Captain EO (Kodak)
Captain EO at Epcot was the most star-powered seventeen minutes in theme-park history: a 3D space adventure starring Michael Jackson at the height of his fame, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and executive-produced by George Lucas, playing in the Magic Eye Theater of the Journey Into Imagination pavilion — presented, as the credit on this recording’s name remembers, by Kodak. The Captain EO Epcot show audio preserved here runs twenty-two minutes and forty-eight seconds, longer than the film’s own published running time, and it carries the full arc of the show: the ragtag crew, the Supreme Leader, and the two songs that were always the real special effects.
Captain EO Epcot: The Crew That Sang a World Awake
The story is a fairy tale in a starship. Captain EO leads a crew nobody would mistake for the fleet’s finest — the elephant-like Hooter, the flying fuzzball Fuzzball, and the two-headed Geex, Idee and Odee — on a mission to deliver a gift to the Supreme Leader, played by Anjelica Huston as a creature of scrap metal and shadow hanging in a web of cables. The gift, of course, is a song. Jackson performs two: “We Are Here to Change the World,” the finale that transforms the Supreme Leader’s junkyard world into a garden, and “Another Part of Me,” which Jackson liked enough to carry onto his album Bad the following year. James Horner’s score threads the whole thing together.
The film was shot in 70mm 3D and the theater did the rest: lasers, smoke, fiber-optic starfields and effects that reached off the screen and into the seats made Captain EO one of the first true “4D” shows, and the template every in-theater-effects film after it had to answer.
Presented by Kodak: The Magic Eye Theater Years
Captain EO opened at EPCOT Center on September 12, 1986, taking over the Magic Eye Theater from Magic Journeys, the gentle Sherman Brothers 3D film that had opened with the park. Kodak had presented the whole Journey Into Imagination pavilion since opening day — it was Kodak’s Makin’ Memories slideshow that warmed up the crowds out front — and the company’s name fronted EO’s engagement too, back when a film sponsor was still a point of pride on the marquee. The theater sat beneath the glass pyramids of the Journey Into Imagination pavilion, and for eight years the Captain’s crew was the loudest thing under them.
The original run ended on July 6, 1994, as Honey, I Shrunk the Audience prepared to take the theater that November. It seemed a closed chapter — the most 1980s attraction imaginable, filed away with the decade.
The Encore Nobody Expected
Then came June 25, 2009. Michael Jackson’s death sent fans back to the one place his music had been a world you could walk into, and Disney listened. Captain EO returned to Epcot on July 2, 2010 — billed as a tribute and a limited engagement, though the Captain would hold the theater for more than five years. Kodak’s long sponsorship of the pavilion ended that August, weeks into the revival, so the encore played out under a name the original run never knew: no sponsor at all.
Epcot was the last place on Earth to say goodbye. The Disneyland, Tokyo and Paris engagements all closed first, and when the final Epcot audience filed out on December 6, 2015, Captain EO ended everywhere, making way for the Disney & Pixar Short Film Festival. Press play and take the mission one more time: we are here to change the world.
