When Disney disappoints
This video in the New York Times looks at Disney’s new Innoventions Dream Home attraction – and finds it sorely wanting.
The attraction is contrasted with the space-age Tomorrowland Monsanto House of the Future created in 1957 – and still looking startlingly beautiful and avant-garde even today.
Actor and writer David Rakoff paid a visit on the Times’ behalf: “I was expecting to find something highly speculative, deeply futuristic. So, I got there, and it’s turns out that it’s not a house. It’s not an actual house. It’s closer to an auto show.”
This is not the only disappointment he experiences: “You get to the front door and two things are evident. It’s incredibly retrogade… art-nouveau wood and transfers with Tiffany glass, but it’s a bit of a let-down. And it looks kinda like a high-end casino.
“There are all these characters. The problem is, they all wear the same yellow journey, so they just look like BestBuy employees.”
He’s got some ideas about why the new attraction doesn’t work: “The Dream Home is characterised over and over again as being an ‘aspirational dwelling’. I know they began it about four years ago, or longer.
“This feels like a house pre-sub prime mortgage prices. It feels like like a house pre-$140 a barrel oil time. It just feels like a reality show set which is a lot of useless public space, a lot of large foyers…
“The nature of the way a home would be seems kind of dispiritingly out-of-touch.”
Rakoff is not the only visitor to dislike it – elsewhere in the blogosphere it is called ‘a big ad for Microsoft’.
The Treehugger blog calls it a “McMansion” as well as “ugly and stupid.” More here >>
Its post finishes with the conclusion: “Walt is spinning in his cryogenic cylinder.”
And, looking at the pictures, it’s quite hard to disagree. You can check its website out for yourselves here >>