The Future You Planned For Just Became The Past.

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IF YOU HAVE young children, you probably know how tricky it can be to explain your job to them. (“Mommy is an investment banker” doesn’t mean much to a 5-year-old.) But for Scot Drake, little explanation is required. His three kids understand very well that Daddy builds roller coasters for Disney in China.

Drake, the executive creative director of the Walt Disney Co.’s Imagineering division, moved his family to Shanghai three years ago. His mandate? To oversee the construction of Tomorrowland, one of six “themed lands” in the soon-to-be-opened Shanghai Disney Resort. At a cost of $5.5 billion (Rs 34,744 crore), it is without question the Mouse House’s most ambitious park to date. 

Indeed, everything is bigger at Shanghai Disney, which features the tallest and largest Enchanted Storybook Castle of any Disney location (and the first pirate-themed land). Drake’s section of the resort is a futuristic city first developed by Walt Disney himself at the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California. When the first Tomorrowland opened in 1955, it represented the future as the year 1986. Building a Tomorrowland for the 21st century, especially in a city like Shanghai, was a very different undertaking.

“The biggest challenge we had was, ‘How do we tell the story of Tomorrowland in a city that is already the city of the future?’” Drake asks. “This pushed us to think differently on all levels.”