Walt Disney’s dream for the future of society was one he intended to share with the world. He spent a great deal of his company’s capital as well as his own personal finances in a stealth attempt to acquire land for his utopian dream. You know it as Project X or the Florida Project. You also know it as Walt Disney World. This is the story of how a part of the second gate there fell into disrepair, even as it exemplified one of Walt Disney’s unrealized dreams for Project X.
After Disney died, his brother and his Imagineers faced a difficult decision. How could they create the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow without the man who initially envisioned it? One of their bold decisions was to emphasize a hallmark of their founder’s career: innovation. He’d built Tomorrowland in 1955 as a celebration of the Space Age and Googie Architecture. A portion of EPCOT would stand as the enduring proof that his vision had come to fruition. If the Imagineers could honor him appropriately, it would remain a utopia in the heart of Florida, and it would celebrate technology in all forms. Walt Disney wanted to advance the modern world into the future, and his followers attempted to mimic this behavior. Ultimately, they reached a turning point where technology fell out of favor, giving way to commerce.
1. CommuniCore’s inception
Image: Disney
Future World debuted at the same time as the park in 1982. It was the front half of EPCOT Center, the one with all the rides that would provide entertainment for people once they were done with the revolving World’s Fair in the back of the park, the World Showcase. That’s the underlying genius of Epcot even today. The front and back divide cleanly, and each one is endearing in its own way.
A key part of Future World was CommuniCore. In fact, it stood as the middle of the hub design for EPCOT Center, split into two symmetrical buildings. To maximize the desire for additional knowledge, a foundational goal of Uncle Walt, Epcot park planners positioned the buildings adjacent to other important Future World locations.
The purpose of CommuniCore was to reinforce the ideas from the surrounding Future World portals. In order to enhance the knowledge younger audiences would acquire at the Universe of Energy Pavilion, as an example, CommuniCore provided the Energy Exchange, a supplemental educational tool. Many of the activities in the twin buildings were hands-on. In fact, several of them included touch-screen technology, something considered rudimentary today that still stood out as revolutionary as recently as 10 years ago. EPCOT was that far ahead of its time with regards to the available technologies of 1982.
Alas, the appeal of CommuniCore waned for predictable reasons. What once seemed like wizardry when Duran Duran ruled the world of pop music already qualified as quaint by the time Kurt Cobain and his band smelled teen spirit. Compact cassette tapes were just beginning to overtake vinyl when EPCOT Center debuted. The world was ready to move on to the digital era of compact discs by the start of the 1990s.
Disney experienced the curse of Moore’s Law expanded into all realms of science. They learned that building a lab of the future can quickly become a pointless endeavor. The giant computer processor lab Disney unveiled at CommuniCore missed something obvious. Technology would grow smaller as it grew faster. Their massive computer lab looked ridiculous after only a few years. And that wasn’t even factoring in the absurd Astuter Computer Review, the first Epcot attraction to close. Disney embraced optimism across Future World. What they dramatically miscalculated was how quickly technology was going to change.
2. Enter: Innoventions
Image: Disney
A dozen years after Future World and CommuniCore opened to the public, Disney’s park planners chose to reboot their failed CommuniCore concept as Innoventions. Rather than predict the world of tomorrow poorly, Disney would celebrate some of the most noteworthy inventions since the inception of Epcot, the truly innovative ones. So, they combined the two words, inventions and innovations, into Innoventions.
Gone were silly premises like SMRT-1. In their place came much more corporate endeavors, presumably because the 1990s version of Disney run by Michael Eisner was extremely budget-conscious. He loved the idea of adding attractions that sponsors paid Disney to host. Companies such as Apple, General Electric, General Motors, and Honeywell all ponied up to have Disney guests thinking about their products while on vacation.
3. A change in culture
Image: Disney
As Disney ceded planning for the world of tomorrow in exchange for commerce, they shifted the focus from predictions to celebrations. The 1994 reboot of CommuniCore as Innoventions included oddities such as the Sega line of videogame products. Not coincidentally, Sega sponsored this wing of Innoventions West. At the time, the company was trying to upend Nintendo to become the number one videogame console, which reinforces just how much has changed over the past two decades.
Rather than educate theme park tourists on the mechanics of videogame manufacturing, Innoventions instead highlighted the technological marvels of videogame hardware like the Sega 32X, Sega CD, Sega Pico, and Sega Saturn. Even Sega’s hardware design team didn’t think any of these were worthy of chest-thumping. You’ll find them on many lists of worst console concepts ever. And that’s the underlying flaw with the reboot of Innoventions.
Walt Disney loved corporate sponsorships. On the opening day of Disneyland, his ties to Pepsi were called into question by angry park guests. They were thirsty yet the park lacked functioning water fountains. He got Pepsi, Ford, and other companies to pay for all his work at the 1964 World’s Fair. Michael Eisner wasn’t doing anything the founder of his business found untoward. He just didn’t do it well. His attempts were heavy-handed, and they alienated people.
4. Another disappointing sequel arrives
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From the beginning, Innoventions suffered from an unpleasant reputation. The replacement for CommuniCore was no longer about innovation despite its name. Instead, it was about product placement. Imagineers bristled at this reputation. They performed a lot of hard work in adding new exhibits to the Pavilion. Some of them like the Live Wire Theater Audio-Animatronic were creepy, while others such as the toilet of tomorrow seemed like their heart was in the right place but they failed to anticipate audience engagement correctly.
The list of failed attractions at Innoventions is long and uncomfortable to read. Innoventions East currently hosts only three attractions, one of which has roots dating back to CommuniCore. That’s The Sum of All Thrills, a roller coaster designer Disney eventually mimicked at another failed endeavor, DisneyQuest. And that’s what passes for the triumphant attraction from either CommuniCore or Innoventions. The other two operating attractions today are StormStruck and Colortopia. Yes, the best ideas that Innoventions has at the moment are a depiction of how inclement weather affects a home and…a Glidden paint simulator.
How did Disney reach this point? At its inception, CommuniCore stood as an accentuation of Future World, the front half of EPCOT Center. It was the literal hub of the park. Then, Disney tore down the inside of both buildings and started over again with Innoventions. In 1999, they showed enough pride to remodel it for the Millennium Celebration, and then they tried again with more renovations starting in 2007. They even duplicated a portion of it at Disneyland in 2008. So, there was at least some optimism at various points over the years.
5. The beginning of the end
Image: Disney
In 2015, all optimism faded away. Disneyland closed its Innoventions exhibit in March. Less than two months later, Epcot closed Innoventions West, thereby abandoning half the exhibits. In its place sits a character meet and greet, a stopgap measure to use central space in Epcot for something useful to park guests. Few of them realize that the spot where they’re standing was once the pride and joy of the Imagineers who built EPCOT Center as a tribute to Walt Disney. It’s impossible to imagine that he’d feel any sense of gratitude, though. All the ambition and optimism of CommuniCore gradually diminished and has now completely evaporated.
So, what was the cause of the implosion of CommuniCore and Innoventions? Did Disney incorrectly project the future? Well, if they could have done that successfully, building a few theme park attractions would’ve been a huge waste of their gifts. Was their rededication to commercialism a key contributing factor? Absolutely. Then again, Test Track is the sluttiest attraction at Epcot due to its Chevrolet sponsorship, and it’s still claiming one of the longest wait-times at the park. So, park visitors aren’t entirely averse to sponsorship as long as the attraction itself is entertaining.
And that’s the true failing of Innoventions and CommuniCore before it. Neither one of them ever found the hook that would sell park guests on the Future World premise. The closest either version of the Pavilion ever came was…a roller coaster simulator. That speaks volumes about how Disney simply misunderstood their target audience, a rare failing for one of the savviest companies in the world. They sold out one of the core concepts of EPCOT and Future World, a celebration of innovation and invention, in order to let sponsors buy space for products that demonstrated neither quality. The Sega 32X is the New Coke of videogame consoles, yet Disney tried to pass it off as an amazing technology. Park guests can accept corporate sponsorships when they’re as seamlessly incorporated as It’s a Small World, but the shameless ones at Innoventions created such a negative stigma that Disney could never overcome them.
