Look up any book, article, or video about Epcot, and you’ll hear it described as a “permanent world’s fair.” If the phrase suggests a state of stagnancy, however, rest assured that nothing could be further from the truth. Disney’s second Florida-based park, Epcot swiftly distinguished itself from run-of-the-mill theme parks—including the more traditional landscapes of Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom—with its forward-thinking attractions and strategically arranged melting pot of international pavilions.
The story of Epcot’s formation is a familiar one to many of today’s visitors. Decades before Disney’s team shaped their $5 million parcel of Florida real estate into something resembling the current Walt Disney World Resort, Walt Disney had already started to cook up his next big project: The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Plans for “EPCOT,” as the project was more colloquially termed, were unveiled to the public in the late 1960s when Disneyland was barely a decade old. In a special film called Project Florida, Walt revealed his vision of a near-utopian planned community, one where cars would be rendered all but superfluous by a high-speed monorail and never-stopping PeopleMover and an estimated 20,000 residents (and tourists and businesspeople) would work, play, attend schools and churches, shop, dine, and vacation under a climate-controlled dome. In other words, it was the next evolution of the modern American city—an ambitious undertaking even for a visionary as imaginative and driven as Walt. And soon after his untimely death in December 1966, the project was steered in a very different direction.
As the company moved forward with the development of their East Coast location, plans to integrate a seamless, complex housing and employment facility fizzled out. In its place: Another theme park (divided into the education and tech-focused Future World and nine World Showcase pavilions—Morocco and Norway wouldn’t be tacked onto the roster until 1984 and 1988, respectively), albeit one with a similarly aspirational philosophy at its core.
“Here human achievements are celebrated through imagination, the wonders of enterprise, and concepts of a future that promises new and exciting benefits for all,” Walt Disney Productions CEO Card Walker read from the park’s bronze plaque during its official dedication in October 1982. “May EPCOT Center entertain, inform, and inspire, and above all may it instill a new sense of belief and pride in man’s ability to shape a world that offers hope to people everywhere in the world.”
Epcot may not have transformed the landscape of urban planning and development in the way Walt imagined it would, but its dedication to technological innovation, conservation, and cultural education still makes it one of the most fascinating and multi-faceted parts of any Disney resort. Here are three things you may not know about the history of Disney’s sixth-most popular destination.
Science fiction author Ray Bradbury penned the original treatment for Spaceship Earth.
Image: Jared Lee, Flickr (license)
Long before “Thank the Phoenicians” became a Disney meme, long before riders could chart a hypothetical course for their own time-traveling avatars, long before Audio-Animatronics were used to illustrate the history of personal computers, Epcot’s signature attraction was placed in the hands of celebrated author, screenwriter, and personal friend to Walt, Ray Bradbury.
By the late 1970s, Bradbury was already well-renowned for his classic dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, as well as a plethora of sci-fi novels and short stories. Writing wasn’t the only area in which his talents and passions converged. He collaborated with Imagineers on an unrealized dream of a three-dimensional animation museum, consulted with architects on California plazas and shopping mall designs, suggested improvements for Disneyland Paris’ Orbitron, and helped flesh out the American Pavilion for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. In many respects, his vision for the future rivaled Walt’s in scope and ingenuity.
So, naturally, when Disney needed someone to take the reins on their newly-revised plans for Epcot, they turned to Bradbury. The result? A 14-page treatment of the attraction housed inside the gleaming silver geodesic dome designed by architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller.
Bradbury’s Spaceship Earth was an amalgamation of poetry and art and history. The script suggested ferrying riders through a misty tunnel of “vague faces,” each of whom had once made an indelible (though not uniformly positive) mark on world history: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Harry S. Truman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Lindbergh, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, and Columbus included.
From the tunnel, riders were soon ushered into a trifold story of past, present, and future. They witnessed the dinosaurs’ extinction and cavemen and women spearing and eating mammoths. They moved through the Stone Age and observed Phoenicians and Greeks debating ideas around carved clay tablets, then onto the Industrial Revolution, where steam-powered machines were king. The remaining influences on modern communication systems—Morse Code, radio transmission, television, and so on—were sandwiched into the next scene of the attraction, where Bradbury proposed the construction of an “abstract shape of criss-crossed, woven strands of wire … symbolically linking continents, countries, communities in remote and distant places.”
With their new, if brief understanding of the history of communication and technology, riders were sent into the “present,” a bustling urban scene where their natural senses were overwhelmed by a plethora of print media, a “computer wall” of blinking lights, and the fires of twenty rockets preparing their dramatic liftoff into outer space. In the final seconds of the attraction, riders floated above the Earth (well, were plunged into near-darkness along the track, anyway) for one last soliloquy from the “Universal Man” as he encouraged each individual to own their life, follow their dreams, and improve the world. The ride vehicles finally returned from the whirlwind journey to their unloading stations, thrusting their passengers headlong into the future… at least, what glimpses of the future were readily accessible within Epcot’s Future World.
Bradbury’s Spaceship Earth was perhaps a little too grandiose and philosophical in nature, but it helped form the basis of what soon became a classic Disney attraction. Instead of a cacophony of historical figures all jostling for attention, the ride’s first moments were spent in relative quiet and its long, dark ascent marked by just a few key moments of early history. Instead of dinosaurs faltering under a falling comet and cavemen digging into their dinners (though the latter is all but implied in the latest iteration of the ride), Audio-Animatronic actors pontificated within Grecian theaters, monks snoozed on their scrolls, and Johannes Gutenberg fiddled with his printing press. The narration, condensed and streamlined from “Universal Man’s” many speeches, was first recited by Lawrence Dobkin (1982 – 1988), then by Walter Cronkite (1986 – 1994), Jeremy Irons (1994 – 2007), and Dame Judi Dench (2008 – present).
Put simply: Spaceship Earth continued to evolve with the times, as it was always meant to do. “You’ve got to be moved by the history of mankind,” Bradbury told The Morning Call’s Geoff Gehman in 1999. And those who experienced Spaceship Earth were—and still are today.
Frozen Ever After wasn’t the first Snow Queen-themed attraction Imagineers planned for the Disney Parks.
Image: HarshLight, Flickr (license)
During the fall of 2014, there was what might be described as a minor uproar over the removal of one of Epcot’s long-standing attractions. Tucked into the furthermost reaches of the Norway pavilion, Maelstrom was a log flume ride that transported its riders through Viking villages and fantastical scenes of trolls, polar bears, anthropomorphic trees, and Norwegian water spirits (Nokken). While not the most beloved attraction in Epcot—that honor reserved for the likes of Spaceship Earth, Horizons, and Journey into Imagination—its eccentricity and charm attracted a devoted following even so.
Unfortunately for Maelstrom’s small band of supporters, that all changed with the blockbuster debut of Frozen in late 2013. The film, a very loose adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale called The Snow Queen, became an unparalleled phenomenon among Disney fans and consumers. Not only did moviegoers identify with royal sisters Elsa and Anna (a bit of a departure from the pint-sized Kai and Gerda of the original tale), but they happily flocked to every show, parade, character meet-and-greet, Disney on Ice performance, and specialty dining and merchandise opportunity Disney provided. Even Epcot, a park known for its deliberate departure from the character-centric designs of Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom, did not go untouched.
While Frozen (2013) is set in the fictional kingdom of Arendelle, animators pulled extensively from Norwegian and Scandinavian culture as they shaped the churches, ships, horses, docks, and fortresses that comprised the film’s landscape. It was only fitting, then, that when they began to look for potential locations to establish a permanent Frozen attraction in the Disney Parks, they turn to Epcot’s Norway pavilion. In the summer of 2016, Frozen Ever After made its highly-anticipated debut to an overeager public. Where there used to be menacing trolls, there were, well, mossy, jolly trolls telling stories on the banks of the river. Where there were polar bears, a friendly anthropomorphic snowman named Olaf welcomed guests into Elsa’s ice palace (and, later, a less friendly anthropomorphic snowman named Marshmallow sent the same guests plunging down an icy waterfall). It was the first attraction based, in however slight a fashion, on an Andersen fairy tale since The Little Mermaid – Ariel’s Undersea Adventure premiered at Disney California Adventure in 2011. Or was it?
Nearly forty years before the Snow Queen underwent a radical transformation into the decidedly Disneyfied Frozen, Imagineers had already started to dream up an attraction based on Andersen’s famous tale. According to Disney Legend and costume designer Alice Davis, her husband, Marc, had first dreamed up a Snow Queen-inspired attraction all the way back in 1977.
Of course, this wasn’t exactly the polished, iridescent palace that set the tone for Elsa’s show-stopping earworm, “Let It Go.” Davis’ attraction, termed the “Enchanted Snow Palace” in multiple concept art renderings, appeared more ice mountain than ice castle. From the entrance, in fact, it looked as though someone had tried to carve an enormous troll out of the Matterhorn. In one icicle-fingered hand, the troll clasped a frozen orb within which a snow sprite had been trapped. Around the back of the attraction, riders careened through the mountain, darting in and out of the mouths and grasps of various frozen trolls in order to escape the summer heat.
“This was going to be a ride that Mark had designed for the hot summer days,” Alice explained, “and they would be kept very cold so you’d walk in from the hot, terrible weather outside and you’d have this wonderful, cool weather.”
Frosty-breathed trolls and penguins aside, exactly how the Snow Queen herself—or any of Andersen’s principal characters, for that matter—figured into the attraction was not revealed.
While it’s not remarkable that one of Disney’s legendary animators dreamed up a Snow Queen attraction years before the studio mined the fairy tale for another of its feature films, it’s hard not to wonder how an existing Snow Queen attraction might have influenced today’s animators. Might it have inspired an original franchise, à la Pirates of the Caribbean or flopped like the doomed 2003 live-action treatment of The Haunted Mansion? We’ll never know.
The FBI kept tabs on the construction and staffing of the China pavilion.
Image: Lucas Possiede, Flickr (license)
The World Showcase is easily Epcot’s most unique and breathtaking feature. Its 11 pavilions span North American, European, Asian, North African, and Latin American countries, among several others, allowing guests to sample the cultures, architectures, and cuisines of places and peoples all around the world. While today’s pavilions symbolize an ongoing hope for unity and peaceful international relations, there were those who had serious reservations about the project during its inception—most notably, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Before we get to the hows and whys of the FBI’s involvement in Epcot, however, let’s take a look at the formation of the World Showcase. After all, Disney didn’t come up with their list of initial participants—Mexico, China, Germany, Italy, the American Adventure (United States), Japan, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada—on a whim. According to Walt Disney Productions’ 1975 Annual Report (excerpted by Warner Weiss), the showcase offered countries the opportunity to set up (permanent) shop in Disney’s new theme park, with whatever manner of restaurants, shops, entertainment, and attractions they deemed most fitting… or had the most capital to provide. Disney also noted that participating countries would be required to staff and house their own employees, not unlike the requirements previously established at world’s fairs. Organizing and staffing a temporary exhibition was one thing, however—providing the funds and employees for a permanent, year-round pavilion was quite another.
It should have come as little surprise to Disney that few countries were willing to make such a sizable investment. Until the opening of the Morocco pavilion in 1984, no national governments agreed to fund their country’s pavilion, leaving it up to private businesses (or, in some cases, Disney alone) to kick in some cash. The American Adventure pavilion’s original sponsors included American Express and Coca Cola, for instance, while Mexico had Moctezuma Brewery and San Angel Inn, the United Kingdom had Bass Export Ltd., Pringle of Scotland, and Royal Doulton, and so on. In the years that followed Epcot’s 1982 debut, rumors of additional pavilions—Israel, Spain, Equatorial Africa, Denmark, Iran, Poland, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Costa Rica, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Russia—quickly sprouted and withered as Disney failed to procure additional sponsors or take on the costs of construction and staffing themselves.
For other countries, it wasn’t a matter of coughing up the money for a pavilion, but of navigating a fraught relationship with the United States itself. In 2016, MuckRock’s Jason Smauthers uncovered FBI documents pertaining to the surveillance of Epcot’s construction—documents that revealed the government had been keeping a watchful eye over Disney’s partnerships with foreign countries as they attempted to attract sponsorships for their new project.
In one report dated December 1979, the FBI noted that the Soviet Union had engaged in preliminary talks with Disney two years prior before they were ultimately dissuaded from financing a pavilion. According to the report, WDW officials made it clear that no participating country could use the World Showcase to make a political statement, which ended up being a clear “turn-off” for the Soviet government. It doesn’t appear that many other countries entertained the same idea—at least, they didn’t admit so publicly—but as Epcot’s grand opening drew closer and closer, more red flags were raised.
While a Soviet Union pavilion never seemed to move past the initial stages of discussion, a China pavilion was soon developed as one of the World Showcase’s original nine stations. Like every other pavilion in Epcot, it would also be staffed by several young foreign delegates, all of whom were initially expected to take up residence in Disney-provided housing in Kissimmee. It was enough to send the Bureau into a tailspin. Partially redacted reports revealed that the FBI feared the People’s Republic of China had the means and intention of purchasing their own segregated communal housing for staffers, though exactly what they imagined the delegates would get up to there is unclear. Nevertheless, the Bureau kept meticulous notes on each of the pavilion’s original six staff members: tracking alleged thefts from the shops, sick leave requests, work hours, performance reports, even personality quirks in their attempts to detect any unusual behavior.
After several years of monitoring the China pavilion, nothing substantive turned up (or, if it did, it was carefully omitted from any documents the FBI publicly released). Additional fears, not concerning interference from the Chinese government, but rather that of international terrorist groups infiltrating multiple points in Epcot’s World Showcase, proved equally unfounded. Disney had opened its doors to the world, so to speak, and it appeared that they would fulfill at least part of the vision of unity and progress the company spoke to in 1975: “An on-going international exposition, […] the World Showcase will communicate the culture, heritage, history, technology, trade, tourism and future goals of the participating nations.”
