Trip Report: Epcot (#1)
Reedy Creek I. D., Florida - 11/18/2003

"Are you sure it's not called, 'Top Thrill Dragster'?"

I parked, I approached the gate, a security guard prodded my camera bag with a sharp stick (why?), and a moment later I was inside. Inside, the entry to Epcot has changed a lot. It's still a big retro-future pavilion that wraps around from the entry gates, encompassing the basic park service areas (film, lockers, stroller and wheelchair rental, map distribution) and just inside the gate is a performance area where selected Disney cartoon characters were doing a meet-and-greet. This used to be a big open plaza leading up to the space beneath Spaceship Earth (the 150' diameter golf ball). Now, the space is largely filled with large polished stone blocks, each block covered with many stainless steel panels, each panel engraved with wallet-sized high-contrast images of people who have (for a fee, of course) had their likenesses preserved within Epcot.

When Walt Disney designed Disneyland, he concocted a logical layout which promoted traffic circulation, tied the park together, and minimized the walking required to get through the park. Unfortunately, his company forgot all of that when it built EPCOT Center. Epcot (note the name change) consists of two major sections. The first, where all the 'E-ticket' attractions is located, is "Future World," consisting of the park entrance, Spaceship Earth, Innoventions, and a series of Expo-style pavilion buildings featuring Energy, The Land, The Living Seas, Imagination, and two other buildings which have been converted into "new Epcot" attractions, Test Track and Mission: Space. I'll get back to that distinction I just made in a moment. The other, larger portion of the park is the World Showcase, again, a series of Expo-style encampments, each one representing a different country, grouped around a large lake. each section is laid out apparently to maximize the walking distance between attractions, which is why it is widely believed that Epcot is an acronym for Every Person Comes Out Tired.

I began my journey in the most obvious place, with a trip on the dark ride contained in Spaceship Earth. The ride vehicles are constructed much like Corkscrew coaster cars, although they can be rotated electrically to face backward during the very steep descent at the end of the ride. The ride spirals upward through the giant golf ball, past scenes depicting the history of communication technology. Would the next correspondent who rides that thing please look closely at the stole being worn by the Egyptian dude right next to the the ride vehicle...I could swear that is a Donald Duck print, but the realization came after the scene had passed. Anyway, it's a mild, Expo-sort of ride with a somewhat educational focus and a message about uniting the world through communication. Hey, that's related to what I do for a living!

On either side of Spaceship Earth is a pair of buildings collectively called "Innoventions." Inside is a somewhat haphazard-seeming collection of technological play areas. The areas are, as it turns out, provided by exhibit sponsors, and as such display modern technology in the form of a thinly-veiled sales pitch, often a very cool thinly-veiled sales pitch. This is an Epcot feature that may suffer a little from the need to keep Future World continuously up-to-date. The focus is on consumer technology which is available NOW, with an eye towards future applications. Well, that was great back in the mid-1980's, when it seemed that there were a lot of areas where new and exciting things were happening. But today, it seems the big and obvious advances are all coming in new and different ways to use personal computers and computer networks, so Innoventions ends up looking like a PC showroom. There is a display from Underwriters Laboratories that shows off some of the product tests that consumer products must pass in order to gain UL listing. There are several displays of computer games, and there is a home theater demonstration by Lutron. Oh, and next to one of the doors a gentleman was demonstrating the Segway. The park uses those things out in the parking lot and as sales kiosks in the World Showcase, so it seems only logical that they would also demonstrate them in Innoventions. So why don't they rent them at the stroller rental counter?

I wandered over to the Living Seas pavilion. Inside, the show begins with a circular holding area where there could be, but isn't, a pre-show. From that holding area, we are invited to go two different directions. To one side of the room is a ten-minute film about the oceans and their importance to life on Earth. To the other is somewhat-direct access to the "undersea" research laboratory which is the bulk of the attraction. I watched the film, then proceeded to the lab facility. We entered the "hydrolators", a series of elevators intended to take us from the surface facility down to the ocean floor (overlooking, of course, the absence of oceans in all of Reedy Creek). That's the story, anyway. The truth, of course, is that the Living Seas pavilion is a gigantic saltwater aquarium with a two-story observation structure in the middle. I suspect that the real reason for the hydrolators is that the attraction was originally sponsored by United Technologies, parent company of Otis, the elevator manufacturer. Once "on the bottom", there is a two-level structure which allows up-close viewing of the deep-sea critters in the aquarium. The whole thing is carefully and cleverly designed to disguise the true limits of the aquarium so that it actually looks like it could be a deep-water undersea facility. On my last visit, there was a short ride through a tunnel on the lower level of the attraction. The ride was really short and mostly pointless, but it did add a "ride" component to the attraction. That ride is gone now, its entrance replaced by a gift shop. Otherwise, the attracton is mostly unchanged, a spacious facility that would not be out of place in a major science museum, constructed in and looking out on a giant salt-water aquarium. I spent some time looking at the fish, then left the pavilion, proceeding to The Land.

The Land pavilon contains an assortment of attractions, including two shows and a revolving restaurant that overlooks a scene in a dark ride. The pavilion backs up to Epcot's greenhouse facility, which is one of the more interesting parts of Epcot. On my first visit, I took the extensive walking tour of the greenhouse. This time, I rode the dark ride. The dark ride operates with the Small World-type ride system, where boats are propelled through a level channel by means of water flow. It begins with lavishly decorated scenes of forests and farms, then flows into the greenhouses. Of all the attractions at Epcot, these greenhouses probably best represent what I understand to be the original concept behind EPCOT. The greenhouses contain a wide variety of plants, most of them grown using varoius hydroponic processes. Supposedly, the greenhouses are employing both proven and experimental processes, and as a bonus the produce produced is sold through the restaurant in the pavilion.

A little bit of backtracking took me around to the Test Track entrance. Three clocks overhead gave admission options: Standby, 10 minutes; single rider, 25 minutes; Evil FastPass, return in 45 minutes. I entered the building and didn't get to see much of the pre-pre-show before going up the stairs to the "briefing room". The building is filled with descriptions of various automobile testing procedures, along with machinery that beats up on dummies for calibration purposes. We were told that the ride had gone down, but that it would be only a short wait. After a few minutes, the door opened to the "briefing room" and a bunch of us went in for the pre-show. There a video explained that we would be taken through a series of basic vehicle tests, including a hill climb, a rough road, a demonstration of ABS operation, a road course consisting of a series of S-curves, environmental tests, a flat-out speed run, and perhaps an added surprise (as the technician calls up "barrier test" on her console). The door swings open, and we enter a queue in the boarding area. Cars pull up empty, six people enter each car (there are three loading stations), and the cars pull out in groups of three. Then something went wrong. After a few moments, something went very wrong. I don't know what, but the crew began evacuating riders from the cars that had just left the station, and presented each of us in the station with an exit pass, directing us up and over a stile at the downtrack end of the station to the ride exit. I guess I'll come back later.

Meanwhile, the next building over is Mission: Space. Again, almost no wait was indicated except for users of Evil FastPass, so I entered the building. The queueing area features basic information about astronaut training, and a model of a space-station structure that could be used to simulate gravity in a weightless environment. The line was so short I really didn't have a chance to get a good look at it all. Instead, I walked directly into a collection area, and moments later, into one of the four preshow rooms. Each of these rooms holds ten groups of four people. We watch a videotape which explains a little about astronaut training (and the fact that we haven't got any), the basic timeline of the mission is explained, and we are reassured that we can certainly handle it OK. We are also warned that if we can't handle dark, enclosed, spinning spaces, we should bail out now.

The door opens in front of us, and we are directed to one of five entrance doors around the ride and told to stand on marks on the floor. A recording synchronized with spotlights overhead let us know which of the four positions we would be taking. We were given another opportunity to bail out, then warned to look straight ahead and not to close our eyes while riding. The door slides open, revealing a narrow corridor between two ride capsules. The side doors of the capsules are open and nearly touching each other, effectively blocking access to the ride center. We piled into our capsules, moving all the way down and filling in every available seat, as is the usual procedure in a Disney venue. I ended up in the end "Navigator" seat. Once we were seated with the shoulder bars down, the control panel at the front of the capsule was tipped toward us. That puts a small square window just inches from my face. A close examination revealed that the program visuals are not viewed directly, but in an angled mirror much like those on many video games...presumably that reduces the depth of the capsule while still allowing the use of high-resolution CRT monitors [Footnote 1]. The entrance door is closed, and the ride begins. The first capsule motion is to pitch backward, so that the riders are lying on their backs. At that point, there is some vibration and the "porthole" opens. A launch gantry comes into view. The spacecraft locks into position, and at this point I caught a rotational motion which I assumed at the time to be the centrifuge starting up for the "launch". On further review, I suspect this very-obvious motion might actually be the capsule frame yawing 180 degrees so that when the machine spins up, the force will be applied in the proper direction. Because, in fact, it is. The launch engines light off, and very smoothly, we are forced downward into our seats with a sustained force. It's not entirely unlike what you feel when riding an Orbiter, though perhaps not quite as strong. As simulators go, this is the first time I've ever been on one that actually applied a logical force in a logical direction so that it felt like it was blasting off. Once clear of the Earth, there were eight tasks...each of us had to press two buttons at the right time, actions which would have absolutely no effect on the ride, but which allow for a little bit of interactivity.

Except for the rocking back at the beginning and the initial rotation, there is absolutely no sensation of what the ride is actually doing. The forces produced by the machine are exactly matched to the film, and much of the time it actually feels like the capsule isn't moving at all...but any attempt to look around the capsule a little quickly squashes that illusion. Once the ride makes it into deep space and the engines cut off, we discover that the one thing this simulator does a lousy job of simulating is weightlessness. Star Tours over at MGM can do a better job of that, but only for a fraction of a second. Mission: Space simulates weightlessness, as nearly as I can tell, by rapidly shutting off the high-G experience of launch. There is a very short window there where the body will mistake "normal" for "weightless", so the script very quickly does a lunar orbit, puts you to sleep, wakes you up, and does a Martian landing burn...all activities that distract you from the fact that you are not, in fact, weightless.

"Awakened" from our few seconds of suspended animation, we learn that something went wrong, and asteroids are in the way of the landing site. It makes the approach a little trickier, and the result puts the ship just slightly off-course. The result is a landing that is a little bit bumpy and requires a little help from the inexperienced crew (us) and the control joysticks we have in front of us. We "drive" the spacecraft past the end of the runway, allowing for a bit of bumping and rattling as one normally expects from a simulator, then the ship parks at the edge of a cliff, but doesn't quite fall off. Hey, that could have been a cool application of the sustained force trick! But instead, the ride ends, and the capsule opens. This time, instead of exiting to the outside, we are directed to the center of the machine, and for the first time we can see the general layout of the ride system. It looks a bit like a wheel from an Intamin Tree Triple Wheel, attached to the top of a Huss Troika center. Looking back at the capsule as I exited I could see that there were obvious mechanisms in place to roll and pitch the capsule; the yaw mechanism was not so obvious, and I am not sure it exists at all.

Overall, Mission: Space is a pretty incredible attraction. Of all the various simulators I have ridden, it is far from the most dynamic, or the most violent, but it generates possibly the most convincing array of forces. It's an absolutely unique attraction, and while it has some significant rideability problems for some people (it's dark, it's cramped, and it can cause motion sickness in people who normally don't suffer motion sickness), for most people, the ride is a real winner. There are some minor issues, for instance, there seems to be some storyline confusion about whether this is a flight to Mars, or training for a flight to Mars. Personally, I wish there were a public observation gallery above the ride so that we could see the thing in action after riding. I do think exiting past the center of the machine is a great idea not just because it separates the incoming and outgoing passengers, but also because it gives us all a chance to get a glimpse of the machine.

Mission: Space exits through an arcade of sorts which includes a children's climbing structure, a gift shop (of course), and some kind of collaborative video game that I didn't stick around long enough to figure out what was going on. Instead, I decided to try again for Test Track, but was denied. It wasn't clear to me whether Test Track was down again, or still.

I figured I could go over to the Imagination pavilion and see what was there. This led me to the very unusual dark ride, Journey into Imagination. I had skipped this one on my first visit to Epcot, and after riding it, I understand why. It basically uses a dark-ride system to carry riders into several video theaters for a presentation that isn't particularly entertaining or informative. The ride exits into an area filled with various activities mostly relating to image manipulation...generally basic science-museum stuff, but built for a larger capacity. I slipped through and went upstairs to go see the Inventor of the Year award presentation. The pre-show has been changed from a multi-image slide show to a video presentation shown on a plurality of plasma displays hanging from the ceiling. It is still basically a Kodak commercial without the call-to-action, though. When it was over, the doors opened and I took a seat in the not-very-crowded auditorium.

The show here is, of course, "Honey, I shrunk the audience," and it is still a particularly well-done enhanced 3D presentation. Enhanced, of course, means this is a "check your seat carefully" presentation...be careful, the seat might be wet. It's also one of the best uses of a theater motion base I have ever seen. It's extremely effective with very little motion, largely because it's so unexpected. "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience" is a show that carefully follows the most important rules for an immersive production (most notably, "maintain a consistent point of view"), combines that with a somewhat entertaining show, and results in a pretty good production.

Top Thrill Test Track had re-opened, then shut down again. I changed my plans a bit, and decided to take a stroll around the lake. Epcot was conceived as a sort of ongoing Worlds Fair. As with any Worlds Fair, there are two basic components. One is corporate, represented at Epcot by Future World. There, exhibits of technology are presented, often by corporate sponsors, to showcase technology and industry, with an overall theme of inevitable progress to a brighter tomorrow. Unfortunately, the tomorrow promised by Epcot during this visit is looking rather dull. This is where Disney has apparently realized that today, the bright future Epcot is promising is getting here faster than the exhibits can keep up. Future World doesn't work so well as a technology showcase anymore because it can't be updated fast enough. So the newer attractions are heading in a different direction. They still maintain the "edutainment" angle, explaining how modern technology gets that way and what it can do for us, but the ride experiences are changing, concentrating on giving us an unforgettable experience. That way it won't be such a problem if the technology is more dated than the equipment in our neighbor's living room, the new attrachions aren't about "show", they're about "do". That change in focus is evident in Test Track and Mission: Space, unchallenged "E-ticket" attractions that are both unlikely to wear thin in the coming years.

The other component of a World's Fair is an international cultural exchange. At Epcot, this means the World Showcase, a collection of exhibits representing countries from around the world. Each exhibit consists of a collection of buildings, a store or two, usually a restaurant, and some kind of show, all designed to create or reinforce a cultural stereotype. Exhibits include Canada, United Kingdom, France, Morocco, Japan, United States, Italy, Germany, China, Norway, and Mexico. Mostly I walked around the lagoon and found the park to be mostly dead. When I got back to the United States building, I was accosted by two large groups of ESPN employees who were running through the park apparently on some sort of scavenger hunt. These groups wanted witnesses to listen to them deliver their renditions of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game". The first group was more talented.

Norway features a flume ride called the Malestrom. It apparently has a very small footprint. A mild ride takes riders out to sea for an encounter with Nordic trolls, resulting in a couple of waterfall drops, one backward as is usual for dark-ride descents in Disney parks. A mild ride, but very well done.

Leaving the World Showcase and re-entering Future World, I returned to Test Track. On my way there I met two other people who had waited for the ride twice and hadn't ridden yet. The three of us walked through the gift shop and the showroom and up to the ride exit. Attendants whisked us to the head of the line for a ride in the front seat of one of the cars. I sat in the front right-hand seat, fumbled with the seat belt, and was ready to go.

The ride begins with a trip up a short spiral ramp, then up a steep hill to the upper part of the building. There, the car runs over a rough road that looks rough, sounds rough, but doesn't feel terribly rough, probably because the car has a decent suspension system. There is a straight run to a sharp curve to simulate stomping on the brake and trying to steer without anti-lock brakes, but if it is supposed to simulate a skid or partial loss of control, I'm afraid it isn't terribly effective. Probably because instead of skidding, the back end is pushed out by the car's four-wheel steering, and it doesn't feel like a skid. The next track segment repeats the test but tries to simulate anti-lock braking. Again, it's perhaps a little bit too controlled. When it is over, we get to watch an "instant replay" of our own runs through the two tests on a video monitor. Next comes a series of S-curves in the dark at increasing speeds, as indicated by the speed indicator on the car's dashboard. When that is over, the car pulls into a room full of heat lamps to test for high temperature exposure, then a heavily air-conditioned room for cold exposure, then past what appear to be painting robots spraying yellow fog, supposedly a corrosive substance (oops!). Then the car goes around a corner into the crash testing area, and accelerates towards a concrete barrier with a suspicious-looking vertical seam in the middle. Sure enough, the barrier turns out to be a door, and instead of colliding with the barrier at 38 MPH, the door swings open and the car speeds out of the building, around a curve, down a straightaway, through a banked curve, and down another straightaway, accelerating as hard as the electric motor can manage. At the end of the straightaway, a sign overhead shows the current speed to 0.1 MPH. The display matches the less-precise dashboard readout, and peaks at 64.8 MPH as our car passes under the sign and quickly slows for a trip down a steep ramp, allegedly past a thermal camera, and down into the unloading platform.

Overall, it's a decent ride. It feels like it does a lot more braking than any coaster nut would prefer, but that's the nature of the beast. The high-speed run really feels fast, and the barrier test is a neat gag, very well done. It would have been better to get the pre-show and the ride together, instead of separated by several hours...and in fact I was able to do that a few days later. If you're looking for a more thrilling ride, I recommend sitting in the center seat instead of the outboard seats, not just because the seat belts on those seats have no shoulder straps (though that is certainly a plus, in my opinion!) but because the seats are wide, and there is basically no lateral support for the center seat, and the grab bar is almost too far away to grab. So you end up feeling the ride a little more in the middle seats. Pity the high-speed segment doesn't go longer, perhaps with another turn around the outside track, just to play that part up a little more. But it's a good ride, and the use of uneven-length rolling blocks for unit protection, while it caused (and apprently continues to cause) all kinds of problems with the design of the attraction...does in fact work, and it really does fit in with the whole innovation theme of Epcot. Even though the ride control system isn't something the rider ever gets to see.

It was early evening. I looked around the Cedar Point-like expanse of concrete that is Future World, and realized I'd seen all the bits of the park that truly interested me. I also realized the place was utterly dead. The only outdoor attraction in all of Epcot is the gigantic fountain, and it's all but invisible because it's completely surrounded by buildings. There were very few people in the park. It was hot. I took a drink from a water fountain, which scolded me, saying, "Hey! What do I look like, a drinking fountain?" I responded that it did, and I considered my options.

I was visiting the park on a "park hopper" pass, and it was about 5:00pm. All of the other parks close at 7:00pm. 7:00pm?! What an uncivilized time to close! But Epcot stays open an extra couple of hours, probably because the restaurants in the World Showcase are a great place to have dinner, followed by the park's fireworks show at closing time. I figured that the simplest thing to do was to take the monorail over to the Magic Kingdom, see the closing show over there, then return to Epcot in time for the fireworks show. And that's almost exactly what I did. Disney says that you should allow an hour and a half to go between parks on their bus system, and my experience was that about 40 minutes was needed by car. My trip to the Magic Kingdom took less than twenty minutes by monorail. They really do need to extend lines to the other parks. At the end of the day, I did return to Epcot, but I didn't re-enter the park. I did return to Epcot a few days later, and I saw the fireworks that night.

In all, Epcot is a nice park, but it's not aging well. It struck me as...well...lacking in substance, not to mention crowds. It looks as though somewhere along the way, the whole "permanent Worlds Fair" idea was forgotten and an attempt was made to turn the park into a gigantic shopping mall. Then later, someone realized that the park wasn't working anymore, and so the place was updated with a couple of new E-ticket attractions. And this has all happened since my previous visit exactly six years earlier, on 11/18/1997. I think the park has suffered since then, but Test Track and Mission: Space are definitely steps in the right direction. I suppose logically I should come back on 11/18/2009 and see if the positive steps continue. For now, it's worth a visit, but I'm not sure the place has enough in it for a full day.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Footnote 1: CRT displays are better than flat screens at close range because they don't show visible pixel lines as clearly. [Return to text]

--DCAjr

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