Epcot’s Midlife Crisis: Disney Reveals a Huge Makeover for the Park’s 40th Birthday

If you ever went to EPCOT Center in the ‘80s or early ‘90s, you got to experience what is probably the most unique theme park ever built. Instead of physical thrills or rides based on movies, EPCOT was originally designed to educate and entertain at the same time. Pavilions in Future World were devoted to specific sciences or types of technology, with long, Audio-Animatronic-heavy Omnimover rides delving into the histories of communication, transportation, the energy industry, and more. It was far from perfect—the different pavilions were sponsored by companies with a vested interested in ignoring problematic aspects of their business, sometimes turning them into a kind of propaganda—but the original EPCOT made learning legitimately fun and exciting, and is still probably the most successful example of edutainment that I can think of. As a young kid who loved theme parks and learning but absolutely hated school, EPCOT Center quickly became my favorite place in the world.

Unfortunately that version of EPCOT apparently developed a reputation as the “boring” part of Disney World. Disney started to slowly back away from the edutainment model as the ‘90s progressed, renaming it Epcot, shutting down many of the original attractions when sponsorships ended, and replacing others with faster and more “exciting” rides. Today only a few pavilions and rides hark back to EPCOT’s original identity, and fans have long been nervous that classic attractions like Spaceship Earth and Living with the Land will inevitably follow such long-gone favorites as Horizons, World of Motion and the original Journey into Imagination into the theme park graveyard.

Epcot’s 40th anniversary is arriving in 2022, and it’s been known for a while that, given Disney’s love of celebrating milestones, the company would be making a big deal about it. The park has felt unfinished ever since it started to drift away from its original mission, though—World Showcase is as creatively and commercially successful as it’s ever been, but Future World is short on attractions and often low in attendance. Heading into this past weekend’s D23 Expo, revitalizing this part of Epcot—the part that houses the park’s entrance, and the part that guests have to walk through to get to the country pavilions at World Showcase—before that 40th birthday was clearly going to be a priority for Disney. And after a variety of announcements at Sunday’s Disney Parks panel at the convention, we now have a clearer idea of what to expect from the Epcot of the future.

Disney does more to leverage nostalgia than any other company today, and its D23 approach to Epcot was just further proof. From the start of the three-day fan convention Disney was reminding guests about the EPCOT that used to exist. On the show floor they had a wall full of beautifully designed posters advertising all the major attractions that have ever existed at Epcot, including many that are long gone. The thematic centerpieces of this display were two posters with the same image of Spaceship Earth but different color accents and text. The first was from the park’s original opening, and showed the iconic Spaceship Earth globe floating in the black vastness of space with two beams of light circling it. “The 21st Century begins October 1, 1982,” the poster reads, with period-appropriate logos for Walt Disney World and the EPCOT Center at the bottom. The other poster has the same image, but instead of black space with stars in the background, everything now has a purplish hue. It’s a more stylish and sci-fi depiction of space surrounding Spaceship Earth, with a new caption to boot: “On the brink of a new age, October 1, 2019.” Beneath the geodesic sphere is a single word in all caps: EPCOT.

That’s the first big news. The current Epcot, formerly known as the EPCOT Center, will be getting a new official name: EPCOT. It’s a throwback to that original name while still avoiding the “center” word that made the theme park sound like some kind of science lab. The new EPCOT also evokes Walt Disney’s original name from the ‘60s—the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a kind of futurist utopia fueled by Disney’s firm belief in midcentury capitalism. If the poster’s combination of that classic Spaceship Earth image with a shinier, more fanciful style reflects the upcoming changes made to the park itself, old-school EPCOT fans might have less to worry about than they fear.

One name that won’t be sticking around is Future World. The front half of the park will be split into three “neighborhoods”: World Celebration, World Nature, and World Discovery. World Celebration will be the central spine of the three, featuring the entrance, Spaceship Earth, and a new structure called Dreamer’s Point, where guests will find a statue of Walt Disney and a festival center with three stories and a large rooftop garden. Disney’s pitching that as the ideal vantage point for EPCOT’s new nighttime show, HarmoniUS, which opens in 2020.