Horizons

If EPCOT Center had a thesis statement, it was this ride. This post preserves the complete ride audio of Horizons, the pavilion that imagined ordinary life in the twenty-first century — desert farms, undersea cities, space colonies — and did it with a warmth no other future-world attraction has matched. Horizons opened on October 1, 1983, the park’s first birthday, presented by General Electric, and for many early guests it was simply the best thing in the park.

Looking Back at Horizons

The ride was designed as a sequel of sorts to an older promise. General Electric had sponsored Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and Horizons picked up where that show’s final scene left off: instead of one family’s kitchen of tomorrow, it offered a whole civilization’s. Your hosts were a grandfatherly narrator — veteran voice actor Bob Holt — and his wife, voiced by Dena Dietrich, keeping in touch with their far-flung family by video phone, a framing device the ride used with real affection.

Photo: Steven Miller, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The pavilion made an impression before a word was spoken. Imagineer George McGinnis shaped the building like a great faceted gem, some seventy-eight feet tall, ringed by acres of garden; inside, the queue passed Robert McCall’s mural “The Prologue and the Promise,” the space artist’s sweep from cave dwellers to starships — McCall painted for NASA as happily as for Disney, and the mural makes the pavilion’s whole argument: every age’s dreamers were looking at the same stars — and the ride itself began on an enormous curved screen, the OmniSphere, with a section called “Looking Back at Tomorrow.”

Before the future, though, came the past: the ride opened by looking back at yesterday’s tomorrows — Jules Verne’s moon cannon, early-century visions of robot-served homes, the rocket ships and moving sidewalks of World’s Fair posters — each one proof that dreaming about the future is itself a tradition. Then the Omnimover vehicles glided into the twenty-first century proper: Mesa Verde, a desert farm worked by robots under holographic skies; Sea Castle, a city resting on the ocean floor; and Brava Centauri, a space station where crystals grew in zero gravity and a baby was born among the stars.

Choose Your Tomorrow

The ending was the ride’s signature trick. As the vehicles turned for home, each row of guests voted — desert, sea or space — and a film finale matched to the winning choice unspooled in front of that vehicle alone: a harvest in the desert, a dive at Sea Castle, a shuttle drifting toward Brava Centauri. George Wilkins’s “New Horizons” score tied the whole trip together, and the pavilion’s motto rode over the exit: “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

Photo: Steven Miller, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Two Closings, and a Demolition

The pavilion lost its sponsor when GE let its agreement lapse in the autumn of 1993, and it closed on December 25, 1994. It earned a reprieve — reopening on December 24, 1995 while the Universe of Energy and World of Motion were both down for refurbishment — before closing for good on January 9, 1999. Then Disney did the rare thing: the building was demolished outright, and Mission: SPACE opened on the site on October 9, 2003.

Almost nothing physical survives, which is what makes a complete recording precious. Press play, and Horizons runs again — nearly fifteen minutes in the company of the old neighbors, World of Motion and the Universe of Energy: the third panel of EPCOT Center’s great Future World triptych, and the one people still miss the most.