'Tomorrowland' Meets 'Lost' in Disney Mystery Box

Calling former fans of ABC's Lost: Remember all the maddening fun you had — prior to that disappointing finale — trying to piece together the show's secrets? Remember rewatching those grainy, choppy Dharma Initiative videos, deciphering the meaning of the numbers on the hatch, or wondering about polar bears?

Well, get ready to wrap your head around another convoluted mystery, because Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof is at it again. This time it's in the service of the self-referential Disney sci-fi movie Tomorrowland, which started filming this week.

See also: Pixar's Sneak Peek at Next 3 Major Movies

Tomorrowland, named for the futuristic section of Disneyland, was a project shrouded in secrecy until now. We knew George Clooney plays an inventor, and Hugh Laurie plays the villain. Then Lindelof, along with director Brad Bird, took the stage at the D23 Disney fan expo this weekend to open a dusty old box marked "1952," which Bird had teased on his Twitter feed back in January. (1952 was the original title for the movie.)

This time around, the mystery dovetails with a lot of real-life Disney ephemera, leaving the viewer to wonder what's real and what isn't. The box, supposedly found by a construction crew in a locked room in the Disney archives, contained all sorts of material related to Walt Disney and his imagineers, who started working on Tomorrowland (the theme park version) in 1952.

A photo claimed to show Walt meeting Amelia Earhart in 1945 — eight years after she went missing. But Lindelof revealed the photo to be a composite, a forgery. Who would fake it, he wondered, and why?

There were plans for the "It's a Small World" ride created for the 1964 New York World's Fair. Numbers on the plans corresponded to a frequency of ultra-violet light. Looked at under that light, the plans revealed a secret second layer to the ride, including a "hold room."

A cipher for a 1928 copy of the sci-fi pulp magazine Amazing Stories revealed the words "I have seen across the gap between. I began practical penetration into the world. Secret retreats needed. The perfection of mechanical labor and organization of industrial resources almost at hand."

Then there was this nine-inch "Phonovision" disc, supposedly a form of video storage that Disney Imagineers had been experimenting with in the 1960s. It was dated November 1963, and titled "A History of Tomorrow."

Lindeloff and Bird said the disc had been deliberately scratched to prevent it from being read, but that a team at Pixar had been laboring to restore what they could. They played the resulting video for the audience, revealing a Disney-style animation that had been chopped up like a Dharma Initiative film reel, with key information missing.

The cartoon suggested that Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Jules Verne and Gustave Eiffel met at the Paris World's Fair of 1889 to "dream about a better future for the planet," using some kind of technology. A letter accompanying the disc pointed out that Edison and Tesla were bitter rivals, and whatever brought them together must have been spectacular.

On the D23 show floor, further contents of the mystery box were revealed in a Tomorrowland booth. One was an electrical device that looked like the famous Trylon and Perisphere buildings from the 1939 New York World's Fair. Its plug fits no known electrical socket.

And then there was this arm, supposedly from some kind of robot that was built after Disney's famous animatronic Abraham Lincoln:

Those who couldn't make it to D23 in Anaheim can download this free iPhone app for the Tomorrowland exhibit.

What do you make of the mystery so far? Are you ready to get sucked in, Lost-style, or does the viral marketing campaign seem too desperate? Does the Disney setting work for you? Let us know in the comments.

Images: Mashable, Chris Taylor