5 Disney World References Hidden In The Tomorrowland Trailer

For as visually impressive and uber secretive as Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is, it’s above all else, a love letter to Walt Disney and his vision for the future. Like any true Disney kids, Bird and writer Damon Lindelof have crafted an alternate reality of Cloverfield-ian proportions centered around the man and his gift for imagining a better tomorrow. And there’s nowhere that Walt and his Imagineers crafted a better vision of the future than in the attractions you’d find in a typical Disney park – a fact that’s most certainly not lost on the creative team behind Tomorrowland.

Submitted for your approval are these five attractions that tell us what the future, or at least May 22, will bring; and how it likely will draw from the storied past of the monumental theme parks of Disneyland and Disney World. First, here's the trailer again:


And now, on to the analysis!

Tomorrowland

Let’s get the front runners out of the way, the top of the list of course being the attraction that gave the film its name. Tomorrowland was Walt Disney’s first stab at showing the world what wonders awaited it in an enlightened, advanced time. Known for his ways of forward thinking, as well as fantastical ideas of the next advances in humankind, Walt Disney used every platform he could to taut his vision of tomorrow, with every Disney theme park following suit and developing its own showcase of better living through scientific achievement.

It’s this part of the Disney legacy that reportedly inspired the Tomorrowland of the film, as well as the 1952 box that first teased the film’s existence. In the film, it is theorized that Walt Disney, being part of a futuristic thinker’s society known only as Plus Ultra, created this section of the park as a primer for the world that was already built on the other side of whatever rift Clooney and company are going to cross. After all, do you think a man who helped envision such things as commercial flights to the moon, or even The House Of Tomorrow, would really sit on his hands if he had the means to create the future?