Innoventions Plaza BGM

The Innoventions Plaza BGM in this post is the sound of the centre of EPCOT in the 1990s and 2000s: bright, electronic and endlessly optimistic. This is the loop that played around the Fountain of Nations, between the twin Innoventions buildings, while the fountain danced and the park’s future was spelled out in neon and chrome. If you walked through Future World in those years, this music is somewhere in your memory of the place.

From CommuniCore to Innoventions Plaza

The plaza began life as the heart of CommuniCore, EPCOT Center’s opening-day showcase of technology, which opened with the park on October 1, 1982. CommuniCore closed in January 1994, and on July 1, 1994, its two great curved buildings reopened as Innoventions — a hundred thousand square feet of exhibits from technology companies, arranged around the same open courtyard. At the centre of the plaza stood the Fountain of Nations, an opening-day feature whose dedication had brought together water carried from rivers and lakes around the world, poured into the fountain as a symbol of the park’s international hopes.

The Music of the Fountain

The plaza’s best-documented loop runs just under twenty minutes, and park-audio documentation credits its assembly to composer Russell Brower, who built it around David Arkenstone’s “Papillon” and wove in his own Future World themes written for the Innoventions era. It is unmistakably a product of its time — synthesizers, bright percussion and melodies engineered to feel like progress — and it had a second job beyond atmosphere: the Fountain of Nations performed choreographed shows to music every fifteen minutes, its jets rising and falling in time, so the plaza’s soundtrack regularly stepped forward and took centre stage.

The loop heard here is the earlier plaza mix preserved by collectors. Brower’s music, in longer and shorter forms, defined the Innoventions courtyard for a quarter of a century, outlasting most of the exhibits inside the buildings around it.

The buildings around the loop had a ringmaster, too. Innoventions’ host was Tom Morrow 2.0, a small robot character — voiced by Nathan Lane — who fronted the East building’s exhibits of video games, home technology and sponsor showcases from his theatre right on the plaza, in the music’s earshot. His cheerful patter matched the loop’s mood exactly: the future presented as a friendly place that wanted to show you its gadgets.

The End of the Plaza

Innoventions West closed on May 19, 2015, as the concept faded, and Innoventions East and the Fountain of Nations followed in September 2019. The plaza was swept away in EPCOT’s transformation and replaced by the gardens of World Celebration, and the fountain — one of the last opening-day features of the park’s centre — was demolished with it.

For a generation of guests, the plaza was also EPCOT’s crossroads — the place you crossed between the sphere and the World Showcase, where you checked the tip board, heard the fountain begin its next show, and decided where the day went next. The loop was the sound of that pause, which is one reason it is remembered with such disproportionate fondness for background music.

What survives is the sound. Its neighbours on this site include Horizons, The Land, and the original entrance medley that welcomed guests through this same plaza in the CommuniCore years before Innoventions.