A note from Jen Funderburk: I came across an old copy of ORLANDO-LAND magazine from 1980 in a pile of severely water damaged memorabilia that was in no condition to keep or sell. As I was tearing out pages from the moldy, wrinkled magazine to start a morning fire, I came across this almost 30 page article on the planning of EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. I cannot believe it was almost burnt, especially after finding it was not available online. I have excitedly scanned all photos and text to share with you. This is part one of a multi part series.

Inside EPCOT

By Edward L. Prizer

Originally published in the June 1980 issue of ORLANDO-LAND Magazine

Image 36-1.png — Inside EPCOT

In the following article, an ORLANDO-LAND reporter describes a rare visit to the realm of the Imagineers and the marvels of ingenuity that are going on there. It is perhaps the most detailed account of the wonders of EPCOT Center ever published.

You drive down a service road through pines and scrub oaks and palmettos and suddenly there it is in front of you. Hundreds of acres of raw earth and water, so vast that the big earthmoving monsters look like toys off on the perimeter.

This is the site of EPCOT Center.

Few of the millions who visit Walt Disney World have any idea it's here, almost within view of the Contemporary hotel. Work will go on for 242 years behind a wall of pines in virtual isolation. Then in a blaze of glory, this marvel of imagination and ingenuity envisioned by Walt Disney will be revealed to the world Oct. 1, 1982. It's estimated $800 million will have been spent by that time.

Today, as Charlie Ridgway steered the stationwagon over trails in the dry brown dirt, I got an inkling how large the project actually is. In statistics, it will cover 600 acres, of which EPCOT Center will occupy 200. initially.

The construction area seems much larger than the initial site for the Magic Kingdom (which seemed large enough when I looked across it 12 years ago). It's a good bet this project will go along more smoothly than the previous one. They've learned a lot from that undertaking.

For instance, they're not scooping out the lagoon with earthmovers as they did before. They're dredging up the muck. The process will produce the same sand bottom and clear water, but it apparently does the job more quickly and economically.

Looking across the wasteland of torn-up earth, I harked back to what Walt Disney said, away back in 1965, when he first spoke of his greatest dream at the Cherry Plaza Hotel in Orlando:

“It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”

A pipedream. An outlandish fantasy. An impossible utopia. So they all said then.

Now it is happening, just a little over nine years after they opened the gates of Walt Disney World. The plan has come a long way since then. It has been reworked and revised and modified and fitted to the practicalities of economic life today. Whatever its final form, the ultimate achievement will transcend all the previous wonders of the world.

Up to now, I had only the general outlines presented to the press over a year ago. What was it really going to be like in all its infinite details? This secret was still largely locked up in a remote place in California where the legendary Imagineers wrought their magic. You heard little about them. They shunned publicity. And so, to truly know what was coming, to understand its meaning, to project how it might affect all of us, I had to go where they were.

And that is what I did, on the invitation of the Disney organization. Let me tell you about it.

EPCOT CENTER-Everything's now in place in the master plan. Visitors disembark at monorail station in the foreground or park in lots on the perimeter. They begin their experience with an introductory show in the 18-story-high globe. From there they p… — EPCOT CENTER-Everything's now in place in the master plan. Visitors disembark at monorail station in the foreground or park in lots on the perimeter. They begin their experience with an introductory show in the 18-story-high globe. From there they proceed to the pie-shaped Communicore and outward from this hub to Future World pavilions. These are, starting at lower left and going around clockwise: Energy, Century 3, Transportation, Imagination (double-pyramid structure), The Land and The Sea (the latter to open in June 1983). World Showcase pavilions around lagoon are (starting at left and proceeding clockwise): Mexico, Costa Rica, Equatorial Africa (coming later), Germany, Italy, American Adventure, Japan, Morocco, France, United Kingdom and Canada. (Copyright Walt Disney Productions)

California, here we come

The Delta jet skimmed smoothly above a thick layer of cloud. I sipped a martini and thumbed through a copy of Commentary. It was a strange feeling going back, after all these years, to the city of smog and palm-lined boulevards and mountains rising out of haze and nondescript urban sprawl stretching into infinity. The City of the Angels. Los Angeles.

College days seemed part of another lifetime.

The article in Commentary was dismal: national crisis in the wake of Iran and Afghanistan. Recession. Lack of leadership. The writer held out little hope.

I looked out across the wing and tried to get a glimpse of the earth that was slowly turning far below us. It was totally blotted out by the clouds. Good riddance. I finished the last drop of martini and handed the glass back to the flight attendant.

Soon we would be going in to land.

Somewhere in the night the melancholy mood dissolved in sleep. With morning came anticipation. My spirits rose as I sped along the teeming freeway out into the Hollywood Hills. Ahead: the WED studios and the secrets of EPCOT.

With Jack Lindquist, vice president-marketing, Disney outdoor recreation, I arrived at an unmarked building nestled beneath the hills that rise along the fringe of Glendale. WED enterprises, the design and engineering unit of Walt Disney Productions. Really an impressive building with tall white columns and neatly manicured landscaping in front and beautiful stonework on the exterior.

Inside, I walked into what can only be described as a beehive of activity, if you'll pardon the cliche. Off the honeycomb of hallways, with their renderings of Disney projects, artists and draftsmen and designers were hard at work in glass-enclosed offices, oblivious of the steady traffic outside.

So, at last, I had come to the lair of the Imagineers. Out of these hidden rooms, out of the anonymous minds that functioned here, had blossomed the ideas that created Disneyland and later Walt Disney World. And now, within this maze of creative activity, EPCOT Center was in the making.

*At WED headquarters, above, EPCOT was born and, since 1975, has been going through many design stages. This is the home of the Imagineers. (Copyright Walt Disney Productions)*

Work has been going on here on EPCOT, without fanfare, since the original announcement in 1975. Ideas and plans and designs and techniques and scripts conceived, reviewed, studied, endlessly tossed back and forth by teams of Imagineers, discarded, started again, refined, elaborated, developed into models and blueprints. A long, involved, never-ending process where nothing is ever final until the last possible moment-a process that only the men inside WED really understand.

In the early stages, some 600 people were at work here. Gradually the number has been growing, faster and faster of late, to a current 1,200.

Joel Halberstadt, manager of concepts and communications, told me:

“We're going through continuous growing pains now. It's a problem to squeeze 1,200 people into the space we have. Offices seem to spring up overnight.”

The project has spilled over into industrial buildings and offices elsewhere in the Los Angeles area. They're making dinosaurs at the staff shop of the Disney movie studios in Burbank. A sound stage at 20th Century Fox has been leased for the painting of a mural almost 500 feet long for the Energy Pavilion. Components of the Transportation Pavilion are being assembled in a plant out at the Tujunga Canyon. Other work is going on in a converted airport hangar. And down at Anaheim, the location of Disneyland, the thousands of costumes needed for the pavilion staffs and animated figures are being put together.

"We've been advertising over radio and in the newspapers for 600 more people for WED and our manufactur ing and production arm, MAPO,” Mr. Lindquist said. “We need artists, architects, dimensional designers.”

“All kinds of creative people,” Mr. Halberstadt said. “We're getting many graduates of top art schools, younger men and women 20 to 35 years old. They work with veterans in the organization. It's an interesting combination of the old and the new learning from one another."

Soon I was to meet face to face some of the key men who guided and controlled this massive outpouring of creative endeavor. I was to discover their unique way of working, individually and together. I was to get some insight into what kind of men they were-visionaries, perfectionists, workaholics. A breed apart, inheritors of the dream Walt Disney left behind at his death in 1966.

*Architectural draftsmen prepare blueprints that will be shipped to Walt Disney World to guide contractors in construction of pavilions. (Copyright Walt Disney Productions)*

The grand design

The model lay in front of us as we entered the big, high-ceilinged room. If WED headquarters is the temple of creativity, then The Model has got to be the altar. Men in shirtsleeves moved around the perimeter shifting miniature buildings and conferring on placement of landscaping.

The Model measures 44 by 32 feet. It is an exact 1/8 of an inch to 1 foot in scale. Progressively, as elements of the pavilions are completed in miniature, they are put in place.

In the center lies a blue lagoon, which represents a body of water almost a third of a mile across. I saw across the lagoon the exquisitely handcrafted models of some of the World Showcase pavilions set on carpets of green lawn.

At the center, on the far side of the lagoon, was the final design for the American Adventure Pavilion. Originally, the pavilion was to be located on the near side of the lagoon, at the point where guests would make the transition from Future World with its pavilions sponsored by American industry to the foreign pavilions of World Showcase.

“We decided we needed a focal point at the back of the setting,” Mr. Halberstadt said. “Something to draw people around. So we moved it there.”

I had no trouble identifying the pavilions of Great Britain, France and Italy. Joel Halberstadt ticked off the others quickly: Mexico, Japan, Canada, Morocco, Germany, Costa Rica. Only portions of some models were in place.

At this point the pavilions of Future World were represented by plastic blocks of various shapes. They were ranged like satellites around a central, circular building tentatively designated the Communicore.

Towering over the rest of the Future World structures, at the entrance to the complex, was a large globe, the home of the show Spaceship Earth. In full scale, it will be nearly 18 stories high. Behind it lay the Energy, Transportation, Land, Century 3 and Imagination pavilions.

Detailed models of the Future World pavilions were being displayed elsewhere in the WED building. For now the plastic blocks served very well to enable designers to determine relative elevations and positioning.

Between this lineup of structures and facades and the wonders that would lie within remained a vast gap which much of the creative activity at WED was now filling,

It was at this point that my voyage of discovery proceeded from the broad vista to the infinite components. And it was here that I began to meet and talk with the Imagineers.

They left me no time to dwell longer on the tragedy of Iran or the catastrophe of Afghanistan.

Draftsmen and model makers work out details of placement and proportion on this master model for EPCOT Center. It's here where major decisions are made affecting the project. Future World pavilions are represented by blocks in the foreground while s… — Draftsmen and model makers work out details of placement and proportion on this master model for EPCOT Center. It's here where major decisions are made affecting the project. Future World pavilions are represented by blocks in the foreground while several meticulously detailed models of World Showcase pavilions can be seen alongside the lagoon. (Copyright Walt Disney Productions)

Visions over salad

Noontime. Lunch time. And what a spread they had laid out at one end of the long conference table. Salads galore, and sliced meats, and pickles and cheeses, and a heaping bowl of big California strawberries.

My hosts were John Hench and Marty Sklar, the top men in the creative part of WED. (I'll use first names from here on since that's the custom at Disney. The nameplates they wear carry no surnames. Walt liked it that way.)

Officially, John is senior vice president of WED. He's tall, dignified, somewhat reserved, with gray hair and a crisp gray moustache. I immediately thought of Walter Cronkite. Others have found a resemblance to Walt Disney himself. Among other things, John personally, approves all colors that go into the many parts of EPCOT.

Marty is shorter, younger, dark-complexioned. You might mistake him for an engineer or scientist in his dark blue shirt and glasses. But, as his title suggests, he is primari ly an artist. He's vice president of creative development.

I soon learned that titles and rank and seniority have only limited importance here. Lines of authority are fluid and ever changing. They talk continually about the “team approach.”

I was staggered by the range of their envisioning. Anywhere else it would have been termed fantasizing. Here it was the raw material of their product.

Their attention shifted like quicksilver from voyages into outer space to the interior of a molecule, from computers to the farming of shrimp and other creatures from the seas. * To try to put the substance of our conversations in logical order would be impossible. And even if it could be done, it would dilute the significance of what they had to say. I think it is far better to pass along a sampling of their comments approximately as they expressed them. You, too, will gain from them a feeling for what EPCOT is all about.

(Let me emphasize at this point that part of what was said was imagineering rather than a detailing of final plans. They spoke a great deal about things that might be done, or could be done, and at times they themselves were verbally shaping their own thoughts on matters of intense interest to them.)

So here goes:

JOHN: "The Transportation Pavilion is a step forward from Small World. We've learned how to control reverbs. In Small World, you hear the sound that is with you plus infinitely staggered signals with the same beat. The same signals slightly delayed give you a sense of space. We tried it on a sound stage. We walked around the stage and couldn't believe it. We kept working until we got the speakers just right. We're always building on whatever we know how to do, pushing a little further..

“In Transportation, we're using a different vehicle, a six-passenger vehicle. We have an open corridor. There's sound stereo close to the head and incidental sound off in the background. We've developed a new approach to sound -digital sound--that has remarkable clarity ...

“Spaceship Earth tells you you're not alone on this earth. It takes you back and shows you how you've come to this point. It will give people a lot more appreciation of who they are. Ray Bradbury (the science fiction writer who wrote the story line) took the metaphor of a wall. It touches on the first recorded primitive experiences. Information on wild animals was recorded in paintings on cave walls. It was a matter of survival for succeeding generations. They became more elaborate. The Egyptians transformed information into hieroglyphics. The Phoenicians broke the walls up into clay pottery. With Gutenberg's invention of printing, the wall became a library wall. Now we have an electronic wall attached to the rest of the earth. Walt believed if people got the right information, they would take the right action. He envisioned a place where people could come and get the best information so they would have no trouble deciding on the best course of action. That was Walt's special ability. He could reach people. He had a deep understanding of people.”

(This idea of providing, entertainingly, in formation on which people could make right decisions kept cropping up during my entire visit to WED. It is the essence, I believe, of EPCOT, a step forward from the more amusement-oriented Magic Kingdom.)

JOHN: "Guests will go to a Telcom Center (an extension of Spaceship Earth) from Spaceship Earth. We'll demonstrate new ways to present information, electronically, visually. It's an update of City Hall in the Magic Kingdom. Bell Labs is bring new technology to the information plaza. Guests can make reservations, leave messages. In the Communicore there will be opportunities to get involved in communications systems. We'll have a functioning TV studio. We'll do interviews and opinion polling. A Future Choice theater will have buttons to push for audience reactions. Guests will go across and through this hub several times in moving between pavilions. We try to make choices as simple as possible. It's been found that anxieties are created at World's Fairs where people continually have to make decisions on where to go next.”

MARTY: "We're starting work with American Express on a Future Travel Port for the Communicore. The name may be changed. It will be the travel agency of tomorrow. You can come in with your family, specify your vacation interests and actually experience the places you'd like to go. You may even get an information printout.”

JOHN: “We asked ourselves why don't we push these services people need, push 'em forward. Guests can look at the dining room of a resort, hear the waves on the beach. They'll get a lot more information on what they're going to buy."

MARTY: "We hope to have a place in Communicore where people can find out about a career. We'll make it as close to real as possible, simulate experiences.”

JOHN: "The Fantastic Flick Cinema will show predictions of the future as done by motion pictures over the years. The main thing is to reassure people about the future.”

MARTY: "Show them there's a purpose for prediction. Many predictions set the tone for what is to follow. We're going to bring the DACS Center (the computer setup that controls a myriad of activities and communications at Walt Disney World) out of its hiding place. We'll put on a show. We have a special device to slow down the action of a computer and show how information is received. Another exhibit is called Solutions. It will present ideas being implemented by cities around the world to cope with problems. The basic premise of the shows in EPCOT is that the future is a moving target. You have to change.”

JOHN: The AT&T communications center will show how a household can function with new communication techniques. We want to make the information relative to something. It will show the tremendous impact of communications systems on lifestyle.

“Then there's the Egghead Arcade. We're bringing a new attitude and new sophistication to arcade games. Games can be made more interesting and relevant. We'll devise engineered games. For a point: man's relationship with the machine."

MARTY: "The Land Pavilion is five acres-as big as Fantasyland in the Magic Kingdom. Guests will go through as a ride. They can go back on a guided tour. We'll have a large growing area behind the pavilion to demonstrate environmental control.”

JOHN: “Plants have their own extraordinary odor which guests will experience. They'll see vegetables as they must have been intended to be. Eighteen-inch cucumbers. Lettuce growing in outer space.'

MARTY: "We met Dr. Carl Hodges, consultant on the pavilion, when we were looking for people to invite to a conference on energy and agriculture. He's director of the Controlled Environmental Lab at the University of Arizona. We sent people to the university to see what he was doing. Their report was so glowing we couldn't believe it. So we sent two other people. Their report was the same. We got Card (Disney president Walker) and others and took the company plane to Mexico, where Dr. Hodges has a shrimp farming operation in partnership with Coca Cola and the University of Mexico at Sonora. He showed us a cylindrical tank and said there are 500,000 shrimp in there. Just hatched. They came out elegant, flawless specimens. On shrimp boats, time elapses before the shrimp get back to shore. It affects the flavor. Not these. The pavilion will show future steps for growing food both on land and water.

“We took a Kraft executive to Dr. Hodges' farm. After he'd seen it, he called his research people in and said to them: What have you guys been doing?''

Ever since Disney announced in 1975 that it was ready to go ahead with EPCOT, John Hench (left) and Marty Sklar have spearheaded planning and development for the project. Both Mr. Hench, senior vice president of WED, and Mr. Sklar, vice president of… — Ever since Disney announced in 1975 that it was ready to go ahead with EPCOT, John Hench (left) and Marty Sklar have spearheaded planning and development for the project. Both Mr. Hench, senior vice president of WED, and Mr. Sklar, vice president of creative development, were close associates of Walt Disney and carry on faithfully the traditions he instilled in his | creative people. (Copyright Walt Disney Productions)

JOHN: “The whole philosophy of the pavilion is not to exploit the land but cooperate with it.”

He handed me a sheet with a quotation from the book “Symbiosis Between Man and Nature” by Rene Dubos. It read:

“It is not true that 'nature knows best.' It often creates ecosystems that are inefficient, wasteful and destructive. By using reason and knowledge, we can manipulate the raw stuff of nature and shape it into ecosystems that have qualities not found in wilderness. Many potentialities of the earth become manifest only when they have been brought out by human imagination. Symbiotic relationships mean creative partnerships.”

Clearly, this idea underlies not only the concept of the Land Pavilion but much of the rest of Future World. Could it counterbalance the violence and destruction of Iran and Afghanistan? Could EPCOT? It was a sharp challenge.

MARTY: “We have brought in experts from all over. We have advisory panels for the pavilions. Our function is to provide credibility, integrity and the ability to communicate through entertainment.”

JOHN: “These people respond to Walt's ideas. They need a forum, somebody to communicate for them. This has got to be an ongoing thing. New people are coming in all the time. They're the kind of people who say things don't have to be this way.”

MARTY: “Many people no longer trust government or industry, but they still believe in Mickey Mouse. Our messages are very short in the physical sense. We have to get across an idea in a few seconds. There can be no ambiguity. We're doing what I call turn-ons, encouraging them to find out more about a subject, providing the way.

Our lunch over, we strolled down a hallway to a camera room where John wanted to show me some of the movie equipment they were developing.

“We're making cameras that never existed before,” he said. "We're building two rigs, one master, one backup. Each has three cameras. We'll use them for filming for the Energy Pavilion this fall. The cameras are 70 millimeter and give us a field of vision of 220 degrees. The screen will be 30 feet high.

"We're doing a 3-D show for the Imagination Pavilion.

"For Spaceship Earth we have a styrofoam model to work out relationships. It shows where the track will come. The whole course of the show will be laid out in five second increments. The first model is one quarter of an inch to a foot. The next is one inch."

Marty commented:

“Walt was a stickler. He didn't want to come around a corner and see a blank wall. There had to be a weenie down at the end of every street. We have to have a model on a scale where you can walk through, see everything you can see on a ride.”

To demonstrate, they led me to a large black box about eight feet high with a narrow entrance.

"Go through and see what we mean," Marty said.

I started up a ramp which had shelves projecting on either side just above shoulder height. Your head could only move along the confined space between these projections. It was enough to give you claustrophobia, but it ensured that you would view each scene from the proper perspective.

This was a model of Spaceship Earth. I followed the sequence of the show, up and around, at each turn another finely detailed and lighted setting with figures and props, exactly as they would appear in the final version, except greatly scaled down. There was that family in the cave with painted walls about which John had spoken earlier, then the Egyptian scene with hieroglyphics followed by a group of Phoenicians with scrolls and clay pottery. I passed Gutenberg in his printshop and a library filled with books and other scenes in the story of the expanding wall until finally I emerged down a descending ramp into the present. Eventually, guests would ride in little cars along a track spiraling through the 18-story Spaceship Earth globe and see these same scenes in life-size scale. It was an ingenious way to lay out the parameters of the show.