"Now that's a surprise...!"
I left the Disney/MGM Studios to go to Epcot. Instead of driving over to Epcot, I decided to park at the Magic Kingdom parking lot and take the monorail over to Epcot. Partly that's because it seems appropriate to arrive at Epcot by monorail; partly that was to accommodate my intention to visit the Magic Kingdom for the fireworks show at the end of the day. There were a lot of variables that went into my decision to do things the way I did, and in hindsight, it turned out to be a good choice. More about that when I get to the Magic Kingdom tomorrow...!
I entered Epcot, and was immediately struck by how DEAD it seems to be. The presence of dozens of polished stone blocks covered with stainless steel panels just inside the entrance do kind of give the area the look of a cemetery, but that isn't really what I mean. What I mean is, there were no people wandering about, there is almost no motion just inside the gate, there is nothing happening. The park appears lifeless. Instead of these giant stone monuments, they need a fountain or something, perhaps some big kinetic sculpture or something. Anyway, hopefully things will get better as I move on into the park.
I walked on into the park and directly up the escalator into Spaceship Earth. The ride hasn't changed a bit since last year. Well, no, that isn't quite accurate. The ride is still a simplified Omnimover dark ride up into the giant golf ball, and I still haven't decided whether the Egyptian is wearing a Donald Duck tie. What has changed a little bit is the exit from the ride. The horrible post-show display has been removed, and when you exit the ride you now face a giant blue wall that directs you directly to the exit. It's the park's centerpiece attraction, and it needs help.
I took a quick walk through Innoventions which is still little more than a glorified video arcade, and not a very good one at that. Okay, there are a couple of other displays in there, but those are still more for the purpose of advertising than entertainment. GM had a concept van on display that looked like a bad idea to me: everything behind the driver's seat was scaled for small children. Fine if you're carrying small children around, but useless for the lunchtime carpool at work, and besides, small children grow up. There were some neat ideas in there, but the complete package looked like it was pretty short-sighted.
I went over to Test Track and entered through the single rider entrance. Once inside, it was obvious that I needn't have bothered...I could have actually got into the ride sooner if I had gone in the normal entrance, as there was no line. This is yet another ride where the ride loads continuously, but it has a somewhat pointless batch-loading pre-show. I suppose the batch-load preshow was a great benefit when the ride was barely running, but today, the ride seemed to be running pretty reliably, and with a small crowd, it could have run very nicely without the preshow. When I came out of the preshow, I was shown immediately to a vehicle.
Test Track is a neat ride, but at times I think it tries to hard to beat the riders over the head with some of the details they are supposed to learn. The comparison of ABS braking to non-ABS braking, for instance, is not especially convincing, especially as you can feel the dynamic braking cycling in both demonstrations. The cars are equipped with 4-wheel steering, and without ABS they simply drive the car through a simulated skid, which means nothing ever skids, and it doesn't feel at all out of control. But if you can stand the inside part of the ride and the bad jokes that go with it, the high-speed run is somewhat entertaining. The ride is interesting, but I don't think it can be at all described as 'exciting'.
Mission: Space from the midway.
For 'excitement' you're better off to visit Test Track's neighbor, Mission: Space. This time I entered through the normal entrance (oddly enough, they were running the evil FastPass machines, but nobody seemed to be using them, as there was no wait for anything) and walked directly into the first preshow staging area. That's the part where they warn you about dark enclosed places, loud noises and spinning, and explain the "training" that is to happen shortly. I don't object to the preshow here nearly so much as over on Test Track even though the Mission: Space preshows (there are two) are even more annoying and patronizing than the one on Test Track, simply because Mission: Space is a batch-loading ride. After a few minutes, no more than 39 of us [Footnote 1] boarded the ride. This time I got a better look at the display system before the console was dropped back, and it appears to me that the CRT is positioned above the viewport. I sat down and pulled down the shoulder bar, and the console dropped back, putting the viewport right where I could see it. I noticed that there is a strong blast of cool air right on my head. Knowing the conditions that have appeared to cause the most serious motion sickness in parks (hot, humid days, for instance), I'm guessing that the cool air is supposed to have the opposite effect. At the launch, I felt the rotation start, and I don't think the forces have been toned down any. Mission: Space winds up as easily the most convincing simulator I have ever ridden. The motions of the cabin are more subtle than those of the usual shaking box simulators. But that's because the thing can actually generate sustained accelerations, the thing that most simulators simply can't do. It is, however, absolutely, totally, completely incapable of simulating weightlessness. Pity, it would be neat if someone could figure out how to do that in a sustained fashion without the use of high-performance aircraft or drop towers.
I considered my options. Epcot was absolutely dead. There were more people in line for Mission: Space than I had seen anywhere else in the park. I know that most of the stuff in The Land has closed, and The Living Seas was a total disaster the last time I was there. I decided to skip the rest of "Future World" and continue into the World Showcase. I must say, Future World is looking extremely dated, extremely dead, and very much in need of a major overhaul. There is a very large building that appears to be completely empty (I think there is a sign on it identifying it as "Odyssey" or something like that. The Spaceship Earth post-show, as useless as it was, is completely gone. The Land and Living Seas pavilions are largely gutted. This is a park that is crying for help. My suspicion is that it has suffered a decade or two of neglect as someone hoped that the park would survive on its shopping and dining experience back in the World Showcase. Well, it could probably do that, but it is fair to charge people $55 per person admission to a park where the only real draw is expensive souvenirs and $60 dinners? EPCOT was Disney's second gate. As a sort of permanent world's fair, it had a unique appeal. It offered displays of 'edutainment' that provided neat experiences, glimpses into modern technology and progress. It was neat, but it was neglected and allowed to deteriorate. My guess is that an attitude set in that the only people who didn't know better or people on length-of-stay passes who wanted to have a great dinner ever went to Epcot. Now the park has two outstanding attractions in Future World, so the situation is improving. But this is still the older park that is screaming for some attention from the park planners. Either that or it is screaming to be closed. The good news is that the park has recently received two major one-of-a-kind attractions, with another major attraction on the way. It's about time!
I started working my way clockwise around the World Showcase. My first stop was the Mexico pavilion, where I had never stopped before. Inside is a large market, and a restaurant, and a dark ride. The ride, whose name escapes me at the moment [Footnote 2] is a flow-driven-boat (think it's a small world) dark ride. Most of the sets in this particular dark ride use projections of film clips rather than animated sets, a bit like selected sections of the dark ride in The Land, or like Spiderman and Men in Black at Universal, but on a MUCH smaller scale. The really memorable part of the ride came at the end. The boat pulls up onto a conveyor in a corridor just upstream of the unloading platform. There a recording plays, saying, "Please remain seated until the boat comes to a complete stop at the unloading platform," in a male voice. That message is followed by another recording, this time in a female voice, saying, "Please remain seated until the boat comes to a complete stop at the unloading platform." Then the cycle repeats. This got my attention, because I think it is the first place on Disney property where I have heard such a message and it wasn't repeated in Spanish. Ironic that the one place where the message wouldn't also be repeated in Spanish would happen to be the Mexico pavilion, don't you think?
The opening in the Malestrom building is clearly visible from the midway.
Next door is Norway, where I walked right on to the Malestrom. Well, I walked right on, but the ride shut down just as I sat down. The shut-down was only a minute or two, as the boats piled up in the station, then they sent us on our way. It's a nice little flume-drive dark ride, featuring Vikings and seas and storms and trolls...and it is unique among Disney rides in that most of it involves riding backward. I wonder if this is an Intamin reversing flume like the one at the park formerly known as Adventure World. It's a short ride, but this time I made an effort to keep track of where the second reversing point, where the back end of the boat pokes out of the show building into daylight, and this time I was able to spot it from the midway. I'd thought that opening was hidden; it turns out it isn't.
My next stop as I walked around the World Showcase was Germany, where I bought a bratwurst and a soft pretzel. The bratwurst was decent, and the person who served it to me asked if I had ever eaten a bratwurst before. Certainly an interesting question. The sausage was decent, the beer was way too expensive for me to buy any, and the pretzel was somewhat disappointing. I'm still looking for a pretzel comparable to the one I ate in the Marienplätz in Munich back in 1986, and so far I haven't found one. Maybe they serve them at the Hofbräuhaus Newport. Of course, it figures that by ducking into a pavilion for twenty minutes I would miss something interesting...as I was eating my bratwurst I saw the big illuminated globe for the IllumiNations show go floating by in the World Showcase lagoon as they set up the equipment for the night's big show. It was about 4:00 in the afternoon, and I continued my walk around the World Showcase.
Someday I am going to actually see the show in the United States pavilion, but this time I missed it by arriving at the pavilion just as the show was starting. Not wanting to wait around for a half-hour, I continued on around. A group of synchronized drummers was pounding away at very large drums at the Japan pavilion and putting on quite a show. Getting that level of synchronization requires a bit of planning and practice to get it right...there is no one there to give cues or to set tempo. On the face of it, it doesn't look so impressive until you realize what level of coordination is required. It's what I've come to think of as, "The Segway Effect." You may recall that when the Segway was introduced, non-technical people who saw the thing for the first time looked at it and said, "Yeah, so what?" while the engineers who saw it were immediately amazed, knowing what a trick it is to get it to balance like that. It's a complicated trick, and the most complicated part of the trick is in making it look simple.
I decided I had seen enough of Epcot, and opted to leave the park and get a preview of the Magic Kingdom, which was my target for tomorrow. Then, on Tuesday night, after spending pretty much the entire day at the Magic Kingdom, I returned to Epcot specifically to see the IllumiNations show. I got to the park early enough to take rides on both Mission: Space and on Test Track before show time, then I hiked around the World Showcase lagoon to a point near Italy to watch the show. At night, the area around the lagoon is dramatically torch-lit until just before the show starts, when the torches are dramatically extinguished, along with the lighting on the giant golf ball, as the program begins.
IllumiNations is a neat show, featuring fireworks used in unique ways...for example, gigantic chrysanthemum shells exploded practically at the water's surface. It's not an aerial display, not at all. For someone like me who sees a lot of good aerial fireworks shows, it's neat to see these unconventional applications. What is even more dramatic, though, is the show's use not of explosives, but of fire, to produce amazing fireballs on the barges in the lagoon reminiscent of the final scene in Revenge of the Mummy. The weakest part of the show is when the giant video-globe comes out into the middle of the lagoon and just sits there for what feels like an hour and a half. The scene is neat when it starts, watching this thing come out is kind of neat, watching images appear on its surface is kind of neat, but the images don't have any connection to the track, and for the duration of an entire song, it sits there flashing away, making people think, "Okay, what's next?" Then the show takes off again with more fire, more fireworks, and with lighting effects scattered all the way around the lagoon. They are able to do some really neat things with the show because all of the park lighting systems are tied in to the show controller. The other particularly neat thing about the show is the sound. Disney places speakers all over the place and has them adjusted very carefully so that every location around the lagoon has good, clean sound. It isn't the loudest PA system in the world, but it is plenty loud, and it is exceptionally clean. Most critically, it was obviously set up by sound engineers who aren't deaf, who know that the LOUDNESS control is worthless for loud music, and who don't mistake overwhelming bass for good sound. The show sounds fantastic, and that alone gets my attention.
In all, Epcot is a park that needs some attention. My feeling is that in recent years, Disney has concentrated too hard on opening additional gates and not worked hard enough on keeping up the existing parks. Building EPCOT was not a problem, as the Magic Kingdom was a fully-developed park at the time. But Disney went on to build Disney/MGM Studios and Animal Kingdom while Epcot was more or less ignored for a decade or so. Now, Epcot is little more than an evening diversion for someone spending a week at the resort (it does have some of the best restaurants in the region); it hardly stands up as a complete park on its own anymore. And that's a shame, as it is a terrific concept. But the big draw for Epcot now is a collection of great restaurants and an awesome nighttime pyrotechnics show. I see evidence that Disney is trying to fix the problem, as Epcot has been the focus of the last couple of major new attractions, and I understand another is on the way. In my opinion, it can't come soon enough. The question is, will it restore life to what should be a truly exciting park?
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: The ride will carry 40 people per load, and the seat next to mine was empty, meaning there could not have been more than 39 people on the ride. [Return to text]
Footnote 2: Just goes to show what a memorable ride it was! [Return to text]
--DCAjr
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