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The Dream Called EPCOT

In 1981, The Walt Disney Story – the attraction which once occupied the area in the Magic Kingdom where the Town Square Theater currently resides – took a brief absence as its queue, theater area, and postshow area were appropriated to become The EPCOT Center Preview Center. In the year leading up to EPCOT’s October, [...]

Whirl Of Motion

We recently showed a picture of the Epcot model from 1978, which included the “Transportation” pavilion that would later become World of Motion. I’ve come across this rendering of that same pavilion, which I believe to be by Imagineering artist Collin Campbell, and I thought it would help to shed a little light on [...]

EPCOT: Origins – A Model Future, 1978

For those of us in the lowly demographic called “fandom”, true insight is only gained through extreme displays of excess and obsessiveness. This especially holds true when researching older Imagineering projects, and most particularly projects that were somehow altered or never came to be. So little artwork or information escapes from Fortress Disney, that each [...]

To GYRO And GERO In The Wabe

When Epcot Center opened in 1982, Disney characters were famously kept out of the new park. There were the big-headed World Showcase dolls and, of course, Dreamfinder, but no Mickey and Minnie. But with its vast, open areas, Epcot Center needed something happening to enliven the sprawling plazas between the pavilions.

Someone, apparently, also through [...]

A Visit To EPCOT Center, 1979

Let’s take a look at EPCOT Center in 1979, three years before it would actually open:

Rendering of EPCOT Center, 1979 (Click to Enlarge)

Slightly different, is it not?

Clockwise from the golden Spaceship Earth in Future World, we have the Energy pavilion (Universe of Energy), the Science & Invention Pavilion, the Transportation pavilion (World [...]