REMAKE OF TOMORROWLAND TAKES U-TURN TO `THE JETSONS'.

Byline: Seth Schiesel The New York Times

There is a place here where the future looks old. It is called Tomorrowland, and it is part of Walt Disney World, the most popular tourist destination on Earth.

When Walt Disney Co. decided to give Tomorrowland a makeover in 1995, it went retro.

Visitors to Tomorrowland's main drag, the Avenue of Planets, stroll not some asphalt version of the information superhighway, but through a green, gray and purple canyon of neon, oversized bolts and swooping arches of anodized steel - an antique remake of ``The Jetsons.''

``The new Tomorrowland begins with Jules Verne and ends with Buck Rogers,'' said Beth Dunlop, a Florida architecture critic who recently released a company-approved book on Disney architecture.

Tomorrowland is hardly alone. The future is growing old all over Disney's magic kingdom. From the film lot to the Epcot theme park to the real-life town that the company calls Celebration, Disney has largely given up on imagining a new future.

The shift is profound for a company whose founder was one of postwar America's great popularizers of technology. And it is a reflection of the ennui that many Americans, at century's end, feel about the chips and bits in which they are immersed.

``We went to the moon and all we got out of it was Teflon pans,'' said Karal Ann Marling, a professor of art history and American studies at the University of Minnesota, expressing an increasingly common attitude.

``Our goals as a people are not these pie-in-the-sky objectives that people grew up with in the '50s,'' said Marling, who is the curator for a Montreal exhibit in June on Disney theme park architecture. ``They settle now for a house in the suburbs and to hell with the moon. What's the point of building monorails if we can hardly get the car to work?''

That was not Walt Disney's America. At the dawn of the space race, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used a Disney television program to introduce Pentagon brass to the possibilities of space travel.

In the 1950s and '60s, the original Tomorrowland, at Disneyland in Anaheim was home to Space Station X-1 and the Monsanto House of the Future.

Mr. Disney perceived ``a role for himself almost as a middleman between industry and the public about communicating ideas of the future,'' said Marty Sklar, a 40-year Disney Co. employee and luminary of the company's fantasy-conjuring Imagineering division.

Today, though, it seems much of the public does not want to hear the message; as technology has entered more lives, it has departed from many imaginations.

All over America, the future is aging. The fantastic visions of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein have been replaced on science fiction best-seller lists by the cynical cyberpunk tales of William Gibson and his imitators.

In film, science unleashed is usually far more dangerous than science ignored. Arnold Schwarzenegger came back from the future as a good robot in the movie ``Terminator 2,'' but only because there was a more advanced, evil model to battle.

Disney, of course, makes full use of modern technology. The company recently bought ABC, the television network, and is in talks to make an investment in Starwave Corp., which develops content for the World Wide Web.

As today's idea of the future has become less romantic, Disney, as myth maker, has recognized that yesterday's idea of the future is, for many, much more inviting.

``Popular entertainment picks at a theme generally that arises elsewhere in the culture,'' said Alvin Toffler, the author and futurist. ``A lot of perfectly fine and decent and human people now think that technology is a negative.''

``These guys at Disney are up burning the halogen lamps to determine what will sell,'' Toffler said. ``They're following the bottom line.''