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High-tech businesses were attracted decades ago to Cape Canaveral, 40 miles away, and they are still coming. Today they are creating jobs in Orlando at a rate three times the national average. Patriot missiles, infrared sights for night warfare and other inventions of the Star Wars era are assembled only a few miles from the site where tourists board fantasy rocket rides based on George Lucas' Star Wars. Disney World has the Space Mountain roller coaster; Orlando has FreeFlight Zephyrhills, a firm that is experimenting with wind- tunnel technology to simulate a skydiving experience on the ground. Disney's Epcot Center has Michael Jackson in 3-D as Captain Eo; Orlando created the simulators on which allied pilots learned to aim their smart bombs.
The movie industry too has moved in. Both Universal and Disney have built studios hard by Disney World, helping to give Orlando the nickname "Hollywood East." Universal has constructed six sound stages and the largest back lot outside Hollywood. In the past two years, as many as 12 feature films, 500 television episodes and dozens of commercials have been made there.
In the spirit of the place, Universal and Disney studios also double as playgrounds where tourists can experience "real" versions of screen phantasms. Universal offers a bumpy encounter with a robotic King Kong, whose breath is banana scented. Not to be outdone, Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park has created participation shows like the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, where visitors pretend to be extras along with actors who pretend to be extras on sets that pretend to be sets.
Orlando's rococo industry of make-believe has put some zip into local gossip columns. Hollywood celebrities pop up regularly. Some, like Steven Spielberg and Robert Earl, the British mastermind behind the international chain of Hard Rock Cafes, have even bought homes in Orlando. The area, says Earl, is "full of millionaires driving trucks and wearing jeans."
Millionaires in jeans is the stuff of ordinary boomtowns. But not every boomtown has the Mouse as its Medici. When the $5.8 billion Walt Disney organization established itself near Orlando, it settled on a 43-sq.-mi. property (twice the area of Manhattan) and won from the Florida legislature a sovereignty often compared to the Vatican's. Above all, it brought to Orlando the power of the Disney ethos, which can never be overstated. Executives have traveled to the park to learn about the Disney style of management, which trains employees to cherish Walt, despise stray gum wrappers, follow a manual that sets the hem length of costumes to the exact inch and put on a smile all day every day. KGB agents have visited the park to line up for photographs with Mickey Mouse. Cultural anthropologist Umberto Eco has studied the Disney iconography. Novelists like Max Apple have produced mythical tales about the park's genesis in Orlando. And so many terminally ill children have made a trip to Disney World their last wish that a foundation has established a permanent village nearby to accommodate them.