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 three of a multi part series. Read the entire 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.

One hundred years ahead

One pavillion, Century 3, is only in its early stages of development. A letter of intent has been received from General Electric for sponsorship, but the contract signing is still pending. (A contract is also pending with AT&T for Spaceship Earth.)

Just before closing time, we barged into Claude Coats' office and found him at a conference table covered with blueprints and drawings. Ideas for Century 3 are very much in the formative stage. There are hundreds of them, and the job now is to bring them down to a film sequence that can be shown in a reasonable amount of time.

Claude Coats, a veteran of 45 years with Disney (he started as a cartoonist), has been through this before in developing futuristic shows for the New York World's Fair and Disneyland.

*Claude Coats combs a volume of technological information in search of more ideas for the Century 3 Pavilion. (Copyright Walt Disney Productions)*

Now he has embarked on the most ambitious undertaking of this type that he and Disney have ever tackled.

"It's like going to school all over again,” he said, pointing to the science fiction type color renderings hanging on the walls all around the room.

“We're going to use a ride device with cars that hang from an overhead rail. It will move 1.8 feet per second. We'll make guests feel they're celebrating the nation's tricentennial, looking back over the last 100 years.

“You will make a two-minute ascent to Future House through thoughts about the future from the past. Then you'll enter a theater for a probe of the future. The screen is more than eight stories high-the biggest screen ever.

“It will curve over above the audience to give a planetarium effect. The audience will get views of outer space and inside the molecule. We're taking people to places they've never seen before. Like inside an electron micro scope. Into living cells. Out to the rings of Saturn. Along the DNA life chain. There'll be many blowups of microscopic stuff.

"It's a celebration of the good times ahead of us. We'll show future urban development. A family celebrating their 100th wedding anniversary, which will be a common thing. We'll show a complete new lifestyle. And robot mining. An undersea habitat. Underground homes. Desert farming. Hobbies, cooking, music as they will be in the future.

"We'll end up going into a space habitat. We'll show work and health activity in space. Manufacturing. Mining of minerals from planets or asteroids.

“At the end of the experience, we'll tie the whole thing into the family unit.”

Guests will leave the theater and go into a polling area. Lights on the dashboard of the vehicle will light up and guests will push buttons to indicate their feelings about what they've seen. These will be instantly tabulated so that each can check his reactions against those of others.

In less than an hour, I had been through the world of imagination and across a hundred years into the future that imagination had wrought. A fitting finale for an incredibly exciting day.

The great, smog-blanketed city of Los Angeles stretched out to infinity before me as I drove in late afternoon traffic, down from the bald hills into the chaos and congestion of urban life. I suddenly realized that here was the milieu in which Walt Disney had developed his fervent urge to guide all mankind to a better plane of existence. He had experienced the dirt and the grime, the violence and the desperation, the choking smog. Often people said, I recalled, that Los Angeles was a preview of the Orlando of the future.

Could EPCOT save us from this fate? After today I had to believe.

Jiminy Cricket

If i carried any forebodings about the future into the next day, Ward Kimball was just the medicine I needed. He was a droll, bouncy little man with shaggy white hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a green shirt with red stripes. For years he had been one of Disney's chief animators and a close associate of Walt. The Disney pixie dust had rubbed off on him profusely. There was a vague resemblance to the Jiminy Cricket character he had created.

*Ward Kimball (Copyright Walt Disney Productions)*

He collected trains, he told me. Out at his three-acre place, he had built a full-size railroad. It was he who first got Walt interested in trains. He collected toys, too. Had a huge collection, gathered over the years. He had a collection of books on old trains and 19th century American architecture which had served as valuable source material for designers of Main Street.

With a range of interest as broad as Walt's, he had helped develop the Disney TV programs on outer space in the 1950s. Eisenhower once forced his generals to watch one of them, “Man in Space,” to shake them out of their landlocked complacency.

Retirement had not slowed down Ward Kimball one bit. He was doing a book and working with his trains and collection of toys, and generally getting as much of a kick out of life as ever. Last January he got his old Dixieland band together and played with it at the head of the Rose Bowl parade.

Despite a drizzle of rain, he had come in from his place far out in the suburbs to show me the show he had designed for the Transportation Pavilion. We had to drive a dozen miles or more from WED to the big industrial plant which Disney had taken over to construct the pieces for the show and for the Tokyo Disneyland they were working on.

I could have spent all day in that building. There were tiers and tiers of shelves where molds for the Audio-Animatronics figures were stored. Some of the figures, with their intricate mechanical works showing through clear plastic bodies, were standing around awaiting their turn to step into the sets that were being fabricated.

I wish I'd had more time to examine the vintage automobiles parked on the concrete floor. There was a stagecoach with them, and an old buckboard from some frontier ranch. Half a dozen well-worn skiffs—the purpose of which no one seemed to know-lay beside the stagecoach.

All around the vast interior were separate working areas with lathes and power saws and buckets of paint, and craftsmen doing intricate jobs. At one corner of the building carpenters were creating full-size replicas of structures for a turn-of-the-century American town.

In the midst of all this sat Ward Kimball's show model — one of those big black boxes with ramps inside that you walk up and view the scenes in miniature.

Working from concepts created by Ward Kimball (below), designer John Stone arranges vehicles at intersection in model of an early 20th Century American city. Collision between horseless carriage and produce cart creates what Ward Kimball figures may… — Working from concepts created by Ward Kimball (below), designer John Stone arranges vehicles at intersection in model of an early 20th Century American city. Collision between horseless carriage and produce cart creates what Ward Kimball figures may have been the nation's first traffic jam. The noise and action will be overwhelming as the ride in the Transportation Pavilion brings guests upon this scene after a journey through the tranquil 1800s. (Copyright Walt Disney Productions)

"They asked me to come back and redesign the show (General Motors will be the pavilion sponsor)," Ward said. “They were planning to use 100% film and I said I had turned down a lot of film offers.”

However, when it was decided to use Audio-Animatronics figures, that was enough of a challenge to bring Ward back part time to work on it.

The ride will take up the second floor of a two-story circular pavilion. On the ground floor will be an exhibit of new developments in transportation, which GM itself is designing.

"This is a tongue-in-cheek ride through transportation history," Ward said as we entered the model. “There are 23 stage sets.”

In the first of the sets, you looked into a cave and saw a prehistoric family, back from a journey, blowing on their sore, tired feet. This kind of whimsical twist had been incorporated in each of the scenes I was to see.

Primitives on a wooden raft-early water transportationwere fending off an animated alligator that threatened to gobble them up. Desert travelers with camels and oxenanimal power-were arriving at a city gate to find themselves confronted with a toll booth. A magic carpet floated above them.

"I insisted we put that in,” Ward said slyly.

The invention of the wheel was depicted in a scene at a Babylonian palace. Inventors were standing before the king with wheels of all shapes-square, triangular, oblong-while one man with a round wheel was getting the monarch's nod.

The sequence moved through Egyptian, Chinese, Grecian and Roman scenes. One I liked was a used chariot lot. To one side was a dazzling new golden chariot under an arch, and a Roman woman was urging her husband to buy it while he made an effort to ignore her.

“I came in here one day,” Ward said, “and found them making the most beautiful, perfect chariots. I told them that that wasn't right at all, that these were used chariots. They had to beat them with chains to make them look dilapidated.”

Ward had added one other whimsical touch in this scene: a used Trojan horse.

The three-dimensional story continued on through the time of early exploration by ship. We looked in on Leonardo Da Vinci's studio, where a Mona Lisa model was scowling at the artist because he'd left his painting to tinker with a flying machine. The story of flight developed in a scene with balloons and later a barnstorming set.

Steampower was depicted on land and water. Then came the westward movement in stage coaches and buckboards. These were drawn up in a circle while Indians and cavalry charged across a screen in the background.

"They move in an endless circle, each chasing the other,” Ward said. “We didn't want to give the impression either one was getting the upper hand.”

Railroads are introduced in a train robbery scene. There are bicycles from the O. Henry era moving around a tranquil green park where a couple is picnicking on a Sunday afternoon.

The ride moves on through a bicycle shop where a man is tinkering with an early gasoline engine. And then the spectators are jolted out of the tranquility of those early days by a cacophony of city noises.

“Every conceivable type of transportation is shown," Ward said.

A primitive automobile has collided with a farm produce wagon at an intersection and all hell has broken loose. The wife of the driver is beating him over the head with an umbrella. Vegetables are strewn across the street. A bus driver honks his horn. The bell clangs aboard a trolley coming around a car barn.

“It's the largest set piece we've used, and has the most movement,” Ward said. “It dramatizes the problems cities are faced with.”

After a 1930s scene with a newly married couple in an old Cadillac, and another, more recent, with a family in a stationwagon, the guests are whisked into a tunnel for an encounter with modern-day speed. They finally exit on a roller-coaster descent that brings them out in the GM exhibit area below.

“The GM Transcenter will show a variety of things," Jack Lindquist told me later. “Things like engine styling, the testing of parts and materials. It is our future statement regarding transportation.”

I've gone into somewhat more detail on this show than others because it was one of two where I was able to see the scenes in a walkthrough mockup. It illustrates the technique that will be used in most of the rides-scene after scene in storytelling sequence acted out by animated figures with cinema effects in the background and controlled sounds.

Ward Kimball has done his job well. He comes in now only once a week to oversee the actual production.