Amazon released the full trailer for the Fallout series. I have hundreds of hours of playtime in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 4 so I’m really looking forward to the show. The series takes place in Los Angeles, a location Bethesda hasn’t visited yet in the games, so it’ll be interesting to see a new setting. They definitely captured the 50s retro futuristic look of the games and they have a lot of the elements (bobbleheads, mutants, robots, the vault and the blue jumpsuits, the Brotherhood of Steel and their power armor.) Now let’s see if they got the tone right. All episodes come out April 11 on Amazon Prime.
I grew up in Pasadena and Eagle Rock and when I was a kid I went to Eagle Rock Park a lot. I had no idea the park clubhouse was designed by famous architect Richard Neutra. The mid-century modernist style building opened in 1953 with its sleek horizontal lines, cantilevered roof overhangs, and thin supporting columns allowing an unimpeded view of the Eagle Rock and surrounding hills. Unfortunately, after 71 years the building needs some restoration work.
Oh shit, Neuromancer is coming to Apple TV as a 10 episode series. A Neuromancer movie’s been in development for years, I remember hearing rumors about it way back in the 2000s. A series seems like a better fit cause the book is so dense that it’ll be hard to cram everything into a 2 hour movie. As a huge fan of the book I’m cautiously optimistic that they can do it justice. The book came out in 1984 so at this point its vision of the future is almost retro-futuristic. But Apple TV’s become the go-to streaming service for sci-fi (they’ve done Foundation, Silo, For All Mankind, Severance, Monarch, and they also adapted The Peripheral, William Gibson’s most recent novel) so this might be the best chance the show would have.
I’ve been getting nostalgic about old malls lately. All the malls that I used to go to have been remodeled in the current sleek, “minimalist” style and they all look so boring and sterile. It’s a very fine line between minimalist and boring and these places all cross it. I look at these photos of the Plaza Pasadena from 1981 and it looks so warm and inviting with the brick and indoor trees and fountains. And those indoor streetlamps — gorgeous! This mall had a huge central atrium with these massive murals of the surrounding landscape and it looked so cool. Even the food court looks like a nice place to have a meal and hang out. Maybe I’m just looking at these photos with rose-tinted glasses but I do miss the 80s mall aesthetic. The Plaza Pasadena was turned into an outdoor mall in 2001 and it doesn’t look nearly as cool. I wish I’d been into photography when I was a kid so I could’ve taken photos before things changed.
WestCOT was Disney’s plan for a second theme park in LA back in the 90s. It would’ve stood where California Adventure is today. They essentially took the World’s Fair idea of Epcot and transferred it across the country, however it would’ve been scaled down due to lack of available space in Anaheim (Epcot itself is bigger than Disneyland and California Adventure combined).
The central area was called Ventureport and it featured a golden sphere almost twice the size of Epcot’s Spaceship Earth. Inside the sphere would’ve been an updated version of the Spaceship Earth ride. Instead of a World Showcase focusing on individual countries, here they had the Four Corners of the World (Europe, Asia, Africa, and America) and they were connected by a long boat ride that cruised through all four regions. Future World would’ve been three pavilions containing new versions of the Epcot rides like Horizons, Universe of Energy, World of Motion, etc.
The WestCOT plan also included developing the rest of the Anaheim resort — at the time there was just Disneyland and the Disneyland Hotel. It included an amphitheater, new hotels, a shopping district, updated local infrastructure, and three massive parking structures that were connected by people movers to the central plaza. The monorail would be extended to go around the sphere, and the new route also included stops at the new hotels.
Unfortunately the plan was scrapped. The failure of Euro Disney led to big financial problems, so Disney had to reconsider spending so much money on a second Anaheim park (it was estimated to cost up to $3 billion) and they ended up building California Adventure on a much smaller budget.
I loved Epcot when I went there as a kid, so having a similar version locally would’ve been awesome. I remember reading about it in the LA Times and getting really excited. This was after they cancelled the Port Disney idea in Long Beach, parts of which would later be incorporated into Tokyo DisneySea. SamLand’s Disney Adventures has a great series of posts about WestCOT.
The entire Back to the Future: The Ride video and queue videos are on YouTube, upscaled to 4k. It’s been a long time since I went on the ride, I don’t even remember the queue video. And I’m a huge Simpsons fan but the ride isn’t as good.
