LEONARD MALTIN IN FOCUS – 1996
Moviegoing at Walt Disney World

I recently returned from a trip to Walt Disney World in Orlando.  It was only my second time there and, taking in all three venues–The Magic Kingdom, Disney-MGM Studios, and Epcot–I was struck by how much filmmaking there is on display, how much of it is good, and how many prominent people have been involved in the making of these films.  Yet no one who doesn't visit the parks is even aware that they exist!

For instance, there's The Timekeeper, a nine-camera, nine-projector Circlevision presentation, originally produced for Disneyland Europe, with Jeremy Irons as H.G. Wells and Michel Piccoli as Jules Verne, who goes on an astonishing series of adventures in time.  It's one thing to launch a film at the Paris Exposition of 1900, but it's quite another to stage it in a 360-degree setting!  The robotic host of the show, in person and not on film, is a character called Nine-Eye who boasts the voice and personality of Robin Williams.

Jim Abrahams of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker fame directed a brief but enjoyable scare-comedy with Chevy Chase and Martin Short for The Monster Sound Show exhibit.

Joe Dante directed an 88-second (that's right, 88-second) film as part of The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror attraction.  I can't comment on this first-hand, because I'm too chicken to get on that ride!  Ditto for Alien Encounters, in the new Tomorrowland.

But I'm a great fan of Cranium Command, one of the least-publicized and most innovative

Here's the host of Cranium Command.

presentations at Epcot, inside the Met Life pavilion.  This combination live-action, animation, and animatronics show is a cornucopia of imaginative and amusing ideas, trying to sell in the most entertaining way the concept of how the brain processes information from other parts of the human body.  Jerry Rees, who's directed both live-action and animation (notably The Brave Little Toaster) supervised this point-of-view, multimedia presentation about the workings of a typical 12-year-old boy.  Charles Grodin is perfectly cast as the sober, left side of the brain, with Jon Lovitz as the emotional right side, plus George Wendt tending the stomach, Hans and Franz (Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey) pumping the adrenaline, etc. 

One of the newer attractions in the park is Ellen's Energy Adventure, a multi-screen, sugar-coated educational film about energy and the environment featuring Ellen De Generes and Disney's Bill Nye, the Science Guy.  For this show, the audience is seated in huge moving trams which angle and reposition you while the film unspools, on a series of enormous screens; at one point, the filmed characters are replaced by audioanimatronic replicas in a live-action setting! 

Honey, I Shrunk the Audience is one of the cleverest attractions in all of Walt Disney World, a 3-D interactive film featuring the cast of the Honey movies, led by Rick Moranis, and Eric Idle as a foundation sponsor about to bestow an award on the luckless inventor.  In this show, the audience actually becomes a participant in the goings-on, with various gimmicks

Kermit and Fozzie seem to jump off the screen (if not quite as boldly as they do in this promotional photo) in Muppetvision 3-D

making it seem as though white mice are running through the aisles, and a dog is  sneezing on the assembled crowd. 

Similarly, Muppetvision 3-D offers a state-of-the-art 3-D presentation, enhanced by the live presence of audioanimatronics characters in the theater, including those longtime Muppet hecklers Statler and Waldorf, seated of course in a box at the side of the theater. 

As is the custom nowadays in theme parks, each of these films is preceded by a "pre-show" which warms up the crowd, and often incorporates multimedia ideas as clever as the ones inside the auditorium. 

When my family and I left Orlando, we traveled to New York, and stopped in at the recently refurbished Warner Bros. store at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to take in the new Marvin Martian 3-D cartoon.  It's twenty minutes long, and a lot of fun, but I'm afraid its half-hearted attempt to add some interactivity to the proceedings paled in comparison to what we'd just experienced at Walt Disney World.  There is no comparison to the entertainment experience they offer, drawing on world-class talent, inventing new technology, and never forgetting the fun quotient.  If you want to see what I'm talking about, you'll simply have to visit Orlando.

(Since I wrote this column, Walt Disney World has added a number of new attractions, but more importantly, both Honey, I Shrunk the Audience and Muppetvision 3-D have been brought to the Disney theme parks in Anaheim, California.)