The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

In 2019, legendary comic writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill completed the two decade long odyssey of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Over 20 years, the sassy Brits brought new and enduring attention to the genre of Retro-Victorian Science Fiction through an encyclopedic pastiche of European fiction. Main plots tied together such diverse works as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain, Dracula, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, Princess of Mars, Gulliver's Travels, The Time Machine, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Orlando: A Biography, 1984, Doctor Who, The Avengers (the British television series), Mary Poppins, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Lost World, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter, and The Tempest. Something of a literary arms race developed between Moore and scholar Jess Nevins, who maintained an online set of annotations listing the references replete in virtually every panel. Sometimes high and sometimes low, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a paean to the wonder of imagination and the glories of literature.

The epic began in 1999 with the publication of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume I. The six-issue series by America's Best Comics (an Alan Moore vanity label published by Wildstorm Comics, which was itself a subsidiary of DC Comics) was one of the highlights in the explosion of Retro-Victorian Science Fiction around the turn of the 21st century. That same year, Wild Wild West and Disney's Tarzan both entered movie theatres. They were preceded and followed by Back to the Future Part III (1990), The City of Lost Children (1995), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), and Treasure Planet (2002), The Difference Engine (1990), Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time (1992) and its sequel Dinotopia: The World Beneath (1995), Disneyland Paris' Discoveryland and Tokyo Disneysea's Mysterious Island, The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne (2000) and The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (1993), and the Sakura Wars video game franchise. It was an embarrassment of riches unmatched since, and I credit League of Extraordinary Gentlemen specifically with catalyzing my then-diffuse interest in the genre that has since consumed my life.

Disneyland Paris' Discoveryland

When looking to breathe some life back into Disneyland's Frontierland in the late 1970's, legendary Imagineer Tony Baxter spearheaded a project dubbed "Discovery Bay". Placed along the Rivers of America, this was meant to mirror a San Francisco harbourfront out of Jules Verne, including a Nautilus restaurant and a ride based on the upcoming film Island at the Top of the World. Unfortunately, Island at the Top of the World failed at the box office and Discovery Bay was shelved, but the essential ideas developed for it resurfaced decades later when Baxter was put in charge of designing the new EuroDisney. Discovery Bay formed the backbone of the new park's version of Tomorrowland, dubbed Discoveryland.

All photos by Cory Gross unless otherwise noted.

One of the consistent problems with Tomorrowland at Disneyland USA in Anaheim, Walt Disney World in Orlando, and Tokyo Disneyland is that the future keeps coming. Walt Disney's original plans were extraordinarily ambitious: a permanent, constantly changing World's Exposition in which American industry could show off the latest technological developments in an entertaining format. That's also expensive, and the rate of technological progress is so rapid that an attraction may already be out of date before it has debuted. The last time that Disneyland developed a proper science-based attraction was Adventure Thru Inner Space in 1967, themed to a microscopic voyage through the atomic realm. The ride, sponsored by Monsanto and featuring a Monsanto showroom at its exit, closed in 1985 when it was replaced by Star Tours, a Star Wars-based attraction. The creation of Star Tours marked a major philosophical change at Walt Disney Imagineering by simply replacing a classic attraction with a new one based on a commercial intellectual property. 

Baxter and his team were given the opportunity with the EuroDisney project in the late Eighties and early Nineties to reimagine the entire Disneyland concept from the ground up. Their radical "blue sky" phase even questioned whether it was actually necessary to have a castle at the centre of a Disneyland park. The Tomorrowland problem was high on their list of concerns. One of the initial suggestions was to essentially abolish Tomorrowland completely and replace it with an entire land licensed to Star Wars. No idea at Imagineering is truly forgotten, and a Star Wars land has finally surfaced at both American theme parks. That plan for Disneyland Paris was ultimately rejected in favour of one that could kill two proverbial birds with one stone.

A challenge Disney faced with building a Disneyland park outside of Paris was France's cultural gatekeepers who saw the prospect as a gauche, kitsch incursion of American consumer culture into the very heart of European civilization. Appeasing those gatekeepers became a serious concern for Baxter's team, resulting in numerous lines of connection between Disney's IP and French and European culture. The French origins of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were emphasized, for example. Their new version of Adventureland drew more definitely from European colonial exploits and adventure tales like Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island. Phantom Manor, the reworked version of Haunted Mansion set to the American Wild West, found some inspiration in Gaston Leroux's immortal creation. An exhibit along Main Street USA celebrates France's gift of the Statue of Liberty. 

Rather than try to keep pace with the future or simply consign Tomorrowland to franchise IP, Baxter's team developed the retro-futuristic "Discoveryland" of Jules Verne's imagination. This version of the land consciously looked to the aspirations of the past to commemorate its ambitions for the future which we were now realizing, as well as celebrated the work of France's pioneers of Science Fiction and Disney's connections to them.

"Tout ce qui est dans la limite du possible, doit être et sera accompli." - Jules Verne
("All that is within the limit of possible, must be and will be accomplished.")

Walt Disney World's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

A film as important as Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea meant that it has always had a presence at Disney's theme parks, in one way or another. A walk-through museum of the film's sets was originally planned for the Opera House on Disneyland's Main Street U.S.A. before finding a home in Tomorrowland in 1956. Disneyland Paris stepped up the concept by floating a full-size Nautilus in Discoveryland's lagoon, allowing visitors to descend into it and examine Nemo's ship for themselves. Tokyo Disneysea took it even further and created the Mysterious Island: Nemo's volcanic base, with a full-sized Nautilus at dock and two rides based on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Arguably the most archetypal was Walt Disney World's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine voyage. When the Magic Kingdom opened in 1971, it imported Disneyland's 1959 classic Submarine Voyage, one of the original park's most popular attractions. To differentiate the two, this trip through "liquid space" was transferred from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland and given a brand new overlay. Instead of the atomic navy submersibles of the 20th century (which were themselves no longer as futuristic as they were in 1959), these became the iron-rivet crafts of the 19th. Where Disneyland allowed guests to ride in a replica of the USS Nautilus, Walt Disney World allowed guests to ride in the Nautilus.

Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

After several years of production, design and location shooting, Walt Disney released his first Hollywood produced live-action motion picture in 1954. If the advertising was to be believed, it was in fact the mightiest motion picture of them all. Considering that the film was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, this is a credible claim. 

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, starring James Mason as Nemo and Kirk Douglas as Ned Land alongside Peter Lorre as Conseil and Paul Lukas as Prof. Arronax, is perhaps the single most important modern film in the genre of Scientific Romance. 20,000 Leagues came to the silver screen in a post-Hiroshima, pre-Sputnik era when Atomic Age Science Fiction was the darling of young and old imaginations alike (not to mention drive-in theatre patrons). Between voyaging to forbidden planets and fighting off prehistoric monsters, filmmakers turned their attention back to the Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. The first of these was George Pal's War of the Worlds, which updated Wells' tale by placing it squarely in the modern day.

Following Treasure Island and a series of three Mediaeval historical dramas shot in England with money tied up during the Second World War, Disney sought another live-action project for production in his studios in Burbank. In doing so, he revived his childhood love for Jules Verne. His concerns, in making the film, were very much the stuff of adulthood, however.

Walt Disney and the Gay Nineties

In a 1997 exhibition of the same name, scholar Karal Ann Marling aptly described Walt Disney's theme park ventures as "The Architecture of Reassurance." Through gingerbread houses, Western stockades, futuristic rocketships, and fairy tale villages, visitors to the newly christened Disneyland in the Fifties and Sixties could find nostalgia, comfort, and hope for the future through the uncertainties of America's changing culture and global position in the post-war milieu. Complimenting Walt Disney's Disneyland, the theme park, was Walt Disney's Disneyland the television series. Each week, Walt's comforting public persona would introduce updates on the theme park, behind-the-scenes programs for newly arriving films, and reruns of past cinematic successes, each themed to a different section of the park, be it Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, or Tomorrowland. When first unveiled to the world, "Disneyland" was not merely a theme park or a TV show or motion pictures, but a state of mind. The gateway to this mentality was Main Street U.S.A. and the reassuring myth of the Gay Nineties.