Illuminations Original Complete Show

Illuminations Original Complete show 1988 – 1996

Before Reflections of Earth, before the great globe and “We Go On,” there was this: the original IllumiNations, which lit up World Showcase Lagoon for the first time on January 30, 1988 and ran until September 20, 1996. The name IllumiNations would stay at Epcot for 31 years across its successors, but this is the show that started it — sponsored, like so much of early Epcot, by General Electric.

Its great leap forward was the music. The lagoon shows before it — A New World Fantasy and Laserphonic Fantasy — had played classical arrangements on synthesizers. Don Dorsey’s IllumiNations took many of those same arrangements and rescored them for full orchestra, performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, with arrangements by Steve Skorija and a new original theme by Dorsey himself, “The Festival of Festivals.” The result sounded less like a theme-park show and more like a concert that happened to have fountains, lasers and fireworks attached.

The fourteen-minute program unfolded in three movements. An opening montage of classical showpieces — Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the William Tell Overture — played over laser images on water screens. Then came the heart of the show: a musical tour of World Showcase, each pavilion lighting up in turn to a salute from its own country — “Funiculì, Funiculà” for Italy, “Rule, Britannia!” for the United Kingdom, Rhapsody in Blue for the American Adventure — with Morocco respectfully left dark out of regard for its religious architecture. Fireworks, remarkably, were held back until the end of the second act, so the third movement — Dvořák, the march from Carmen, Handel, Mahler — could unleash them all in the finale. This recording is the complete show, opening announcement to last shell.

For more of the sound of Epcot’s first decade, the archive also holds the Impressions de France film score from the France pavilion and The Land’s original area music loop.