The future is forged by pouring a stiff drink, kicking back, and taking a second to question everything. We here at Esquire.com love a crazy-idea-that-just-might-work, so this week, we're paying tribute to the forward-thinkers of past and present with a series called Esquire Predicts. Because no one gets ahead without imagining what "ahead" looks like.

It all began with a vision of a wheel. Folks would call the circumference home, while a climate-controlled city center would house corporations from all over the world. Between the urban and suburban would lie the greenbelt, dotted with parks, golf courses, and anything else paradise had to offer. A web of electric monorails and car-sized movers would act as the spokes, zipping residents to and fro. No more grueling commute. No more noisy streets. No more of life's little frustrations.

Walt Disney called it the "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow," and he wanted it yesterday. After opening Disneyland in July 1955 in Anaheim, California, the visionary conceived of a city that would bring his patented magic to life. Of course, that was easier said than done, the defining characteristic of most Disney projects. But logistics didn't faze him. He was a student of aesthetic, technology, and workflow. Whatever he couldn't crack himself, he threw to his elite Imagineers.

This wasn't Walt Disney's first folly. When Hollywood pundits told him that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs wouldn't work as the company's first feature-length animated film, he produced it anyway. And when he mounted Disneyland, critics said the same. So why not build the perfect city?

He nearly did. But when Disney peered into the future, he failed to see his own timeline. On October 26, 1966, Walt and Marty Sklar, principal creative executive of Walt Disney Imagineering, produced a film detailing their plans for "EPCOT." Two months later, Walt died of acute circulatory collapse due to lung cancer. In 1966, Walt Disney Productions had the land, the manpower, the designs and the dream to build the Community of Tomorrow. All that was missing was Walt, the last line of defense against reality.

Imagineering the Future

Concept for the Community of Tomorrow's city center by Herbert Ryman Disney

Few of life's inconveniences were as irksome to Walt as the early morning trash pickup, cans clanging through the silent streets. That was no way to wake up. "Why can't there be a better way?" former colleagues recall him asking. The question followed him everywhere. In the mid-'30s, Disney also regularly took his daughters to a merry-go-round in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz, though he didn't much care for it. As the girls played, the animator would sit on the bench, eating peanuts and wondering why his neighborhood attraction—and all amusement parks, for that matter— couldn't be cleaner. They could, of course, if he willed it.

Walt was a smooth operating amalgam of creative willpower and savvy sales tactics. He was a regular Don Draper, right down to the carousel obsession. After Disneyland opened and filled investors' pockets with cash, suits were lining up on Walt's doorstep. They wanted him, which offered some promise. He wanted something, too: tools of the future.

"Walt Disney had one foot in the past, because he loved nostalgia, and one foot in the future, because he loved new technology," says Marty Sklar, who joined Disney's marketing and publicity team in the 1950s. During his early days at the company, Sklar watched as Walt devoured futurist literature, clocked long days with tech companies, and traveled the world searching for new-fangled solutions. (He solved the trash problem when he discovered a pneumatic waste collection system in Sweden.) But he was still country boy at heart. During a 1956 visit to his hometown of Marceline, Missouri, to celebrate a swimming pool named in his honor, Walt told the crowd that he felt sorry for lifelong city dwellers. "I'm glad my dad picked out a little town were he could have a farm," he said, "because those years that we spent here have been memorable years."

Walt's close colleagues can't pinpoint a moment when the Community of Tomorrow idea popped into his head. Things just seemed to snowball with evolving technology. At the top of the list was Disneyland's monorail. "He was fixated on transportation," Sklar says. "We spent so much time and energy on figuring out new ways to move people." During a trip to Germany with his wife, Disney wound up alongside a suspended "sandbag" monorail system. Bob Gurr, an Imagineer specializing in transportation, says Disney was so taken by it that he drove to the service yard, jumped out of his car, and approached the guys working on the trains. "He didn't speak German," Gurr says. "But he came back with a whole bunch of information and photographs of this really ugly-looking train. He said, 'Bobby, I want you to design a monorail.' It looked like a loaf of bread with a slot in the bottom sitting on a stick." After clearing his head with a little Saturday morning Buck Rodgers, the redesign came to Gurr. "I was at my coffee table, and in about ten minutes I sketched it up real quick," he says. "I came in on Monday and made a rendering of it."

Walt unveiled Disneyland's first monorail in 1959, as the idea for the Community of Tomorrow took hold. By then, conglomerates were going full court press for partnerships. General Electric had approached Disney to design an exhibit for New York's 1964 World's Fair, "Progressland," which would take visitors through the history of electricity, all the way through a near-future city run quietly on eco-friendly GE power. And Walt Disney Productions was slated to build four attractions for the World's Fair: "Progressland," the Ford Wonder Rotunda's "Primeval World," "It's a Small World" for the Pepsi-sponsored UNICEF pavilion, and "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln" at the State of Illinois Pavilion.

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"Progress City" slideshow with original "Carousel of Progress" narration

Disney's World's Fair work would double as a testing ground for the percolating EPCOT. Art illustrated by Imagineer Herbert Ryman for GE's "Carousel of Progress" informed his design work for EPCOT, and later became the basis for a "Progress City" 3D model that lived in Disneyland's Tomorrowland. Even more influential were Gurr's designs for the Ford Magic Skyway, which introduced the public to Disney's WEDway PeopleMover. Inspired by the Minirail automated monorail at the 1964 Swiss National Exhibition, Gurr's version featured a rotating turntable entry system to ensure shuttles were always available, no hassle.

Sklar says Disney kept one book placed prominently on his desk during the World Fair days: Victor Gruen's The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure. Published in 1964, it challenged sociological, historical, and psychological city planning theories with logic and artistry. Also, the ideal city was a wheel. "One of my mentors, [designer] John Hench, had a whole theory about that," Sklar says of Walt's fixation on circles. "Everything in Mickey is round and non-threatening, whereas you'd get into characters like Felix the Cat and he'd have all these sharp edges and they didn't last because of that. And John said, 'Well, you know, the things we think about are round, and we love women's breasts."

Like Disney, Gruen preached the distinction between utilitarian functions and home life, people coming and going with ease. The book breathed life into the lofty EPCOT notion, immediately recognizable in commissioned art from Ryman, Hench, Gurr, set designer Harper Goff, architect George Rester and the many others involved with looking ahead to "Tomorrow." Sklar calls Disney's approach to overseeing these early designs—and everything that went into his parks—as "specifically vague." "Disney knew what he wanted, but he demanded input from his team." Should the central city be under a dome? Yes. Should there be a skyscraper at the center? Yes, it would be hard to resist a "wienie," Disney's term for a pillaring object that screams "come this way." How about an underground roadway for cars? Yes. And they couldn't forget the monorail. While Ryman painted one of his City of Tomorrow watercolors, Gurr remembers Disney coming behind him to make the request. "Hey Herby, we're gonna have a monorail, so … stick a monorail on there."

Walt had to make the Imagineers believe in the Community of Tomorrow. Gurr recalls Disney Productions' "boiler room," a giant meeting place with 16-foot ceilings where the core team set up graphics and soaked up the ambition. "The meetings were really, really upbeat," Gurr says. 'But we hadn't yet come to the part of, 'Okay smarty, let's start this thing and now let's see how we're gonna figure it out.'"

New City, Old Business

Concept for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow by Herbert Ryman Disney

Soon after the World's Fair, Walt and the Imagineers visited Westinghouse Electric headquarters to discuss the Community of Tomorrow. They'd eventually hit all the majors—IBM, DuPont, General Electric, the Sarnoff—but first up was Westinghouse. The day kicked off with Disney's EPCOT pitch, then Westinghouse followed with their own product preview. Then there was lunch, and then cocktails. Then more EPCOT talk. "By the next morning," Gurr says, "everybody was still saying, 'Well, what the hell is this place? I don't understand it!'"

Disney's EPCOT plans elicited blank stares and blind support. If Disney was in, so were the bigwigs. Construction talks even predate the World's Fair. One preliminary land study review, drawn up by Disney's resident economist Harrison "Buzz Price" and his company, Economics Research Associates, in 1959, reveals a partnership between RCA, Disney, and John D. MacArthur to build the Community of Tomorrow in Palm Beach, Florida. The early incarnation would have stretched across 11,956 acres and demanded a new theme park's income just to sustain itself. RCA ultimately bailed, with Disney's resources going toward the World's Fair. In 1965, EPCOT was simply called "Project X," a code name as retro-futuristic as they come.

While Disney hoped to surprise the general public with concept art and model designs, he first needed real estate for the sprawling complex. Disneyland's size disappointed its creator—you can only pour so much magic into 160 acres—and he wasn't about to skimp on this vision. Finessed plans pictured the city stretching across 1,100 acres, with an adjacent theme park and airport of the future covering 26,300. Locations in St. Louis, the Canadian side of Niagra Falls, Washington D.C., New Jersey, and even New York's abandoned World Fair site were considered. But only one place had the malleable land and blue skies that embodied Walt Disney's perfectionism: Florida.

The EPCOT land acquisition was the Mouse House's Chinatown. To covertly obtain low-cost property in Osceola county's Reed Creek Basin, Disney formed several real estate companies that strategically purchased plots under government and reporters' radars. Factions like "Reedy Creek Ranch Co.," "Latin-American Development," "Ayefour Corporation," "Tomahawk Properties," and the "Compass East Corporation" swooped in to buy property, baffling locals. Someone wanted their swampland? Sold. But when word got out that the buyer was Walt, zeroes were added to price tags. "On one parcel, the guy jacked the price out of sight," Gurr recalls. "We simply designed the park around his property and he lost his access. He finally sold decades later." In June of 1965, Disney snagged the desired 27,433 acres—twice the size of Manhattan, as he'd remind throughout planning—for $5.1 million.

"The Florida Project," "The Future Project," "Waltopia" were some of the names Community of Tomorrow adopted as it trudged toward fruition. "Progressland" was the only misnomer—between terraforming the Reed Creek swamp lands to ecological surveys, and translating the Imagineers' majestic art into a livable habitat, EPOCT needed a plan. Of course, that didn't stop Walt, the P.T. Barnum of amusement parks, from selling the thing. He'd have to, if EPCOT was to fulfill his vision.

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Standing between Walt and the future was the Florida legislature. The particulars are a cloud of tax bracketing, legal quagmires, and zoning issues (see Steve Mannheim's dense Walt Disney and the Quest for Community for more), but, clearly, launching a city in the middle of an established state was going to be hard. Beyond that, Community of Tomorrow was an "experimental" metropolis tricked out with cutting edge toys.

As Sklar puts it, Walt wanted the "freedom to be able to do what he wanted to do." ("Freedom" being "the authority to generate power through nuclear fission," a right the team would actually receive). So he appealed to the Florida Legislature the way he knew how, with an educational special. Disney and Sklar wrote the "Florida Film" (above), which offered a vague glimpse of just how darn wonderful EPCOT would be. Sklar still has the seven pages of notes he took from the first meeting on October 10, 1966: "EPCOT WILL BE A SHOWCASE TO THE WORLD OF AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE." The pair even wrote and shot two versions—one for Florida Legislature and a second for the general public. On February 2, 1967, the finished product screened for legislators. Walt never saw it.

What Happened to the World of Tomorrow?

Concept for Epcot Center by Herbert Ryman Disney

Gurr recalls one particularly devastating headline published in the wake of Walt's death: "Epcot Died Ten Minutes After Walt's Body Cooled." While not entirely accurate, questions remained. Up until then, the Imagineers' had focused on the big picture. But how would families in EPCOT function? And who would live there? The loose idea was to invite employees of General Electric of Westinghouse to inhabit EPCOT's Homes of the Future for a six-month sabbatical. But where would the kids go to school?

Bigger problems weren't clarified either. What would Florida weather, around-the-clock public transportation, and high-powered trash disposal mean for daily life under a 50-foot dome? There were too many concerns. "It made great sense to Walt, but he didn't live long enough to get into the nitty gritty details of getting an idea to work," Sklar says. "There's a gigantic difference between the spark of a brilliant idea and the daily operation of an idea."

Nonetheless, Imagineers rallied to keep EPCOT alive. Sklar, Gurr, and their colleagues started the "Wednesday Morning Club" think tank, while Roy Disney, on the brink of retirement (he was five years older than Walt), led a hardheaded charge. If Project X wasn't going to become the Community of Tomorrow, it wouldn't become the Big Talk of Yesterday, either. Over the course of a decade, EPCOT, a residential oasis, evolved into Walt Disney World and Epcot Center, a theme park founded on futurism.

After opening in 1982, the Imagineers continued to nurture Disney Studios' ties to progress by hosting the Epcot Forums, where great minds like Ray Bradbury, atmospheric physicist Carl Hodges, and Girard O'Neal, inventor of the particle storage ring, met to discuss the future of science. The original park had a center where any teacher could bring educational materials on Epcot-friendly subjects back to their classrooms. Sklar even worked with industrial companies to create a kind of snail mail Google, in which patrons could send questions and get responses within two weeks. "We were really looking for people who were doing far out things and things we thought the public should know about," he says.

But it wasn't the Community of Tomorrow, nothing could be. "I think he was quite naïve from the standpoint of naïve about the negative parts of life," Gurr says of Walt. The engineer believes that if Walt had lived, if EPCOT had launched smoothly, the practical and pragmatics would have crushed him. "He always saw the good parts of life as being so interesting…. and how could you make it even better?"

Walt treasured aesthetics. If a film looked vivid, a park felt clean, and a ride whisked you to the 23rd century, that pile of work back home wouldn't seem so bad when you returned. Life had a little more joy to it.

No one can live in Disney's Community of Tomorrow, but they can enjoy its aesthetic and feel Walt's passion explode off the page. The art still leaves an impression, burrowing into our dreams. Which is where it counts, after all.

Matt Patches Senior Writer Patches is a Senior Writer at Esquire.com.

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