With Disney’s Latest Announcement, Is EPCOT Finally Finding It’s Identity?

While the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom have seen large amounts of money spent on them in the past few years to add memorable new lands with lavish attractions and experiences and Hollywood Studios is currently transforming into the new home for Star Wars and Toy Story, EPCOT seemingly has been left out in the cold but that is all about to change with several new shows, attractions and renovations being confirmed for EPCOT.

EPCOT seems to have been stuck in a bubble for the past few years. Lack of investment in new attractions and lands hasn’t gone unnoticed by the public.  EPCOT is generally seen as the least loved of all Disney Parks but it also has vocal defenders, myself included. I love the park, I love what it represents, the educational slant it has in all its attractions.  A trip to Disneyworld isn’t complete until I have visited EPCOT at least once.  Even I can admit though, it would have been nice to have seen more investment in the park sooner. It’s not that Disney has been ignoring EPCOT, it’s just that they were perhaps unsure of which direction to take the park, until now.

EPCOT is currently home to one of the most popular attractions on Disney Property, Sourin’, which replaced the ageing Food Rocks show in The Land Pavilion in 2005.  The flight simulator style attraction proved so popular, Disney decided to add a third theatre in 2016 along with a new film, ‘Sourin’ Over The World’ that replaced the original ‘Sourin’ Over California’.  Sourin’ helped Disney realise that there is still life in EPCOT with the right story to tell and the requisite technology to seamlessly tell that story in a fun and engaging way.

EPCOT is also home to one of the best and largest nightly fireworks shows in the world. ‘Illuminations: Reflections Of Earth’, which is getting its own makeover. After playing out to millions of appreciative fans over the last 20 years, the curtain will finally come down one of Disney’s longest running and most beloved fireworks shows.  It will close forever after the summer 2019 season.  Disney knows how popular this fireworks show is and has given fans over a year to be able to say goodbye before it is replaced.  If you are staying around the resort over the next year or so you may hear late night shells exploding as Disney tests Illuminations’ replacement which is scheduled to take over almost immediately once Illuminations is retired.

Test Track was recently re-imagined after it’s initial sponsor dropped funding for the ride It now has cool new Tron like lighting effects and an interactive queue line adding a definite wow factor to Disney’s current fastest Disneyworld attraction.  The long-running Ellen’s Energy Adventure, a staple of EPCOT since it opened closed earlier this year to make way for ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’ which will be one of the largest enclosed roller coasters in the world when it debuts sometime in 2021.  Disney is also promising it will also feature an innovative new ride system to help bring the story of the Guardians to thrilling life.

Things in the World Showcase section of the park seem to be a little more sedate, however, but investment is slowly starting to trickle through.  The Ratatouille dark ride clone from Disneyland Paris is taking shape in the France Pavilion. The controversial replacement of Maelstrom, a flume based dark ride themed to Norse mythology in the Norway Pavilion kick-started a revival of sorts in 2016 when the building was gutted to become ‘Frozen Ever After’. EPCOT fans were furious at the addition of a fictitious decidedly non-nordic themed ride being added to a pavilion about Norway.

Does it work?  As a standalone ride it is outstanding (and I was humming that tune for days after I rode it initially) but as an addition to the Norway Pavilion, I’m not so sure. Visitors though have spoken loud and clear.  Frozen instantly became one of the most visited attractions upon opening, garnering queues of 5 hours or more for the first few days and now, 2 years on, it still attracts huge swathes of people eager to sing along as they float around Arendelle.  If you don’t FastPass the ride you can easily expect to queue over an hour on any given day.  Frozen, as a test attraction, clearly surpassed even Disney’s expectations.   And that is going to be the key decision-maker in the next few years as Disney attempts to make EPCOT more relevant and more timeless.

EPCOT had, in the eyes of the public, become stale and boring.  Disney management more than likely knew this but the problem they have been struggling with is, ironically, Walt Disney himself.  Before he died, Walt had a vision for EPCOT.  He wanted EPCOT to become a community, not necessarily the educational theme park it is today.  Today’s Disneyworld visitors are very different to those in Walt’s day.  Technology has come on in leaps and bounds since Walt died and visitors want to be thrilled by experiences.  They want to be ever more immersed in the stories around them and nobody does that better than Disney.

If Disney tried to follow Walt’s original dream they risked EPCOT never shaking off the stale persona that has dogged it through much of the last 15 years.  What is cutting edge at the start of a new attractions life cycle, at its initial development stage, has become tried and tested by the time that attraction launches a couple years later and it will be stale a couple years after the attraction opens. Disney needs to innovate to really bring the essence of EPCOT to life and they are starting to do that through IP.  Nobody has a better catalogue of Intellectual Property than Disney.

Disney is part of everyone’s childhood and with recent acquisitions and a broader long-term view, they have been capitalising on the Marvel brand as well as their very well known cartoon characters.  EPCOT never used to have character meet and greets but these have been introduced over the last couple of years.  I’m sure this small change in decades-old policy has already seen an improvement in customer service scores for the park.

Now Disney is taking things one natural step further, by introducing attractions based on popular IP such as Frozen and Guardians Of The Galaxy.  EPCOT purists bemoan the dilution of what EPCOT stands for.  Or rather what it stood for.  Disney cannot ignore public opinion forever and the public; people like me and you, that pay an awful lot of money have clearly shown Disney what they think of EPCOT.  They have stayed away in droves and when they do visit it tends to be late in the day so they can enjoy Illuminations: Reflections Of Earth as a family.  Why?  Because that firework show is quintessential Disney.  Illuminations: Reflections Of Earth is storytelling at it’s best using the sky as a canvas.  Everyone, young or old, is captivated by the storytelling.

We want to be entertained and in that regard, EPCOT was failing because of a lack of identifiable characters and properties. Their latest announcement this week is further proof that they believe the direction they are taking the park is going to be a winner with the public.  Spaceship Earth, the giant geodesic ball that is the icon of EPCOT will be closing for its longest period of refurbishment from early 2020 until the “second half of 2022”, which marks the parks 40th anniversary.  Details of whats planned are being kept under wraps but the length of the refurbishment tells us that there are some pretty big changes coming to EPCOT’s entrance area and central Future World, probably for the better to deal with an expected influx of visitors for all the new attractions that have been confirmed.

Spaceship Earth houses an ageing ride system that is in desperate need of an overhaul.  My last ride on it was quite painful, not helped by the unforgiving ride cars and steep gradient, its one of the steepest attractions of its type in the world.  Quite how Disney Imagineering managed to fit a ride about communication into a giant sphere over 3 decades ago is a miracle.  I loved the ride and will miss it dearly although my back won’t miss that ride track.  Now with a projected near 2.5-year closure, it’s time to give Spaceship Earth the love and attention it truly deserves.  t’s time to give EPCOT an iconic attraction that it really deserves. This will also likely entail the removal and rebuild of the post-show building to improve guest flow.  It’s notoriously difficult to get out of the park come 9 pm after the fireworks finish.

What probably won’t change is the theme of the ride, communication through the ages.  A lot of scenes are going to be upgraded and the top of the dome will, hopefully, utilise projection mapping to great effect.  The outside of the dome will probably become used as part of the nightly fireworks extravaganza, again through cutting-edge projection mapping technology, already deployed so successfully on the Magic Kindom’s ‘Happily Ever After’ fireworks spectacular.

Whatever Disney has in store for EPCOT it is clearly an exciting time for the park to finally be at the forefront of innovation like when it first opened in 1982.  Whether you agree with the ‘Disneyfication’ of the park or not there is a lot to be excited about in the coming months as Disney’s master plan finally rolls out.