Whether you first visited EPCOT in the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s, or 2010s, a trip to the park today would tell you that EPCOT’s story has been a complex one. EPCOT is a park rooted in the past and perpetually tasked by the present to envision a future we now inhabit. At nearly every step of its life, it’s battled between what it was, is, and could be. Somewhere between being hopelessly retro and hopelessly futuristic, the park has been the subject of fan debate for decades, even as piecemeal updates, changes, replacements, and character injections have tried to balance EPCOT’s thrills, entertainment, and family appeal.
We all know that in 2019, Disney officially launched a California-Adventure-sized reimagining of EPCOT, committing billions of dollars and at least a half-decade of focused attention to Walt Disney World’s second gate. It’s unlikely than any singular vision for EPCOT could ever balance the whims of fans who recall its intellectually ambitious origin, executives who have long detested its lack of character, and guests who have long been caught between the park’s competing identities.
And yep, true to form, EPCOT’s all-at-once reimagining has all the highs and lows you’d expect of modern Imagineering… especially thanks to the interruption of COVID-19, which has seen plenty of projects announced back in 2019 get sidelined, go silent, or get swept off the schedule altogether. Even if no park deserved a complete master plan more than EPCOT, there’s no denying that a whole lot is still happening that’ll reinvent this park once more…
So here we stand, 40 years out from EPCOT’s opening. Aside from assorted merchandise and the #EPCOT40 logo, Disney didn’t have much prepared to celebrate this legendary park’s landmark anniverary… and with half of its north end comprised of construction walls and dirt piles, that’s probably fair. But with EPCOT in the midst of metamorphosis, one thing we can use its 40th anniversary for is to reflect on 6 elements of the “classic” EPCOT you can still find in the park today, and how each is so permanently tied to what the park was, is, and could be…
1. The Architecture
EPCOT simply wouldn’t be EPCOT without its architecture. Whereas most Disney Parks go to great lengths to transport you to new, timeless, and sometimes impossible environments, EPCOT plays by its own rules. Famously, the park was envisioned as a permanent “World’s Fair,” and true to that M.O., guests stroll through its “neighborhoods” as they might a campus. In keeping with that “World’s Fair” ethos, the organizing principle of the park is its “pavilions.”
Thanks to the era in which they were designed and assembled (the late ’70s and early ’80s), EPCOT’s physical pavilions are quintessentially retro. We’re talking about monumental architecture; lots of beige and pastel; brutalist concrete; large geometric forms. Some are imposing. Some endearing. Some natural forms. Some artificial. EPCOT looks more like downtown Akron than Magic Kingdom.
And EPCOT’s ’80s DNA is literally baked into those pavilions. The average guests might not be able to guess when Magic Kingdom or Hollywood Studios or Animal Kingdom was designed based on their architecture, but EPCOT? EPCOT was a product of the ’70s and ’80s. Period.
That would be fine except that – like clockwork! – the public’s taste for the style of the ’80s fell sharply as the decade itself passed into the rear view mirror. In the ’90s, Disney went to great lengths to try to mask EPCOT’s inherent ’80s-ness, grafting EPCOT in bold primary colors, Disney Renaissance films, and Memphis patterns (which, by the way, aged just as terribly heading into the 2000s… sort of a never-ending lesson in the futility of keeping a park “timely” to the design tastes of the present.)
As luck would have it, enough time has passed that elements of the ’70s and ’80s are back en vogue. One step at a time, Disney’s Tomorrowlands are reverting to the Space Age aesthetic they sported in the real Space Age. Likewise, EPCOT’s reimagining is clearly embracing the park’s ’80s ingredients – albeit, modernized and stylized. The result is a park that leans into its now-retro-cool foundation through architecture, color, and 2D design while mixing in flourishes of the 2020s, like wood, steel, greenery, and glass.
EPCOT will always look like a product of the ’80s, because it is. All designers can hope is that the architecture of the era remains nostalgic and retro-cool going forward, and that their 21st century accents turn out to be timeless this time around.
2. The Icon
One quintessential element of the “World’s Fair” formula has always been the presence of an icon – a clear, centering structure serving as the symbol of the Fair (and often, left behind once the Fair itself closes). Everything from Seattle’s Space Needle to New York’s Unisphere; San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts to Paris’ Eiffel Tower were all built for and have each had starring roles in the imagery of its respective city’s hosted expos. So naturally, EPCOT has one, too…
Whether it’s known as “the EPCOT ball,” “the golf ball,” or its true name, “Spaceship Earth,” EPCOT’s icon really does hold its own with the best of ’em. Designed by Wallace Floyd Design Group with the assistance of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, Spaceship Earth is a 180 foot tall geodesic sphere supported by three legs. Named for a concept developed by architect Buckminster Fuller, Spaceship Earth beautifully captures the sort of architectural, scientific, and progressive ambitions of Future World while echoing the unity and globalism of World Showcase – in other words, a perfect centering icon for the park.
Even though Spaceship Earth is the park’s icon, it was also designed as a pavilion in its own right. In EPCOT’s original organizing scheme, each pavilion of Future World was dedicated to a single area of science and industry (with the Lost Legend: Horizons then serving as a capstone attraction combining them all). Spaceship Earth’s focus was communication, housing an eponymous dark ride that traveled through time from the earliest primitive humans to the future.
That ride has gone through three substantial re-writes, totalling four definitively different versions marked by different narrators. The current version (narrated by Dame Judy Dench) is the longest-lived, having launched in 2008. But a fifth version announced in 2019 (and then delayed or cancelled by COVID-19) intends to shift the ride’s focus from communication to the much more franchise-friendly topic of “storytelling,” weaving (hopefully subtle) nods to Disney films into the attraction.
So even if it’s been reimagined here and there, Spaceship Earth is the “last man standing” when it comes to EPCOT’s lengthy, informative dark rides of olde. And the structure itself – truly a globally-recognized architectural landmark – shines even more brightly as an iconic structure thanks to the “Beacons of Magic” lighting package that launched alongside Walt Disney Word’s 50th Anniversary celebration in 2021.
3. The Visual Language
One of EPCOT’s most enduring and spectacular elements was also one of its most subtle: the visual language that designers invented for it.
It starts with the logo. Though lots and lots of logos were sketched out for the park, designer Norm Iounye decided to draft a logo that played off the recurring circles in the park – from its figure-8 layout to Spaceship Earth. Head of Imagineering Marty Sklar requested that a visual representation of Spaceship Earth be placed in the center of the interlocking rings, commenting on the final product by saying:
The EPCOT Center logo symbolizes unity, fellowship, and harmony around the world. Five outer rings are linked to form the shape of a flower – a celebration of life. The heart of the logo is the Earth, embraced by a star symbolizing hope – the hope that with imagination, commitment, and dedication, we can create a better tomorrow.
From there, Inouye was tasked with creating a set of logos that could be used to concisely, clearly identify and (most importantly) connect pavilions dedicated to communication, technology, energy, transportation, imagination, agriculture, oceans, and the unifying Horizons with its road to tomorrow. Playing off of the circular iconography of the park logo, the symbols Inouye created are beautifully simple, resonant, powerful, and memorable.
Combined with the park’s recurring typeface – a modified Handel Gothic – EPCOT’s internal directional signage, logos, and colors created a consistent visual language used across Future World, further exemplifying the interconnectedness of the pavilions to the park’s larger concept. That complementary design aesthetic alone helped make the park more than the sum of its parts, communicating that these “topics” weren’t chosen at random and indeed added up to a larger message.
Of course, beginning in the 1990s, those once-unified pavilions began to fall apart. Whereas the park had been so beautifully master-planned with unity and cohesion and messaging in mind, two decades of piecemeal thrill rides, random character injections, pavilion closures, and that distaste for the look of the ’80s saw the pavilion icons disappear, typefaces modernized, and the park’s name and logo changed.
There’s no denying that EPCOT is still a place filled with disharmony. Just as it has for the last thirty years, the park is packed with contradictions, piecemeal character overlays, and “brainless” thrill rides right next to “intellectual” remnants of the past. But at least as part of the park’s newest “reimagining” and its aforementioned lean into ’80s nostalgia, we’ve seen the return of a retro-modern take on the park’s original logo (above), a modernized-but-nostalgic World Bold typeface across in-park signage, a refreshed color palette…
…and the return of pavilion logos (including from-scratch icons for Mission: SPACE, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, the cancelled Celebration pavilion, the delayed Play pavilion, and the already-shuttered EPCOT Experience). The new suite of icons is color-coded to represent their grouping into the three new “neighborhoods” formed by the subdividing of the former Future World (World Nature, World Celebration, and World Discovery) and their colors together create the new, updated style guide for the park, with bands of the colors sweeping across construction walls, merchandise, and more.
So even if the substance of EPCOT still feels disjointed, at least there’s an attempt to return to that essential language of style from the past. And frankly, even if those elements are so relatively subtle that most guests would never notice, that’s how some of the best visual language work, subconsciously, warmly, and colorfully offering the navigation, messaging, and unification that EPCOT definitely needs. A touch of the past returned to the present!
4. The Entrance
By design, EPCOT has one of the most unique and powerful entries of any Disney Park. Again defying the established “norms” of post-Disneyland parks, there is no “Main Street.” Instead, guests entered into a courtyard nestled beneath Spaceship Earth itself, marked by oblong planters and wide paths that coalesce around three acrylic pylons in the center of a fountain. From there, guests were funneled further into the park by passing under the iconic geodesic sphere itself and into the center of Future World (now World Celebration) where the (formerly) symmetrical buildings of Communicore / Innoventions served as portals to the pavilions to the east and west.
As we’ve mentioned, Imagineers spent a great deal of time and effort in the ’90s trying to mask EPCOT’s stark, monumental ’80s architecture. According to entertainment writer Jim Hill, a so-called “Project Gemini” initiative planned to break up the vast concrete expanses and stark white and beige of Future World for good, bringing in more greenery and earth tones while injecting more “semi-scientific” thrill rides into the park. Some aspects of “Project Gemini” came to be (like the forested entry of The Land, the addition of characters to The Seas, and thrill-focused rides like Test Track and Mission: SPACE).
But the same wave also introduced a new entry to the park. A sort of capital campaign centered on Millennium Celebration invited guests to “Leave a Legacy.” For $35 for a single person (or $38 for two), guests could have their faces etched into a 1×1 inch steel panel. Over 550,000 guests bought in (to the tune of about $20 million), with their faces added to a new installation to serve as the park’s entry.
Thirty five polished, brown monoliths between 3 and 19 feet tall were constructed in the entry. Designed by Disney Legend John Hench, the idea was that these granite sculptures would appear to “cradle” Spaceship Earth from the point of view of entering guests. But the effect was lost on most visitors. Instead, it felt like the entrance to EPCOT was a somber one, with guests manuevering through a plaza that looked and felt uncomfortably like a graveyard, right down to faces etched onto brown, gravestone-like granite towers.
Even the plaza’s central fountain – where those iconic transluscent pylons had one stood – got in on the act, with new “organic” rock forms to disturb the water’s flow and an earthy, brown patina.
Guests’ “Leave a Legacy” tile purchase included fine print promising that their etched-steel image would remain available for viewing for no less than 20 years. And since the “Leave the Legacy” purchases far outlasted the Millennium Celebration (continuing until 2007), it seemed highly unlikely that the “graveyard” would change until at least 2027. Even then, Disney reported that the largest of the granite “monuments” weighed 50,000 pounds – the equivalent of about five pickup trucks… so maybe they’d never leave.
But at the 2019 D23 Expo – as one of the first major announcements in what would become EPCOT’s reimagining – Disney unveiled concept art for a new entry plaza for the park. Restoring oblong planters, trees, and even flags flying the new pavilion logos (above), the new plaza feels bright, inspiring, and warm.
Like so much of EPCOT’s retro-modernist redesign, the new entryway manages to restore a long-lost piece of the park’s history, unwrap the now-trendy ’80s nostalgia baked into its DNA, and yet feel decidedly sleek and modern in a way that simply never having touched the original entry wouldn’t. Most importantly, it feels much more like a shaded, colorful, and welcoming city park than a graveyard.
And of course, the entire plaza is again built around those long-lost acrylic pylons. By day, light filters through them, casting prismatic rainbows across the park’s entry. By night, they project beams of light into the sky as the re-designed, geometric water fountain changes colors in sync with the “Beacons of Magic” lightning package on Spaceship Earth. In other words, everything old is new again at EPCOT’s entry, now embracing the park’s history and its retro-nostalgic ingredients to immensely beautiful effect.
By the way, the “gravestones” are long gone, but in keeping with their commitment to displaying the “Leave a Legacy” plaques until at least 2027, guests who forked over $35 over two decades ago can find their faces on a new set of walls (in EPCOT’s new colorways) just outside the park’s main entrance. Bring a ladder, though – if your 1×1 inch photo is on the top row, it’s 7 feet 8 inches high!
5. The Music
Music has always been an essential piece of what makes EPCOT, EPCOT. Look no further than the park’s entrance loop as it was in 1982 – a stirring, energetic, emotional, monumental collision and crescendo of orchestra and synthesizer composed by the legendary George Wilkins. Filled with wind chimes, strings, electronic instruments, and waxing and waning intensity, this score alone is packed with memorable motifs, hummable melodies, and soul-gripping spirit. All of it was meant to set the stage for a park that was historic, reverent, intense, innovative, and joyful.
But music has always been there at the core of the park’s identity. As the original scores of the ’80s gave way to the Millennium Celebration, the music of EPCOT became even more engrained into the park experience.
The score of the long-running Illuminations: Reflections of Earth and its New Millennium counterpart, Tapestry of Nations – both composed by Gavin Greenaway – remain among the most moving in the Disney Parks songbook. Atmospheric, celebratory, cultural, powerful, and goosebumps-inducing. They are, for lack of better terms, perfect compositions, and so absolutely perfect for the park’s spirit. Both centered on the idea that the world tends toward order, and that “we go on,” persevering day-by-day and century-by-century, living on through those we touch.
Few would deny that EPCOT’s ambitions are far less deep today than they were back then. For better and worse, the park has somewhat stepped away from its lofty pursuit of intellectual, life-changing reflections on industry and culture. Instead, it’s settled into a decidedly more modern niche: a semi-scientific “discovery park” of brawn-over-brains attractions that use Disney, Pixar, and Marvel characters as stewards. (Though fans feel they can eke out a Future World-style scientific focus hidden in Cosmic Rewind, Occam’s razor would suggest that the standards for entry to EPCOT have just changed.)
Luckily, one thing that has not changed is the park’s reliance on music… even if the music itself has. As part of the park’s multi-phase relaunch, an entirely new score and musical motif was developed for EPCOT around its identity as Disney’s park of “Possibilities.” Composer Pinar Toprak’s theme (not yet officially released, but heard in the embedded video above) carves out a new recurring musical motif. Like the music that came before it, it’s both mysterious and emotional; contemplative, yet celebratory; a sparkling, inspirational, and fittingly colorful orchestral hook that’ll be heard across the park.
6. The Message
For better or worse (and probably much to the chagrin of modern Disney leadership), the “original,” 1982 version of EPCOT was not a park of fantasy and animation, nor one compatible with it; it instead tasked guests with imagining themselves as global citizens who would shape, inherit, and then pass on the planet. EPCOT Center dared to deem visitors as capable – capable of understanding, connecting, dreaming, and applying what was showcased there, making the unthinkably bold assumption that when offered it, guests would use the park to look back on the past and imagine what lay over the horizon.
Did it work? Well… On one hand is EPCOT’s oft-mocked embodiment of “edutainment”; a theme park that kids dreaded “wasting” a day at; a pop culture punchline; a park that, put simply, wasn’t much fun. But on the other hand, look to a generation of themed entertainment design professionals, engineers, designers, scientists, and theme park fans – like so many of us! – who were shaped by the park… sometimes without even stepping into it in its original form ourselves.
Yes, its forms and functions were unique… but most important was its message: “to entertain, inform and inspire,” and “above all, […] instill a new sense of belief and pride in man’s ability to shape a world that offers hope to people everywhere.”
We’re of two minds when it comes to EPCOT’s message today.
On one hand, we question whether any Disney theme park really “means” anything uniquely its own anymore. Yes, Walt Disney World’s four parks have very different decorations, and the elevator pitch for Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom is simple – “magic,” “technology,” “movies,” and “nature,” respectively… but considering you’re equally likely to find Finding Nemo or Moana or Guardians of the Galaxy at any of them, it stands to reason that in the age of the Disney+ Park, there’s an air of interchangability to the four, caused by the slow and steady loss of distinct, deep themes.
But on the other hand, EPCOT will always be different from any of its sisters. It looks different. It sounds different. It feels different. It was born of an entirely unique set of circumstances. It has lived forty years torn between the past and the future. Through its architecture, its icon, its visual language, its entrance, and its music, it’s clear that EPCOT is not a “Magic Kingdom” and never will be.
Though characters have officially invaded, “Future World” has fallen to new “neighborhoods,” the pandemic has shuffled the master-plan, and the intellectual, industrious, and cultural ambitions of old have been softened into the more dreamy ideals of “Possibilities,” the vision is clear: that the “new” EPCOT will embrace what was, what is, and what could be. Imagineers are hoping that the 21st century version of the park feels fresh but familiar. That’s why echoes of “classic EPCOT” can still be found in new and nostalgic places… if you know where and how to see them…
