I’ve moved the blog from TypePad to WordPress, and there are all kinds of weirdness happening here and there; the RSS flood is only one of them. You’re lucky I only update this blog every six weeks or so.

That said, I am hopeful that the move to a new platform will move me to action. Once the blog had transferred I realized that I have three — three! — unfinished drafts in backlog, and that cat simply won’t fight. Look for a return to normalcy, or whatever it’s called, in the coming week. And please do update your links and tell at least 700 people that this blog exists!

Story and Song from the Hanted Mansion from David Witt on Vimeo.

Via my friend David Wahl, whose Mostly Forbidden Zone blog is one of my daily habits: A terrific animation of the classic Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion LP, created by his friend David Witt at Quasi-Interesting Paraphernalia Incorporated. I’ll never be able to look at the LP again without seeing these subtle movements in my periphery. Who knew an LP itself could be haunted?

Okay, just this once. On the occasion of the WalDisCo and James Cameron going abed, we'll allow Disney's theme parks division to be nakedly reactive. This isn't the first time Disney has parried a perceived threat to its theme parks (see every other article Jim Hill has written from 1998 onward), but it's got to be the first time that they've telegraphed a counterstrike. (Okay, okay: The first time since Eisner.) It must have taken real restraint for Disney's social media wonks not to send a message like this one to the bloggers:

Yes, the Avatar attractions we're now planning for Disney Animal Kingdom are a response to the runaway success of Universal Orlando's Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Also: As you've long suspected, we profit from our theme parks; they're not a public trust.

No, we couldn't come up with our own franchise to compete with Potter. Pirates of the Caribbean and Star Wars already have a presence in the parks, and we can't build around them without screwing up already-themed areas at great risk; we don't dare rip up that much Walt. Also, Tron has too narrow an appeal, Prince of Persia was a stupid idea from the word go, and you know what we're doing with Cars.

Yes, you're absolutely right, o savvy observer of our business: The reason we didn't announce this at the D23 convention was because contracts weren't yet in place. You're so smart! And you use such big words.

No, we could care less that James Cameron is kind of an asshole. He's an asshole who gets your money, again and again, despite his flat storytelling and crotch-grabbing acceptance speeches.

No, we can't put it in Disney Hollywood Studios. That's not the park that so desperately needs paid admissions. And Avatar kinda fits into Animal Kingdom better, anyway, because it has trees and animals and stuff.

Yes, it would be nice to have those KUKA Robocoaster usage rights about now.

Yes, we expect Geoff Carter will show up, despite the fact that he's never seen Avatar and he never, ever wants to see Avatar.

EDIT, SEPTEMBER 21, 9:30 A.M. PACIFIC TIME: Less than a day after I posted this entry, Disney released a statement that more or less approximates it. You're welcome, Mr. Staggs! I'll invoice you shortly.

Several years back a friend of mine visited Disneyland for the first time. His girlfriend wanted to go; he didn’t. My friend is over 40, sharply literate, and not easily given to whimsy; he likes his punk rock fast and arty, his movies slow and thoughtful, and his corporations engulfed in flames.

Shortly before he struck out for Anaheim, I gave him the advice I give everyone who doesn’t want to visit Disneyland but is compelled to go for reasons beyond their control: Look at the details and the artistry, and to try and divorce Disney now from Disney then.  Walt Disney didn’t build a theme park to compete with other theme parks, or to sell more monogrammed Cars 2 crapola; he built it because he wanted a place he could enjoy as much as his two preteen daughters. I told my friend to visit that Disneyland, the one Uncle Walt built without consulting a single focus group.

And he did. My friend loved Disneyland. He wasn’t wild about the crowds and the double-decker strollers, but he loved the architecture, the lay of the “lands, “ and nearly every single attraction he tried. One kind of attraction, however, engaged him above and beyond all the others.

“At some point, I decided that any one of the dark rides would be worthwhile,” he said, “and I was right.”

Disneyland’s dark rides are the gold threads in the Park’s tapestry. Other Disneyland attractions may enjoy more prominence, more pride of place (even my friend lavished fervent praise on the E-ticket attractions: Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, Space Mountain, et al)—but without the dark rides of Fantasyland, Mickey’s Toontown and Critter Country, none of Disneyland’s marquee attractions would exist. They’re what Walt Disney started with: A trio of Fantasyland dark rides (Snow White’s Scary Adventures, Peter Pan’s Flight, and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride), plus a steam railroad, a riverboat and miscellaneous spinners, train and boat rides. Imagination-wise, those dark rides did most of the heavy lifting in Disneyand’s early years: They are sealed worlds within Disneyland’s sealed world, and nothing of the outside world penetrates those painted scrims lit by backlight. You can’t even bring your own ego with you. You are a spirit, floating free through the storybook, enveloped in whimsy and wonder and fear.

One thing I couldn’t give my friend before his trip was a top-to-bottom rating of Disneyland’s dark rides, but I can give you one of those. For the sake of this list, I am defining “dark ride” as a two-to-three minute attraction based on one of Disney’s animated films, excluding those attractions that are too epic in scale to be called a simple dark ride (it’s a small world), more midway game than dark ride (Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters), or not located in Disneyland at all (Monsters Inc.: Mike and Sully to the Rescue). These are the attractions that caused an old, crusty punk to regress back into a teenage theater geek, and he’s far from being the only one.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

GRADE: A

If the purpose of a Fantasyland dark ride is to put you inside the animated film upon which it’s based, this three-and-a-half minute dark ride is Disneyland’s most faithfully realized.  It truly is the real-life analogue of Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland: the trip down the rabbit hole, the garden of singing flowers, and the marching playing cards are all represented here, and they make about as much sense as they did in the 1951 film. Love or hate the animated Alice, there’s no denying that it was a series of colorful and lunatic episodes without the heart Disney’s animators gave Snow White or Pinocchio. Oh, sure, the film has one of Disney’s plucky heroines at its center, but it’s not really about Alice: She stumbles into situations and scenarios without fully understanding or wanting to understand what’s happening to her, and she seemingly hasn’t learned anything by the end of the film. She has no character arc, just an inexplicable lost-time episode—and the ride reflects that, with your caterpillar-shaped ride vehicle bursting through a succession of seemingly disjointed set pieces, each one more fascinating and claustrophobic and terrifying than the one before it. In other words, this Alice a flawless translation from two dimensions to three. Alice, the dark ride, is everything it needs to be: a shot of candied hallucinogen, vividly colorful and manic.

PETER PAN’S FLIGHT

GRADE: A-

Though shorter than the Alice attraction by more than a minute and fifteen seconds, the dark ride based on Disney’s 1953 Peter Pan routinely draws much longer lines; it’s not unheard of to wait longer than an hour for these two minutes and twenty seconds in Neverland. Themepunks and Disnerds cite a number of reasons for this: the enduring appeals of the film and its characters, a lower hourly capacity than other Fantasyland attractions, blah blah blah. The real reason for the monster success of Peter Pan Flight is that its ride vehicles are suspended from the ceiling, and this novelty—which is pretty goddamned unique, really—has yet to lose its allure in nearly six decades of near-continuous operation. I don’t precisely recall what Peter Pan was like before all the Fantasyland dark rides were refreshed in 1983, but I do know that the pirate ship ride vehicles have always hung from the ceiling, and they have always taken their sweet time soaring over moonlit London and starlit Neverland; the “You Can Fly” portion of the ride accounts for nearly half its running time. Frankly, I could spend hours drifting over those “streets” and through those fiber-optics stars, but minutes is all you get, and perhaps that’s the real secret of Peter Pan’s hour-long queue: It is the only one of Fantasyland’s dark rides whose excitement is still building even as it ends. That’s a stunt worthy of Hitchcock.

SNOW WHITE’S SCARY ADVENTURES

GRADE: B+

Two of the best effects in Snow White’s Scary Adventures occur even before you hop into one of the dark ride’s mine car vehicles. If you look at the window in the tower of the attraction’s castle façade long enough, you’ll see the Evil Queen part the curtains to glare at you. Touch the golden apple at the queue entrance and you’ll hear her cackling. There are other special effects in this effects-heavy dark ride that are just as surprising—the Evil Queen’s transformation into the Old Hag is clever and scary as hell—but none of them are quite as potent as getting the stink-eye and being laughed at. Don’t listen to your parents: The Evil Queen is real, babies.  She’s the true star of this aptly named two-minute dark ride, despite the ingénue’s name on the marquee; she is the Terminator wearing the leathery hide of Amy Winehouse. (Too soon?) And when the Old Hag “dies” at the end of the ride (some business with lightning; it’s all very ambiguous), it’s as unconvincing as Olivia Wilde’s death at the end of that cowboy/alien mashup. Run outside and look at the tower; the Queen lives on, unbroken, just as Wilde lives on in her own “House.” Please make the scary women stop. Actually, don’t. Not ever.

MR. TOAD’S WILD RIDE

GRADE: B-

As I said of the Peter Pan dark ride, I don’t remember exactly what Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was like before it was gutted and rebuilt in 1983, but I do recall one thing with absolute certainty: it was better. The two-minute dark ride, loosely based on a 1949 animated short film that I guarantee most of you haven’t seen since childhood (if at all), is indeed a wild ride—you literally crash through it, banging through one set of painted flats after the next, never really getting a sense of what you’re looking at. I suppose a joyride is a joyride, but I’m old-fashioned: I like to know a little bit about the people and animals I’m running down with my car. What color are their entrails? How mellifluous are their screams? Mostly, I’m bothered that one of the ride’s best set pieces—the pitch-black “train tunnel”—is over so quickly that you never really get a chance to be scared. Then again, the next set piece is Hell … yes, that Hell. It’s red and steamy and demon-riddled and kind of wonderful, and it makes up for every last thing that came before it.

ROGER RABBIT’S CAR TOON SPIN

GRADE: C

Everything Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride does wrong, Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin very nearly does right. The winding indoor queue is atmospheric and packed with story details. The ride vehicles can be spun 360 degrees, helpful if you’ve missed a detail or simply want to ride backwards. The effects, the animated show figures, and the set design—every last bit of it is impeccably done. So why is it that this three-and-a-half minute dark ride seems so alienated from the witty 1988 film on which it’s based? Of all Disneyland’s dark rides, this one feels the least Disneylike to me; it replicates the frenetic pacing of Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s action sequences, but lacks the film’s emotion and sentimentality. It’s a pretty bloodless exercise, and while it’s easily to look at Car Toon Spin (and from nearly any angle, thanks to that usable steering wheel), it’s tough to make yourself feel one way or another about it. Dizziness is not an emotion.

PINOCCHIO’S DARING JOURNEY

GRADE: C-

Considering the richly detailed and breathtakingly gorgeous world painted into Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio, the Disneyland dark ride based on the film is surprisingly slight. The three-minute Pinocchio’s Daring Journey is a pleasant enough diversion; the Pleasure Island portion of the ride is suitably lurid, and Geppetto’s workshop is so cozy that you could swear you feel the heat from the “fireplace.” But there are no special effects really worth the mention (the “Pepper’s Ghost” effect that allows the Blue Fairy to vanish is used to far superior effect in the Haunted Mansion, which preceded Daring Journey by longer than a decade), and the story is even more difficult to follow than even the nearly plotless Alice dark ride, and it pivots largely on Jiminy Cricket yelling directions at you: “Don’t go in there! Look out! This way!” It’s like the time just after you got your driver’s license, when you thought it’d be fun to drive your parents to Applebee’s. How wrong you were.

THE MANY ADVENTURES OF WINNIE-THE-POOH

GRADE: D

I must confess that I’m coming at this three-minute dark ride from a disadvantage. The character of Winnie-the-Pooh never made much of an impact on me—not in A.A. Milne’s charming books, not in Disney’s 1966 featurette Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree (released almost a year to the day before I was born), and not in Disneyland, where Pooh merchandise sold gangbusters even before 2003, when Disney finally saw fit to give the tubby ursine his own dark ride. Still, I suspect I’d find The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh underwhelming even if I had drank the honey. There isn’t much to recommend the ride: the character animation is limited; the effects are modest and copied largely from Disneyland’s other dark rides; and the sets are pleasant but forgettable. I understand how it might appeal to very young children, being moderately paced, sunshine-bright and not the least bit scary, but little kids grow up, and there’s nothing here for older children, teens or parents. Two things in the ride’s favor: the wait to get on is rarely longer than five minutes, and as the Disnerds and Passholes are fond of saying, the air conditioning is nice and cold.

Forgive the drive-by entry, but this news is too wonderful not to share immediately: Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom is losing its substandard Tiki Room and going old-school. Yes, fellow themepunks, the tyrannical reign of “The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management” is finally over, and we don’t even have Seal Team 6 to thank for it — just an electrical fire that destroyed one of the offending Iago robots. And people say there’s no Walt watching over us. Ha! Infidels! Anyway, follow the above link to Disney’s official blog and weep joyous tears into your Sunday morning Mai Tai. Next up: Stitch, meet water damage.

Oh, I just don’t know. I get what Annie Leibovitz and Disney are trying to do with this campaign; it’s a shrewd effort to gain the consumer confidence of the Vanity Fair set, those holdouts who think that Disney entertainment is below them but the cult of celebrity isn’t. Well, if Academy Award-winners Jeff Bridges and Penelope Cruz think this Disney stuff is all right, then I guess I can pop a few antidepressants and take the kids.

Meanwhile, you should know that your children are looking at this stuff and they’re thinking, “Dude, you’re out of your element.”

It’s not that I don’t understand why celebrities would want to play dress-up for Disney and Leibovitz; it’s not like I wouldn’t slap on the phallus and clogs if Disney called and said “We need a Pinocchio for the Parks’ national print and web campaign, and you’ll be working with the photog who first ruined Miley Cyrus for us.” The part that I don’t get is why Disney is even going to this presumably million-dollar effort when their own staff photographers have captured lots and lots of photos of celebrities goofing off in the Parks for free.

Hey there, it’s Stephen Colbert! And he’s in Disney’s California Adventure of his own free will.

Huge Ackman! (The photo is from Just Jared and is used without permission, but I’m pretty sure one of Disney’s press wonks took it.)

Laura Dern, who continues to make me hotter than Georgia asphalt, at the opening of Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage.

Aaaand just like that I’ve reunited the cast of “Wild at Heart.” (On an unrelated note: At least Nic wore a nice jacket, right? Who cares if he combed his hair with his thumbs?) I don’t have to look for a photo of Willem Dafoe riding Dumbo to know that it’s out there.

Look, it’s Maryk … I mean, it’s Marik-er … It’s that pretty lady from “Law & Order SVU!”

Look, it’s that pretty lady from “The Astronaut’s Wife!”

Granted, these are off-the-cuff candids and quickly-posed shots, not the elaborate (I’d say too elaborate) productions that Disbovitz seems to think they need. But these candids have something the Disney Dream portraits do not: a pulse. They’re fun, like the kind of fun one might expect to have in a Disney theme park. They don’t just sit there and congratulate themselves for being something that, despite its elaborate making, has almost no life to it. The Leibovitz photos are so thoroughly refined and processed that no one really needs to be there for it — not the celebrities, whose heads appear to be superimposed even though I know otherwise, and not Leibovitz, who could have easily farmed this entire job out to Disney’s art direction staffers.

So, do they work? Do these photographs make people want to visit Disneyland or Walt Disney World? Do people even realize that they’re supposed to want to do that? Or do they look at these shots and think “Wow, it’s like the orgy scene from ‘Eyes Wide Shut?’” Whatever the case, I’d expect Disney’s marketing army — the people who managed to sell us not one but two god-damned films starring chihuahuas — to come up with something a little less contrived. I don’t have the math on this, but I’d be willing to bet that more people Google the other Disney/Leibovitz collaboration — the one starring Miley Cyrus.

CORRECTIONS SINCE FIRST PUBLICATION: I corrected “Leibowitz” to “Leibovitz” throughout the piece; thanks to constant reader Ginny Morey for the catch. And I accidentally called the photographer “Fran Leibowitz,” which I’ll attribute to “writer’s blockade.”

There are things I could do to make Your Souvenir Guide more popular. No, no, you don't need to spare my feelings; I know that precisely five people read this thing. Even the sub-culture of Disney theme park geeks (er, "enthusiasts") at which this editorial is squarely aimed rarely interacts with Your Souvenir Guide, even when I say something inflammatory. (I DON’T GIVE A CRAP ABOUT THE DISNEY CRUISE LINE OMG WTF.) There are myriad ways to promote a blog, and I should be doing them. I should create a YSG page on Facebook. I should post more often than bi-annually. And I should optimize this content for maximum exposure in search engine results.

This latter process is called "search-engine optimization" — SEO for short — and it's killing English as you've known it. I don't fully understand SEO, but I do know that it requires the writer to use keywords in places that keywords wouldn't usually go. If you want people to find your unofficial Disneyland theme park blog, you need to use that phrase as often as possible. Under the terms of SEO, the new headline for this entry would be:

Unofficial Disneyland theme park blog: Disney applies SEO practices to its theme parks

And I'd need to put "unofficial Disneyland theme park blog" in the first sentence of the piece, as well. SEO isn't an art, it's a science, and not even a noble science, like distilling gin or playing "Angry Birds." SEO is rude, crude and in yo' face. And it surprises me to see Disney using it to name its newest attractions.

Consider. Until recently, Disney could name its attractions however it wanted, without regard for the thematic source; a dark ride based on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" could be called "Roger Rabbit's Toon Car Spin," and a dark ride based on a "Toy Story" character could be called "Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters." It was enough to use the name of the character in the attraction name; the kids could figure out the rest.

Recently, however, Disney has been leaving nothing to chance. They've begun to stick the name of the source material right at the front of the attraction name. If they feel there's more to be said — if "Monsters Inc." doesn't fully describe the experience of an attraction — they add a clumsy subtitle.

Toy Story Midway Mania

Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor

The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure

Monsters Inc. Ride and Go Seek

Cars Race Rally

Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage

Monsters Inc. Mike and Sully to the Rescue!

Now, I'm just a freelance journalist untrained in the Imagineering arts, but it seems to me that with but a couple of exceptions, very few of those names make sense if you haven't seen the movies they're based on. (Believe it or not, there are still people on this planet who have never seen a Pixar film. Yeah. I know, right?) I could get worked up about this, or I could offer my help — and that's what I intend to do, right now. I won't tell Disney how to fix these attraction names to make them more attractive to the ear, but I will optimize every other attraction in the Parks so these new attractions don't stand out as much. Here's are a few examples of the SEO modifications I've conceived thus far:

Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs Scary Adventures

Finding Nemo: Themed Science Exhibit with Aquarium

Star Wars The Clone Wars Episode 3.5: Star Tours 2

Song of the South Splash Mountain (please visit NAACP.com)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Captain Jack Sparrow Shows Up Three Times

Ratatouille France

Toy Story: Toy Story Midway Mania!

Next week, I'll explain how every bathroom at Disney's theme parks could be improved with the addition of character photo locations. I swear, this stuff comes to me in dreams.

Via Wonkette. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed this hard on a Tuesday; I must check the logs to confirm. “Jimmy Goose.”

Heh, heh. This is "Splat!", by Jason Freeny. I'd wear this on a t-shirt to the Parks and by God I would have your scorn, because in my mind Mickey ceased to be interesting soon after Walt Disney stopped voicing him. Cute? Sure. Friendly? You bet. Human? No. I regard the Mouse as I regard a Coke bottle — as a masterwork of American design whose contents are too saccharine for my tastes.

It's time for Mickey Mouse to go fishing or something (seems I once saw a cartoon in which he did just that), and allow Wall-E or Ariel or even Duffy to be the face of the company for a while. I know Disney's trying to make the Mouse more contemporary by stamping him into Kid Robot-like collectibles* and mussing up his hair in video games, but they're only strengthing the character as a commodity; they're not making him any more human. When a Jason Freeny slams him into a wall, at least I know that the Mouse isn't invincible — and I wonder how he's going to get out of that nasty fix, just as audiences did when Walt was still speaking for him.

Modern-day Mickey Mouse shouldn't be trapped in his own mythology, fighting the same, safe malevolence he's been vanquishing these past fifty years or so; he should be fighting to keep Peg Leg Pete from foreclosing on his home, sluicing buckets of water out of his waterfront shack, pounding the pavement looking for work. That's the kind of scrapper we need right now — a Mouse with real problems and the wit and savvy to beat them back.

I like to think that Disney will eventually get it. "Epic Mickey" underperformed badly not because the game was poorly-conceived (and I know that Broke Hoedown disagrees with me in this), but because we weren't ready to take Mickey back as a living thing. Removed from the context of the original shorts — which Mickey has been for years — we don't know who he is or what he wants. We know only that he's good-looking and that he seems a nice enough guy, like Keanu Reeves. We're going to need more than that if we're going to accept him as an everyman. He has to face discrimination, stare down bullies, and have his 80-year childless courtship of Minnie Mouse savagely questioned by the punditocracy. He needs to overcome. I like to think that John Lasseter and Bob Iger know this, and are trying to think of the best way to pull it off.

If you ask me, the best way to get Mickey Mouse out of his lethargy is to smack him into a wall. Do horrible things to him, and let him figure out how to fix them. That’s Storytelling 101, right there — and it’s where the Mouse came from, so he’ll know his way around. Remember that Mickey Mouse’s first seafaring job wasn’t captaining a floating theme park; it was piloting a broken-down steamship for a hot second before he was sent back to the mess to peel potatoes. We're only captains for moments in time. Mostly we're peeling ourselves off of brick walls, saying okay, so that happened. Now what?

*I own twenty Vinylmation figures. That's less due to my affection for Mickey Mouse — which does still exist, believe it or not — and more to my appreciation of these street art-like subversions of a popular form. I might have been tempted by miniature Coke bottles, similarly painted.

This is a special message for Your Souvenir Guide’s many CEO readers. Word up, robber barons! Thanks for taking a break from your daily regimen of amalgamating and capitalizing to read — or, more likely, to order an unpaid intern to read and summarize — this special presentation. Today, I’d like to suggest to you a promotional opportunity that will galvanize your company’s customer base and transform its brand message. Today, savage capitalist, we’re going to talk about EPCOT.

We Disney theme park geeks — hereafter known as “themepunks,” because it makes us sound cooler — talk about EPCOT often, because it’s a sad place. The World’s Fair-style Walt Disney World theme park, the last living vestige of Walt Disney’s desire to build a true city of the future, opened to great promise in the 1980s, sustained with good grace the “let’s add B-list celebrities to every one of our attractions” craze of the 1990s, and is currently languishing in a state of practical neglect. The Future World section of EPCOT has received only four new attractions (one of them now closed and boarded up) and five renovations of existing attractions in nearly thirty years of operation … and it’s the lucky half of the park. World Showcase has gotten just one whole-cloth new attraction since opening day, and a series of halfhearted upgrades in the form of restaurants and shops.

It's trendy for us themepunks to wring our kissably-soft hands and wonder how EPCOT came to this pass. The short answer is this: Disney can’t deal with EPCOT right now because there’s no clear-cut way for them to make more money from it by dumping Pixar characters into it. The themes are too difficult to sell to modern audiences, who care little about the future or the world at large, and difficult for modern-day Disney to work with, because Imagineering isn’t the think tank it once was and upper management hasn’t had a stake in the future since Uncle Walt bought the freezer. The future? Look at our Blu-Ray release schedule. The world? Um, “Tangled” just opened in Bali.

Now listen up, CEO. Normally, this is the point in the article where I would appeal to Disney to fix EPCOT by dumping the kind of money into the park that they’re currently pouring on Disney’s California Adventure to fix its b-list celebrity shortcomings. But I won’t do that. Several other Disney blogs — most notably Progress City, USA, highly recommended — have already done so, and better than I could ever hope to do. Also, I’m fairly sure that Disney knows all this stuff and doesn’t care. There’s no money to fix EPCOT and no compelling reason to spend the money they don’t have; it’s not like a bunch of egghead science crap is going to repel the magicks emanating from Universal Orlando.

This means an open field for you, benevolent corporate overlord. You may not know this, but EPCOT Center was built on corporate sponsorships — Kraft, General Motors, American Express, Kodak and others — and your investment can rebuild EPCOT as a 21st Century entertainment/branded marketing force, a true 2.0 model. EPCOT wants to move forward (to “win the future,” right?), and you want to sell your products in a world that’s growing increasingly suspicious of corporate hegemony. Tell me how this couldn’t work for both of you.

I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up partnership blueprints for you and EPCOT. Please read through them, and feel free to email me if you have any questions. Don’t worry about catching me on the clock; I’m currently working as a freelancer, partially due to your inability to create large amounts of jobs. No offense; nothing personal.

Google.  A few years ago I wouldn’t have thought your brand needed a dash of EPCOT, but you’re neck-deep in the iPhone vs. Android firefight and your advertising revenues are this close to getting pinched by Facebook. This calls for some trick maneuvering because Friend of Disney Steve Jobs haaaaaates you, but he’s currently on medical leave and there’s a mostly dead pavilion at EPCOT that I think would be a good fit for your company — one that was formerly devoted to the intangible fancies of the human imagination.

Your company is a cloud of mostly nerd, but when it sets its mind to creating an educational tool — a real-time map of the night sky, an instantaneous translator, a visually-based search engine — it absolutely shines. I’d guess that a lot of people don’t even know half the cool things you do; they know your company solely as the maker of a search engine. An attraction that explores the creation and consumption of art, music and literature, and the many ways in which those things can be better enjoyed through the judicious use of technology, seems like it would be right up Google’s alley. Your entire company is a searching mind, every bit as inventive and curious as your rivals at Apple, and it’s time your customers discovered that for themselves by way of a nice hi-tech dark ride and a post-show area full of interactive hoo-hah.

General Electric. Ding. You’ve had terrific successes with Disney attractions in the past: Carousel of Progress is closing in on its fiftieth birthday, and the late, great Horizons is so beloved that one enterprising Disney geek is rebuilding it as a kind of first-person swooner. Now it’s time to come back to the party — not as a producer of consumer electronics, but as driving force in renewable energy technologies. You’re second in wind power market share, with nearly 14,000 wind turbine installations set up around the world — wouldn’t you like people to know that? You’ve just introduced a consumer-side electric car charger — don’t you want to flaunt it? And for that matter, wouldn’t you like to assert your windpower dominance over fellow EPCOT sponsor Siemens, which is currently ninth in total market share and gainin' on ya?

The sponsorless Universe of Energy attraction is located inside an enormous, wedge-shaped structure. It rivals the old Horizons building in volume. If you were to rip out everything inside — the movie theaters, the pointless primeval diorama, Bill Nye and the rest of the dinosaurs — you could make one hell of a dark ride in there, one that imagines the future of renewable energy and its many possible applications. I say again: The building is there, and the love is there. All you need to do is sign a third check to Disney and reap the benefits.

Inditex. You’re one of the largest fashion distributors in the world, with dozens of subsidiary brands and 48 stores in America (Zara, they’re called). More importantly, you're based in A Coruña, Spain. EPCOT needs you because Disney has been trying to get a Spanish pavilion into its World Showcase since the Reagan Administration. And you need EPCOT because, until five minutes ago, I had no idea your company existed.

SAS (Scandinavian Airlines). Please allow me to make introductions. You’re the flagship airline of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, with daily flights out of Newark, Dulles and O’Hare. You carry 25 million passengers a year, many of them to Bergen, Stavanger and Trondheim. You provide a conduit to the last of the red-hot beds of tourism; nearly everyone I know has recently become interested in visiting Norway, drawn by the fjords, the aquavit, the black metal bands, and the what-have-you. Norway is teh sex and SAS is teh sexay.

This shrinking lutefisk behind me is EPCOT’s Norway pavilion. Now, I think I’ve learned a few things about the Norwegians — I live in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard, home to the largest Syttende Mai parade in the United States. If I want a helmet with horns on it, I can walk to the end of the block and get one. And this EPCOT attraction, whose ostensible purpose is to promote tourism to your homeland, doesn’t even fill me with the desire to visit my own neighborhood. The queue leading to the pavilion’s centerpiece attraction Maelstrom is a simple blue wall cheaply bedecked with tiny flags; the attraction itself has precisely one interesting scene and a bunch of terrible ones. I know that yours are a people not naturally predisposed to showing off, but c’mon. Norway has left 1979; your amazing techno scene proves it. The chorus of Röyksopp’s “The Girl and The Robot” is sick.

A relatively small outlay of sponsor cash — $10 million, maybe $20 million — could make EPCOT's Norway into one hell of a tourism office. It could pay for an update of the dated and borderline frightening movie that plays at the end of the boat ride; it could pay for badly-needed scenery and technical improvements to the ride itself; and it could enable Disney to do something, anything, with that boring queue. In exchange, Disney will slap your name on every flat surface and probably give you some shop space if you want it.

Sony. Oh boy, do you ever need this. Look: Samsung is spanking you in LCD TV sales, Microsoft and Nintendo are taking turns pwning you in gaming console sales, and you never came up with a satisfactory answer to the iPod, iPhone or iPad. However, your company does make some great products — your TVs, in particular, are terrific — and you’re one of the few multinationals that’s at least trying to reduce its greenhouse gases. If you were to sponsor a thrill ride at EPCOT’s Japan pavilion, it might help you to regain a foothold in the consumer consciousness — take us back to the time when we thought of Sony when we thought of electronic anything.

Starbucks. I’m kinda surprised we’re having this conversation. Walt Disney World is open territory, you latte-pulling Queequegs — perhaps the last place in the world without a Starbucks on every corner. Disney is still pouring Nescafe even though Nestle has left the building. People can’t believe Starbucks is not already a presence at Disney World; even Dave Hickey noticed your absence. Call Disney — odds are they’ve got a dedicated hotline assigned to you, just like Ryan Bingham in “Up in the Air” — and tell them that you might like to put cafes in Future World and World Showcase and every other damn part of Walt Disney World, if it’s not too much trouble.

While you're at it, tell Disney you’d like to "sponsor The Land pavilion, or something." They’ll know what you mean. They will mention a badly dated 70mm educational film and a few other places you might be able to insert your brand, then they’ll quote you a multimillion-dollar figure. Tell Howard Schultz to dig around in the tip jar and pay it.

Congratulations! This transaction makes you the new Coca-Cola. Enjoy the buzz until the FDA starts gunning for you.

Wired/Conde Nast. I think I’ve found a venue suited to the resurrection of NextFest, your World’s Fair-style showcase of emerging ideas and technologies. EPCOT’s Communicore pavilions — parenthesis enclosing the center of Future World — are currently occupied by “Innoventions,” a kind of low-rent Consumer Electronics Show clone that promotes dated technologies and makes exceedingly poor use of the Communicore space. (Floor-to-ceiling windows are meant to be used.)

Have your Conde Nasty bosses make a deal with Disney to clean out that crap and install NextFest for at least a year. After that, encourage Disney to create a kind of tech incubator, which you’ll sponsor through print and web advertising trade. Disney gets a shot of your credibility, and you’ll increase circulation of your magazine, website and mobile app.

I know that EPCOT seems like an old-fashioned idea, corporate overlord, but the timeworn ideals on which it was founded will always ring true. Ideas remain as contagious as ever. The future remains full of promise. The world continues to be vast and amazing, and it deserves to be saved. And people still want to be amazed by technologies indistinguishable from magic. This is your Sputnik moment.You can make an investment in a new EPCOT and be a part of the march of ideas that will save the world, or you can continue to make commercials like these:

Line dancing. Heh-heh. Call Disney right now and say “help us.”