Return to Progress City: Bob Weis and Eric Robison Imagine Walt Disney’s Unfinished Future
What If Progress City Was Never Really Finished?
What Walt Disney’s original EPCOT, Marty Sklar’s handwritten notes, and two Imagineers can teach us about creativity, storytelling, the blank page, and designing a better tomorrow.
What if the most interesting thing about Walt Disney’s idea for Progress City, a real, working city of the future, isn’t that it was never built, but that it was never really finished? Nearly sixty years later, that unfinished idea is still inspiring new questions about what Walt was really trying to create and what might have come next.
That is the conversation I found myself having at the WDW Radio booth at D23 with former Walt Disney Imagineering President Bob Weis and artist, architect, and former Imagineer Eric Robison. Between us was Eric’s extraordinary new book, Return to Progress City, inspired by the city Walt envisioned as the original EPCOT but never lived long enough to build.
Progress City has fascinated me for as long as I can remember because unfinished Disney projects leave room for one of my favorite questions: What if? Eric started asking that question during COVID in a wonderfully unexpected way, when his son suggested that he paint another hundred Mickeys.
Eric made it to 38 and decided he was not doing that again. Instead, his imagination wandered back to the enormous Progress City model that had fascinated him since childhood, and he began drawing.
The project started with Eric looking closely at Walt’s original ideas and the work of artists including Herbert Ryman and John Hench, but eventually something changed. Eric gave himself permission to stop trying to simply follow what came before and began imagining something unmistakably his own.
Bob saw those drawings and recognized something beyond beautiful concept art. After decades spent helping move Imagineering ideas from sketches toward physical reality, he saw concepts grounded not only in imagination but in architecture, transportation, urban planning, human behavior, and the belief that places can make our lives better.
And then, in the middle of our conversation, Bob handed Eric a blank card and told him to draw. Eric picked up a pen and immediately started, and watching that happen may have explained the entire episode better than anything the three of us could have said.
What You Will Discover
- How painting 38 Mickeys during COVID somehow led Eric back to Progress City
- Why Eric initially looked to Herbert Ryman and John Hench before finding his own visual language
- The wonderfully strange Progress City story Bob and Eric dreamed up over pastrami and martinis at Canter’s Deli
- What Bob discovered inside Marty Sklar’s enormous archive
- Why Marty had handwritten notes from Walt about EPCOT and the City of Tomorrow
- How Walt’s original city concept ultimately evolved into the EPCOT Center Disney built
- Why Bob believes Eric’s ideas are visionary but still potentially possible
- How real-world research into transportation, waste management, materials, and urban life influenced Eric’s work
- Why Bob raises the concern that architects may be losing some of their ability to draw
- What Eric believes can disappear when an idea moves too quickly from the imagination to the computer
- Why Eric says that even beautiful visual work still needs a writer and a story
- How Imagineering uses sketches, words, collaboration, and “yes, and” thinking
- What happened when Bob handed Eric a blank card and asked him to draw the future
- Why going through the book made me tell Eric that he felt like the Tony Stark of 2026
- Whether something inspired by Progress City could actually be built today
- What Eric thinks Walt might say if he could hold the finished book
Timestamps
- 01:58 Meet Bob Weis and Eric Robison
- 02:31 The first copy of Return to Progress City comes off the press
- 03:43 How Bob and Eric’s collaboration began
- 04:12 How 38 Mickeys led Eric back to Progress City
- 05:01 Bob on Eric’s artistic voice and Herbert Ryman’s influence
- 05:49 What if Eric wasn’t imagining Progress City, but remembering it?
- 06:29 Pastrami, martinis, Canter’s Deli, and a city hidden beneath Florida
- 07:45 Why Eric seemingly cannot stop imagining the future
- 09:04 Honoring Walt’s original vision while creating something new
- 10:37 “You can play cover songs all your life…”
- 10:50 Marty Sklar’s handwritten notes from conversations with Walt
- 13:25 Kurt Russell, Walt Disney, and the mysterious domed city
- 14:35 Bob Weis inside Marty Sklar’s extraordinary archives
- 15:06 David Brinkley and Disney actually building the future
- 16:00 Could Eric’s Progress City concepts actually be built?
- 17:15 Using real-world cities to help imagine a better one
- 17:45 AI, art, and what makes human creativity different
- 18:38 From “chicken scratch” to finished Imagineering concept art
- 19:17 Why I called Eric the Tony Stark of 2026
- 20:09 Creating something before you know exactly what it is
- 20:58 Bob hands Eric a blank card and tells him to draw the future
- 21:38 Bob congratulates me on The Disney Interviews: Disney Legends Edition
- 24:21 Eric’s creative process and learning to trust your imagination
- 25:39 When vision meets the practical realities of Imagineering
- 26:49 How this conversation starts feeling like an Imagineering design session
- 28:53 Why the blank page excites some people and terrifies others
- 29:25 How an Imagineering idea fills a wall before it becomes a story
- 30:27 Why Eric says, “You always need a writer”
- 30:58 Have architects lost the ability to draw?
- 31:28 Putting motion and emotion into physical spaces
- 32:35 The human spirit inside a hand-drawn sketch
- 33:56 Could a modern Progress City really exist?
- 35:14 The responsibility of putting the name Progress City on the book
- 35:53 What Eric thinks Walt would say if he saw it
- 36:48 Bob on Walt’s desire to make life better
- 37:18 Why Return to Progress City is a book you can open anywhere
- 37:38 Eric’s surprise D23 announcement and where to find the book
- 38:16 Why passion projects can create some of the most meaningful work
The City Walt Never Finished
One reason Progress City remains endlessly fascinating is that there is no final version to compare against. Walt’s EPCOT existed as ideas, models, films, conversations, notes, and plans, but Walt did not live long enough to guide it through the long and difficult journey from concept into a living community.
That absence leaves a void, but it also leaves possibility. Eric explains that when he started Return to Progress City, he initially tried to stay close to Walt’s vision, and even the opening pages consciously acknowledge artists such as Herbert Ryman and John Hench.
Eventually, Eric realized that the project could not stay there if it was going to become something of his own. As he says in the conversation, “You can play cover songs all your life, but one day you gotta write your own music.”
That may be the key to understanding Return to Progress City. Honoring Walt does not necessarily mean trying to freeze his ideas exactly where they stood in 1966, because Walt himself was constantly looking at the world, identifying what was not working, studying what others were doing well, and asking what might be possible if you approached the problem differently.
Eric eventually began doing the same thing. The result is not a claim about exactly what Walt would have built, but a new exploration inspired by the question Walt left behind.
Pastrami, Martinis, and the Secret Progress City Under Florida
One of the things I love about watching Bob and Eric together is that their creative collaboration clearly did not end when they left Imagineering. At one point they tell me about sitting at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, eating pastrami sandwiches and having martinis, when Bob pulled out a napkin and started sketching Florida with a purple ballpoint pen.
That eventually led to a wonderfully strange story idea. What if Eric had once gotten lost in Florida, ended up somewhere beneath the mangroves, discovered that Progress City actually existed, then returned with amnesia and began painting things he was not imagining at all, but remembering?
It is funny and wonderfully weird, but it is also a small example of the much larger creative process we spend the rest of the interview discussing. One person starts with something, the other asks “What if?” or adds a “Yes, and…,” and suddenly the idea is somewhere neither person could have reached alone.
The Notes Marty Sklar Took From Walt
One of the moments that immediately stopped me during the conversation came when Bob began talking about Marty Sklar, who was a mentor to both of them. As part of his work with Marty’s enormous archive, Bob has seen Marty’s original handwritten notes from conversations with Walt about Progress City and the City of Tomorrow.
Marty was uniquely positioned to capture those ideas because he was preparing the television script Walt would use to introduce and explain the Florida Project. Walt talked through the idea with Marty, Marty wrote it down in his own hand, and decades later Bob found himself studying those notes while working through the archive.
There is something remarkable about that line of connection. Walt explains an idea to Marty, Marty preserves it, Bob discovers and studies it decades later, and then Bob sits beside Eric while another generation asks where the underlying idea might lead next.
Bob also talks about the challenge Disney faced after Walt died. Once Walt Disney World had become successful, Card Walker turned to Marty, the person Walt had entrusted with articulating the EPCOT idea, and essentially asked what Disney was going to do about it.
The answer ultimately became EPCOT Center. It was not the functioning city Walt had described, but it attempted to preserve pieces of the larger philosophy through technology, culture, possibility, and a belief that Disney could offer people a glimpse of what tomorrow might become.
That history makes Return to Progress City much more interesting when you stop asking, “Is this exactly what Walt would have built?” and instead ask, “What question did Walt leave behind?” The latter gives us room to respect the past while continuing to imagine the future.
Progress City Was Supposed to Be Proof
Bob brings up another moment that helps explain why Walt’s original concept still feels so audacious. He recalls journalist David Brinkley standing near Disney’s Contemporary Resort around the opening of Walt Disney World with the monorail moving behind him and reflecting on how people had heard promises of futuristic transportation and cities, while Disney had actually started building some of those ideas.
That distinction matters because Progress City was not simply about predicting what tomorrow might look like. Walt wanted to create a working example, something people could see, experience, learn from, improve, and perhaps take back into the real world.
That is also why Eric’s work is more interesting than a collection of futuristic paintings. He is not simply drawing things that look like the future, but asking many of the same underlying questions about transportation, efficiency, beauty, technology, and the human experience that sat underneath Walt’s original idea.
The goal is not to predict tomorrow perfectly. It is to help make tomorrow worth moving toward.
A Future That Might Actually Be Possible
Bob brings a perspective to Eric’s work that very few people could. He spent decades at Walt Disney Imagineering seeing drawings arrive on a table and then helping teams figure out how those ideas could become architecture, attractions, resorts, parks, museums, and experiences in the real world.
When Bob looks through Eric’s book, he is therefore looking at more than the beauty of the paintings. He is also thinking about scale, transportation, circulation, infrastructure, spaces, and the way people might actually live inside them.
Bob describes Eric’s work as visionary while still being practical and possible. Eric also did more homework than simply imagining futuristic buildings, studying transportation, materials, waste management, and examples of efficient urban life in places such as Sweden and Copenhagen.
That matters because Progress City was never supposed to be futuristic simply because the future looked cool. The underlying question was always about whether transportation, architecture, technology, and thoughtful planning could make everyday life better.
How could people move more efficiently, and how could cities become more beautiful and functional? How could technology improve daily life instead of simply being displayed as a novelty?
That is a very different ambition from predicting what the future will look like. It is trying to help create it.
The Tony Stark of 2026
As I was turning through the book and looking at Eric’s transportation systems, service bots, architecture, and the way he thinks about technology as something that should actually work in the real world, I finally told him what had been running through my head. He felt like the Tony Stark of 2026, and I meant that as the highest possible compliment.
The section on service bots immediately reminded me of the Iron Man Experience queue at Hong Kong Disneyland, where the technology does not simply feel decorative but seems to belong to a larger functioning world. That comparison also helped me articulate something I have always believed about Walt’s original Progress City concept.
Progress City was never really about Walt successfully predicting what the future would look like. It was about creating a place that could continually change with the future, and that same philosophy runs through much of what Eric has imagined here.
The Blank Page
At one point in our conversation, Bob hands Eric a blank card and tells him to draw something for me. There is no computer, no reference image, no elaborate setup, and seemingly very little hesitation as Eric picks up the pen and allows the line to lead somewhere.
That launches one of my favorite parts of the conversation because a blank page can mean very different things depending on who is looking at it. For many people, the blank page can feel intimidating because it contains no instructions, while for Eric that absence appears to be exactly what makes it exciting.
He describes sitting down, sometimes with something playing on television, and allowing himself to doodle without immediately forcing the drawing to become something specific. Eventually he looks through those sketches, circles ideas that seem interesting, refines them, and begins figuring out what they might become.
Sometimes he creates a space before he even knows what the space is for. That uncertainty is not a failure in the process, but part of the process itself.
Bob explains that early Imagineering sessions can work in much the same way. People write words, make sketches, pin ideas to a wall, react to what other people are creating, and gradually discover a story or throughline that may not have been obvious when they entered the room.
Somebody contributes one piece of the puzzle and somebody else takes it somewhere unexpected. Eventually an idea begins to emerge that no single person could have created alone.
“You Always Need a Writer”
One of my favorite unexpected comments comes from Eric himself, because here is this remarkable visual artist surrounded by pages of beautiful drawings and paintings, and he says that you always need a writer. He compares it to film, where you can have something visually stunning, but if the writing does not work, the images alone cannot carry the whole thing.
That says something important about Imagineering too. Concept art can give an idea form, architecture can give it space, and technology can make impossible things feel possible, but story is what gives all of those pieces a reason to exist together.
Eventually, the wall of sketches needs a throughline and the puzzle pieces need to become something more than a collection of beautiful ideas. The most impressive space in the world still needs to make you feel something, and that usually begins with knowing what story you are trying to tell.
Motion, Emotion, and the Human Hand
The conversation becomes especially timely when Bob and Eric talk about computers and artificial intelligence. Bob shares a concern he has heard discussed within architecture, which is that architects may be losing some of their ability to draw.
The argument is not that software is bad or that digital tools should disappear. Both Bob and Eric work in a modern design world and understand exactly how valuable technology can be, but the concern is what happens when the creative process jumps too quickly from a written idea into a computer-generated plan.
Something may disappear in between. Bob talks about trying to put both motion and emotion into a physical space, asking, “How do you inject motion into space and emotion into space?”
That question stayed with me because it gets to the heart of why certain places make us want to return again and again. Great spaces do more than function properly or look beautiful, because they create a feeling and tell a story.
Eric describes something similar when he looks at a rough hand-drawn sketch. Even if it is messy, imperfect, or barely understandable to anyone else, he believes there is something of the human spirit inside it.
You can see someone searching, making decisions, changing direction, and occasionally discovering something they did not expect. That is also why Bob makes such a strong distinction between what Eric has created and something produced simply by typing a description into an AI image generator.
The issue is not whether technology can make a beautiful picture. The more interesting question is whether our tools are helping us express our imagination or quietly replacing the part where imagination is supposed to happen.
Could We Build Progress City Today?
Eventually, I had to ask the obvious question: could something inspired by Progress City actually be built today? Eric’s answer is immediate, because he believes it could.
That does not mean dropping Walt’s 1966 model into modern Florida and expecting it to function exactly as imagined. It means that the underlying challenge Walt was trying to solve is still very much with us.
Can we create cities that are more efficient, humane, inspiring, beautiful, connected, and adaptable? Can we use technology and thoughtful design to improve how people actually live rather than simply creating something that looks futuristic?
Bob sees Walt’s ambition as trying to demonstrate possibilities the rest of the world could learn from. That is what made Progress City more than a spectacle, because it was meant to become evidence that better ideas could actually work.
What Would Walt Think?
Near the end of the interview, I ask Eric a question that had been sitting in the back of my mind throughout our conversation. When you put the words Progress City on the cover of your work, do you feel a responsibility to Walt?
Eric knows there are Disney historians and fans who understand every surviving detail of the original concept, and he knows some people may disagree with the choices he made. He is comfortable with that because this book is not a claim that he knows precisely what Walt would have built.
It is a creative project inspired by the question Walt left behind. When I ask Eric what he thinks Walt might say if he could hold the finished book, he answers without much hesitation and says he thinks Walt would want to build it.
Whether or not he is right, I love the optimism inside that answer. A great big beautiful tomorrow has always required somebody to imagine it before anyone else could see it.
Get Return to Progress City
One of the things I love about Eric’s book is that you do not necessarily have to read it from beginning to end. You can turn to almost any page, spend time with a sketch or finished rendering, read Bob’s thoughts around it, and let the idea take you somewhere.
For a Disney fan, an artist, an architecture student, or anyone curious about how ideas move from rough sketches toward finished environments, it is also an unusually tangible look at the concept-design process Eric experienced at Imagineering.
During our conversation, Eric shares that the book is available through ReturnToProgressCity.com. He also reveals that Walt Disney Imagineering was giving 300 copies to guests at D23 the following morning, which says something about how warmly this very personal passion project was received.
Why I Released The Disney Interviews at D23
This conversation about preserving creative history also felt especially appropriate because D23 was where I finally released The Disney Interviews: Disney Legends Edition.
For more than twenty years, one of the greatest privileges of doing WDW Radio has been sitting down with the people who did not simply witness Disney history. They helped create it.
Podcast conversations are wonderful, but I kept discovering that certain stories, observations, lessons, and moments stayed with me for years after the audio stopped playing.
I wanted those conversations to have a permanent home.
I wanted something you could pull off a shelf years from now, turn to almost any conversation, spend ten minutes with, and come away with a story, an idea, or a perspective you did not have before.
So I curated 18 in-depth conversations with Disney Legends, went back and wrote completely new introductions to every interview, added stories and context from before, during, and after many of those conversations, and included new portrait and park-inspired artwork throughout the 456-page book.
Nine of those 18 Disney Legends have since passed away.
That fact gives the project a meaning I could not have fully understood when some of those conversations originally happened. These are firsthand stories from people who were there.
Their window into Disney history does not stay open forever.
The Disney Interviews: Disney Legends Edition is available now in paperback and Kindle on Amazon, and if you read and enjoy it, I would be incredibly grateful if you left an honest review. Reviews help independent books like this reach people who may never otherwise discover them, and a couple of minutes really can make a meaningful difference.
Get the book:
I have been working on this very quietly for a very long time, and I cannot tell you how excited I am to finally put it in your hands. Because these are not just interviews. They are voices and stories that deserve to be remembered, preserved, and shared with generations of Disney fans to come.
If you read it and you enjoy it, please leave a review on Amazon. And if you do not enjoy it, please do not leave a review. Email me or DM me instead and tell me why, because I truly do want to listen, learn, and improve.
One more thing, and I mean this. This book and the conversations inside it would not exist without you. Your friendship, your trust, your encouragement, and your support through the years are what made every one of these opportunities possible. So this is not just something for me to celebrate. It is something for you to celebrate too.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Why This Conversation Matters
Return to Progress City is ostensibly a book about a city Walt Disney never built, but I think this conversation is really about something much more universal.
There will always be unfinished ideas. There will always be blank pages. There will always be some tension between honoring the work that came before and giving yourself permission to make something new. And there will always be tools that promise to make the process faster.
The question is what we do with them.
Eric’s answer seems to be: pick up the pen. Bob’s answer seems to be: let the idea get bigger. And maybe Walt’s answer would simply be: keep moving forward.
Your Turn
If Walt handed you one blank page today and asked you to add ONE thing to Progress City for the way we live now, what would you draw first?
Bring your idea to the WDW Radio Clubhouse, call me at 407-900-9391, or join me Wednesday night at 7:30 Eastern on Facebook and YouTube.
How to Listen
You can listen to WDW Radio on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or directly through the WDW Radio Podcast Jukebox. The show is updated weekly, and following the podcast helps make sure the next conversation finds you!
Resources
- Return to Progress City – https://returntoprogresscity.com
- Bob Weis and Dream Chasing interview from D23 Expo 2024 – https://www.wdwradio.com/2024/09/wdw-radio-803-bob-weis-former-walt-disney-imagineering-president/
- “Dream Chasing” book by Bob Weis – Get the book on Amazon.com
- Marty Sklar Interviews and Archive Material – https://www.wdwradio.com/tag/marty-sklar/
- Walt Disney’s Original EPCOT and Progress City – https://www.wdwradio.com/2026/06/walt-disneys-carousel-of-progress-history-2027-reimagining/
- Walt Disney Imagineering – https://sites.disney.com/waltdisneyimagineering/
- Shure Microphones – https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones
- WDW Radio Clubhouse – https://www.wdwradio.com/clubhouse/
- WDW Radio Events – https://www.wdwradio.com/events/
How to Listen
- Apple Podcasts: WDW Radio on Apple Podcasts
- Spotify: WDW Radio on Spotify
- YouTube: WDW Radio on YouTube
Momentum Weekend Workshop
If this conversation has you thinking about what you want to build next, I want to invite you to something.
Momentum is my intimate, four-day, one-room, fifty-person workshop for creators, solopreneurs, and entrepreneurs, and it returns to Walt Disney World October 15 through 18, during the EPCOT International Food and Wine Festival, with an optional Mastermind Day. That location is not an accident. It is a place designed from the ground up to make people think bigger and dream louder, and some of the best ideas I have ever had came from being surrounded by the very thing that reminds us what is possible when you refuse to settle for good enough.
The goal isn’t just more information. It’s clarity, making decisions, and building a real plan, through me and an incredible lineup of speakers, presentations, and interactive workshops.
There are fewer than ten seats left. The Mastermind is capped at six people, and I believe there are only two spots remaining.
If you’ve been circling this one, waiting for the right time, the right people, and the right push, this is it. Everything you need to know is at LouMongello.com/Momentum. Think of this as me, on my birthday, holding the door open for you and inviting you in.
And if you have questions about whether Momentum is right for you, email me directly at lou@wdwradio.com. I’m happy to help any way I can.
Join the Conversation
Now I want to hear from you.
If you could experience one thing that was announced tomorrow, what would it be?
For me, it’s walking through Villains Land at night. I think it’s going to fundamentally change the vibe of Magic Kingdom. For Beci, it’s getting to the top of Piston Peak in the middle of a Florida summer and feeling the cold.
And if you came out of that presentation feeling less optimistic than I did, I want to hear that too. What did you want that you didn’t get?If Lisa’s story resonated with you, I want to hear about it.
- 📞 Call the WDW Radio voicemail: 407-900-9391 (407-900-WDW1)
- 💬 Join the WDW Radio Clubhouse: WDWRadio.com/Clubhouse
- 📺 Watch the live show every Wednesday at 7:30 PM Eastern on Facebook and YouTube 📧 Sign up for the free weekly newsletter at WDWRadio.com
- 🎃 Haunts and Heroes at Disneyland, October 27-28: WDWRadio.com/HauntsHeroes26
- 🚢 WDW Radio Group Cruise to Alaska and all events: WDWRadio.com/Events
- 🚀 Momentum Weekend Workshop tickets and info: LouMongello.com – fewer than 15 seats remaining
- ✈️ Plan your next Disney visit: MouseFanTravel.com
There is always a great big beautiful tomorrow. But there is only one today.
Lou Mongello: What you handed me in terms of Return to Progress City is a gift enough. Let me just sort of set the table for those tuning in. I have the very distinct pleasure of sitting with two incredible people who have done so much before and with the Disney Company, Eric Robison, incredible artist, and Bob Weis, the former head of Walt Disney Imagineering. Gentlemen, thank you both for being here and for taking time out of what I know is a very busy day and schedule for the two of you.
Eric Robison: Thank you very much for having us. This is really a pleasure because this is right off the press, this book. You’re the first guy, so thank you.
Bob Weis: Yeah, thank you, Lou. You helped me launch Dream Chasing two years ago, and when I saw this amazing book and art that Eric was producing, and he asked me to write some commentary, I said, “The first place we should go is come see you, Lou, and get your audience to know about this.” It’s really an under-the-wire kind of publication, an insider’s series of fantastic art. People who get this are going to get something really special.
Lou Mongello: I could tell as soon as I picked the book up and started to thumb through it. I think it’s special just in concept alone, and I’m a sucker for a good origin story. I know a little bit about your backgrounds, and obviously you worked together at Imagineering, but how does this project start to come together in terms of the ideation and the two of you joining forces to put this together, which is really something you guys did on your own?
Eric Robison: Bob and I have continued to work together even after the Imagineering years. We worked for other companies and did concept work, and he’s kind of taken me under his wing. Wherever he goes, I go.
Bob Weis: Me too. We’ve worked around the world.
Eric Robison: Gensler, architecture, different places. We’ve always done concept projects together. When COVID hit, I had nothing to do, so my son said, “Dad, paint another hundred Mickeys.”
I started doing that, Lou, and I got to 38 and said, “I’m not doing this again.” I realized I had always thought about Progress City because I loved the model when I was a little kid. I was just fascinated by Progress City, and then I thought, “Wait a minute, it never got finished. Why don’t I just goof around and finish it myself?”
So I just started designing. I love transportation, so I did all the transportation things coming in and out of that big circle city. PeopleMovers, maglev limousines, and all kinds of fun stuff. Then I didn’t want to write anything, so I called Bob and said, “Bob, this is still a fun illustration book, but you’ve got to put some of Bob’s words on this thing.” That’s how I got him into it.
Bob Weis: I think the artwork is so compelling. Eric’s communication, painting, and storytelling in art are really extraordinary. I know Eric spent a lot of time with Herbie Ryman, and I won’t say Eric is like Herbie Ryman because Eric is a generation past that. He has that amazing ability to visualize, but it’s Eric’s style too.
You can see a little bit of Ryman in it and you can see other artists in it, but it’s absolutely Eric’s art style. When he showed me this, I said, “This is extraordinary. We’re going to get together and do something. We’re going to make this into a movie,” or something like that.
Eric Robison: You started writing stories.
Bob Weis: I’ll give you the movie pitch really fast, Lou. The first start was, okay, Eric got lost in Florida one time, and I came to the hospital to pick him up and he had amnesia. He kept saying he went to this place, and when he finally got healthy and got out again, he started painting all this stuff, as though there really is a Progress City someplace and he got to it.
Now he’s not painting it and he’s not imagining it. He’s remembering it.
Eric Robison: It was a good story. It is a good story. We’ll probably still do it. Here’s what happened, though. We were at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles.
Bob Weis: We were at Canter’s, celebrating something.
Eric Robison: We were there eating pastrami sandwiches and having martinis, and he pulls out a napkin and a purple ballpoint pen, which is a very ugly ballpoint pen. Anyway, he sketches Florida and these roots underneath the swamps.
Bob Weis: When you go down into the mangroves, there’s the still water and the roots going down. You could actually imagine that if you went down under one of these cenotes or something like that, you could have a whole thing that was built down there that we don’t even know about.
Eric Robison: We’re going to put Progress City down there in the story.
Bob Weis: If you think about discovering Shangri-La, it’s kind of like that idea.
Eric Robison: Anyway, that’s how we started. Then I said, “You know what? I’ll just look at my images, and you tell me how you would describe them.” He asked me a couple of questions like, “What’s this particular thing?” But I liked seeing from his mind and his point of view how he perceived my designs and concepts. That was a fun idea for me and also a relief because I didn’t have to write anything. I’m just an artist.
Bob Weis: The thing about Eric that I find extraordinary, Lou, and I’ll talk about him like he’s not here, is that he just has a passion to visualize things. He works all the time. I’ll be in China, like I was for the last month and a half, and I’ll send him a text without even looking at the time. He’ll send me a sketch or something, and then I’ll realize, crap, he’s in Honolulu and it’s two o’clock in the morning. But I know he’s working.
He must sleep sometime, but he’s always thinking about the future. If people see this folio, this beautiful book that he’s done, it has images of transportation, arts, universities, cultural institutions, stations, and all of these things. It’s like a world where we wish the world was like this in many ways.
Eric does work in the real world. He works at Disney, he goes to Gensler, which is one of the largest design companies around the world. He is contributing to the future, but there’s a huge future here in this book that we wish could happen.
Lou Mongello: I think that’s the thing about Progress City that has always fascinated people. Like you said earlier, it is one of Walt’s unfinished projects, and I think that makes us so very curious. Was the idea for the book, when you first started the project, to imagine what Walt’s vision would look like if it was finished, or what the idea of Progress City could become today?
Eric Robison: That’s a really good question, and that did go through my mind when I started. Even the very opening page of the book is a nod to Herb Ryman and John Hench. You can see in that caption there that I actually started scribbling over their concept drawings as well, to get myself in the mood to finish what they started.
The more I realized, it’s kind of like when you’re learning something. First you look at other people you admire to learn the craft. Then all of a sudden, one day you wake up and say, “I found my own style now.”
So I started off trying to be true to Walt. I ended up just doing the idea of Progress City and making it my own, like you said. That was more fun to do, and it was more original as well.
Lou Mongello: I think when you’re creating artwork for something that never actually existed, you’ve got to draw this line and balance between honoring what Walt’s original vision was and then giving yourself permission to create something completely new and very much put your own handprint on it.
Eric Robison: Yeah. I really wanted to do that because there are a lot of people out there who can do the other thing. You’ve got to make it your own. You can play cover songs all your life, but one day you’ve got to write your own music.
Bob Weis: If I could, Lou, I want to talk a little bit about Marty Sklar, who was a mentor to both of us and a very close mentor of Eric’s as well. While Eric was doing this, I wrote this new book about Marty Sklar that comes out in April, and it’s a collection from a massive archive that we discovered of Marty’s material after he passed. It’s about 1,500 boxes of files and images.
The reason I’m bringing this up is that I have now seen the original handwritten notes that Marty wrote when Walt talked to him about this whole issue of Progress City and the City of the Future. Marty took a whole series of notes, and the reason he got those notes directly from Walt, as you probably know, is that he was preparing the TV show where they were going to announce the Florida Project. Marty wrote that script for Walt.
In this archive book, we have the original notes Marty wrote and then the first onion-skin copy out of his typewriter. The struggle after Walt died, which is kind of at the epicenter of why the work Eric is doing is so important, was that after Walt Disney World was built and became successful, Card Walker came to Marty and essentially said, “You’re the guy Walt articulated the concept of the City of the Future to. You’re the one who has to figure out how we’re going to do it.”
They quickly realized Walt wanted to build a city, but they were more apt to build something that combined images of the future with guests. That’s the creation of EPCOT. Marty had to figure out, “How do I fulfill Walt’s dream in a different way, where it can be a showcase and a showplace for the world, technology, and the future?”
We know EPCOT got done in that way. What Eric is visualizing is, what if they had actually built the city that Walt had envisioned? Walt was incredibly interested in urban planning as a result of going and working at the World’s Fair in New York.
That’s why I think this is so wonderful. We know EPCOT, we know that history, and we know Marty was the one who figured out how to do Walt’s dream in a theme park way. This articulates it as if it really did happen the other way.
Eric Robison: It’s funny, I just saw Kurt Russell on a talk show two weeks ago, and he shared a rare Walt story. He said Walt liked him a lot, and he would go into Walt’s office once in a while and say hi.
One day, he walked in there and there was a dome over a city in Walt’s office. Walt said, “Hey, you like that, Kurt? What do you think of that?” Kurt said, “Yeah, I like it a lot. It’s cool.” And Walt said, “I’m going to build us a dome city in Florida.”
I’m pretty sure that was Progress City. It gives me goosebumps when I hear stuff like that.
Lou Mongello: When I heard that story, because I saw the clip too, I thought, wait a minute. For years, I used to ask people about that all the time, and I was told no, it was a metaphorical dome. Walt realized he couldn’t actually build a dome because the humidity and condensation just would not work. But again, I thought that was fascinating.
Bob, obviously we have to talk again in April when this book comes out. I imagine going into Marty’s archives is like the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You open up these doors and it is just a treasure trove.
Bob Weis: That’s why getting immersed in Eric’s work here has been so interesting for me over the last few years. As I dig into Marty’s history, it comes together with Eric’s work in my mind because of that whole dream.
One of Marty’s favorite moments that I did put in the book is this moment at the opening of Walt Disney World when the famous journalist David Brinkley stands in front of the Contemporary with the monorail going by. He basically says, “We’ve all heard about the future. We’ve heard that we’re going to have whizzing monorails and soaring cities and all that stuff, but nobody’s done it except Disney.”
Lou Mongello: Where are PeopleMovers everywhere?
Eric Robison: Exactly. Why?
Bob Weis: If we try to put ourselves in Walt’s mind, which we can only imagine, Walt did want to do real cities. I think Walt wanted to do an example that the other cities in the world could follow. I think that really was his motivation in many ways.
That’s what Eric’s work here will do, remind everybody of that and say we can strive to be a lot better. We can strive to be bigger. We can strive to be much more visionary in the way we think about our cities.
Lou Mongello: That’s why I love that the two of you are together on this project, because you spent decades at Imagineering, Bob, having artists and Imagineers come to you with concept sketches like this. You would take those sketches all the way from rough drawings into the real world.
When you look at Eric’s work, you have a very unique perspective on it. You can look at it and say, yeah, this is something that authentically, if we wanted to move forward, we could bring into the real world now or sometime in the future.
Bob Weis: Eric does bring together a visionary artistic perspective of dreaming about things that are bigger than we’ve ever seen, more beautiful, or more visionary than we’ve ever seen. But he is an architect.
When Eric draws, he draws things that could really happen. They’re visionary and amazing, and we’ve never seen them before, but because of his architectural ability, they’re in scale and they’re in reality. Somebody could really take this and say, “Okay, let’s try to remake the city this way.”
It’s visionary but, in many ways, practical. Possible.
Eric Robison: Actually, to give credit to the real world, I did study waste management in Sweden and Copenhagen, and materials. I did real-world homework because there are some countries that are very efficient at the human experience.
Studying that helped me and inspired me. It’s kind of going backwards in a way, because the world is helping me conceptualize as well.
Bob Weis: You see a lot of art today, Lou. We’re seeing a lot of stuff coming out of AI. We’re seeing people who can describe crazy worlds, and Gemini or one of the AI programs can help them create that.
The vision here that Eric creates is his. It doesn’t come from AI. It is going from his crazy brain directly, literally, to his hand, and you can see that. After 40 years of working with artists and designers, he’s very unusual in that sense.
Eric Robison: I think for art and design students, college level and maybe even high school level, seeing this process can be really valuable. It’s real hand sketching with pens and pencils, with nothing electronic, all the way through to rendering.
This is what Imagineering does. This book is a peek at exactly what a show designer or concept designer does inside Imagineering. I don’t really see many books like that. I’ve seen it in animation, but this is showing the grassroots chicken scratch from my brain and then all the way to a polished rendering.
Lou Mongello: There were times as I was going through the book, and I mean this as the highest possible compliment, where I thought, he’s Tony Stark. You’re the Tony Stark of 2026.
Bob Weis: All he needs is a couple of billion dollars. That’s all he needs.
Lou Mongello: When I got to the section about the service bots, it made me think of the queue for the Iron Man Experience in Hong Kong. I thought, you’re right, he’s thinking the same type of way that Tony Stark would think about creating these real-world things.
The way I interpret Progress City is that it wasn’t about Walt predicting the future. It was about creating a place that could continually change with the future. As I was going through the sketches, I thought, that’s exactly what he’s doing here.
Eric Robison: This page you’re on right there is a good example, experiential architecture. Bob said, “Hey, Eric, this is beautiful. What’s this one?” I said, “I don’t know yet.”
That was my most honest answer. I don’t know, but I thought it was just a beautiful space. He literally wrote, “Eric’s still working on this. He doesn’t know what it is yet.”
That’s the fun of this whole project and the fun of art and design. You don’t always have to know. Create it, and then you go, “Wow, I don’t know what it is yet, but it sure is cool.” Somebody will figure it out. It’s an art space, it’s a gallery space, it’s a theater space. It could be anything.
I still just had to do it. Anybody who is curious about Imagineering can look at this and say, this is what we do. It really is just chicken scratch to start.
Bob Weis: All right, I’m handing Eric a white card, and I’m giving him a choice of whatever pen he wants. I want him to draw for you, Lou, and sign for you a vision of the future. He’s going to draw it right now.
It’s not going to be Goofy. I want to see one of these great spaces and how you doodle.
Lou Mongello: You want to use this table?
Bob Weis: We’ll put it on a book. By the way, congratulations on your interview book. I’m going to totally embarrass Eric and make him draw a piece of architecture for you, so you can put it on your site with this interview.
Lou Mongello: Thank you very much. While he’s drawing, as somebody who can’t even draw stick figures at this point, it’s incredibly impressive to watch.
Bob Weis: You see how his vision flows.
Lou Mongello: I don’t understand how my brain just does not function that way. I always wonder, as he’s drawing it, does he have the vision in his mind and the hand is just doing the work?
Bob Weis: Honestly, in Eric’s case, I think there’s a sophisticated artist who also has an uncomplicated quality. When we grow up, we get more serious about stuff and more practical. I think what Eric has is an innocence that believes in this, and that allows it to flow out and not be constrained.
That truly is one of the great things about working at Imagineering. You try to get people not to think inside the box. You want them to think outside the box, and whenever possible, to think really broadly. That’s what I always see when Eric works, that ability to just envision and think big.
Lou Mongello: And you, being able to sit at the head of Imagineering and say, “I have this idea for this thing,” then having somebody like Eric able to articulate that in art, in two-dimensional art, the words that you’re saying become something you can actually see.
Bob Weis: The best relationships work when the artists can think so far beyond anything you originally imagined. I worked for many years with some of the great artists in Disney history, and where it works great is when the artist can think beyond the idea you gave them.
You think, “Wow, I thought this,” and they think so far beyond that.
Bob Weis: I just wanted you to see that because imagine him sitting in his studio and being able to articulate this. I can wake him up in the middle of the night and get something like this by text.
Lou Mongello: Eric, are you more of a pen-on-paper person, or do you like to do digital art as well?
Eric Robison: I love what I’m doing now to start. These days I do a hybrid situation. I start with chicken scratches. I’ll sit in the TV room and put on Netflix or whatever and just start doodling, and let my mind do whatever it wants without me controlling it.
It’s hard to describe. It’s not really meditation, but it’s trusting your mind and trusting that your imagination will take over. When you start saying, “I’m now going to draw a vehicle that does this,” it doesn’t ever turn out good.
You just start doodling, and after all the doodles you start circling the ones that are kind of decent or have ideas in them. Then you refine and refine. When you first start, it’s like what I just drew for you. I don’t even know what that thing is.
Bob Weis: Because you’re absorbed in this Progress City thing, I think internally in your brain there is a language and a vocabulary that you draw from. You may not know what that is right now, but if you go through that book, you’ll see there’s a vocabulary of this world that he sees and it just naturally flows from him.
Lou Mongello: Bob, when you see audacious vision like this, does your practical Imagineering brain take over and say, “Okay, this is great, but I start to see what some of the impossibilities are?” Or do you allow an artist like Eric to just let those ideas flow and then figure out the rest later?
Bob Weis: Certainly it’s flowing from Eric. When I looked at it, there were a few things I said. I said, “Eric, I want to see the interior of a living space. I want to see who’s living there and what that life would be like.” The book has that now.
He applied that thinking and said, “Okay, I hadn’t thought about the interiors yet,” so he did that.
Lou Mongello: I love that the book is not just about technology and places and spaces. There are people there. You can see the people living there.
Bob Weis: We talked about part of it being a research center that was also a school, where you could imagine students working there and researchers working there. There was some back and forth like that.
It’s his work, but I try to stimulate, “Okay, what’s the next thing you could do?”
Eric Robison: It felt like we were back at Imagineering in the conference room and Bob was telling me what he thought. I worked on the first Tower of Terror, which was Bob’s park and his studio.
I remember sitting in a conference room with all the Imagineers from your team conceptualizing Tower of Terror, and this is how it started. I was just doodling what they were talking about.
Lou Mongello: A lot of “yes, and.” Yes, and, yes, and. This is good.
Bob Weis: Yeah, and more. Could it go around? Could it plug in? Could it do something else?
This is a blank piece of paper again. Marty Sklar loved a blank piece of paper. If I just hand this to Eric, he can’t not draw.
Eric Robison: That’s what happened at the bar last night. They start handing me Sharpies and napkins, and I start drawing. I can’t stand it.
Bob Weis: He can’t not draw.
Lou Mongello: It’s just the idea that you get that pencil or pen in your hand and those ideas start flowing through you.
Bob Weis: Ask him for a character, Lou. Let’s do a character. What’s your favorite character?
He’s going to pick your favorite character for you. This is a guy who’s done about 4,000 Mickeys. We’re going to get a special one.
Lou Mongello: This is a one of one.
Bob Weis: What I want to do sometime is a time-lapse so we can see how he does it. For any artist, it’s a great thing to see.
Lou Mongello: Especially for somebody who is not artistically inclined. It would take me years to try to do what he’s doing.
Bob Weis: We don’t have an iPad here with a pattern or anything. We’re drawing this on the back of a card.
Lou Mongello: To that point, the blank page is interesting. Both of you have spent your careers creating things that start with this, that start with just a blank page.
For somebody who is not an artist or Imagineer, who can open up and pick up Return to Progress City, what can they learn about the courage to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet? I think there are lessons and inspiration to take away from the book even if you’re not an artist.
That blank page excites Eric, and I think it scares a lot of other people.
Bob Weis: When we worked at Imagineering in a big conference room, what usually happens is people like Eric will draw little cards like this, and some people write words and some people write ideas. What Marty loved about a blank piece of paper is the same thing as a blank room.
You walk in there and, if you have a big wall, you just start pinning this stuff up. Here’s what the entry could feel like. This is what the center of the space could feel like. These are living spaces. This is transportation.
In a couple of days at Imagineering, you might have a group just paper the walls with a visual idea, and it’s all very rough. Then you try to figure out, okay, what’s the throughline of this story? What is this thing we’re really going to do?
Then someone like Eric can take all that stuff and put it into one image and say, “Okay, this is what the whole setting will look like. We’ve got some of that, some of that, and some of that.”
Eric Robison: It’s like a puzzle at that point. You want everybody to be happy, but you always need a writer. I always need a writer.
It’s like a film. You can see beautiful films that are horribly written, and they’re still no good. The visual doesn’t carry the whole deal all the time.
When there’s a splash board of Post-it notes with everyone’s ideas and they ask you, “Can you do a montage of this idea?” it’s like putting puzzle pieces together.
Bob Weis: Eric and I have worked together on projects with Gensler, which is one of the largest architectural companies in the world, with talented people in China, Paris, South America, and all over.
What people say there, and in many architectural firms around the world, is that architects have lost their ability to draw.
Lou Mongello: Forgotten.
Bob Weis: If I took you right now to a library and we looked at a portfolio like Eric’s from Frank Lloyd Wright, or any of these great architects we’re used to seeing, they drew all the time. They articulated a vision through their art.
Now so much jumps straight to the computer. It becomes a plan that gets maximized for square footage, and then it gets blown up into a three-dimensional image.
What you don’t get, which is one of the things Disney works really hard at and that Eric is extraordinarily talented at, is how you inject motion into space and emotion into space.
Why do people want to come to EPCOT or Disneyland Paris again and again? Because it makes them feel something. There’s a story there that makes them feel.
We’re both educated as architects, and that’s something we unfortunately miss in regular architecture. We’re just not seeing that enough.
Eric Robison: There’s no soul. Even these scribbles, even if it’s a bad scribbly sketch, the human spirit is inside of it.
When you go straight from a writer’s idea to your computer and start digitizing the idea, it’s just cold. It doesn’t feel like that Matterhorn painting right there. That’s an acrylic painting. If I did that digitally, you could fake it pretty good, but you still wouldn’t have what that has.
It’s important.
Lou Mongello: You talked about feeling, and I think that’s so very important and not something that’s talked about a lot. Eric, as an artist, when you metaphorically close the book and say, “Okay, this is it. This project is done,” I’m sure that was tough for you. I’m sure you could have kept drawing forever.
Eric Robison: I just did something yesterday. Bob said, “Do a second book.” I have enough to do that, but I’m working on another idea now. I’m redesigning something else.
Bob Weis: What we’re hoping is that this amazing book will stimulate a bigger idea of, okay, what if we really can go back to Progress City? What if we could do it in the narrative way that Disney could do? Something big.
Lou Mongello: Is the idea of a Progress City something that is possible in the near or distant future?
Eric Robison: Totally. Even looking at Walt’s model back in the sixties, it looked like they could have built it. I don’t see why not.
The world’s getting uglier and uglier. We’ve got to help it. Make some beautiful things, right? It’s our day-to-day life. You walk out and there are mini malls and really bad stuff. I’m not going to mention any cities.
Bob Weis: It doesn’t matter. You can mention any city.
Lou Mongello: This could be something that could be very inspiring.
Bob Weis: I think it’s more than beauty too. In Eric’s mind, it is about efficiency. It is a vision for life that could be a better life for all of us. That’s really the strength of this.
At some point, we’ll do a broader narrative and do more. I’m going to make him do more paintings. This is kind of like the first step.
Lou Mongello: I have a thousand more questions in my head I could ask you, but I want to be respectful of your time. The thing that keeps coming back to me is that when you put the words “Progress City” on a project like this, something that was so important to Walt, do you feel there is a pressure or responsibility when you are putting this together?
Do you ever ask yourself, “I wonder what Walt would think if he held this in his hand?” What would Walt feel? What would you want to show Walt, or what would you tell Walt this book is meant to do or be, and how it pays respect and tribute to him and his vision?
Eric Robison: My son said, “Dad, get ready for criticism from the Disney factoid people, the guys who know every fact of Walt’s life and Progress City way more than I know.” I said, “Okay, I’m ready for it.”
I’m going to put the name on there because that’s what it is. That’s what I did. So I am ready for those comments, but who cares? This is a fun concept design project, and there’s nothing more than that.
I think Walt would love this. He’d probably say, “Eric, let’s go build this.” I think he’d really love it because he had a wild imagination, he loved technology and science, and it’s all in here. It’s about beautifying life and making it more efficient.
Lou Mongello: And creating a better place for humanity to live and work and play together.
Eric Robison: That’s exactly what Bob wrote in the foreword, basically. Making the world a better place.
Bob Weis: That was certainly Walt’s motivation. Walt’s motivation was always to create places that made people have not just fun, but a sense of internal happiness that made you want to come back and made you want to be in those places.
In some ways, it was somewhere that idealizes life so that once you go back outside, where it’s a lot tougher, you’ve experienced that. I think Walt was always striving for that.
Lou Mongello: I think the book is absolutely beautiful. You can turn to any page. You don’t have to read it from beginning to end. You can turn to any page, see this incredible work, and very much leave inspired.
It’s something that belongs on every Disney fan’s coffee table because I think there’s a lot to it. Eric, tell people where they can find the book.
Eric Robison: Thank you, Lou. I have a surprise to tell you. I don’t know who’s going to hear this today, and I was supposed to say it tomorrow morning, but I’m going to say it now.
Walt Disney Imagineering is going to hand out 300 books tomorrow, Sunday, at 11:30. I’ll be signing at Talent Central.
Lou Mongello: What a gift. This is the first press.
Eric Robison: It’s a beautiful gift, and God bless Imagineering. After that, you can go to ReturnToProgressCity.com and buy it. It’s my website, and so far that’s how I know it’s going to work.
There is somebody talking to me about selling it, but they haven’t inked the deal yet, so that’s all I know at the moment.
Lou Mongello: I love that because clearly this is a passion project for both of you, and that’s where some of the most beautiful stuff comes from. The fact that you and Imagineering are being so generous and giving them out is going to be a huge gift to those very lucky 300 people.
If you’re not here, visit ReturnToProgressCity.com. I’m incredibly grateful for the book, for your time, and for this artwork that I promise is not going on eBay. It is going in my office.
Bob Weis: Awesome, Lou. Thank you.
Lou Mongello: Thank you both so very much for your time, and congratulations.
Bob Weis: Thank you so much, Lou.
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