Spaceship Earth With Judi Dench

The version of the ride heard in this recording — Spaceship Earth with Judi Dench — is the longest-running edition of Epcot’s signature attraction: the complete ride-through of the show that officially opened on February 15, 2008, and still carries guests up through the great sphere today. Dench, an Academy Award winner, was the ride’s fourth narrator and its first woman’s voice, and her tenure has now outlasted every version that came before hers.

A Seven-Month Reinvention

The change was the most thorough in the attraction’s history to that point. Spaceship Earth closed on July 9, 2007 — the same season the Mickey Mouse wand came down off the sphere outside — and spent more than seven months behind walls under sponsor Siemens, which had presented the pavilion since 2005. Imagineers rebuilt the ride’s final act, refreshed its classic scenes with new costumes, lighting and props, and gave several moments entirely new staging: a Greek classroom where mathematics is born, rows of mainframe computers humming in the dark, and the personal computer taking shape in a suburban garage.

Guest previews began in December 2007, and after a few weeks of fine-tuning the new version opened officially on February 15, 2008; the ride was formally rededicated that March 4. Much of the beloved journey survived the surgery intact — the cave paintings, Gutenberg at his press, Rome still burning on the wind — but the ride that emerged was a new telling of the story of communication, shaped for the networked age: less about speaking face to face, more about the web drawing the whole species together. Below the sphere, the new Project Tomorrow post-show carried the same theme out into the plaza. Siemens presented the attraction until 2017; the ride has flown without a sponsor ever since, and Dench’s voice has outlasted the sponsorship that brought it there.

Spaceship Earth with Judi Dench: Score, Screens, and a New Ending

The sound of the version is Bruce Broughton’s. His new score, performed by a 63-piece orchestra and a 24-voice choir, dresses each era in its own musical clothing — lyres and drums for the ancient world, strings for the Renaissance, electronics as the future approaches — and it is the first Spaceship Earth score to flow as a single continuous composition from ascent to descent.

The descent itself was the revolution. Riders now board past a camera that takes their photograph on the climb, and each vehicle carries a touch screen: choose a language — English or five others, a first for the ride — tap where on Earth you live, and on the way down the screen builds a playful cartoon future around your own face. Earlier versions had ended with models, projections and a sponsor’s promise; Dench’s ends with you. And it is Dench who delivers the version’s gift to the language, the line every rider since has repeated on the Phoenician scene: thank the Phoenicians. In the 1960s living room a few scenes later, a family watches the moon landing on television — and the face on their screen is Walter Cronkite’s, the ride saluting one of its own earlier voices.

This recording is the complete current ride-through. The archive holds the whole line of succession: Jeremy Irons before her, Walter Cronkite before him, and Vic Perrin’s original at the head of the line — or you can strip the voices away entirely with the instrumental version.