Disney's Last Dream

By Michael Demarest

Epcot Center, a toytown to entertain and educate

Unlike Alexander the Great, Walter Elias Disney never ran out of worlds to conquer. This week, nearly 16 years after his death, the most ambitious of all the great fantasist's projects opens at Disney World in central Florida. Named Epcot Center, Disney's last, vast vision is a combination world's fair, theme park and dream factory executed at a cost to date of $900 million. Like the Magic Kingdom at Disney World and California's Disneyland, it is destined to become a part of the American experience, but with a difference. Unlike its predecessors, Epcot is aimed primarily at grownups. There are no Mickey Mouselings on the streets. Wine, beer and whisky flow, as they do not at other Disney theme parks. Epcot offers serious cuisine of several nationalities, in addition to fast food. And finally, a semiearnest air of education hangs over Epcot's 260 acres.

While Disney's successors have clung to the founder's ugly acronym (Epcot stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), they have departed from his Utopian concept of a real-life community evolving in harmony with an ever changing and beneficent technology. What they have wrought is not the town but the adult toy of the future. Epcot is a mind-pummeling assault of electronic ingenuity, historical fact, fancy, showmanship, faith, hope and goo.

The fairway consists of two principal areas: Future World and World Showcase, both intended, in the words of Disney's trumpeters, to "satisfy the imaginative appetites of the tens of millions of people . . . destined to become 'Epcot travelers.' " Visitors enter through a building that is already a symbol of the center: an 18-story geosphere called Spaceship Earth. Inside they are whisked along a track to view a depiction of man's evolution in communications from cave to spaceship, glimpsing such wonders as Gutenberg's print shop, an Audio-Animatronic Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, and astronauts at work.

Radiating from Spaceship Earth are pavilions that explore other areas of technological endeavor. The World of Motion (sponsor: General Motors), nested within a wheel-shaped building, is a mostly light-hearted show with 24 Audio-Animatronic scenes depicting such momentous occasions as the invention of the wheel and the first traffic jam. The Universe of Energy (sponsored by Exxon) is a serious but compelling presentation whose three-acre roof with a partial photovoltaic surface is probably the largest privately built solar-energy collector in the world. Inside, life-size models of dinosaurs fight to the death; there is even an erupting volcano with 7,000 gal. of simulated lava and realistic odors that turn each eruption into a smellodrama. The lava is pumped by the same kind of machine that is used to shoot dog food into cans (it could be nicknamed the Alpo Volcano). The Land (sponsor: Kraft) manages to meld a boat tour, environmental subjects (topsoil loss, space-grown plants) and musical cutups by such Audio-Animatronic vegetable performers as the Colander Combo and the Kitchen Krackpots led by a human being, Bonnie Appetit.

Epcot's surest-fire hit is a pavilion called Journey into Imagination (Kodak) in which Disney's "imagineers" have pulled out all the computer stops. Guests star in their own video movies, press colored spots on the floor to create electronic music and engage in a kind of electronic finger painting with lasers. The pavilion features the only major new Disney character, the Dreamfinder, "older than wisdom and younger than the morning mist," who conducts the tour with a dragon named Figment.

From Future World, the Epcot traveler leaves the glitter of yesterday and tomorrow for a lake surrounded by slightly scaled-down scenes of eight countries and an "Independence Hall" complete with an overview of the American past. There are a Mayan temple from Mexico, the Eiffel Tower and a street scene from Paris, Peking's Tiananmen Square and the Temple of Heaven, a small corner that will forever be a Hollywood pastel of England, a Japanese pagoda and minigarden, a St. Mark's Square with the Doges' Palace deliberately misplaced on the left instead of the right (to accommodate a neighboring Roman scene), Canadian Rockies settled snugly next to a Montrealesque hotel, and a Bavarian village in Oktoberfest. In France there is a restaurant bearing the imprimatur of Master Chefs Paul Bocuse, Roger Verge and Gaston Lenotre (a traditional veal or chicken dinner at about $12 is a fair buy), and the Italian pavilion replicates an Alfredo's of Rome restaurant, with passable fettucini.

As with all Disney endeavors, the logistics strain the imagination. Some 54 million tons of earth were moved; 16,000 tons of steel were used, and 500,000 board feet of lumber went into the construction of the sets alone. Around the 40-acre man-made lagoon, 70 acres of sod have been laid, 12,500 trees and 10,000 shrubs planted. More than 1.5 million ft. of film were shot in 30 different countries and edited for more than four hours of shows. An entire new 3-D camera and projection system were invented for the 360DEG wrap-around show in the Imagination pavilion.

The Disney magic, of course, depends on a suspension of disbelief. There are no fanny pinchers on this Appian Way, no Red Guards in Disney's China, no air pollution in the Tokyo transplant. In the Land pavilion, the myriad plants have to be pollinated by hand: bees might gum up the works or sting the guests.

Despite, or maybe because of, the sanitizing, Epcot is bound to be a huge success. Though the new venture is more than half financed from its own assets, the Disney organization is no longer the magic profitmaker that Uncle Walt bequeathed. Disney films have flopped almost without exception since Mary Poppins in 1964; the organization's celluloid bid for adult acceptance, TRON, has yet to recoup its $22 million expenditure. The recession and the declining appeal of its theme parks have reduced attendance at Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom. Epcot Center is expected to attract 9 million admissions its first year at a one-day price of $15. Disney strategy is to persuade guests to tarry at both Magic Kingdom (13.2 million admissions in 1981) and Epcot at a bargain four-day adult rate of $45 for the two, thus lengthening their stays. Epcot is designed to lure the 25-to-34 age group, the dominant force in the economy but one that has not responded strongly to previous Disney-style fantasy. While 75% of Florida visitors today do not attend Disney World, 80% of this group say that they would be attracted to a center like Epcot. Thus Disney should retain a powerful lock on the American imagination. His heirs can still say, as Walt used to, endlessly, "I count my blessings." --By MichaelDemarest. Reported by B.J. Phillips/Orlando

With reporting by B.J. Phillips

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