Comment by chrisco255
11 hours ago
I think EPCOT could have been quite successful. The Villages, Florida was centrally planned and designed by many Disney architects (among others) and it is hugely successful and profitable.
Walt's brother, Roy (who remained after Walt's passing), was not the same visionary that Walt was. Simple as that. Most people would never have taken the risks Walt did with the company. Even the idea of a theme park that has tens of thousands of employees and requires millions of people to fly in from all over the world to be profitable sustainably, was quite a bold idea in the 1950s.
I regret that Walt passed too young. Florida would probably be covered in a large monorail network had he lived a couple more decades. And Epcot as a city would have been a tourist destination in its own right, and might have influenced urban development elsewhere.
Monorail? Monorail!
Well, sure, but The Villages doesn't have all vehicles restricted to an underground roadway supply system grid built out under an entire city, pedestrian PeopleMovers for an entire city, a downtown completely enclosed in a climate-controlled dome, the legal issues that come with changing peoples' furnishings out from under them or trying to evict anyone unemployed, etc etc. There's a huge difference between 'planned community' and the kind of absurd stuff that Walt wanted to build that would all need to work perfectly before anyone could even move in for the first time.