Ok, so what hell is an Epcot? Well, it's an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, an idea Walt Disney had more than two decades ago. For the past several years, Disney planners and engineers have been making Walt's wildest dream come true on a vast tract of Florida woods at Walt Disney World, and by the time Epcot Center opens outside Orlando on October first. it will have cost more than $800,000,000 to build. Now, the Disney folks aren't known to squander money on boring park entertainment or worthless technology. After a number of exclusive previews, I'm prepared to go on record as saying that Epcot really stands for the most extravagant amusement facility ever created, and you'll be reading most of this here for the first time.
To begin with, what you won't see at Epcot are any of the familiar Disney characters. No mice, no ducks, no dogs or other cartoon creations roam the Epcot premises – as they routinely do in the Magic Kingdom and in other areas of W.D.W.
Epcot Center is divided into two areas. Future World and World Showcase. On opening day, seven pavilions in Future World will be ready for visitors. The most striking of those is Spaceship Earth, the world's largest geosphere: 164 feet in diameter, 18 stories high. Its theme is communications, and at the top of the dome is a huge planetarium in which the vastness of space has been reproduced by Disney imagineers. Visitors are taken aboard a time machine to embark on a journey that spans 40.000 years, beginning with an introduction conceived by Ray Bradbury and moving on to a show that covers communications from the age of cave dwellers to machines far in the future. The combination of frighteningly lifelike Audio-Animatronic figures, those remarkable robots pioneered by Disney nearly two decades ago, and state-of-the-art communications – thermography, computer graphics and microcircuitry – makes the passage through time tinglingly realistic.
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