The Living Seas "Mural"

EPCOT Center had some of the most beautiful mural work, most of which survives in some form today (the caveman/spaceman in Spaceship Earth, the tile mosaic at the entrance to The Land).

Ever since Nemo and his Friends moved into The Living Seas, the entryway has looked like this:

(Image from this site.)


But for 20+ years, the entryway looked like this:

(Image from this site.)


Even though sunsets and sunrises can be slightly cheesy, I loved the colors in this and I really liked the 3D "piecing" to emphasize the sun's colors reflecting and bouncing off of the rippling ocean surface.  Yesterday I created a piece of artwork inspired by this original EPCOT mural.

I did not recreate it exactly; aside from not having a chunk of wall big and long enough to do it justice, I am trying to steer clearly of a literal remake of everything exactly as it was.  I don't have that level of skill or resources, and I'm trying to make an inspiration house, not a monument.

So here's how I did it.  This piece cost around $30 to make.  If you want to spend more, go for it, but I don't think it's necessary (save the $ to make other projects!).

The canvas was most of the expense at $20.  It's around 18 x 24; the wall where it's going obviously determined the size of the canvas.   I used two shades of blue acrylic paint and put some loose 'wave' shapes on it.  As this is going to be a background, it doesn't have to be too precise.

I knew all of those years of drawing M-birds in elementary school would pay off some day.

I bought the canvas at an art store; everything else was bought at your local crafting emporium.  (You can get canvas there too; I just wasn't sure when I was at the craft store if I was going to use one, and the art store is closer to me.)  I grabbed some balsa wood strips (all around a dollar each) in various widths.  Balsa is best for this because it's lightweight; real wood is going to add up in weight very quickly, and you don't want to have to brace it and anchor it so it doesn't rip out of the wall.

You can obviously paint directly on the wall, but to get the 3D effect, you'll need to attach the pieces to the wall too.  My goal is to make stuff that can go with me in the event of a move, and I don't want to do too much to the wall surfaces directly.  Repairing walls can be a huge pain.  But YMMV.

Celebrate the magic of cheap wood.

I used acrylic paint to color each strip a different shade for the 'sunset.'  I didn't bring a picture to match the colors exactly-- I just eyeballed it and took my best shot.

The color scheme of a track suit.  In 1981.

The five tubes of acrylic paint cost 99 cents each.  The shop had an insane sale on sponge brushes, so I picked up a dozen for a dollar.  They're not radically more expensive at regular price, though.

The balsa strips suck up paint and dry pretty quickly.  I cut them into random lengths-- some very short to make the rippling-light effect.  I've never worked with balsa and damn, is it soft.  Cutting them is easy, almost too easy.  Be careful as you could tear it and make jagged edges.  The paint also comes off anywhere your saw so much as touches the wood.  I cut with a tiny crafter's hacksaw, but that's not necessary; a pair of wire cutters would probably do just as well, even better perhaps because they won't pull at the composite and shred it.

I used a fine-grain sandpaper (220, left over from a recent floor refurb) and evened off the edges of the balsa bits.  Don't sweat cutting them perfectly straight; balsa sands really easily, so you can even out the edges while you smooth it.  Then I touched up the bare-wood ends with a matching paint color.  You could, obviously, cut the wood first and then paint it all up at once, which probably makes more sense to do.

Pic taken pre-sanding and pre-retouching.  You can see how jaggedy the edges can get.

I laid out the pieces on the now-dry canvas (I gave it a couple of hours to dry) to create something resembling an abstract sunset, then used Gorilla Glue to adhere the pieces to the canvas.  A little glue goes a long way, especially with balsa, but cheap wood will have some warping here and there, so a couple of pieces may need some extra coaxing to lie flat.

And here she is:

Again, if you want to hew more closely to the original mural, go for it.  This isn't a piece that would be hung under a spotlight; it's more the visual version of background music, and it's going on a fairly 'dead wall' in the kitchen.  There, it'll provide a little interest, but isn't going to dominate the room.  If you think about the original EPCOT pavilion design, they had the live water effect on the pavilion sign, which drew your attention; the mural on the back wall was really a companion piece to the main draw of that repeated, crashing wave.

I don't dislike the changes that the Nemo reboot brought to the mural, but now there isn't that balance that used to be there, between the serene mural and the unexpected violence of the breaking wave.  Now it's a bunch of squawking seagulls (don't get me wrong, it's cute) and the busy-ness of the movie critters all over the mural space.  It's not bad, but the tug-of-war between calm and chaos is lost.

Earth Station Break

I haven't posted in a couple of days (real life stuff, like holidays and sick kids, gets in the way) but I haven't abandoned the project, obviously.  I'm trying to get some actual project work done so I don't just post a bunch of navel-gazing essays-- I want to put up some pics of what I'm doing!  I should get something done this week (it's easy and-- fingers crossed-- should be cool-looking).  I'll add how-to tips in case it's something anybody else would like to make.

By the way, there's no deadline for this project.  It will never be completely DONE-- I suspect there will always be another little thing I can add or tweak or experiment with. 

It would be nice to, um, not run out of ideas.

Pavilions

I think it wouldn't be a proper EPCOT house without pavilions grouped around a theme.  As I have one building *total* to work with, though, I'm going to have to settle for theming rooms as 'pavilions.'  I've got a pretty rough idea of how it's going to shake out; a lot of it is based on what is already in the room that I can make work.  I'll break down the rooms in detail in separate posts later.

'Formal' (ha ha) Living Room:  Spaceship Earth.  I am prepping this room for painting now.
Family Room:  Universe of Energy
Kitchen:  The Living Seas
Dining Room:  World of Motion
Powder Room:  Journey Into Imagination
Florida Room:  The Land

One of the things I'd like to do is incorporate lots of things to explore and discover in each room (yeah, even in the bathroom).  Part of the fun of the original pavilions was that they weren't just show buildings for a dark ride and a gift-shop exit; they had a few different things to do and, if you took the time to check them out in detail, you were usually rewarded.  I'd like the house to honor the same spirit.

A lot of the detail will be mostly aesthetic-- color schemes, visual hat-tips to landmark features.

Also, the EPCOTing of the house is restricted to the main floor only.  I'm a believer in letting people design their own rooms, so I can't force it upstairs.  I can achieve what I want to do on the main floor anyway.

You'll note the much-mourned Horizons is not on the list.  I am a bit of an EPCOT heretic when it comes to Horizons.  I didn't hate it, but I always thought it was disappointing.  If you haven't ragequit reading this blog at this point, I'll break down why in tomorrow's post.

A Little Perspective

Before I go any further, I want to clarify my point of view on Original Recipe EPCOT and on this project.

First off-- I LOVE EPCOT.  Hard.  I wouldn't be weaving references to the place throughout my home if I didn't absolutely adore it and wasn't intellectually and emotionally nourished by it.  Some of that is nostalgia, sure, but a healthy chunk of it stems from aesthetics and from being reminded to embrace the future (a good lesson as I enter middle age) and to dream big. 

Second--I don't take it too seriously, I promise.  As I just noted, I am a middle-aged person, and it is more than just a little ridiculous to love a theme park this much.  I embrace the ridiculousness, but I also acknowledge it.  Plus, a lot of the EPCOT references I put in are going to be of the 'wink-wink-nudge-nudge' variety.  There will be some gentle teasing of the concept.   Every heady concept is helped by a generous helping of humor and not taking itself too seriously.

Third-- it's not as if the original EPCOT Center was flawless.  Far from it.  I will eventually go into my feels on the major changes between then and now, but for now I'll just say that while I loved the original park and feel like it's lost a step or two, the place did have some issues:

• Sponsorship:  Yes, I know the risk of the original concept was high and that Disney didn't have the cash flow to front that risk by itself in 1982.  I also don't think corporations are inherently evil, and I do like the idea of creating a showcase for corporate-driven innovation.  However, having the pavilions sponsored inevitably meant message control, corporate brand-building aimed at children, and a noticeable absence of mentions of innovative work being done by the competition.  Attractions were changed out just because a sponsorship changed hands, and often the changes weren't for the better.  As others have noted, too, a lot of the EPCOT sponsors were bad actors.  I don't care how awesome the original Universe of Energy finale was; Exxon does some baaaaaaad stuff (as do many petroleum companies--Google Shell's activities in the Niger Delta, for example).
• Monolithic view of the future:  As much as we love a holistic experience in a futuristic environment, the fact is that many people aren't futurists and cling to the familiar, and some people are just as in love with the past-- antiques, historic homes and some form of retro styling are almost always popular.  A good trend in more-recent films/stories set in the future is the mix of styles, rather than everything being, say, minimalist chrome.  The recent film Robot and Frank used generally contemporary settings but would add in some features (chiefly the robots, but also the home-based videoconferencing and the occasional 'futuristic' car) to alert you that the story was set some time in the future.  EPCOT's original Future World may have benefited from some hat-tips to the past and the present, since not everybody wants their day-to-day worlds to vanish completely.
• World Showcase:  I'm not including WS in my EPCOT House, for the most part.  This isn't because I'm a xenophobe-- actually, I wish I had a much bigger travel budget so I (and my family) could see more places-- but because I think it's a poor copy of the world we live in.  Yes, it's good to showcase a variety of cultures and cuisines, and I adore that the pavilions in WS are generally staffed by people from those respective countries.  But it's just not the same as the real thing.  "Well," you might say, "isn't it better that people who can't afford to travel to these places can at least experience WS?"  Yes, absolutely.  Buuuuuuut-- and to be fair, this is a recent development and not really true back in 1982-- for the price of a Disney trip these days, you probably could pull off a trip overseas.  Seriously.  I priced one out recently and I was thinking, "Damn, we could go to Paris for a couple of days for this cost."
• My other ding against WS is that the Earth isn't just Europe.  Yes, I know that WS has China and Japan and Morocco, but sheesh, 75% of the place is North America/Europe.  Part of that is due to the countries having tourism agencies that could sponsor these places, which is going to leave out most of the Earth...but then that means you haven't built a "World" Showcase so much as a "G7" Showcase.  Part of that was the early 80's mindset where we considered Europe pretty damn exotic, and with globalization and increased awareness and contact with the Third World, that Eurocentrism has become dated.  If they build another pavilion, I really hope it's Tanzania (NOT "Africa"--ugh, it's not all the same place, people) or India.
• Obsolescence:  This is a major problem for the park and has been since it opened.  Technology moves too fast for bricks-and-mortar displays, and what's cutting-edge one day can be woefully outdated in months.  (My spouse is a technology academic and they don't even publish in paper journals because the technology moves too fast to wait for the production turn around.)  In some sense, I wish EPCOT Center had been like a World's Fair:  temporary.
• Last criticism:  repetition.  Again, I get that there's budgets and technology availabilities and blah blah blah.  But FW was HEAVY on the "omnimover-dark-ride-with-AA-dioramas" setup, and after a while, that grew dull.  The Land and The Living Seas bucked this trend somewhat, and I totally understand the thinking behind the diorama approach-- dynamic presentations of what-can-be dull content, keeping the crowds moving through, and doing so in a way that all ages can ride.  But after a while, it did start to feel like they were returning over and over again to the same well.  WS was a worse offender, with 3 different CircleVision (I think one was a SemiCircleVision) films with lean-rails instead of seats.  They were GREAT movies, and CircleVision is boss...one time.  Again, even as a kid I thought it felt lazy.  (Granted, I was mad the theaters didn't have seats, so who was the lazy one?)

EPCOT Center was overall a marvelously done place with wonderful things in it...but no, I don't totally drink Dreamfinder's Kool-Aid.  

August, 1983

I awoke one August morning in the odd little bed in the back of my grandparents' camper.  Outside the window, the campsite I had fallen asleep in had vanished, replaced by a long line of still and silent cars, gleaming in the early-morning Florida sun.  I craned my head and could see, just up ahead, the parking-lot gate topped with the words EPCOT CENTER in that rounded font that looked so futuristic in 1983.

I didn't want to be here.  I was nine, and as I lived nearly a thousand miles north of central Florida most of the year and was entirely dependent on my parents' schedules, desires and budget to get anywhere close to Disney World, if I was going to go, I wanted to go to the Magic Kingdom, dammit.  I remembered seeing odd posters around the MK last time I had been there, proclaiming that "The 21st Century Begins October 1, 1982," and the posters were devoid of any sign of Mickey and his pals.  I shrugged and got in line to ride Peter Pan's Flight, not giving this weird little park with its weird little posters any further thought.

When EPCOT Center finally opened, I spent the subsequent summer with my dad's parents, and my grandfather declared that we would be visiting it.  (My Grandpa was a bit of a Fun Dictator.  You always did crazy-fun stuff with him, but it was always his idea and he brooked no disagreements or alternate plans.  Hell, he was paying, so I guess it was his prerogative.)  I was disappointed that we wouldn't be riding the Jungle Cruise for the sixth or seventh time, but boarded the camper for the trip south to Orlando.

Now, seeing the parking gate, my interest was piqued.

My interest blossomed into full-blown awe when I saw the geosphere of Spaceship Earth for the first time.  It was HUGE, and it was different (I was too young at the time to be aware of the 1967 World's Fair).  We bought tickets, walked past the entry fountain, the music swelling in our ears, and I stood beneath the sphere, seeing the triangular detailing (how big the triangles were!) up close...and wait, what is this...there was a RIDE in this thing?  We could go IN IT?  I assumed it was just a statue!  Not only was it a functional building...it was a RIDE.

Every thing we went on that day blew my little elementary-age mind.  I had gently resisted The Land-- farming is boring, Grandpa!-- until I realized that I had never seen farming like this.  Lettuce growing on a centrifuge?  Plants growing in sand?  The cool, ascending outdoor spiral of World of Motion leading you to a gently-humorous story, ending in those awesome video tunnels that sent you first speeding through a Scandinavian (?) forest, then swirling into a fiery black hole.  The movie theater of Universe of Energy, which...hang on, the theater seats are moving!  Into a land of dinosaurs!  The joy of Figment and Dreamfinder, inspiring you before sending you off to play in the Image Works, conducting entire symphonies with light sensors, then trying to catch the fountains outside as they leaped overhead.

Man.  FORGET you, Magic Kingdom!

It was a great and glorious day that I will never forget.  It opened my eyes to possibilities and ideas that I didn't know about or think about.  It made me want to learn and do more.  It absolutely, slam-dunk succeeded in its stated mission to "entertain, inform and inspire," with heavy emphasis on the 'inspire' part.  As we drove away at the end of the day, I stared out the back window at Spaceship Earth, watching it grow smaller and smaller and finally vanish from sight, my heart sad to see it disappear.

I will never get the criticism of early EPCOT that it was boring, or too dull for kids.  It was anything but that for me.  Thirty years later, I am still inspired by that experience of encountering it for the first time. 

Considerations

Not to start right off by conjuring clouds into my blue-sky phase, but obviously there are going to be some...let's not call them restrictions, but considerations going forward.  I've mentioned budget earlier, which is obviously a biggie.  

If money was no object, I could really go crazy with this...or could I?  Perhaps...perhaps not.

1.  I am not building a theme park.  There will be no Omnimovers spiraling upwards.  No Audio-Animatronic cavemen.  No smellitzers wafting burning wood.  No catchy theme songs.  As awesome as that would all be, I do not have $1 billion in 1982 dollars.  Besides:

2.  We have to live here, after all.  Whatever I do can't intrude on the house being a sanctuary where we can relax and live normal day-to-day lives.  (If anything, my changes should make our day-to-day lives better, no?)

3.  We= there's more than just one resident of the house, and as much as everybody may like EPCOT, they aren't fanatics like me.  I have to respect that and not push it too aggressively.  I also have to bear in mind that two of these residents are children and a third is a dog.  The key word here is "subtle."

4.  The house, its neighborhood and its architecture aren't exactly styled after a geodesic dome, and just as old Walt himself liked different eras and styles of things, I think that's an okay consideration to have.  It'll be a good aesthetic challenge to make futurism mesh (and ideally sing) in a house made with dark-stained woodwork and stone.  I am not doing any hardcore remodels to make the house look JUST LIKE The Land--or any other-- pavilion.

5.  Upkeep and labor-- as lovely as EPCOT's lush flowerscapes are, I do not have a grounds crew to tackle maintenance (and I suspect those areas are weeded and deadheaded and all that jazz on a daily basis).  I like yardening, but I like other things too, and I can't set up a situation where all I'm doing is tending and repairing.  Also, I refer you back to the aforementioned children and dog.  Ergo, nothing can be too precious or delicate or too high-maintenance.

6.  Changes in social considerations and knowledge-- our world has changed a lot since 1982, and the things we didn't really think about back then should come into play today.  One of these issues is accessibility.  I have grieved for the beloved and long-lost Image Works...but when you realize that one (of the many) reasons Disney ditched it was because it wasn't in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act...well, fair enough.  As a private residence, I'm not bound by the ADA, but I would always want to honor its spirit.  I have friends with mobility restrictions and it's important that our house be open to them.  Any changes that I make can't pose barriers to their entry.  If anything, in the spirit of EPCOT, I should make changes to make our home more accessible. 

Another concern: the environment.  As graceful and calming as those curving reflecting pools were...I can imagine they used quite a bit of water (they weren't already there when they started building, after all), and they probably required a lot of chemical upkeep to keep them from becoming mosquito farms in the hot Florida sun.  Any of the 1982 EPCOT elements that would inadvertently end up 'sticking it' to Mother Nature are off the table.  (Again, I think this actually is in keeping with the spirit of the place.) 

Having said all of that, there's a lot I can do...and it's more than you think.  Right now I'm still in the research (there's so much I didn't know...and still don't; that's for another post) and site prep phases.  But I've come up with some cool stuff and I can't wait to install some of it...and share it. 

EPCOT House vs. Epcot House vs. EPCOT Center House

There is a difference!

I'm still debating how, exactly, I'm going to implement EPCOT in the house, and part of the decision-making rests on how I'm going to define what EPCOT is.

If I wanted to get full-on hardcore about it, the EPCOT House would be radically overhauled and remodeled into [cue echo voice effect] THE HOME OF THE FUTURE, rather than some kind of theme-park tribute.  The problem?  That costs some serious bank, which I don't have. 

I like the aesthetics of EPCOT Center, so that's definitely going to come into play.  I also have a lot of fond memories of the early-80's, version 1.0 of the park.  I'm also mindful of the dangers of getting too nostalgic, and nostalgia doesn't always play nicely with futurism, so I'll need to keep that in check.

I know I'm not going to do too much with Epcot, which is what I (and The Walt Disney Company) call the park that exists today.  (I am not anti-Epcot by any means; I'll break that down in a later post.)  But I don't feel the need to have a Character Spot or Pixar characters; I'm an EPCOT girl, not a Disney girl.

So the final product will probably combine some aesthetic hat-tips to EPCOT Center and some of the futurist visions of EPCOT.  Again, I have some limitations on what I can do, so we'll see how it turns out.  Right now, though, that's my mindset going forward.  I am still in the 'blue sky' phase, and as time goes on and circumstances permit, anything might happen!

If I can dream it, I can do it...right?