If we look back at the global concept of "the future" throughout the last century in America, we will likely find that Spaceship Earth is not the only part of EPCOT tied implicitly to the ideologies of the World's Fair.
In the 1939/1940 New York World's Fair, we find the roots for the entire concept of EPCOT center. Here, the fair had the unique attribute of being "themed", and the "theme" was strikingly similar to that of Future World: "Building the World of Tomorrow".
The icons for this momentous occasion were none other than the Trylon & Perisphere, designed by Wallace Harrison (exterior) and Henry Dreyfuss (interior show, called "Democracity"). This giant white spike and accompanying globe stood where the Unisphere has stood since the 1964/65 World's Fair, in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, New York.
Before Spaceship Earth started taking travelers through the pre-modern futuristic concepts provided by Ray Bradbury and Buckminster Fuller, the Democracity exhibit and the striking image of the Trylon & Perisphere provided the basis for the concept of a space- be that space a city or not- that provided guests and visitors with a view of what the future would actually be like.
The Unisphere, Icon of the 1964/65 World's Fair.
It's strange today just how transparent the history of the 1939 fair has become. The Trylon stood at a magnificent 700 feet tall, the Perisphere 200 feet, and the fair itself ended its second season with attendance levels topping 25 million people from April 1939 until October 1939, and from April 1940 until October of that year.
If you do the math, thats a total of 12 months. In contrast, today's Epcot takes in between 12 and 16 million guests a year.
In the New York World's Fairs, we see many of the concepts that would later shape EPCOT Center (the theme park) begin to develop.
The 1939 fair featured "zones" (lands, anyone?) fifteen years before Disneyland was a reflection in Walt Disney's eye. The zones featured themes of their own, all of which related back to the central idea of "Building the World of Tomorrow". In the transportation zone, guests could experience "Futurama", an attraction designed by a Hollywood set designer named Norman Bel Geddes. Guests traveled in seats suspended from the ceiling that took them through a series of miniatures depicting the cities of the future, and specifically their options for transportation.
As the show progressed, the models got larger and larger until guests found themselves in a full sized city block with automobiles whirring around them. And to think, all of this preceeded World of Motion by just over 40 years!
Now, none of this is to take away from the credibility or creative ingenuity of EPCOT's talented team of designers. They were the ones who organized these ideas into a cohesive whole- and the ones who took the concepts presented at the fair forty years earlier as essentially a very expensive science fair, and made them fun and family-friendly.
EPCOT was and is the single most innovative concept that exists in themed entertainment today, and we cannot thank Wallace Harrison, Henry Dreyfuss, Buckminster Fuller or even Ray Bradbury for that.
But we can thank them for presenting the first physical place that provided an optimistic view of the future and caused the public to take an interest in Building the World of Tomorrow.
26 years ago today, The Walt Disney Company opened the doors of EPCOT Center and changed the way we view a Disney themed show or experience forever.
While some of the changes have been positive and others have not been in the best interest of Epcot, we can thank Robert Moses, Buckminster Fuller, Ray Bradbury, Wallace Harrison, Henry Dreyfuss, Gilmore D. Clarke, Walt Disney, John Hench, Marty Sklar, Rick Rothschild, Barry Braverman, Tony Baxter, Marc Davis, Bob Zalk, Eric Goodman, Ken Neville and the many other talented and passionate people that have been building the world of tomorrow since before we could imagine the year 1982.
Happy 26th Anniversary, EPCOT.
We've Just Begun to Dream.
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