The Walt Disney World Resort is almost its own entertainment
nation state, made up of theme parks instead of cities. At thirty-nine square
miles, it is the size of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, or slightly bigger
than Jersey.
Its second theme park, Epcot, opened in 1982 as a
celebration of human endeavour, a kind of answer to how the Magic Kingdom came
to be. Building from Walt Disney’s original idea for the Experimental Prototype
Community of Tomorrow, where traffic would travel in tunnels under a lush
garden city, the “EPCOT Center,” to use its original name, would combine two
further theme park concepts, one of technology and another of international
cultures, into what was often labelled a permanent World’s Fair. Disney’s involvement
in the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair is a precursor to Epcot, where its
attractions “It’s a Small World” and the “Carousel of Progress” would be
relocated to Disneyland after the fair ended, while Disney’s first full
animatronic display, “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” would be reworked as
Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents.
I would have loved to have seen the original EPCOT Center, having
become aware of it – when it opened, the future was coming thick and fast, with
the advent of home computers and compact discs, while British TV audiences
still had its own primetime showcase for new technology in “Tomorrow’s World,” coming
live from the site of the 1980 Franco-British Exhibition, proving that, in
building BBC Television Centre on the land, you should still look to the future
as much as you can.
Like the World’s Fair, Epcot would use corporate sponsorship
to maintain and develop the rides – World in Motion, now Test Track, has always
been sponsored by General Motors, now using the Chevrolet brand, while the Universe
of Energy was sponsored by oil company Exxon, now ExxonMobil. However, this model
has its problems: Horizons, the ride that specifically looked towards the
future, lost General Electric as its sponsor in 1994, and carried on until 2004
without ever having been updated in twenty years.
The worst example of this was how Journey Into Imagination,
sponsored by Kodak, went from being Epcot’s most popular ride to its most
reviled, with Kodak’s reluctance, and later inability, to spend too much on
updates, resulting in a cheaper ride that had its length cut from thirteen to
five minutes. When the ride’s original mascot, Figment, was brought back to
irritate the shorter version’s host, Eric Idle, it smacked of a lack of
imagination, especially as the ride has not been updated since 2002.
These days, Epcot rarely has sponsors, the united nations of
the World Showcase have been somewhat undermined by the Trumpery of “America First,”
the health-oriented Wonders of Life pavilion is now the centre of the International
Food & Wine Festival, while Innoventions, a technology showcase formerly
named Communicorp, is mostly empty. The current edutainment-led rides at Epcot,
already using some familiar Disney properties like Finding Nemo and Frozen, will
be joined with rides fully based on them, with a “Guardians of the Galaxy”
rollercoaster replacing the Universe of Energy from 2021 – there had already
been a plan to supplant the idea of a “FutureWorld” with a more thrill-based “Discoveryland,”
and it sounds like it is now on its way.
Is the future over? Even if I am no longer able to visit the
future, as seen from 1982, I would have loved to have visited an Epcot that ran
with the future theme all the way, visiting a pavilion titled “The Wonderful
World of Graphene,” displaying roll-up computers with antiseptic surfaces, or
something. Meanwhile, I could be fired like a proton through a virtual Large
Hadron Collider, much like you can take a rocket to Mars on the current
Mission: Space ride.
Mind you, as we hark back to the 1980s... and as “Guardians
of the Galaxy” harks back to the 1980s... and as BBC Television Centre is
redeveloped as apartments, using its history as a TV studio as a selling point,
I am left with the ghost of a theme park I can never visit. At Epcot, the
future has been cancelled.
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