Between meeting characters like Pleasure from Inside Out, riding epic roller coasters like Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, and consuming their weight in Mickey ice cream bars and Dole Whips, it’s no surprise it takes my three children a minute to share their favourite factor about Disney World. However on our most up-to-date journey, all three of them fell in love with an sudden attraction — one which’s been at Walt Disney World for 50 years, and one which’s often getting essentially the most wait time in Tomorrowland if it’s raining and folks need an enclosed attraction to get pleasure from.
My kids fell head over heels in love with Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress. And the extra I thought of it, it made full sense.
Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress is a kind of Disney World attractions with a wealthy historical past. It’s been within the Tomorrowland part of Magic Kingdom since 1975, and was initially a sponsored Common Electrical attraction on the 1964 New York World’s Truthful. It was meant to be an modern, rotating stage present that highlighted a number of the expertise that’s modified the common, on a regular basis American household because the early 1900s. Because the ‘60s, it’s been up to date to replicate much more fashionable modifications. Every of the many years options the identical household, and it’s the right little slice of life to witness as expertise and innovation have actually taken off during the last 100 years.
However the attraction was designed to spotlight each nostalgia and progress, and in 2025, I really feel the depth of that with my three ladies. The primary time we sat via it, even our 2-year-old was in awe.
It opened up a complete dialog for my children in regards to the modifications on the earth and what “progress” actually means. From Sarah sharing that laundry solely takes her 5 hours now as an alternative of three days (and John, after all, making slightly quip about all of the free time she’ll have now) to the daughter Patricia worrying about what her boyfriend will consider her in a Statue of Liberty costume, all of the whereas making an attempt to get in form with an train machine within the ’40s, my ladies witnessed extra than simply technological progress: They acquired to see feminism in an American household absolutely launch.
By the top of the present, the household finds themselves within the 12 months 2000. Patricia’s sporting a university sweatshirt whereas her dad does the cooking — and Mother is on the pc. It is a refined shift in gender stereotypes, however I like this development simply as a lot as the arrival of the automobile cellphone and speaking home equipment.
In 2025, it is arduous to think about the Carousel of Progress rising any additional. The present’s finale has been up to date through the years with small particulars, however the precise script of the finale (with speaking home equipment and digital actuality sport headsets) was written in 1994. It is fairly unbelievable to suppose that the imagined future seems to be a lot like our precise future… and that it looks like we have hit our peak.
In 1994, they imagined we would be able to speak to our ovens and play digital actuality video games with our grandparents. Now we do. Whereas AI and self-driving automobiles and different expertise really feel like they’re subsequent in line, there additionally appears to be this concept that model new expertise lately is a little bit of a battle — it looks like new expertise simply because, and never as a result of we might truly use it or want it in our actual lives. Carousel of Progress takes expertise and makes it work higher and sooner for our households, with out lacking any of the simplicity inside.
Between every decade, the Sherman Brothers’ traditional track “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” performs because the attraction’s theme, and my children instantly launched into it. Within the darkened, rotating theater, listening to my three ladies sing this, feeling all of Walt Disney’s hope and optimism and desires, I acquired tremendous emotional. Carousel of Progress is an ode to shifting ahead, to larger and brighter issues. But it surely’s additionally an homage to having fun with what’s taking place proper now, to being pleased with what now we have and the place we’re.
Carousel of Progress is not about change or kissing the previous goodbye. It is about optimism, pleasure, and development. It is about realizing that these moments together with your children — after they’re all this age as soon as, and also you’re all in Disney World collectively — are valuable, however they don’t seem to be the top.
It is really easy to get caught up in nostalgia and want our youngsters had the identical childhood we did or that issues had been the identical as they had been earlier than. However our household remains to be our household, and as I develop from having a home filled with preschoolers and infants to tweens and large children, it feels fairly particular to sit down within the rotating theater and keep in mind that there is a “nice huge stunning tomorrow.”
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