Sponsors were critical to the creation of Epcot Center, and some of the very first corporations to sign on for the park were German companies. One of the earliest was Goebel, who sponsored the Glas und Porzellan shop in the Germany pavilion. It remained an Epcot presence until 2010, when the shop closed to make way for the Karamelle-Kuche candy store.
So with Epcot Center being such a big deal in 1982, and with sponsors having shelled out admirably for a seat at the table, why not advertise a little bit and get some of that Epcot mojo?
No, that's not at all creepy!
It’s a bold advertising strategy to include one of the scary World Showcase dolls looming over the doorway of your establishment.
With the arrival of EPCOT Center in 1982, Disney was forced to take a look at its pricing structure. The old ticket-book strategy wouldn’t work for this new park, with its megalithic corporate-sponsored pavilions. With every corporation paying handsomely for a seat at the EPCOT table, how could Disney tell one sponsor that their attraction was a D- or C-ticket, when their neighbor’s was an E? Disney had to act like everything at EPCOT was an E-ticket and, to be fair, it was indeed a very different park than Disneyland, with a very different mix of attractions. There’s an obvious difference between, say, a Main Street trolley and the Matterhorn, but how do you quantify the difference between Kitchen Kabaret, Horizons, and Impressions de France?
When you add into the mix the fact that the sponsors wanted to make sure that as many guests as possible visited their pavilions, and didn’t want people skipping over an attraction because they were out of tickets, it became apparent that EPCOT simply wouldn’t work with the time-honored admissions system.
This led to the rise of the Passport – the all-inclusive, full-day admission. For the first time, guests could enter a Disney park and ride every ride as much as they wanted. It was a big change, and so in Spring of 1982 Disney published this article in Disney News to help explain the new policy:
There is no way I could adequately prepare you, so just watch.
Why? Seriously, why?
This video was distributed at General Motors dealerships in 1995, to people who came in to test-drive cars. G.M. was, at the time, sponsoring World of Motion at Epcot Center, which was preparing to give way to Test Track. Where Leonardo da Vinci or any of this other randomness comes into the picture is anyone’s guess.
Seriously, this might be the goofiest Disney promo video ever. Although I do like how they portray Epcot as the product and culmination of one’s mastery of their own imagination.
Nice footage of the parks, though! What did you see that you miss?
So, there’s this rumor that seems to be spreading everywhere…
People keep suggesting that Imagineering has a plan to – at last – replace the unfortunate Innoventions exhibit at Disneyland with some sort of attraction modeled on the Stark Expo from last year’s Marvel release Iron Man 2.
Yeah, that’s totally not a thing.
For those of you who haven’t seen the film (and you really should), amongst the film’s many Disney references is the Stark Expo – a fictional event held in Flushing Meadows, New York, that is heavily based on the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair. Many of the actual event’s iconic buildings and features can be seen in the layout of the fictional, computer-generated fairgrounds in the film. Stark’s expo even has a theme song written by Richard Sherman, who wrote all those catchy ditties for Disney’s real World’s Fair pavilions. There is, therefore, a lot of thematic crossover between Disney’s real-world efforts and Stark’s fictional celebration, and of course Disneyland’s Innoventions is housed in the building where the Carousel of Progress once turned. The building looks like it’s ripped straight from the old fairgrounds, so it seems like it would be a thematic match.
But it’s not going to happen.
I’m not saying that no one at WDI has considered this, or sketched it on a napkin, or what-not. I have no idea. But I can tell you with a pretty good degree of certainty – and with a source who would know, that I trust implicitly – that this is not on anyone’s radar and not going to happen.
If I can add some pure speculation (and I reiterate that it is only that!) I would guess that WDI is more likely to wait and push for a larger overhaul of Tomorrowland itself instead of doing things piecemeal. Perhaps this is merely wishful thinking, but since Disneyland is known to be the darling of everyone with clout these days one hopes that it will get a sweeping rehab of Tomorrowland that will reverse the transgressions of 1998. Al Lutz has reported that areas adjacent to the land are under consideration for new attractions, and we also know that WDI is trying to figure out what to do with the old PeopleMover track. It sure would be nice to tackle these issues along with Innoventions, the Astro Orbiter, and all the other thematic trainwrecks that currently occupy the area.
Just don’t go looking for Stark Industries to be taking part.
I know that we here at the ProgressDrome can be a little hard on Disney’s output these days. Too often are their televised specials shallow, full of awkward forced synergy, and generally unentertaining and devoid of Disney-related content. I know, I know – we can be really picky. But despite how great Disney specials were back in Walt’s day, it doesn’t mean that the rest of Disney televised history was a golden age.
We’ve already documented many of the horrors of Disney television in the 1970s, from Shields and Yarnell to Pablo Cruise. When Michael Eisner arrived to make the company more “Hollywood” in 1984, the general production values of Disney’s television specials nosed up considerably. That doesn’t mean, however, that they too couldn’t be full of awkward moments that today seem as if they’d have been too cripplingly embarrassing to perform.
On December 28th, 1986, the Disney Sunday Movie aired Tiger Town, starring the great Roy Scheider, but it also featured a short presentation about Star Tours, then preparing for its grand opening at Disneyland. (This, of course, was a great affront to those of us Star Wars obsessed kids on the east coast, who would be unable to fly through the trenches of the Death Star for nearly three more years.)
While this special was shown many years before Jar-Jar Binks would arrive to darken our souls, it begins with a little number that might have been an early warning sign that all that is Lucas is not gold. I mean, look…
From the Progress City archives comes this collection of 33 tall tales and true from Disney history. Available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats.
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