No George Jetson Here

The future, according to the wishful thinkers at Disney, will be a lot like the biblical Garden of Eden, except with thrill rides.

Stay with us here, because that high-concept view of the future will debut at Disneyland’s new Tomorrowland on May 22, and you don’t want to misunderstand the point of the multimillion-dollar renovation. Creating this latest Disney future--the fourth Tomorrowland incarnation in the park’s 43 years--meant adhering to two improbable guidelines based on Disney’s tried-and-true reassurance formula: (1) the future needed to be upbeat and fun; no sterile, soulless “Blade Runner” stuff here and (2) this version had to be timeless enough that it wouldn’t seem absurd within a couple of years.

What the company’s “Imagineers” came up with is something called “the Montana Concept.” (It helps to think of it less as a state than as a state of mind.) That concept holds, basically, that people no longer are yearning for a Jetsons-style urban techno-future because that vision long ago was warped into something ghastly by everyone from George Orwell to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead, Disney researchers found a lot of people fantasizing about a future in which they could live in some rural outpost (like Ted Kaczynski, for example) and still be, for example, a wired-to-the-max securities trader.

“We found the antithesis of the glass towers and gold lame suits,” said Tony Baxter, the vice president for creative development at Walt Disney Imagineering, who oversaw the renovation. “They wanted to live in a log cabin by a river and be close to the environment and commute to their office via computer. For a while, we toyed with the idea of just switching the signs with Frontierland.”

The tricky part was converting that subtle, subconscious back-to-nature need into a future-themed amusement park that still included crowd-pleasers such as Autopia, Submarine Voyage, the Monorail, Space Mountain and Star Tours. The first thing they did was make the landscaping edible.

“The fact that every plant in this land is edible is reassuring,” Baxter said of the new Tomorrowland, where avocados, persimmons, lettuces, cabbage, coffee and other examples of “agrifuture landscaping” grow in perfect formation and where Big Brother won’t necessarily intervene if you pick a leaf to nibble. “A future that looks like the Garden of Eden is very reassuring.”

The next thing they did was corral all forward-looking notions of what the future may hold into an exhibit hall (formerly the Carousel of Progress) and call it Innoventions, where visitors have a chance to see and interact with an ever-changing array of products and technologies that Baxter says “are about six months from hitting the street.” It’s still the future, but in bite-sized chunks with a reasonable expiration date.

Finally, Disney planners decided the only truly predictable thing about the future is that people will continue to think about the future. Instead of trying to stay ahead of those fantasies, Baxter says, Disney decided to celebrate the one thing that links visionaries past, present and future--imagination.

“Dreams are the fuel of the future, and without them the next guy that comes along doesn’t have anything to build on,” Baxter said. ‘So we set about to put some cultural past into our future.”

For example, visitors to the new Tomorrowland are greeted by the Astro Orbitor, a decidedly retro ride inspired by a Leonardo da Vinci drawing. It replaces the Rocket Jets. They’ll also see a quaint two-thirds reproduction of the park’s original Moonliner rocket ship--scrapped as outdated in 1966--atop a snack stand near the repainted Space Mountain. They’ll find the cold metal and concrete visions of “Blade Runner,” “RoboCop” and “Terminator” contradicted by “fun new color palettes” and old-fashioned pavers.

One attraction that Disney planners did prod into the next generation is the old PeopleMover system. It has been replaced by the new Rocket Rods, a three-minute thrill ride in which mock rocket-powered hot rods race along the same nearly mile-long track that the pokey PeopleMover used to traverse in 16 minutes. Disney press materials describe Rocket Rods as a “fantasy transit system of the future” but they don’t really explain how wheelies and contorting G-forces will become a practical part of public transportation.

Generally, Baxter said, “the new look will have a vintage time frame. You’ll see an old moon rocket standing next to a futuristic restaurant. It recognizes that as long as we’ve all been around here, people have been thinking about the future. The fact that all these things stand side by side makes it a cultural history of the future, and it becomes a more comfortable space. When people leave, they’ll feel good about the future.” Or at least that’s the concept.

Martin J. Smith’s second suspense thriller, “Shadow Image” (Jove), was just published.

Gazing Into the Future

* The Big Picture: A Tinker Bell’s eye view of the layout of the renovated land of the future. Pages 28 and 29.

* Getting There: Traffic woes are expected in the early going. Page 8.