The real world - several worlds, in fact - is only minutes away: highway billboards announcing Sea World, Circus World, Weeki Wachee Magical Mermaids, Stuckey’s; rows of houses by the highway no bigger than cabooses; gas stations where attendants slump against the pumps, sipping Mr. Pibb. The land is filled with scruffy palmetto, saw grass. armadillos, alligators, boggy, buggy swamps.
The 200-acre futureville called EPCOT Center, the largest private construction job in history (the second-largest was the rest of Walt Disney World. three miles away), sprouts out of the flat land near Orlando, as abrupt as its name, shimmery as a mirage under the Florida sun. EPCOT - for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow - is Walt Disney Productions' billion-dollar high-tech Oz, meant to make the visitor’s jaw drop. At the entrance is the aluminum geodesic sphere, a mammoth silver-coated thistle called “Spaceship Earth." Behind it, in a broad circle, are the four other pavilions of “Future World": Exxon's triangular, silver “Universe of Energy"; General Motors’ “World of Motion," shaped like a giant, silver-wrapped tire; Kraft’s “The Land," topped by a cone-shaped glass hat; Kodak’s “Journey into Imagination," two glass pyramids with the tops sliced off. Behind Future World is a man-made lagoon, as still as if it were frozen; surrounding the lagoon is the rest of the world, called "World Showcase": replicas of buildings from nine nations, including a five-story pagoda, the Doge's Palace, and a hundred-foot Eiffel Tower. Walt, as the Disney executives are forever saying, would have loved it. […]
