SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I think it's important to build something like an upcoming warrior for the matter Disney World or Disneyland because we attract young people, minimal people, who have made up their minds about the future. So therefore the kids come in as we older at a certain age looking for their own futures there. We go into libraries for these things, we go to movies for these things, but we go to world fairs. And somewhere along the line, we're passed through the experience. I look upon the Hipcomb Center, the center of it, the very center of it, the Spaceship Earth, as a kind of Schweiter centrifuge. Schweiter was always telling us what? That we should set examples, someone may imitate them, preferably good examples. So if you put the children in the centrifuge of Spaceship Earth and world them around filled with the ideas of the former past, the immediate present, and the former future, they'll come out galvanized and care very much about getting out of bed tomorrow morning. That's what you must do for children. The educational process must do it, teachers must do it, and we must do it. And let's be there ahead of the teachers this time, huh? Let's say to the children, for God's sake, the future is worth building.

SPEAKER_04: 1:32

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.

SPEAKER_05: 2:15

So Pete, yes. What are we talking about today? Well, last our last episode, we took uh our listeners on an extraordinary journey into nothingness. And uh it was uh it was our it was one of our annual what if episodes where we like to uh find proposals of theme parks that never existed or just come up with our own suppositions as to why a particular uh theme park was never developed. Um two years ago we did Fleischer Land, and last week, uh uh is it really it feels like last week, um, we released our episode on um the uh was it the electrical time maze? Is that what that was?

SPEAKER_04: 3:00

You've forgotten already. It's the great electric time maze.

SPEAKER_05: 3:02

See, it doesn't it doesn't even exist, that's why I forgot it. Um yeah, so it and it is based off of a proposal that was written by Mr. Ray Bradbury, one of the great science fiction authors of the 20th century. And um we carried it through to its to its climax of waxing poetic and building wax eloquent all the way through. And it um it was a lot of fun to do. Uh and some of you may be listening and wondering. Yeah, it was harrowing. But it in the end, we had to let everybody off the hook and say this does not exist, sadly. It would have been a great attraction, but it's not. Um and some of you may actually be wondering about the validity of some of our facts that we spewed about Ray Bradbury. And even we're wondering, even we're wondering some of the validity of these facts.

SPEAKER_04: 3:50

We're gonna add some air quotes to the word facts on the phone.

SPEAKER_05: 3:54

Yeah. So uh so we have brought an expert uh as who's a guest on our show today.

SPEAKER_04: 3:59

That's right. Uh just to add some credibility to the nonsense that we spew. We have brought Dr. Phil Nichols. Hello. Uh Dr. Nichols is in England, so uh, we have this great what eight-hour time gap between the three of us, but we've managed to work it out. Dr. Nichols is a university lecturer. He has so many letters after his name. Many of them I don't know what they are. I recognize Masters, I recognize PhD. There's there's others we can get into later. He is the editor of the new Ray Bradbury Review, which but puts you in a lineage with William Nolan, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_03: 4:36

Yes, he he edited the original uh when it wasn't even new, and it was just called the Ray Bradbury Review, which was a kind of a one-off, really. Right. In the um, I don't know when it was, sixties, seventies? Yeah, it was then revived as an academic journal. Well, semi ac semi-academic. Uh and that's when I uh stepped in.

SPEAKER_04: 4:57

That's great. He's a senior consultant at the Ray Bradbury Center. He uh broadcasts two podcasts that I myself listened to, which is how I got in touch with the gentleman. He does Bradbury100, which is a wonderful podcast, and with his friend Colin. He does Science Fiction 101, which is also delightful. He also does the Bradbury 101 YouTube channel. Uh that basically, if you have questions about Ray Bradbury, this is your guy. Yep. So welcome.

SPEAKER_03: 5:26

I don't always have the answers, but I'll I'll always tackle the question.

SPEAKER_04: 5:30

I can almost guarantee your answers are better than ours. So welcome. We really appreciate you being here. Thank you. So uh let's just uh as a kind of first shot across the bow. You very kindly and and bravely listened to our great electric time maze episode. What did we get egregiously wrong?

SPEAKER_03: 5:54

Nothing. I don't think you got anything egregiously wrong. In fact, I thought you brought it to life incredibly well. Oh wow, thank you. Thank you. I mean, what people need to know is that it's just a a few pages of text. Well, actually, it might be about twenty pages. But um, it sure feels like it if not.

SPEAKER_05: 6:12

You know, it's no offense to Mr. Bradbury. It he obviously had a huge block of cheese and some schlitz beer and just typed away, you know, just crank it away at this thing.

SPEAKER_03: 6:21

So what I find amazing about it is that he he stuck it in this book of his called Yes Tomorrow, which is not a terribly well-known book, but it's a book of essays. Yeah. And uh it's in there without any real explanation of what it's there for. Um and so you just read it and you think, what was that? And if he'd given it some context, you know, I think m most readers would be able to make more sense of it than they can at present. I mean, it's an interesting read, but it's probably the most peculiar piece of Bradbury writing you will ever see.

SPEAKER_04: 6:57

Yeah. It's it it's really interesting. And there's a moment, uh I think it's maybe the last couple of lines of it where he says something like, and now I'm exhausted and and I have to go to bed, you know. And it just seems like he just went, it was some like caffeine-fueled mania. He was like, I'm going to write everything that I have been holding back writing about theme parks, and I'm just gonna do it in this one run, and it's gonna be a little bit insane, and it's going to be fascinating. Really interesting, uh some really interesting stuff going on in there, and then just get it out of my system and put it away, and it feels like that to me.

SPEAKER_05: 7:36

Yeah. He's kind of uh emulating Robert E. Howard there a little bit with just the first draft of Conan. It's like you will write this, you know, in the middle of a rainstorm in Texas.

SPEAKER_03: 7:46

I mean, he was known, as you said in the in the podcast, um, he he was known for saying, don't think, and just trying to get the words to flow out of him. So I've I've no doubt at all that he did write it in a sort of a continuous flurry of ideas coming into his head and and ending up on the page. But usually, certainly when he's writing fiction, he would go back to it later and edit. Right. So it it wouldn't look like a first draft. But this piece is I don't know how you found it, but I found there's quite a lot of repetition in there. Yes. He quite often will state an idea and then sort of rewind his steps and then say it again. And uh it really does feel like he did not go back and do a a further draft of it. In the context of the Yes Tomorrow book, it he sort of gets away with that because everything in that book is uh what you referred to last time as blue sky thinking. Yes. Um he most of the essays in there were written for an architectural company to give them inspiration. And so he he was paid to come up with basically crazy ideas which other people could then bounce off. Um and so uh one of the things that was in the time maze is that whole first section where the first thing you do when you enter the time maze is you eat. Yeah, yes. And this comes out of one of Ray's other essays, and I've forgotten what it's called, but he he basically says at the beginning of this other essay people don't go out to shop, people go out to eat. And while they are out, they shop. Now I can see the logic of that, and I think that's possibly more true of Bradbury, who perhaps didn't like going out shopping with the family, but he loved to eat. Well you can imagine that that's how he coped with shopping, is that he would you know, he would go and sit in the food court or whatever, and then face up to the shopping that he had to do, which was like a chore to him. But that that simple concept that um we don't actually go out to shop, we go out to eat. And then while we're out, we shop. That is what caused the invention of the food court. Like of every shopping mall that you've ever been in, yeah. Nowadays, there's a food court. Yeah. And that comes from, I believe, from Bradbury's essay, which he wrote for John Jurdy uh Architectural Firm. They then built one of the earliest malls in America, which I think was probably the one in San Diego. If not that, it was in Glendale, uh California. Um and those were built either around a food court or with a food court at the heart of them. And ever since then, mm all shopping malls have had some kind of food court. Yeah. So, in a sense, Bradbury is responsible for that.

SPEAKER_05: 10:48

For better or for worse. We're gonna lay it at his feet one way or another.

SPEAKER_04: 10:54

We we uh you know one thing that I noticed, and reading over yestermoro on the whole, which I I did uh a couple of years ago for some some other, I was looking for something else, but I I found it interesting. And one of the things that kind of dovetailed for me into some other research and some other podcasts that we had done, is that uh what Bradbury tended to propose as far as urban planning, and yesterday is in in a large way about urban planning. Yeah. What he tended to propose was very similar to the things that Victor Gruen had proposed. Which Victor Gruen's known much to his chagrin. He hated this, but he was known as the the father of the shopping mall. What the shopping mall became was not what he intended. But I thought I thought it was really interesting because you have this sense of, you know, uh a sort of central place for a community to come. It's it's once you at least once you get there, it's very walkable, uh, which obviously would have been very key for Bradbury who didn't drive. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And so I just I I thought a lot of the ideas sort of dovetailed with Gruen's ideas, which uh we we learned doing some research a little while ago that uh well Disney was also fascinated with Victor Gruen. So they have similar sort of ideas, like this is how a community should work. It should have a centralized place that you can go to that has uh shops and food and but mainly bookstores if you're talking about Ray's writing. So we we get things like the writings in Yestermorrow, but we also get kind of Disneyland coming out of Victor Gruen's writing, uh, which obviously Ray was was fascinated with.

SPEAKER_03: 12:40

Yes, absolutely. And Ray really thought that Disneyland was the template for uh downtown areas. He really believed that Disney had perfected that in Disneyland, the way that you have the the kind of the go in you go in through the gates at Disneyland and you're sort of on Main Street. Um he felt that was the perfect small town, and it reminded him of the small town that he grew up in and other places that he had um seen over the years. Um and in fact he even said to Disney, apparently, allegedly, he said to Disney, um you should run for mayor of Los Angeles. Yeah. Um because he really thought that that was a model you could apply. I think he was I mean th I there's a lot of truth in that, but I think he's also losing sight of the fact that Disneyland is it Disneyland is a place you pay to go into. You expect perfection, you know, you expect everything you want to be laid on exactly there. Whereas when you go to a town, you're not necessarily paying anything. You're you're getting it for free up to the point where you go in somewhere and spend money. So I uh to me they're not a perfect analogy, Disneyland and the small town, but for Bradbury he saw it saw it as a uh a real model to follow. And he certainly was influenced in that with his own ideas. Plus, he was influenced with his notions of uh European cities where you know you would have a central plaza uh which would be surrounded by cafes, and uh each cafe would have seating outside as well as inside. So he kind of saw that as being the perfect uh model as well.

SPEAKER_04: 14:25

Yeah, and it's interesting because you you read through some of the things in in Yestermorrow, and I forget which essays in particular, but there are essays where he suggests that these these town centres are places where you should be able to go to specifically without paying for anything. With without even shopping or buying books or eating.

SPEAKER_03: 14:47

Yes. Yeah, so so it it is the disnification that of um the town that he he wants to see. Yeah. But then he does add things to that. And one of the things, um, I don't know if you remember this from your own reading of the book, but there's an essay in there which is called something like The Aesthetic of Lostness. Yeah. And the idea is that when we're in a place uh l like a shopping mall, we don't actually, according to him, we don't actually want to be able to see everything from where we are. We want to be able to go down uh sort of branching corridors, some of which will be dead ends, and we don't know exactly what we're gonna come across when we get down there. Right. Um now I think there speaks somebody who, again, probably found shopping very boring, and he he thought having avenues to explore would be interesting. But I I don't know about you, when I go to a shopping mall, I just want to be in and out. I don't want to spend any time there. So to me, branching corridors is the worst thing you could have. But for him, that idea of being lost so that you can uh explore things at your leisure and backtrack and find new byways and so on, he found that very appealing. And again, that was that was acted upon by the uh uh John Jurdy architecture agency and some of their mole designs. So he you know he had a an influence with this.

SPEAKER_04: 16:17

It wasn't just theoretical stuff, unlike the time maze, which um which was purely theoretical, but there it very much is there they are mazes. You know, they they are you are intended to get lost in them. Yeah, yeah. Which is which is contradictory with the weird narrative thing that he tries to put together in the second time maze. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 16:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 16:38

I I can understand his his fascination with getting lost in an especially in an eatery situation because of his love for places like Clifton's cafeteria, because um he was a regular there, and I don't know if you've ever been there, Phil, but it is quite a maze. And it is like three or four stories of redwood trees and taxidermy. I mean, it's a cabinet of curiosities, is what it really is. Um but that's that's where Forrest J. Ackerman and uh Ray and uh another Ray, Harryhausen, all kind of founded their their lifelong friendship together. And since Ray was, you know, Bradbury was such a regular there that probably some of his ideas also sprung out of Clinton's uh Clifford Clinton, who created Clifton's cafeteria, was very much into utopic uh ideals, especially when it came to feeding people. Um he seriously, I mean, because he had he operated his restaurant, he would serve 50,000 people a day during the depression. Wow. And um and he ran it by the golden rule. It's like pay if you can, and if you can't, don't worry about it. We gotcha. And so, you know, I I can see Ray Bradbury definitely having some of that rubbed off on him by being exposed to that.

SPEAKER_03: 17:57

Yeah, I I can see that as well. Um, I mean it lest anyone think that Ray was some kind of gourmet who uh perhaps appreciated fine European dining or whatever. Um he wasn't. I he he was more of a junk food eater than anything else.

SPEAKER_05: 18:13

Yeah, um Yeah, I keep making jokes about Schlitz beer. I only get that because of a TV interview that he did, and he famously like pulls out a plate and he slices a huge chunk of cheddar and he pops open a slit and he goes right back to his typewriter and starts going. And so that's why I make that joke. But that's kind of evocative of his of his diet.

SPEAKER_04: 18:33

So this kind of leads me to a track that I'm sort of interested in. You know, we think about Bradbury as particularly kind of at the 50s, like the kind of the peak of his career, uh, as a as a writer of about old towns and like you know, Greentown and and nostalgia. But you know, talking about Cliftons and talking about urban planning, Bradbury was an Angelino. He was he r really adapted in a lot of ways for a long time to Los Angeles. Do you do you have do you have kind of thoughts about that? Is that is that contradictory for him?

SPEAKER_03: 19:11

Um To me it's not contradictory because I I've I've lived with that knowledge for a long time. But I I guess if y you you're sort of learning about Bradbury for the first time, that would seem contradictory. To me, I think the reason it isn't contradictory is that the small town represents his past and his childhood and the nostalgia element. But the big city and the the urban sprawl is the science fictional future. Um so I I don't see them as that contradictory. And if you if you listen to any of his speeches or read any of his essays or interviews for that matter, you'll find that he's frequently referring back to the same touch points. He keeps referring back to King Kong, he keeps talking about dinosaurs, he keeps talking about um the small town. And uh he will also talk about urban transport, the trol the trolley that he used to ride in well, I can't remember if Walk Eagan actually had trolleys, but from his childhood, Chicago and Walk Eagan, plus the old trolleys that used to run in Los Angeles, and for years he was uh a campaigner, an active campaigner for having a monorail in LA.

SPEAKER_04: 20:34

He was thrown out of a s a city council meeting, wasn't he, for for advocating for that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 20:42

Took some notes from John Houston, did he? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 20:46

But it it it again it relates to that thing of he didn't drive. Um through choice, he he found uh cars very scary because he witnessed accidents and um wanted nothing to do with driving. So to him, having a monorail system or any form of urban transport would have been ideal. But um for some reason the monorail is the particular form that uh he he always fancied. Um maybe because of Disneyland, I don't know.

SPEAKER_04: 21:18

I yeah, I have I have to expect it was because of Disneyland. And as I understand it, what was going on with that particular monorail project was that the Allweg Company, who is the company that ostensibly built the Disneyland monorail, but really they just kind of took some plans and built it on their own. But the Alweg Company was trying to make inroads in the United States, and they decided that Los Angeles was going to be a perfect place to install a monorail, and it was really going to take off. And uh, which does it make a lot of sense, and they were basically going to give it to the city for free. They they they were going to take some sort of fair uh payment, but they weren't gonna charge Los Angeles anything to build it because it was going to be good press for them. And they were like, look, we've we've connected Los Angeles, and and they would let the fares pay them slowly over time. And uh I I don't know how accurate this is, but evidently there was some sort of lobbying from the gas companies or tire companies or something like that that shot it down. So I I think maybe uh part of Bradbury's frustration and and why he was so focused on it was hey, this is a free thing for my city. It's gonna be great. And seeing it shut down, I I think infuriated him. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 22:44

We weren't gonna get pneumatic people tubes, so we were definitely gonna try and get it.

SPEAKER_03: 22:53

It's that kind of science fictional vision of the future, you know. It's um I don't know if you've ever seen Logan's Run. Oh, yeah. The um, you know, the the sort of the mo the it's really very corny model of the the domed city that they keep showing in the film. That is the the the vision that he would have grown up with. Uh not from Logan's Run, but from the pulp magazines, which were full of those sort of city designs. Gernsbeck and all those illustrators, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04: 23:20

Yep.

SPEAKER_02: 23:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 23:21

That's so cool. Yeah, this kind of leads me to another thing I was uh going to bring up. Uh I I recall actually on on your podcast, Phil, a while back talking about Bradbury being accused, or uh you'll you'll correct this story for me, but uh I think his his publisher had put out something that suggested that he might be anti-technology and he had to sort of lay lay down the law and say, no, no, no, no, I'm not. And it it occurred to me, I actually uh when I heard that, I was like, this is interesting because in a way, uh a lot of science fiction writers from the 50s and 60s, truly great science fiction writers, were a little bit anti-technology, they were cautionary tales. Um so I don't think that that was wrong. But w what's interesting to me is that there seems to be an arc from yes, there they are sort of cautionary tales, to especially when you get to Ray working on on things like Epcot Center, where he seems to be a true, pure, optimistic futurist. And do you do you see that as an arc or do you see it as sides of the same thing?

SPEAKER_03: 24:36

Um it it is a definite arc. Um but it's I I it's it's quite complicated how he m moved from position A to position B. I think he always had those two mindsets um going in, because as you say, science fiction is full of cautionary tales, but science fiction is also full of optimistic visions of the future. And I think he he always held those two elements within him. I think, though, that his early stories, the ones that were successful, tended to be the ones that were a bit dark or that had some kind of twist, or that were a uh a severe warning to us all. So he wasn't anti-technology, he was just wanting people to be mindful of what they were doing. Um so if you take a story like The Velt, for example, which is the one about the children's nursery, yeah, where these parents pay for this complicated virtual reality room. This is written in 1950, I think. Wow. Um build they build this room or buy this room for their children. The children can go in there, they can play in any world they want. Yeah. Um, and of course, what the children do is they conjure up things from their imagination, including um lions, tigers, and all sorts of things. And um the the parents end up being consumed by the lions. Sorry to spoil the story for anyone. Yeah. But um that story people say, oh, anti-technology, he's anti this virtual reality thing. Well, the story isn't about virtual reality. What it's about, in my view, is bad parenting. It's precisely about those parents who would take their children, plonk them down in front of the TV, and then go off and do something more interesting while the TV was entertaining the kids. So he was just taking that and um being metaphorical about it, setting it in the future, extrapolating a trend to its logical negative conclusion. Yeah. That's not because he's against the technology, it's because careful folks, this is what this will end up as if you don't use it sensibly. So that was always there, and I think that's where he was getting his early success. But then I think as time went on, you got a different kind of Bradbury. You got Bradbury the essayist. Um, from about the mid-50s onwards, he was not only selling fiction, he was selling essays to magazines. And probably I'm sp speaking out of turn in a way here, because I don't actually know this, but I'm guessing he probably got paid just as much for an essay that he could type out in half an hour as he would for a short story that he had laboured over for a couple of weeks. Um and as time went on, he started writing uh screenplays for Hollywood and is selling the rights to his books to Hollywood, and he made a good income from this stuff. He he he often said that he um selling the options on his books to Hollywood is what put his daughters through college. So he found and I and I I'm not trying to make it sound as if he was purely about the money because he wasn't. Right. But I I think there came a point in his career where he found that the the money would come in for relatively little effort, and the story writing was getting harder and harder because he kind of used up a lot of his best ideas. Yeah. Um and so I think as we get into the sixties and the seventies, you see the emergence of Bradbury, the public figure, the public speaker, the interviewee, the lecturer. Um and if you look at some of those public performances, he's very good. He's very persuasive. Even when sometimes he's talking stuff that is a bit well, hang on. Hang on, Ray, I don't I don't really see how that's gonna work. But he's so persuasive. Um that video of him um pre-Epcot talking to I think businessmen uh about um what Epcot can be about and how we're all gonna work together on this. He goes through some crazy ideas of his, some of which are beautiful, some of which are a bit disjointed. Um but that he he's he's almost like a preacher in that. He gets quite shouty at times, at times he's like a politician who's telling you this is how things have got to be in the future, you know. Um so he it's a a different aspect of his personality, which is being given permission to come out, I think, in in that era, which really stretches from the sixties through to the end of his career, really. Um and and I think what he found is that he was more in demand to speak optimistically as a vision visionary, so that's why that second half of his career he seems to have become an optimist. But I think he always had that uh as part of him in the early days, except he wasn't writing stories like that in the early days, he was writing these cautionary tales.

SPEAKER_04: 29:52

Well it yeah, and it's interesting because it's certainly fun to look at science fiction stories from the thirties and forties that are sort of. Early space operas and they're you know with Buck Rogers and and Flash Gordon and and they're fun for sure but there's not a ton of meat on the bone. And I think once the writing of science fiction becomes more sophisticated, they have to be cautionary. That is almost at the point.

SPEAKER_05: 30:21

Yeah. I mean fifth Fahrenheit 451, written in 1953, is that correct? Rightly then? Yeah. You have to understand. You think of it like he's a reflection of his time. And um I think of 1953 kind of trepidatiously because, first off, his stories were starting to get ripped off by EC comics. And then he busted them because he was very good at that. Hold on a second, wait a second. This is a very good story, but it reminds me a lot of another story that I wrote one time. You know, could you please send me royalties? You know, it was his very very direct but very polite way of getting you. So they actually started putting, you know, written Brave Brave Bradbury, but 1953, this is the time in which the Senate subcommittee hearing on juvenile delinquency is going on, and you have comic book burnings going on. And I'm sure that actually seeing his own name on covers like weird fantasy and vault of horror, etc., being incinerated certainly mod probably brought back memories of Nazi book book burnings during World War II and leading to Fahrenheit 451 of him going, Hold it, hold it, wait a second. I'm operating in this realm. You know, so those types of cocastery things are very, very personal to him.

SPEAKER_03: 31:37

Yes. And also, of course, uh the McCarthy hearings. Which didn't directly affect Ray, because he, you know, he was never um called to testify or anything, but a lot of his friends were affected, directly or indirectly. Um and he thought it absolutely outrageous that people were being called to rat on each other. So he he was really disturbed by that. He took out um a I think a full page ad in some magazine, probably Variety or something like that, condemning McCarthy. I didn't know that. That's cool. You know, that that in itself could have got him in some trouble. But he he he knew when and where to take a stand. And so all of that was feeding into Fahrenheit 451, plus, of course, general Cold War anxieties, the fear that we're we're going to be blown up at any moment. Um and I think it it's it's probably in the 60s when the space programme really takes off that he begins to feel a bit more confident again because he uh I mean obviously World War II ends with the atomic bomb, and that was a big shock to the science fiction field in a way, but also a validation of it, because a lot of science fiction writers had been writing about super bombs and super weapons. So the people in the field of of science fiction were kind of vindicated when um the the atomic bombs were made public. And uh also in World War II you've got Werner von Braun's V2 rocket, which is every science fiction fan's dream was rockets that could fly just like that.

SPEAKER_05: 33:27

Yeah, yeah. Um it's just where they land, that's the problem.

unknown: 33:31

That's right.

SPEAKER_03: 33:34

That's right. But by the time you get to the 60s, of course, the that's that rocketry is being used for peace. I mean, it's also being used in weaponry as well. But yeah, um the the colossal achievement of the Apollo programme is where Ray really felt vindicated as a science fiction writer because all this stuff that people have been saying, ah, that's silly stuff. Going into space, ah, silly stuff. All of a sudden in the 60s, wow, I was right all along. Basically, what he was able to say, as other science fiction writers were as well. Um so again, that's part of that shift from being, oh my god, we've got these dreadful technologies which we've foreseen science fiction writers are partly to blame for these bombs and oh my god, to wow, we've left our own planet, everything we've ever dreamed. So, you know, I can see reasons for a shift, if there was a shift, uh, in his outlook, really.

SPEAKER_04: 34:33

Yeah. You know, and and this this sort of takes us to I'm I'm glad you brought up that uh speech, the one that he he gave in uh I think it was 1975, uh, because uh it it is it's an incredibly optimistic speech. Yeah. Uh it's it's it's quite powerful. There's some some stuff in it that is of its time where you're like, mm, okay. But but uh it it's it's quite moving, and as I understand it, it really kicked the Epcot project back into gear. It was a project that had all but died at that point, uh, while Disney having passed away, and you know, it was what they were were trying to do is is actually build a functioning city. And when uh Disney passed away, they really couldn't keep the propulsion going for that. It was just going to it involve too much civic work, too much government work, uh too much planning, and things started to die, so they had to figure out another way to go with it. But Bradbury coming in, I mean, he feels like a full-fledged futurist at that point. And it's really powerful. He makes that speech, the project gets kicked back into gear. A few years later, I don't know how much he's actually doing on the project for a while, but it's pretty clear that once they hit up near 80, he's involved. Oh yeah. Do you know much about this time?

SPEAKER_03: 36:05

I I do, I do. Um he I'm uh and what I know basically comes from the documents I've seen in Bradbury's papers, which are held in Indianapolis. Um and in there, uh among the many, many files, uh are his ideas for Epcot, which are all of course centered around Spaceship Earth, which for the people who who aren't particularly familiar with it, the the famous uh white sphere that you always see whenever anyone talks about Epcot, they always show this sphere. It's kind of the symbol of Epcot. That was Spaceship Earth, and inside it was Spaceship Earth, the I don't know what you call it, a ride or attraction. It is it is a ride.

SPEAKER_04: 36:51

Um yeah, you you you go through the the history of communication, the spiralling inclinator.

SPEAKER_03: 37:00

And so Ray wrote that, basically. I mean he he created the idea for it, and he wrote the dialogue that you hear as you travel through it. And he started work on that in 1976. Yeah. So shortly after the speech that we've just been talking about, which was 75, um, the earliest documents I've seen relating to it are from 76. And 77 is when he begins to uh approach a f a kind of a final draft of the idea, and then I think it passes to the imagineers or whatever they were called in those days, uh, to develop it as a practical proposition. Um and obviously there were changes made uh as it went through through that. Um but yeah, so more or less after that meeting he was putting ideas on paper and working them through. And pretty much the um Spaceship Earth ride as it became is what he wrote. It is what he proposed. They obviously they've modified it over the years. I think it's had about three facelifts. Um right now, actually. Right. And every time they've replaced the narration because they've wanted to add things, and the only way of doing that would be to, well, we can't get whoever it was last time. Um Jeremy Iron.

SPEAKER_04: 38:25

So each time she uh I think I think she's she's about to be replaced though because they're replacing the uh the narration again.

SPEAKER_05: 38:32

Yeah. Eddie Deeson. Welcome to Spaceship Ice. What? No, no.

SPEAKER_04: 39:00

Belowdown on the Plus Up is a Boardwalk Times podcast. At Boardwalk Times.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.

SPEAKER_03: 39:30

But the the interesting thing for me is uh with Spaceship Earth, as with the Time Maze concept, is Ray he comes up with the narrative and the the kind of what what you will see and hear as you go through this experience. But he does also address what happens as you enter the building and what happens when you leave. He doesn't just write the show, he also thinks about audience flow, um, uh how to keep people occupied and interested while they're really just queuing up to get in. Right. And what they're going to do when they're released. Because you don't want them to just run off somewhere else and forget what they've experienced. You want to somehow consolidate what they've learned or what they've been uh shown. So you give them some interactivity to to think about, you know. And it tends to be, I mean, I haven't been to Epcot for years. Um, it's probably had at least one facelift since I went in there. But um, my understanding from having read uh descriptions, detailed descriptions of the various scenarios over the years, it tends to be those beginning and end bits that Disney have changed. And the middle bit hasn't changed a huge amount.

SPEAKER_04: 40:42

But but you know, it's interesting because you talk about that the sort of sealing off of the experience by having something as you leave. That seemed to be a an important part of early Epcot, at least. Pretty much everything you did emptied into something that was more like uh a science fair or more like uh interactive screens uh to do exactly that. And I wonder how much of that came from from Bradbury.

SPEAKER_03: 41:13

Yeah, I'd I'd I'd like to know that as well. Um even the earliest drafts I've seen include those kind of uh topping and tailing of the experience. But it may be that that came out of Ray's discussions with the Disney people, you know, because he um he he very much believed in sitting down with them and giving them his blue sky thinking, and they would say, Well, yeah, but maybe we could do it this way, and they would give him this kind of practical understanding, which he would then build into his um later drafts. So I'd I as I say, the documentation I've seen does include the pre and post activities in a in a very rudimentary form, but that doesn't mean to say that's where the ideas began. They they may have begun in a meeting, they may have begun in a phone call, and there's no documentation of it, and Ray's not here to ask anymore. Right. And we don't know precisely who he was talking to at the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 42:21

Um I mean there was certain key people, but he's he's very much like a sponge, I find, in in his writing. And maybe uh please correct me if I'm wrong, or at least I'd love to hear your observation on that. It seems that Ray, you know, definitely picks up new techniques, new ways of thinking. He's very open-minded to that sort of thing. So at first when he's working with the pulps, he's very open to that type of style of writing and those types of ideas and concepts, and then he moves into the comics industry, and you have something very similar, and then he branches off into film and television, you know, having to have to having to endure John Houston's ragging for a while in Ireland, you know, etc. etc. And then he finally comes back and he's very transformed. Like his his work transforms after his Hollywood connections, you know, in his film film connections. And it wouldn't surprise me that hanging around Walt Disney a lot certainly rubbed off on him in a way where he's like, wow, this is a whole new way of storytelling. I can't just do it with my typewriter, but I don't have access to anything else, so I'm just gonna do it with my typewriter.

SPEAKER_03: 43:27

Yeah, and I I think you're right. I I think he uh he he did absorb ideas from elsewhere. He's he he was never one of those writers who believed that he was the only one who had good ideas. He believed that they could come from from elsewhere. You were talking about Houston. Um Houston is the classic example of a a film director who was also a writer who wanted to collaborate with Ray, but then changed Ray's words. And that always rubbed Ray up the wrong way. If you employed him to write your film, he wanted to write your film. When it came to the theme park stuff, I think it was so obviously a collaborative form that he he would sit down with these people who knew the technical stuff because he knew he didn't know the technical stuff. So he would come up with the fantastical idea and then basically look at them and say, How can we do that? Right. Um I don't know, don't know. So there there does seem to be a a difference in how he responded to being rewritten by producers and directors and how he collaborated with Imagineers and similar people. But it it may be that the Disney people were more respectful of him. Um I I have read, for instance, that he found working with technical people, with engineers, much easier than working with other writers, because uh every writer thinks they can second guess you. Right. Whereas an engineer won't try and second guess your idea, they'll try and facilitate your idea. The one exception to that that I know of is when he worked with the Smithsonian with an idea for the Air and Space Museum, and he wrote this essentially it's a planetarium show that he wrote, and he got a ton of feedback from these astronomy people who said, no, that's not how the sun is created. No, that's not where planets come from. No, that's that's not how life begins. And in each case, he'd written something metaphorical about the sun berthing the planets uh or or whatever. So he'd written these metaphorical things, and the scientists were taking them literally and saying, nope, that's not correct. So he had a hard time working with those people. Although his planetarium showed that he didn't get to work with the Smithsonian, he then sold to somebody else, and it was in California instead.

SPEAKER_05: 46:09

So that's why it explains the plaque out in front of the Griffith Park Observatory. Everybody welcome except Ray.

SPEAKER_04: 46:17

No, it's interesting, it reminds me of there was an old ride at Disneyland, long gone now, that Pete and I have talked about before. It was a ride called Adventure Through Inner Space. And I was it was uh sponsored by Monsanto. Oh boy. And uh it was supposed to be about how atoms and molecules formed everything in in the world. The designers of that ride was started kind of building it up, and and you when you talk about these things, they have to be metaphorical. You you can't really show that kind of scale. And Monsanto kept coming into them and saying, no, no, no, no, this is not how this works. And finally the designers had to just shut them down and say, Look, it's just it's a metaphor. You can't I can't like make an atom this you know size of the Empire State Building. I don't have room.

SPEAKER_05: 47:07

We only have styrofoam and glitter, like give me a break. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 47:13

So I I uh I'm curious, like it kind of in this Epcot period, and and also I know that Ray worked a little with design for um the park that I believe is now called Disneyland Paris, but was at the time called Euro Disney. Yeah. Um do you do you know of I ideas or uh things that he worked on that weren't used?

SPEAKER_03: 47:35

Not for Disney, no. Um I'm pretty sure that what we what we got is what he wrote. I don't think there were any major proposals that were shelved or anything. Uh I mean, having said that for Euro Disney or Disneyland Paris, as far as I know, the only thing he worked on was the Orbitron. Yes, that's what I was. Yeah. Which is isn't that complicated, really. You know, it's not it's not something with a a narrative particularly, it's just a ride as far as I can see. Yeah. It's it's pretty. Oh, it is. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. I I I haven't been there, but I have seen um there's a a walkthrough video on YouTube, which has been done very well without any narration or anything. It's literally somebody walking slowly with a camera through it and going through the ride multiple times. So you get a really good sense of what it is.

SPEAKER_02: 48:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 48:35

Um but I I find it hard to believe what Ray's input to that would have been because there isn't really a script for that. Um the o the only thing that I've um seen relating to the Orbitron is that the designers at one point were saying we're struggling to make it feel that the rockets are going very fast, because they're just going they're just going around in a circle, basically. Right. Fairly slow. It's a fairly sedate ride, and there are these sort of planets going around in a kind of an or I can't say this word, or arrangement.

SPEAKER_04: 49:08

Yeah, yeah, it's a hard way. Or or like in the dark crystal.

SPEAKER_05: 49:12

I love those cookies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 49:16

Um and apparently Ray said, Well, if you made the planets go the other way, so the way the rockets are going, they'll appear to be going twice as fast. And ah, yeah, brilliant idea. Yeah, really. They seem they seem to have built that into it. Although if you look at the actual Orbitron, there are some planets that go one way and some that go the other. So you know, whether they really did take Ray's idea on board or not, I don't know. But um it is alleged that that's what happened.

SPEAKER_04: 49:46

Now you you say uh not for Disney, but are there other rides, theme park things that he worked on that uh didn't get used? Other than the Great Electric Time Maze?

SPEAKER_03: 49:57

Yeah, there are loads. Um I I have to tell you this. I was researching in the Bradbury Centre in I'm gonna say 2014. I may be a little bit out there, but I was I was there at a certain time, uh, which was just a few months after all of Bradbury's materials were shipped to Indianapolis, where the Bradbury Centre is. Uh Ray died in 2012. He left his papers to the Bradbury Center, and that's where the papers are now. All shipped across from California to Indianapolis in the original filing cabinets, so that Ray's filing system was preserved. I was the first person to go through all of the cabinets. They were still wrapped in plastic when I was there. Wow. I was given permission to un unveil them, and the only restriction placed on me was if you take anything out, put it back exactly where you found it. Okay, I'll do that. And so I was there primarily to look for scripts because I was focusing on Ray's uh screenplays, his film work, his TV work. Right. But every time I came across anything that was narrative that I hadn't seen before, I would make a note of it. So here are my notes. Some of these things ha have no context to them. They're in a file, and you think, what's this? So there is one. Oh, let me go to the right page here. There is one called Aviopolis. Okay. All that is there in the file is just one page, and it's page three of some document. Uh-huh. And we don't know how long the document should have been, or what was on page one or page two. It doesn't say what it is, it just says Aviopolis. It's in Ray's handwriting, Aviopolis, and there's this one page r sort of randomly taken from a script. And it looks like it might be for the air and space museum, the Smithsonian maybe, or some other air and space museum. Don't know. Wow. Very mysterious, but it's some kind of experience that involves people travelling up escalators as they learn about the history of avi aviation. That's all we got for that one. There's one called Chartship Universe. Where the only page that I found is page one. So the rest of the thing isn't there. We just give an introduction to it. Um and this is some kind of ride that you would uh there'd be some kind of pre-ride activity, and then you'd get in the ride, and you'd basically be taken through the universe. Uh I don't know how far you would get because there's only one page of it there. I'm not sure who this was for. Um probably was for Douglas Trumbull, you know, the guy who did the special effects for 2001 A Space Odyssey, directed the film Brainstorm and Silent Running.

SPEAKER_04: 52:54

We ran into him when we talked about the Back to the Future ride at Universal, because he directed that film.

SPEAKER_05: 52:59

We even mentioned him. That's bizarre because we even mentioned him in the Time Maze episode as doing some of the effects for the time thing. And I had no clue that this is what this was for. This is hysterical.

SPEAKER_03: 53:12

That's awesome. Yeah, so Doug Trumbull was um had a company that specialized in these rides. He was um an early pioneer of motion control electronics, um, which probably came from his effects work originally, like building motion control cameras for the I don't know whether it would have been the it wouldn't have been the Star Wars films, probably for close encounters or something. Yeah. Um so he developed all of this stuff for entertainment purposes. And of course he was also a pioneer of high definition video, and so that would have been built into some of these ride things that he worked on with Ray and with other people.

SPEAKER_04: 53:53

I got to do one of his show scan theatre films once, uh, because one of the first ones uh was in uh Texas, where I grew up. So I I I I got to see it, I think you know, one of ten people who ever actually saw them functioning.

SPEAKER_03: 54:08

Brilliant, brilliant. So there's a couple of things for Trumbull in the Bradbury papers, but again, with very little context, you you don't know where this would go, or whether it was just a blue sky thing, or whether it was uh a kind of a a genuine script for a real ride that did turn up somewhere. Yeah. It's really hard to pin down. I think what is needed is for somebody, and I I don't have the the energy to do this, but somebody needs to go into the Trumbull archive if there is one, and uh find his side of the discussion, you know. To put it together. We in the Bradbury papers you only get the Bradbury side of things mostly. He doesn't always copy incoming documents, he mostly just stores his own document. Then there's that thing that I mentioned earlier for the Smithsonian, which variously was called Great Shout of the Universe, uh or I think just universe or something like that. Um and then there are all sorts of things that he did for I'm gonna say large-scale video walls, which is again one of these sort of big technologies of the eighties and nineties, the idea that you could put together a huge screen out of lots of monitors. And he he wrote a number of uh experiences that were for display on these, and in those cases I never found any documents about them, but I did find video recordings where people had basically for as a test, they'd set the video wall running and then they'd set a camera up and filmed the whole thing so that people could have a look, have a representation of of what it would look like. And of course, this is all low definition um VHS, because it's from the eighties and nineties. Yeah. So so there's a whole load of this stuff that Bradbury was doing, and very little of it came to a final product, as far as I know. Yeah. Uh but I think it's a it's if there's anybody listening to this whoever wants to do a PhD, this is something that would be a fantastic research project, because there is a ton of material in the files, but it needs somebody to study it carefully, more carefully than I have, and uh piece it together and come up with a timeline and figure out who Ray was interacting with, Trumbull or Marty Sklar at Disney or whoever it was, you know. I think there could be a book in that.

SPEAKER_05: 56:40

Sounds like a challenge.

SPEAKER_03: 56:42

Absolutely. I'm I'm I'm I'm really suggesting that somebody do that, please. Somebody.

SPEAKER_04: 56:47

Oh, it would be so interesting. So uh just to to investigate Ray's uh activities in in experiential art.

SPEAKER_03: 56:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_04: 56:57

Which he which he he he obviously was was fascinated by.

SPEAKER_03: 57:01

Yeah, absolutely. And it's it in a way it is similar to his work in film because if you look at Bradbury's published output, yeah, he was a prolific author from the late 1940s, well no, sorry, from about 1940 onwards. His output began to decline in terms of quantity, not quality, but in terms of quantity, began to decline in the late fifties. During the sixties, he didn't publish many books. 70s, not many books, has a bit of a comeback in the eighties with books, but his career looks like it's disappeared. But what has actually happened is that in the sixties he started writing poetry, some of which was published. He started writing plays and producing his plays. He started working in Hollywood. And a lot of these resulted in projects that have no shelf life. So the Hollywood scripts weren't filmed, so they just disappear effectively. The plays were staged, but when a play is finished, it's gone. I mean, you can publish the book of the play, obviously, but nobody reads those really. That's right, yeah. So and and these tended to come out over the last couple of decades in uh limited edition books from small presses. So you can find them, you can find Bradbury's film scripts nowadays. But to the average reader who just you know goes into a Barnes and Noble or whatever, it it looks as if Bradbury stopped writing in about 1960. He didn't at all. He was writing constantly, but he was doing it for non-book projects. And there's a whole load of these rides and experiences which um with the exception of Epcot have just evaporated.

SPEAKER_05: 59:03

It's it's interesting you mentioned like his all these scripts that disappeared. One of his more famous books and also something that lives on in Disneyland was actually spawned out of a script that he originally wrote, which is the Halloween tree. Um it originally started off as a script in 1967 with Chuck Jones. And um it didn't come to fruition until much, much later. Hannah Barbera produced a very version of it. Um I honestly think that like Leica or some or Ardman, you know, some sort of stop-motion animation studio would do a great job of doing an adaptation of the Halloween tree. Um so if you guys are listening, go to it. Um but but uh he published the it as a book in 1972. And eventually in 2007, Ray collaborated with a historian and writer named Tim O'Day, whom I've done some business with in the past. uh in erecting a tree. And originally they were going to build like some sort of elaborate fiberglass tree with all of the pumpkins with Mr. Mound shroud somewhere in the side of it. But now it's just a tiny little tree with orange lights in it, you know, in Frontierland. But Ray visited it over and over again. It's great. It's a nice little touch, you know, it's a nice little touch to Frontierland.

SPEAKER_04: 1:00:19

This is actually it's interesting I'm glad you brought that up, Pete, because just last week I saw a thing that Tim O'Day had posted about I guess I gather that Disney is about to start streaming Something Wicked This Way Comes again. Because it had not been available for a long time. And he made a post about it and Phil he posted a link to your podcast where you spoke I guess your three podcasts where you broke down the history of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Yeah. So I just I I I thought that was nice synchronicity.

SPEAKER_03: 1:00:54

Yeah I mean but both of those uh Halloween Tree and Something Wicked are examples of in a way of Ray recycling unused projects because something wicked started out as a film script that never got made so he turned it into a novel and then he turned the novel into a film script again. Idea after idea yeah Halloween tree as you say was a script didn't sell turned it into a book and then the book became a script which became a film. So there's a process of recycling going on there. But always creative he never w with one or two exceptions, he he never slavishly translates something from one form to another. He always it it's as if he uh kind of reads the story and says right yeah okay that's the story puts it down and then types everything afresh so now I'm gonna write a script and I've got that story in my head but I'm not retyping that story. I'm telling a new story based on what I've just read and off he goes. So you always get nearly always get something different when he recycles. He will recycle but always with added value or nearly always with added value. But um the specific case of Halloween tree reminds me as I was looking through the Time Maze script again and some of the other scripts like the Epcot um spaceship Earth script I was reminded that the Halloween tree is the same sort of thing. The story of the Halloween tree is basically a bunch of kids, Halloween time, one of their friends goes missing and they have to travel through time to try and rescue him. And that is essentially the plot of uh the time maze I think the second maze yeah yeah yeah so it's one of his go-to ideas is to have this kind of search and rescue operation with time travel. And in the case of the Halloween tree what they do is they go back to Halloween in the past. You know so they look at the origins of Halloween they look at the for some reason I can't remember they look at the building of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

SPEAKER_05: 1:03:13

It's all about the origins of why each kid is dressed you know so one of them is Quasimodo and so it's like yeah let's climb up climb up the cathedral and blocks form underneath their feet as they're running and I'm sorry I read this book once a year at Halloween so I'm a big big nerd for this one but um but uh yeah it's I I I saw that when we got to the October country portion of the Time Maze area and I went and that's when I had a very similar realization like wait a minute that sounds like the same plot like and a lot of authors we talked about his influences it makes you wonder what happened in his past that makes you think like was there a kid that went missing and if so did he have some sort of fantasy as a child like maybe I could go back in time and find this kid and it just kind of stuck with him and it just like a like a song you can't get out of your head he keeps coming back to that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:05

I I don't like to psychoanalyse authors usually have you ever heard of his story The Lake? No, I don't think I have heard of this one. Remind me what the one of his early stories uh from about 1943 I think and it's basically it centres around a girl of Lake Michigan um building a sand castle with her little friend she goes into the lake and she never comes back until thirty forty years later the man goes back to his childhood home he's on the beach and somebody's found something in the water and it's all covered in seaweed and you know I'll I'll I'll leave listeners to go and find that story. But that apparently was based on a real incident from Battery's childhood. Wow. Some somebody went I I don't know if it was somebody that he knew personally but it was something that happened where he lived that uh a girl went missing in the lake. So years later it becomes the basis of this story where he's sort of reminiscing uh about his childhood. And it may be that the missing character in the Halloween tree which I think is Pipkin possibly um it may be that he's the same character essentially he's somebody who's gone missing in childhood.

SPEAKER_05: 1:05:29

It's interesting put the world to rights. Yeah it reminds me a little bit of his story I I see you no more where it's about um extradition of a um uh person by immigration forces in the 50s and it was like based off of a neighbor of his that got uh deported during the Great Purges in Los Angeles and you know he a friend of his being taken away never seeing it never seen again it's a heart wrenching story.

SPEAKER_03: 1:05:55

There's also a story called um John Huff's Leave Taking which is about two twelve year olds and uh John Huff is the friend of the narrator or the the focal character of the story. And John Huff is leaving his family is going to another town and it's basically the the heartbreak of this little twelve year old kid losing his best friend. Yeah um not because of anything evil that's happened but just because you know this is this is what happens in life and that's a very very touching story and uh in that particular instance Ray spoke about that story and said that well it's a tr essentially a true story but it was actually the other way around in real life that in real life he was the one who went away leaving his friend in the lurch. Yeah. But for fictional purposes he he sort of took the opposite point of view and showed what it's like when your best friend leaves you.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:55

What a great expression of empathy. That's so good. Which is I suppose really in an intensified way what something wicked ultimately is. It's it's about is your best friend going to be pulled away from you. Oh yeah it certainly is I think that the the thing I struggle with was the film version of something wicked which I I like is that it seems to have reframed the story to be a story about a son and a father and and I don't feel like that's what the story was.

SPEAKER_03: 1:07:25

Jason Robarts was gunning for an Oscar you know it's the awkward thing with the film is that Robards I I think is is very good. He's incredibly good.

SPEAKER_05: 1:07:37

And so is Jonathan Price. The duel in the library is one of the more chilling conflicts between good and evil I've ever seen on film.

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:45

It still works so good with his resistance and everything even if you don't know anything about those characters if you just show that scene out of context the the visual presentation of it the ripping the pages out of the book beautifully done clearly the the key scene in the film yeah it's perfect hey everybody Kelly here sorry to interrupt uh aside from all of the cool stuff that's going on on Boardbot Times right now uh I also have an article coming out on fanfare uh should be coming out uh pretty much the same day that this drops. So uh if you want to go if you have any interest at all in reading about uh Orson Wells reading poetry on the radio and how that affected the rest of his career I I'm gonna hook you up. Check out fanfare.pub fanfare dothub for that uh now back to Kelly Pete and Dr. Phil Nichols let's let's talk about Ray and Walt Disney which I don't think we've really discussed at all. What what what's your take on that relationship?

SPEAKER_03: 1:09:09

Um I think in many ways they were kindred spirits because they believed in many of the same things in terms of what is entertaining and uh Disney of course would although he made these films that people think of as light entertainment, there are some very dark Disney films. You know, Bambi is as dark as you get. Oh my gosh yes um and and that really echoes Ray as well. Ray is a an entertaining storyteller but with a a tremendous streak of darkness running through what he does. So I can see a lot of commonality there and um the but the the reality of it I I looked in some of the biographies of Bradbury today just to remind myself of the the sort of the time scale. But it appears that Bradbury first met Disney in 1964 and they met in a sh in a department store just purely randomly Ray says he was doing Christmas shopping with his kids and across the aisle there was Walt Disney carrying a whole pile of boxes that he'd just been buying and Ray goes up to him and introduces himself and Disney says I know who you are I've read your books so there's a kind of an instant oh my god y he knows me let's go to the food court yeah yeah I mean at this point Disney was quite a well known face because he was on TV all the time you know and not just his his work was on film on TV he was on TV as well as he was a character yeah that's right yeah um Ray wasn't that kind of personality at that point um so Ray would have recognised Disney but Disney wouldn't have recognised Ray I don't think um but Disney apparently according to Ray and I I've no reason to doubt this Disney invited him to lunch the next day so Ray turned up at Disney's office they sat uh apparently at a little card table and they had soup and sandwiches and Ray was given one hour apparently there was a secretary who said you you you must stick to time Mr Bradbury don't distract Mr Disney Ray was supposed to have an hour and they had their hour and then Disney said let me show you some stuff and he he takes Bradbury on a tour of the studio and he shows him the animatronics he shows him the animatronic um Lincoln the Abraham Lincoln animatronic that was just being worked on at that time which Ray then goes and writes a story about oh which story is that uh it's called Downwind from Gettysburg nice basically it is basically the the Disney animatronic Lincoln who gets assassinated oh wow oh terrific so they had this one meeting um according to one of the biographies I think it's John Ellers biography of Ray he he wrote three volumes of a biography of Ray I think it's in his book um they never met socially or outside of Disney's office. So although they call each other friends and they spoke several times over the years um they only apparently ever met in Disney's office always at the little card table probably always with the salad and soup. But of course Disney only lived till 66 so they just knew knew each other personally for a couple of years there. But I think what you Kelly what you were saying earlier on is that with Epcot there was this kind of drive to either kill the project after Disney had died or to do something that would truly honour him. And I think Ray very much felt that the thing to do was to honour the man. Yeah so he he always spoke very positively of of Disney as a person. But beyond those little meetings they had um the the that they didn't um interact a huge amount. Ray mostly interacted with uh people who worked for Disney so he he interacted with Disney's brother I think and a lot of the technical people but very little with Disney himself. So they seem to have got on really well as far as I know.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:46

Yeah you know it's it's interesting because you know we talked about that 75 1975 speech and I mean I'm probably projecting a little bit here but there does seem to be a tenor that Bradbury has which is I knew Walt I was friends with Walt I am hanging on to the legacy of Walt and I'm going to make sure that you don't mess it up and he doesn't say that exactly but he does say I'm going to be watching you which is very interesting I was gonna say my favorite part of that um speech is when he he goes off uh on a tangent about money because he he says something like a lot of you are uh saying that money is an obstacle here he goes off on this rant of of how money originated and yeah he comes up with this theory that the way all money has ever worked is that you do the job and then you get paid.

SPEAKER_03: 1:14:47

So in the case of this Epcot thing um let's do the work and then we'll worry about the money later. And uh in a in a sense he's absolutely right if you if you believe in a thing you ought to commit to doing it but um I I as somebody who's had to bid for funding for things in the past I I do think it you can't get away with that Ray. You can't just spend millions on developing something and then say well now let's have the money. You've got to have some of that money there.

SPEAKER_04: 1:15:19

Maybe he should have told that to you know we should tell that to the current uh company of Disney um just saying but but it is it's profound when he says it in the in that speech you if it feels very very moving you're like oh yes of course you're right you we we should just do what we believe in and then the money will come absolutely well and to give Walt you know credit for a quote that Ray loved to quote him on was one of the first things that he remembers Walt ever telling him which is nothing has to die.

SPEAKER_05: 1:15:51

You know and that's that's evocative of both men, frankly I th I feel I mean from a emotional and a creative point of view. I mean we talked about how Ray recycled his ideas so nothing really died with him but but we're still talking about these guys because they have they both in their own ways and together actually had a very profound effect on the world around us. And that's not really an exaggeration. I mean we've already talked about how Disney's uh creative uh approach especially in his later years we won't talk about Disney the Huckster years but we will definitely talk about his the Epcot and Disneyland era definitely did usher in how uh rapid transit was viewed and how political points of view were viewed how Ronald Reagan was elected you know things like that that uh definitely have influenced and the same thing with Ray Bradbury his his writings you know were in some ways we are still talking about them because they are still very very relevant. In the current climate that we have here in America we are constantly bringing up two books 1984 and uh Fahrenheit 451 they're both coming up and um they are warnings for a reason is because that they really strike a chord within all of us. And so I guess Walt's quote nothing has to die is very very true.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:10

I I would add a third book there by the way I would add the handmaid's tale.

SPEAKER_04: 1:17:15

Oh yes oh yes yeah with those three you you've got the whole thing covered that's it I agree I might also uh I might also add the parable of the sower which yeah uh it is is almost too realistic almost like oh no we're actually doing that now that's not even cautionary anymore yeah yeah no kidding well this this seems like a pretty good place to start drawing it to a close uh is there anything we haven't covered that either of you uh would like to touch on uh actually something we didn't talk about really is world fairs oh yes that's that's very interesting uh because Bradbury did did he not work on the what we like to call the not a 1964 world's fair because it was an unsanctioned fair yes didn't he worked on the America Pavilion is that correct yes that's right so essentially it's it's Spaceship Earth but rather than talking about the whole human species it's um the history of America basically um it's and it's a ride it's but it's a very primitive one obviously I wasn't there it doesn't exist so it's good to look at it but the script exists and there are there are photos uh of it um and basically people would get on these sort of um kind of a trolley thing with with lots of seating on and it would travel along and they they would be towed past various screens and tableau um in front of them and experience a narrative of uh how America became what it is.

SPEAKER_03: 1:18:57

Oh wow yeah so that's his his dry run he didn't know this but it was his dry run for Spaceship Earth in many ways. Yeah um but he was influenced by previous World's Fairs because he went to the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 and probably again in 34 because it ran for two years. And his aunt Neva who was the she was the creative one in the Bradbury family and she's probably the one where he gets most of his creative DNA from is not directly from his parents but sideways from his aunt who he spent a lot of time with her as a child and she did some work on the Chicago World's Fair and she took him along. So he experienced that when he was twelve or thirteen and then in nineteen thirty nine before he was an established author he went off to New York to the World Science Fiction Convention the first ever science fiction convention which was scheduled to coincide with the nineteen thirty nine World's Fair in New York so while he was there for the convention he also went to the World's Fair.

SPEAKER_04: 1:20:09

So again influenced by that I I don't know what he would have seen at that one but um I I can help it one of the things that that and I believe I think uh Phil the first time I ever uh reached out to you was to ask if you could help me locate this piece of writing but and and may maybe I imagined it but uh the 1939 World's Fair had uh a ride that was called Futurama oh and yes Futurama was uh similar to what you're describing with his American ride where they you they basically put you in theater seats that were on chains and pulled through this this alien landscape and you kind of circled around the alien landscape and I I seem to remember a piece that where he had written about that. And then that that ride Futurama was revised for the 1964 World's Fair and and there was a Futurama 2 it was a sequel ride so uh it it seems very likely to me that he at least experienced uh those.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:25

Yes all almost certainly yeah because he loved those things. Yeah so yeah he would have done I'll have to uh I I don't recall that piece of writing but I'm sure you're right um so I will try and track that down and if I didn't ever get back to you about it previously I'll do so now.

SPEAKER_04: 1:21:46

I'm just committed to you were very you were very kind and generous and you said I don't know offhand but I I will I will see well I'll I give the same answer now yeah oh I'm on to you nichols but uh yeah there's the interesting thing about the there's a lot that's interesting about the 1964 World's Fair. Uh uh much of what we think of as the modern theme park starts right there. Uh especially with Disney but obviously with with Ray's participation in the American pavilion um there's also uh just to kind of wrap back to the beginning of our conversation there were proposals for different World's fairs around that time and there were two that were very close to being green lit and the other one was to also to happen in Chicago again. And the Chicago World's Fair had a uh uh quite an elaborate proposal and it was designed by Victor Gruen who we talked about earlier the the father of the shopping mall but so it it's really interesting because a lot of what Victor Gruen designed for the 64 World's Fair uh the one the she the Chicago one that was never actually built looks a lot like what Epcot became there there's strong similarities between the two.

SPEAKER_05: 1:23:18

Well Gruen actually was quoted several times by Imagineers a lot with one of his books um in his design for Epcot so that doesn't surprise me at all.

SPEAKER_04: 1:23:27

Yeah the aft after Walt died when they went through his library they they found a single book about urban design and it was Victor Gruen's um The Heart of Our Cities.

SPEAKER_05: 1:23:39

It all ties together doesn't it all comes around it all comes around. So I think we've reached a point of our conversation here that we do on our show that I think I would love to actually have you participate in, Phil, if you don't mind which is we we do a thing with our show that's in our title the plus up and so it's without any consideration of budget time safety constraints or whatever was there anything in the time maze that you would have added or changed? We'd love to hear your plus up on that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:24:16

Oh anything I would have added or changed um or inspired you yeah yeah uh let me give you uh an opposite of inspired first and then maybe I'll come up with an inspired one while I'm when I'm great talking about that. Um one thing I noticed when I was reading about the time maze and and I think you you kind of glossed over it when you were talking about it and rightly so because it wasn't that important. But m much of what Ray put into that time maze is revisits of his greatest hits. So there's a dinosaur hunt which is basically his story a sound of thunder there's people being flung out into space away from each other which is basically his short story Kaleidoscope and and there's oh there's the October country which of course is a a short story collection of his and he puts that in there. What I would change if Ray were sitting across the table from me now I would say Ray you've got to give us something new you can't just keep recycling we've done mechanical hounds yes I think that's an awesome that's actually a great note.

SPEAKER_04: 1:25:31

It's like Ray come on come on yeah you're right the mechanical hound was in there as well wasn't it's Fahrenheit 451 yeah he wanted to he wanted to give people some sort of magnetic belt where they would get a mild electric shock yes touched by the mechanical hounds.

SPEAKER_05: 1:25:48

Which is really nice I I think that's some Disneyland patrons probably deserve it. I'm just I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_03: 1:25:57

That's like the Mr. Electrico which you talked about last time where Mr. Electrico would touch you with a sword and say live forever and you'd get a shock. Some people would have a heart attack. Yeah maybe a universal but not a Disney yeah but the thing that I I sort of took as a real positive from the time maze is the the that consideration of the before, the during and the after so although he presents it as three mazes it's really pre-show show and post show and it's that kind of structural thought which I I think is terrific because um you go to a lot of shows that you can pay a lot of money for in theatres and whatever and people don't give any consideration to what goes on before. They just play a bit of musac over the PA system while you're sitting there waiting for the show to begin. But I I like things like Cirque de Soleil where before the show begins they send clowns out into the audience and it takes about ten minutes takes about ten minutes for people to realise hang on there's a clown people start pointing and oh my god oh my god it started it started and of course it hasn't started but they're giving you a little pre-show and I I I like that I like that people take into account what's going to happen before the show begins and then how are we going to get people out at the end? Let's have something that isn't just everybody out let's have some method and because leaving a theatre is a bit like getting off a plane you know you know that you've got to wait for all those other people to get off before you can get off. It would be nice if there was something that entertained you while you were doing that. And I don't think Ray brought that to fruition but he had considered it and that's what I liked.

SPEAKER_04: 1:27:58

What about you Pete? Do you have a a plus up for the plus time?

SPEAKER_05: 1:28:04

I want to see it built you know like I would I would actually would would like to see a a version of this built and especially with in a revitalized interest in retrofuturism today and design the the Guji style etc uh I would actually like to see that applied. So it actually does like it make it a Futurama 3 for all we care. Yeah. But the the very sweeping design and the very approach. And obviously because of uh his widespread imagination we can't verbatim do everything that Ray intended into it but doing a a version of it really wouldn't be a bad thing. Yeah. And and uh especially today uh where we've talked about this Kelly and I in our previous episodes where there's almost a um adversarial nature to going to theme parks these days where like as soon as you pay that high price ticket it then becomes you better give me all my money's worth or else I think that something like the time maze would be structured you had mentioned earlier about when you pay or what you don't pay for uh when you are entering an like if you're entering a town you're not paying for that experience but you are paying for a restaurant unless you're in Rome which you pay for everything. But still you raise the notion I think of introducing the optimism and not necessarily a full utopic approach because that's just not feasible in today's economy. But I think introducing concepts that go beyond just mild entertainment um are very, very possible with the time maze. And so even though this is kind of a a a wishy washy, mealy mouthed approach to a plus up, that's actually the main concept I would like to see introduced to it would be A, I'd love to see it done, but B, I would love to see some of Ray's optimism inserted in there to To kind of bring back the optimism into a themed experience. So when you walk out, you feel better than when you entered.

SPEAKER_03: 1:30:08

Yes, I I think that's great. I think that's how it should be. Um incidentally, I don't know which version of the time maze you read, but I looked at a version that's in the Bradbury Centre files, and it includes a preamble, which is basically a kind of a business um account of what this thing will be. And it talks about the time maze requiring, I think it says two hundred thousand square feet of of land. And it talks about how many of these there would be, and I think it's something like six in across the US. Six different locations and others around the world. And it's sort of some m just made up figures, I'm sure, but some figures suggesting how much this would generate, you know. So it's it's not just an off the top of the head idea. I mean it may have started as that, but it it became a serious business proposition. That's really cool. Oh and by the way, three there are three names on that proposal. There's Bradbury, there's John Jurdy, who is the architect who I mentioned earlier, the shopping mall guy. And the third one is I've got to check my notes, make sure I get this right, John DeCor, who is uh or was an art director, production designer from Hollywood, who worked on films such as South Pacific uh right the way through to Ghostbusters in 1984. So that you know, there's some serious thought gone into it. It's not just Ray's proposal. Um it's got two other people behind it. That's really cool.

SPEAKER_04: 1:31:44

That's fascinating. It never even crossed my mind that he thought of this as a serious possibility. I you know, I just read it and it was like, this is a flight of fancy. Yeah he wrote it real quickly and then walked away from it. It never occurred to me that he actually considered trying to build something like it. That's wild. Amazing. That's really, really wild. Well, I think as we kind of draw this to a close, I want to uh first off, thank you, Phil. Yes, Dr. Phil Nichols, for joining us today. Thank you so much. Wonderful. It's been really delightful. Yeah, it's been great. Is there is there anything you'd like to plug? Anything that you'd like to sell? Anything.

SPEAKER_03: 1:32:25

Well, I would just uh suggest that if people are interested in Bradbury, have a listen to my podcast, Bradbury100, uh, or visit my website, which is Bradbury Media.co.uk, and on there you'll find links to all the other things that I do. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_04: 1:32:41

And we'll put those in the show notes too. Uh uh folks, I I listen to Bradbury100, so you should too. Yep. All right, so from me and Pete and Dr. Phil Nichols, this has been A Lowdown on the Plus Up. 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 Boardwalk Times.net. Feel free to reach out to Pete and I at Lowdown on the Plus Up on Blue Sky, Mastodon, Instagram, and all the other socials. Or you can 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_00: 1:34:27

And you can't escape me. Luckily, it's a short poem, but it sums up some of my feelings on why I love space travel, why I write science fiction, why I'm intrigued with what's going on this weekend on Mars. And part of this has my philosophy about space travel in it, and if you'll permit, I'll read it to you. It's very, very short. The fence we walked between the years did balance us serene. It was a place half in the sky where in the green of leaf and promising of peach, we'd reach our hand to touch and almost touch the sky. If we could reach and touch, we said, 'twould teach us not to, never to be dead. We ate and almost touched that stuff. Our reach was never quite enough. If only we had tallered then and touched God's cuff, his hem, we would not have to go with them who've gone before, who sure has us stood tunnel as they could stand, and hooked by stretching, turn, that they might keep their land, their home, their heart, their flesh and soul. But they like us were standing in a hole. Oh Thomas, will a race one day stand really tunnel across the void, across the universe and all, and measured out with rocket fire, at last put Adam's finger forth, as on the cistine ceiling, and God's hand come down the other way to measure man and find him good and gift him with forever's day. I work for that. Short man, large dream. I send my rockets forth between my ears, hoping an inch of good is worth a pound of years. Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal mouth. We've reached Alpha Centrality. We're tall. Oh God, we're tall.