:14

Um we'll get to that in a second. So um they Monsanto was like was go coming up with different kinds of acids. They were trying to they were thinking about amino acids, they were thinking about like, you know, actual, you know, dissolving acids. And the Disney people kept coming back and saying, you can't send the guests into acid. And there was there was huge arguments between um the the Monsanto and Disney because Disney kept simpling down all of the ideas. And you know, Walt was pretty compelling about this. And he he would say, he was like, look, you have to make this so people can understand it quickly and a ride that lasts a couple of minutes. Yeah. And it's really interesting when you look at the um so but Walt died in 1966. Uh Adventure Through Interspace opened in 1967. He didn't see it. Right. Uh but Dr. Thomas was there at the opening, and this is what he said, and you can still hear some bitterness in his speech about this. He says, he says, I came to respect the fact that Walt Disney was an extraordinary educator in addition to being one of our century's greatest showmen. In our Tomorrowland exhibit, we have avoided paths which, however intriguing to the scientist, interfere with the understanding by the general public. In this process, we have oversimplified certain areas. The quantum this is his opening day speech. Wow. Quantum mechanical description of a molecule cannot be pictured in any satisfactory physical model. There was simply no way to duplicate the nucleus of an atom within the capabilities of our natural world. It is almost unimaginable.

Pete 40:12

Au contraire. I think disco balls and styrofoam have proven him wrong. They are going to take care of that. Yeah.

Kelly 40:23

But you know, of course, in this case, like well, Walt and the Imaginers were right. Like you can't explain the fullest full theory of atomic science. I guess there was a point where Dr. Thomas was arguing with Walt and saying you can't show the electrons circling the nucleus like that, because if you were this size, the electrons would be like the distance of us to Jupiter. Right. And Walt was like, well, what am I supposed to do with that? You know? Right.

Pete 40:58

Like Monsanto's journey through darkness. Yeah. You know, like, okay, you're just making this not fun, you crazy scientists, you.

Kelly 41:09

So ultimately, this became more of a um representative, more of a symbolic representation of the ideas they were coming across than any sort of actual science. Um but it's but it was wonderful. Yeah. I mean, it was wonderful. And and part of what makes it wonderful, and and and I'll love to hear your memories of it too, Pete. But part of what makes it so wonderful is it just feels so intimate. Like you were in your omni mover, you and maybe one other person, and you had Paul Freeze's voice right in your ears, much in the way you do in the haunted mansion, but it's much more fragile. Like he's you're following the sound waves of this scientist that's being shrunk. And clearly some of this stuff was stolen from Richard Madsen's Incredible Shrinking Man. Oh, yeah. Clearly. Oh yeah, oh yeah. But um, and it's just and he's scared and he's interested. And he's starting to kind of almost uh awaken spiritually as you go through this thing. It's fascinating.

Pete 42:17

It's very reminiscent also of the Stargate sequence in 2001 of Space Odyssey. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm sure it has a very, very similar effect on the main character. Yeah. Uh as he's traveling through, where his mind is expanding and almost breaking with what he's seeing and comprehending. Right. And you can kind of hear that in Freeze's performance, even though it's a little on the um performance equivalent of, say, Ken Nordeen's word jazz. Yeah. Which at times I think Freeze is actually impersonating Ken Nordeen. Yeah, I can get that. Yeah. You know, because there are times where he sounds very much like him. It's, you know, you're just expecting, you know, do do. And still I continue to shrink.

Kelly 43:08

Yeah. Shrunk inside of the flippy jib. Yeah. Poof.

Pete 43:16

There goes perspiration. No. But that being said, his performance is actually really, really effective. And I think it almost carries it because it adds a level of empathy. Yes. To, you know, you are, like you said, it's intimate and it's pulling you in. It's like it almost tells you this is how you're supposed to be feeling about this moment right now. Yeah. Look at the speed of these molecules. Look at the size of these ice crystals. Look at this giant disco ball. Look at the humongous eyeball that's staring at you. Yeah. Look at the atom that has a heartbeat for some reason. And then you you leave, and you know, oh, the ice is melting. Melting. That's right. The ice is melting.

SPEAKER_03 44:04

But there's no cause for alarm.

Kelly 44:08

Anyway. I I not only have an inner space tattoo, I also have a uh picture disc of the soundtrack, which has the music and the narration, and then on the other side just the music. And one of my favorite things to do is to put that on and turn it's a 45 RPM record and turn it down to 33. It's so cool.

Pete 44:27

Oh, dude, we have to do that. I have not heard that. Oh, I'll do it. Yes. That is so cool. Well, turn on a whole bunch of colored lights and stuff like that, just shrink.

Kelly 44:41

What's so interesting about this, and it's it's there's a kind of whiplash effect with what they're trying to do. So Monsanto, this is 1967. So the Vietnam War is is on its is going on. Now Monsanto is escaping a certain amount of the criticism of companies like them because Dow Chemicals is getting the brunt of it. Um Dow Chemicals is uh making Agent Orange and a number of other things. Parasit and all that. Yes. Napalm. Oh, yeah. Monsanto is also making Agent Orange, um, and they've been making DDT for a time. And but they're they're kind of ducking under the radar because Dow's getting hit with it. Yeah. And so we're coming into 1967, and Monsanto is trying to kind of make people feel comfortable with what they're doing. And this is part of the point of this attraction is like look at all the amazing things. And you know, you come out with a chipper song and people in cool things. But when you're in the attraction, it goes wrong. Yeah. Like part of the narrative is that what they're trying to do goes south, and you maybe almost die. Yeah. So it's like, I'm not sure that it is giving the sense of comfort that they were looking for.

Pete 46:12

Yeah, I mean, so for those who are younger than Kelly in my age group and may have never experienced this before, yeah. Uh let's take them on a quick little tour. Yeah, you bet. Okay. So for those who have been to the park in Anaheim at Disneyland, the first thing you need to know is its location. And so when you enter Tomorrowland from Main Street, it is on the right, uh, which is now Star Tours. Right. And you walk through those main doors and you enter into this large hallway with this gigantic, almost rainbow-colored uh snowflake design on the wall. Yeah. With flashing lights, and and you see this gigantic blue and silver microscope with huge descending tubes of plexiglass on it. Yeah, it's massive. It's like 30 feet long. It's huge. Yeah. Um, which is where uh C3PO and R2 D2 are now in Star Tours, racing Star Cruiser.

Kelly 47:13

Right. And the microscope the microscope itself appears in both the original Star Tours film and in the current Star Tours films. Yeah. Yeah.

Pete 47:22

It's wild.

Kelly 47:23

They put it off to the side, but you can see it as you exit the initial launch bay that you're in.

Pete 47:28

Yep.

Kelly 47:28

Yeah.

Pete 47:28

You know, you cycle around, you know, uh in the line, waiting for your turn. Right. And and every once in a while there would be this announcement music, this ladies and gentlemen. And then Paul Freeze would come on and give kind of weird factoids about what you're about to experience. Yeah. You know, if if you uh the nucleus is so dense that if we had, you know, just one pound or whatever, half a teaspoon, it would weigh one million tons. You know, you're like, whoa, that's so cool. I haven't even been on the ride yet, and my mind is already blown. This is 1967. Yeah. So you you enter onto this big circular platform where these these shiny blue omni movers are smoking as they come out of this dark hallway. Assuming that they have been sterilized by whatever biomes that they have exposed to.

Kelly 48:28

But uh you get on board and wait, before you get on board, so you're looking at the microscope and you are seeing the atom mobiles go into the microscope, and part way up the microscope chamber, you're seeing really tiny people in little tiny atom mobiles. And they're going towards this giant, you know, glowing ball. Yeah, well, it's it's a it's a glass, it's supposed to be like a um petri dish, but it's filled with snowflakes. Right. Because the idea is that you're gonna be put into a snowflake. Right. Because you're going into water.

Pete 49:01

Right. So you're gonna be like flicked. Yeah, just like you're like shot into the snowflake. Um, but I always love that effect. Yeah. And I would actually try to like, wait, what color? Like when I was a kid, I remember standing in line going, Yeah, that guy's got an annoying green shirt. Yeah. Let's see if he gets shrunk. And I go, I see an annoying green. I it must be him.

Kelly 49:24

What whatever it I mean, I know it was a simple effect, but it was so effective.

Pete 49:29

Yeah. And all it was was like little models of omni movers with little people. Uh, one of these you can actually still see at the Disney Family Museum. Yep. It's on display in a glass case. It's about eight, you know, about ten inches tall. Yeah. And it's these little people, but they were uh fixed onto a conveyor belt.

Kelly 49:48

Yeah.

Pete 49:49

And going upwards on the top part of this microscope, so it would come up and then it would enter into this ring, and then it just cycles down and goes underneath again and comes around. Brilliant. Yeah.

Kelly 49:58

It's just absolutely brilliant. Yeah. Also, one of the smaller atomobiles used to appear in the original queue for Star Tours. There used to be little baskets of like droid junk flying around over your head. Yeah, yeah. They they put a couple of small atomobiles in there, too. You can see them.

Pete 50:14

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 50:17

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, in just a few moments, the window to the magic podcast show will begin. My name is Patrick. My name is Calvin. I'm Mousketeer Green. My name is Paul, and I will be your guide through the wonderful world of Disney sound experiences. This show is a weekly trip into the world of the Disney theme parks and resorts. And this is the place where you get to use your ears to surround yourself with the magic. For your safety, please remain seated while listening to the WindowTothemagic.com podcast. Maybe there's a name for this, something like Disnotic Obsession. Please visit window to the Magic.com for more information, or you can find us on Apple Podcasts and in the iHeart Media app.

Pete 51:16

Once you had entered into the Omni Movie, you're secured, you would then enter into darkness and you would have this moment of we are now about to be affected by magnification. Magnification. And have some of the like these flashing beams of light, you know, around you, and you've and it was all done in forced perspective. So you felt like you were being shrunk. And it was when you're a kid, it was really effective. Oh, it was great. Like you know, so charming.

Kelly 51:43

You would kind of go in and then uh sort of see snowflakes projected on the wall and some some styrofoam snowflakes. The the effects in this thing are very simple. Very simple. Um, but just beautifully, beautifully designed. And also I do want to say, um, though there's some some technical issues with it right now, usually, if you have an Oculus Rift or an Oculus Quest II, um, the good folks at the Disney History Institute did a recreation of the ride. Yeah. So you you literally can sit sit down, put your headset on, and go through it as it actually looked. And it's a very good recreation. That's if you want to ride this you know 40 years gone ride, you can.

Pete 52:26

Yeah. So as you ride through, you are exp you are slowly and surely shrinking lower and smaller and smaller.

Kelly 52:34

Yeah.

Pete 52:34

And a lot of it, as Kelly said, it's just like light gobos, basic styrofoam cutouts, wire balls with lights flashing on top of them and colored lights. There's not much to this.

Kelly 52:47

Yeah. There's uh and yet it is ridiculously effective. It is, yeah. They they did electrons, they had clear plastic tubes with uh little fluorescent pieces of something in them. And as you would go through, they would just hit those tubes with jets of air and it would shoot up. So you just see this flash of light moving really fast, and you go, electron, sure, I buy it.

Pete 53:09

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you because you were you were in dark. This was not you're not you were you were your view was being controlled by the OmniMover. Yeah. But also you were in extreme dark. So they could really control what you were seeing to their advantage, which you know, I don't I don't have the figures on how much this thing costs. Right. But I can imagine, based upon the simplicity of it, that I'm sure that the return on this thing must have been ridiculously high because of how little they probably spent compared to stuff like the mansion.

Kelly 53:40

Yes, oh yeah, for sure. It's interesting you talk about the return because this was one of the very few attractions at Disneyland that required no tickets. You could ride it for free. Wow. And uh the reason was because of the Monsanto sponsorship. Uh-huh. Monsanto was trying to, you know, keep their name as clean as they possibly could during a difficult time, so it was free for a long time. It wasn't until the 80s that you actually had to use a ticket to get on it. And the reason that that happened was because of um teenagers, the teen element discovered that Adventures Through Inner Space was a fairly secluded six or seven minutes that you were out of sight of anybody, or so they thought, um, where you could make out with your date. Aaron Ross Powell And have real adventures in inner space. Yeah, and if you were quick, you could get further. And you know, we all remember being a teen. But what they sort of discovered along the way is for a while they would put uh ride operators in the ride. It looks a lot bigger than it is, but there's really someone probably near you most of the time. So people would kind of break stuff up, and eventually they s they discovered that teenagers would come and just ride it over and over and over again. So they eventually made it a C ticket. Wow. But only the last couple of years of its operation, the entire rest of the time it was free. And in some ways, I think this is why a lot of us are so fond of it. I mean, it was cool, it was cool science fiction stuff in the 60s. But also, if you were out of tickets, write it as many times as you wanted to.

Pete 55:32

I mean, I remember being a kid going to Disneyland um late 70s, early 80s, and absolutely writing that thing over and over. I mean, being absolutely enchanted by it.

Kelly 55:47

So let's I it probably now is a good time to probably start talking about Monsanto. Yes. So mm Monsanto, who and they're still around. Um they had two very devastating inventions aro around the time. They had well, they didn't invent Agent Orange, but they certainly produced it. Yeah. Um they did, I believe, invent DDT.

SPEAKER_07 56:12

Yes, they did.

Kelly 56:13

Um both of these things caused a great deal of suffering, not only you know raining it upon the the Vietnamese jungles, but soldiers on both sides of that war uh suffered for years and years.

Pete 56:28

As did their offspring. Yeah. Because it did affect genetics.

Kelly 56:31

My um my uncle did two tours in Vietnam, died of Parkinson's just a couple of years ago. The Army absolutely admitted that it was Agent Orange caused Parkinson's. Man. So there's reasons to be deeply concerned about Monsanto.

Pete 56:50

Yeah. Yeah. Kelly and I actually had this debate like, do are we gonna talk about this aspect of it? I said we have to. Yeah, you have to. We do deep dives, so we have to.

Kelly 56:59

And uh ultimately Monsanto walked away from the attraction in the late 70s. Um and so all of the the stuff referring to them was pulled out of the soundtrack, and all the displays of Monsanto around the world, which is creepy on its own was removed from the displays. Yeah. Um and and you know, uh at that point no one was was funding the attraction, so it wasn't really being maintained, and it really started to fall apart, and that's why when they closed it in eighty-five. It a it actually probably was kind of a mercy killing of the attraction because it's a shame. Yeah, you know.

Pete 57:38

And eventually at that time it just cleared the way for star tours, which is another great attraction. Yeah, for sure. But at the same time, you know, uh my soft spot for this bizarre little attraction that lasted a long time. Yeah. Well, it's one And it had legs. I mean, it really did.

Kelly 57:57

It did. And and it's one of the few attractions where everything in it is symbolic of the thing. Yeah. You go in the Snow White Dark Ride, you see Snow White and the Witch, and those are they are those characters. Yeah. But you go in Adventures Through Inner Space, and there's nothing that can actually look like what they're trying to represent. So mostly what you're seeing is lights and shapes. And you know, I've I've heard people kind of go on this thing of like, well, it was the 60s and it was like psychedelic, and it wasn't. It was not psychedelic. It was cool science fiction stuff. And I I love psychedelic stuff, don't get me wrong, but that's not what this was.

Pete 58:38

No.

Kelly 58:38

It was all symbolic of what they were trying to tell you, not actually representational. And I can't think of very many other rides that did that.

Pete 58:48

No, I would actually make an argument that it was UPA. Yeah. And this is the animation company that produced films like Gerald McBoing Boeing, the Mr. Magoo series, Rudy Toot Toot. Yeah. They were very experimental, and for a while they were the true rebels of animation in their day in the 50s and early 60s, because uh their art style was not representational, it was not realistic, yeah. Almost blatantly against all of those notions, and yet incredibly effective, uh, in which characters would be drawn with just outlines, but the colors in them would bleed out into the background and things like that.

Kelly 59:30

I uh you know, when whenever I watch like the first Gerald McBoing Boing, uh, which is wonderful, all of the Gerald McBoing Boinges are wonderful. Whenever I watch that, to people who haven't seen it, I'm like, okay, when you're watching this, tell me where the floor and the wall and the ceiling in this room is. Anywhere in it. And and they can't. No one can tell you. No. There are sort of sketch marks and stuff that indicate shape, but there is no real shape. And it's fascinating.

Pete 1:00:02

But you also have Fudget's budget, which was very, very avant-garde, very much about very simple shapes. Yeah. Uh in order to espouse a particular concept. And I would actually make the argument that it had its influence on the design of Monsanto's Adventures Through Inner Space. The reason being is because at that time, Disney, you can actually see Disney was seeing the writing on the wall that these upstarts at UPA were um uh causing a ruckus in the animation world. Yeah. And this kind of newfangled design thing of modern art. And so they decide to follow suit. So you can actually see it even affect Donald Duck shorts, where all of a sudden the backgrounds are not these beautiful gouache or watercolor paintings, they're just like these simple outlines with blocks of color. And even the designs of the characters become simplistic.

Kelly 1:00:55

Well, and you know, you can definitely look at something like Ward Kimball's Toot Whistleplunk and Boom. Oh, which is it might as well be a UPA short.

Pete 1:01:02

Absolutely. And and that that one cartoon right there is very much the one where I think everybody was seeing this, and it was just permeating itself into the subconscious of designers at Disney. Yeah. And so I think that that's probably part. I won't say the whole thing, but definitely one of the seeds that probably got planted in Imagineers' brains as far as the design. Yeah. For just let's just work with simple shapes. Like, why try to be realistic? Yeah. Why can't we just do this conceptually with a really good narrator and and let's let's see if it works?

Kelly 1:01:38

And it does. And it does. And and you know, it could very much be we have no way to accurately show this thing. And we may be on a fairly limited budget. So we've got you know these blocks of styrofoam and some cheap effects. Is that enough? And then you see the this kind of animation and you go, yeah, you can work with that.

Pete 1:01:59

Uh-huh.

Kelly 1:01:59

You can make that work. Yeah, absolutely. Um and and it does, it just it worked spectacularly. And I don't you know, Pete and I were talking about nostalgia earlier, and I don't know how this attraction would look to me now, as opposed to like, you know, 15-year-old me. Yeah. Though it is nice to have that that virtual recreation to go, hey, this is still pretty cool. Yeah. It's the simplicity that makes this thing work. Yeah. And Tony Baxter, who we talk about a lot, who everyone who talks about Disney Parks talk about a lot, was kind of the one person that, and and and this was his last uh job as a ride supervisor, was working on inner space.

Pete 1:02:46

Oh wow.

Kelly 1:02:47

Yeah. And he said as they were about to uh shut it down for good and open up Star Tours, he said, Look, you you had to either update it or get rid of it. It can't stay as it is. You know, Monsanto had abandoned it, the effects were starting to fall apart. The ride operators, in order to sort of subvert um teens both getting a little too frisky and potentially trying to reach out and grab pieces of the set as they rode through, started speeding up the ride, which threw threw things out of sync.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:24

And still I continue to shrink, and now I'm getting bigger and melting, and now there's iceberg melting.

Pete 1:03:29

Oh God. So magnification, magnification, magnification.

Kelly 1:03:38

So, you know, they eventually they closed it down in '85. But one thing I I wanted to talk about and before we kind of got to the end of this and to the the plussing up of this are the murals that used to be outside Adventure Through Inner Space because there there is um there's some real uh kind of kind of tragedy here that involved that was involved with the closing of the ride. Yeah. Uh when they did the New Tomorrowland, which opened in 67, Walt hired Mary Blair to do these two gigantic murals, one that was outside Adventure Through Interspace and one that was outside the Carousel of Progress. Together they sort of comprised one mural that she called the spirit of creative energies through children. Interestingly enough, it was kind of a solar energy thing that statement that she was making. They're beautiful. I I remember them so fondly. If you see pictures of them, they're just gorgeous. Aaron Ross Powell Some of the best views of those uh uh murals were from the People Mover. That's right.

Pete 1:04:45

Yeah. It was kind of like one of the great features of the People Movers. You can kind of casually look and really get a great view of these these murals.

Kelly 1:04:53

Aaron Ross Powell Right. And so you know you're talking about these huge murals. Each one was fifty-four feet. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're massive. Yeah. Um they were both over 15 feet high. The one on the carousel of progress was a little taller because um it went down farther. Yeah. Uh but they were huge. Huge pieces of art by a major artist. So when inner space was closed, they decided that they wanted to put something more akin to star tours on the outside of the building. So, and I get it. Um, so they put in a a new mural, not not these kind of like beautiful tiles that Mary Blair did. It's just one big sheet. They did not remove the previous murals. So what they did was basically drill the new one into it. Now, there was there was some stuff that came from the company for a while that said, no, no, no, the mural's fine under there, like it's preserved. But then pictures and film came out of exactly what the construction had done to it, and you could see how much of it was broken. So it was severely damaged. There's there's a lot of it still under there. Sure. Untouched, but it is in bad shape. The eventually in 1998, so this is you know, Strictures is 86. Yeah. 1998, the the other mural, the carousella progress side, was covered. So it lasted for a while over there. Wow. And it was covered with something they called the new Tomorrowland mural, which ironically includes pictures of early Tomorrowland ride vehicles, like the Atomobiles. Jeez. That mural they took a lot more care. It's still there, it's still under there, but they made sure to cover it protectively before they put the other mural on the outside. Okay. So that one is under there, pretty much intact. Okay. Okay. Who knows if they'll ever be able to do anything with those murals. It's it strikes me that you're you're talking about a very significant American artist and a major, major work that is being covered up. Boy, it'd be great if someone would go in there and and rescue those things.

Pete 1:07:26

I would be one I would be right there at the front of the line helping with that. Yes. I mean I grew up in uh a small town called Gilroy, right on the border, actually between Gilroy and Morgan Hill, which is where Mary Blair grew up. And so uh I grew up with tales of Mary Blair uh all over the town and being a huge fan of her work before I really understood that her connection to Disney. And then when I finally put two and two together, it just made me like, well, yeah, Mary Blair's awesome, you know. So yeah, it's uh it's a real shame the company has this problem of forgetting, especially the early years, yeah, that these works were not just industrial waste of mass-produced fiberglass and steel ride cars and facades that can easily just be torn down, thrown away, repurposed, or sold at auction. There you go. Right. Some of the pieces that are in these parks were hand-done works of art because that's the way Walt wanted it to be. He wanted these handcrafted aspects to have people's heart and soul get put into these pieces. Yeah. And it really came through, it really shone through. Yeah. Maybe it's because there isn't a five-legged goat on it or something. They they tore it apart, but that break it breaks my heart because I have fond memories of looking at it, going, honestly, I I felt it was out of place in Tomorrowland. Yeah, well, but that being said, I still loved it.

Kelly 1:08:59

Yeah. That was the deal. It's interesting because Walt's idea of Tomorrowland was not kind of grim, dark, explodey spaceships science fiction. That wasn't anything he ever showed any interest in at all. Um he was interested in a very sort of positive, science-based, progressive future. Yeah. So to an extent, I I get why those murals made sense.

Pete 1:09:28

Maybe that's where maybe okay. So I'm gonna make a proposal. Yes. Listeners, you have to join us on Zazzle and pick up more of our t-shirts to help pay for our episode on Tomorrowland, which we will broadcast from the Howard Johnson's Suite of the Future.

Kelly 1:09:48

We don't have anything on Zazzle.

Pete 1:09:52

Yet. Yet I think that sounds like a dare. But but yeah, I I I I it's this weird notion that now the embro the the embracing of dark and dystopian and cynical futures is a thing, and yet it was all built upon these positive approaches that I wanted.

Kelly 1:10:18

Yeah. And it's just you know, it's never quite held together. Um but it could. I mean, you you could really make it work. I I've always thought of Disneyland's Tomorrowland at its best being a lot more like uh Clifford Simak's versions of the future, where he he's you know, his versions of the future is that stuff that you also see in like Warner Brothers cartoons where there's a house of the future where robot arms are making pancakes for you.

Pete 1:10:49

Like that's like there's anything wrong with that. Nothing whatsoever. I think that's amazing. Yeah. And uh, I'm still afraid of that one robot that comes out of the closet and starts, you know, uh sweeping stuff. Yeah. There's something disconcerting about the fact that his head is this little antenna that buzzes. But the rest of it's really cool.

Kelly 1:11:08

And you know, the the dark side of that is uh Ray Bradbury's uh There Will Come Soft Rains. Or the Velt. Yes, or the Velt. But there's there's a a more like if you read the Simek short stories or some of his books, like City or or Way Station, there's a comic aspect to it. Yeah. There's a funniness to it, and there's um uh a positive, like salvation-y kind of aspect to it. Like this this is the this is uh a happy future I'm moving into. Yeah. And that's that's when Tomorrowland works. As it gets darker and darker and disparate, like science fiction elements just sort of being jammed together. I don't it it doesn't make a ton of sense to me anymore. I agree. How did I get off on this tan well, like how do we get here from Mary Blair?

Pete 1:11:59

Well, I think no, I think it's because well i uh I can I can circle this back. Okay, thank you. So you have this positivity of the future, but I also think it's it's this love of the handcrafting of the future that Walt was trying to instill by having Mary do these these pieces on solar energy and possibility, yeah. That that the human race, the notion of the future is a wholly human commodity. Animals do not sit there and oh boy, next Tuesday, you know. Our dogs are thinking I have to poop now. I want to eat now, I want to play now. They're not going, oh man, on the 14th, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna eat this thing on the 14th with this other dog, you know. They're they're in the moment. Whereas humans are obsessed with the future. Entire industries, Monsanto, are built on the development of the future or the destruction thereof, depending upon how you view it. Yeah. And I think Adventures Through Inner Space encapsulates Walt's notion of a hopeful future because it's a positive exploration of the unknown, right, as opposed to say a darker approach to delving into atoms and chemistry, as Monsanto wanted, as we talked about before. Like, let's put them in the molecule of acid. It's like that's great. What do we what are you talking about here? Like, no, that's too cynical, you know?

Kelly 1:13:31

Well, and you and you go through the ride and you're following the the original voyage or the Paul Freeze voice, and you're following his voice trail or something. And and you get to the end, and and it is frightening, and he almost gives up his self, his selfhood to shrink even further. Um, but instead, he has a kind of actualization of himself at the end. He he he uses the technology to become more himself. That is, I think, a fundamentally positive, maybe not realistic, but fundamentally positive uh message. No, I dare not go on.

Pete 1:14:15

Yes, yeah, it's if it's pretty great, you know. I almost wanted to see film of this, like like have him in the pod. I think if we if if this ride had been produced later, like if this was done as a a star tours or back to the future, I think we would have had those types of moments projected on a screen view screen or something like that. But I kind of like the the theater of the mind, which is another element of uh dioramas where it's like there's an element where the viewer has to do some of the work. Right. That I think makes this a lot more viable.

Kelly 1:14:50

I do too. Yeah, I I I agree. There's there's definitely an element of radio in here. Oh, yeah. Big time. Where you're looking at as abstract shapes and trying to make sense of the words that you're hearing. Let's talk about the giant eyeball.

Pete 1:15:05

Oh, my favorite part ever. The giant eye.

Kelly 1:15:09

Yeah. So you're you're at a point in the ride where you're still shrinking. Yeah, you should. Well, and and you've you've are you're about to consider going into the atom's nucleus. Right. And you are starting to become concerned about what might happen to yourself. Could you keep shrinking? And of course, this is lifted straight from Richard Mathson.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:32

Oh, yeah.

Kelly 1:15:33

Yeah, like the end of the incredible shrinking man, which, spoiler alert, uh skip the next uh 35 seconds if you haven't seen the incredible shrinking man. Uh at the end, he does shrink into this sort of abstract, all weirdly all-knowing state. Yeah. Like something happens and he shrinks, shrinks beyond the universe. Right. Yeah.

Pete 1:15:55

It becomes this macroverse, microverse kind of approach, which is the very high concept for its time, actually.

Kelly 1:16:02

But you're on this attraction, your Adam Not. Um I think I think that's what he's called. I'm not sure. Uh Atom knot. I love that. Paul Freeze says, No, I dare not, and he turns back. Right. And as soon as he says that, you start to hear voices, some of which are Exotensio, um, the who wrote the script for this. Yeah. And and also wrote the lyrics for Grim Grinning Ghosts.

Pete 1:16:28

And kept Paul Freeze on track all the time during recording sessions because apparently Paul would have a tendency to kind of veer off. Very much like me. Yeah. Well, that's the point of this show.

Kelly 1:16:39

Yeah. But you you hear uh and Freeze and the Ten CO and a couple other people in the background saying, We we have them back on the view screen. We we have and so they they found you in in inner space. And they uh oh, and you also hear like the the snowflake is dissolving, dissolving, which it sounds terrifying if you're in it. But they get you back on their view screens and they start bringing you back, and as you start I'm doing the sound, the scot track. As you start to come back to normal size, you see what I guess is supposed to be you looking up into the microscope. We found it looking at you. Yeah, and it's this massive eyeball.

Pete 1:17:25

Yeah, just staring at you. Yeah, well, it's looking back and forth. Yeah. For you know, and it you know, like it doesn't blink or anything, it's just this big mechanical eye on a kind of a very simple rudimentary rod and puppet style with a motor going back and forth, but it's lit around the rim, so it really looks like this gigantic eyeball looking down at you. My dad, look, Pete, we're going back to regular size. There's the giant eye. Wow. That's so cool. You know, like, what's wrong with his retina? You know. He might have been out a little late last night, Pete. Yeah. It's a little bloodshot. Well, you know them scientists at Monsanto. Different types of molecule miracles.

Kelly 1:18:09

But it is for a lot of people that did that right, that the eyeball is the thing that they remember. They remember the mighty microscope at the beginning and the giant eyeball staring down at them.

Pete 1:18:21

With a third being styrofoam snowflakes. Styrofoam, snowflakes. Styrofoam, snowflakes. Like those become the three big things. Yeah. One, two, three. So yeah, I mean, it's it's such a it's such a goofy, simple effect, and yet it's just so memorable. Yeah. And I think it's because you just get you you have to surrender yourself a little bit to the abstract of the ride itself. When you do, you buy it. You totally buy into it. You're like, okay, I'll roll with this. One. Just you lean back in your omni-mover and enjoy it. Like enjoy the ride. And you do. Yeah. Or you're enjoying a different ride, in which case they're going to speed it up. Yeah. So um you might get a tap on the shoulder from someone. From Tony Baxter. You know, heaven only knows how many times he's had to stop people. I can imagine Tony Baxter. Uh, you guys need to cut that out. Hey, hip daddios. And then I honestly don't think Tony Baxter has ever uttered the words hip daddy. No. So I'm just saying. Sorry, Tony.

Kelly 1:19:22

Hey, pal, get to shrinking.

Pete 1:19:23

Yeah, get to shrinking.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:25

Wow.

Pete 1:19:28

Too far? Do I have to? I'm just saying, pal.

Kelly 1:19:35

Oh man. Do I have to hit the explicit button this time?

Pete 1:19:38

We may. This episode is brought to you by oops.

Kelly 1:19:43

And wow.

Pete 1:19:46

Animated by UPA.

Kelly 1:19:50

Mick Boing Boing indeed. Face Palmerama.

Pete 1:19:55

So, anyhow, I think we've reached the point now. Oh, let's before we jump ahead, real quick. Yeah. Because of the nostalgia for Monsanto's journey into inner space, I do want to bring up two things in the 80s that did arise, probably inspired by this and also inspired by a film called Fantastic Voyage. Yes. That is it has the same premise shrinking somebody down and injecting them into somebody's body.

Kelly 1:20:26

Right.

Pete 1:20:26

You obviously also have at Epcot Body Wars. Yes. Uh, which is, you know, the the ride is very similar to Star Tours in its makeup, but that is one. You also have a movie directed by Joe Dante called Inner Space. And a lot of people Which is a lot of fun. It's a delightful film. I I it's one of my favorite 80s sci-fi films. Uh Martin Short and uh Dennis Quaid. Martin Short is a hypochondriac, uh supermarket clerk who accidentally gets caught up in some uh Silicon Valley techno-terrorism when Dennis Quaid, who is a test pilot, who's been shrunk down inside of this miniature capsule, yeah, thinking he's going to be injected into a rabbit, gets accidentally injected into Martin Short's butt. And that's where the movie starts. Yeah. And it's really amazing, and including a fantastic performance uh by Robert Picardo of Star Trek fame, who plays a character called the Cowboy, who's a black market technology salesman. Yeah, I think he's he's supposed to be Israeli, but he thinks he's a cowboy. And uh Robert Picardo is supposed to be an Israeli. Yeah, it's it's it's it's so weird. But he at one point, Dennis Quaid and Melanie Griffith subdue Robert Picardo's character, the cowboy, and Dennis Quaid uses uh certain synapses in Martin Short's face to transform Robert Picardo. No, I'm sorry, uh uh Martin Short into Robert Picardo. And so Robert Picardo plays Martin Short playing Robert Picardo, and it's so good. Like that actor, I swear, he's one of the best character actors. Oh, he's a genius. He's genius enough. But uh a lot of people had wondered is this actually a tie-in to something that Disney's gonna do? And it turns out it there was talk about it, but it the rights went away, and so it became Joe Dante going, ah, no, then you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna do uh a movie based off of Fantastic Voyage. And I mean my own little version of Fantastic Voyage, no problem.

Kelly 1:22:36

Well, it was it was a touchstone film. It was indeed. So essentially a Disney film.

Pete 1:22:41

Yep. Then there was another film uh in the early, late 80s, early 90s that did get its own Disneyland attraction, Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Yeah, which eventually replaced Captain EO in another show entirely that is going to be even more complex than Ideas of Monsanto. I can't even think of that right now. No. Honey I shrunk the audience still pays homage to Monsanto's journey in adventures in inner space by shrinking the audience back down. Now, granted you don't go down to the size of an atom, but the notion of shrinking people, a lot of Disney fans found as a nice little nod to the fact that inner space did exist. Yeah. And then for those who I want to go to Disneyland to shrink, who didn't want to jump in with the atom boats, uh wouldn't have to worry so much about shrinkage at Disneyland. So uh but this notion of shrinking people down uh as a ride uh doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah, it really doesn't. And it's fascinating because there's some opportunities for that.

Kelly 1:23:50

You know, it's it's interesting. This is uh just as a science fiction concept overall, is something that has appeared since time immemorial. Like people have always like they keep coming back to it. You'll rarely find a long-running science fiction show where they don't do it a couple of times. Right. Um L.

Pete 1:24:10

Sid Marty Croft did a whole show called Dr. Shrinker. Yeah.

Kelly 1:24:14

Dr. Shrinker. Dr. Shrinker. Okay. He's a madman with an evil mind. No, we we did not rehearse that. We both do, in fact, know the Dr. Shrinker theme song. I'm the Billy Barty character. You two it, you'll get it. Yeah. But I but yeah, I mean, Doctor Who has shrunk people a number of times.

Pete 1:24:39

Even the Beatles did it in help.

Kelly 1:24:41

Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah. Paul's little journey on the floor. And uh the the monkeys do it in head. Yeah. Um they become dandruff. I think even I think even the goodies did it on their show. I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. I mean, but it's you know, it's a science fiction concept you see all the time. There's uh uh award-winning Frederick Pohl short story about it. There's it just it it's all over the place. People keep coming back to it and keep coming back to it. But it's interesting that as far as I know, the only attractions ever that have attempted to represent this in a theme park are Adventure Through Inner Space and and Honey I Shrunk the Audience.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:21

Yeah.

Kelly 1:25:22

I like Honey That I Shrunk the Audience too, by the way. A lot of people don't for some reason, but I really enjoyed it.

Pete 1:25:27

I enjoyed it. I I I I enjoyed it. Um strangely enough, not as much as Captain Eo. But again, different episodes. So uh so speaking of other attractions, yes. Let's do our plus up. All right, shall we? Yes. Um, I got to do last time's plus up first.

Kelly 1:25:49

I got to.

Pete 1:25:51

I had to. I forced you into it. Yeah, you totally like it's up to you. Oh yeah, you go. Okay, so this is your turn.

Kelly 1:25:58

Okay. What would your plus up be? It's always difficult to think of a plus up for an attraction that's been gone for this long. Sure. So, you know, you can always say, I just wish it was still there. And in some ways I do. I love Star Tours. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy it a lot.

Pete 1:26:14

Oh, yeah.

Kelly 1:26:14

But I do miss inner space. I do miss a non-screen science fiction ride, which there just ain't that many. I mean, Space Mountain, but you know, it's uh not the same thing. So, but you know, I'm not gonna damn Star Tours by saying let's get rid of it and put Adventure Through Inner Space back.

Pete 1:26:33

No.

Kelly 1:26:34

Um what I would say, I'm gonna do a dual attraction plus up. Let's take the people mover track, which is still there. Uh-huh. Let's do what we need to do to fix it, because come on, Disney, you can fix it. Yeah. And instead of putting people movers on it, let's put Atomobiles on it. I'm in. And you know Six passenger, six passenger atomobiles. And you know how like the people mover used to go through the Tomorrowland attractions, but it also had show scenes of its own. The in Florida, the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, which is also the people movers, has show scenes in between attractions. So let's put the Atom Mobile on the People Mover track. Let's, you know, let it go through the Tomorrowland attractions, and in those show scenes, let's have representations of the old Tomorrowland attractions. Ooh. So, you know, when and and it's okay if you want to do it as as a screen thing, that's fine to save space. Just an homage. Like you go in, do you remember the Tron super speed tunnel?

Pete 1:27:46

You have entered the world of Tron.

Kelly 1:27:48

Yeah, where you the people mover would go in.

Pete 1:27:53

You are now escaped the master control program. What happened?

unknown 1:27:57

Yeah, what was that?

Kelly 1:28:00

But like go in there and instead of trying on the walls, project snowflakes and atoms and the giant eyeball from inner space and yeah and go go in another hallway and see like some of the mission to Mars film or stuff like that. Just have it be a tour of Tomorrowland attractions, old and new. And you know, but w now you're in an atomobile and have someone imitating Paul Freeze taking you through it.

Pete 1:28:31

And they should all be drawn as if they were designed by Mary Blair. Ooh. So like like w weirdly colored watercolors? No, no more like her ceramics. Yeah. More like her ceramic murals. So that it represents the murals that were covered up or destroyed. Oh, that would be so cool. That would be my little dig.

Kelly 1:28:50

That's my other plus up is just repair the repair the damn murals. Yep. You know, it's uh it's okay if you want to keep the current murals up. Pull the mural down from the uh the carousel side, which I think is the Buzz Lightyear side now, and pull it out and and put it somewhere else. And go into the mural on the Star Tour side, the old inner space side, and pull it down and restore it. It's gonna take a little time, but restore it and put it somewhere else. Put it in a museum, put it um anywhere, put it in the Disneyland Hotel. Just do something. Fix those murals. Or send it to the Disney Family Museum and have them put it on display. Absolutely. Absolutely. Uh speak speaking of, there will be another Mary Blair exhibition at the Disney Family Museum next year. Oh, yay. They announced that at an event I was at recently. Also, the Disney History Institute, the people that did that Adventure Through Interspace ride-through, their podcast is doing an epic long life of Mary Blair right now. Nice. So that's my plus up, though, is fix the murals and use the people mover track, put Atomobiles on it and have a ride through old Tomorrowland to drive.

Pete 1:30:10

I love that. I love that. Um so this is tricky because I actually have kind of two plus ups. Okay. Um you're allowed. I love your notion of bringing back the people mover. Like I have a soft spot for it. I love it. And making those Atomobiles again would be fantastic. Yeah. Um another thought uh this is actually a plus up not just for Disneyland, but also for Disney's California Adventure. Okay. Because there's something missing in their Avengers campus. Yeah. Like a big attraction. Like anything. So wouldn't it be cool if the quote biggest savior, unquote, of the Avengers in the grand scheme of things, the one who actually pretty much saves the day during the grand fight with Thanos, as far as getting things kicked off again. Right. Ant-Man. Uh huh. What if we actually did uh a whole approach to an adventure through inner space, but you're riding in a PIM mobile. Oh, brilliant. And so that way, that way you you still have Adventures Through Inner Space, but it's Ant-Man's Adventures Through Inner Space. Oh. And you have Paul Rudd narrating it, and he's and still I continue to shrink. Yeah. And at some point during the ride, they could you could actually, and it would probably be a giant screen ride with motion sensors and everything. Sure, whatever. But it would be great to actually have him catch up with the classic 60s automobile, and you hear Paul Freeze, and still I continue to shrink. And you like stop and you look next to him and you look at each other, and you're like, oh hi, Paul Freeze, and you keep going. Remember, when you get to the nucleus, turn back. Yeah. Well, that would be the thing. At this point, it would go even further. And so you enter the microverse. And so that would be a way to have this really cool sweeping thing. Yeah. But I think it'd be really fun to base it off of some of the technology that they used for rides at Universal, like Gringotts ride, in which, yes, there's screens and there's like these moments of fast moving and then stop, fast moving and then stop with a giant screen, where it feels a lot more like a roller coaster. So you're not just moving at this casual pace, you're really having this fast pace adventure of zipping through inner space and then coming back and you're full size again.

Kelly 1:32:46

Yeah.

Pete 1:32:47

Or have a moment in which you get too big. Ooh. In which you're actually like the whole car is actually above all of Anaheim. And you're looking down at the Avengers campus and stuff like that, but you're like 50 feet tall, going, I think we got too big.

Kelly 1:33:07

So you become giant man.

Pete 1:33:08

Yeah, we became giant man, you know, and giant man's like, okay, I think, oh, I think we got too big. Back down. So it's this really quick little nod of like, hey, we could go too far the other way, too. Yeah. You know, but I think it'd be a lot of fun. And it doesn't, and you don't even need to have a villain. You don't need to have you don't need to have any sort of villain, you know. It's just here's an experiment, and it's Ant-Man, and he's, you know, Paul Rudd's Ant-Man has messed it up, and Michael Douglas, like, look, you crazy kid. You know, you gotta you use too much of the pin particle, you're going too fast, you're entering into the quantum verse. Oh, that'd be so great. It'd be so cool. And it'd be very easy to do, and suddenly it would give us something to do except, you know, besides watching robotic Spider-Man fly over. You know, like I and I love the notion of the Avengers campus. The the 12-year-old and me would love that place if it only had one thing to do.

Kelly 1:34:01

Well, I mean, it has the it has the Web Slingers attraction, which is fine. If there were a big attraction there, you would look at the Web Slingers thing and say, that's a great sea ticket. Good. Right. Um, but there's nothing else. And and I love being there and seeing the Dormelage do their march and and interact with kids because that's beautiful. Yeah. And the Spider-Man show's funny. It is. You know, I saw Moon Girl there one day. That was really cool. Yeah. So I there's things about it I really like, but I will also point out that the first time I walked through it, I realized I didn't realize I had walked through it.

Pete 1:34:38

I know. It's really kind of an anti-c anti-opening and anticlimactic show. Yeah. Yeah. So here's my second, here's my second plus up. My second plus up is an opportunity for Monsanto to actually do right and to actually sponsor it again. So it becomes Monsanto's journey into inner space once more. This time it's it becomes the story of how to use futuristic technology and the possibilities that it presents to us of cleaning up the world's oceans of microplastics and forever chemicals. This is a way of saying we're sorry without having to say you're sorry, but giving people who are seeing this ride the opportunity to do something themselves. Yes. You know, these are microplastics. They're adhering to the nucleus, nucleus, nucleus. Forever chemicals will never leave your body. They're in your testicles, testicles.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:41

You know, stuff like that. That's a medical term. We can get away with it. I just want to hear Paul Freeze say that. Poor Kelly, he's bright red. Oh, you got me.

Pete 1:36:04

So but it becomes a journey into another human being seeing the effects. Yeah. And I know that's kind of hard, but you would approach it with the same kind of like, this is gonna be fun, but hopeful. We're gonna find a way how to fix this. We're gonna fix it. We're gonna fix it using the same approach and miracles of molecules in order to actually save a human being from these elements that have found their way into the human being. Yeah. Now I'm not saying we're gonna go here, we will inject you into an agent orange baby. Yeah, no, no, no. No, we're not doing that.

Kelly 1:36:40

Let's not get too too far here.

Pete 1:36:42

We'll leave that from universal. Yep. That's more their thing. That's more their thing.

Kelly 1:36:46

Yeah.

Pete 1:36:47

But but it could be something where you are going into a body or some other or a blood cell or something where you are you are connecting how chemicals have affected human beings, acknowledging it, and saying, this is what you can do to avoid this situation or fix it. And I think they'll never do it. Right. But I think that's a great idea.

Kelly 1:37:09

I think you know, again, we we we're never concerning ourselves with viability.

Pete 1:37:13

So I I think it's I think however, we have been proven right a couple of times on our plus ups. Yeah, that's weird. I'm keeping my fingers and my toes crossed for my I I want my first option, actually. I actually want to go into inner space with Ant-Man.

Kelly 1:37:27

That's I do I do too. And and I'm I'm gonna say right here, I actually really liked Quantum Mania.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:32

Yeah, I thought it was fun. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Kelly 1:37:35

It's goofy fun.

Pete 1:37:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:37

Drink the goo, drink the goo.

Pete 1:37:40

So well, I mean, as as complicated as Monsanto's adventures through inner space is, I think we've done a pretty nice job of still maintaining that it was fun, folks. It wasn't all awkward. It really was. It really was fun. Yeah. So uh I I think we're good.

Kelly 1:37:57

I think I think we've done it.

Pete 1:37:58

Okay, so I'm uh Peter Overstreet. And I'm Kelly McCubbin. And you've been listening to The Low Down on the Plus Up.

Kelly 1:38:20

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of The Lowdown on the Plus Up. If you have, please tell your friends where you found us. And if you haven't, we can pretend this never happened and need not speak of it again. For a lot more thoughts on theme parks and related stuff, check out my writing for Boardwalk Times at boardwalktimes.net. Feel free to reach out to Pete and I on our Lowdown on the Plus Up Facebook group or send us a message directly at comments at lowdown-plus-up.com. We really want to hear about how you'd plus these attractions up and read some of your ideas on the show. Our theme music is Goblin Tinker Soldier Spy by Kevin McLeod at Incompitech.com. We'll have a new episode out real soon. Why? Because we like you.

SPEAKER_06 1:40:02

Now men with dreams are further, but nature first began.