Time & Perspective Quote by John Hench

Even Disney utopias run on grudges, compromises, and missed sightlines. John Hench is looking back at EPCOT with the rueful candor of someone who knows exactly where the seams are hidden - and where they tore. The “not too successful” isn’t a broad swipe; it’s a designer’s indictment, precise and painful. He’s talking about separation as a moral principle: World Showcase and Future World weren’t just two areas, they were two arguments about progress. One celebrates culture as lived tradition; the other sells tomorrow as engineered spectacle. Letting them blur isn’t just a wayfinding issue. It muddies the thesis.

His monorail fixation sounds like transit nerdery until you catch the deeper logic. A station “in the center” is a narrative fulcrum: arrive, choose your story, commit to it. Hench wanted the park to behave like a two-day curriculum, not an all-you-can-eat buffet. “One day… the other day…” is pacing as ideology, a bid to protect both halves from becoming mere backdrops for snacks and souvenirs. He’s arguing for thematic integrity in a place built to monetize wandering.

Context matters: EPCOT’s evolution from Walt’s planned Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow into a theme park left artists like Hench negotiating between bold conceptual masterplans and operational reality. His critique reads like an epitaph for a more coherent EPCOT that almost existed - and a reminder that in corporate futurism, the future is often value-engineered down to a shortcut.