The Simpsons once joked about the dated nature of Epcot in an episode entitled Special Edna. In this 14th season bit, the family visited EFCOT and rode World of Tomorrow, a parody of basically the entirety of Future World. As the dialogue quipped, it was an opportunity for the Simpson family to see “what the people in 1965 thought the world would be like in 1987.” If you visited Epcot during the 20th century, you understand and likely laughed at the joke.
Walt Disney World park planners faced an uphill struggle in honoring the original concept for EPCOT Center. At the time of its opening, Disney Imagineers attempted to follow Uncle Walt’s vision for the city of tomorrow. That meant a demonstration of technologies just around the corner as well as those still decades away. The problem was that after the park opened in 1982, computers evolved at a pace that largely honored Moore’s Law. Building attractions required years of constructing architecture from blueprints. Some of the original Future World features were already dated. Others joined the list after a few years. The city of tomorrow quickly became a relic.
Perhaps no building suffered more in the battle between ideals and practicality than The Living Seas. The initial concept for the nautical attraction was a celebration of the mystery of the ocean. It would operate as an educational facility, meaning that parents could feel good about the time their children spent at a theme park. In execution, The Living Seas came across as preachy and underwhelming to the very target audience it tried to attract. Eventually, Disney officials accepted that their ambitious strategy had failed to pay dividends. Here’s the story of why The Living Seas didn’t work as well as the turning point when the company introduced a new premise that proved much more entertaining to kids and their parents.
Presenting: The Living Seas
Image: Disney
“We welcome you to The Living Seas. We welcome you to Seabase Alpha.”
Beginning in 1986, guests at The Living Seas received this welcome. The building wasn’t ready in 1982 when the rest of the park opened, but Disney execs always planned it as an anchor portion of the second Walt Disney World gate. The corporation spared no expense in crafting the largest aquarium known to man, spending $90 million on development. That’s the equivalent of $200 million today.
Disney envisioned an unforgettable water show for kids, unlike anything nearby competitor SeaWorld could match. When it opened in 1986, The Living Seas featured 5.7 million gallons of water, and it stood as the largest aquarium in the world almost two decades before the Atlanta aquarium surpassed the record in 2005.
At its inception, The Living Seas created a great deal of excitement. Here’s a clip of Joan Lunden on Good Morning America as she hypes all the entertainment options at the facility. She doesn’t mention one of the central features of the building, which was a movie called The Seas. You can watch it as part of this ultimate tribute to the original version of the pavilion.
Zero leagues under the sea
Image: Disney
The other iconic parts of the building were the Hydrolator and the Seacabs. The former feature was theoretically an elevator that would lower passengers to the abyss. In actuality, it was a well-disguised moving platform masquerading as a descending apparatus. The faux-elevator would lead to the Seacabs. In turn, these vehicles carried guests to Seabase Alpha, a non-ironic kind of Sealab 2021. It was here that the most memorable aspects of The Living Seas resided.
The Seacabs were a form of Omnimover that transported guests through the heart of the aquarium. Here, Epcot visitors would learn of rare species of aquatic life, watch interactions between cast members and fish, and enjoy up-close views of natural habitats. It was one of the most detailed exhibits of underwater living ever displayed during the 20th century. Alas, the popularity of The Living Seas was always questionable.
Here are words you’ll never hear a child say. “I want to go to Walt Disney World to learn stuff!” Do you know what kids really don’t want to learn about? Water. It’s the dullest topic imaginable. The Living Seas was an entire building that existed for one simple reason. It was the world’s largest aquarium intended to teach children about the mysteries of the deep blue seas.
Image: Disney
Due to the sheer volume of water and staff required to operate the facility, The Living Seas was also extremely expensive to maintain, and that’s not factoring in the prohibitive investment required to build it. To justify the expense, The Living Seas had to maintain its popularity. To children, it was the equivalent of having to eat vegetables before getting dessert. Disney had a huge problem. The issue escalated when they lost their original sponsor, United Technologies, in 1998. The turning point occurred when they stumbled upon a serendipitous solution.
Injecting a bit of character
Image: Disney
In 2003, Finding Nemo became the eighth most popular domestic release of all-time and the seventh biggest worldwide, earning $380.8 million in North America and $937 million overall. Relatively unheralded in the months prior to its release, it quickly became the most popular Pixar release ever until that point.
While Disney wouldn’t purchase Pixar until January of 2006, the two organizations already enjoyed a strong working relationship. Disney park planners shrewdly calculated a way to leverage the power of the Finding Nemo license to enhance demand at their flagging pavilion, The Living Seas. Whereas kids showed a stunning lack of enthusiasm for the Seacabs, so much so that Disney closed them permanently in 2001, these same children loved a clownfish named Nemo and an Aussie-accented shark named Bruce.
The choice was clear. Epcot dropped the education-only focus of The Living Seas in favor of a character-oriented one. Their logic was that the strength of Magic Kingdom and Disneyland before it had been strong intellectual properties. Guests loved the characters from the massive Disney catalog. When they visited parks, they desired interactions with their favorites. This constant has driven Disney theme park revenue for more than six decades now. Epcot had not embraced it since the initial plan prioritized education over entertainment. While the designers of The Living Seas maintained it was equal parts fun and informative, kids saw it clearly as too much of the latter. The dismissal of the original plan was long overdue. In order to maximize the popularity of the giant aquarium, Disney needed to slap a popular license on it.
By the end of 2003, Disney had negotiated an agreement to alter the exterior of The Living Seas to exhibit a Finding Nemo theme. Before long, they fully committed to the endeavor, adding interior touches that reflected the Nemo-verse. By the end of 2004, Disney had introduced Turtle Talk with Crush, an understated but revolutionary attraction. As you know, it blends live interactions from human children with commentary from a fictional sea turtle. Kids ate it up, causing Turtle Talk with Crush to perform as a sort of proof-of-concept for a character driven experience at The Living Seas.
Image: Disney
In August of 2005, barely two years after the theatrical release of Finding Nemo, Disney closed The Living Seas for renovations. In reality, it was a conversion to a character experience. The building changed its name to The Seas with Nemo & Friends, thereby identifying to children that if they wanted to hear Seagulls chant, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” over and over again, they’d have to visit.
Disney also repurposed the defunct Seacabs into Clamobiles, altering some of the previous Omnimover space for the Finding Nemo ride. The importance of this choice cannot be overstated. A pure ride that would fit just as perfectly at Magic Kingdom was now located at what had formerly stood as an educational pavilion. Kids now had two reasons to want to visit. They could hear Big Blue World on repeat during the ride, and then they could talk to Crush during his show.
By the time the new iteration of The Living Seas was ready to debut, Disney had purchased Pixar. That entitled them to 100 percent of the merchandising revenue for all Finding Nemo sales. It was a happy bonus to their elegant solution for reinventing a formerly stale locale. In the decade that followed, The Seas with Nemo & Friends has sustained its popularity in a way that the first version of the pavilion never managed. In addition, Disney has already included new characters from the movie sequel, Finding Dory, into Turtle Talk with Crush. The new story offers them other avenues to renovate the building and its attractions if so inclined.
Epcot has never claimed a lot of attractions. Once the original version of The Living Seas lost its luster, Disney was brilliant to adapt a property they didn’t even own at the time to renew interest. This turning point from educational pavilion to character driven entertainment facility (with some informational data remaining) has proven to be one of the strongest on-the-fly renovations in the history of Epcot. It was a masterstroke at a park that hasn’t had enough of them since its inception.
