The Disney Utopia That Never Was
Twenty-five years ago today, on October 1, 1982, the much-anticipated EPCOT Center opened at Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida. It was a massive 260-acre park packed with technology and cultural exhibits that cost more than $1 billion to build. But it was a mere shadow of what Walt Disney had dreamed of.
Why? The answer goes back to when Disney himself first envisioned EPCOT, in the early 1960s. His original concept, for an Experimental Prototype Community (or sometimes City) of Tomorrow, went far beyond a simple theme park. He wanted to build a real-life, ideal, futuristic city—a city in which he, Walt Disney, would hold supreme authority.
The science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury once asked him if he might ever run for mayor of Los Angeles. Disney replied, “Why should I run for mayor when I am already king?” But by the late 1950s the success of Disneyland, his first theme park, in Anaheim, California, had changed his perspective. He was no longer merely a maker of brilliant animated movies but a visionary builder as well.
As he formulated plans for his “Florida Project”—what became Walt Disney World—he had relatively little interest in simply building another amusement park. This time he wanted to create his own city from the ground up—the perfect city. He would have a central commercial area with a residential community surrounding it. With his appetite for detail, he would tackle all the logistical challenges that city-building entailed—traffic, noise, infrastructure, and so forth. The “experimental prototype” city, with 20,000 residents, would try out new strategies, ideas, and materials for tackling urban social ills. It would have schools, preschools, community centers, and churches like any other city; unlike other cities, it would have no unemployment, or even retirees. No land ownership, and no voting rights. And Disney was determined to retain complete control.
His plans particularly focused on creating new cutting-edge technologies. Mass transit, including a monorail, would remove the need for individual cars. “It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed,” he said in a promotional film, “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.”
Free enterprise was key to the plan. Walt Disney’s high-flown and expensive ideas were beyond the expertise of his own engineers, so he met with representatives of such firms as General Electric, Westinghouse, and RCA, asking them to strike deals to make EPCOT a laboratory for their most forward-thinking new technologies. The ultimate goal was to find ways to overcome problems that had long plagued American cities. The legendary New York City planner Robert Moses believed it could be done. He predicted that EPCOT would be the “first accident-free, noise-free, pollution-free city center in America.”
EPCOT preoccupied Disney throughout his last years. Suffering from lung cancer in late 1966, he worried about his legacy, feeling that it hinged on the project. “Fancy being remembered around the world for the invention of a mouse!” he told a friend in his final days. He died in December 1966, less than a year before construction began on the Walt Disney World complex—whereupon the Disney company’s board of directors breathed a collective sigh of relief that they wouldn’t have to invest in a utopia. A venture into city planning would be far too financially risky, and they didn’t want to get into governing a municipality either. The EPCOT concept died along with its creator.
It was revived, in a vastly scaled-down form, when Disney’s chief executive, E. Cardon Walker, announced plans for the EPCOT Center theme park, in October 1978. The new concept abandoned city planning but retained a focus on showcasing American technology. EPCOT’s Future World would consist of pavilions that would be monuments to American free enterprise, each directly sponsored by a large American corporation. General Electric, Kraft, MetLife, General Motors, Eastman Kodak, and Hewlett-Packard would all at one time or another be sponsors of attractions. The other part of the park would be a series of buildings showcasing various cultures around the world, including Japan, Germany, Mexico, and China. The overall effect when the park opened was of a kind of permanent world’s fair—a far cry from what Walt Disney had hoped for.
Some of his ideas were later hinted at in the town of Celebration, Florida, a planned community created by the real-estate division of the Walt Disney Company and opened in 1996. Today Celebration has some 4,000 homes clustered around a main marketplace. But the experimental and radical concepts for energy use and transportation in Walt Disney’s EPCOT scheme are completely absent. And the Disney company has since sold off much of its interest in the town.
Meanwhile, EPCOT has become a financial success, bringing in more than 10 million visitors each year. Still, you have to wonder what Walt Disney himself would have thought of the park’s dilution of his vision. Perhaps the most telling detail about EPCOT is the company’s abandonment of the EPCOT acronym. In 1994, EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, was renamed Epcot—a name that stands for nothing but itself.